Use WordPress for your business or use it as a blog. Here are Free WordPress Plugins That Make Money [Guaranteed] 💰 👇
You use WordPress. You have a website (or a blog, a portal, or what have you). Yet, you struggle to make money with it?
Understandable. WordPress is a powerful blogging platform with over 60 million websites. It has been estimated that WordPress powers about 20% of all the websites on the internet.
However, those numbers don’t impress anyone who’s still looking to make the famous “one-click install” worth it for themselves.
WordPress can be used for any type of website, and it’s really easy to use. That’s where the “easy” part ends.
Everything else with digital marketing takes super-human effort (if you thought it was easy, you are wrong). However, these free WordPress plugins really makes things easier for you. Read along:
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Yes, I know that you know about it. You just don’t use it as much, you don’t use it right, and you have no idea just how much value the free Yoast plugin already has in store for you.
This plugin is the most popular WordPress Plugin for search engine optimization (SEO). It’s easy to use and it will make your blog or website more visible on Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search.
More traffic = more money in your pocket.Use it the right way and you have almost instant traffic coming in. Set up the plugin the right way (such as meta tags for pages and posts and others) and you are good to go.
It’s easy to use (just focus on getting the SEO basics and readability right). Also, make use of the Schema tab (most people don’t).
While you are on the topic of SEO, remember that the Yoast SEO plugin won’t just help you make bank automatically.
You’ll need a solid content marketing strategy (which is a big ass name for something as simple as publishing velocity — the speed and frequency with which you publish content).
Pretty Links For WordPress
Are you into affiliate marketing? Do you contantly publish (across the web) in several formats, starting with the bred-and-butter blog posts? You’ll need Pretty links.
This WordPress plugin is easy to use (just install it and follow the installation instructions) and gives your links a bit of style.
Say goodbye to big, bad, and unwieldy affiliate links and use nice looking links such as yoursite.com/yourlink.
This also makes it easier for you to just “say it” when you do podcasts, YouTube videos, and teach online courses.
Affiliate is a huge, multi-billion dollar industry, in case I see you frowning your eyebrows. In some cases, it’s collectively larger than the startup ecosystem in a few countries.
JetFormBuilder by Crocoblock
JetFormBuilder by Crocoblock might be free. However, the way it’s built and the functionality it provides makes it worth paying for (but that’s optional for you).
With the JetForm Builder, you can create beautiful forms (of all kinds) and that includes forms with dates and time, forms with Stripe connectivity, multi-step forms, and so much more.
You get a lot more when you go premium but even the free version is worth a lot. Use your forms properly and it’s your ticket to making money.
Want your WordPress forms to get you results while they look awesome? Checkout this JetFormBuilder Plugin Review for WordPress review 👇
Normally, WordPress form plugins are just that: WordPress form plugins. They help you create forms. But most of us don’t use the full-potential of these plugins. At most, we have contact forms and a few other forms on our website.
This JetFormBuilder Plugin review, however, is going to change that. It’s going to make you think in a different direction. You are going to start dreaming up in the shower (or wherever it is that doubles up as a dream zone).
The JetFormBuilder Plugin — by the awesome folks at Crocoblock — is a WordPress form plugin that is designed for enhanced functionality, customization, and ease of use for WordPress users.
However, it’s no ordinary plugin: you can transform the way you do business with the JetFormBuilder plugin. In fact, The JetBuilder form plugin for WordPress is a game changer:
Watch this video by WPtuts and see it for yourself:
What can JetFormBuilder Plugin do?
A lot. More than that you’ll actually use it for.
For starters, with JetFormBuilder you can create forms in minutes without having to code anything.
Think of the kind of forms that can help your business: You care create all of the types of forms on WordPress, with absolute control on design and functionality (without code):
Registration forms
Contact forms
User-controlled updation of user profiles
Email subscription forms
Appointment booking forms
Complete application forms (for signing up job applicants, partners for your partner programs or affiliate programs, onboarding clients, and more),
Booking forms, and more.
All of the forms you’ll create will be gutenberg ready. You have more than 18+ field blocks to work with and the ability to add custom HTML and a free styling plugin as well.
Create forms on the front-end (what you see is what you get) as easy as you create an email (ok, not exactly! You get the point though).
The builder makes it easy to create beautiful looking contact forms or membership signup forms. You can also integrate the plugin with your favorite email marketing service provider like MailChimp, ConvertKit, and more so that leads are automatically added into your email list as they submit their information on your website.
Or, you could create forms to accept payments on WordPress, complete with an Addon for Stripe.
Alternatively, you can create Stripe links and use it in your forms as well.
This blog post will discuss how JetFormBuilder plugin beats other WordPress form plugins out of the park by being more functional and easier to use than any other form plugin on the market.
Let’s see how:
Go nuts with Form Field Types [Stretch your imagination]
With more than 18+ field types, you have your bases covered as to what forms you can create on your WordPress site.
Think about your business, end user experience you want to achieve, and the functionality you need. Chances are that you can do all of that, and more with just the JetFormBuilder plugin and nothing more.
Avoiding the obvious ones (such as text), let’s see how a few of the special field types work [+ Ideas for your Business]:
The Select and Radio Field Type
Using the JetFormBuilder’s “Select” Field type, create simple drop downs letting your visitors choose options. This, by itself, lends itself to several use cases.
Allow your visitors options to choose from (which gives you more information about them).
Match user selected options to use for “email marketing segmentation” by using tags, segmented groups, and other features that email service providers such as ConvertKit and Mailchimp [Shameless plug: Sign up for the free online course on MailChimp]. The JetForm builder plugin also has additional Addons for ConvertKit to help you save even more time with this.
You can also narrow down choices by using simple radio buttons to let your visitors provide you with information, such:
How would they like being contacted? Email or phone?
Topics they would be interested in? Paid ads or organic marketing?
Frequency of emails they’d like to receive? Weekly or Monthly?
Simple. Yet, amazing. Eh?
The Hidden field type
The JetFormBuilder plugin helps you do crazy magic behind the forms available for your visitors, potential customers, and others to see.
For instance, you could automatically calculate tax, shipping fees for a user while they fill out a form to select the services they need (as shown).
Also use the hidden field for:
Using this metadata for internal segmentation
Source and sort data (depending on form inputs) to your email marketing tools, CRM systems, and other tools in your marketing stack.
Collect additional data about your leads while you use forms on landing pages.
The “Calculated” Field Type
Here’s where the JetFormBuilder plugin gets really interesting. You can have your forms calculate numbers (most often, it’s the total cost that you’d be interested in) but you can stretch your imagination here.
Let users select a slew of services and service addons (each with varying prices) and the form calculates the amount for your users. Just like that.
See how that looks like:
Your potential customers can then proceed to make payments with PayPal or Stripe as well.
The Number, Date, and Time Fields
Using the JetFormBuilder plugin alone, you can have interactive forms that allow users to choose numbers (inventory?), dates and times (for appointments? Call Scheduling?) and submit that information to you.
Remember that you can change the styling of these numbers, data, and time field inputs (includes typography, colors, and more) and make the forms reflect your brand.
See how this works:
Forms with Media Inputs & WYSWYG
Who says WordPress forms have to be boring? You can have your users provide information to you in the form of media too: have users submit images, photos, screenshots (especially useful for customer support), and maybe even videos.
Use the media input field to:
Collect testimonials
Images of your customers actually using your products
Video feedback (or testimonials), and more.
All of this functionality with the simple WYSWYG editor: Just drag-and-drop elements or other field inputs to create your form.
Create Multi-step Forms (Headers, Form Break, & Group Break)
Did you know that using multi-step forms can help boost conversions?
Here’s a demo of how a multi-step form looks like, compared to a regular form.
With the JetFormBuilder Plugin, you can create multi-step forms for WordPress just as easily as you’d create regular forms.
Create multi-step forms as it were or by using the “form break” feature inside JetFormBuilder. You can also choose to use the “group break” feature to create sets of fields appropriate for “sections” inside a form.
Smart Forms & Smart Features With JetFormBuilder Plugin
By using smart features inside the JetFormBuilder, you can make your forms adapt to user inputs.
For instance, using conditional fields you can make certain form fields show up (or hide), appear (or disappear) depending on user inputs.
Alternatively, determine what actions happen after users submit forms by using the “conditional actions” feature.
Input Dynamic Value
The full list of use cases for dynamic value input is beyond the scope of this JetFormBuilder plugin review, but it’s interesting enough to note that you can boost the user experience multi-fold just by using the “Dynamic values” feature.
With the Dynamic values feature, some other fields in the form will be pre-filled (by automatic inputs from the database).
Let’s say an existing customer or an email subscriber is trying to fill up a form (say a WordPress form to sell your services), some of these form fields will automatically populate based on the user data already inside your database.
User-friendly (& Result-oriented) Forms for WordPress
Loaded with other features such as step indicators (something like a progress bar) and AJAX reload (Reload forms dynamically using AJAX), WordPress forms can not only be beautiful and functional but also result-oriented and fast.
Throw in other features (above) such as pre-filled values, placeholder text, page break, group break, multi-step forms, and dynamic values and you have magic on your hands.
Form Validation
For all the effort you take trying to build forms for WordPress, spam is a real problem. You need ways to battle it.
Thankfully, there’s form validation available with the JetFormBuilder plugin for WordPress.
Just by enabling form validation for your forms, ensure a better lead score, higher conversation rates, and high quality submissions for your WordPress forms.
See how form validation looks like:
Form Submit Actions [ Guided Post Form Submission Journeys]
What happens after your visitors, users, or customers submit a form? In most cases, for most WordPress, there’s just a bland message saying “thank you”. You can do more and actually control the entire journey from form submission to exactly what you want your users to do.
The use cases for form submission are many (agreed), but you can choose how it all works out.
Start with the frond-end form creation (with the JetFormBuilder) such as letting users fill up forms, add new information (which automatically creates content — such as adding or updating real estate listings).
Allow users to update their profiles, add new information to their profiles, or create new profiles altogether.
Redirect to other dedicated pages on your site (such as a dedicated thank you page purposefully built in a way that helps you get more results such as cross-selling, upselling, making one-time offers, or signing up for other products. You can also redirect to home pages, checkout pages, or other pages as well.
Automatically connect with third-party webhooks and automatically send lead information (or those who fill up forms for various use cases) to CRM systems, email service providers, and more. You can also use Zapier to connect with thousands of apps (if you need to).
Have users automatically subscribe to mailing lists (which you can also sort, tag and segment automatically) and connect with MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, ConvertKit, and more.
Accept donations or payments with PayPal after form submission.
Of course, you can do more (just think about what you need to achieve).
Go pro with Addons
You could do a lot of the above with the absolutely free version of the JetFormBuilder plugin.
Go pro and load up on several addons (will require a paid version of JetFormBuilder plugin for WordPress), and you can do even more.
Get access to more features such as:
Select autocomplete
Address autocomplete
Schedule forms
Limit form responses
Saving form progress
Connecting with HubSpot
Connecting with some other email service providers such as ConvertKit, MailPoet, MooSend, and MailerLite.
Integrating your forms with Stripe to accept payments.
Whether you choose the free JetForm builder plugin or the paid version, you always have access to support and help (not to mention helpful documentation, resources, and guides) to help.
What magic are you going to create with the JetFormBuilder for WordPress? Did I miss anything in this JetFormBuilder Plugin review?
Wondering how to create WordPress polls and surveys? Want to find out at least five use cases for polls and surveys to help grow your business? Read on đź’Ş
WordPress Polls are a great way to get your visitors engaged and feeling like they have some control over what happens on your blog.
Polls are the equivalent of a virtual vote. It’s a way for you to let your visitors and/or customers know that their opinions matter.
That leads us to two questions:
How to Create WordPress Polls?
How to use Surveys & Polls to Get Business Results
We’ll address both (since both of those questions need to be answered)
How to Create WordPress Polls [With WPForms]
The new WPForms Surveys and Polls Addon is a fantastic little addition by the team at WPForms. This makes it the best WordPress Surveys and Polls plugin in the market (as if all of the features and addons that WPForms already comes with wasn’t enough).
You can now use the WPForms surveys and Polls Addon to create surveys and launch polls on your WordPress website. Just like that.
Plus, there’s a lot more to it:
Turn Existing WordPress Forms Into Survey Forms
Instead of having to create brand new WordPress forms to create surveys and polls, you could just use the Smart Survey fields built right into the WPForms designer. With a click, turn any form into a survey form or a poll (or retroactively convert older forms into surveys)
Your form fields — including text field, drop downs, checkboxes, ratings, radio buttons, and also a new Likert Scale field (or Matrix questions) — turn into survey forms as shown below.
Let data shine through with Survey Reports
What’s the point of launching a survey or poll without a clear insight into the results?
With the WPForms Survey and Poll Addon, you get classy, beautiful, useful and visual reports providing you with real-time insights on your surveys and polls. See how that looks like below:
For polls on WordPress, make use of the real-time polls report (and each user can also see the results after they submit their response).
The best part about asking poll questions?
You can embed your polls into blog posts, pages, or other areas of your WordPress website (like a sidebar that never vanishes while your readers devour your blog posts).
Share & Export (Why Keep It To Yourself?)
Did you just launch a gigantic survey –spanning several months — for feedback on a new product idea? Did you want to validate some sort of a new MVP? You don’t have to keep the results to yourself.
Share or export your survey results as a PDF document or even a JPG with one click.
Use these results in your company presentations, pitch decks, online courses, or social media posts.
If you want to take this offline, WPForms surveys and Polls Addon also provides you with completely customizable print styles. Print your survey reports (including graphs and visualization styles) and go offline.
Personalize & Level Up with Powerful Survey Logic [Conditional Logic]
Ever took an online GMAT or SAT test? Noticed how the questions change based on your inputs?
While you don’t have to run tests on your WordPress site (We are just focusing on doing WordPress Surveys and WordPress polls after all), you can still do clever things with the powerful Survey logic (extended from WPForms Conditional Logic feature).
For instance, you can randomize the order of items in multiple-choice surveys or polls and eliminate choice bias from your surveys and polls.
Grab New Survey Templates, Polls Templates, & More
The new WPForms Surveys and Polls Addon also comes with brand new form templates for surveys and polls. No coding. No learning curve. No fuss.
Get to work quickly and launch a poll on your WordPress site or go nuts with a WordPress survey with two templates.
It’s never been easier to use surveys and polls on WordPress.
Talking about use cases, here’s how to effectively use Surveys and Polls On WordPress to get results for your business 👇
How to Use Surveys & Polls to Get Big results
How can you use polls to increase conversions? There are some obvious ways to use Surveys and polls to grow your business and there are some not-so-obvious ones.
The obvious one: Ask questions and get answers (the usual polls, surveys, market analysis, customer satisfaction scores, etc.)
Not so obvious ones? Read below
Here are a few ways that WordPress polls can help improve conversion rates:
Promote contests by running a poll for the best giveaway prize
Want to generate leads fast (like, real fast), launch a contest just by running a poll (for a set period of time) and choose a random winner from the poll submits.
Be sure to choose a giveaway that makes sense for your business and relates to your audience (No iPhones, iPads, and other tinkets please).
Why, you ask?
That’s because several people will take part just for the goodies and not because they care about what your business is about.
One poll. One contest. More leads than you can handle.
Image Courtesy: Wishpond
Ask For The Big Idea (blogs, PDFs, or even digital products).
You do know that you have incoming traffic, don’t you? People coming in and reading your blog posts all the time. Why not ask your regular visitors what they’d like from you?
You can either launch a poll (with a limited set of ideas for them to choose from) or a survey which can provide them with a lot more options.
Have them pick (or provide) an idea for your next blog post, a title for your upcoming eBook, or even ideas for improving your products (also applies to digital products, online courses, membership sites, and more).
Image Courtesy: Survicate
Collect data from Polls & Surveys. Make a Downloadable & Generate Leads
If you have thousands of visitors visiting your site, you have the equivalent of people packed into several hundred football stadiums. Think about that for a moment.
Using original data is a great way to stand out from your competition. It’s also a great way to generate leads by letting your visitors download this data in exchange for an email address.
Just use WordPress forms (made with WPForms) itself or use OptinMonster. Maybe even use landing page builders like Unbounce, LeadPages, and Instapage if you want to take the full sales funnel route.
The point is that you can do your research, collect data from real people visiting your site (data from polls and surveys), export it to a PDF document, and turn it into a lead magnet.
One of the most popular ways to use surveys is for customer satisfaction scores.
With conditional Logic, the Likert scale feature (or matrix questions) that already come with your WPForms Addon, you can easily launch customer satisfaction feedback forms, baked right into any form you want (but it’s advisable to create a new form for this).
Talking about social proof, you can not only collect testimonials from your existing customers but also use polls to help point point exactly what it was about your products, online courses, memberships, or services that they really love.
Use surveys for slightly longer responses or polls for shorter, guided responses. Since you are using WPForms for collecting testimonials, you can design the forms the way you want (and maybe even have people submit video testimonials).
Either way, you get real people (your customers) to give you the insights and testimonials that you can use everywhere (including your marketing copy, landing pages, ads, and more).
Image Courtesy: SurveyMonkey
Learning how to create WordPress Surveys and Polls is one thing; wondering what else you can use WPForms for? Here’s an ever-growing list:
Google is going to come up with its June 2021 update on Core Web Vitals and it’s going to impact everyone. It’s time for us to roll up our sleeves, Dig into these WordPress Speed Hacks, and do what we can to ensure that we don’t drop off into the depths of the pacific.
You might be thinking, “What do WordPress Speed hacks have to do with my site’s Web Vitals Score?”. Why should you even bother to make your Web Vitals Score go north?
The short answer: Everything (and there’s no TL; DR for this one). Ready? Let’s jump in.
Here are the details of the study, in a single infographic:
From the study above, it’s clear that:
Almost 84% of the URLs analyzed have a “poor” experience or need to “improve”.
Websites with good rates across all three parameters usually have better search rankings (already). This will be true even more so after the new Google update (June 2021).
Core Web Vitals & Why Should You Care?
Over the last few years, Google has been giving increasing importance to website speed as a ranking factor.
In fact, page load times are now more important in determining rankings than even content quality and engagement. So I put together this blog post on WordPress Speed Hacks That Make Your WordPress Site Vitals Score Great (for the impending update and beyond)
Page speed is one of the most important factors in determining how a site ranks on Google. Websites that load quickly and provide an instant browsing experience have better chances than slower sites to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is because users abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load. Period (and all of us suffer if there’s anything called “abandonment” on our websites).
But then, Google doesn’t want everyone on the planet to be a site performance guru. The search engine giant wants to simplify (or at least it thinks it will) what it means to score well when it comes to the Core Web Vitals.
Want to see your own Core Web Vitals scores? Get a free SEMrush account and see how you are doing with the Core Web Vitals
What is Core Web Vitals?
The latest set (so far) of Core Web Vitals focuses on three key areas:
loading,
interactivity, and
visual stability
If you are the nerdy type, here’s Google’s explanation on the Core Web Vitals [https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience]
The Core Web Vitals include loading, interactivity, and visual stability. Users can use the Core Web Vitals to evaluate a page’s experience by looking at three key areas of influence (above).
According to Luke Harsel of SEMrush, Google will specifically measure your site across three prime parameters:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — a metric that tracks loading speed.
First Input Delay (FID) — a metric that tracks the time it takes before someone interacts with the page.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — a metric that tracks visual stability on the page.
Note: this is on top of several other page ranking parameters such as being useful to users, good usability or UX/UI, helpful content — that won’t change.
Here’s a helpful visual on what the Core Web Vitals are (from SEMrush):
Want to find out where you stand? Get a free SEMrush account and see how you are doing with the Core Web Vitals.
Clearly, there are some critical things you’d need to worry about such as:
A solid base infrastructure for your website
Speed of website pages
The way your website is designed (and the content is displayed),
How your web servers handle page requests
The number of Javascripts, CSS files, and how they are managed.
How some elements on your website behave: such as ads, dynamically changing images, dynamically injected content, and web fonts.
Focusing on several other basics are a must. Consider spending time on crucial Google ranking factors (such as high-quality content, proper website structure, fast-loading websites, backlinks, and more).
WordPress Speed Hacks: Go Fast. Go Now
Having covered the basics, let’s see how to use speed hacks, a few tools — including MonsterInsights, Google Search Console, SEMRush, and others — to achieve a Core Web Vitals score you’d be proud of:
Maintain WordPress Website Health
The famous one-click install for WordPress is cool. It lets you go live with WordPress in less time than it takes for you to snap your finger. But the fun ends there.
To ensure that you meet the standards to rank well with SEO, your website health is critical (and you’ll be surprised just how many WordPress sites don’t meet these basic requirements. At the time of writing this, I struggle with this too).
Here’s what it means to keep your WordPress site in good health (all of these affecting your SEO ranking notwithstanding customer experience):
Update WordPress site & Minimize resource use
I can’t believe that this is 2021 and several thousands of website owners (be it solo entrepreneurs or entire businesses) *don’t* update their WordPress sites regularly. It takes a few minutes but it does so much for your website.
Please do this:
Update themes and plugins. If you use managed hosting providers, use the “staging” option provided for you when you do this.
Try to minimize the use of WordPress plugins. This isn’t rocket science: the more plugins you use, the more loaded your WordPress database becomes.
Where there’s a Javascript that can do the work of a plugin, use Javascript. Then, load the script by using the Google Tag manager (see below)
Maintain WordPress Site health
Look out for errors, warnings, and notices about various things you didn’t even know existed on Core web vitals, site performance, crawl issues, internal linking, markup, security (https…), and more.
Fix Broken Links In WordPress
Google hates broken links. Period. Some of these broken links happen because the sites you pointed to have all but vanished. Or, you could have several comments (including comment spam) that cause these broken links.
Remove Toxic Backlinks
Over a period of time, you’ll accrue backlinks from several domains. Most of them are healthy enough. Some aren’t. Those that aren’t are going to sink you into the pacific (fast).
Then, there are other issues related to your WordPress site such as redirects, blocked pages, and pages that have issues.
Get a free SEMrush account and see your site health status with a simple and comprehensive Site audit report. Besides, you can also check for backlink reports, manage your toxic backlinks, and more.
Speed Up Your Website: The Basics
There’s no denying the importance of fast-loading websites. Go to page speed insights tool from Google and see how your website is doing when it comes to page speed.
53% of visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And if there’s a 1-second delay in your page load time, you can see a reduction in conversions by 7%.
If you are using WordPress, consider starting from scratch (your basic settings, the site structure, how your permalinks are set up, and more). Read some of the best platforms optimized for WordPress your site should be living on, and more.
Want to stay on top of how well your website is doing when it comes to page speed? Download the MonsterInsights plugin and it always works to keep the information you need, inside the WordPress dashboard as shown with MonsterInsights site speed report.
After you download MonsterInsights plugin, connect with Google Analytics, and then go to Insights » Reports » Site Speed
Not only that, you’ll also get specific instructions on how to improve various aspects of your website to help your pages load faster (such as using web-optimized images, remove unused CSS and Javascript, and more. See how the report looks like:
Here’s a breakdown of what those metrics mean:
Server Response Time – It is time for the server to respond to a data request and load the website.
First Contentful Paint – This metric measures the loading time of the visual elements on your website, like images, fonts, and theme.
Time to Interactive – The time difference between the website first starts to load and when it’s no longer loading for the user.
Total Blocking Time – You can use this to measure the time it takes until people can interact with your website.
Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Further, consider (I stand corrected: Be sure to…) using a CDN to speed up your website and load your site to the entire world. Fast.
Accordingly, on the subject of speed (just in case you are still not using managed WordPress hosting, Aazim from MonsterInsights recommends using WP Rocket as it’s user-friendly, allows you to cache your website with a single click instantly, and offers other features to speed up a WordPress website.
Further recommendations include the free WP Super Cache plugin a try. You may also want to check out this article to find the best WordPress caching plugins.
Most people use slow themes. It’s a fact. I believe that small business owners (especially) just go by looks and functions and don’t care much about WordPress themes optimized for speed, light-weight code, and amazing functionality (not-to-mention) looks.
Slow themes, full of bloated code are a bottleneck for your growth as well.
Here are some blog posts to help you choose the best WordPress themes for your business (regardless of any business you run)
Hence, don’t skimp on WordPress themes. They are the single biggest reason you have a slow loading WordPress site.
Use Fonts Judiciously & Boost WordPress Speed
Don’t go overboard with your fonts. Yes, Typography is important but “looking pretty” isn’t as important than “getting results” for your business.
Also, playing with Typefaces and fonts is for graphic designers. It’s not for you and me.
Google recommends using font-display to control how your fonts are downloaded and displayed to your visitors (complete with options such as auto, block, swap, fallback, and others). Yes, it gets a little technical here somewhat (and I am still struggling with this one).
Here’s a sample code on how to control fonts on your site using font-display
Furthermore, the team at MonsterInsights recommends this:
…Using too many custom fonts can slow down your website. That’s why we recommend picking a single font for your website and use it throughout your design. This will reduce the time it takes to load each custom font and provide a fast user experience.
What are you going to do about it?
Load Scripts On Google Tag Manager (and not on your site)
By default, most websites have all their Javascripts and tags loaded on the site directly (whether you use WordPress or anything else).
This slows down your website to a large extent. It’s highly recommended that you use the Google Tag Manager to load all your scripts (designated with appropriate names so you know what you are adding to your GTM Workspace).
Here’s how I uploaded all my scripts and tags to the Google Tag Manager (to avoid these Javascript codes slowing my website down)
The more Javascript codes you use, the slower your site will load. Even if you are using WordPress and Google Tag Manager, there’s no excuse to not doing this.
Watch the video below to learn how to add scripts to your Google Tag Manager:
Reduce Initial Server Response Time ( TTFB)
If you have a managed WordPress host like Kinsta, FlyWheel, or WPEngine most of this work is done for you from their end. So, you’d be doing relatively better with these hosts above than you would if you were using cheap web hosting providers.
This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you should be doing to help reduce your Initial Server Response time (TTFB) by doing a few things.
Themes, plugins, and server specifications all contribute to server response time. Consider finding a more optimized theme, carefully selecting an optimization plugin, and/or upgrading your server.
Be sure to use a WordPress plugin to optimize your database (old comments, comment spam, improperly formatted tables, tags, categories, posts, images, all have the potential to slow down your website).
No, you don’t have to know what these are (although trying to understand helps).
First, you could do it manually.
Second, you could just let a WordPress plugin handle this for you. I personally use Hummingbird by WPMUDEV to help me manage all this other technical mumbo-jumbo that I can’t seem to understand even if I pretend to have 20% cerebral capacity.
Here’s how Hummingbird helps you manage unused CSS, Javascripts, Page Caching, and more:
While we are at it, Hummbingbird also lets you run tests on your WordPress website performance, enable GZIP compression, help lazy load images, help you with page caching, allow you to optimize your assets, and more.
90% of all the data the brain transmits is visual.
The human brain processes one image in the same amount of time it would take to read 1000 words. (Yes, turns out the old adage is indeed rooted in scientific fact.)
The recall value of visual content even after three days is 65%, whereas the recall value for written text is merely 10%.
Images are resource-heavy. They take up space on the viewports (on pages, posts, and the like). But they are also visual (which helps with several things, out of the scope of this post).
Since you can’t avoid using images, you’d have to find a way to balance between usage and optimal size for images.
Best Image Size for SEO
Kamal recommends images of sizes 1080 X 1080 pixels and 1500 X 2500 pixels. Whatever you do, don’t cross 1200 pixels (from what I hear from various webinars and videos).
How to Save Images (with ALT tags)
Kamaljeet also recommends saving images the smart way.
Use descriptive and keyword optimzied names such as “WordPress-speed-hacks” and “How-to Make-a Million-dollars”
All of this helps with ranking your site well. This is notswithstanding the extra boost you get when your images also show up in “Image search” and others.
How to Compress Images (best done automatically)
Even if you do get the sizes right and follow through those pixels like it’s religion, there’s the image size to contend with. I’ve had clients who insist on using TIFF (read: humongous size but great quality). Most of us use PNG, don’t we?
Stick with PNG if you have to. Or go for JPEG (lower quality but also small sizes).
Either way, find a way to compress your images. Aazim of MonsterInsight recommends using TinyPNG to compress images before uploading them to your site.
Additionally, if you want to automate this process slightly, use a plugin such as WP Smush by WPMUDEV again. This is what I use here, for fetchprofits since I go heavy on blogging (at least 3 times a week and I use lots of images).
Manage Videos Properly
If you plan to use videos on your blog posts and elsewhere on your WordPress site, I’d highly recommend you do.
However, uploading videos directly to your media library is a disaster waiting to happen (you don’t want to do that).
Instead, use the Gutenberg block for videos and choose YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia to use those links to directly embed videos to your WordPress. This way, high-quality videos won’t hog your previous hosting bandwidth and resources.
Optimize Your Video For SEO
Basics still remain intact (even if it’s video). Add titles, meta descriptions, and other information that you need to.
If you are using Yoast SEO plugin (since we are talking WordPress), Yoast has a separate plugin for Video SEO. Even if you don’t plan to use it, Yoast recommends using Video Schema for each of your videos.
Using the Video SEO plugin helps ensure proper video sizes, faster loading times, automatic XML video sitemap, and also takes advantage of the video OpenGraph tags.
What are you going to do to prepare for Core Web Vitals? Which of these WordPress speed hacks are you going to implement? How far will you go to help speed up your WordPress website?
One of the most important aspects of any business is payment. How will customers pay you? You have to be able to accept their payments in order for them to do business with you. Learn how to create payment forms for authorize.net and WPForms below.
When it comes to accepting payments, there are a ton of options out there. The obvious big guns are Stripe and Paypal.
However, not everyone is able to use Stripe and Paypal (I know how long I had to wait for Stripe, and it’s not available to me officially).
In case you can’t use Stripe or if PayPal isn’t available in your country, you can use Authorize.net. All you need is an Authorize.net account and a WPForms account.
Authorize.net can help your business grow by enabling you to take credit cards and checks online and offline which increases your conversion rates, sales, and customer satisfaction.
Authorize.net boasts of more than 430,000+ merchants and you are in good hands.
This post walks through how easy it is to get started with Authorize.net so that you too can start receiving more payments from your customers.
With WPForms Authorize.Net Addon (available for the WPforms Elite License), you can easily create payment forms on WordPress that’ll help you accept payments from within your WordPress site itself. No code needed. No help required.
While using authorize.net is incredibly easy (along with advanced fraud detection features), with WPForms, your WordPress forms are mobile-friendly, easy-to-create (and manage), and you can also use conditional logic to do some very smart things with your WordPress forms.
You can also sell products and/or services with one-time or recurring payments (if you want to).
How cool is that, eh?
Here are the details on how to use Authorize.net with WordPress, thanks to the simplicity and power of WPForms
How to Connect Authorize.net To WordPress (& WPForms)
I assume that you already have an active Authorize.net account that you can use and sync with WPForms [Install and activate, if you haven’t done so].
Once you have WPForms installed, you’ll be able to navigate to “Addons” and activate the Authorize.net Addon inside WPForms.
If you already have an active Authorize.net, you’ll have to go through a one-time process to connect Authorize.net to WPforms.
How to Add Authorize.net as Payment Provider To Your WPForms
Once the Authorize.Net addon is active on your site, you’ll need to open WPForms » Settings in the left menu of your WordPress site. From there, click on the Payments tab.
Doing so will allow you to access this feature in the side menu.
Change the currency from the Currency dropdown before proceeding (if you’d like to change the currency).
For Authorize.net to work with WPforms, you’ll need the following details as form fields in your form:
Step 1: Create a new form or choose an existing one.
Step 2: Create at least four fields in your form:
A Name field
An Email field
An items field (Single Item, Multiple Items, Checkbox Items, or Dropdown Items)
An Authorize.Net field (which collects credit card details)
If you’d like to set up recurring payments with Authorize.net and WPForms, do this:
Note: Subscriptions will take a payment right away and then according to the schedule you specify in the “plans” you’ll create.
To create subscriptions, you’ll need to create the following:
Plan Name: Also appears in your customers’ credit card statement. This defaults to the name of the form if you leave it empty.
Recurring Period: The period in which future payments are processed.
Customer Email: Connects and syncs with the Email field from your form that this subscription relates to.
Customer Name: The name of your customer.
How to Add Conditional Logic to WPForms
You could learn about how to create payment forms for Authorize.net all you want, but it’s at conditional logic that WPForms totally blows your mind. You can take that humble WordPress form and turn it into a smart little thing that allows you (and your customers a lot more flexibility).
Using conditional logic, you can do pretty much a lot of smart things (depending on what your forms do). Since we are on the topic of payments here (and related to Authorize.net), let’s have conditional logic play a part in how your customers choose to pay you (for your products or services).
Use case: Allow your customers a choice as to whether they should pay you a one-time fee or a subscription-fee.
Step 1:
Create a drop-down or multiple-choice field in your form. Add relevant labels, descriptions, and provide other inputs (example shown below).
Step 2:
Go to Authorize.net settings, payment plans, and set recurring method to monthly payments
Step 3:
In your payments form, at the bottom, check the box labeled Enable conditional logic.
Step 4:
Set up conditional logic (depending on your form fields). Here’s an example WPForms provides:
Process payment as recurring if Would you like us to automatically renew your plan? is Yes, please auto-renew my plan each month..
There are thousands of WordPress themes. But you are busy, and looking for fast WordPress themes isn’t exactly like browsing an art gallery (although that sounds nice!).
The WordPress theme universe is big. You, however, have no time. With the Core Web Vitals Google Update coming through (In June 2021), you better be prepared.
More than 14.7% of all top websites are on WordPress, and WordPress commands a massive 60% share in the CMS market, according to Maddy Osman of Kinsta.
There are good reasons for that: The ease of use, the ever-expansive ecosystem of themes and plugins, instant help available, and new WordPress themes just keep popping up (it’s so hard to keep track that most people even give up looking).
Super note: Don’t get too swayed by “visually stunning WordPress themes”, the prettiness of a site, and just how “oo haa” it looks. In the end, design is good only as far as it gets you results. Pretty-looking websites don’t always make you money.
WordPress is a great platform that can help you create an amazing site with ease. With the right theme, it’s possible to have a visually stunning design that also loads quickly. In this article, we’ll go over 10 of the best themes for WordPress that are not only beautiful but also super fast!
Another boring Note: With each of these WordPress themes, you make it your own. Add your own logo, swap out the colors to match your brand colors, use your style guide for fonts, and use your own images.
Because Matteo Duo already tested 11 Fastest WordPress themes in 2021 (with testing), I don’t have to repeat myself. I’ll just list my favorites here.I am not interested in writing a massive list like 78+ Visually stunning WordPress themes.
For one, too many options will freeze you. Second, not all WordPress themes are fast (there are just a few of those insanely fast WordPress themes that you should care about).
So, here goes:
GeneratePress
The GeneratePress theme is one of the best-looking drag and drop themes I have ever seen. It’s also lightning-fast, which is a must now that Page speed is a critical factor to determine whether or not your website will even rank in the first place.
With a maniacal focus on speed, stability, and accessibility, GeneratePress is a well-thought out WordPress starter theme that can be installed as the base for any site.
Use the GeneratePress site library and you only have more choices (and an instant kickstart for your WordPress business website). Would you like to scratch the power of Gutenberg blocks and build your website instead? Use the GenerateBlocks plugin and swing for the fences.
As if all this wasn’t already enough to make it worth your consideration, GeneratePress is free to use to start with. Go premium if you need full access to the site library, be able to use GeneratePress on more websites, and get lifetime updates with premium support.
Hello Theme By Elementor
Hello Theme By Elementor is a WordPress theme that has been in the wild for just over six months. It’s secured about 12,000 downloads and counting — which is no small feat considering its three-month lead time on release date compared to other themes we’re featuring today.
Hello Theme by Elementor is fast, lightweight, and the theme supports RTL (Use it with any translation plugin, and easily create multilingual and RTL sites). Hello theme by Elementor is free and open-source(… was built for use with Elementor and Elementor Pro).
Hello theme outperforms several other themes in the market (read: beats almost every other theme you’d be considering), is SEO-friendly, and loads blazing fast.
Note: Hello Theme was practically the fastest theme on Matteo’s tests.
Astra Theme
The Astra theme has a customizable, fast, and beautiful design that is great for personal blogs, business websites, and even full-blown LMS-driven online course websites (if you want to take that route).
You can also customize the color scheme to match your branding, which makes it perfect for any website you’d want to build. The sleek layout of this theme supports images beautifully without cluttering up your content.
Make use of Astra’s starter site templates and kickstart your WordPress website design (and hopefully finish in a day) so that you can focus on what’s even more than WordPress design: Digital marketing for your website.
As with most themes on this list, you can customize your layout options, tweak the headers, change colors or typography, and more.
Most importantly, more than 6000+ Astra users swear by its speed, dependability, and support.
Talking about Astra (and because I am a huge fan of learning), there’s also the Skilljet Academy that you have access to when you join the club.
Blocksy By CreativeThemes
Blocksy is a stunning and speedy WordPress theme that offers you the ability to get your blog set up in minutes.
With Blocksy, it’s easy to create an engaging site with plenty of content using its drag-and-drop Page Builder blocks and live preview options. You also get a few starter sites to take off with. This theme also features one-click demo import, RTL support, fast speeds, and more.
Blocksy is eCommerce ready, allows code splitting, and Gutenberg-block ready.
Kadence
I’ve been hearing a lot about Kadence themes (but I’ve never used them for myself or for clients).
Kadence comes with the promise of top-notch support, easy import-ready themes, powerful plugins (such as Kadence Blocks, Kadence Woo Extras, Kadence AMP, and more).
Kadence has also announced Kadence Cloud which provides you with your very own personal website library (among other features).
Customify
Customify by PressMaximum was one of the fastest themes in Kinsta’s test (mentioned above). While it’s nowhere as feature-packed as some of the themes on this list, it should be on top of your consideration if you have the “need for speed”. Talking about features, it does come with everything you might need though.
Customify (and the pro version) give you opportunities to use Blog Pro (use your blog posts in many different layouts), deploy sticky headers, make changes to the footer, use mega menus, and even multiple headers (like different headers for different pages).
Which of these is your pick for the most visually stunning (but also insanely fast) WordPress themes?
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