Category: Development

Fix the Most Common SEO Issues on Your Site Using 301 Redirects

Whenever you see a commercial or an article talking about creating websites, or you hear someone talking about starting one, the emphasis is always on “I was surprised at how quickly I have created my website, it only took me a couple of days!”. It makes you feel like creating an online presence, and earning a living online is a mere piece of cake that takes two days tops. Still, the ugly truth behind it is that there is no “set it up & leave it” aspect to having an online presence that puts the bread on the table. Maintaining your website is constant work, additionally, sites are rarely completed in a couple of days.

First, you need to work on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to actually get some visitors to your site. Then you have to work on their user experience (UX) to keep them there and help them make the decision to leave their money with you.

While setting up your website is no brain surgery nowadays with WordPress’ Gutenberg, for example, getting on the first page of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) so that your visitors will find you, almost is as difficult as open-heart surgery. Keeping your visitors on your site and having them spend their money with you is a result of a good user experience. The catch here is that there is no such thing as rules when it comes to UX, with everything being mere guidelines. UX takes a lot of testing and implementing feedback for the results to show.

Luckily, there is a technique that will help you make your customers happy, and that can help with both SEO and UX. It is called 301 redirections. What are 301 redirects, and in what instances would you use 301 redirects to help? Let’s check it out.

What are 301 redirects, and why should I use them?

301 redirects are a technique that you can implement to guide your traffic from one URL to another. They state that something that was on URL1 has moved permanently to URL2, directing traffic to URL2 without them realizing it.

It comes quite handy in numerous instances and plays a huge role in keeping your visitors happy and coming back, which is the key to making a living online. Here are some scenarios when you would find this technique useful.

Moving from one domain to another

Many people, when creating their new site, tend to overlook the importance of a proper domain name, especially when they are trying to get their online presence up and running in no time. This can prove to be a costly mistake later, as having a proper domain name can help immensely with your SEO score.

However, even if that’s the case with your site, not everything is lost. You can always move to another domain. This is where 301 redirects come handy, as they can help you ensure that your visitors will be moving to the new site as well, without going to the old one.

Taking care of 404’s on your site

Those pesky 404’s tend to creep into every site every now and then and are usually no reason to worry. However, if left unattended, they can do some serious damage to your website’s UX. Just think about how you feel when you are trying to find something online, you click on a link, and you get “Nothing found here” error.

In frustration, you probably click back and head on to the next result. Your visitors do the same. So, it is quite important to set up a 301 redirect, and have your visitors land somewhere else instead of on the 404 page in the first place, no matter how nicely you designed it.

An illustration showing lost sailor on an island

Making sure your content is updated at all times

On the same note, if you are searching online for “the best SEO practices,” and you click on the first result only to find that that result goes way back to 2016, you might feel rather disappointed. This is another situation where 301 redirects can help with your user experience.

What you should do is create a new article “the best SEO practices in 2020”, and set up a redirect for the older article to take the visitors to the new one. Not only are you providing your visitors with relevant and useful information, but you are also helping the new article rank higher in SERP, meaning more visitors!

Google will take notice that your visitors are actually reading the article instead of hitting back – which is what Search Engine Optimization is all about.

The Cocktail Technique

Speaking of helping the article rank higher using redirects, “The Cocktail Technique,” coined by ahref, which is a technique of merging two pieces of content into one. This helps immensely with page or post’s authority, as now a single piece of content has the authority of the two combined, meaning that it gets more credit from Google, too. Ultimately, the new piece will have a better result in SERP!

Stting up 301 Redirects on a WordPress site

You might have figured out the importance of setting up 301 redirects before but kept postponing it or trying to avoid it because messing up with .htaccess file is really not your thing.

That’s okay – not everyone is comfortable with writing code. It is probably why you are running your site on the WordPress platform, too.

However, every WordPress-er knows that when it comes to WordPress solutions, all you should do is find a proper plugin to help you out. With over fifty-thousand plugins in the official WordPress repository, it is quite impossible not to find the one to help you out with any kind of problem you might have.

The same goes for setting up 301 redirects on your site. The good news is that you don’t have to dig deep. There is a plugin called “301 redirects” which can help you with setting them up in no time.

Set redirects up with 301 Redirects plugin

301 Redirects plugin is by far the simplest way to set up your 301 redirects and win the battle with any of the instances mentioned above. Not only will this plugin help you set up your redirects in no time, but it is also very safe to use.

It doesn’t come with any unnecessary code that would slow down your site, or collide with other plugins.

wp 301 redirects image showing stats

Let’s check the few, carefully selected features this plugin comes with.

Effortlessly set up 301 redirects

With this plugin, setting up redirects is as simple as a copy and paste. No complicated editing, trying to figure out code, or anything of the kind. All you should be aware of is the URL of the page you want to redirect from, and the URL of the page you want to redirect to.

Once you figure that out, the location of your 404 page, for example, all you have to do is to copy and paste the URL in the “redirect from” provided field and copy and paste the new URL into “redirect to” field. The plugin will do the rest.

wp 301 redirect wordpress panel

Managing the redirects on your site can be done in another way – using the provided dropdown menu, which makes the process even simpler. Instead of pasting the “redirect to,” you can effortlessly choose the destination from the dropdown menu, which includes Custom, Post, Page, Media, and also Term Archive for you to select from.

redirect rules in wp redirect

Simple preview of all existing redirects and number of times they were used

As soon as you create a redirect, it will be neatly listed under the redirect rules feature. From there, you can effortlessly edit them, remove them, or, overall, modify them to fit your needs. Apart from being able to preview them, you will also be able to see how many times a specific redirect was used – thanks to the hits tab. This way, you can monitor the effectiveness of the redirects you set up.

Import or Export redirects in Bulk

You might have prepared an Excel file containing all the redirects you need to set up, and are now frustrated about the amount of copy-paste you need to do. Everybody hates repetitive, manual work, which is why the Import/Export feature is a true nerve-saver.

import option and others in wp 301 redirect

Thanks to this feature, you can simply export your table as a CSV file, and then upload your CSV file into the plugin. The plugin will take it from there, turn those values into redirects, while you sit back and relax.

On the same note, you can take advantage of the Export feature, and export all the existing redirects into a CSV file. It’s perfect if you are looking to share them, or store them outside WordPress.

Conclusion

All in all, gaining new visitors and keeping them happy with fresh and relevant content is what SEO and UX are all about. It is mandatory that you provide them with what the information they were searching for instead of a 404 page or outdated piece of content, which is why redirects are an important aspect of every online presence.

With 301 Redirects plugin, setting them up is a piece of cake, even if you have never done it before. Just a couple of ctrl+v’s, and you are good to go. Overall, if you need to handle those UX and SEO mistakes, this is the plugin to keep in your arsenal! If you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on 5 Best Wordpress or ClassicPress Security Check Tools!

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Filed under: Development, eCommerce, WordpressTagged with: ,

Efficiently Manage LearnDash In Wordpress Or ClassicPress

Managing courses, students along with handling administration responsibilities can be tedious. And although this is what you have to do on a day-to-day basis, you wonder if there are other efficient ways to handle all of this? Is it possible to delegate course management responsibilities to co-authors? Is there a better, student-friendly way to update your courses – through feedback maybe? How about a faster way to create new courses in Wordpress or ClassicPress? Here I’ve rounded up a few tips to help manage your LearnDash website effectively.

Bulk Enrollment Hack: Efficiently handle student enrollment in groups

Student enrollment takes time. Entering student details, the whole communication, can be a long-winding process. To scale up, you’d have to offload some responsibilities to group leaders and empower them to enroll students.

The plugin for the job: WISDM Group Registration

Manage LearnDash LMSUsing this extension you can effortlessly handle student enrollment in groups and assign Group Leaders. As the ‘Admin’ you have control over groups and those who get added. But group leaders can purchase the course on behalf of multiple students and them to it, manage members and analyze reports, taking this task off of your shoulders. This is also a great way to open up your courses to schools or corporations where students get enrolled in bulk or batches.

Course Management Hack: Empower teachers to undertake course creation and updation 

Of all the things you have to do, course creation and management might just be the thing that impacts your business in the most positive way. But when you’ve got other tasks, creating and managing courses can be difficult at times. Your option? To hand this over to fellow instructors. 

LearnDash extension to use: WISDM Instructor Role

Manage LearnDash LMS

Instructors or course creators can help you add new courses, increase your offering, and manage the ones you already have. They can assist with student evaluation too. The Instructor Role plugin also offers instructors a custom dashboard to make it easy to work with WordPress.

Student Experience Hack: Improve trust with reviews 

Course credibility is directly linked to student trust, and hence, enrolment. Reviews, ratings, and feedback help increase this trust and get students to believe in your offering. 

Feedback is also a great way to improve your course content and meet students’ needs. 

The plugins for the job – LearnDash Student Voice or WISDM Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback

Manage LearnDash LMS

Student Experience Hack: Provide a classroom-like note-taking experience 

LearnDash Notes is the perfect tool to boost engagement and learning. You can enable a new level of learner involvement within your LearnDash courses. By configuring various notifications to be sent out automatically based on learner actions, the plugin offers a richer learning experience.

Manage LearnDash LMS

Student Experience Hack: Improved course layouts and branding

Nothing appeals better to students than an attractive user interface. While there’s nothing to take away from LearnDash in terms of functionality, the interface can be improved and brought in line with your branding using a professional designing tool like the Design Upgrade Pro or Quiz Customizer. 

Manage LearnDash LMS

Custom designs can not only improve the look of your website but can make it appear more professional, giving you an opportunity to increase your prices and appeal to a wider set of students. 

Student Experience Hack: Gallery-view of courses for easy browsing

An overload of courses can overwhelm students. They might lose on finding a course that’s relevant to them or simply get lost in the plethora of your offerings. 

A LearnDash extension like Course Grid or WP Grid Builder lets you create a better course library that’s responsive and can be added on any page of your LearnDash website. Users can filter courses by category for easy search.

Manage LearnDash LMS 

Course Cloning Hack: Simple Course Content duplication

Many-a-times you end up creating similar course hierarchies. That’s when you’ve figured out the best course structure that suits the learning process. In LearnDash, although you have the drag-and-drop course builder, course creation can still take time.

With the LearnDash Content Cloner, you can create new courses with the same hierarchy in one-click. Right from lesson, topics, to quizzes a duplicate course is created. You can rename the course and edit the titles to publish a new course in no time.

Manage LearnDash LMS 

Student Evaluation Hack: Make grade tracking simple 

LearnDash Gradebook is the perfect tool if you are using LearnDash in a traditional classroom setting or wish to have a blended learning program.

With the Gradebook add-on, you can manage your students’ grades and track their online progress all from a centralized location. You don’t need additional tools or platforms making grade keeping a cake-walk.

Manage LearnDash LMS

Student Enrollment Hack: Create a course calendar

To manage student enrolments and make the course schedule more predictable, you can use the Course Scheduler for LearnDash. 

You can simply drag courses on a calendar to let students know their availability and start dates so that learning can be better planned.

Manage LearnDash LMS

Student Evaluation Hack: Easy quiz report analysis 

Student evaluations take up a lot of teacher time. They have to be prompt and done carefully to ensure timely progress. When it comes to quizzes, you need a better way of sifting through results for speedier analysis.

The LearnDash plugin to your rescue is WISDM Quiz Reporting 

Manage LearnDash LMS

With this extension, you can export reports for the quizzes attempted by students in your courses and manage time easily. You can choose to export quiz reports for a single user or for all users for a particular quiz making it easy to analyze responses.

Conclusion

As your business grows and more students come on board, you’ll need some assistance and helpful tools to be able to seamlessly manage your LMS. The above tools such as Instructor Role, Content Cloner, Gradebook help you progress with ease. Are there any specific hacks you’d like to share with us? Do you have questions about what I’ve discussed? Leave a comment below, and if you enjoyed this mpost, why not check out this article on WordPress Building Trends For 2020!

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Filed under: Development, eCommerce, WordpressTagged with: ,

Modular Design For Front End Developers

As a front-end developer, nailing the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is relatively easy. It’s learning how to write, architecture, and organize your code in a maintainable way that’s challenging. Using modular code for front-end development can make your experience significantly more enjoyable and efficient. In a nutshell, taking a modular design approach lets you write code and building block patterns for repeated use. The result is being able to add, remove, and replace elements on your site with ease. In this post, I’ll explain what a modular approach to design is and what its benefits are. Then I’ll look at three tips for adopting it as a WordPress developer. An Introduction to Modular Design

Modules are building blocks for a website. They let you create beautiful web pages and functional, aesthetically-pleasing sites for your clients: In this context, a module refers to an element with set functionalities that aren’t tied to the site’s layout. Common examples include forms and buttons. While they may not have the same style, they are used to perform similar functions.

Modular design, also known as ‘atomic design’, is the practice of grouping site elements into patterns that are reusable. The best way to think about modular design is to liken it to building with Legos.

In other words, modules are versatile bricks, each self-contained, that can be arranged and rearranged in whatever order you wish. Each one has the same padding between elements. The result is a grid-like pattern that makes it easier to move the elements around, without disrupting the rest of the content on the page.

The Benefits of a Modular Approach to Web Design

There are many benefits of using modular code for front-end development. The first is that it lets you make changes quickly and easily. As a designer, you know that client approvals and redesigns can stall project timelines.

Plus, templates can be rigid and sometimes limiting. You’re often restricted to using certain elements in the pre-structured content spaces. Modular designs, on the other hand, are more flexible and easier to amend. Fewer mockups are needed, minimizing the development, approval, and deployment process.

Additionally, you can recreate pages using a different variation of the same modules with ease. This can make the deployment of future sites significantly quicker. In addition, it makes the design experience more manageable and organized as projects get bigger and more complex.

Modular design also presents the opportunity for you to create sites that are more modern and clean looking. This type of design creates a clear distinction between elements. This makes them easier to navigate and simpler to adapt as responsive for mobile devices – ultimately resulting in a better User Experience (UX).

3 Tips for Getting Started With a Modular Approach to Front-End Development

If you’re sold on the benefits of modular design, the good news is that it’s not difficult to adopt this strategy. Let’s take a look at three tips you can use for getting started with a modular approach to front-end development.

1. Use a Preprocessor Such as Sass

CSS preprocessors are scripting languages that make it easier to extend CSS’s default capabilities. You can incorporate variables, functions, mixins, etc. to produce more logical code. Preprocessors are an effective way to improve your workflow as a front-end developer.

There are a handful of preprocessors to choose from. One you might consider using is Sass

The Sass website homepage.

Sass is a stylesheet language compiled to CSS, which can make your stylesheet both modular and more scalable. You can use it to turn a large stylesheet into one that is more organized and maintainable. The Sassy CSS (SCSS) language of Sass is similar to CSS, so its principles are pretty easy to adopt.

Once you install Sass in a local staging environment, you can use it for creating built-in modules. We recommend familiarizing yourself with the basics before getting started.

Fortunately, there are many online resources available that you can leverage to gain a better understanding of modular CSS architecture. For example, you might consider taking this Modular CSS with Sass course to improve your Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS (SMACSS) skills.

Susy

Not someones girlfriend, but a Web Layout Toolkit. Susy is a lightweight grid-layout engine for Sass, designed to simplify and clarify responsive grid layouts without ever getting in your way. You can use Susy with floats, flexbox, tables, or any other CSS technique.

2. Download the Advanced Custom Fields Plugin

As a front-end developer, you’re no stranger to the convenience WordPress plugins offer for extending capabilities. When it comes to modular design, a particularly useful tool you may want to consider installing is Advanced Custom Fields:

The Advanced Custom Fields WordPress plugin.

This plugin lets you add your own fields to your WordPress edit screens. You can place them anywhere in theme template files.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you can use it to create a new Field Group. Each ‘field group’ has a designated layout where you can define your own modules that are post-specific:

Settings page for the Advanced Custom Fields WordPress plugin.

In each module, you can include a defined set of fields, each with a wide range of formats to choose from. With the Flexible Content and Repeater field features (available with the Pro version), you can build a series of modules to apply and reuse on any page.

3. Be Clear and Consistent When Naming and Defining Elements

When it comes to writing maintainable code, consistency is key. This is another reason we recommend familiarizing yourself with SMACSS best practices. At the core of this are five types of categories:

  1. Base
  2. Layout
  3. Style
  4. Module
  5. Theme

With the CSS rules divided into five categories, it’s easier to achieve clarity and understanding through naming conventions. Jonathan Snook, the creator of SMACSS, suggests using classes over IDs and element selectors for modules.

When naming classes for modular design, the goal is to make them generic enough to be reusable. However, they should still be specific enough to make finding and understanding them easy. It’s a smart idea to separate classes to define how the elements fit into a layout as well as how they’re styled.

Let’s say you’re creating a callout module. You can simply name the class after the module: .callout. If you wanted to add a state to the module, you could add .is-state. A collapsed callout, therefore, would look like this: .callout.is-collapsed.

Sass offers more guidance and advice on modular CSS naming conventions. Once you choose and establish an approach to naming elements, the key lies in keeping it consistent over time.

Conclusion

Like any front-end developer, you probably want your approach to creating client sites to be as easy, efficient, and manageable as possible. However, the bigger and more complex design projects get, the more difficult this becomes. This is why modular design is worth considering for front-end development.

As we discussed in this article, three tips you can use for getting started with modular design include:

  1. Using a preprocessor such as Sass.
  2. Downloading the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
  3. Being clear and consistent when naming and defining elements.

Do you have any questions about using a modular design approach? Let me know in the comments below, and if you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on WordPress Building Trends For 2020!

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Filed under: Development, Inspiration, WordpressTagged with: ,

83 Top WooCommerce Extensions

WooCommerce is one of the most well known and used e-commerce WordPress plugins. Not only is it an  e-commerce solution for WordPress or ClassicPress that it is also easy to use, includes support for many product formats, has options for currencies and taxes, offers the ability to integrate multiple shipping methods and has built-in support for PayPal, check, bank transfer and cash on delivery. It’s pretty awesome but what if you want more?

WooCommerce is perfectly great on it’s one, but what really makes it one cut above other e-commerce plugins is the wide variety of free and premium extensions available. Today we’re sharing some of the best WooCommerce extensions for WordPress. These plugins add extra features like WPML translations, advanced shipping, easy style customizations and more to WooCommerce so you can build the store your website needs. Self builders and enthusiasts read on!

1. WooCommerce Premium Memberships Bundle

The WooCommerce Memberships bundle the perfect extension to create you own membership or subscription based online business. Sell a monthly subscription box, offer premium monthly support for your web design clients, create a premium weekly investments newsletter or anything else. This bundle includes 19 key WooCommerce add-ons (created by WooCommerce) to add membership tiers, custom website access, products, billing schedules, multiple payment processors and more.

2. WooCustomizer (Free)

WooCustomizer Plugin

Customize your WooCommerce pages with WooCustomizer. This free plugin is full of features to make your store even better. Use the built-in styling options in the live Customizer, edit/remove tabs on product pages, create sale banners, customize your “Add to Cart” button, edit/remove standard WooCommerce product settings (ex: SKU, title, etc) and more to design even better pages. And WooCustomizer also offers options to edit your cart page, checkout fields and even frontend Admin sales stats.

But for more features you’ll want to upgrade to a WooCustomizer pro license. This way you’ll have access to a catalogue mode for easy browsing, nearly instant ajax product search, conversion boosting product quick views, a WooCommerce menu cart and even a customizable thank you page. Plus all pro licenses include a year of premium support and updates.

3. OpenPOS – WooCommerce Point Of Sale (POS)

OpenPOS - WooCommerce Point Of Sale (POS)

Looking for a way to grow your WooCommerce business and increase sales? Sell your goods online and in-store using WooCommerce and the OpenPOS add-on. This awesome plugin makes it easy to sell your products directly to your customers, whether it’s at a brick and mortar store or a popup shop. With OpenPOS you can process purchases and sync you stock in real time. You can even print a receipt for your customers onsite. And the refund or exchange capability makes it easy to keep your customers happy and coming back.

Other awesome features include support for multiple outlets and registers (with assigned cashiers), offline capabilities, barcode scanner support, discounts and coupons, split payment options, session information (see logins, cashier name, location and ip), plus more. All this and there are no monthly fees! OpenPOS really is a great investment for many WooCommerce shops.

4. Product Extras – WooCommerce Product Addons

Product Extras - WooCommerce Product Addons Plugin

Allow your customers to personalize your products with the Product Extras addon. This premium plugin makes it easy for you to offer customizations to your customers. Whether it’s initials on towels, or build-your-own gift boxes, Product Extras makes it easy. Just use the intuitive “Product Extras” options when creating or editing a WooCommerce product.

Add checkboxes or dropdowns for product options, include conditional rules for product features, add a personal message field, offer gift wrap, display selectable swatches and more. You can even display additional products (just remember to add them as child products). Plus, with Product Extras the final product price is automatically increased as extras are added (or decreased as they’re removed). Product extra is also compatible with WooCommerce Subscriptions, Bookings for WooCommerce, WooCommerce Print Invoices, WooCommerce PDF Invoices and many other WooCommerce addons (even some off those mentioned in this list).

5. Abandoned Cart Pro for WordPress

Abandoned Cart Pro for WordPress

Stop losing sales with the help of Abandoned Cart Pro. This powerful plugins helps you retain customers and recover lost carts Enable settings for cart reminders via email, text or even Facebook Messenger. Best of all – setup is easy. Just install the plugin, style your add-to-cart popup, choose an email template, set the reminder delay and you’re ready to go. You can manage your abandoned and recovered orders from the plugin dashboard, as well as view your analytics and stats (complete with graphs and conversion rate).

6. Beeketing WooCommerce Marketing Automation (Free)

Beeketing WooCommerce Marketing Automation Free WordPress Plugin

Looking for tools to automate your marketing process? Then this one is for you. Built to seamlessly integrate with WooCommerce, Beeketing is a pack of WooCommerce marketing extensions for online store owners. It helps you set up the sales funnel and leverage the conversion rate automatically without any continuous manual intervention. You can use the Beeketing suite to promote products via up-sell and cross-sell offers, scalable discounts based on cart purchases, exit-intent targeted discounts, personalized product recommendations and way way more. It’s a quick and easy way to improve your marketing and conversion rate.

7. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search (Free)

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search Free WordPress Plugin

The free WooCommerce Ajax Search plugin makes it easy for your customers to search your WooCommerce store and see instant ajaxed results. By adding a “live search” like this it’s much easier for customers to search through your current inventory, especially if your store has hundreds or thousands of items.

8. WooCommerce MultiStep Checkout Wizard

WooCommerce MultiStep Checkout Wizard Premium Addon

The WooCommerce MultiStep Checkout Wizard is an awesome plugin that guides your customers through the checkout process. By splitting and cleaning up the standard WooCommerce checkout page you can create an attractive, professional and easy to follow process that any customer can understand.

9. WooCommerce Bulk Discount (Free)

WooCommerce Bulk Discount Free WordPress Plugin

The WooCommerce Bulk Discount plugin offers a variety of features that you can use to offer your best customers discounts on products or orders. With this plugin you can easily add incentives for your customers to buy more. Offer fix discounts (such as $5 off when purchasing 5 or more items), percentage discounts (such as 20% off a purchase of 20 or more items) or item specific discounts (more traditional bulk pricing such as 5% off 10, 10% off 20, or 15% off 30 or more). The possibilities are endless and sure to influence your customers to buy more!

10. WooCommerce Custom Product Boxes

Assorted Bundles (Custom Product Boxes) for WooCommerce

Want to offer customers special pricing for creating their own bundle of goods? That’s exactly what Custom Product Boxes was built for! This fabulous plugin allows you to create bundle offers for your WooCommerce store where customers get to choose from a variety of products (like 12 assorted cupcakes for $12, a build-you-own gift basket, or even a WordPress developer pick-3 services package).

11. YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier (Free)

YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier Free WordPress Plugin

If your product images show your item on display in a room (like a chair for sale staged in a sample living room), your products are intricately detailed (like delicately tooled jewelry) or you want to show off the quality of the materials used to create your goods (like a fine leather purse) then the free YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier plugin is for you. With this plugin customers can zoom in on product images – just be sure to upload high quality photos.

12. Stripe for WooCommerce (Free)

Stripe for WooCommerce Free Plugin

This official WooCommerce plugin extends WooCommerce to include support for the Stripe payment gateway. You do nee to have a valid SSL certificate in order to add Stripe and accept credit card payments, but it’s well worth the extra effort since your customers will have the option to use their Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, JCB and Diners Club card to make purchases.

13. WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates

WooZone WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates Plugin

Want to refer customers on your website to Amazon products they’ll love? Then this is the plugin for you! The WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates plugin makes it easy to add Amazon products to your WooCommerce store with your affiliate links. There is even an built-in module to auto import new items from Amazon based on keyword. Other features include built-in reporting to keep track of referral sales, custom styling options, easy to use shortcodes and much more!

14. WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway (Free)

WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway Free WordPress Plugin

With the WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway free WordPress plugin you can accept payments via Stripe. Stripe makes it possible for you to accept major credit cards including Visa, MasterCard, American Express and more as well as Bitcoin. There are no setup fees for Stripe so you can start accepting payments straight away (just be aware that you are charged when payments or refunds are processed).

15. WooCommerce Customer Relationship Manager

WooCommerce Customer Relationship Manager Premium WordPress Plugin

The WooCommerce Customer Relationship Manager plugin gives you advances options to keep track of your customers. This plugin makes it easy to add and edit customers, set customer status, import & export customer lists, track and send emails, place and log calls, view customer purchase activity and much more.

16. YITH Infinite Scrolling for WooCommerce (Free)

YITH Infinite Scrolling for WooCommerce Free WordPress Plugin

The YITH Infinite Scrolling plugin works with WooCommerce so you can show your store with infinite scrolling. This way customers can browse your entire inventory from your main store page. While this might not be optimal for stores with hundreds of products it does make a lot of sense if your store isn’t so large.

17. FacetWP Advanced Filtering

FacetWP Advanced Filtering for WordPress

FacetWP is a powerful search tool for WooCommerce and WordPress in general. With FacetWP your customers can specify their search for products using various facets, such as categories, tags, etc. The plugin is ajax-based so search results are quickly loaded on the page so your customers aren’t left waiting.

18. WooCommerce Multilingual WPML Integration (Free)

WooCommerce Multilingual WPML Integration Free WordPress Plugin

Need to translate your WooCommerce store into multiple languages? With the WooCommerce Multilingual integration plugin you can easily use WPML to translate your WooCommerce store pages & products just like the rest of your WordPress site. Note: this plugin requires you to have your own copy of the premium WPML plugin.

19. WooChimp – WooCommerce MailChimp Integration

WooChimp WooCommerce MailChimp Integration Premium Plugin

WooChimp is a premium MailChimp integration for WooCommerce that makes it easy for your to add MailChimp subscribers when they signup at checkout to complete a WooCommerce purchase. Plus with WooChimp you can also create subscriber groups, insert forms on any page with the included widget & shortcode and use the campaign targeting and advanced reports to optimize your conversion rate.

20. WooCommerce Conversion Tracking (Free)

WooCommerce Conversion Tracking Free WordPress Plugin

The WooCommerce Conversion Tracking plugin makes it easy to track and monitor your advertising campaigns for your WooCommerce store. The plugin adds tracking codes to your cart, user registration and checkout success pages then it creates valuable reports that you can use to keep track of your conversions.

21. YITH WooCommerce Compare (Free)

YITH WooCommerce Compare Free WordPress Plugin

Looking for a way to allow customers to compare prices among similar products in your store? Give the YITH WooCommerce Compare plugin a try. This free plugin adds options a Compare button on item pages so users can see a predefined comparison table of products your have created, or you can add a comparison widget so customers can click to choose which items they want to see compared.

22. WooCommerce Prices By User Role

WooCommerce Prices By User Role Premium WordPress Plugin

In order to offer dynamic pricing to your various customer groups you’re going to need a plugin, and WooCommerce Prices by User Role is just the plugin to extend WooCommerce for you. This plugin makes it possible for you to create user role based pricing as well as custom discounts specific to each grouping. Other handy features include the ability to hide prices and the “Add to Cart” button from non-registered users, display a saving percentage for specific user roles, create product markups and more.

23. WooCommerce Wishlists

WooCommerce Wishlists Premium WordPress Plugin

Want to add a wishlist to your online store? No problem! The premium WooCommerce Wishlists add-on makes it easy for customers to create an unlimited number of wishlists, which they can make public to share with friends (like a wedding registry or Christmas list for Santa) or private. Wishlists support all product variations including groups and can even be shared to social media.

24. WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart Premium WordPress Plugin

Customers abandon shopping carts for a variety of reasons – window shopping, closed browser, walked away from their computer, etc. What do you think it would mean for your online business if you could convert every prospect into a paying customer? What do you think would happen if no one abandoned cart? It would mean more money and happier customers for your business.

To get them back try using the WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart plugin. It works by sensing when a cart has been abandoned, following up with the customer by sending an email with a shopping cart link. You can even entice the user by attaching a coupon to the follow up emails. If all goes well the customer will click on the link and complete their purchase.

25. ShipStation Integration Free Add-on for WooCommerce

ShipStation Integration for WooCommerce

ShipStation Integration is WooCommerce’s official plugin for streamlining your order fulfillment process. ShipStation can sync with orders from so you can follow the whole process from order, to label creation and customer communication. Plus there are plenty of options for shipping service mapping, custom order rules, return labels, reporting and more (note: a ShipStation monthly plan is required for this plugin).

26. Request a Quote Add-on for WooCommerce

Request for a QuoteUp Premium Add-on for WooCommerce

Request a Quote is a premium quote and proposal manager for WooCommerce. This plugin adds features so you can include a “Request a quote” in your WooCommerce store. This is great if you sell in bulk or if your store offers fully customizable items (like websites, car customizations, home remodeling – you get the idea). The advantage it that the plugin makes it extremely easy for users to make requests and for you to manage and respond to them right from WordPress making the whole process more efficient and effective.

27. WooCommerce Customizer (Free)

WooCommerce Customizer Free WordPress Plugin

The WooCommerce Customizer plugin makes tweaking cart button text, labels, products per page, placeholder images, checkout text and more super easy thanks to a customization panel it added to WooCommerce. It uses PHP filters built into WooCommerce so you can make changes without having to know any code.

28. WooCommerce Fancy Product Designer

WooCommerce Fancy Product Designer Premium WordPress Plugin

The Fancy Product Designer is a premium plugin to add powerful product customization options to your website. This way you can offer fully customizable products with colors, text, sizes, images, and more with an easy to use preview so customers know what they’re getting (like Zazzle or TeeSpring). Plus you can add variable pricing so if it costs more to create a certain style you can add an up-charge for it.

29. WooCommerce Checkout Manager (Free)

WooCommerce Checkout Manager Free WordPress Plugin

Customize your WooCommerce checkout page with the free WooCommerce Checkout Manager plugin. This handy plugin adds options to extend (or hide) fields on your checkout page as well as make fields required, limit fields based on user role, retain information for particular fields, add a date picker, set a default state, create conditional fields and much more. This is an exceptional tool if you need to collect extra customer information for State or VAT taxes, if you want customers to register their purchase at checkout (like for premium themes or plugins), or if you want to add custom discount fields for certain customers (based on their user role).

30. WooCommerce Point of Sale

WooCommerce Point of Sale Premium WordPress Plugin

Want to sell products to customers in person, face to face, in your real life store? No problem. With the WooCommerce Point of Sale (POS) plugin you can make sale in your physical store using WooCommerce, all you need is an internet connection and a method to accept payment. The plugin also includes support for adding local taxes, variable products, previous orders, barcode support, order notes, discounts/coupons, email receipts and you can even see a register report at the end of the day.

31. Enhanced E-commerce Google Analytics (Free)

Enhanced E-commerce Google Analytics Free Add-on for WooCommerce

Want to see your Google Analytics for your WooCommerce store with the added Enhanced e-commerce feature? Give this plugin a try. The Enhanced eCommerce Google Analytics plugin adds four reports: shopping behavior, checkout behavior, product performance and sales performance. With this you can optimize your product pages, sales tactics and more.

32. Klarna for WooCommerce (Free)

Klarna for WooCommerce Free WordPress Plugin

Klarna for WooCommerce adds a new payment method for customer checkout. This official Klarna WooCommerce extension replaces the default WooCommerce checkout with Klarna’s so customers and shop with their email and zip code. Klarna gives shoppers the ability to shop on a variety of websites, checkout and then pay for all of their purchases on one monthly invoice.

33. WooCommerce Menu Cart (Free)

WooCommerce Menu Cart Free WordPress Plugin

The WooCommerce Menu Cart does just what it says – it adds a WooCommerce shopping cart to your theme’s main navigation menu. There are options for adding an icon, item count and cart total as well as for floating your cart to the left or right. You can also tweak the styling with a bit of custom CSS as it will take on the default styling of your current menu.

34. WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts

WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts Premium WordPress Plugin

WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts gives you the power to add custom prices and incentives to convince your customers to buy more. This plugin gives you comprehensive control over the prices on your website, allowing you to implement a number of rules to override the default prices. This allows you to offer discounts for holidays or bulk purchases, or give loyal customers promotional pricing for lifetime spending. Use options for quantity discounts, special offers, matched items, repeating special offers, percentage discounts, conditional promo application and much more.

This is done by configuring conditional pricing strategies, allowing you to set exact prices for a seemingly unlimited number of scenarios. For example, you can set rules that determine when a pricing strategy is activated based on date, total spend, and whether specific items are in the customer’s cart. You can also stack these rules for increasingly sophisticated pricing strategies. If you want to limit one promotional price per order, you are able to rank your pricing rules in a hierarchy. So if the top one is activated, the rules further down the list can’t be. Finally, you can choose whether the discounts are applied before or after tax.

Pricing can have a big impact on the amount you sell, and if you want an impressively sophisticated solution for handling all your pricing strategies, look no further than the WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts plugin.

35. WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration (Free)

WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration Free WordPress Plugin

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing reader behavior, popular content and traffic sources for your website. But with the WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration plugin you can see all of this information and more for your WooCommerce store. The plugin makes it possible for you to see how your customers are finding your products, which are more popular and you can even integrate it to see which referrals are converting into sales.

36. YITH WooCommerce Quick View (Free)

YITH WooCommerce Quick View Free WordPress Plugin

Have you ever visited an online store that has a quick view to open a lightbox for an item so you can see the item details, additional photos and even add it to your cart without having to leave the page? That’s exactly what YITH WooCommerce Quick View adds to WooCommerce. It’s easy to install and setup and will make your customers’ shopping experience much easier.

37. AfterShip WooCommerce Tracking (Free)

AfterShip WooCommerce Tracking Free WordPress Plugin

The AfterShip WooCommerce Tracking plugin is an easy way to manage the location of your goods to be sure they are delivered on time and to the right location. The plugin adds fields for Tracking Number and Carrier to your admin panel so as soon as you ship an order simply key in the information so the customer can see it on their order history page. Over 200+ carriers world wide are supported and it’s free to track all of your shipments.

38. Display Product Multi-Layout for WooCommerce

Display Product Multi-Layout for WooCommerce Premium WordPress Plugin

Display Product Multi-Layout for WooCommerce is a quick and easy way to add product display options to your WordPress theme if it doesn’t already support WooCommerce. The plugin adds WooCommerce options for page setup, button styling, color options, custom button text, grid layout, table layout, carousels, filters and more.

39. WooCommerce PDF Invoices (Free)

WooCommerce PDF Invoices Free WordPress Plugin

With the free WooCommerce PDF Invoices Free WordPress plugin you can create simple PDF invoices for all of your WooCommerce sales. The plugin creates an invoice automatically, attaches it to an email to your customer or sends it to their Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or Egnyte account.

40. WooCommerce All-In-One-SEO Pack Integration (Free)

WooCommerce All-In-One-SEO Pack Integration Free Plugin

The WooCommerce All-In-One-SEO Pack Integration plugin is a free and simple way to add SEO options from the All-In-One-SEO Pack plugin to your WooCommerce store (note: you must have All-In-One-SEO installed and active for this plugin to work). It adds meta details to your product pages for title, description, keywords,  menu title, title attributes and the option to disable product.

41. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter (Free)

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter Free WordPress Plugin

The free YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter makes it quick and easy for your customers to filter your store products without having to leave the page. Customers can filter by labels, lists, color and dropdown to see which of your products meet their exact needs.

42. WooCommerce Currency Switcher

WooCommerce Currency Switcher Premium WordPress Plugin

If you operate a store that serves multiple countries chances are you’ll want a way to display your prices in local currencies. The WooCommerce Currency Switcher makes this super easy! Just install and configure your currencies to be converted by Google, ECB or by hand. There’s also an included widget and shortcode to add your currency conversions where you think customers will find them most useful. Bonus: you can also try the free version (which has fewer features and options) of this plugin to see if it’s right for you.

43. Booster for WooCommerce (Free)

Booster for WooCommerce Free WordPress Plugin

Want to add a huge amount of features to WooCommerce in one click? Just install Booster for WooCommerce. This free but powerful plugin includes a surprising amount of WooCommerce add-ons including currencies, exchange rates, price formats, name your price option, wholesale pricing, custom button & price labels, bookings support, crowdfunding, automated SKUs, mini checkout cart, custom payment gateways, additional admin tools, WPML translation booster, WooCommerce export tools and so much more. It’s pretty awesome.

44. WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers (Free)

WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers Free WordPress Plugin

Want your orders created in numerical order? Don’t worry – that’s what the free WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers plugin is for. Once installed this WordPress plugin ensures that your orders are all in, well, order. If you already have existing orders the plugin will begin from your highest order number and proceed sequentially. If you have no orders it will start at 1. Easy and effective!

45. WooCommerce Simple Auctions

WooCommerce Simple Auctions Premium WordPress Plugin

WooCommerce just got better with auctions – simply install WooCommerce Simple Auctions plugin and extend WooCommerce to become true auction solution. By using this WooCommerce extension you can easily create auction website or make Ebay clone with regular, reverse and sealed auctions along with normal products.

The WooCommerce Simple Auctions Plugin features powerful wp-admin tools like page with all auction activity, auction history where you can manage bids, setup automatic relist or manually relist auctioned items. Your bidders will be notified by email notifications (with editable templates) about status of their auctions, users can also watch auctions by checking their auctions page or their auctions activity page.

Plenty of included shortcodes and widgets enable you to nicely setup your WooCommerce auction website. The plugin also features advanced sorting related to auctions – you can sort auctions by end date, current bid, activity, ending soonest and buy now price. Plus if you enable ajax live bid check bidders can watch auctions change live without need to reload auction page, plugin automatically refreshes current bid and auction history table.

With WooCommerce Simple Auctions you get simple yet powerful auction solution which is easy to setup and maintain – you can have you auction site ready in less than 30 minutes. Get your own WordPress auction website ready today – and be sure checkout more plugin features below!

46. YITH WooCommerce Featured Video (Free)

YITH WooCommerce Featured Video Free WordPress Plugin

The YITH WooCommerce Featured Video plugin does just what it says – adds the ability for you to use a featured video on WooCommerce products. Simply paste in the URL to add a YouTube or Vimeo video showcase to your products to showcase how your product works (which will hopefully drive more conversions).

47. Subscriptio – WooCommerce Subscriptions

Subscriptio - WooCommerce Subscriptions Premium WordPress Plugin

Subscriptio WooCommerce Subscriptions makes it possible for you to sell subscriptions to your customers. This plugin adds recurring payments with the options for setup fee, a free trial and an expiration date to help you manage your subscription offerings. The subscriptions include options for pausing, multiple subscriptions, one off fees and more.

48. YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode (Free)

Download YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode Free WordPress Plugin

The YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode free WordPress plugin assembles your entire WooCommerce store inventory into an easy to read catalog format. This is a very useful plugin, especially in cases where you might need to take your store offline for a bit for routine maintenance or site updates. In this case while your main store might not be accessible to customers they can still view your online catalog and contact you with questions or order requests.

49. WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping

Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce

Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce is a premium WordPress plugin that gives you the ability to add multiple shipping rate options to your WooCommerce store. This is a great way to offer consumers multiple shipping options at checkout.

Who doesn’t love shopping online? It’s easy and you can find pretty much anything you want. Make life easier for your frequent shoppers by adding Table Rate shipping for WooCommerce. With this awesome plugin you can offer your regulars free shipping over a certain amount,  a choice between standard or 2-day shipping, special rates based on weight or dimensions and much more. Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce makes it easy to add helpful shipping options for your customers.

In addition to being able to add tons of shipping options at checkout, you can also specify which options are available based on a user’s order or based on the items in their cart. This is a great way to run special discounted shipping on featured products, free shipping for big orders and more. You can also use the Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce plugin options to set rules based on weight, quantity, dimensions, destination and of course price.

50. WooCommerce Extra Product Options

WooCommerce Extra Product Options Premium WordPress Plugin

The WooCommerce Extra Product Options plugin is a versatile product creator for WooCommerce. With this plugin you can build product pages to include conditional product variations, flexible pricing options and product page customizations. The plugin adds a ton of options to WooCommerce including checkboxes, lazy loading for images, fixed and percentage price increases, a form fields builder plus much more.

51. YIKES Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce (Free)

YIKES Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce Free Plugin

YIKES Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce is a great tool for extending the basic WooCommerce plugin to include additional custom tabs on product pages. From the product edit screen admins can add tabs (on a per product basis), reorder tabs and of course delete them. This is handy if you want to add a custom location tab with a Google Map, a special with a table of additional product information, or even a tab with directions on using the product.

52. WooCommerce Product Slider (Free)

WooCommerce Product Slider Free WordPress Plugin

The WooCommerce Product Slider plugin is an easy way to add a responsive WooCommerce product slider and carousel to your website. Simply install the plugin and use the included shortcode and widget to add product showcase sliders and carousels to any post, page or widget ready area.

53. YITH Essential Kit for WooCommerce #1: Free Add-ons Bundle

Yith Essential Kit for WooCommerce #1: Free Add-ons Bundle

Love the YITH suite of free WooCommerce extensions, but don’t want to install them all one by one? Get their FREE plugin bundle! The YITH Essential Kit #1 currently includes add-ons for ajax search, product filters, colors/labels variations, product comparisons, product image zoom, WooCommerce quick view, infinite scrolling, wishlists, quotes, wait lists, catalog mode, advanced reviews and tons more.

54. WooCommerce Lucky Wheel Discounts

WooCommerce Lucky Wheel Discounts Premium WordPress Plugin

Add a fun new way for customers to save at your store (plus add a sense of buyer urgency) with a spin to win coupon or discount. The premium Lucky Wheel plugin for WooCommerce includes easy options for you to add a coupon “wheel” to your site – all customers have to do is subscribe with their email address and the plugin will generate a unique code to be sent to them. Best of all the plugin sync with MailChimp so you grow your newsletter list and new customers save some money – it’s a win win.

55. Square for WooCommerce (Free)

Square for WooCommerce Free WordPress Plugin

Accept payments for your store products online and in store with the Square add-on. With Square you can grow your business faster, having the capability to accept payments any time and any place. Plus, since the plugin integrates with your inventory you’ll instantly see any product changes in Square, so you always know the current name, price, stock number, etc.

56. WordPress WooCommerce Multi Vendor

, each with their own sell profile and the ability o manage their wn shipping. You (as teh admin) will still ahve full control over the entire WooCOmmerce powered store plus the ability to approve sellers, set commission rates and enable auto-publish for trusted sellers.

Start your own marketplace with WordPress and the Multi Vendor plugin for WooCommerce. This powerful marketplace plugin gives you the ability to add multiple vendors to your WooCommerce store, each with their own sell profile and the ability to manage their own shipping. You (as the admin) will still have full control over the entire WooCommerce powered store plus the ability to approve sellers, set commission rates and enable auto-publish for trusted sellers.

57. WooEvents Calendar and Events Booking

WooEvents Calendar and Events Booking Premium WordPress Plugin

Create a calendar of your upcoming events and sell tickets online with WooEvents. The plugin adds useful options for your calendar including event date, location, speakers, schedule, Google map, images, social share and integration with calendar apps (like Google Calendar or iCal). But most importantly you can set a price and sell tickets using WooCommerce. This is a great way to manage tickets for community events, carnivals, fundraisers, concerts and more.

58. WooCommerce Pay With Amazon (Free)

Pay with Amazon for WooCommerce

This free plugin integrates Amazon Payments with your WordPress installation. With this plugin customers can use Amazon to complete their order. The checkout process still takes place on your own site, but there is the added benefit of Amazon Payment’s fraud protection ad well as built-in mobile optimization.

59. SendPulse WooCommerce Push Notifications (Free)

SendPulse WooCommerce Push Notifications Free WordPress Plugin

Let your customers know when a new product is available, or announce a flash sale. Whatever you want to share with your audience, SendPulse email marketing for WooCommerce is the perfect addition to your e-commerce store. Send free push notifications to you customers, anywhere, anytime. The plugin works great with Chrome (desktop/Android), Safari (Mac OS X systems) and Firefox (desktop). Plus offline notifications mean that customers will see your message even if they’re not browsing your catalogue.

SendPulse is also useful for your shop newsletter. Add a checkbox for new visitors to subscribe on your order or checkout page. This way you can build your subscriber list faster! Then use the plugin to take over shop emails automation for order creation, processing and completed statuses. So instead of using the default WooCommerce templates you can use your own custom messages through SendPulse.

60. WooCommerce Social Login

WooCommerce Social Login Premium WordPress Plugin

The faster you capture your buyer’s details, the better the experience and the quicker the checkout. What better way to speed up checkout than allowing users to create accounts, login and checkout via their favorite social networks?

Supporting major social networks, custom redirect URLs, auto-integration, once-click registration, drag and drop UI, multiple login instances and pie charts to track registration activity, WooCommerce Social Login plugin is a robust tool that helps you to achieve a lot with little effort. The plugin comes with great support, full documentation, tutorials and has a near perfect buyer rating.

61. WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods Add-on

WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods

WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods allows you to skip the unnecessary fields, so you can close the deal faster. After all, asking for physical address to send an eBook via email is just plain unnecessary. If you’re selling downloadable digital products customers expect to get the product as quickly as possible. This plugin does not require any kind of configuration to streamline your checkout page – just install and play!

62. WooCommerce Catalog Mode

WooCommerce Catalog Mode Premium WordPress Plugin

On the internet where the competition is just a click away. Standing out counts more than you want to believe. Add functionality and differentiate yourself using the WooCommerce Catalog Mode, which replaces the default WooCommerce shop with a catalog view shop.

In catalog mode, the “Add to Cart” button is removed and you can choose to show the price or whatever you want in its place. Catalog mode will allow you to show more products and capture interested prospects only. Since prospects cannot add the products to a cart, they will contact you instead (or do whatever you want them to).

63. WooCommerce Online Products Designer Extension

WooCommerce Online Products Designer

Give your customers the opportunity to customize product designs easily before checking out. After installing (easy and straightforward), you can use WooCommerce Products Designer to create your own custom designs, grab pictures form social networks such as Instagram or take advantage of the unlimited clipart as well as custom fonts.

The customer can create awesome designs by choosing from your pre-made templates, uploading their own designs or making unique designs from a blank slate. The WooCommerce Products Designer plugin also supports multiple languages and includes premium support.

64. Galaxy Funder WooCommerce Crowdfunding System

Galaxy Funder - WooCommerce Crowdfunding System

Another awesome plugin from FantasticPlugins, Galaxy Funder is the tool you need powering your crowd funding site. It gives you all the options you need to transform your WooCommerce store into a powerful crowd funding portal.

It’s easy to setup and use. For instance, Campaign creation is just like product creation in WooCommerce, so you ought to have lots of fun. Galaxy Funder comes with a couple of cool features such as a shortcode generator, reward/perk system, customizable design (using CSS), fully responsive, translation ready and WPML compatibility among others.

65. WooCommerce Delivery Time Picker for Shipping

Woocommerce Delivery Time Picker for Shipping

Marketing does not end when the buyer gets to your e-store. It doesn’t end when they make the purchase. The customer service you offer your buyers is a huge part of your marketing, and this plugin helps you to take your after-sale customer service to the next level!

This WooCommerce add-on lets your customers to choose the delivery date and time for their products on the checkout page. You can “…restrict dates and date ranges for shipping…“, so don’t worry about customers requesting shipping on holidays, weekends or any other time you cannot deliver.

66. WPB WooCommerce Product Slider Free Plugin

WPB WooCommerce Product Slider Free Plugin

The WPB WooCommerce product slider is an easy way to a responsive slider to your shop. Choose from featured products, latest additions, specific category, tags, or create a custom list of product ids. You can even display the rating, price and add to cart button.Just use the shortcode to insert your sliders on any post or page. The plugin is also translation and RTL ready.

67. WooCommerce Product Badge Manager

WooCommerce Product Badge Manager Premium Plugin

Add custom badges to your store with the WooCommerce Product Badge manager. With this plugin you can design your own badges for categories, product attributes, popularity, sales, etc. Once created, display you badges on product pages, archives or even filters.

68. Product Gallery Slider for WooCommerce – Twist

Product Gallery Slider for WooCommerce - Twist Premium Add-on

The Twist Product Gallery Slider is an easy way to update your product pages. Just ins tall the plugin and enable horizontal or vertical gallery sliders for your items. Just be sure to add lots of product images! The plugin also supports videos, autoplay and include lightbox customization options.

69. WooCommerce Product Filter

WooCommerce Product Filter Premium Plugin

Potential customers should be able to find the products they want straight away – if they can’t, don’t expect them to spend more than a few seconds searching for it. With this in mind, a cluttered store can cost you serious sales. This is a common headache for anyone running an eCommerce store with lots of SKUs.

Good news, though: the WooCommerce Product Filter plugin can help solve this problem. The plugin adds a user friendly filter to your shop, allowing visitors to home in on the products they want with a few simple mouse clicks. The plugin’s filters are actually quite sophisticated: visitors can use the filter to find products in certain categories, between specified price points, and also to find size/color variations.

WooCommerce Product Filter comes with an impressive range of styling options, allowing you to configure the filter you want for your store. This includes columned filters, masonry-style filters, and widget filters. You also have the choice between dropdown menus, radio buttons, and check boxes. If you want to make your eCommerce store easier to browse, the WooCommerce Product Filter plugin really is a must.

70. WooCommerce Bulk Edit Plugin

WooCommerce Bulk Edit

If you stock a lot of products in your eCommerce store, managing them all can be tough. Imagine having to go through over 1,000 products manually to make small adjustments to the prices. There’s got to be a better way, surely?

Well there is! WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit makes managing huge volumes of products a breeze. The plugin adds a master spreadsheet to your website’s backend. Any changes made to items in this spreadsheet will be reflected on the live version of your website.

The plugin supports 44 fields, all of which can be edited. Let’s say a manufacturer makes a small update to one of the models you stock. In just seconds, you could find the product, edit the name, description, and price, without ever clicking through to the product page. This can save substantial amounts of time. The plugin supports a powerful filter system, allowing you to find the products meeting your specified criteria with ease.

If you face a price hike across the board, it could take you most of the day to update all prices manually, even when using the handy spreadsheet. With WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit you can set bulk prices across your entire product range – this could be a fixed value price change or a percentage-based price change. You can even configure your sales prices this way.

71. WISDM Customer Specific Pricing

WISDM Customer Specific Pricing

As a WooCommerce store owner, you might want to set different prices for different customers. Discounted prices can work wonders for special roles like contributor or shop manager. Also, you may have groups of VIP or platinum customers for whom you would want to set custom prices. Customer loyalty only translates to more sales after all.

How do you get all of this done without having to turn your WooCommerce code inside out? Customer Specific Pricing Extension for WooCommerce.

Customer Specific Pricing is a WooCommerce extension that enables the store admin to set different prices for individual customers, roles (subscriber, customer etc) and groups. It will help you show the customer, role or group only the custom prices that were set for them, and not the WooCommerce sale or regular prices.

What’s more, it also allows you to import and export all your customer data. You can export a .csv file of your customers, assign custom prices to the customers, roles or groups and import it so that you could bulk set prices for each customer, role or group without having to do it manually which is time consuming.

In a latest addition to its wide range of features, the plugin received an update that introduced Pricing Manager. This particular feature allows the store admin to set custom prices for a certain customers, roles or groups for one or multiple products all at once from a single window.

72. WooThumbs Product Imagery

WooThumbs Awesome Product Imagery

WooThumbs is a premium WooCommerce extension that adds product gallery options to your store. With this handy plugin it’s easy to add galleries and variations to your WooCommerce products.

WooThumbs is the perfect solution for optimizing your WooCommerce Product Imagery. Your customers will be able to experience your products like never before. Image zoom, multiple images per variation, fullscreen image galleries, and product videos are just some of the fantastic features. It’s easy to make WooThumbs match the style and layout of your theme with a multitude of styling options.

WooThumbs is also responsive. You can adapt the layout at a specific breakpoint, making it look perfect on any device. Give your customers what they want. Let them view your products in all their glory. Have them craving ownership by enhancing your product imagery with WooThumbs.

73. WISDM Scheduler

WooCommerce Scheduler WordPress Plugin

Boost Sales on Your WooStore with WooCommerce Scheduler! Introducing unique products for a limited amount of time is one of the surest ways of picking up sales on your WooCommerce Store. However, despite being the most popular e-commerce platform for websites across the world, WooCommerce does not have a built-in setting for this functionality.

Overcoming this shortcoming is the WooCommerce Scheduler plugin, which allows you to add and sell products on your online store for a limited duration. The plugin can be used to add sale-time limits to existing, as well as new products, by simply choosing the dates while editing the product.

Once the dates and timings are set, a countdown timer is displayed near the product which generates a perceived sense of scarcity in the minds of your customers. This stimulates an urgency to buy, and hence possess, the product at the earliest, which leads to a purchase 7 times out of 10!

Also, Creating limited edition products is a great way of showcasing novelty products that are different from the usual fare on your WooCommerce Store. Not only does this play on the consumer’s psyche of possessing a unique product that is available for a short duration, it also nudges buyers on the fence towards making a purchase, as they are convinced that these products will no longer be available after a given amount of time.

In the customer’s mind scarcity equals attractiveness, which is a tried and tested method of marketing. All the WooCommerce Scheduler plugin does is ensure that getting there to set up these products is quick, painless, and easy.

74. TI WooCommerce Wishlist

WooCommerce Wishlist Plugin

TI WooCommerce Wishlist is a powerful but simple Wishlist solution for your WooCommerce store. Using WooCommerce wishlist is a great way you build loyalty to your store site, grow audience and understand the needs of your customers.

TI WooCommerce Wishlist will be helping you from the very first steps by welcoming you with the setup wizard. You’ll be fully set in a few clicks. However, if you need some extra adjustments the plugin comes with plenty of options. You can adjust button styles separately for shop and product page, each element in wishlist page table, login and processing options and so on.

Once you complete setup, Wishlist will start tracking customers behavior in wishlists and providing you with analytics. You’ll be able to see sales to product popularity and other important stats.

Shoppers like to share their wishlist with friends and family. This is why the TI plugin comes with social share functionality. But with the exclusive “Follow” feature they are able to follow each other (or any other public) wishlists and stay informed about any changes in wishlists. The plugin includes recent/popular wishlists shortcode and widget to help you gain additional attention to public wishlists.

When you gain leads and analytics data you can send promotional emails to all or specific customers using predefined email templates. For example, you could send a discount to all customers who added a specific product to their wishlists. In just one click!

TI WooCommerce Wishlist is responsive, translation ready and works well with many popular WordPress plugins. This includes WPML, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache and WooCommerce – Gravity Forms Product Add-Ons. But these are just a few features of this powerful plugin, check full list below.

75. Woo Credits

Woo Credits

Woo Credits is a great WooCommerce extension that allows WooCommerce store owners to easily create, sell and accept credits in their WooCommerce driven shop. Woo Credits Platinum works with Simple, Variable and Subscription type products.

Store admins simply create Credit Bundles and then have the option to assign each product a unique “Credit” price. The functionality is very similar to iStockPhoto or other credit based sites. Customers first purchase Credits in bulk, then redeem those Credits towards products in the store. Woo Credits also works perfectly with “Virtual” and “Downloadable” products giving WooCommerce store owners even more flexibility to earn revenue and repeat visitors to their respective stores.

In addition to these great features, WooCommerce admins can choose to run a “Credits Only” store. Simply select the option in the plugin settings. Running a “Credits Only” store will hide all currency prices and only let customers check out with their credit balance. A currency option will then reappear when customers replenish their Credits. WooCommerce admins can market and sell their Credit Bundles by using the “buy_credits” shortcode on any page or post.

WooCredits also offers Visual Composer template add-ons available for purchase which are pre-designed blocks to help market your Credit Bundles. Other shortcodes available include “user_credits” which displays the credit balance of users who are logged in. Admins also have the option to set credits to expire and can show how long the credits are good for by using the optional parameter “show_expiry=yes” in the “buy_credits” shortcode.

76. WooCommerce Product Feed Manager

WooCommerce Product Feed Manager

WooCommerce Product Feed Manager generates a product feed to sync your products with your merchant center – including Google Shopping, Amazon Product Ads, Pricegrabber.com, Become, etc. You can quickly add all your product (no limitation) from your WooCommerce store to different dealer shops. WooCommerce Product Feed Manager has setups that meet the requirements from various merchant stores.

The plugin is compatible with the latest versions of WooCommerce. Also, this plugin supports any WooCommerce theme available on the market. This plugin won’t give you any problem when you want to design your website. You can tweak the content of every field to maximize your revenue from your products in merchant shops. You will get the option to generate a custom feed, add dynamic attributes as you need, and add static field values to your product feed when needed.

Also, you get the option for category mapping and freedom to fully marge your shop category with merchant stores category. You can change the title depending on your merchant category also.

77. WooCommerce Compare Products

WooCommerce Compare Products

Compare products in your WooCommerce shop without ever leaving the page. Create compare groups to organize the products, and then setup a list of subcategories and features as you would like them to appear. The features can be comprised of predefined WooCommerce Attributes, or custom content including HTML. The additional settings page allows you to control many of the plugin’s features. Including thumbnail size, location of the preview basket and compare links, how the table is viewed, and so much more.

When setup is complete, customers are able to select products of their choosing for comparison. While browsing your inventory, a preview basket can be seen floating at the bottom of the browser. You can also opt to show the preview box as a widget in the sidebar, or embedded in the content at the top or bottom of the shop archive. When ready, the customer can click the ‘Compare’ button and be directed to the comparison page, or shown the table in a popup container.

No matter how you view the table, it will adjust according to screen size and width of the table. This means it will scroll appropriately if you have several items being compared. Or if are viewing the list on a smaller mobile device. It is comprised of features and (optional) categories at setup, but can be narrowed to show only different rows. Customers can also directly add their chosen product to the cart right from the compare table.

78. Dokan Multivendor

Dokan WooCommerce Multivendor Marketplace

Dokan is not just an eCommerce solution for WordPress. It’s the one-stop Multivendor solution for entrepreneurs looking for the ultimate deal! Start your perfect eCommerce website with an unlimited number of vendors and create any product type even with a limited budget. Dokan has you covered in every way! It only takes a couple of minutes to get started and create something magical.

Dokan was created to be easy to use, with new entrepreneurs and small businesses in mind. You will find that managing payments and subscriptions are actually as simple as ABC! Intuitive design and interface make things flawless for rookies in eCommerce.

Dokan also has advanced marketplace features that let it seamlessly manage itself. Your vendors will have detailed individual frontend dashboards, personal store pages, and the ability to manage everything on their own. And you will only have to perform as minimally as reviewing the orders. Imagine the amount of time and energy it saves you!

Set flexible commission rates and automatic revenue splits for all sellers. Your vendors will absolutely love all the amazing features.

Maybe you want to create something like eBay? Dokan Simple Auction lets you create stores of auctionable products. With Dokan’s exclusive features you can also create serviceable products, like hotels, resorts, taxi cabs, and more, that customers can book as they like.

Worried that you won’t be able to sell to a non-English speaking audience? Dokan is multilingual ready. Make your dream marketplace no matter where you live! What’s more! Dokan comes with a free theme to get you started right away.

79. WooCommerce Product ExportFeed

WooCommerce Product ExportFeed

Starting an eCommerce site with WordPress is relatively easy when compared to actually running your business. Meaning reaching potential customers for your products and getting them to buy them. So if you are a beginner in the field of eCommerce business

One important consideration is that the more sales channel you add to your sales funnel, the more customers you will have. But adding all of your products to one or more of these channels will give you a tough time. If you are listing your products manually, it will be a time consuming and cumbersome process along with the chances of errors that you may make and the consequences of them. Also, managing your product feed and updating the product information will be a hassle.

Instead you can use tools like ExportFeed to help you create your product feed for all your products. Or selected some products based on keywords, price, category or such. As ExportFeed has pre-loaded all the feed specification templates for popular search engines, you will save time for feed creation and ensure acceptance of products on merchants like Google Shopping, Amazon, Facebook Shop, eBay, Pricefalls and a lot of others.

80. Moodle Integration

WooCommerce Moodle Integration

Employ the power of WooCommerce with this Moodle-WooCommerce Integration plugin! Moodle certainly is one of the most popular learning management systems out there. But Moodle users have often struggled to find a good solution to their e-commerce woes. This plugin integrates Moodle with WooCommerce so as to allow Moodle users to utilize the benefits of one of the leading e-commerce platforms — WooCommerce.

What the plugin essentially does, is synchronize your Moodle courses onto WooCommerce as products. As a Moodle administrator, you can make these products paid, and set a price for each course. Interested students can then sign up for the course upon purchasing it.

Use WooCommerce features such as sale prices, discount codes or coupons, or can easy couple this plugin with other payment gateways, search engine optimization or marketing plugins to boost course sales.  A powerful feature the plugin is an option to upsell using the bundling functionality. Instead of associating one course per product, you can bundle together two or more courses and sell them as a single product at a discounted price.

Course categories in Moodle can also be synchronized as product categories in WooCommerce. Alternatively, product categories can be manually created and assigned to products. plus when a student purchases a course and registers on WordPress, a student account is automatically created in Moodle. With the same credentials – and the student is enrolled for the course purchased. And subscription products can be created using the WooCommerce Subscription extension. Using this extension, courses can be sold on a subscription basis.

81. IcyMobi App

IcyMobi – All-in-one E-commerce App Solution

Made by Inspius, a leading web and mobile app development agency in Singapore, IcyMobi was launched in August 2016. Built on Ionic platform, IcyMobi can help users to transform their E-commerce websites to M-commerce apps both on iOS and Android quickly and without any prior programming language. The vision is to build an ecosystem around IcyMobi so that designers and coders can build new designs and plugins for IcyMobi and earn for their work.

Since the launch, a lot of releases and updates have been made, most inspired by requests from users. IcyMobi now supports major payment gateways across geographical regions such as PayPal, Stripe, Mollie and Omise. Push notification helps store owners to notify consumers latest news, attractive discounts and big promotions for grab.

82. Genesis Connect for WooCommerce (Free)

Genesis Connect for WooCommerce Free WordPress Plugin

Love your Genesis theme but wish your WooCommerce store matched? With Genesis Connect for WooCommerce all of the built-in shop templates included with WooCommerce are replaced with Genesis supported versions. Plus the plugin also works with Genesis Simple Sidebars & Genesis Simple menus to make them compatible with WooCommerce as well.

83. WooCommerce Pretty Emails

WooCommerce Pretty Emails Premium WordPress Plugin

Customize your store emails with the WooCommerce Pretty Emails plugin. Create email templates that match the rest of your business by customizing the fonts, colors, text size, banners, width, headings, borders, product thumbnails, social links and more. This way customers making purchases will know your emails when they see them!

Conclusion

Well, there are quite a few Woocommerce extensions listed above! Hopefully you’ve found at least one or two add-ons that you can use to make your WooCommerce store even more powerful. We’ve listed the best free and premium plugins we could find, but if you think we missed one just leave a comment. And if you do give one of these plugins a try let me know how it works out and share your experience with our other readers! If you enjoyed this post, while you are at it check out this article on 5 Trending WordPress Development Tools!

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Filed under: Development, eCommerce, WordpressTagged with:

14 Best WordPress or ClassicPress Plugins For Self Builders

Choosing the right WordPress plugins for your website as a self builder can be difficult. The massive number of free and premium plugins, and the amount of information circulated about them, often results in people having to put in hours and hours of research to help them decide on the best plugins for their sites. I have put together this collection of top WordPress plugins, to help save you time and ensure you have the best plugins installed and running on your site. I have made sure I included a range of plugins that will add most of the essential functionality your WordPress site will need, as well as plugins that add powerful advanced features, to give your website an edge over the competition. So let’s check out which WordPress plugins are the best for self builders at the outset, although it may well be that at some point they get swapped for something else, these are a good place to start.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the leader in its field when it comes to search engine optimization. This free plugin comes with a ton of features including XML Sitemaps, title and meta description templates, schema implementation, and control over your site’s breadcrumbs.

Importantly, Yoast SEO also analyzes everything that appears in your content – keywords, titles, meta descriptions, and more – to optimize your posts and pages for the search engines.

What’s the alternative? 

Having an SEO plugin on your WordPress website is a must. So if you aren’t keen on Yoast SEO then RankMath is a great alternative.

Visit Yoast SEO

2. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a popular list building plugin, created to help you grow your mailing list and increase conversions on your site, whatever your goals. This plugin comes with a long list of features including a huge collection of optin form styles, form templates, a drag-and-drop form builder, extensive A/B testing, analytics, and much more.

Thrive Leads is a premium product, with prices starting at just $67 for one site license. To find out more about this plugin, check out our in-depth review of Thrive Leads to help you decide if this is the right solution for you.

What’s the alternative?

OptinMonster is the obvious alternative to Thrive Leads. However, although OptinMonster provides superior functionality to Thrive Leads, bear in mind that it’s monthly subscription price isn’t cheap.

Visit Thrive Leads

3. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a powerful email marketing provider. This tool aims to empower users to understand their audience, and consequently send the right emails to the right people at the right time.

Constant Contact boasts an intuitive drag-and-drop editor to customize email templates and create professional emails that engage with your audience. You can then automate email series, sending emails based on individuals’ behaviour on your site. By delivering personalized and relevant emails, you will soon see an increase in traffic and conversions on your site.

What’s the alternative?

There are numerous email marketing services to choose from. Other than Constant Contact, we recommend Convertkit, another feature-rich email marketing provider.

Visit Constant Contact

4. Akismet

Spam can be a major problem, and a drain on your resources and time. Thankfully the free WordPress plugin Akismet can deal with spam for you. By default, Akismet comes pre-installed on all new WordPress installations, but can also be found in the WordPress repository should you need it.

Akismet’s main task is to filter spam comments and pingbacks, so you are left with legitimate blog comments that you can publish on your site’s discussion boards. Although Akismet works for free on personal blogs, you will need to pay for its service if you are running a commercial site.

What’s the alternative?

Spam Protect by Clean Talk provides protection from spam for all major comments and forms plugins, as well as landing pages, email services, WooCommerce sites, and more. Although there is no free version of this plugin, prices start from only $8 a year.

Visit Akismet

5. Sucuri

A premium security plugin, Sucuri will help to keep your website safe and secure. This high-end plugin will protect your website using a variety of tools and features including 24/7 monitoring, a cloud-based firewall, and malware removal.

Sucuri will also boost your site’s performance via its highly optimized CDN. For more information on how to keep your site safe, check out this article – 7 Ways to Protect Your Website.

What’s the alternative?

Sucuri isn’t cheap, with prices starting at $199.99 a year. For a free and effective alternative to Sucuri, check out the WordPress plugin Wordfence.

Visit Sucuri

6. UpdraftPlus

As well as installing a reliable security plugin, backing up your website is also a must. UpdraftPlus is a freemium WordPress plugin that will enable you to rest easy, knowing that your website is backed up and ready to be restored with a click of a button, if the need arises.

With UpdraftPlus, you can back up to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and many more locations. You can then set automatic backups to a schedule of your choice.

What’s the alternative?

If you are looking for a more advanced backup solution, BlogVault might be for you.

Visit UpdraftPlus

7. Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is an impressive freemium plugin that will enable you to add stylish and highly optimized forms to your WordPress website. Create and display a range of form types including contact forms, surveys, online orders, quizzes, file upload forms, and more.

Gravity Forms also provides an extensive list of features to help enhance each form you add to your site. Design your forms using the intuitive visual form builder, select from 30+ form fields, use conditional logic to personalize what your users see, and integrate your forms with third-party services to streamline your workload.

What’s the alternative?

Simple Basic Contact Form is an impressive free WordPress contact form plugin (which we will discuss next)…

Visit Gravity Forms

8. Simple Basic Contact Form

If you are looking to add a simple yet effective contact form to your website, that is quick and easy to create, then the free WordPress plugin, Simple Basic Contact Form, is for you. Designed by the developers over at WPKube, this plugin is clean, secure, and extremely flexible.

Using this plugin, you can easily configure a stylish contact form via the plugin settings. You can then display the form anywhere on your site using either shortcode or a template tag. Simple Basic Contact Form also blocks spam and protects against malicious content.

What’s the alternative?

If neither Gravity Forms or Simple Basic Contact Form appeal to you, then you should check out WPForms, another professional form builder plugin.

Visit Simple Basic Contact Form

9. WooCommerce

If you are looking to create an eCommerce store, then installing WooCommerce is a must. This high-end plugin has everything you need to sell physical, digital, or affiliate products online. It is also thoroughly supported by the WordPress community, integrating with an array of purpose-built WooCommerce themes, as well as plugins and other tools.

Although the core WooCommerce plugin is free to use, as your store grows you may well need further advanced functionality, which is available through premium WooCommerce extensions.

What’s the alternative?

A popular eCommerce alternative to WooCommerce is Shopify. If you aren’t sure which is the right solution for your project, have a read of our WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison.

Visit WooCommerce

10. MemberPress

MemberPress is a leading solution in the membership plugin sphere. Not only is it extremely user-friendly, but it also has an impressive list of features, helping you to quickly build a professional and successful membership website.

MemberPress offers extensive control over membership privileges, pricing pages, subscription management, content dripping, and a ton of integrations. And to top it all off, this plugin starts at just $149 a year.

What’s the alternative?

If MemberPress is outside of your budget, then PaidMembershipsPro offers a free version of its service, with premium extensions available when you need the extra functionality.

Visit MemberPress

11. WP Rocket

Part of what makes WP Rocket Caching Plugin so great is that it does more than just manage your caching. It’s compatible with Cloudflare, offers lazyload, optimizes Google Fonts, detects mobile devices, and provides DNS prefetching.

A single site license for this plugin will set you back just $49, but the speed increase for your WordPress website will be worth every penny.

Check out my article on WP Rocket!

What’s the alternative?

A great alternative to WP Rocket is W3 Total Cache. If you are interested in this free plugin, have a look at this Beginners Guide to help you with the install and set up process.

Visit WP Rocket

12. ShortPixel

ShortPixel is an image optimizer that focuses on ease of use. Not only is the plugin free to use for 100 images per month, but it also offers lossy, glossy, and lossless image compression. This alone makes it a versatile image optimization plugin that’s worth checking out.

All types of images can be compressed including PNG, JPG, and GIF, and it’s WooCommerce compatible. Additional images are only $4.99 for 5000 image credits.

What’s the alternative?

If ShortPixel doesn’t appeal to you, then Smush Image Compression and Optimization from WPMU DEV is a great alternative plugin.

Visit ShortPixel

13. Embed Code

Embed Code is a free WordPress plugin from the developers over at DesignBombs. This plugin can be used to easily embed code into your website’s header or footer.

Embed Code can be used to insert almost anything, including Google Analytics tracking code, the Facebook Pixel, live chat integration, and custom CSS, to name a few options.

What’s the alternative?

A popular alternative to Embed Code is Insert Headers and Footers, though both plugins do a similar job.

Visit Embed Code

14. Monarch Social Sharing

Monarch is a social media sharing plugin created by Elegant Themes. Integrating with over 35 social networks, this plugin will encourage readers to share your posts and pages, helping your content to reach a wider audience.

Within the dashboard of this all-in-one solution, you can customize your sharing buttons and configure your display settings, as well as monitor analytics to see how your sharing buttons are performing. This premium plugin is available when you purchase an Elegant Themes license, which also gives you access to the Divi and Extra themes, as well as the lead generation plugin Bloom.

What’s the alternative?

Social Snap is a complete social media tool kit, that includes social sharing buttons as well as social follow buttons, click-to-tweet, and automatic social sharing, to name a few options.

Visit Monarch

Conclusion

All of the WordPress plugins mentioned in this article, including the alternative plugins provided, are great options. Adding the extra functionality to your website that these plugins provide will ensure that your site is fully optimized for performance, the search engines, and your audience. So, if you haven’t already, its time to start installing these top WordPress plugins. If you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on Top 15 WordPress Plugins for Non Techies!

Filed under: Development, eCommerce, WordpressTagged with:

Kinsta Wordpress Hosting Review And Test

Kinsta is a performance-oriented managed WordPress host that’s powered by Google Cloud Platform, which is the same hardware running Google’s own products (perhaps you’ve heard of Google?). In the past, Kinsta was almost exclusively a premium host, with prices starting at $100. This is a lot different  now, though because at the beginning of November 2017, Kinsta completely relaunched with an all-new pricing plan that starts at just $30 per month.

In this Kinsta review, I’ll investigate Kinsta and examine its new pricing and all-new dashboard design. And, of course, I’ll also run plenty of performance tests so that you can see how quickly your site will load with Kinsta.

In general, Kinsta consistently impresses me with its performance and it’s one of my favorite WordPress hosts. But let’s not jump the gun – here’s why I think that:

Kinsta Performance Tests: My Test Site Loaded In Under 1 Second

How quickly your website loads is a massive part of how successful your website is. Page load times affect everything from your Google ranking to how much people enjoy browsing your site and are willing to buy lots of stuff from you.

So if your chosen host doesn’t set you up with a quick-loading WordPress website, none of the other bells and whistles make a difference.

That’s why I want to start off my Kinsta review by running a few performance tests.

To see how quickly Kinsta loads, I’ve set up a test site that:

  • Is using the Elementor page builder
  • Has a homepage using the Elementor Canvas blank layout and an Elementor landing page template.

Other than installing Elementor, I didn’t make any changes to my test site. Its page size is 1.0 MB and it has 43 requests.

First, I ran it through a Pingdom test, where it loaded in just 946 ms:

kinsta review performance data

Then, I put it through GTmetrix, where it loaded in a similarly impressive 0.9 seconds:

kinsta gtmetrix test data

So, as far as one-off tests go – Kinsta consistently loads in under 1 second, which is pretty dang fast. But what about a situation where your site is receiving actual traffic?

That is, will your site load just as quickly for the fiftieth visitor as it does for the first visitor?

To see if that’s the case, I ran my test site through a Load Impact test with 50 concurrent visitors. Here’s how it fared:

kinsta load impact test data

What does that chart mean?

  • The blue line indicates the number of “active visitors”. It increases from 0 all the way up to 50.
  • The green line indicates how quickly the site loaded for each visitor. It hovered around 510 ms.

Essentially, this chart shows that the load times always stayed around 510 ms, no matter how many visitors were active on the site. That’s a good thing and indicates that your site will perform well even when your site is getting real traffic.

All in all, Kinsta has maintained its high-quality performance, despite dropping its prices.

Here’s The Technology That Makes Kinsta’s Performance So Good

In case you’re interested in why Kinsta sites load faster than cheap shared hosting, here’s some of the technology that powers Kinsta:

  • PHP 7.X support
  • NGINX
  • Google Cloud Platform infrastructure
  • MariaDB
  • HTTP/2
  • LXD containers
  • Automatic MySQL Database optimization

6 Other Things That Are Cool About Kinsta

Beyond Kinsta’s quick page load times, here 6 other things that I like about Kinsta hosting.

1. The Kinsta Dashboard Is Awesome And User Friendly

Kinsta’s dashboard was always easy to use. But the recent redesign just made things even better.

Say goodbye to cPanel for good, because here’s what Kinsta’s custom dashboard looks like:

kinsta dashboard

All the sidebar tabs are interesting, but the area that you’ll probably work in most is the Sites tab.

Here, you can view all of your sites, as well as basic usage and traffic stats:

kinsta site management

And if click on each individual site, you’ll be able to manage:

  • SFTP/SSH details
  • Database access
  • Backups (more on these in a second)
  • Caching
  • HTTPS (which you get for free)
  • New Relic Monitoring
  • Your PHP Engine
  • Plugins
  • CDN
  • Server logs

2. Support Is Available Everywhere Through Intercom

In those screenshots above, you might’ve noticed that Intercom icon floating around in the bottom right corner:

This is how you get support with Kinsta, which I love.

Why is Intercom better than regular live chat support? Because Intercom isn’t tied to a specific window. That is, you can navigate through the dashboard without affecting your chat. Or, you can even completely close the window and your chat history will be preserved for the next time you access your dashboard.

For example, you can see that I can still quickly access my support chat from four weeks ago:

kinsta support through intercom

It’s a small thing, but much more convenient.

And in case you’re wondering – Kinsta responds pretty dang fast. Even though I’m in Vietnam (super weird time zone!), I still got a quick response to my query.

Just be aware – Kinsta purposefully does not offer phone support. You can read their reasoning here. That’s not a negative to me as I prefer live chat anyway – but it is something that you should be aware of.

3. Easy-to-Use Staging Sites

Staging sites allow you to create a clone of your live site that you can safely make changes to. Then, when you’re happy with the changes, you can click a button to push those changes to your live site.

Basically, they’re pretty awesome and ensure you don’t accidentally mess up the live version of your site when you’re tweaking things.

Kinsta makes staging stupid simple. Whenever you’re managing a site, you can quickly switch between the Live and Staging environments by using a drop-down:

Once you switch to staging, you can manage all of your staging site’s details and push it live with a single click:

kinsta staging

Then, Kinsta automatically creates a backup whenever you push staging live, in case you need to revert back to the old site after making the switch.

Speaking of backups…

4. Automatic Backups + Easy Restores

Kinsta automatically backs up your site every single day and stores 14 consecutive backups for you. You can also run a manual backup at any time.

And here’s what I really like – Kinsta gives you two options:

  • Restore (to live site)
  • Restore To Staging

That way, you can easily test out a backup before replacing the live version of your site:

kinsta backups

5. WordPress-Specific Security Plus A Hack Guarantee

If you want to keep your WordPress site secure, it helps to take a proactive approach. Kinsta does this for you with a number of security-conscious features. These include:

  • Hardware firewalls
  • Malware scanning
  • DDoS protection
  • 24/7 uptime monitoring – uptime checks every 60 seconds
  • Free Let’s Encrypt SSL

Additionally, if, by some chance, something does happen to your site, Kinsta offers a Hack guarantee. If your website is ever hacked, Kinsta will fix it for you and restore your site back to working condition.

6. 13 Global Data Centers

When you host a website, you want to host it on the physical server that’s closest to your target audience in order to offer them the best page load times possible.

Kinsta makes that easy for you by offering a whopping 13 different data centers on 4 different continents. Those locations are:

  • Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
  • St. Ghislain, Belgium
  • Changhua County, Taiwan
  • Sydney, Australia
  • The Dalles, Oregon, USA
  • Ashburn, Virginia, USA
  • Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
  • São Paulo, Brazil
  • London, UK
  • Frankfurt, Germany
  • Jurong West, Singapore
  • Tokyo, Japan
  • Mumbai, India

Having such a large selection makes it easy to host your site near your visitors, no matter where they’re located.

What I Don’t Like About The New Kinsta Pricing Plan

In general, I think that Kinsta is a great host. But there is one thing that I don’t really like about the new plans.

In the past, Kinsta charged based on bandwidth, rather than placing a cap on visits. If you’re familiar with the managed WordPress hosting industry, this was fairly unique and actually one of Kinsta’s unique selling propositions (beyond the stellar performance).

With the new plans, though, Kinsta has fallen in step with the rest of the managed WordPress hosting industry and puts a cap on visitors for each monthly plan (here’s how they count visits).

This isn’t necessarily a negative because it is the standard approach for managed WordPress hosting. But it is…the “removal of a previous benefit”, so to speak.

Still, the new visitor caps do come with a price slash from $100 to $30 per month (starting price), so it’s not all doom and gloom.

How Much Does Kinsta Hosting Cost?

Since I just mentioned pricing, I might as well share the exact plans. Here’s Kinsta’s current pricing structure:

Kinsta hosting price comparison

Is Kinsta Right For Your WordPress Site?

< Because of its price, I don’t think Kinsta is necessarily the best host for beginners. That is, if you’re launching your first website, you can probably save some money by using a host like SiteGround which is a good quality Wordpress host for small to medium sites..

But if your site has started to gain some traction and you’re looking for improved performance, as well as improved management when it comes to things like staging and backups, that’s when I think Kinsta is a great option.

The new prices are competitive and Kinsta’s performance, support, and features are top-notch.

So, if you’re looking to make the jump from cheap shared WordPress hosting to performance-oriented managed WordPress hosting, Kinsta is a great choice that just got a heckuva lot more affordable, if you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on 5 Trending WordPress Development Tools! Or just Go to Kinsta!

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5 Trending WordPress Development Tools

WordPress is the King of Content Management Systems (CMS’s) with in excess of a 61% market share of all online CMS’s. One of the many reasons WordPress is a preferred platform is that it’s constantly evolving to incorporate new technologies. However, with so much innovation, keeping up with the latest changes can take some effort. To do the best for your clients it helps to look ahead to understand what web design and development trends are expected to dominate the market. Doing this will make it easier to adapt and gain an advantage over competitors.

In this post, I’ll take a look at five WordPress (or ClassicPress) development trends you can expect to see in the upcoming year and explore some examples of how they can be used.

1. Chatbot Integration

Automation and assistive technologies are cropping up in many different forms on websites these days. One of the increasingly popular uses for this technology is chatbots:

A chatbot message.

These web-based messengers streamline a wide range of administrative and customer support tasks.

Chatbots aren’t necessarily anything new. They’ve been around for a while now. However, thanks to the progressive nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots are becoming more ‘human-like’ every day.

Take a look at this spoof demo I built for Sally Illngworth of Illingworth Media, and hit no in the dialogue for a chuckle.

Spoof Illingworth Media Bot

As such, businesses are able to use them in many different environments and applications, and will likely continue to do so in the future. In fact, at least 85 percent of businesses are expected to use chatbots by 2022.

If you’re interested in exploring chatbots for your client’s sites, we recommend using a tool with easy WordPress integration. For example, you might try using Botsify. You can create a chatbot through its website, and then quickly add it to WordPress sites via a plugin or code.

Another option you might consider is the IBM Watson plugin. This tool uses IBM Watson Assistant (previously Watson Conversation) on the IBM Cloud. It has a steeper learning curve but offers nearly unlimited customization potential.

2. Voice Search Optimization

Speaking of AI, voice search is quickly gaining traction as a staple technology for both business and personal purposes. Voice-activated search assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, are becoming more common as well.

According to research, by 2020 about half of searches are expected to be voice-activated ones. Moreover, one-third of browsing sessions will happen without a screen at all.

Voice shopping, in particular, is expected to disrupt the retail industry over the next few years. The use of smart home speakers is expected to increase from 13 percent to 55 percent.

Voice search is also expected to influence and improve SEO. People tend to use more natural language when they are conducting a search query verbally, rather than typing it. As voice search becomes more prevalent, it’s likely that we’re going to see search engines producing results that are more aligned with user intent.

To get started with voice search optimization, you might consider trying a voice search plugin. For example, WP Fastest Site Search lets you add voice capabilities to your site:

WP Fastest Site Search WordPress plugin.

This plugin replaces the default search widget in WordPress. You can use it to create and customize your own WordPress search user interface, with no custom coding needed.

3. Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology, thanks to its adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is becoming particularly prevalent in financial sectors. However, we can also expect to see it influence plugin development and content monetization for WordPress sites. It can be particularly useful for enhancing on-site security and improving the speed of payment transactions for e-commerce sites.

This year, WordPress launched a new platform with blockchain features called Newspack. The primary purpose of this product is to improve the reliability and security of publishing outlets. It should alleviate many of the challenges that come with back-end site maintenance and development.

Additionally, there are plenty of WordPress cryptocurrency themes and plugins you can use. For example, to create a cryptocurrency website you can use a theme such as Cryptic:

Cryptic WordPress cryptocurrency theme.

As for blockchain plugins, you can use Site Reviews to verify reviews. WordProof Timestamp is also worth checking out, as it enables you to timestamp your WordPress content on any EOSIO blockchain.

4. Augmented and Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology have made strides in giving businesses the ability to offer interactive experiences. Both take a person’s physical environment and superimpose it with layers of digital information to mimic real-world scenarios.

The IKEA Place app is just one of many examples of how AR and VR can be used to create better experiences for consumers. It lets users place pieces of furniture within a room in their homes via smartphone camera, in order to preview how they will look.

Another use is being able to ‘virtually visit’ a location and take a tour without actually being there. For example, realtors can provide clients with 3D VR tours on their websites.

WordPress now authorizes VR content with 360-degree images and videos. If you’re interested in adding AR and VR features to your client sites, there are a variety of ways to go about it. You might also consider using the Ozisti Theme:

The Ozisti Theme for WordPress.

This theme is one of the easiest ways you can integrate AR functionality with WordPress sites. It was built specifically for e-commerce, but can be used for a wide range of projects.

5. Progressive Web Apps

Last but not least, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) provide an app-like experience to mobile users without actually requiring users to install anything. They work within mobile browsers, and function largely as native apps would.

Among the many benefits include:

  • Increased security
  • Faster loading times
  • More flexibility
  • Better user experience

PWAs have been around for a while. However, with more people relying on mobile devices, they’re becoming increasingly popular for WordPress applications.

Aside from building your own PWA from scratch, you can also use WordPress plugins to turn a site into a PWA. For example, you can check out Super Progressive Web Apps:
The Super Progressive Web Apps WordPress plugin.

Once you install this plugin, users who visit the site from a mobile device can add it to their home screens. Then, each page they visit will be locally stored and available to access offline.

Conclusion

WordPress is constantly adding new features and functionalities. Of course, it’s important to keep up with the latest changes. However, to really enhance your offerings and better serve your clients, it helps to familiarize yourself with the most anticipated trends.

In this article, we taken a look at five WordPress development trends you can expect to see grow in popularity in 2020:

  1. Chatbot integration
  2. Voice search optimization
  3. Blockchain technology
  4. Augmented and virtual reality technology
  5. Progressive web apps

If you have questions about any of these WordPress development trends let me know in the comments section below and nif you enjoyed this post, why not check out this related article on other Wordpress Build Trends!

Post by Xhostcom Wordpress & Digital Services, subscribe to newsletter for more!

Filed under: Development, eCommerce, WordpressTagged with: ,

Page Redirects in WordPress or ClassicPress

Page redirects in WordPress or ClassicPress are not the most straightforward topic if you are dealing with it for the first time. Many people have heard of page redirects before but aren’t always sure when you need to use them or how to implement them. These are sometimes needed when maintaining a Wordpress or Woocommerce site.

In the following blog post, you will learn everything you need to know about page redirects (in WordPress and otherwise).

This includes what they are and why they matter when to use what type of redirect, where to apply them, and different ways of correctly implementing page redirects on your WordPress site, so to start lets take a look at what they are.

What Are Page Redirects and Why Do You Need Them?

Page redirects are basically like a send-on notice for the post office. When you move, you can get one of those and any mail that was sent to your old house will automatically be delivered to your new mailing address.

Redirects are the same thing but for web pages only that, instead of letters and parcels, it sends visitors and search spiders to another web address.

Implementing page redirects can be necessary for many reasons:

  1. A mistake in your title and URL that you want to correct
  2. Attempting to add/target a different keyword with your page
  3. The entire permalink structure of your site has changed
  4. Some external link is pointing to the wrong address and you want visitors to find the right page
  5. You want to change parts of your URL, like remove www or switch to HTTPS (or both)
  6. You have moved to an entirely new domain (or merged another site with yours) and want the traffic and SEO value of the old URL to land on the new one

Why Do They Matter?

From the above list, it’s probably already obvious why page redirects are a good idea. Of course, if your entire site moves, you don’t want to start from scratch but instead, benefit from the traffic and links you have already built. However, even if you only change one page, implementing a redirect makes sense.

That’s because having non-existent pages on your site is both bad for visitors and search engine optimization. When someone tries to visit them, they will see a 404 error page. This is not a pleasant experience and usually very annoying (as entertaining as 404 pages can be).

Because of that, search engines are also not a big fan of this kind of error and might punish you for it. Also, you want them to understand your site structure and index it correctly, don’t you? Therefore, it’s a good idea to leave a “this page no longer exists, please have a look over here ” message whenever necessary.

Different Redirect Codes and What They Mean

When talking about redirects, you need to know that there are several different types. These are categorized by the HTTP codes that they have been assigned to, similar to the aforementioned 404 error code for a missing page. However, for redirects, they are all in the 300 category:

  • 301 — This is the most common kind. It means that a page has moved permanently and the new version can from now on be found at another location. This page redirect passes on 90-99 percent of SEO value.
  • 302 — This means a page has moved temporarily. The original URL is currently not available but will come back and you can use the new domain in the meantime. It passes no link value.
  • 303 — Only used for form submissions to stop users from re-submitting when someone uses the browser back button. This is probably not relevant to you unless you are a developer.
  • 307 — The same as a 302 but for HTML 1.1. It means something has been temporarily moved.
  • 308 — The permanent version of the 307.

When to Use What?

Of course, the biggest question is, when to use which type of page redirect?

While there are several options, you usually only need two of them: 301 and 302. Out of those, probably more than 90 percent of the time, you will use a 301. That’s because for the rest (except 303), it’s not always clear how search engines handle them, so you basically stick to those two options.

As for when to use which, much of it you can already understand from what the code tells the browser or search spider, however, here’s a detailed description:

  • 301 — Use this when you are planning on deleting a page and want to point visitors to another relevant URL or when you want to change a page’s permalink (including the domain).
  • 302 — Use this, for example, when making changes to a page that visitors are not supposed to see or when you redirect them to a temporary sales page that will soon turn back to the original. That way, search engines won’t de-index the existing page.

Redirects and Page Speed

While page redirects are great tools for webmasters and marketers, the downside of them is that they can have an effect on page speed.

As you can imagine, they represent an extra step in the page loading process. While that’s not much, in a world where visitors expect page load times mere seconds, it matters.

In addition, page redirects use up crawl budget from search engines, so you can potentially keep them from discovering your whole site by having too many of them. Therefore, here are some important rules for their usage:

  • Avoid redirect chains — This means several hops from an old to a new page. This is especially important when you redirect http to https and www to non-www. These should all resolve to the same domain directly (https://domain.com), not ping pong from one to the next.
  • Don’t redirect links that are in your control — This means, if there is a faulty link inside a menu, inline, or similar, change them manually. Don’t be lazy.
  • Try to correct external links — If the fault is with an incoming link, consider reaching out to the originator and ask them to correct it on their end.

In essence, keep page redirects to a minimum. To see if you have multiple redirects in place, you can use the Redirect Mapper.

How to Find Pages to Redirect and Prepare the Right URLs

So, besides when you do a site or page move, how do you find pages to redirect?

A good place to start is the 404 errors/crawl errors in Google Search Console. You find them under Coverage.

Note that Search Console now only shows 404 errors that threaten your pages from being indexed and not all of them. Therefore, to track down non-existent pages, you can also use a crawler like Screaming Frog. Some of the WordPress plugins below also help you with that, additionally you can take a look at SEMRush, and SEO management tool which is very popular, and used by many experts and beginners alike, you can get a free trial via the link above.

Then, to prepare your page redirects:

  • Get the correct to and from URL — This means to stay consistent in the format. For example, if you are using a trailing slash, do it for both URLs. Also, always redirect to the same website version, meaning your preferred domain including www/non-www, http/https, etc.
  • Get the slug, not the URL — This means /your-page-slug instead of http://yoursite.com/your-page-slug. This way, you make your redirects immune to any changes to the top-level domain such as switching from www to non-ww or from http to https.
  • Redirect to relevant pages — Meaning similar in topic and intent. Don’t just use the homepage or something else, try to anticipate search intent and how you can further serve it.

How to Correctly Implement Page Redirects in WordPress

You have different methods of implementing page redirects in WordPress. Basically, you can either use a plugin or do it (somewhat) manually via .htaccess. Both come with pros and cons:

  • Plugin — Easy to use, nontechnical, however, potentially slower because many of them use wp_redirect, which can cause performance issues.
  • .htaccess — This is a server file and very powerful. For example, you can include directives for using gzip compression in it. Using this is faster because page redirects are set up at the server level, not somewhere above it. However, making a mistake can mess up and/or disable your entire site.

Let’s go over both options:

1. Using a Plugin

You have different plugin options for redirects in WordPress. Among them are:

  • Redirection — This is the most popular solution in the WordPress directory. It can redirect via Core, htaccess, and Nginx server redirects.
  • Simple 301 Redirects — Easy to use, few options, does just what you need and nothing more.
  • Safe Redirect Manager — With this plugin, you can choose which redirect code you want to use (remember what we talked about earlier!). It also only redirects to white-listed hosts for additional security.
  • Easy Redirect Manager — Suitable for 301 and 302 redirects. The plugin is well designed and comes with many options.

All of the plugins work in a very similar way. They provide you with an interface where you can enter a URL to redirect and where it should lead instead.

add page redirect via wordpress plugin

Some of them, like the Redirection plugin, also have additional functionality. For example, this plugin also tracks whenever a visitor lands on a page that doesn’t exist so you can set up appropriate page redirects.

2. Using .htaccess

.htaccess usually resides on your server inside your WordPress installation. You can access it by dialing up via FTP.

filezilla ftp client for wordpress

Be aware though that it is hidden by default, so you might have to switch on the option to show hidden files in your FTP client of choice.

filezilla force show hidden files

The first thing you want to do is download and save it in a safe place so you have a copy of your old file in case something goes wrong. After that, you can edit the existing file (or another local copy) with any text or code editor.

A simple redirect from one page on your site to another can be set up like this:


RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /old-blog-url/ /new-blog-url/

If the brackets already exist (as they should when you are using WordPress), all you need is this:

Redirect 301 /old-blog-url/ /new-blog-url/

Just be sure to include it right before the closing bracket. You can also use wildcards in redirects. For example, the code below is used to redirect all visitors from the www to the non-www version of a website.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To explore more options and if you don’t want to write them out manually, there is this useful tool that creates redirect directives for you.

When you are done, save/re-upload and you should be good to go. Be sure to test thoroughly!

Conclusion

Page Redirects in WordPress can be very useful & page redirects have a very important function. They keep visitors and search engines from landing on non-existent pages and are, therefore, a matter of both usability and SEO.

Above, you have learned all you need to know about their usage and how to implement them. You are now officially ready to start sending visitors and search spiders wherever you want.

Note that these aren’t the only ways to implement page redirects. However, they are the most common and recommended. If you want to know less common ways, check this article on CSS Tricks.

What do you use to implement page redirects in WordPress? Any more tools or tips? Share them in the comments section below & if you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on WordPress Building Trends For 2020!

Post by Xhostcom Wordpress & Digital Services, subscribe to newsletter for more!

Filed under: Development, eCommerce, WordpressTagged with: , ,

Woocommerce Vs Shopify for Your Small Business

Woocommerce & Shopify are both great options for building and hosting your eCommerce website. But if we compare them side by side is there a clear winner? With a large percentage of retail and other types of sales, up to 75%, predicted to be online in the next couple years, its a question which will interest many budding store owners, especially as these two platforms are now seen as the de facto options for eCommerce owners.

It will ultimately come down to what you’re looking for in an eCommerce platform and what the needs of your business are. It also depends on how much you want to fool with back-end machinations from simple HTML tweaks to full-on coding. However, they each have particular things that they do really well. Because of this, you should be able to make an easy decision on which one is going to be the right fit for you.

Is Shopify the One?

Shopify is an incredible eCommerce platform for businesses that need a seamless integration into their web presence from start to finish. It does a lot of things really well and doesn’t ask a lot from the user in return. Except, perhaps, a bit more money, but more on that later.

Handling your product collections is a breeze with Shopify. And it can create automated ones once you feed it with the filters you want. You can practically curate an entire e-commerce website with adequate product categories using only attributable rules for your products.

Getting Help

Shopify offers more than 2,000 apps to help you customize your website. While that can’t compare with the number of WordPress apps that the open source platform has created, it is likely more than enough for most users. And if you can’t accomplish what you need with the apps already on offer, there is always the option to pay for help. Shopify excels when it comes to customer service (which is free with a subscription). They can point you toward the right group to help you with creating customized functionality for a fee.

Products Selling

The Shopify platform was built to help you sell your products online right out of the box. While that may make it sound like the best choice straight away, just keep in mind that it has its limitations and drawbacks. Shopify will likely be at least a little more expensive than WordPress. And it has comparatively less functionality assuming you’re someone who is experienced and willing to do some of your own coding.

But it is one of the best, dedicated e-Commerce platforms out there all the same. It is user-friendly. It is exceptional if you’re business makes use of drop-shipping.

SEO

Search engine optimization is a strength for Shopify even though it may be edged out by WordPress because of its exclusive and excellent SEO app, Yoast (more on this later).

Functionality

It is easy to use. Product pages have dedicated boxes for alt tags and meta descriptions. Allowing Google Search Console to crawl the site is a breeze because your sitemap files are already created for you. If you decide to change the name of a page, your 301 redirects are automatically done for you. And while Yoast is exclusive to WordPress, Shopify does have some pretty nice apps that can get the job done.

Overall, it does a more than passable job. But assuming you’re using the Yoast companion app, WordPress is slightly better. The biggest issue is that it URLs are not quite as clean as they could be with unnecessary prefixes added onto pages’ addresses.

This is a sitewide issue that becomes exacerbated when you consider its effect on blogging. Each and every post is going to have an extra “/posts/” prefix added into the URL which is less than desirable from an SEO perspective.

Blogging

That does not mean you cannot create a great blog on your Shopify site, though. And you certainly should. Blogging is a fantastic way to generate excellent, rich content on subjects pertaining to your website in order to drive traffic. It’s called inbound marketing and it works like this. You come up with subjects which are going to be thick with target keywords. Then, write amazing blog posts/articles that are going to be highly useful to your customer base and followers while at the same time adored by the major search engines. Voila. Increased traffic that will naturally turn into more website conversions.

Software Updates

Those converting customers will always be confident that they’re shopping on a secure site, as well. Shopify does everything for you in terms of software updates and all that behind-the-scenes maintenance that you probably don’t have time for even if you do have the expertise to handle. With WordPress, it is up to you to keep your plugins, themes, and software up-to-date. If a server goes offline, you’ll be chatting with a representative trying to figure out what went wrong. That’s not to say that this is a prevalent issue on the platform. However, Shopify already does all of this for you. And, whenever you do need a professional to help, most plans cover your phone conversation with an expert who will be prompt and professional with assisting you.

In that same vein, all Shopify sites come with SSL certificates which means to get the “s” in “https” for your URL, signifying a secure site. You can add this with WordPress, but you’ll have to come up with your own SSL certificate.

Shopify is The One if you:

  • Require no coding or HTML work
  • Have a bit more to spend on your website
  • Need eCommerce functionality built-in to your platform
  • Drop-ship goods
  • Are planning to mostly pay for SEO as opposed to going organic

Is Woocommerce the One?

Out of the box, WordPress cannot do eCommerce. You will have to make use of one of many plugins like WooCommerce in order to convert it into a market-friendly site and this is something that Xhostcom specialize in along with other technologies. Woocommerce can easily handle large sites with a lot of products and is a good alternative to the more expensive Magento, which is also far more resource heavy, re server requirements etc, and is easier to use for admins than Magento.

Content Versioning

Content is one thing that Woocommerce excels at. There are several reasons for this. One is that the platform offers content versioning, which is to say that each and every time you update a page or post, you are creating a different “version” of it which is stored and able to be accessed or reversed to at any time. This is something Shopify cannot currently do, so in Woocommered you can go back to any version of a page you created earlier.

Inbound Marketing

It’s also why Woocommerce beats out Shopify for inbound marketing. Considering that the platform has been a natural partner of the blogger since its inception, it comes as no surprise that features such as archiving, using tags as well as categories within a post, and clean URLs remain a cornerstone of its commitment to professional blogging.

SEO

For search engine optimization purposes, Woocommerce wins hands-down solely because it has the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast gives you a clear, color-coded and bullet-pointed list of SEO-related observations that are easy to act on. Red for an imminent change needed, yellow for something more borderline and green for stuff you’ve already done well. It acts in real time and it’s actually quite satisfying once you get everything checked off and achieve a full green score on your page.

SEO-Friendly Sitemap

Yoast will go even more in depth than this, though. It even allows you to create SEO-friendly sitemaps – files that make it easier for Google to understand your website’s architectural structure. It also gives you the ability to choose canonical URLs which really makes Google’s heart throb. This means that you get to set which of two identical pages (which might happen if you have pages in different sections of your site out of necessity but they are the same content-wise) is the one that Google should recognize as the original and most important so that it isn’t duplicating your valuable content.

Clean URLs

Another win for Woocommerce is clean URLs. Web addresses should be as human-friendly as possible. That’s the best way for us to read them and it’s how the search engines like it, too. If your web page is finished off with a bunch of alphanumeric text, that just looks junky. That isn’t to say that Shopify does a poor job with this. It is just a bit easier to accomplish on Woocommerce.

Mobile Apps

Both platforms, however, have exceptional mobile apps that excel in different areas. Woocommerce focuses on content, allowing you to update pages and posts right there from your phone. Shopify is all about the eCommerce side of things. With their app, you’ll be able to perform product updates and keep in touch with your customers. It all makes sense, really. Woocommerce is the writing site while Shopify is the shopping site. It stands to reason that they would transition these major focuses on the mobile side of things.

That isn’t to say that eCommerce sales can’t be accomplished on Woocommerce. It really just depends on using the right plugins, and there are a huge variety. Also, you can code your own plugin or a developer like Xhostcom can do this for you.

Useful Plugins

Anti-Spam

This plugin is one of the best plugins to avoid unwanted comments. Some plugins like Akismet come by default on Google. But the anti-spam plugin is essential for your blog since it works differently; this plugin does not send files to the unwanted folder what the rest does. Anti-spam directly prohibits robots to enter and even leave comments in this folder.

Shopify Vs WordPress

It is also very easy in use. With this free plugin, you will be more than protected.

Setup time: 1 minute

Yoast SEO 

Yoast is among the best WordPress plugins. Without a doubt, it is an essential plugin for SEO. There is not any person who omit this plugin to be installed or another similar SEO plugin. Yoast SEO is a perfect WordPress plugin that can familiarize you with SEO techniques when you get started.

Shopify Vs WordPress

Although it consumes some resources, the benefits it gives are fantastic. Besides, this plugin makes things much easier if it is configured correctly.

Mainly this plugin realizes a real-time SEO study of each entry you make. Its function is to correct everything that is missing from the post to be correctly optimized: keywords, title, meta description, paragraph length, etc.

This is only one of the main functions, but it has many more.

Setup time: 15 minute

Woocommerce Plugin

This a required plugin for an eCommerce store using Wordpress (or ClassicPress) If you want to sell products, assign colors, sizes, prices and turn your website into a virtual store, this is the best plugin to use, along with associated eCommerce orientated plugins to get the best out of your site.

Shopify Vs WordPress

You can simply drag and drop to adapt the store with the possibility of choosing a wide variety of additional widgets and customizing it with customer opinions, images, shopping cart, etc.

Setup time: 60 minutes

WP Smush

It is used to reduce the weight of the images. WP Smush is a WordPress plugin that performs a general size reduction of all the images on your website automatically and without losing quality.

Shopify Vs WordPress

If you have previously done your particular compression, it will make the images very light for your blog and increase the loading speed as well.

Setup time: 1 minute

Elementor

Elementor cannot be missed out of this list of essential plugins. If you have bought a WordPress template and your idea is to start building your website only with your options – just forget because you need a layout plugin.

Shopify Vs WordPress

Elementor Page Builder is a plugin with the help of which you will be able to create the pages of your website in an easy and fast way with spectacular professional results. With a drag and drop system (Drag & Drop) you can do absolutely everything that crosses your mind: forms, buttons, backgrounds, sliders, galleries, effects, gradients. 

Have you seen a web design that you loved and would like to replicate? With this layout plugin, you will get it.

It has a free version with which you can get results that you will hardly achieve with the template unless you use CSS code. 

Woocommerce is The One if you:

  • Are fine with a bit of coding and can be more independent on the troubleshooting side of things
  • Want a professional site that can be customized for your own brand.
  • Are going to be focusing a lot of your efforts on SEO
  • Need more customization and flexibility
  • Are building a site focused on content-building over e-commerce (selling on the side)
  • Want more control over what goes in to the back end of the site.

Keep in mind that none of these final traits preclude either site from being good for e-commerce business or content marketing. Each is fully capable of doing both admirably.

However, the strengths and weaknesses of each platform detailed in this article will hopefully give you an advantage when choosing which is going to combine best with your own goals and specialities. If you enjoyed this post, which has just been a short introduction to the platforms, and decide you like Woocommerce, why not check out this article on WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts!

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Filed under: Development, eCommerce, WordpressTagged with: ,

Install MongoDB on Ubuntu Server 18.04

If your company is in the business of using, handling or depending on data, chances are you’re in need of a document-oriented, NoSQL database. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a NoSQL database is a non-relational database that doesn’t use tables filled with rows and columns. Instead, they make use of a storage model that is optimized specifically for the data.

These types of databases offer scalability, flexibility, data distribution, and speed of processing that relational databases can’t match.

One NoSQL database is MongoDB. This database has been adopted by big data and enterprise companies including Adobe, Craigslist, eBay, FIFA, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. MongoDB comes in both an enterprise and community edition. I’ll be demonstrating with the open-source community edition, installing it on Ubuntu Server 18.04.

This edition can be installed from the standard repositories, however, that will likely install an outdated version. Because of that, I’ll show how to deploy a version from the official MongoDB repository. This will install:

  • mongodb-org (this is the meta-package that will install everything below)
  • mongodb-org-server (the mongod daemon)
  • mongodb-org-mongos (the mongos daemon)
  • mongodb-org-shell (the mongo shell)
  • mongodb-org-tools (the MongoDB tools package which includes import, dump, export, files, performance, restore, and stats tools)

Do note that this package only supports 64-bit architecture and LTS (Long Term Support) versions of Ubuntu (so 14.04, 16.04, and 18.04).

Once installed, your Mean Stack development company (or whatever sector your business serves) can begin developing for big data.

Update/Upgrade

When installing a major application/service, it’s always best to first run an update/upgrade on the server. Not only will this ensure you have the most recent software, but it’ll also apply any security patches. Do note, however, should the kernel be updated in this process, you will need to reboot the machine before the updates take effect.

To update and upgrade Ubuntu, log into the server and issue the following two commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Once up the update and upgrade completes, reboot your server (if required). You are now ready to install MongoDB, and you won’t even need to bring in your Java developers to take care of this task.

Adding the Repository

The first thing to be done is the addition of the necessary MongoDB repository. To do this, log into your Ubuntu server. From the command line, add the required MongoDB key with the command:

wget -qO - https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.2.asc | sudo apt-key add -

If you see an error regarding the wget command, install that tool with:

sudo apt-get install wget

Once you’ve added the key, create a new apt source list file with the command:

echo "deb [ arch=amd64 ] https://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu bionic/mongodb-org/4.2 multiverse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list

Installation

Now it’s time to install MongoDB. Update apt with the command:

sudo apt-get update

Once apt is updated, install MongoDB with the command:

sudo apt-get install mongodb-org -y

Starting and Enabling the Community Edition

With the database installed, you’ll want to start and enable it to run upon server reboot. Otherwise, you’ll have to manually start it every time the server is restarted.

To start the MongoDB database engine, issue the command:

sudo systemctl start mongod

You’ll then want to enable MongoDB with the command:

sudo systemctl enable mongod

Using MongoDB

In order to start working with Mongo, issue the command:

mongo

If you get an error status 62, it means that the version of MongoDB is too new for your server. If that’s the case, you’ll need to uninstall the latest version and install the version from the official Ubuntu repositories. Here are the steps for that process:

  1. Remove the latest version with the command sudo apt-get purge mongodb-org.
  2. Remove any extra dependencies with the command sudo apt-get autoremove.
  3. Install the older version of MongoDB with the command sudo apt-get install mongodb -y.

At this point, you should then have access to the MongoDB command prompt (Figure 1) by issuing the mongo command.

Figure 1

The MongoDB command prompt.

Let’s say you want to create a new database. Unlike relational databases, you don’t use the CREATE command. Instead, you simply issue the use command like so:

use DATABASE

Where DATABASE is the name of the database to be created.

This doesn’t actually create the database. In order to finalize that, you must insert data into the new database. Say you create a database named albums. You can then insert data into that database with the command:

db.artists.insert({artistname: "Devin Townsend" })

The above command would insert the string “Devin Townsend” associated with artistname in the database albums. You should see WriteResult({ “nInserted” : 1 }) as a result (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Successfully insertion of data into the new db.

And that’s all there is to installing MongoDB on Ubuntu 18.04 and creating your first database. For more information on using MongoDB, make sure to read the official documentation for the release you’ve installed. So, a little sidetrack from Wordpress in this post, but thought it worth a mention, Mongo DB being used in many Node and other dev environments, and I use Lubuntu. which of course is not dissimilar. Also, if you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on 8 Reasons for Slow Speeds in New York City!

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