Thinking of using WordPress to create and sell courses? Just don’t. (If you are a WordPress Geek, ignore this post)
If you live and breathe WordPress, if you don’t mind the extra slog, and if you have the cash plus resources to make it happen, you can try.
Most of us don’t. Most first-time online course creators are hard-pressed for resources of any kind.
Plus, not all of us are born WordPress geeks.
When WordPress is So Good, Why Not?
Don’t get me wrong: WordPress is extremely capable and it has everything you need to create and sell courses.
You have WordPress LMS themes specifically built for online learning (Astra, for instance, has ready-made WordPress LMS themes integrated with LearnDash).
Then, you have several plugins (for LMS, membership management, course creation, course promotion, and for running your own affiliate programs).
WordPress itself is free. But everything you need to create, manage, and sell online courses on WordPress will take enormous amounts of cash, time, and nerdy wizardry.
Here’s what you’ll need to manage your crazy endeavor of trying to create and sell your own online courses or memberships on WordPress.
Fast, reliable, hassle-free hosting: You’d have to politely skip the cheap hosting options and go for WordPress managed hosting. This’d mean that you’d have to choose between the likes of WPEngine, FlyWheel, Kinsta, or 10Web. These plans start at $15 at least. The usual ballpark is around $30 per month.
WordPress Theme Builders: Alternatively, you’d have to choose to drag-and-drop and design a WordPress theme for your online school by using a theme builder such as Divi, Elementor, Brizy, or Beaver Builder.
Membership Plugins For WordPress & Course-specific plugins: You’d need several other WordPress plugins such as Restrict Content Pro, WPComplete, and more.
eCommerce WordPress Plugins: To accept payments, you’d need WooCommerce itself along with WooCommerce Recurring Subscriptions, WooCommerce for Stripe, WooCommerce for Online Courses, and several others.
Most of these tools, plugins, themes, and hosting itself are all recurring payments each month.
Additionally, if you take annual licenses for each, you’ll still have annual recurring payments to make (in most cases, unless you pick lifetime licenses (if available).
I know that Chris Lema is a huge advocate of Creating Courses on WordPress. But you aren’t Chris Lema and neither am I.
So, what should you do? What are the alternatives of WordPress as LMS? If you don’t (or can’t) use WordPress for Online Courses, what can you use really?
Options For Selling Online Courses and Memberships
You have at least three options (after all considerations, tryouts, and failures):
Podia
Podia just takes all the geeky work behind the scenes. You don’t look for themes or use any plugins. You don’t try to integrate LMS into your website and work with 16 other tools to make your online course(s) work.
The tool is incredibly easy to use. It’s fast. It’s intuitive, and it’s something that your typical 8-year old can use.
Sell and promote digital downloads (files, music, videos, eBooks, special reports, and anything else that can be downloaded)
Manage, sell & promote online courses
Run full-fledged membership sites with varying payment plans for members)
Pre-sell your products (digital downloads, memberships, and others)
Do most of the marketing that you need by launching webinars (on YouTube and Zoom). Use landing pages, and
Take advantage of their in-built email marketing tool (so, at least initially, you don’t have to spend more on email marketing tools such of ConvertKit, Drip, and MailChimp).
Podia also provides you with offsite widgets you can use as calls-to-action within your blog posts and other pages.
Plus, Podia now has Live Messaging (use it to make instant connections with your potential customers).
AccessAlly: One Valid Option To Create And Sell Courses Using WordPress?
The only reason AccessAlly is being mentioned (even though it works with WordPress) is because it’s somewhat universal — it can work with your existing theme or the way your WordPress site is set-up right now.
However, Just in case you have a lifelong love for WordPress and just can’t think of moving away from it, there’s still an option for you.
AccessAlly is a WordPress plugin, yes.
No, it’s not a WordPress LMS theme. It’s not an online course builder.
It’s a swiss-army knife of a WordPress LMS plugin and Membership management plugin for WordPress (just because you have to call it something). However, it does more.
AccessAlly is mentioned here because apart from being an online learning WordPress theme and a specific WordPress plugin that does “something”, it’s a comprehensive WordPress plugin that facilitates online course creators.
With AccessAlly, you get:
Create regular courses on WordPress LMS or go for dripped-content type courses.
Use conversion-focused forms, affiliate management (and tracking), video engagement metrics, abandoned cart follow ups, and more.
LMS gamification, membership management, and more.
Struggling with WordPress Salesforce Integration? Good times are here.
Are you copy-pasting data from your form entries to Salesforce, manually? Manual data entry is so 1990s. Today, you have the power of automation, the use of Artificial intelligence, and/or machine learning to help you manage your marketing better.
The WPForms addon for Salesforce is a game-changer. Plus, you don’t need to pay for a service like Zapier to connect WordPress to Salesforce (at least not for this part of your lead generation efforts).
The Behaviour Shift: Customers will ping you online
The trend from 2019 to 2021 is clear: Your customers want you to interact with them online. That’s it. Your opinions about this won’t count. Heck, even customers’ own opinions won’t matter.
Call it the “Covid-19” effect or what have you but everything — from lead generation to making sales; from messaging to regular interactions is moving online.
When it comes to lead generation, there are several powerful plugins for WordPress that you could use. While most of them are exceptional, some of them still require a wee bit of manual admin.
Manual administration on anything to do with your WordPress website takes time. Time is something you have very little of.
Salesforce is one of the most sought-after CRM systems in the world while WordPress is the leading CMS (Content Management System) in the world.
WordPress Salesforce was supposed to be the marriage that was made in heaven.
The marriage, however, isn’t straightforward (When was the last time a marriage was easy, eh?).
Using Web-to-lead forms by Salesforce: This doesn’t really give you complete control over how you want your web forms to look, feel, and the type of information you want to gather.
WordPress form builders (GravityForms, Contact 7? There are way too many to count, and most of them cost you money). Here are some of those WordPress form builders in the WordPress plugin directory.
WordPress + Salesforce Custom Integration (get specialists to do it for you and this is even more expensive than anything you’d use).
Life calls for simplicity. Using WPForms and Salesforce integration features saves you the hassle, puts WordPress lead generation on steroids, and maybe even prints you money.
For using WPForms with Salesforce, you’d need to be on a Salesforce Elite license and have the necessary admin credentials to start connecting your forms with Salesforce on WordPress. Plus, you’ll need to be on the WPForms Elite Plan
With the WPForms Salesforce Addon, you can directly link your WordPress forms with Salesforce. You can also connect multiple WordPress forms with your salesforce account (or multiple salesforce accounts, if you need to).
With WPForms securely sending lead data to Salesforce, you have complete flexibility to manage your data as the case may be.
Create Salesforce Objects Quick, In Style
Even with something like creating salesforce objects, you can do that from right inside your WPForms dashboard (where you normally create WordPress forms of all kinds).
Instead of manually creating salesforce objects inside “salesforce”, creating a form, and then integrating that particular WordPress form with the Salesforce object in your Salesforce account, cut the flab and do it from inside the WPForms form builder dashboard as shown below from the form settings.
Create a new Lead from each submission, along with the requisite properties, data, and details associated with each lead directly into Salesforce.
Associate leads with specific campaigns
Mark leads (as Sales Qualified Leads or Marketing Qualified leads) automatically based on lead form data. You may also choose to mark leads as opportunities, those associated with particular products or services, and more.
Once you decide how to process your lead and send the details over to Salesforce from your WordPress lead form, just choose the Salesforce object that the data should be sent to by mapping the details of your WordPress lead form to the input details of your Salesforce Object as shown.
After activating the WPForms Salesforce Addon, open the plugin, head to the vertical navigation menu inside WPForms builder, and click on the “marketing”. On the panel that appears, choose “Salesforce” and click on “Add new connection” as shown.
Give your connection a name (this won’t ever be shown to your end visitors, leads, and customers) and it’s only for your internal form/lead management purposes.
Assuming you’ve followed through the instructions in the Salesforce Addon Setup Documentation, you should be able to see your Salesforce account information and associated Salesforce objects in the next screen that shows up (as shown).
Select the appropriate Salesforce account you want the WordPress lead forms to connect with. After selecting the Salesforce account, you’ll be able to select the appropriate Salesforce object as shown below.
This is the part where you’ll attribute lead values, custom fields, and custom values to each person who’ll sign up as a lead on your forms (which are essentially connected to the Salesforce object of your chosen Salesforce account).
Click on the blue “+” icon if you’d like to map more form fields available on your WPForms to your Salesforce Object.
Want to do more with your WordPress lead forms and Salesforce Integration? Unleash the power of conditional logic that WPForms provides for you.
If you would like to use the conditional logic function to further streamline lead data collection, to segment your leads, or to establish SQL (Sales Qualified Leads) or MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads), select the little checkbox to enable conditional logic and create your steps to process lead data.
Process lead details with conditional logic and then segment your leads into specific groups based on regular “if-else” conditions.
This way, you are already controlling lead data quality and ensuring that some form of segmentation exists while you collect and process leads by using WordPress lead forms and Salesforce integration.
According to Kinsta, WordPress powers 60.8% of the CMS market share in the world. More than 14.7% of the world’s websites run on WordPress.
Now, that’s indeed saying something about the popularity of WordPress.
The story no one told you is that this also makes WordPress vulnerable. Your website, based on WordPress, is completely vulnerable to hacking, malware, attempts to break-in, spam comments, spam form fill ups, and so much more.
If you aren’t careful enough, your website can break.
One of the more pressing problems — among several others — is form spam. Bots and malicious visitors trying to attack the forms on your WordPress site to exploit the data within. That data could be your email list, your customers’ credit card or payment details stored on your website, and really anything else.
Plugin vulnerabilities represent 56% of the known entry points for cyber attacks. With over 55,000 WordPress plugins that collectively have been downloaded over one billion times and more added monthly, it’s more important than ever to update them safely
There was, however, a need to add more layers of protection to prevent spam on WordPress while giving you more options to choose from as far as spam control for WordPress is concerned. For that reason, WPforms rolled out the brand new hCaptcha
What is hCaptcha?
hCaptcha now runs on 15% of the Internet, according to YCombinator.
hCaptcha is a direct and simple drop-in replacement for reCaptcha. Using easy tasks for humans but hard for bots, hCaptcha tries to solve not just the spam form problem but also issues with regards to privacy, data usage, and data exploitation.
hCaptcha protects user privacy, rewards websites, and helps companies get their data labeled.
There are three simple reasons why hCaptcha should be your preferred choice (remember, every business that has a blog is also a publisher).
Focus on Privacy: Ad networks see your visitors as the product. hCaptcha doesn’t care who your users are, only how likely they are to be malicious. hCaptcha also supports initiatives like Privacy Pass, and works hard to balance privacy and security.
Security first: Accuracy is in your interest and theirs. hCaptcha is publisher-focused. hCaptcha works to give you real data and let you decide how to use it. Other captchas provided by other companies (Read: Google) have a vested interest: each bot or visitor they block may reduce their revenue.
Better user experience: Sophisticated machine learning models are used to determine humanity. This requires less annoying tasks from users and takes less of your time in doing so, while still producing useful labeled data.
Mathew Prince recently announced that Cloudflare moved from Google’s reCaptcha to hCaptcha for much of the same reasons as above. Further, Cloudflare made that decision also because hCaptcha was effective, could scale, and was offered for free.
How To Set Up hCaptcha with WPForms: Free And Privacy-focused
Getting started with hCaptcha with WPForms is easy. Just get to your WPForms Plugin settings, click on CAPTCHA, choose hCaptcha.
Note: As you can see from the image below, you still retain the choice to use Google’s reCaptcha
Working with WPForms & hCaptcha
If and when you build your forms for WordPress, you want to keep these forms as bulletproof as possible. That means it’s on you to keep out the bots, malicious visitors, malware, spam comments, break-ins, bad user signups, and more.
Instead of creating forms and then worrying, just use the available CAPTCHA options that you’ve enabled with WPForms (above) such as hCaptcha or reCaptcha.
WPForms also includes the ability to add hCaptcha element to any form you build, right through the WPForms builder as shown in the screenshot below:
Learn more about hCaptcha and see how WPForms can help you create forms of all kinds such as Payment forms (Integrated with Stripe or PayPal), file upload forms, contact forms, and more.
Check out various other features of popular WPForms for WordPress and WPForms add-ons such as smart conditional logic, instant notifications, multi-page forms, and so much more.
You thought you were done with your excitement with what you could achieve with Elementor or Elementor Pro? You haven’t seen nothing yet. Read this Crocoblock review and see just how you can build on top of your Elementor websites.
Crocoblock started off just like any other third-party Elementor theme provider along with a few plugins. But then, the team at Crocoblock went further ahead and built an all-in-one toolkit that absolutely anyone — from web designers to WordPress agencies; from developers to Entrepreneurs; from bloggers to online publications could use.
Crocoblock comes with various products in their stable, which include:
Dynamic WordPress templates: Fully-functional WordPress templates which you can use to plug-and-play.
Regular WordPress themes such as Kava and Kava Pro
A mind-boggling array of WordPress pluginswhich can make even an 8th-grade child an expert on WordPress
Extras such as an Interactive Pop-up library and Pop-up templates to make your WordPress site a lead generation machine.
Crocoblock provides you with two different kinds of WordPress templates, along with plugins, extras, DevTools, and more: WordPress design templates (the usual kind) and WordPress Dynamic Templates (See below).
Crocoblock WordPress Templates
Visually and functionally, Crocoblock’s WordPress Templates are crafted with care without the usual WordPress theme bloat.
Crocoblock WordPress templates are built and sorted across categories such as corporate, business events, personal portfolios, digital agencies, IT courses, bitcoin trading, and so many more.
Crocoblock’s WordPress templates, built to work independently or on top of the Elementor Pro Plugin, are fast, well-equipped, and ready-to-go. You’d just have to pick a template you like, change the elements around, and launch your website.
Crocoblock’s WordPress templates are ready-made, sorted, and categorized such as WordPress templates for Real estate, portfolio websites, business websites, corporate websites, and so many more.
For each WordPress template on offer (there are over 47+ templates for you to play with), check out the live demos to see how they really look and work on your devices (such as desktop, mobile, and tablet).
Crocoblock Dynamic Templates
Forget WordPress themes and plugins. If you wanted to launch a full-fledged business straight out of a WordPress setup, Crocoblock’s dynamic WordPress templates are the way to go.
Featuring around 9+ dynamic templates, each of these WordPress dynamic templates come loaded with everything you need (the themes, necessary plugins, and other functionalities) that you’d need to start a rental website (like AirBnB), a WooCommerce Shop, a car rental website, an automotive dealer website, a hotel booking platform, or a doctor appointment portal.
Just pick the kind of dynamic WordPress website you want to launch, change the elements to reflect your own business (such as the logo, the images, the copy or content, and other details), and launch your new business based on WordPress, built on top of Crocoblock and Elementor.
Pick the kind of WordPress Dynamic template your business relates to, customize your WordPress theme (top-to-bottom), and launch your new website in minutes.
Crocoblock Plugins
Crocoblock WordPress plugins can be used as standalone plugins or they can be used on top of whatever Elementor goodness you might already have available. Each of the Crocoblock plugins are built to do something very specific. Here are some of the WordPress plugins available with Crocoblock and what you can do with each:
JetElements: Bring visual delight to any of your WordPress themes, including Crocoblock’s themes or other themes you might use such as StudioPress, those from 10Web, and more.
JetEngine: Did you know that you can transform the way your website displays content based on the power of showcasing dynamic content on your pages? Use JetEngine to setup parameters to help users create or display any kind of dynamic content (calendar sync, display grids, and more).
JetPopups: Create and have pop-ups trigger on your website based on various parameters and triggers (such as exit intent, click on link, or click on button). Customize and style your pop-ups the way you want them to be with JetPopups plugin.
JetTricks: Bring your website to life by adding interactive visual effects to your website assets (such as content and images). Pick from tooltips, satellite effects, and more.
JetSmartFilters: You’d not be using the full power of the CMS and Database engines that your WordPress website is powered with. Using Jet Smart Filters, you can allow your users to select, choose, sort, and filter based on several criteria (which makes sense for your business). For instance, your customers can choose to display products based on price, range, or other variables (depending on what you sell). Build filters such as search filter, checkbox filter, rating filter, visual filter, and more.
JetBooking: Would you like your users to book rooms based on date ranges, travel packages, cars for rent, rooms on long-term vacations?Use the JetBooking plugin from Crocoblock to build the next AirBnb or Booking.com.
JetAppointment: Want to easily enable your users to book appointments on your WordPress website? Use JetAppointment to allow your potential clients to book services (from an array of multiple services you provide) along with multi-step forms and customizable checkout.
JetWooBuilder: Want to build custom product pages or custom eCommerce grids for your eCommerce store? Use Jet WooBuilder to create taxonomy lists, product grids, product carousels, and control how your products are displayed to your customers.
Jet Product Gallery: Retain the power to display products or items on your eCommerce store the way you think is best. Use Jet Product Gallery add product display carousels, product images, reviews or ratings, and more.
Jet CompareWishlist: Bring an Amazon-like experience to your eCommerce store by letting your users add items to a “compare” table or have them add items to a wishlist. You can enable this feature easily by using Jet Compare Wishlist.
JetReviews: Reviews can help drive more sales on your website. It’s called the power of social proof. This is a simple strategy you can’t ever go wrong with. Use Jet Reviews plugin to add reviews to any post type (including review-type posts) along with ratings and comments.
JetMenu: Were you ever impressed with some of those mega menus on popular websites, newspaper sites (like CNN), and other online publications? You can do that yourself with the JetMenu plugin. Create horizontal, vertical, and hamburger menus in just a few clicks.
JetBlocks: Manage your site logo, add extra elements to your headers (such as a login icon, eCommerce cart, add registration forms or add a search field to your header) with JetBlocks.
JetSearch: Implement fast, light, and visually enriched search experience for your WordPress website with JetSearch.
JetBlog: You don’t have to do the “same old”, “same old” with your blog layout on WordPress. Use the JetBlog plugin from Crocoblock to add dynamic content to your blog layout, style individual blog pages, and more.
JetTabs: Ever wanted to use accordion tabs or pricing table switches (to display variable pricing such as monthly or annually)? Use JetTabs to deploy tabs, price switchers, and accordions on your WordPress website?
Jet StyleManager: Style your pages way faster with the Style Manager plugin. Make sweeping changes to how content and website assets are displayed to your users.
Jet ThemeCore: Design, build, and manage an entire WordPress website’s site structure. Work & manage your headers, footers, archive pages, blog pages, and other such universal parts of your WordPress website
Forget what you keep reading about pop-ups and the rallying cry that pop-ups are irritating or that they are bad. You are in business and you are not in the business of pleasing people. You are a business. You need leads. You need sales. Period.
According to the folks at Sumo, the average conversion rate for a pop-up is around 3.09%?
Will pop-ups work? Are pop-ups good? Is there a chance that Pop-ups can harm user experience?
What if you wanted more functionality when it comes to creating and launching pop-ups (for lead generation on your WordPress) on top of the powerful Elementor Pop-ups?
Pick any template from the available pop-up templates on Crocoblock and create your Pop-ups on the fly. If you need inspiration, do check out the Interactive Pop-up library.
Remember that all of these features and functionality are on top of what Elementor Pop-ups already provide (if you are using Elementor Pro along with Crocoblock that is). Even if you don’t use Elementor Pro, you can still work with Crocoblock Pop-ups or the JetPopup plugin or both.
Crocoblock Widgets
On top of everything else available with Crocoblock, you also get access to more than 150+ WordPress widgets. Some of these work to enhance your game with Elementor Pro. Pick from a variety of widgets such as design widgets, basic WordPress widgets, and WooCommerce widgets.
For instance, you can use Crocoblock WordPress widgets for WooCommerce to customize your customers account login page, the thank you page for each order, and the cart page. You can also use design widgets to add scroll navigation, parallax effects, progress charts or bars, logo showcase, or animated flipboxes.
If you ever looked for a perfect WordPress theme — a true match that can work with Crocoblock, Elementor Pro, you should consider using Crocoblock’s Kava Theme. With the Kava Theme itself, you get plenty of layouts to mix and match in a way that makes sense for your business. Choose from several blog display styles, and single-page layout styles (for everything else on your WordPress site).
The Kava theme was also designed for page speed (no superfluous code) and is built for performance-oriented websites. The Kava theme is WooCommerce-ready, developer-friendly, easy enough to be used by everyone else, comes with preset styles, and is also compatible with Elementor.
Note that you get access to everything above (including the Kava Theme) along with DevTools and extras for a single license of Crocoblock or a subscription to Crocoblock.
Crocoblock pricing is available for a single website or for unlimited websites. Further, Crocoblock’s pricing also makes everything Crocoblock has to offer for a yearly subscription. There’s also a lifetime license available for you if you think you need to work with several websites (for clients) or for your own portfolio.
Looking for the top Crocoblock WordPress Plugins? This is where you’d find some of the best, ever.
If I could, I’d write an entire book on Crocoblock’s plugins alone. There are so many Crocoblock Plugins available that it’d really need a series of blog posts (or a book or a coffee table publication?) to feature all of these.
Crocoblock WordPress plugins work even better if you already use Elementor. Using Crocoblock with Elementor is like a supercharged V12 engine that can simply change the way you do WordPress.
Ever fancied making design changes to your website but didn’t know where to begin? Were you impressed with how a website has these subtle design elements and you thought you’d need to hire an expensive WordPress designer to get that done?
The secret is that you don’t need much to bring in some awesome effects to your website.
With more than 44 different styling widgets (On top of anything else that Elementor provides), the JetElements plugin can help you transform your website into a visual delight.
Want to take the visual treats on your WordPress website several notches up? How about adding tooltips, satellite shots, hotspots, parallax scrolling, sticky columns, and more?
With JetTricks, you can add the following to your website:
Enhance your website pages with Parallax scrolling
Make your “View More”, “Learn More”, or “Discover” prompts animated, stylish, and snazzy with the animated “view more” break.
Have an image for your eCommerce product? Use HotSpots to mark the various features of your product within the image itself (works something like interactive tooltips)
You’ve heard that WordPress is elastic and probably powers any kind of website by now. But did you know that you could use the power of dynamic content and make your website really powerful?
Dynamic content for WordPress allows you to run database-powered websites. All of those websites that you might have used before such as doctor appointment booking platforms, AirBnB-like hotel booking sites, travel websites, and others.
Guess what? You could build a WordPress-powered website just like those, all by yourself by using something like Crocoblock’s JetPlugin.
If you thought that you need WordPress specialists for this, you are wrong again.
Crocoblock’s JetEngine can help you use the power of dynamic content for WordPress, just like that.
Create dynamic content (such as use dynamic images, dynamic links, dynamic terms, dynamic fields, and dynamic snippets) to showcase content automatically.
Use grids, masonry, injecting dynamic elements into grids, or sliders to showcase personalized or specific content (depending on what your dynamic WordPress website does).
Power your calendar with JetEngine’s dynamic widgets and work out a visually compelling schedule. Add as many events as you want and play around with the styles to make them catchy. As a result, you’ll get a classy calendar that ticks all of your boxes.
JetEngine gives you the opportunity to build a stronger connection with your visitors. Make your web property more interactive by implementing a fully-responsive step-by-step form. Registration, Contact, Feedback, Booking, Order – whatever you’re up to, JetEngine & Elementor are here to slay any form type. Did you know that you can also have forms calculate prices or use step-by-step forms for your users?
Want to start a car rental business? A hotel or hostel booking site? Or would you like your real-estate website to accept bookings? JetEngine is the plugin to use.
JetPopup
Want your website to turn into a mean, lead generation machine? Use JetPopups plugin to create interactive, conversion-focused popups easily and add them to your WordPress site.
Note: This plugin can work on top of the already powerful Popup functionality that Elementor provides for you.
With more than 50+ interactive pop-ups available for you to choose from with JetPopup, it’s just a matter of picking up a pop-up template, changing the elements within, and making those pop-ups work hard to generate leads for you.
As with any pop-up builder, JetPopup Plugin also has options to “trigger” these pop-ups (on arrival, on click, exit-intent popups, and more).
Use these pop-ups to help build your email marketing list, provide discounts or coupons, create info cards to let your visitors know about new product launches, conduct quick surveys with Yes/No pop-ups, or maybe just roll out GDPR permission pop-ups.
Your blog (no matter how you intend to perceive it) is the central engine for your digital marketing presence. Your blog gets you traffic. It helps attract new customers. It provides you a way to educate, entertain, inform, inspire, and train your customers.
If you don’t use anything else on this list, just pick the JetBlog plugin and give your blog a visual makeover with a news ticker, smart posts list, blog post grid displays, post tiles, and more.
Of course, if you layer your JetBlog plugin with JetPopups plugin, you can also turn each of your blog posts into lead-generating content assets by adding popups to each of your blog posts (or static lead generation subscription forms that you can place under or in the middle of each blog post).
You have a business to run, but you don’t have the time, knowledge, experience, and the resources to really turn their websites into marketing machines or sales magnets.
But that’s what you need to succeed.
Guess what? You intuitively know this.
It’s just that you couldn’t bring yourself get your hands dirty yet. You didn’t know who to ask. You had no way to know what platform you should build your website on. Even after you build a website (or get it designed by someone else), there’s no way to know if your website can manage to rack up a decent conversion score
You need conversion-focused websites that load fast. You’d need your website to generate leads for you. You’d need landing pages (in addition to any pages on your website) so that you could point visitors to specific, dedicated landing pages that make a very specific offer (so you can generate even more leads).
In short, WordPress is perfect for marketing your business. It only helps further that it’s popular, used by about 27% of all the website owners in the world, a developer favourite, resource friendly, and extremely customizable.
Here are reasons why WordPress is perfect for Marketing Your Business
WordPress Specialist Hosting (Speed & Stability)
A StrangeLoop Case Study (Involving Amazon, Google, and a few other larger sites) reveals that a 1-second delay in page load time leads to a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
WordPress has more hosting options than you’d care to admit. In fact, there are so many that it really becomes hard to pick the right choice. Your WordPress hosting choice comes down to a few things.
What do you really need in a hosting? Does your hosting provider have server clusters in the geographic area of your choice? Is the WordPress specialist host dependable enough? Does your WordPress specialist hosting provider give you everything you need, and then some more? How is hosting support like?
Instead of spending time to do any research, I’ve already identified a few WordPress specialist hosting companies that you could serious consider (finally boiling down to a few choices like budget, costs, and others).
Since WordPress is so popular, starting with WordPress is almost stupid-easy. There’s no need to go looking for WordPress specialists and designers (unless you really need to).
Here are some of your options to fast track your WordPress website design (along with your WordPress hosting):
StudioPress themes
Start with StudioPress themes (available along with Genesis Framework as a standalone package free with both WPEngine & Flywheel). StudioPress themes — and the Genesis Framework — are no ordinary themes. Each of the themes has been built for speed, security, and for being mobile-responsive. The Studiopress themes are free from the usual WordPress theme code-bloat.
Each of the themes from StudioPress is audited and tested before release (and they have a reputation to worry about).
With StudioPress, you don’t really spend time fiddling with your website. You’d rather be better off getting into the marketing side of things as soon as your StudioPress site is ready.
Elementor
Elementor has everything you’d ever need not only to design your WordPress website (without code) but also to help you with other things (which other builders usually neglect).
You could edit your entire site with Elementor (without having to do it multiple times), work with Dynamic colors, and to implement Global CSS. Some of many other features (and new features are constantly added) include a drag-and-drop editor, 300+ designer-made templates, pop-up builder, responsive editing, theme builder, full-site editor, Elementor landing pages, and so much more.
Remember that with Elementor, you don’t just design a website. You’ll also have all the tools such as the landing page builder and the pop-up builder to start doing things that matter for your business.
Divi by Elegant Themes
Divi — by Elegant themes — comes with a theme and/or a plugin (If you use the theme, you don’t need the plugin). If you use any other theme and want to use Divi’s functionalities, you’ll need the Divi plugin.
Divi Visual builder for WordPress allows you to do design your WordPress website, design WordPress themes, and do a lot more by using the drag-and-drop builder. You’ll also have access to other products from the Elegant Themes stable such as Monarch plugin, Bloom plugin for Lead Generation, and more. Within Divi, you have Divi Leads (to help you do A/B testing for each page you create — especially landing pages).
The best part about Divi is that it has a reasonable option of a lifetime purchase for their all-inclusive plan (unlike others who only have monthly or annual plans_.
Astra Themes
It becomes a tough choice to look for bloat-free, lightweight, and capable WordPress themes (there are literally thousands of them out there, and counting). That’s when you should go looking for options such as The Astra theme.
You can use the Astra Theme, as it were, or pick any of their starter templates (made for several WordPress builders such as Divi, Elementor, Brizy, and Beaver Builder).
The Astra theme is a super-fast theme (loads in less than a second), doesn’t use JQuery, and it needs less than 50KB of resources.
You could be up and running with your new website (depending on your business) with The Astra Theme in seconds if you use the Astra Starter Templates
Crocoblock Themes
If you happen to use Elementor but if you want to squeeze even more out of your Elementor package, consider using Crocoblock which comes with several WordPress templates you can use for Elementor. Plus, you also get access to Crocoblock’s Kava theme (along with Kava Pro). By itself, Kava theme has several more layouts inside that you could mix and match.
Make Anything Happen With WordPress Plugins
You can possibly do anything with WordPress. No matter what of a website you need, you’ll have a way to build it with WordPress.
If there’s a functionality you need or if there’s a feature you are looking for, there’s a plugin that can do it for you. You just have to know what you need and you need to have enough patience to look for the right plugin for the job.
Take the Crocoblock plugins, for instance. With plugins like JetAppointments, you can manage your appointments (with a lot more features built-in than anything else you’d ever use).
With JetBooking, you can practically build a travel website like orbitz.com or booking.com. Since we are talking about marketing, using a plugin like JetPopup is enough to launch stellar looking pop-ups for lead generation.
Talking about Lead generation, there are several other plugins for WordPress that can help you with marketing. OptinMonster, for instance, provides you with several ways to generate leads (exit intent, slide-up, between or under blog posts, spinning wheels, and so much more). There are several other marketing plugins for WordPress that just work.
While we are talking about plugins, don’t forget to use Yoast SEO Plugin — it’s just one WordPress plugin you can’t afford to miss.
Everything Just Connects With WordPress
WordPress connects with most business apps, business tools, CRM tools, and SaaS applications. In most cases, there are dedicated plugins deployed by the SaaS companies or other vendors themselves. You’ll never find it hard to integrate your favorite marketing tool, CRM, email marketing service provider, or any other app that you’d use when it comes to WordPress.
Thanks to this dedicated product build connected to WordPress, most of what you need to do marketing with WordPress just happens to connect with WordPress.
For instance, if you use WordPress, you could:
Instantly connect your website with your landing page builders such as Unbounce , Instapage, or LeadPages.
Easily integrate your email service providers such as MailChimp or Drip.
Connect an entire Inbound Marketing Software such as HubSpot to make it work with your WordPress website.
Make use of Powerful analytics tools such as MonsterInsights or easily build powerful analytics reports with a tool like SuperMetrics
In rare cases when you don’t see direct integrations with WordPress, there are tools like Zapier which can still help you bridge your WordPress website to several other tools, plugins, or business apps that you might need.
In most cases, there’s never a need to get external help paying thousands of dollars (like you’d have to if you were to use a website built with PHP by some designer or developer) just to connect WordPress websites with other tools such as CRM systems, Landing Page builders, Email Marketing tools, and more.
How does your WordPress website help you with marketing? Tell us about it.
