Everything You Need to Know about Dedicated IP and Why It’s Good for Your Online Business

Take a step forward and improve your business with a dedicated IP address. Let us show you why. Technology has revolutionized business. Now, even the smallest companies can reach audiences around the world thanks to the power of the internet. As you grow your business, there are a variety of different ways you can use technology to not only help you reach larger audiences but also organize your internal networks better. One of many great tools for businesses looking to scale is using a dedicated IP.
What Is a Dedicated IP Address?
As you probably know, the Internet Protocol or IP is the address that each computer is assigned when connected to a particular network. What you might not be aware of is that many websites share an IP address with sometimes upwards of hundreds of customers under many different domain names.
Typically, most websites begin with a shared IP. And, while it is fine for the initial stages of your company, many businesses shift over to a dedicated IP in the long term.
A dedicated IP is simply having your unique IP address. Depending on your hosting company or your IT support, the process of transitioning from a shared to a dedicated IP can usually be set up in a
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18046/everything-you-need-to-know-about-dedicated-ip-and-why-it-s-good-for-your-online-business

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/everything-you-need-to-know-about-dedicated-ip-and-why-its-good-for-your-online-business/

The Basic Guide to Enterprise WordPress Hosting

Your WordPress page is not just about having an online presence. It’s also a priceless business asset that you can utilize to grow your business. Your website performance and user experience are directly related to your customers’ satisfaction and that’s why you can’t afford to host your WordPress website in the wrong hosting environment. What you need is a scalable and superior hosting environment that can help you serve big surges of traffic and grow your audience in the process. Enterprise WordPress Hosting is a hosting environment that is specifically customized and aligned to your business goals and strategy.
In this article, we’re going to look into the basics of enterprise WordPress hosting and why it’s an excellent solution to choose for your scalable WordPress website.
WordPress and Enterprises
In 2003 when WordPress started as a blogging tool, and people didn’t expect that it would evolve into the leading content management system (CMS). WordPress now commands the web development industry and commands more than 30% of the Internet.
Bloggers use this platform for years, and its flexibility is excellent for an enterprise-level CMS. With
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18045/the-basic-guide-to-enterprise-wordpress-hosting

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/the-basic-guide-to-enterprise-wordpress-hosting/

A Look at We’ve Got Your Back by Freemius

As someone who continues to participate in the WordPress economy, specifically in developing custom solutions for others, and as someone with many friends and acquaintances who are also developers, I know that one of the hardest things that we can do (aside from naming things) is branding and marketing a product or business. I’ve written about Freemius a few times in the past (with the most visited post being All About Freemius for WordPress).
As such, I’m a fan of keeping up with what they are doing. Recently, they released a We Got Your Back program that aims to provide a solution to the problem marketing, branding, and so on of products those of us in WordPress build and strive to provide in WordPress.
We’ve Got Your Back by Freemius
Here’s a quick rundown of what they offer:
This program is specifically for Freemius Partners (or those who use the Freemius platform to sell plugins and themes.
It provides design-related collateral for WordPress product businesses at no-charge assuming you’ve surpassed a revenue threshold.
Here’s a breakdown of the perks as provided by Freemius:
It’s easy to understand, right? The more your gross revenue within
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18044/a-look-at-we-ve-got-your-back-by-freemius

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/a-look-at-weve-got-your-back-by-freemius/

How to Easily Add a Client Feedback Form in WordPress (Step by Step)

Do you want to add a client feedback form on your website? Client feedback is very helpful in improving your products and services. In this article, we will show you how to easily add a client feedback form in WordPress.

Why Do You Need a Client Feedback Form?

A client feedback form or a customer feedback form is a contact form that your customers can use to give direct feedback about your product or service.

Basically, it helps you gain insight into how your clients evaluate your processes, services, products, and brand. You can then use this feedback to make improvements to your business and win even more customers.

Client feedback form is different than Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys which are a popular method of measuring customer loyalty.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add a client feedback form in WordPress.

Step 1. Selecting the Best Feedback Form Plugin

The first thing you need to do is to select a WordPress feedback form plugin.

We recommend using WPForms, which is the best WordPress contact form plugin on the market.

WPForms drag & drop form builder makes it easy for anyone to create an online form (yes even the non-technical folks can use it). That’s why it’s being used on over 1 million websites now.

Since feedback forms are simple forms, you can use the free WPForms Lite plugin to build your form.

Now that you have chosen a plugin, the next step is to install it and start creating a client feedback form.

Step 2. Install a Feedback Form Plugin in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit WPForms » Add New page to create your feedback form.

It will launch the WPForms form builder. Simply start by adding a name for your feedback form and then select the ‘Suggestion Form’ template.

WPForms will now load the form template with basic feedback form fields already added to it. You can click on any field to edit it or drag & drop to change their order.

If you want to add a new field, then you can simply select it from the left side of the screen and drag it over.

Once you are done, click on the ‘Save’ button to store these settings.

Step 3. Configuring Form Notifications and Confirmation

After creating the feedback form in WordPress, the next step is to configure the form notifications and confirmation.

While confirmation is for the user, form notifications will be for you. You’ll receive an email when a client submits the feedback form on your website.

WPForms allows you to manage both of these settings and customize them as you want from the ‘Settings’ tab within WPForms builder.

First, you can edit the form confirmation settings. Simply go to ‘Confirmation’ tab and select a confirmation type from the dropdown to change the settings.

If you choose to display a thank you message, then there’s a pre-built message below the confirmation type section. You can change this message to add your own. You can also redirect users to a separate thank you page or a different URL from the confirmation type dropdown.

Next, you can go to the ‘Notifications’ tab. It has the default settings that are ideal for a feedback form and may not need any changes.

By default, it will send all the feedback form notifications to the admin email of your WordPress website. If you want to send the notifications to another email address, then you can simply add it in the notifications setting. You can also add comma separated emails to send notifications to multiple email addresses.

Step 4. Adding the Client Feedback Form to Your Website

Now your feedback form is ready, and you can add it to your WordPress website.

Simply edit a WordPress post or page where you want to add the form or create a new one.

On the post edit screen, you’ll notice the new ‘Add Form’ button above the text editor. Clicking on it will bring up a popup where you need to select the feedback form you created earlier.

When you click on the Add Form button in the popup, it will add the feedback form shortcode to the post editor. You can go ahead and save or publish your post / page.

Next, you can visit your website to see the client feedback form in action.

Step 5 (Optional). Adding Client Feedback Form in the Sidebar

WPForms comes with a widget that you can use to add your client feedback form in the sidebar or any other widget area in WordPress.

You need to go to Appearance » Widgets page in your WordPress admin area. On this page, you can drag and drop the WPForms widget in the sidebar widget area.

Simply add a title for the feedback form widget and select your form to show it in the sidebar. Make sure to click on the ‘Save’ button.

You can now visit your website to see your client feedback form displayed in a sidebar widget.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add a client feedback form in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to create a donation form or how to create a survey in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Easily Add a Client Feedback Form in WordPress (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-add-a-client-feedback-form-in-wordpress-step-by-step/

I Installed a Pirated Theme and Here’s What Happened! – Tareq Hasan

I needed to test a compatibility of Dokan with a premium theme from ThemeForest. So I quickly googled and landed into a pirated/nulled site. I was surprised to fo find out it wasn’t asking for money or didn’t land into paid affiliate links. Although it was suspicious, I downloaded the theme and installed it in my local machine (don’t judge me
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18043/i-installed-a-pirated-theme-and-here-s-what-happened-tareq-hasan

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/i-installed-a-pirated-theme-and-heres-what-happened-tareq-hasan/

Freemius Launches The “We Got Your Back” Pilot Program For WordPress Products

Calling all WordPress product creators who are selling through Freemius – today we are officially launching the “We Got Your Back” program, which will help you handle all of the things you prefer to avoid in your business! I can see you doubting and sneering at what I just wrote in that 1st paragraph, but if you’re selling your WordPress plugins and themes with Freemius, then you already know that we were not kidding when we said that we would truly become your business partners and do everything we can to empower your business and to push it forward, simply because YOUR success is literally our success.
As you know, the Freemius service was created in order to handle everything that might be considered “meta” in running an online business that sells WordPress plugins and themes. In other words, everything that’s not about coding the actual product:
Checkout
Licensing
Recurring payments
Automatic updates
Taxes (EU VAT)
Trials
Affiliation
Cart recovery
Decreasing the uninstall rate
Collecting user-feedback
Customer communication
Etc.
As you can see, another thing we were not kidding about was when we said: “Your WordPress business headache?
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18042/freemius-launches-the-we-got-your-back-pilot-program-for-wordpress-products

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/freemius-launches-the-we-got-your-back-pilot-program-for-wordpress-products/

Freemius Is Launching The “We Got Your Back” Pilot Program For WordPress Product Sellers – see if your business is eligible:

Calling all WordPress product creators who are selling through Freemius – today we are officially launching the “We Got Your Back” program, which will help you handle all of the things you prefer to avoid in your business! I can see you doubting and sneering at what I just wrote in that 1st paragraph, but if you’re selling your WordPress plugins and themes with Freemius, then you already know that we were not kidding when we said that we would truly become your business partners and do everything we can to empower your business and to push it forward, simply because YOUR success is literally our success.
As you know, the Freemius service was created in order to handle everything that might be considered “meta” in running an online business that sells WordPress plugins and themes. In other words, everything that’s not about coding the actual product:
Checkout
Licensing
Recurring payments
Automatic updates
Taxes (EU VAT)
Trials
Affiliation
Cart recovery
Decreasing the uninstall rate
Collecting user-feedback
Customer communication
Etc.
As you can see, another thing we were not kidding about was when we said: “Your WordPress business headache?
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18042/freemius-is-launching-the-we-got-your-back-pilot-program-for-wordpress-product-sellers-see-if-your-business-is-eligible

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/freemius-is-launching-the-we-got-your-back-pilot-program-for-wordpress-product-sellers-see-if-your-business-is-eligible/

WP Accessibility Team on Gutenberg: “We have to draw a line.”

WordPress’ accessibility team has published a statement on the level of overall accessibility of Gutenberg. The team, largely a group of unpaid volunteers, collaborated on a detailed assessment that publicly challenges Gutenberg’s readiness for core in a way that no other WordPress team has done through official channels to date. After a week of testing the most recent version of the plugin, the team concluded that they cannot recommend Gutenberg to be used by anyone who relies on assistive technology. The Accessibility team – like any team in WordPress – has no specific authority over the project. Because we’re a small team of volunteers, we’ve been pragmatic in how we apply the guidelines. We have made tradeoffs in prioritization. Gutenberg is a place where we feel it is necessary to draw a line. The ability to author, edit, and publish posts is the primary purpose of WordPress.
Accessibility team rep Joe Dolson, speaking on behalf of the team, cited cognitive load and complexity, inconsistent user interface behavior, heavy reliance on keyboard shortcuts, and difficulties with keyboard navigation through blocks, among other concerns about Gutenberg.
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18041/wp-accessibility-team-on-gutenberg-we-have-to-draw-a-line

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/wp-accessibility-team-on-gutenberg-we-have-to-draw-a-line/

5 UX tips for better SEO results

When Google’s Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev was asked about Google’s most important ranking factors, he gave three: content, links, and RankBrain.

We’ve known for a long time that links impact websites’ search rankings and Google has for a very long time emphasized the importance of quality content. What is RankBrain all about, however? Unlike content and links, RankBrain is influenced by behavior metrics that indicate that users actually find a site to be useful. These behavior metrics, more than anything else, are influenced by the usability of your website — in other words, user experience (UX).

If you’ve been focusing on content and links at the expense of user experience, you won’t be able to maximize the performance of your website in the search engines. The following five UX tips will give you an SEO advantage.

1. Work on your site’s mobile compatibility

Google hasn’t hidden the fact that it pays a lot of attention to a site’s mobile compatibility. Anyone who has been in SEO for more than a few years will remember mobilegeddon, and mobile-first indexing is a thing: in other words, coming to terms with the realization that most of the usage of its search engine comes from mobile devices, Google has decided to start indexing the mobile version of a website first.

In other words, if your website does not have a mobile version — or if the mobile version of your website is not properly optimized — then you could lose more than half of your search traffic.

Below are some tips to ensure your website is mobile compatible:

• Use a responsive website design that adapts to mobile devices or create a mobile version of your website that is properly redirected for mobile users.
• Ensure that content is consistent across your mobile site and desktop site.
• Make sure that all the content formats used on your mobile site can be crawled and indexed.
• Ensure that metadata is consistent across the mobile and desktop version of your site.
• Ensure that your sitemap is also accessible on your mobile site.

2. Optimize your website speed

Just how important is the speed of your website? Research shows that a single second delay in site load time can reduce your conversions by 7 percent, and that 40 percent of people will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. In other words, people don’t like slow websites. And that explains why Google keeps strengthening page speed as a ranking factor.

While Google has long been using site speed as a factor to rank desktop sites, it recently began to use site speed as a ranking factor for mobile sites in July 2018.

You can make your website faster by doing the following:

• Enable caching
• Use a CDN
• Remove unnecessary scripts and plugins
• Compress your images
• Combine your background images into CSS sprites
• Minify your JavaScript and CSS

3. Optimize your site architecture

Another UX tip that will give your site an edge in the search engines is to optimize your site architecture in a way that is easy to use and search engine friendly. For example, take a look at the following screenshot from the website of Lookers:

In particular, pay attention to the navigation bar and you will notice a few things:

• The navigation links are clear and descriptive enough to make people know what they will get without much thought.
• People are presented with links to all the key pages — so they don’t have to waste time looking for what they want. One of the hallmarks of good site architecture is that it enables people to get to where they want with fewer clicks.
• The format and presentation of the navigation links is consistent — both the link structure and the description.

Not only will a good site structure make your site more accessible to readers, while at the same time making it easy for the search engines to crawl your website, but you are also likely to be rewarded by sitelinks. Here’s what a Google search for Lookers turned up:

4. Use breadcrumbs navigation

A breadcrumb is a secondary navigation system that helps users know where they are on your website and that can help them trace their way back. Besides the fact that breadcrumbs make it easy for users to navigate your website, they also make it easy for Google to see how your site is structured and while increasing your site’s indexability.

Here’s a look at SEW’s breadcrumbs:

As you can see, from the screenshot above, the trail goes like this “Home >> Industry >> The end of Google+ after a data breach and how it affects us.” In other words, it makes it easy for the user to trace his/her steps back to the primary category of the article, then to the homepage.

5. Work on your content readability

While we tend to focus on the technical aspects of UX when it comes to SEO, content also plays a great role in UX as far as the big G and other search engines are concerned. Making the following tweaks to your content will give you an edge:

• Ensure your content is properly formatted. Use a lot of subheadings, bullets, and numberings to make your content more easy on the eyes.
• Use short paragraphs and avoid long blocks of text.
• Work on your content grammar, spelling, and structure.
• Spice up your content with visuals and multimedia.

Conclusion

While good UX can give you an edge when it comes to SEO, it does more than that: it ensures that users actually use your website while guaranteeing an improvement in ROI and conversions.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/30/5-ux-tips-seo

@JJJ Review of WordPress 5.0 Beta 1

I’m writing this post using the new block-based editor that comes packaged with the first WordPress 5.0 beta, known previously and externally as Gutenberg. For just general writing, so far it ain’t so bad, but one thing that bugs me straight away is that the auto-save causes the UI in the upper right corner to spaz out every few seconds. I keep thinking it’s a notification in macOS, so I stop writing to look up at it, because it’s all just outside my periphery.
So far in this post, I haven’t needed to add any blocks or format any text, and I haven’t needed to move any text or paragraphs around. I have a feeling this is how most people will interact with this editor most of the time, and for that, it generally gets the job done no different than the classic editor did.
I suppose it’s about time I try to insert some kind of image, so here’s a shot I took today of some concrete that got poured behind the building my office is in.
I think it’s a little weird that the default new-block buttons are: image, header, and gallery. I also think it’s weird when I hover over the “P” for paragraph button, that it changes to 2
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18040/jjj-review-of-wordpress-5-0-beta-1

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/jjj-review-of-wordpress-5-0-beta-1/

When is it Worth It to Buy Premium WordPress Plugins? (Explained)

We are often asked by users when is it worth investing in premium WordPress plugins? One of main reasons why WordPress is the popular website builder in the world is because it gives you access to thousands of free and paid plugins (also known as premium WordPress plugins). In this article, we will explain when is it worth buying premium or paid WordPress plugins.

What are Premium WordPress Plugins?

Premium plugins are paid version of WordPress plugins that come with additional features, priority support, documentation, and regular updates.

You can learn more about WordPress plugins by reading our beginner’s guide on what are WordPress plugins and how do they work.

WordPress has become the most popular blogging platform in the world because it has a healthy ecosystem of both free and paid plugins. At the time of writing this article, there are more than 55,000 free plugins available in WordPress.org directory. You can use these free plugins to access various features without paying anyone.

Often beginners wonder how does WordPress make money if the plugins are free. Well, WordPress does not own all these plugins.

Since WordPress is open-source, majority of these free plugins are written by third-party developers who want to give back to the WordPress community and build a brand for themselves, so they can get more client-work.

But the issue is that like any other software, WordPress plugins also need to be properly maintained and updated. Although the individual developer is not required to offer support, most of them go above and beyond to help users and even add new features as requested.

As you can imagine, all these things take a lot of time and resources. Plugin authors are often unable to give free plugins proper attention as they grow and get a larger user base.

For some plugin developers, it becomes difficult to take time out of their work and personal life to maintain a free product over a long period.

This is where premium WordPress plugins come in.

For a small licensing fee, you get access to dedicated support, guaranteed updates, and premium features. The license fee provides plugin authors steady income, so they can improve the product and dedicate more time to growing their WordPress plugin business.

On the other hand, it gives you, the customer, a more refined product with reliable support and updates.

That being said, let’s talk about when you should consider buying premium WordPress plugins.

Are Premium WordPress Plugins Worth the Money?

If you have read our guide on controlling the cost of a WordPress website, then you would know that we are not a fan of unnecessary spending.

We believe that most beginners can control their costs by using free WordPress plugins whenever they can. There are free versions for many of the the best WordPress plugins on the market. Following are just a few examples of great premium WordPress plugins offering free or lite versions.

• WPForms Lite is the best free contact form plugin.
• MonsterInsights Lite – The free version helps you easy install Google Analytics in WordPress.
• Yoast SEO – The best free WordPress SEO plugin.
• WooCommerce – WordPress ecommerce plugin to start an online store.
• SeedProd – The best a coming soon page and maintenance mode plugin.

However as your website or business grow, you will want access to more features, priority support, and reliable plugins that you can count on for regular updates.

To help you decide, we have added the top reasons that justify investing in a premium WordPress plugin.

1. Solutions Specific WordPress Plugins

There are some WordPress plugin categories that cater to very specific solutions. For example, building a membership website or selling online courses are hard work.

Free plugins alone cannot do justice to these complex solutions. Even if you find a free plugin for the job, you will likely have to purchase paid addons to support their business.

If you are building a website that requires a very specific / advanced functionality, then you will be better off with a premium WordPress plugin.

2. Advanced Features

While there are free plugins for most basic tasks, you will only find advanced features in paid plugins. That’s mainly because building and maintaining advanced features take a lot of resources.

For example, while WPForms Lite is the most beginner-friendly WordPress contact form plugin, the pro version of WPForms comes with advanced features like user registration form, surveys and polls, payment forms, etc.

3. Dedicated Support from Plugin Developers

Support is not guaranteed with free WordPress plugins because free plugin authors are not required to offer support. If you are new to WordPress with no programming skills, then support becomes crucial for you. Premium WordPress plugins give you faster email responses for your support questions.

4. Extensive Documentation and Tutorials

Premium and paid WordPress plugins provide extensive documentation to help you get started without even contacting support. Many premium WordPress plugins have docs or resources sections where you can find guides, tutorials, and video instructions. These resources help you use the plugin without waiting for someone to help you out.

5. Regular and Frequent Updates

Free WordPress plugins are sometimes abandoned by their developers. This leaves your website open to security vulnerabilities and bugs. Sometimes you might not even realize that a plugin has been abandoned until you see your site behaving strangely after updating WordPress.

Premium WordPress plugins give you regular updates to address bugs, glitches, and most importantly any security issues. You don’t have to do anything as those updates would automatically appear in your WordPress dashboard, and you can install them with just a few clicks. See our guide on how to properly update WordPress plugins for detailed instructions.

6. New Features and Enhancements

Free WordPress plugins usually don’t have an incentive to enhance and improve something that is already working for many websites.

On the other hand, paid WordPress plugins are businesses with competition. In order to stay on top, they continuously work on their products by adding new features and improving existing features. Depending on your license terms, you will get access to those features right away.

7. Supporting The WordPress Ecosystem

Premium WordPress plugin companies are small businesses. By purchasing a license, you help them build a sustainable business that provides for their families and even creates new jobs all over the world.

Your small payment helps those developers create killer products for other small businesses like yours and improve the WordPress ecosystem (See: Most influential companies in WordPress).

Frequently Asked Questions about Premium Plugins

We have answered a lot of questions about premium WordPress plugins via email. To help you find the answer quickly, we have compiled the list of the most frequently asked questions.

1. Should I only use all premium plugins on my website?

No, there is no need to only use paid WordPress plugins on your website. You should only buy premium plugins when you actually need them. There are a lot of great free plugins that have no premium alternative or are much better than their paid alternatives.

2. How do I find premium WordPress plugins?

Premium WordPress plugins are not sold on the official WordPress.org website. You can buy them from their own websites. Now the problem is that all those websites are scattered, so how do you know which plugin is good?

This is where WPBeginner can help. We are the largest WordPress resource site on the internet. We regularly write how-to’s about different free and premium WordPress plugins. We do the research for you by actually testing the plugin and breaking down their features with pros and cons.

Following are just a few plugin showcases that you’ll find on WPBeginner (they contain both free and paid WordPress plugins).

• Best contact form plugins for WordPress
• Best WordPress SEO plugins and tools
• Best WordPress security plugins
• Best WordPress backup plugins
• Best free WooCommerce plugins
• Best WordPress caching plugins
• Best WordPress membership plugins
• Best WordPress LMS plugins
• Best WordPress drag & drop page builder plugins
• Best WordPress plugins for small business

Need more recommendations? Just type in your keyword in Google and add wpbeginner.com at the end of your search term.

Another way to find great premium WordPress plugins is by upgrading to the paid plans of a free plugin that you already love and use.

3. Are all premium WordPress plugins good?

No, not all of them are great. In fact, some paid plugins can be quite terrible. That’s why you need to carefully evaluate them before making the purchase. Find out who are the people behind the plugin, what kind of reputation they have, what other people are saying about the plugin on the internet.

Whatever you do, DO NOT buy a paid plugin from an unofficial source like Fiverr. Always buy the plugins from the official author website to make sure that you’re buying the secure version of the plugin.

4. Do I need to keep paying premium WordPress plugins every year?

Once you purchase a WordPress plugin, you can keep using it for as long as you want. Premium WordPress plugins come with different licensing terms. The most common licensing term is for 1 year of updates and support. If you are on a yearly license plan, then your plugin will continue to work, but you will not get updates and support after your license is expired.

If you like the plugin you are using, then you should definitely renew your license when it expires.

We hope this article helped you learn when you should buy premium WordPress plugins. You may also want to see our guide on free vs premium WordPress themes for a similar discussion regarding WordPress themes.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post When is it Worth It to Buy Premium WordPress Plugins? (Explained) appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/when-is-it-worth-it-to-buy-premium-wordpress-plugins-explained/

The Best Website Analytics Solutions for Your Small Business

So, you’ve been working hard to build a strong online presence, drive traffic to your website, and generate more sales for your business. And so far as you can tell, whatever it is you’re doing, is working. The problem is, without actually tracking the data, you’ll never know whether you’re actually making progress or not. Worse yet, you may be missing out on huge opportunities to grow even more, simply because you don’t know who is coming to your website, where they’re coming from, and what they’re doing once they get there.
All businesses, no matter what size, can benefit from investing in an analytics solutions to track what’s really happening on their website at any given moment.
That’s why today, we’re going to look at the top website analytics solutions for your small business so you can start monitoring your strengthes (and weaknesses) and providing customers more of what they want (and less of what they don’t).
But first, let’s take a closer look at why website analytics are crucial to the growth and success of your business.
Why Invest in Website Analytics?
In short, website analytics gives you the data
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18039/the-best-website-analytics-solutions-for-your-small-business

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/the-best-website-analytics-solutions-for-your-small-business/

Determine What Changes a Plugin or Theme Made to a WordPress Site

Installing a plugin (or theme) means that you are entirely trusting your site into the hands of their developers. There are no restrictions on what the code you’re putting on the site can do. It can move all your buttons to the left by two pixels because of a CSS bug, but it can also purposely wipe out all your files and the entire database. Installing plugins from the official WP repository eliminates chances for the second scenario, but it still leaves you wondering – what changes did a plugin make to my site? In practice, what changes do plugins make?
Before the realistic scenario, let me repeat the theoretical one, one more time. You are installing and activating a 3rd party piece of PHP code on your site. There are absolutely no limits on what the code can do as long as it’s in the realm of PHP and it’s capabilities and privileges on the server. It can certainly delete files, modify them or send them to a remote server. Same goes for the data stored in the database. You can’t stop any of that once the plugin is activated. So, don’t use nulled plugins or themes and if you’re installing sketchy plugins on a live site make a backup first.
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18038/determine-what-changes-a-plugin-or-theme-made-to-a-wordpress-site

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/determine-what-changes-a-plugin-or-theme-made-to-a-wordpress-site/

Write a Blog Post That Converts: 7 Modern Rules of Sales

Writing blog is one thing but writing a blog post that converts your readers into customers is totally another thing. You can write loads of blogs and keep hitting that publish button, but if you think that doing that is all that is required and rest will happen automatically, then I have to burst that bubble for you. There is a lot more than that you need to do.
If you are posting blogs on your company’s blogging page or website and not receiving many conversions, then you need to do conversion optimization to your blogs.
What does conversion optimization mean?
Conversion optimization is what many bloggers and marketers miss out on when writing and publishing a blog.
You can write blogs as you wish but if you are writing them to boost your sales, you need to make sure that they have the qualities that retain the users and make them your customers.
If you are posting bulk articles and not focusing on making them conversion oriented, then there is no point of posting at all.
By doing this, you surely will be pulling a lot of visitors, but if they are not getting converted into customers, it is all a waste of time.
What does it mean to convert a customer?
Well, converting a reader
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18037/write-a-blog-post-that-converts-7-modern-rules-of-sales

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/write-a-blog-post-that-converts-7-modern-rules-of-sales/

Report on the Accessibility Status of Gutenberg

On October 3rd, the schedule for WordPress 5.0 was proposed. Prior to this, the accessibility team had not been made aware of a release time frame, and had no reason to believe WordPress 5.0 and the Gutenberg editor were under time pressure. The schedule proposed a release date of November 19th – 6 weeks from the announcement date. The initial reactions to the announcement of the release schedule were negative, which is unfortunate. We have no desire to increase the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the release of Gutenberg. To that end, this article is intended to shed light on the issues the WordPress Accessibility Team sees as most critical to the success of Gutenberg at release.
We want to give some background on the Accessibility Team, the commitment WordPress has made to accessibility, and then dive into the issues in Gutenberg as of this writing. The issues addressed come from reviews of version 4.1.0 of the Gutenberg plug-in released on October 24th, 2018.
Who is the Accessibility Team
For anybody reading this post who’s not already deeply involved in the WordPress project, it’s important to give some background about the team structure in WordPress
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18036/report-on-the-accessibility-status-of-gutenberg

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/report-on-the-accessibility-status-of-gutenberg/

How should PPC and SEO work together to gain visibility?

Getting PPC and SEO to work together effectively is always a key goal, whether we’re managing just one of the channels or both of them.

Although it sounds easy in principle, it’s generally not. A typical request cropping up is around sharing top-performing PPC ad copy by category and using this to update meta descriptions.

Sharing ad copy performance is something PPC teams should definitely be doing with their SEO counterparts; but unless your meta descriptions are awful the impact here is minimal.

This brings us to the first problem you encounter — although there is lots you CAN do, picking and prioritizing what you do when is vital.

The second common request is switching off PPC ads when you rank in position one (P1) organically. Initially this makes perfect sense and gets the attention of sharp CMOs and CFOs. But this is the second key challenge to overcome; how do I get the right data in the right place to know if it’s actually working.

Let’s take a typical example: car insurance. Here we see MoneySuperMarket ranking P1 organically:

The inevitable push comes; can we turn PPC off in [car insurance] because it’s really expensive and we’re ranking P1 organically.

Well, probably not. Yes, your report is accurate: you rank P1 organically. But you’re actually the fifth result on that page. On my work monitor the organic ranking is well past halfway down the page. On mobile you’re well below the fold:

This is where getting the right data is key.

Keyword universe

One way in which we’re improving SEM data for our clients is via a Keyword Universe. This isn’t perfect by any means, but it gives us a working framework on which to build our reporting and optimize efforts. A template can be found here.

It uses PPC search query data as a starting point. It’s important to use this; instead of the Paid v Organic report you can find in Google Ads or Search Ads 360. The reason for this is that Shopping search query data isn’t included in this report, so for retailers you’re likely to be missing out on a ton of data!

Layer this with organic data from Search Console and you’ll start to be able to build up an idea of your coverage.

Pulling in conversion data at a keyword level for PPC is easy; organic not so much. What we recommend here is using the category column to categorize your terms and then pivot up. You can then assign landing pages to categories and understand organic conversions and revenue. Not a perfect solution, but it gives you something to work with.

Then you can add in search volume estimates from Google Keyword Planner or other tools you may use. You can use this to figure out what your paid, organic, and SEM share of voice is. This gives you a few ideas:

• Where is PPC very dominant and SEO not so much? What can you do to improve rankings across these terms?
• Are there areas where PPC has coverage but conversion rate is poor, and you can perhaps sacrifice this spend and allow organic to pick things up?
• Do you have a good share of voice across SEM across your key categories?

You can then add in search queries where you only rank organically and see if you want or need PPC coverage.

Finally, you could add in keywords you might want to target and ask the PPC team to run some tests to see what kind of volume and competition you will be up against. Run PPC temporarily until organic rankings get up to scratch.

The categorization element of the report is the most time-consuming.

Brand testing

As you can see, the argument for switching off generics can be blurry at best. However, we tend to also see an argument for switching off brand. It’s generally the next conversation once a client realizes that turning off a generic head term is perhaps not going to have the impact there were expecting.

Again there are a multitude of options and approaches here but we’ll cover the most common ones:

• Turn all PPC brand off because we’re ranking P1
• Leave PPC brand on all the time and gun for 100% impression share
• Switch off desktop

There are tech providers out there which offer, in various guises, ways supported here. The important thing to remember is that you are not allowed to scrape Google search results if you are also making changes to bidding. So for example, ad monitoring platforms which can tell you what competitor creative is for certain terms can do that because they are allowed to scrape the results — but they cannot use this information to make automatic changes to your account. That means an account manager jumping between both monitoring tools and search engines on a daily basis to eke out minor gains. It’s possible; but probably not a sensible use of time.

The challenge we have with the strategies outlined above, respectively, are:

• Turning it all off will lead to drop in traffic and a potential drop in orders and revenue.
• This can be expensive; you don’t necessarily need to protect your brand all the time, and you can use saved budget elsewhere (i.e use it to grow your brand with YouTube)
• You lose data because you aren’t bidding for your terms.

As such, we’ve been establishing a more balanced approach – which takes time, but will help save budget and, most importantly, keep the data flow going so you can explain WHY the results are as they are.

Key steps to a more balanced approach

1. Understand the lay of the land:

• Use Google Ads to report on your top spending exact match brand terms. You’ll also want to include search impression share and search exact match impression share.
• If you are in position 1, with 100% exact match share (or 95%+ overall search impression share), you can probably stand to save some budget by reducing your costs-per-click. If you aren’t in P1 with 100% impression share then this gets more complex; and you’d need to understand the reasons for not being at those levels. However, you can still follow the next steps to help you monitor overall performance.
• You’ll also want confirmation you are ranking P1 for the terms you are looking on PPC. It would be very rare that you wouldn’t be — but worth checking!

2. You now want to identify a target search exact match impression share. This is a little bit finger in the air as the idea is to drop this gradually over a period of weeks; but you need a starting point. We’d recommend:

• If the auction for your terms is usually aggressive then play it cautiously – drop from 100% to 95% and monitor from there.
• If the auction tends to be weak (i.e not many competitors) you can afford to drop to 90% or 85%; but we wouldn’t recommend going lower than that in week one.

3. A report template can be found here. All you need to do here is to populate the table with your data. Take the PPC data from Google Ads for the campaign you are testing and then Google Search Console data and look for your branded terms.

4. Fill out the report every week, with both your PPC and SEO teams feeding into it. What you are hoping to achieve is SEM traffic staying static and your overall PPC investment declining.

Key benefits of brand testing

This is a good starting point for brand testing. The key benefits are:

• If you keep spend going through Google Ads, you can monitor your cost savings, your traffic drop and how aggressive the auction is getting.
• It allows you to measure where the point of no return is; once you start seeing SEM traffic drop, you can bump up your bids a little bit to regain the traffic – although we’d recommend not being too jumpy here. Day by day things will change – look at this over weeks rather than days.
• A common concern is the time taken to manage this; but typically you are looking at a handful of keywords – no more than 10 which actually spend the greater share of budget – and making changes maximum twice per week.

Build an environment that encourages sharing

Aside from the more practical tips outlined above, we’ve found the most important strategy in getting PPC and SEO to work well together is enabling a method for the teams to talk to each other. If this is internal it should be easy; but across different agencies it’s likely to be a bit more difficult. Our top tips for this are:

1. Establish a monthly learning deck. This changes from client to client but typically looks like this:

• A top-line view of performance versus targets for key metrics (orders, revenue, ROAS, traffic to site, etc.). Do this for each channel individually.
• A review of the tests / learnings that have been made in the past month
• It’s also important to focus on what is important to both teams, including:
  • New keywords / new negatives from PPC
  • Any kind of landing page testing
  • Any kind of a copy testing
  • Any data regarding audience from PPC. We’re finding content teams are able to use PPC data to help ideation. For example; what are people’s affinity segments, what are their detailed demographics?
• A review of what is coming up and anything that’s currently in progress.

2. Have a monthly call. This can be tweaked depending on the scale of work that’s going on; but monthly works for a lot of our clients. It takes 30 minutes and we run through the monthly learning decks and highlight areas of opportunity. One example of a benefit here was landing page testing. An SEO team had struggled to make a case for changes to the organic page because the internal brand team were winning the argument on what the page should look like. We used PPC landing page data to evidence how a change in the position of a call to action had a significant impact on the conversion rate of the page; immediately the SEO team got the green light to start testing new page designs and performance improved!

3. Make sure you’re sharing anything you think may be relevant. Sometimes even the smallest detail can be important. For example SEO teams may be planning for AMP pages; but that means new Floodlight tags for PPC teams if they are using SearchAds 360.

4. Don’t forget about the other teams. I know this is an SEM post; but audience data is already a key pillar. Search has had to play catch-up with the likes of Facebook; but the stuff PPC teams have access to at their fingertips is extensive. Make sure the social and programmatic teams know about it!

Getting PPC and SEO to work better together is a bit like the attribution conversation. It’s not always perfect; but it’s better than doing nothing! Hopefully these points give you a jumping-off point.

Martin Reed is PPC Account Director at Croud.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/29/ppc-seo-work-together-gain-visibility/

New Plugin Adds Elementor Templates as Gutenberg Blocks

One of the most pressing concerns for users in the Gutenberg era is how page builder plugins will respond. Speculation about the new editor “killing off page builders” has run rampant, but these plugins are slowly evolving ahead of Gutenberg’s imminent inclusion in WordPress 5.0. In February, Elementor, one of WordPress’ most popular page builders, announced the plugin would be completely compatible with Gutenberg beginning with its 2.0 version that was released a few months later. Like many other plugins, that meant a nominal compatibility without any custom blocks built specifically for the new editor.
This week marks a major milestone for the page builder, as Elementor introduced its new Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg plugin. The plugin goes beyond basic compatibility, allowing users to insert any Elementor template into Gutenberg with one click. Its custom block functions as a pipeline to the Elementor library, pulling in content and designs the user has already created in the Elementor interface.
Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg lets users compose with the new editor while maintaining convenient access to items designed in the page builder. It makes it possible
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18035/new-plugin-adds-elementor-templates-as-gutenberg-blocks

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/new-plugin-adds-elementor-templates-as-gutenberg-blocks/

Optimizing Images with WordPress? Let’s skip the bull and tell it straight!

Out of curiosity, why don’t all these blog posts from affiliate sites, hosting companies, theme developers, AdSense sites, plugin owners (or anywhere else) ever grow some gumption and say _(something like)_ : “STOP UPLOADING BIG ASS IMAGES IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!”
I can’t quite say I’ve ever seen a post resembling that much truthful bluntness. So, perhaps I can add a bit of gentle rhetoric around that message while still maintaining the importance of the above text in red. Here goes.
Use a FIXED WIDTH – NOT FLUID
Every WordPress Theme is unique. Some themes have an option of fixed or fluid width. Fluid width, flexible width, or full screen width might be additional terms to use – but the result is the same. On any screen possible, the theme is designed to take up as much room as possible.
That would also be known as incredibly impossible, not possible, no way in the world, not actually going to really happen, for your own sake please stop thinking that it looks cool in-your-own perspective.
As someone told me years ago, “This is Business: Unless Y-O-U can print your own money, your own opinion does NOT mean jack sh!t. Never forsake that
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18034/optimizing-images-with-wordpress-let-s-skip-the-bull-and-tell-it-straight

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/optimizing-images-with-wordpress-lets-skip-the-bull-and-tell-it-straight/

How to Show Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress

Do you want to display social media reviews on your WordPress website? You may have business reviews from your customers on different social sites like Google, Facebook, etc. These reviews are excellent social proof that you can use to attract new visitors towards your business. In this article, we will share how to display business reviews from Google, Facebook, and Yelp in your WordPress site.

Why You Should Display Business Reviews in WordPress?

Your customers often leave positive reviews about your business on social platforms like Google, Facebook, or Yelp. These reviews are excellent social proof and can be used alongside customer testimonials on your website.

You can show these business reviews on your WordPress site to build trust and boost conversions (Bonus: see 29 more ways to use social proof to increase conversions).

Normally, you would need to install separate WordPress plugins to show reviews from multiple social platforms. Each plugin has different settings, and it may even conflict with each other.

We recommend using WP Business Reviews plugin by WordPress. It’s an all-in-one solution to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp business reviews.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress.

Showing Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress

First thing you need to do is to install and activate the WP Business Reviews plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to go to Reviews » Settings page in your WordPress admin area. Under the ‘License’ tab, you need to add your license key and activate it.

You can get the license key from your account on WP Business Reviews site.

Once the license key is successfully activated, you need to go to the ‘Platforms’ tab and select the review platforms from where you want to display business reviews in WordPress.

Once you have selected the platform, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store the settings.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will select Google, Facebook, and Yelp to pull reviews from. You can choose the platforms that you like.

Next, you need to go to the ‘Google’ tab on the left side and add the Google Places API Key to show Google reviews on your website.

You can login to your Google account and click on the visit Google Places API documentation link to get your key.

It’ll change the platform status from disconnected to connected. Make sure to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to continue.

After that you need to head over to the ‘Facebook’ tab and click on the ‘Connect with Facebook’ button. It will ask you to login to your Facebook account.

Once logged in, you need to give permissions to Facebook for the connection. Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Now, go to the ‘Yelp’ tab and click on the create a Yelp App link to get your Yelp API Key.

Click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to change the platform status form disconnected to connected.

After connecting all the platforms successfully, you can go to Reviews » Collection page in your WordPress admin area. From here you need to create the collection of your business reviews.

You can do this by clicking on the ‘Add Collection’ button on any platform to create your reviews collection.

It’ll take you to a new page where you can build a reviews collection.

Start by adding a title and selecting a review source on the right side. After that you need to click on the ‘Get Reviews’ button on a resource to retrieve reviews from the source.

It’ll show all the reviews from this source on the left side of your screen.

Next, you can open the ‘Presentation’ options on the right side. In these options, you can select style, format, maximum columns, and maximum reviews for the collection.

Nextx, you can go to the ‘Reviews’ tab to enable / disable the review components like reviewer image, name, star rating, etc. You can also define the maximum number of characters for each review.

Lastly, you can go to the ‘Filters’ tab. There you’ll find Minimum Rating and Blank Reviews filters. You can select the star rating and show your best reviews to the new visitors.

Once you are satisfied with all these settings, click on the ‘Save’ button and then click on the ‘Copy Shortcode’ button.

You can add this shortcode anywhere on your WordPress site to display the business reviews collection.

This shortcode will show the complete collection of reviews that you created above.

If you want to show a single review on your WordPress post, page, or sidebar widget, then go to Reviews » Single Review page and copy the shortcode of the preferred single review.

You can paste this shortcode anywhere on your posts, pages, or template files to display the single review instead of the complete reviews collection. It also allows you to manually add custom reviews in WordPress.

If you want to show the reviews in a widget area of your website, then you can do this by heading over to the Appearance » Widgets in your WordPress admin and draging the WP Business Reviews Collection widget to the preferred widget area.

Next, simply select the reviews collection in the widget dropdown to show business reviews in your sidebar.

Once you are done, you can head over to your website to see the business reviews in action.

You can create multiple collections of Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews for different pages in WordPress. It lets you customize the style and presentation of all your reviews, so they appear beautifully on your website.

That’s all. We hope this article helped you learn how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to add a customer reviews page in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Show Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-show-google-facebook-and-yelp-reviews-in-wordpress/