Are you wondering what’s the different between 302 vs 301 redirects?
Redirects are important for providing a great user experience and helping search engines better understand your site. 302 and 301 are types of redirects you can use for different situations.
In this article, we will compare 302 redirect vs 301 redirect. We’ll also show the best practices when using redirects in WordPress.
302 Redirect vs 301 Redirect – What’s the Difference?
Redirection in WordPress allows you to send users and search engine crawlers to a different URL than the one they clicked on.
You’d need to set up redirects if you delete a page on your WordPress site, move to a new domain, conduct A/B experiments, and more.
Without redirects, users would not be able to see the content they requested. Instead, they’ll see a 404 error page, which is bad for your site’s user experience and search engine rankings.
When it comes to setting up redirects, you’ll come across two most common types: 301 and 302 redirects. Let’s look at each one of them and see what’s the difference.
What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. If your website or web page has been moved permanently to a new location, then you can use 301 redirects to point users in the right direction.
For example, when a visitor types your site’s address or clicks on a link, the 301 redirect will automatically change the requested address to the new address.
What is a 302 Redirect?
A 302 redirect also helps point users and search engines in the right direction, but temporarily.
Unlike 301, which is a permanent redirect, 302 redirects are temporary. You can move your website traffic to a new location for a limited amount of time and then go back to the original URL whenever you want.
When Should You Use 301 and 302 Redirects?
Now that you know the main difference between the two types of redirections, you may be wondering when is the best time to use 301 and 302 redirects.
Under certain conditions and the goal you’re trying to achieve, it makes sense to use 301 redirects. While in other situations, it is better to use 302 redirects.
When to Use a 301 Redirect?
Since 301 redirects are permanent, here’s when to use them:
On the other hand, if you don’t want to point your audience to a new page or another location permanently, then it’s better to use 302 redirects. Here are some situations where using 302 redirection makes sense:
Conducting A/B tests for designs, layout, and features of a new website or page
Temporarily redirecting users to a sales page or promotional offer
Send users to the correct version of your website based on their language or location preference
Collect user feedback about a new product or service without impacting your current SEO rankings
Impact of 301 Redirects vs 302 Redirects on SEO
When it comes to using 301 or 302 redirects, you have to consider the impact it will have on your site’s WordPress SEO (search engine optimization).
Search engines work by crawling your website pages using bots and indexing them on the search results. These search engine bots follow links to discover new content and find different pages on your site.
Using the right type of redirection is important if you want to your blog posts to be easily uncovered by search engine crawlers and continue to rank higher on search results.
With 301 redirects, Google and other search engines will know that you’ve moved a site or web page permanently. This way, it will fully pass the link equity or link juice to the new URL. Link equity is like a vote of confidence from other sites that your page is valuable and worth promoting.
On the other hand, if you’re performing a temporary change and don’t want any impact on your original page’s SEO rankings, then it’s better to use 302 redirects. It doesn’t pass the link juice fully and tells search engines that the change is temporary.
How to Set Up 301 and 302 Redirects in WordPress
The easiest way of setting up 301 or 302 redirects on your site is by using a WordPress redirect plugin.
For instance, you can use All in One SEO (AIOSEO) for configuring redirects. It is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and offers a powerful redirection manager tool.
Do note that you’ll need the AIOSEO Pro version to use the redirection manager. There is also an AIOSEO Lite version you can use to get started for free.
First, you’ll need to install and activate the AIOSEO plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you’ll see a welcome screen and the setup wizard. Simply click the ‘Let’s Get Started button’ and follow the onscreen instructions to configure the plugin.
Next, you’ll need to go to All in One SEO » Redirects from the WordPress admin area and click the ‘Activate Redirects’ button.
Once the Redirection Manager tool is active, you can go to the ‘Redirects’ tab at the top.
From here, you can enter the link that you’d like to redirect in the ‘Source URL’ field. Next, enter the new location for the link under the ‘Target URL’ field.
After that, you can click the ‘Redirect Type’ dropdown menu and select 301 or 302 redirection.
Once that’s done, simply click the ‘Add Redirect’ button. You can repeat this step and add as many redirects as you want.
If you scroll down, then AIOSEO will show you a log of redirects you’ve created for your website.
Besides that, AIOSEO also lets you perform full site redirects without any technical knowledge or editing code.
Best Practices for Implementing 302 and 301 Redirects
Setting up redirection on your WordPress website can be complicated. To help you out, here are some best practices to follow.
1. Testing Redirects to Ensure They’re Working
After you’ve set up 301 or 302 redirects, it is better to test each link multiple times.
This is to ensure that the 301 and 302 redirection is working properly. If something goes wrong, then it will be bad for your site’s user experience and SEO rankings.
A simple way to check is by visiting your site in incognito mode and opening the link that you redirected. If it opens the new location, then it means your redirects are working fine.
There are also free tools available on the internet that will check redirection for you. Or you can use the AIOSEO plugin, which shows logs of your redirects inside your WordPress dashboard.
2. Monitoring Redirects for Broken Links
Next, you should also set up tracking for broken links after adding 301 and 302 redirects to your website.
If you moved a web page to another location or send users to a new page temporarily and the redirection didn’t work properly, then it will result in a broken link. As a result, users will see a 404 error page on your website.
Tracking these broken links after 301 and 302 redirection will help you fix them quickly, provide a better user experience, and avoid any impact on your keyword rankings.
The best way to track broken links is by using the AIOSEO plugin. You can enable the ‘404 Logs’ to start monitoring for 404 error pages.
Do note that initially, you won’t see any data because it will only start recording broken links after you enable the setting.
Once the plugin starts gathering information, you can view broken links on your site under the 404 Logs tab.
To quickly fix 404 error pages, you can click the ‘Add Redirect’ option and set up 301 or 302 redirections.
PRO TIP: If you want continuous updates on broken links that aren’t just 404 errors, check out our free Broken Link Checker plugin.
3. Avoid Creating Redirection Chains and Loops
A redirection chain is when you have multiple redirects between the source URL and the target URL. Google officially follows up to 10 hops in a redirection chain. If there are more than 10 redirects, then it could show a redirect error in the Google Search Console.
That’s why it is a best practice to avoid redirection chains and point directly to the new location of a website or page. This is especially important when setting up permanent 301 redirects. Having too many 301 redirects can cause errors and lead to poor user experience.
Besides that, you should also try to avoid redirection loops. It occurs when the URLs in a chain redirect back to itself and creates an infinite loop.
As a result, users and search engines won’t see the intended page and instead view the original page. This could also result in a ‘redirected you too many times’ error.
One way of fixing it is to remove all redirects in the chain and try redirecting to the final destination.
Another best practice for using 301 and 302 redirects is to avoid duplicate content if your site has multiple subdomains.
For example, if your site’s URL has HTTP and HTTPS, www and non-www, capitalized and lower-case URLs, trailing slashes (/), and more.
Although these subdomains point to the same web address, search engines will view them as separate sites. As a result, it could lead to duplicate content issues. To fix this, you can simply redirect all subdomains to a single website URL.
If you are migrating sites and domains, also, you might use a 302 redirect to show Google and other search engines that you’re moving, and the content won’t be duplicated forever.
You will then have to create 301 redirects to tell search engines which is the preferred version of the content you want them to index.
Additional Resources
Here are some more guides and reading material you can go through:
Do you want to prevent WordPress SQL injection attacks?
SQL injection is a security vulnerability that hackers can use to attack your website database. Once they do that, an attacker can read your sensitive data, modify it, and take control of your entire database.
In this article, we will share some actionable tips to prevent SQL injection attacks in WordPress, step by step.
Why Prevent WordPress SQL Injection Attacks?
SQL stands for Structured Query Language, which is a programming language that communicates with your WordPress site’s database. Without this feature, your site cannot generate any dynamic content.
However, unauthorized user input, outdated software, or revealing sensitive information can cause security vulnerability and make it easy for hackers to perform SQL injection attacks.
This attack targets your database server and adds malicious code or statements to your SQL. Upon doing that, hackers can use sensitive information stored in your database like user data for identity theft, account takeover, financial fraud, and more.
They can also change database entries or account permission and perform DDOS attacks, making it difficult for actual users to visit your website.
This can damage customer trust, impact user experience negatively, and decrease your website traffic which will be bad for your small business growth.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some actionable tips that can prevent SQL injection attacks in WordPress.
Note: Before you make any changes to your database for preventive measures, we recommend creating a backup for it. This way, if anything goes wrong, you can use the backup to fix it. For details, see our tutorial on how to make a WordPress database backup manually.
1. Perform Site Updates Regularly And Use a Firewall
An effective way to prevent SQL injection attacks is to regularly update your WordPress site to the latest version. These updates often patch up security vulnerabilities, including database software issues, making it difficult for hackers to attack your site.
If you are using an outdated version of WordPress, then we recommend enabling automatic updates for the latest version by visiting the Dashboard » Updates page.
Here, simply click the ‘Enable automatic updates for all new versions of WordPress’ link. Now all the major updates will be installed on your site upon release.
Once you have done that, you can also add a firewall for additional security. This feature acts as a shield between your site and incoming traffic and blocks common security threats, including SQL attacks, before they reach your website.
For this function, we recommend Sucuri, which is the best WordPress firewall software on the market. It offers an application level firewall, brute force prevention, as well as malware and blacklist removal services, making it a great choice.
By default, WordPress displays the current version number of the software you use on your website. For instance, if you are using WordPress 6.4, then this version will be displayed on your site for tracking.
However, the public visibility of your version number can cause security threats and make it easier for hackers to perform WordPress SQL injection attacks.
This is because each version of WordPress has its own unique vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit after discovering your version. This will allow them to add malicious code snippets to your site through vulnerable input fields.
You can easily remove the version number from your site by adding the following code snippet to your functions.php file.
Once you do that, hackers won’t be able to find your WordPress version number through automatic scanners or any other way.
Note: Keep in mind that a minor error while adding code can make your website inaccessible. That is why we recommend WPCode. It is the best code snippets plugin that makes adding custom code to your site super safe and easy.
By default, WordPress adds the prefix wp_ to all your database files which makes it easy for hackers to plan an attack by targeting the prefix.
The easiest way to prevent SQL injection attacks is to change the default database prefix with something unique that hackers won’t be able to guess.
You can easily do this by connecting your website using FTP. After that, open the wp-config.php file and find the change the $table_prefix line. Then, you can change it from simply the default wp_ to something else like this: wp_a123456_.
$table_prefix = 'wp_a123456_';
Next, you must visit the cPanel of your web hosting account. For this tutorial, we will be using Bluehost, however, your cPanel may look a bit different depending on your web hosting company.
Here, switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab and click the ‘Manage’ button next to the ‘PHPMyAdmin’ section.
This will open a new page where you must select your database name from the left column and switch to the ‘SQL’ tab from the top.
After that, you can add the following SQL query into the text box.
Just keep in mind to change the database prefix to the one that you picked when editing the wp-config.php file.
RENAME table `wp_comments` TO `wp_a123456_comments`;
RENAME table `wp_links` TO `wp_a123456_links`;
RENAME table `wp_options` TO `wp_a123456_options`;
RENAME table `wp_postmeta` TO `wp_a123456_postmeta`;
RENAME table `wp_RENAME table `wp_commentmeta` TO `wp_a123456_commentmeta`;
posts` TO `wp_a123456_posts`;
RENAME table `wp_terms` TO `wp_a123456_terms`;
RENAME table `wp_termmeta` TO `wp_a123456_termmeta`;
RENAME table `wp_term_relationships` TO `wp_a123456_term_relationships`;
RENAME table `wp_term_taxonomy` TO `wp_a123456_term_taxonomy`;
RENAME table `wp_usermeta` TO `wp_a123456_usermeta`;
RENAME table `wp_users` TO `wp_a123456_users`;
Hackers usually inject SQL attacks on your website using fields that are used for entering user data like comment sections or form fields in contact forms.
That is why it is important to validate all the data that is being submitted on your WordPress blog. This means that user data won’t be submitted on your site if it does not follow a specific format.
For instance, a user won’t be able to submit their form if the email address field does not have the ‘@’ symbol. By adding this validation to most of your form fields, you can prevent SQL injection attacks.
To do this, you will need Formidable Forms, which is an advanced form builder plugin. It comes with an ‘Input Mask Format’ option where you can add the format that users must follow to submit the form field data.
You can add a specific format for phone numbers or single text fields.
If you do not want to validate your form fields, then we recommend WPForms because it is the best contact form plugin that comes with complete spam protection and Google reCAPTCHA support.
You can also add dropdown menus and checkboxes in your forms with it. This will make it difficult for hackers to add malicious data.
Another tip to prevent WordPress SQL injection attacks is to limit user access to your website.
For instance, if you have a multi-author blog, then you will have various authors along with subscribers and administrators. In that case, you can improve site security by limiting the full admin access to the administrator only.
You can restrict all the other user roles to specific functions that they will require to perform their job. This will reduce user access to your database and prevent SQL injection attacks.
Sometimes your users may come across a database error on your website, which can display important information about your database, making it vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.
In that case, we recommend creating a custom database error message that will be displayed to users when they come across this common error. To do this, you will need to copy and paste the following content into a notepad app and save the file as ‘db-error.php’.
<?php // custom WordPress database error page
header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: 600'); // 1 hour = 3600 seconds
// If you wish to email yourself upon an error
// mail("your@email.com", "Database Error", "There is a problem with the database!", "From: Db Error Watching");
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>Database Error</title>
<style>
body { padding: 20px; background: red; color: white; font-size: 60px; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
You got problems.
</body>
Now when users come across a database error on your website, they will just see an error message informing them about the issue without revealing any sensitive information.
Plus, the “Database Error” title will be displayed in the tab of the web browser.
To prevent SQL injection attacks, you should also try to remove all the database functionality and files that you do not need on your website.
For instance, you can delete unnecessary tables, trash, or unapproved comments that can make your database susceptible to hackers.
To remove unnecessary database functionality, we recommend WP-Optimize. It is an amazing plugin that removes unnecessary tables, post revisions, drafts, trashed comments, deleted posts, pingbacks, post metadata, and so much more.
It removes all the files that you do not need and optimizes your database to become more secure and faster. For details, see our beginner’s guide on how to optimize your WordPress database.
Bonus: Use WPBeginner Pro Services to Create a Secure Site
Once you have taken all the preventive measures against SQL injection attacks, you can also opt for WPBeginner Pro Services.
We can help you identify and fix any other security vulnerabilities that you do not know about. Plus, if you have already faced an SQL injection attack, then our experts can help you contain the damage and recover your systems.
You can also hire us to improve your site’s speed optimization, design, SEO, or even completely rebuild your existing WordPress site, whether it’s been hacked or not.
Are you struggling with WordPress local SEO and getting your site noticed in local searches?
SEO can be tricky, and local SEO has its own set of challenges. But here’s the good news: we’ve been helping small business owners win at SEO for years. We know what it takes to rank in the search results and get more traffic to your website.
Local SEO is more than just using the right keywords. It’s about attracting potential customers who live right around the corner.
In this article, we will show you the ultimate WordPress local SEO guide to get your website noticed by your local customers.
For example, if you run a pizza place in your area, then local SEO can make your business appear at the top of relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search engines use algorithms to understand a user’s location and offer relevant local search results. They look at the person’s IP address, the search query, and business listings to associate businesses with specific locations.
With this information, search engines can then show results that are most relevant to the person’s location and needs.
Optimizing your online presence for local searches can help you drive more organic traffic and attract potential customers in your area. This is why local SEO is an important digital marketing strategy for small businesses.
What Are Local SEO Ranking Factors?
Local SEO ranking factors are what search engines look at when they are deciding which local businesses should appear at the top of search results.
Here are some key factors that influence local rankings:
Google Business listing – This free Google tool allows businesses to manage their online presence across Search and Maps. Having your company listed here will make it easier for users to find you.
Reviews – Comments from customers are like social proof. They can influence local search rankings because they show potential buyers that other people have had a good experience with your business.
NAP consistency – Short for Name, Address, and Phone number, it’s important that these details are consistent across all your online platforms to avoid confusion.
Proximity to the searcher – This refers to how close your business is to the person doing the search. Search engines often rank businesses closer to the searcher.
Other standard search ranking factors, such as website performance, high-quality content, and user experience, can also affect where your web pages rank on search engine results pages.
Now, let’s look at some of the best WordPress SEO practices to rank for local searches. You can use the quick links below to navigate through our tutorial:
A Google Business Profile, also known as Google My Business, is a free and powerful tool that can help your business appear in local organic searches.
It acts like a digital storefront that appears on Google Maps and Search results when people look for businesses like yours in their area.
Here’s an example:
By claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile, you can provide potential customers with key information about your business, like your address, phone number, WordPress website, and opening hours.
To create a Google Business profile, head over to https://www.google.com/business/ and click ‘Manage now.’ Then, sign in with your Google account.
Once signed in, you can start by entering your business name. Google will then search for existing listings.
If yours doesn’t appear, then you can select ‘Create a business with this name’ to continue.
The next step is to choose one of these business types: online retail, local store, or service business. The onboarding steps for each business type may look a bit different from one another.
Once you have made your choice, click ‘Next’.
If you picked ‘online retail’ in the previous step, then you will now enter the web address of your online store.
You can skip this step if you have not made an eCommerce site yet.
Now, it’s time to choose a business category. Simply type in what type of product or service you offer in the field, and some options will start appearing.
Then, click ‘Next’.
At this stage, you can enter your business address.
To complete this step, fill out your country/region, street address, city, state/province, and zip code. Then, hit the ‘Next’ button.
Based on the address you enter, Google may suggest some business listings that are already in their directory but have yet to be claimed.
If you don’t see any listings related to your business, select ‘None of these’ and continue to the next step.
Now, a map will appear. Here, you will have to drag the pin onto your business location. This will help users find your business with Google Maps.
Once done, click ‘Next.’
The next step is to enter your contact phone number.
If you don’t have one yet, then just skip this step. You can also read our expert pick of the best business phone services if you need some recommendations.
You have now successfully created a business listing on Google.
To go ahead with updating your business details, click ‘Continue’ on the screen below.
First, you must verify that you actually own and manage the business. Google automatically determines the verification method based on the business information you’ve provided so far.
If you want to verify your business at another time, just click ‘Verify Later.’
Now, depending on your business type and category, you will have to enter additional information in the next onboarding steps.
For example, if you run a restaurant, then you will have to specify your business hours and dining modes and add photos of your establishment.
Once you have completed all that information, you will see an option to claim a $500 Google Ads credit. With this, you can advertise your business so that it appears at the very top of local searches (above organic search results).
You will also see an option to sign up for Google Workspace, which is a software kit that includes professional Google Mail, Drive, Calendar, and other Google products.
And that’s it. If you decide to verify your business right away, then Google will review your business profile integrity within 7 days of your verification. After that, your business listing will be visible on Google.
Pro Tip: Besides Google Maps, Apple Maps is another popular mapping platform people use to find local businesses. Our guide on how to optimize your site’s SEO for DuckDuckGo includes a handy tutorial on how to add your business to Apple Maps.
2. Install a WordPress SEO Plugin With Local SEO Features
Having a Google Business Profile is a great first step, but it’s not the only tool in your local SEO toolbox. A WordPress plugin with local SEO features can also help your website rank better in Google search results.
While Google My Business focuses on your business listing, SEO tools and plugins can help optimize your website content for local searches.
Many plugins offer features specifically designed to improve your local ranking, like adding schema markup to your website. Also called structured data, schema markup gives search engines more information about your business in a clear and organized way.
By adding schema markup, you are not just helping search engines crawl, index, and rank your website. You are also making the information about your business in search results clearer and more interesting.
This can make your website stand out more in search results, which can improve your website’s click-through rates.
Here’s an example of a snippet you may find when looking for ‘Joe’s pizza NYC’:
There are many SEO plugins for WordPress websites, but our favorite is All in One SEO (AIOSEO).
This WordPress plugin makes it easy to set up your local business schema without using code.
For more information about using AIOSEO’s local SEO features, you can read our guides below:
This doesn’t mean that adding Google Maps to your website will suddenly put your site at the top of search results. But it can increase your chances significantly in a few ways:
Local SEO signals – Embedding a Google Map on your website strengthens local SEO signals to search engines. It tells search engines your business has a physical location, which is crucial for local searches.
User experience – Having a map on your website improves the user experience by allowing people to easily see your location and plan their visit. This can keep visitors engaged on your site for longer.
Social proof – Google Maps reviews can serve as social proof, showing potential customers that others have had positive experiences with your business. This can increase trust and encourage more people to visit your website.
Alternatively, you can check out our guide on how to embed a Google Map in a contact form. This tutorial can be useful if you want to include the map in your contact information page.
Before you jump into creating content, it’s essential to understand what people in your area are actually searching for online. Local keyword research is an important SEO strategy that can help you achieve this.
Unlike regular keyword research that focuses on global search terms, local SEO targets specific keywords with a local focus, like ‘best pizza near me’ or ‘pizza delivery [your city].’
To get started with local keyword research, you don’t need to be an expert. There are many keyword research tools available, like WPBeginner’s Keyword Generator Tool.
All you need to do is enter a keyword, like your business category and your location. After that, the tool will come up with keyword ideas that you can include in your content later. Here’s an example using ‘pet sitters Seattle’:
We see that the tool has suggested ‘best pet sitters Seattle.’ You can use this keyword when you create the copy for your homepage or other pages so that they show up for those search terms.
You can also include details like pet sitting rates or certification because, based on the keyword ideas, people are interested in this information.
If you want to use a more advanced tool, then check out Semrush. This tool helps you discover relevant keywords and their search volume and shows you their ranking difficulty based on location.
Here’s an example when you type ‘pet sitters’ into Semrush and limit the location to Seattle, WA:
You can see that Semrush gives you information about how easy it is to rank for the keyword in its ‘Keyword Difficulty’ section.
If you scroll down, then you will also see keyword ideas that you can use in your website content.
For example, you can use ‘trusted pet sitters’ or ‘in-home pet sitters’ to make your website appear on those local search queries if that’s what your target audience uses.
Just read these guides for more detailed information:
Creating website content for local search means writing articles specifically for your local audience. This goes beyond just mentioning your location on every web page of your WordPress blog.
Imagine you run a pet store. In addition to listing your products on your website, you could create a blog post on ‘Top Dog Parks in [Your City]’ or ‘Common Dog Walking Mistakes in [Your City].’
This type of content positions you as a helpful resource for locals and strengthens your connection with the community.
There are many benefits to creating local content. First, it attracts potential customers who are already searching for related topics. Second, it lets you showcase your expertise and build trust with your target audience.
You can then optimize these blog posts using on-page SEO techniques like including relevant keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text.
This increases your chances of ranking higher in local search results when people search for those keywords.
If you use AIOSEO, then you can use the TruSEO On-Page Analysis to see whether you have used enough relevant keywords in your content, title tags, and meta descriptions for your page to rank for your target keywords.
You can also use the Headline Analyzer to see if your article’s headline is enticing enough for people to click and read the content.
Here’s an example:
If you want to learn more about content optimization, then you can read these articles below:
6. List Your Business in Local Business Directories
Listing your company in local business directories is a very important step for local SEO. It involves registering your business with various platforms that are recognized in your local area, making it more visible online.
This visibility can lead to increased traffic to your website, higher engagement, and ultimately, more leads and sales.
Doing this can also improve your search engine rankings for local searches.
This is because directories often provide a link to your website, which acts as a form of link-building. Search engines view high-quality backlinks from relevant websites as a sign of trustworthiness.
There are general directories like Yelp and Google Business that every business should be on. That said, you should also consider your local industry associations or review platforms because they can put you in front of potential customers in your area.
Additionally, local newspapers and websites sometimes feature establishments in articles like ‘Best [Your Industry] in [Your City]’ or guides to your area. Try contacting them to see if they’d be interested in writing about your business.
If you are curious to see if there are any sites that already link to your business website, then you can use a backlink checker tool to do that.
Also, ensure that your business’s name, address, and phone number are the same across your website and all of the other directories you list in. Inconsistencies can confuse search engines and customers, potentially leading to a loss of trust and visibility.
For instance, if your business name is ‘Baker’s Delight’ on your website but ‘Bakers Delight Bakery’ on your Google Business Profile, then search engines might not recognize them as the same entity.
7. Get Customers to Leave Online Reviews
Besides getting listed on local directories or review sites, you should also encourage your customers to leave online reviews on those platforms.
Customer reviews are digital word-of-mouth recommendations. They can improve your local SEO by increasing the number of mentions of your business online. This way, search engines and other potential customers see your company as trustworthy.
At the very least, you should get customers to rate and review your business on Google. When people search for things like ‘best cafe in Seattle,’ Google often shows businesses with high review ratings in the local results.
Reviews on Yelp, Trustpilot, TripAdvisor, and other sites are valuable, too. These platforms attract people who are really interested in your industry, so your business gets seen by potential customers who are a good fit.
Social media reviews on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram can also help your local SEO as people often look there for recommendations.
Once you have collected some customer reviews, we recommend displaying them on your website with the Smash Balloon Reviews Feed plugin.
This way, people who find your site through search will see great feedback from others, making your business seem more reliable and trustworthy.
You can check out these guides on displaying customer reviews for more information:
Even with strong local SEO, a user-friendly website is key to converting visitors into customers. Here are some ways to improve your website’s experience:
Clear and easy navigation –Make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. A clear navigation menu with simple categories and relevant internal links helps people navigate your site quickly.
Mobile-friendly design–Most people search on their phones, so you need to ensure your website looks good and functions well on all desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Fast loading speeds – Nobody likes a slow website. Best practices like optimizing your images and code can significantly boost your WordPress site’s performance.
Relevant and up-to-date content – Keep your website content fresh and informative. Include valuable information about your services, pricing, and frequently asked questions (FAQs).
Strong calls to action – Tell visitors what you want them to do on your website. Clear call-to-action buttons like ‘Book Now’ or ‘Contact Us’ can boost conversions.
Technical SEO– At the very least, your website needs to have an SEO-friendly URL structure, an XML sitemap, an SSL certificate, and a proper canonical URL in its header to avoid duplicate content issues.
9. Track Your Website Performance Regularly
Just like any marketing strategy, local SEO needs progress monitoring. Tracking key website metrics helps you see how your SEO efforts are performing and identify areas for improvement.
Here are a few key metrics to track for local SEO:
Website traffic– See how many people are visiting your website and how much is coming from organic search.
Local search rankings– Monitor your rankings for relevant keywords in local searches. Tools like Google Search Console can show you where you appear in local search results.
Conversion rates– Track how many visitors take desired actions on your website, like contacting you or booking an appointment. This helps you measure the effectiveness of your website in converting visitors into customers.
User engagement– Track how visitors interact with your website. Look at metrics like bounce rate (how many people leave right away) and average time spent on site. Low engagement suggests your website content is not informative enough.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking these metrics. However, its reports are very detailed and can get confusing.
If you want to use Google Analytics for WordPress sites, then we recommend installing MonsterInsights.
This analytics plugin can integrate Google Analytics with WordPress, making it easier to monitor your website’s performance directly from your dashboard.
For example, you can track how many visitors come from Google Search, how they interact with your site, and which pages they visit most.
Furthermore, if you connect Google Analytics with Google Search Console, then you can check out the Search Console report to see your top 50 search terms right in WordPress.
This way, you won’t have to switch between platforms to check your SEO analytics.
For more information on SEO analytics, check out these guides:
Now that we have covered some local SEO best practices, let’s answer a few frequently asked questions about the topic:
How long does local SEO take to work?
Local SEO can start showing results within a few weeks to a few months, depending on factors like the competitiveness of your local market and the quality of your SEO efforts.
Local SEO is beneficial for businesses that operate in a specific geographic area, such as restaurants, plumbers, or local retailers. It’s also suitable for businesses that want to attract customers from a certain region.
Which is better: local SEO or paid search?
Local SEO is cost-effective and builds a long-term online presence, while paid search ads can provide immediate visibility and targeted results. Ideally, it’s best to use both for a strong online presence.
Does blogginghelp local SEO?
Yes, blogging about relevant local content can improve your website’s rankings and establish you as an expert in your industry.
Is local SEO still relevant?
Absolutely. More and more people search online before buying locally to make informed decisions and choose the best business for their needs. Local SEO helps people find you by making your online presence more visible to your target audience.
We hope this article helped you learn about WordPress local SEO tips and tricks you can use to boost rankings. You may also be interested in our ultimate WooCommerce SEO guide and our expert pick of the best WordPress hosting providers to host your business website.
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.
Users have often asked us if they can use content syndication to get website backlinks or content.
Most WordPress blogs use content syndication, which is a built-in WordPress feature that makes it easier to share content using RSS feeds.
This feature allows users to subscribe to your website using news reader software. It also enables other websites to automatically share your content on different platforms.
In this article, we will discuss content syndication and how to do it properly in WordPress as a blogger or content curator.
What Is Content Syndication, and Why Use it?
Content syndication is when content creators and bloggers make their published work available for other interested parties to republish and share on their own platforms.
For instance, if you have a blog, then you can make your articles available for other people to publish and share on their platforms.
Similarly, if you want to curate content from different blogs on specific topics, then you can do so by fetching their syndicated content and publishing it on your site.
Why Use Content Syndication as a Blogger?
Now, you may be wondering why anyone would want to allow others to share their content on their websites and platforms.
There are several benefits to making your content available for syndication:
Wider Audience – If you are a new blog, then syndication helps you promote your content on different platforms and find new audiences to visit your blog or website.
Build Partnerships – You can discuss and negotiate terms with other platforms using your content in a way that helps you promote and establish your brand using their existing traffic.
SEO and Backlinks – More websites citing your original content with a link back to the source helps with search engine optimization (SEO). Some of these backlinks can be useful, depending on the website’s reputation and how they share your content. At the same time, websites with poor reputations and spam won’t be beneficial, and you can request that they not share your content.
Increased Social Reach – A good content curator will promote the content that they are sharing on their website using their social media accounts. If they appropriately attribute it to your socials, then this could help you gain new followers.
Why Publish Syndicated Content as a Curator?
The following are some of the benefits of publishing syndicated content as a curator:
Building Topical Authority – Citing quality content from various sources on a specific topic helps you build authority and credibility around that subject. This allows users to find better content and helps search engines understand your platform’s focus on that niche.
Save Time and Resources – Writing high-quality content takes time. Even with the help of AI writing tools, you will still need to edit, rewrite, and publish all your articles. Curating content helps you save some time by sharing similar content from other well-established sources.
Networking and Partnerships – Instead of fetching syndicated content without permission, you can contact the sources and ask for approval to share their content. They might request that you share their content in specific ways, and respecting those requests will help you win partners and network within your industry.
That being said, let’s look at content syndication in WordPress and how to do it properly.
How Does Content Syndication Work in WordPress?
WordPress has built-in support for syndication using RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
RSS feeds work by publishing your latest content in a structured XML document. This feed contains your full articles or the summary, along with metadata for each item, like the date, author, category, and so on.
This RSS feed can be found by adding /feed/ at the end of any WordPress website’s URL. For instance:
https://www.example.com/feed/
Users can subscribe to an RSS feed using a feed reader app like Feedly. Other websites can also use these apps to get updates and publish them on their own blogs or websites.
That being said, let’s dig in a little deeper and learn how to syndicate content properly so that you get the maximum benefit as a publisher. Later, we will also discuss how to ethically source syndicated content as a curator.
How to Share Syndicated Content as a Publisher / Blogger
As a publisher and blogger, you will want users to visit your blog or website to view your content.
Now, if other websites started publishing your content, then why would users come to your website?
And wouldn’t search engines count it as duplicate content?
How do you ensure that your articles rank before the sources that are republishing your content?
Let’s eliminate all those risks to ensure that your content and website don’t lose out on traffic, SEO, or reputation.
1. Only Syndicate Summaries Instead of Full Content
Instead of giving your entire articles to other websites, you can restrict WordPress only to sharing a short summary of the content in the RSS feed.
To do this, you need to go to the Settings » Reading page in the WordPress admin area and scroll down to the ‘For each post in a feed, include’ option.
From here, select ‘Excerpt’ and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.
Your WordPress syndication feed will now only show a summary or excerpt of your article. You can also customize WordPress excerpts for your articles to make them more engaging, like a teaser to grab the audience’s attention.
2. Add a Link Back to Your Original Article in RSS Feed
Content curators often use auto-blogging software to fetch blog feeds and publish them on their websites automatically.
This doesn’t give you proper credit, and for some low-ranking keywords, those content scrapers could even outrank you.
Canonical URLs ensure search engines aren’t confused when different URLs point to the same content.
By default, your WordPress content may appear across your website on category, tag, author, and other archive pages.
Plus, sometimes, you may intentionally publish the same content across different URLs for marketing purposes. For example, you might do this when making landing pages for different ad campaigns and promotions.
Or let’s say you have a blog post about selling your SEO services and another page on your website listing those services with very similar or identical content.
When an external website syndicates your content, they will share the information from your post. But as you want search engines to prioritize your content over the third-party website, you can add a canonical link to the services page.
WordPress automatically adds canonical URL tags to your articles to ensure that search engines can understand which URL gets preference.
If you need to have two URLs for the same content, then you can add the canonical URL using All in One SEO for WordPress.
Simply edit the secondary post/page that you don’t want to be indexed, and then scroll down to the AIOSEO Settings box below the post editor.
From here, switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab and add the preferred URL into the ‘Canonical URL’ field.
Don’t forget to save your post or page to store the new settings.
Search engines also recommend adding an RSS sitemap to your site.
An RSS sitemap contains your recent articles. It is a smaller file, and search engines can access it more frequently to discover new content.
By using an RSS sitemap, your content gets indexed before it is found on other websites. This helps search engines understand which source appeared first and should be considered original.
To add an RSS sitemap, go to All in One SEO » Sitemap and then click on the ‘RSS Sitemap’ tab.
You can see that the ‘Enable Sitemap’ toggle in the ‘RSS Sitemap’ box is already enabled.
You can click on the ‘Open RSS Sitemap’ button to view and copy the URL of your site’s RSS sitemap.
Tracking your website analytics helps you analyze the sources sending the most traffic to your website. More importantly, it also enables you to monitor any drops in traffic and take immediate action.
The easiest way to track analytics in WordPress is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that allows you to monitor your website traffic directly from the WordPress dashboard.
Note: There is also a free version of MonsterInsights. However, we recommend upgrading to the premium version to unlock the plugin’s full potential.
Upon activation, the plugin will walk you through the setup process. Need help? You can also follow our tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress for complete setup instructions.
Once set up, you can see regular website traffic reports by visiting the Insights » Reports page.
The reporting page gives you quick information in human-readable format, with a graph at the top showing your website’s traffic performance.
You can review and further drill down website traffic reports to understand where your traffic is coming from and look for any signs of traffic loss.
As a curator, you can use syndicated content to build an engaging experience for your users.
However, what is the appropriate way to do that without being taken down for copyright violation or penalized by search engines for duplicate content?
Here are some expert tips on sharing syndicated content as a curator.
1. Finding Syndicated Content
Finding the right content for syndication helps you provide your audience with unique perspectives. It also helps you avoid content duplication penalties from search engines.
For instance, most popular blogs are already shared across many platforms. Curating content from only the top sources in your industry would make your website look quite similar to other curated platforms.
Instead, you can pick a variety of sources based on quality to ensure that your curated list offers a different mix of content.
2. Ask Permission to Share
Having an RSS feed does not mean that a website has given you permission to share its content on your website automatically.
You can share an excerpt or blurb from their website under fair use. However, website owners may not feel your sharing qualifies for fair usage.
To avoid potential problems, you should always seek permission from original publishers. This will not only allow you to network, but you may also be able to build business partnerships beyond sharing content.
3. Use Auto-blogging Software
There are a ton of auto-blogging software options that you can use to curate content on your website.
We recommend using Feedzy. It allows you to fetch RSS feeds and publish content on your website automatically.
It also lets you choose which content qualifies for publication. For instance, you might only publish content that matches specific keywords.
Feedzy includes an integration with ChatGPT and other AI software, allowing you to paraphrase content before publishing it. However, you must be mindful of how to do that ethically and legally without infringing on copyright.
As a content curator, sharing articles from other sources makes your website vulnerable to copyright notices and DMCA takedown requests.
If a creator is unhappy about you sharing some part of their syndicated content, then they may want to ask you to remove it.
You need to make it easy for them to make such requests by adding a contact form to your website.
If you don’t make it easy, then those creators may file their take-down requests directly with search engines, who can then penalize your website. Even worse, they may ask your website hosting provider to take it down, making your website inaccessible.
The easiest way to set up a “Request content removal” form is by using WPForms. It is the best WordPress contact form plugin that allows you to create all kinds of forms for your website.
Note: There is also a free version of WPForms, which is good enough to add a simple contact form. However, we recommend using the paid plugin with more features and templates.
WPForms has 1500+ powerful templates and a simple drag-and-drop form builder to create your form.
Afterward, you can easily embed that form anywhere on your website using the WPForms block.
Recently, one of our users asked what the recommended server requirements are for running a WordPress website.
The best thing about WordPress is that it will work in almost any kind of environment. However, when you’re picking a hosting solution for your site, it’s important to check whether it meets the basic prerequisites or not.
In this article, we will share important WordPress server requirements you should know.
Why is it Important to Check Server Requirements?
All WordPress websites on the internet need a server to function. They are used to store and use website files, databases, media files, content, and other important data.
When it comes to running WordPress smoothly, there are some server requirements you should look into. Technically, WordPress will work in minimalist conditions, like on outdated versions of PHP or basic hardware, but it’s not ideal.
WordPress server plays a big role in your site’s performance. Limited server specifications can slow down your site, which can have a negative impact on user experience and keyword rankings.
It will also make it difficult to handle large spikes in traffic. If you run multiple WordPress plugins and third-party tools, then meeting server requirements is critical. Otherwise, you’ll risk breaking your site or experiencing sluggish performance.
That said, let’s look at the server requirements for WordPress. You can click the links below to jump ahead to any section:
To run WordPress, you will need to check some prerequisites. These include the PHP version, MySQL or MariaDB version, HTTPS support, web server type, storage space, and other hardware specifications.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these requirements.
1. Ensure the Server Supports Recommended PHP Version
WordPress currently requires PHP version 7.4 or higher to work smoothly. PHP is a programming language for creating dynamic interactive websites. It is open source and WordPress is written using PHP.
Just like any other programming language, there are many versions of PHP you can use. Each version receives updates and fixes for up to 2 years. While WordPress officially recommends PHP version 7.4, it no longer gets any security updates.
That’s why we would suggest using the latest version. If you already have a WordPress site, then it’s better to update the PHP version at the earliest.
This will protect your site from security vulnerabilities, bugs, malware, and hackers. Plus, it will improve performance by running processes much faster and reducing memory usage.
You can also check the PHP version of your server by going to Tools » Site Health from the WordPress dashboard. From here, switch to the ‘Info’ tab.
Next, you can scroll down to the ‘Server’ tab.
Go ahead and click the tab to expand the Server section and view the server’s system information along with the PHP version.
Besides that, you should also check the PHP memory allocated by the WordPress server. PHP memory is the amount of memory reserved for running PHP-based processes.
The standard PHP memory used by WordPress is 64MB, but this is often not high enough. If a task or process requires more memory to work, then it could lead to the WordPress memory exhausted error.
A simple fix is to increase the PHP memory by manually editing the wp-config.php file or .htaccess file. Or you can reach out to your web hosting provider and increase the limit.
2. Check for Suggested MySQL or MariaDB Versions
WordPress recommends MySQL version 5.7 or greater and MariaDB version 10.4 or higher to function.
MySQL and MariaDB are database management systems used by WordPress to store and retrieve blog information. You only need any one of the systems to install and use WordPress on a server.
You can easily access the databases from your hosting provider’s cPanel. For instance, simply use phpMyAdmin to access the MySQL database in your web browser.
However, when checking the WordPress server requirements, make sure that the database is stored on a solid-state drive (SSD). It is the fastest storage technology currently available and offers quick performance.
You should also see if the server offers automated database optimization and if there is an option for automated database backups.
3. Look for NGINX or Apache Web Server Software
The optimal web server software recommended by WordPress is NGINX or Apache. While it is not mandatory to run WordPress, using either software has certain advantages.
For instance, Apache is an open-source server software that is fast, reliable, and secure. It powers almost 31% of web servers and is highly customizable. You can use different extensions and modules to meet the needs of any environment.
On the other hand, NGINX is newer and faster and requires fewer resources to run than Apache. It runs more than 34% of web servers and is developed to address performance issues. However, it doesn’t offer the flexibility that you’d get with Apache.
When looking for a web server for your WordPress site, either Apache or NGINX is a great choice.
PRO TIP: Many users have had great success with Litespeed server software as well. If you’re interested in checking it out, we recommend using Hostinger because they have optimized Litespeed hosting for as low as $2.99 per month.
4. Support for HTTPS by WordPress Server
HTTPS, or hypertext transfer protocol secure, is an encryption method that secures the connection between your server and your user’s browser. It is an extension of HTTP, and all web addresses begin with HTTPS.
HTTPS makes it harder for hackers to eavesdrop on your connection, and it helps make your site more secure. Plus, it also sends a positive signal to search engines like Google and helps improve your WordPress SEO.
That’s why it’s important to check if your WordPress server supports HTTPS and offers SSL certificates.
When choosing a WordPress server, you should also look into some basic hardware specifications.
That’s because a web server is actually a physical server that stores and shares websites with people on the internet. If the hardware requirements are limited, then you could run into storage issues, poor performance, and other WordPress errors.
Some important hardware requirements include checking the disk space available for storage, RAM (random access memory), and CPU (central processing unit).
Storage (Disk Space) – The minimum disk space requirement for WordPress is 1 GB. However, we suggest looking for servers that offer at least 10 GB or more storage. WordPress will use disk space to store website files, images, videos, plugins, themes, and other data. So, as your site grows, it is better to have enough space to keep your website running smoothly. Plus, look for SSD drives as they are faster than the standard HDD (hard disk drives).
Memory (RAM) – It acts as a link between your server’s hard disk and processor. RAM speeds up server processes by temporarily storing data required by the CPU from the hard disk. WordPress itself only requires at least 512 MB of RAM, but look for a web server that has an option for expansion. As your site grows, you’ll need more RAM to improve performance.
Processing Power (CPU) – The processor or CPU is the brain of your web server, and it controls how many processes can happen at a given time. Its performance is usually measured in gigahertz (GHz) or the number of cores available. WordPress requires only a 1.0 GHz CPU to work normally. However, more powerful processors will have multiple cores and deliver faster performance.
6. Check Your WordPress Server Location and CDN Option
The physical distance between your site’s server location and the user’s location can affect the loading speed of your website. If a user is located near your server, then your site will load faster compared to someone living further away.
It is a network of servers spread across the globe, and they store static versions of your site. When a user wants to view your content, the closest server in the CDN will instantly load the website.
Even though it’s not a technical server requirement, when you’re looking at hosting companies for your site’s needs and requirements, there is an added advantage if the one you choose offers a CDN.
Now that you know some important WordPress server specifications, the next step is to pick a hosting solution that meets these requirements.
In our 16+ years of experience, we’ve tested multiple website hosts. And to help you out, here are some of the best hosting providers you can choose from.
Bluehost is the oldest web host in the market, and they’re an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider.
It offers a free domain for 1 year, a free SSL certificate, and a 1-click WordPress installation with every plan. Plus, you get SSD web storage space starting from 10 GB and going all the way up to 100 GB.
Besides that, it offers free CDN with every pricing plan. If you opt for dedicated hosting, then you get a minimum of 4 CPU cores (2.3 GHz) and 1TB HDD storage.
SiteGround is one of the most popular and highest-rated hosting providers. They provide a unique in-house speed and security solution for WordPress.
With SiteGround, you get free WordPress installation, 10 GB of web storage space that goes up to 40 GB, a free SSL certificate for HTTPS support, free CDN, and more.
It easily meets the minimum WordPress server requirements and offers advanced solutions. For instance, it automatically updates the PHP version once it is stable, and lets you create unlimited MySQL databases, offers SSD storage, and more.
Hostinger is one of the fastest WordPress hosting services in the industry. It offers automatic 1-click WordPress install, free CDN, free domain name, and 24/7 customer support.
The best part about Hostinger is that the minimum storage space it offers is 100 GB, which goes up to 200 GB. Plus, it offers the fastest SSD technology currently available.
Besides that, you get free SSL, unlimited bandwidth, regular backups, unlimited databases, and multiple PHP version support. Their shared plans also run on Litespeed web server software, a popular alternative to Apache and NGINX.
Are you looking to create an online thrift store website?
Many people think that to start an eCommerce business, they’ll need to create a new product. However, there’s another way. You can find pre-owned items and sell them online through a thrift store.
In this article, we will show you how to start an online thrift store using WordPress.
What is an Online Thrift Store?
A thrift store is a type of eCommerce business where you can sell used or pre-loved products. It can be anything ranging from clothes to automobiles, electronic items, toys, books, furniture, and more at bargain prices.
One of the benefits of starting an online thrift store is its low startup cost. You don’t need a lot of money to buy and maintain an inventory. Plus, the cost of building an eCommerce site is also low.
For example, if you have an expensive dress that doesn’t fit you anymore. Instead of throwing it away, you can have it cleaned and sell it online.
Besides that, it is a great side hustle to make money online. You can start small and slowly expand your business.
What Do You Need to Start an Online Thrift Store?
When it comes to starting an online store, many people think it is too complicated. However, it’s a lot simpler than you might think.
There are 3 main things you’ll need to get started:
Domain Name – This is the name of your thrift store that people will enter in their web browser (like wpbeginner.com). Think of it as an address to your home.
Web Hosting Service – It’s where your website lives on the internet and where all your website files are saved. You can think of it as a house for your online thrift store.
SSL Certificate – This adds an extra layer of security to your online store, so you can easily accept online payments from customers.
It’s really that easy!
You can build an online thrift website without any technical skills, coding, or complicated setup.
We’ll show you step-by-step how to get started. Simply click the links below to jump to any section:
Choosing an eCommerce Platform for Online Thrift Store
The first and most essential step is to find the right platform for your online thrift store.
Choosing the wrong eCommerce platform can be a costly mistake for new store owners. Moving to a new service later on would mean you’ll have to re-do all the work and spend money again.
To avoid making this mistake, we’re here to help.
There are two popular eCommerce platforms that we recommend for your online thrift store: Shopify or WooCommerce (built on WordPress).
Shopify is a fully hosted eCommerce solution that lets you create an online store quickly.
However, the biggest drawback is its pricing. You’ll need to pay $25 per month, which can be quite expensive for individuals and small business owners. You also get limited payment options unless you pay extra.
This is why most users choose WordPress + WooCommerce. It is more flexible and cost-effective compared to Shopify. WooCommerce does require some setup, but it’s worth it in the long run.
For this tutorial, we will walk you through how to start an online thrift store using WooCommerce + WordPress.
Select a Web Hosting Service and Install WordPress
As we mentioned earlier, you will need a domain name, web hosting service, and SSL certificate to create an online thrift store.
If purchased separately, a domain name costs around $14.99 per year, web hosting will cost around $7.99 per year, and an SSL certificate will cost roughly $69.99 per year.
This cost can go even higher if you add extra features and addons to your hosting plan.
Thankfully, our friends at Bluehost offer an exclusive offer for WPBeginner readers. You can save up to 61% on website hosting plans and get started for as little as $1.99 per month.
Bluehost is an official WordPress and WooCommerce-recommended hosting provider. The best part, you get a free domain name and SSL certificate with each hosting plan.
Note: At WPBeginner, we believe in transparency. If you sign up with Bluehost using our referral link, then we will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you (in fact, you will save money and get a free domain).
We would get this commission for recommending just about any WordPress hosting company, but we only recommend products that we personally use and believe will add value to our readers.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Bluehost, then we suggest using SiteGround WooCommerce hosting. It is another officially recommended WordPress hosting service.
To start, simply visit the Bluehost website and click the ‘Get Started Now’ button.
Next, you’ll need to select a pricing plan.
You can get started for $1.99 per month. However, Bluehost also offers an Online Store plan costing you $6.99 per month. It comes with an exclusive store theme, store analytics, and $450 worth of eCommerce plugins included in the plan.
We’ll select the ‘Online Store’ plan for this tutorial.
Next, Bluehost will ask you to enter a name for your online thrift store.
If you don’t have a domain, then simply enter a website name under the ‘Create a new domain’ section, select a domain extension, and click the ‘Next’ button.
Make sure that the domain name relates to your business, is easy to pronounce and spell, and is memorable. You should also try to get a domain with a ‘.com’ extension.
After that, you’ll need to provide details like name, address, email, and more to create a new account.
Bluehost will also show extra features to add to your hosting plan. We don’t recommend purchasing these additional features, as you can always add them later on.
Lastly, you’ll need to enter the payment information to complete the purchase.
Once that’s done, Bluehost will open the account dashboard from where you can manage your websites.
The best part is that Bluehost offers a one-click WordPress installation. However, if you are using another hosting provider or somehow skipped the setup step, then please see our guide on how to install WordPress for more details.
For instance, in Bluehost, you can log in to your account and navigate to the ‘Websites’ tab. From here, simply click the ‘Add Site’ button in the top corner.
This will launch the WordPress setup wizard in Bluehost.
You can click the ‘Install WordPress’ option and click the ‘Continue’ button.
After that, you’ll be asked to enter a name for your online thrift store website.
Once you’ve entered a title, click the ‘Continue’ button.
Bluehost will now install WordPress and create your thrift store site.
After the installation is complete, you can go to the ‘Websites’ tab to see your new website. Go ahead and click the ‘Edit Site’ button to view the WordPress admin panel.
As an alternate, you can also log in to your WordPress dashboard by going to ‘yourthriftstore.com/wp-admin’ directly from the browser.
Here’s what the WordPress admin area will look like:
Next, you’ll need to view WordPress settings and ensure everything is set up properly.
First, you need to go to the Settings » General page and add a WordPress site title and tagline. If you’re happy with the site title, then you don’t need to change it.
A tagline acts as a small description for your thrift store. However, this is optional, and you can add it later on.
Besides that, you’ll also need to ensure that your WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) are using HTTPS instead of HTTP.
Next, you can go to the Settings » Discussions page from the admin panel and scroll down to the ‘Before a comment appears’ section.
Here, click the ‘Comment must be manually approved’ checkbox. This way, your comments will go into moderation and help prevent spam.
Upon activation, the WooCommerce setup wizard will launch. You can click the ‘Set up my store’ button to continue.
Simply follow the onscreen instructions to complete the WooCommerce setup. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to start an online store.
Once the setup is complete, you can set up payment options on your thrift store.
WooCommerce supports some of the most popular payment gateways. You can accept credit cards, cash on delivery, bank transfers, Stripe, PayPal, and more.
Simply go to WooCommerce » Settings from your WordPress dashboard and switch to the ‘Payments’ tab.
You can click the ‘Set up’ button for the payment service you’d like to add to your online thrift store.
For example, let’s say you want to configure Stripe credit card payments. Simply connect your Stripe account or enter account keys to add the payment method to your store.
Another optional setting you can configure in WooCommerce is shipping zones. It lets you add different shipping methods and costs for various regions.
Simply head to Appearance » Themes and click the ‘Customize’ button to edit the theme.
This will launch the WordPress Full Site Editor (FSE). It was first introduced in WordPress 5.9 and uses blocks to edit the theme, just like editing content in the block editor.
The goal of the full site editor is to simplify website editing and make it user-friendly.
If you don’t like the default theme, then you can simply change it. There are thousands of WordPress themes to choose from. You can see our list of the best WooCommerce WordPress themes to pick the on you like.
On the other hand, you can create a custom theme for your online thrift store using a WordPress theme builder.
For instance, SeedProd is the best theme and landing page builder that offers a drag-and-drop interface. It comes with pre-built templates, which you can easily customize without editing code.
Once you’re done, simply click the ‘Publish’ button.
Now, you can repeat this step and add more products to your online thrift store.
You can then visit your site to see all the products listed on the store page.
Sourcing Products for Your Thrift Store
Finding products on a regular basis for your online thrift store can be a challenge for many business owners.
However, there are different places from where you can source used or pre-loved products. For instance, a quick search on other thrift stores and sites like eBay and Craigslist can help discover multiple products that you can list on your site.
Similarly, visiting flea markets, other local stores, and garage sales can also help you find the right products for your store. This is a great option if you’re selling clothes, books, and second-hand electronic items.
Another option is to allow users to upload their items for consideration on your online thrift store. This way, you’ll get to build an inventory without having to invest and simply share the revenue from the sale.
You can also create an online marketplace using WordPress where users can sell their products using your eCommerce platform. For example, people can sell their used items on your site and give you a percentage or a fee for using your site.
Add Plugins to Grow Your Traffic and Drive Sales
WordPress offers different plugins that act like apps for your website. They allow you to add extra features and functionalities and help customize your online thrift store.
For example, there are plugins for adding a contact form, product image galleries, product comparisons, gift cards, giveaways, popups, and more.
You can choose from over 59,000 free WordPress plugins. There are also premium plugins that are sold by third-party sites and developers.
That said, we’ve handpicked some essential plugins that you should install on your thrift store.
Add Extra Features and Functionality
WPForms – It is the best form plugin for WordPress that lets you add a contact form to your site. You can also create other types of forms, like a file upload form, order/billing form, online payment form, and more.
MonsterInsights – You can connect Google Analytics to your site using MonsterInsights without editing code. Using the plugin, you get insights about how users behave in your store, where they click, which products they purchase, and where they are from.
SeedProd – It’s the best drag-and-drop builder for creating custom landing pages, layouts, and website themes without any technical knowledge.
Envira Gallery – Create stunning image galleries for products on your online thrift store.
Website Optimization for SEO, Performance, and Conversions
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) – Optimize your site for search engines without technical knowledge, improve your WordPress SEO, and boost website traffic.
OptinMonster – It is the best lead generation and conversion optimization software. You can create dynamic popups, modals, floating bars, and more. It offers personalization features to grow your email list and optimize your thrift store for conversions.
PushEngage – Show push notifications on your site to connect with your visitors, bring them back to your site, and increase website traffic.
TrustPulse – Leverage the power of social proof with real-time notifications and boost eCommerce conversions.
UserFeedback – Add interactive surveys to your online store and collect user feedback. Use the data to improve user experience and satisfy customer needs.
Smash Balloon – Display social media content on your store and boost engagement.
Uncanny Automator – Automate workflows to save time and streamline work. Connect plugins, sites, and apps to automate your thrift store.
Constant Contact – It is the best email marketing service that you can use for all your email needs. Easily set up email campaigns, autoresponders, A/B testing, WooCommerce integration, and more.
WP Mail SMTP – Ensure your WordPress emails reach your customer’s inbox and don’t end up in spam. Fix email deliverability issues.
LiveChat – Offer real-time support to customers through live chat software. Answer customer queries, improve user experience, and boost sales.
At WPBeginner, our main goal is to provide helpful and beginner-friendly WordPress tutorials for non-techy users, small business owners, bloggers, and eCommerce store owners.
To help you learn more about WooCommerce and WordPress, you can follow these guides:
We are often asked about using WordPress for enterprise websites. Is WordPress a good choice for enterprise?
An enterprise website typically refers to a large website with millions of page views. It may also refer to websites run by big-name brands or corporations.
Normally, these organizations have slightly different requirements than small business websites. They need flexible scalability, better access controls, tighter security, and improved performance.
In this article, we’ll look at WordPress for enterprise and share our tips on using WordPress for large-scale enterprise projects.
Here is a break-down of the topics we’ll cover in this article:
WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder, powering more than 43% of all websites on the internet.
In terms of CMS (content management system) software, WordPress dominates the market with a 65% market share. (source: CMS Market Share Study)
The immense popularity of WordPress is due to its flexibility, freedom, and ease of use.
The same reasons that make WordPress a great choice for smaller and medium-sized businesses also make it an excellent option for enterprise clients.
Costs – As a free, open-source platform, WordPress makes it easier to control costs at the enterprise level with the freedom to choose between different providers for hosting, development, support, and administration.
Add-ons and Integrations – With over 59,000 free WordPress plugins, there are a ton of ready-to-use add-ons for WordPress. Want to use a third-party email marketing service or payment gateway? Chances are that there is already an integration available for WordPress.
Expertise – As the most popular platform, plenty of people with high levels of expertise are available for you to hire. Whether you want to hire a developer, SEO manager, or system administrator, you’ll find the best people with years of experience with WordPress.
Security – As open-source software, WordPress is heavily scrutinized for security best practices by the world’s leading security experts. This assures you that if a vulnerability is found, it will be quickly reported and almost immediately patched.
All of this sounds good, but what about the concerns regarding WordPress usage in the enterprise?
Let’s address some of those misconceptions.
Debunking Myths About WordPress in Enterprise
Anything as popular as WordPress often faces myths, stereotyping, and misconceptions.
Generally, such myths are fuelled by competing alternatives to sell their own products or services.
Let’s look at some of those misconceptions about WordPress and debunk them from an enterprise software point of view.
1. WordPress is For Blogs Only
If you look back at the history of WordPress, you’ll find out that it started to solve a blogging software requirement.
That was two decades ago.
Soon after its start, WordPress evolved into a CMS and a full-fledged platform to make any types of websites.
It powers more than 43% of all websites and is used by all sorts of businesses. This includes businesses, big-name brands, popular online stores, subscription-based businesses, software companies, and more.
2. If WordPress is That Great, Why is it Free?
A misconception about WordPress being free is that people think of free as in free coffee. Which WordPress is not.
Users still need to pay for hosting, buying domain name, pay for third-party tools, and more.
WordPress is free, as in ‘freedom.’ It is an open-source software, meaning anyone can download it freely and build whatever they need.
Enterprises widely use free software like WordPress because it helps them cut costs. The biggest tech companies in the world use free software, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and countless others.
Another misconception is that WordPress is less secure than some other software.
Considering the size of WordPress’s market, it is significantly leaps and bounds ahead of any competing software available in terms of security.
Being open source and a crucial component of the Internet ecosystem, its code is consistently monitored, tested, and scrutinized by the world’s top security analysts.
With just some very basic WordPress security setup, it can be further strengthened. From an enterprise perspective, those common-sense security precautions are normal best practices.
The popular game Angry Birds uses WordPress for their website. They use it to make a highly interactive website showcasing videos, sliders, game stories, and more.
With these successful examples in mind, what should you know before using WordPress for enterprise?
Whether you are an enterprise client considering hiring a WordPress agency or an agency taking on a new enterprise customer, the following essential tips will help you easily navigate those challenges.
1. Choose The Right WordPress Enterprise Hosting
One of the major concerns of enterprise clients is the scalability of the platform.
It should be able to handle very high traffic simultaneously, with little to no impact on performance.
This is why you must choose a WordPress hosting platform made specifically for enterprise-grade clients.
We recommend using SiteGround. Their scalable cloud hosting platform is the most flexible managed WordPress enterprise hosting on the market.
You can choose from different levels of server resources for your needs and easily increase them by adding more RAM and processing power as needed.
You can also turn on auto-scaling, which automatically scales server resources in the event of a sudden traffic spike.
It includes daily backups, free CDN, built-in server-level caching, and enhanced security. Not to mention their incredibly outstanding support. Hosting with SiteGround Cloud is like having your own team of DevOps taking care of your hosting infrastructure.
WPBeginner is also hosted on SiteGround’s dedicated cloud cluster. Check out our case study of why we switched to SiteGround.
Need a SiteGround alternative? Take a look at WP Engine. They are the premium among the premium WordPress hosting platforms.
WP Engine offers a rock-solid hosting infrastructure suitable for enterprise. Trusted by top WordPress agencies and several Fortune 500 companies, WP Engine provides unbeatable performance and security.
2. Set up Enterprise Level Security
Security is one of the major concerns for enterprise websites. Poor security could have devastating consequences for an organization’s finances and reputation.
You are halfway there if you follow our earlier advice and select the top enterprise-grade WordPress hosting.
These hosting companies follow the highest security standards to protect your website from malicious attacks.
The next step is to set up a website application firewall (WAF). Now, depending on your hosting provider, you may already have WAF available under your hosting plan.
For instance, SiteGround offers Cloudflare CDN, which provides dual advantages of a CDN and a Web Application Firewall.
However, if your hosting provider doesn’t offer a built-in WAF, then we recommend using Sucuri. It is the best WordPress firewall on the market.
It blocks malicious requests, DDoS and Brute Force attacks, and other suspicious activities before they reach your hosting server.
It also comes with a CDN, which helps you further reduce load on your hosting server while providing faster page load times for your users.
That being said, no website security system is complete without preparing for the worst, which brings us to our next tip: backups.
3. Make Your Own Backups for Redundancy
Almost all enterprise-grade hosting providers offer daily backups and have redundancies built into their systems. This means you won’t lose all your data if something happens to one of their data centers.
This all sounds good on the paper. However, you must always ensure that you have your own backups stored safely as well.
This allows you to control all your website data instead of relying upon your hosting company.
For enterprise-level WordPress backups, we recommend VaultPress by JetPack. You’ll need a paid JetPack plan that includes VaultPress backups.
VaultPress makes incremental backups, which means your backups are always up-to-date. It offers easy 1-click restoration, a full archive of 30-day activity (depending on your site’s overall size), and 10GB of cloud storage.
All Duplicator backup files are fully encrypted to ensure they are secure regardless of where you store them. You can keep as many backups as you want and choose which data to store.
As for storage, you can choose from any of the top cloud storage service providers, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft Onedrive, or any Amazon S3-compatible storage provider. You can even store backups on separate servers using SFTP.
4. SEO for Enterprise Level Publications
In a recent study of WordPress for Enterprise, 34% of participating websites were in the Publishing / Media, and 12% were in the Marketing / Advertising industries.
WordPress is an SEO-friendly platform by design. However, at the enterprise level, you would need extra tools and controls to ensure that your content is highly optimized for SEO.
It comes with the most comprehensive set of SEO features you’ll need, including easy on-page optimization tools, advanced schema.org markup support, easy integration with Google Search Console and other webmaster tools, built-in content analysis, headline analyzer, and more.
It allows you to leverage AI to generate SEO titles and descriptions or track internal links across your website.
Most importantly, it comes with SEO user roles that enable website administrators to manage access to crucial areas of the website properly.
Learn more about All in One SEO features that make it the most powerful SEO toolkit for enterprise websites.
For an enterprise project, you may need to give specific users access to different areas of the website to do their jobs.
For instance, you may want writers to be able to submit their articles and editors to review them. You may also want to set up permissions so only authorized users can publish content or change the website.
WordPress comes with a robust user roles and permissions management system out of the box. You can assign user roles that give them specific permissions on the website.
For other things, like SEO, you can use All in One SEO to give your SEO team access to areas where they need to work.
You can even create custom user roles where you can combine different permissions.
For better publishing tools, we recommend using PublishPress. It is a publishing suite for WordPress that gives you robust access control and editorial workflow tools.
It comes with several plugins to improve publishing workflows on a WordPress website. Whether you want to let multiple authors collaborate, add a checklist for writers, create custom user roles, or schedule content updates, PublishPress has you covered.
Many enterprise clients need to serve multilingual content for audiences in different regions.
WordPress does not support multilingual content out of the box. However, there are two excellent routes that enterprise clients take to manage multilingual websites.
The first one is to build a WordPress multisite network. This allows you to have a subdomain or directory for each language. Each subsite can use the same theme and plugins but localized content.
The downside of this method is that it can quickly get quite complicated to manage. Search Engines may consider sub-domains to be unique sites, and if you run an eCommerce store, this adds an extra layer of complexity.
TranslatePress allows you to easily translate any content on your WordPress website, including WordPress themes and plugins.
It has a robust translation management system that makes it super easy to manage all the languages you want to add to your site. It has an easy language switcher, allowing users to select a language.
Plus, with TranslatePress, you can easily add translator accounts and outsource translation tasks to third-party agencies.
Alternative solution: WPML is an equally capable WordPress multilingual plugin.
Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress for Enterprise
Following are some of the most commonly asked questions about WordPress for the enterprise that our users have asked us.
1. Is WordPress good at the enterprise level?
Yes. WordPress is excellent at the enterprise level. It is flexible and highly customizable for any enterprise-grade website. Plus, it is open-source, which gives enterprise clients more options to build upon it. This is why even the top tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, and many more prefer it as a CMS solution for their enterprise websites.
2. What does enterprise WordPress mean?
Enterprise WordPress means WordPress for large businesses, multinational companies, big publication companies, non-profits and government agencies, universities, and more. At the enterprise level, these organizations may need additional scalability, security, and customization features compared to regular WordPress websites.
3. How much a WordPress website costs at the enterprise level?
The costs of a WordPress website at the enterprise level usually end at the highest. WordPress needs a more robust hosting infrastructure at the enterprise level to ensure scalability, security, and redundancies. Costs are also associated with any custom development of plugins and themes, additional third-party integrations, system administration, maintenance, and ongoing support. Depending on a business’s need, it could cost thousands of dollars monthly.
We hope this article gave you a good understanding of WordPress for enterprise and busted common myths about WordPress at the enterprise level.
You may also want to take a look at our complete WordPress security guide, which talks more about securing WordPress websites, or take a look at our comprehensive list of essential WordPress plugins for all kinds of websites, including enterprise websites.
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.
Backups are the most important security step and are often the most neglected by website owners.
Manually backing up a WordPress database is a quick and easy way to download all your WordPress data. It is not a complete WordPress website backup, but it is handy for recovering a WordPress site.
In this article, we will show you how to back up a WordPress database manually.
Here is a quick overview of the topics we will cover in this tutorial:
When and Why Make a WordPress Database Backup Manually?
You should always install and set up a WordPress backup system for your site. This allows you to restore your site should something go wrong.
There are several situations when you may need to manually back up a database.
For instance, you could be making some big changes to your WordPress website and just to be on the safe side, you want to have a database backup.
If you have access to the admin area of your website, then you can use a plugin to make an on-demand database backup (We will show you how and which plugin to use later in this article).
On the other hand, in some instances, you may not have access to the admin area of your WordPress website.
Note: There is also a free version of Duplicator, which can be used to create database backups. We recommend upgrading to the paid version because it offers more features.
Upon activation, you need to go to the Duplicator Pro » Packages page and click on the ‘Create New’ button.
On the next screen, Duplicator allows you to choose what you want to include in the backup.
Select ‘Database Only’ and then click on the ‘Next’ button.
Duplicator will now scan your WordPress site and database.
After that, it will show you the scan results. There may be a notice next to the Database section informing you that you are creating a database-only package.
Click on the ‘Build’ button to continue.
Duplicator will now prepare your database backup in the background and show you the progress.
Once finished, you will be able to download the backup files. We recommend downloading both Archive and Installer files. This will allow you to restore your website more easily.
2. Backing Up WordPress Database Manually Using phpMyAdmin
For this method, we will be using phpMyAdmin. It is an open-source software that allows you to manage your MySQL database using a web-based interface.
For the sake of this article, we will show you screenshots from Bluehost. However, the basic procedure is the same for most hosting providers.
First, you need to log in to your WordPress hosting control panel and click on the ‘Settings’ button under your website.
Under your website settings, scroll down to the Quick Links section.
Next, click on the ‘phpMyAdmin’ button to continue.
This will launch the phpMyAdmin app in a new browser tab.
From here, click to select your WordPress database from the left column and then click on the ‘Export’ button at the top.
You will be asked to select the export method.
Next, you need to select ‘Custom’, as it will give you more options to explore.
Once you choose the Custom option, it will show all your tables in your WordPress database as selected.
Sometimes, WordPress plugins add their own tables to your database. If there are any tables that you would like to exclude from export, then you can deselect them. If you are unsure, it is better to keep them all selected.
You now need to scroll down to the ‘Output’ section.
By default, phpMyAdmin will show you the output of the export process as text.
You need to change that by selecting the ‘Save output to a file’ option.
For compression, you must select the zipped or gzipped option.
Now, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the ‘Go’ button. phpMyAdmin will now send you the database export as a zip or gzip file.
That’s all. You have successfully made a manual WordPress database backup.
3. Creating a Manual WordPress Database Backup From cPanel
Most good WordPress hosting companies also offer easy ways to download on-demand backups. Here is how to make a manual WordPress database backup from your hosting dashboard.
For the sake of this tutorial, we will show you screenshots of Bluehost. However, the basic procedure is quite similar for other hosts.
First, log in to your hosting account dashboard and click on the ‘Settings’ button under your website.
On the next screen, you need to switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab.
From here, simply scroll down to the cPanel section and click the ‘Manage’ button.
This will launch the cPanel interface in a new browser tab.
From here, just scroll down to the files section and click on the ‘Backup’ button.
On the backups page, scroll down to the partial backups section.
From here, you need to click on your database name to download your database backup file.
You can also download the backup of your WordPress files from this page if you need to.
Restoring a WordPress Database Backup
Once you have downloaded the WordPress database backup, you can continue fixing your hacked WordPress site or make any other changes you need to.
In many cases, you probably won’t need to restore your website from the backup.
But in case you do, we have a detailed step-by-step guide on restoring WordPress from backup. It covers all common WordPress backup options including restoring from a database backup.
Set Up a Proper Automated Backup System for the Future
You can make WordPress database backups manually, but keep in mind that this is not an alternative to a proper backup solution for your WordPress site.
There are situations when you may not have access to your WordPress database. For example, this can happen if your hosting company suspends your account or loses your website data.
Another possible scenario is when some hacker injects malicious code into your WordPress database. Cleaning an infected database will be a lot more difficult.
That’s why we suggest using a proper backup plugin to store your WordPress database backups on the cloud automatically.
We recommend using Duplicator. It automatically creates and stores your backups on a cloud storage service like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and more.
Having an active domain name is essential for your business. Otherwise, your audience won’t be able to view your content, products, and services. Domain registration renewals often happen every year, but you can choose to pay for multiple years at once so your site is in no danger of losing its URL.
In this article, we will show you how to renew a domain for all major hosting registrars.
What is Domain Renewal?
Domain renewal is a process where you renew your domain name by paying a fee to a registrar.
It is essential that your WordPress website is active so users can easily read your blog posts, subscribe to newsletters, purchase products and services, or contact you. If your domain name expires, they won’t be able to do any of this.
Plus, an expired domain can be auctioned off to the highest bidder on different domain registration websites. Or it will become available in the market again, and anyone can purchase it. As a result, you’ll lose your website and have to find a new name and URL for your business.
Now, the domain renewal costs usually depend on the domain extension (like .com, .net, .org) you’re using. You can also renew a domain for multiple years, depending on the domain registrars and hosting services you are using.
Most domain registrars and web hosting services have an auto-renew option enabled by default for domain names. They also inform users a few weeks before a domain expires, usually by email.
That said, let’s look at how to manually renew a domain name in major WordPress hosting services. You can click the links below to jump to your preferred hosting or domain registration service.
Bluehost is one of the largest WordPress hosting companies in the world and is the official WordPress-recommended hosting service. It delivers fast performance, 24/7 support, and a wide variety of pricing plans for all types of businesses.
With Bluehost, you get a free domain name and SSL certificate with each hosting plan. Plus, it offers a free content delivery network (CDN), so you get fast load times.
You can read our detailed Bluehost review to learn more about the hosting service.
To renew a domain name in Bluehost, you’ll need to log into your account and head to the ‘Renewal Center’ from the menu on the left.
On the next screen, you can select the ‘Domain Name’ option.
After that, go ahead and click the ‘Renew’ button at the top.
Next, you can go to the cart page and proceed with the checkout process.
There is also an option to choose the number of years for domain renewal (like 1 year). Plus, you can also renew any addons, like domain privacy.
Once you complete the purchase, your domain will be renewed in Bluehost.
Renewing Domain Name in Domain.com
Domain.com is one of the leading domain registrars that helps you find the right name and extension for your website. It also offers web hosting services, domain protection features, a WHOIS lookup tool, SSL certificates, and more.
To renew your domain name, you’ll first need to log in to your Domain.com account. Next, you can click the domain name or the gear icon to open the settings.
After that, you should see a summary of your domain.
Simply click the ‘Renew Domain’ link at the bottom.
Next, you can follow the checkout process and complete the payment to renew your domain.
Domain.com also lets you choose the number of years for domain renewal. For instance, you can select anywhere from 1 to 5 years.
Once the purchase is complete, you will receive a confirmation email notifying you that your domain has been renewed.
Renew Domain Name in Hostinger
Hostinger is one of the fastest web hosting services in the market. It offers a variety of hosting plans, including WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting solutions, and more.
With Hostinger, you get a 1-click WordPress install, automatic updates, free CDN, free domain name, enhanced security features, free SSL, and different website speed acceleration features.
You can renew a domain name in Hostinger by logging into the dashboard. From here, head to the ‘Billing’ tab at the top.
Next, you will see your domain names.
Simply click the ‘Renew now’ button for the domain you want to renew.
After that, a popup window will open where you can select the number of years for domain renewal.
From here, go ahead and click the ‘Choose payment method’ button.
Lastly, complete the checkout process to make the purchase and renew your domain name.
If you want to learn more about Hostinger and its features, then you may want to see our detailed Hostinger review.
How to Renew Domain Name in SiteGround
SiteGround is the highest-rated WordPress hosting service. What’s great about them is that they offer in-house WordPress speed and security solutions.
It is also an officially recommended hosting solution by WordPress, providing one of the industry’s best customer support around the clock. This is why we use SiteGround to host the WPBeginner website.
You can easily renew a domain name by logging in to your SiteGround account. Once you’re on the dashboard, head to the ‘Billing’ tab.
Under the Billing tab, you’ll see more options. Simply switch to the ‘Renewals’ tab.
After that, click the checkbox to choose your website and renew its domain name. There is also an option to choose the time period for domain renewal. You can select anywhere from 1 month to 24 months.
Next, you can scroll down to enter the payment details.
Simply click the ‘Pay Now’ button after entering the payment information, and your domain name will be renewed.
Renewing a Domain Name in HostGator
HostGator is another popular WordPress hosting service and domain registrar. It offers 24/7 support, 1-click WordPress installation, free domain name, free SSL certificate, and more.
To renew a domain name in HostGator, you will first need to log in to your account. After that, you can click the ‘Renewal Center’ option from the menu on the left.
On the next screen, you will see different products and services you’ve purchased in HostGator.
Go ahead and click the ‘Domain Name’ checkbox to select it, and then click the ‘Renew Now’ button at the top.
After that, you will see your cart with domain name renewal.
You can also change the number of years for renewing the domain name. By default, it will be set to 1 year. But you can click the dropdown menu and change it to a maximum of 5 years.
Next, you can click the ‘Continue to Checkout’ button and complete the purchase process.
Once that’s done, your domain will be renewed in HostGator.
Domain Name Renewal in Namecheap
Namecheap is a popular domain registrar that helps users find the right domain name for their website.
You can renew a domain in Namecheap by logging in to your account. From here, you can head to the ‘Domain List’ tab from the menu on the left.
Now click the ‘Manage’ button next to the domain name you want to renew.
Next, you can head to the ‘Status & Validity’ section.
Go ahead and click the ‘Add Years’ button for your domain name.
After that, you can click the dropdown menu to select the number of years to renew your domain name.
Once that’s done, you can click the ‘Confirm Order’ button.
From here, simply follow the checkout process and complete the payment to renew your domain name.
How to Renew a Domain Name in GoDaddy
GoDaddy is one of the biggest and most popular domain registrars. It also offers managed WordPress hosting, website builder, security features, automatic updates, daily backups, and more.
You can log in to the GoDaddy Domain Portfolio to renew a domain name. To access the Domain Portfolio, click the dialpad icon at the top next to My Account and click the ‘Domains’ option.
Next, you can select the domain name you want to renew by clicking the checkbox.
After that, you’ll need to click the ‘Renew Now’ option at the bottom.
A new popup window will now open, where you can select the domain name renewal length. GoDaddy lets you renew a domain from 1 year to 9 years.
From here, simply click the ‘Continue to Checkout’ button.
Next, you can view your cart and complete the checkout process to renew the domain name.
WordPress.com is a hosting service by Automattic, the company led by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.
Most people often confuse WordPress.com with WordPress.org, but they are very different. WordPress.org is a popular website platform and is open source. While WordPress.com is a propriety blog hosting service.
In WordPress.com, you get a free domain name with its hosting plans. To renew the domain, you’ll need to log in to your account. From here, head to the ‘Purchases’ tab from the menu on the left and then select your domain.
On the next screen, you will see details of your domain name.
Simply click the ‘Renew now’ button at the top or bottom of the page.
After that, you can head to the checkout page, select the renewal length, and complete the payment process.
That’s it. Your domain will be renewed on WordPress.com.
Bonus Tip: Transfer a Domain Name for Lower Rates
When you’re renewing a domain name on your preferred registration or web hosting service, it’s better to compare prices on other platforms as well before paying.
Sometimes, the renewal costs can be higher on your existing service. This is where you can transfer a domain name to another web hosting company or domain registrar.
For instance, Hostinger offers a feature to transfer a domain easily without any hassle.
You can also find this feature in other WordPress hosting services.
Besides that, here are more useful guides to help you out with domain names:
Do you want to create a news website but are not sure how to get started?
News sites are popular among users all around the world. You can attract an audience from every corner of the world and build a brand. While it can be difficult to compete with established sites, you can write about your favorite topics, cover local area news, and report on specific niches.
In this article, we will show you how to make a news website step by step.
Here is an overview of everything we will cover in this guide. You can click the links below to jump ahead to your preferred section.
People are constantly in search of the latest information about different topics. Be it current affairs, technology, lifestyle, fashion, or updates about your local area, creating a news website can open a world of opportunities.
For instance, it helps you reach a wider audience. You can attract readers from different parts of the world and grow traffic on your website.
It also allows you to make money online. You can partner with brands and companies in different countries. Or start a subscription service like The New York Times and offer exclusive access to premium content.
Besides that, a news website lets you create a brand for a specific niche. You can cover training topics or the latest news from different industries and build brand recognition over time.
Another benefit of making a news site is that you can create different content formats. For example, simply turn textual news articles into videos, start a newsletter to inform your subscribers, or start a podcast.
That said, let’s see what you’ll need to make a news site.
What You’ll Need to Start a News Website
To get started, the first thing you’ll need to do is find the right platform for your news website. This is essential because moving to a new host can be tricky and technical later on.
There are many platforms that you can use to make a news website, but each one of them has its own pros and cons. You can learn more by seeing our comparison of the best blogging platforms.
For example, you can start for free on WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger, Medium, and more. However, free platforms offer limited features and flexibility, which makes it hard to monetize your site and scale your business.
This is where WordPress.org comes in. It powers more than 43% of the websites on the internet. Plus, it is a powerful website builder that gives you full control and ownership of your website.
In fact, many notable news brands like CNN Press Room, Microsoft News, The New Times, and more use WordPress.
Do note that WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two different platforms. Please see our comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org to learn more.
Once you’ve selected WordPress.org as a platform for your news site, you’ll also need:
Web Hosting – This is the home for your news site where all the files, content, images, and other data will be stored.
Domain Name – It is your site’s address that users will enter in their browser (like wpbeginner.com or google.com)
Your undivided attention for the next 30 minutes.
In just a few minutes, you can easily create a news website using WordPress. Let’s dive into the steps.
Selecting Web Hosting and Installing WordPress
When creating a WordPress website, there are several costs you’ll need to look after.
For instance, a domain name usually costs $14.99 per year, and web hosting costs $7.99 per month. If you add an SSL certificate and more features to the web hosting plan, then this cost can go even higher.
That’s a lot for beginners and new website owners.
Luckily, our friends at Hostinger are offering an amazing deal where you get a free domain name and free SSL with each hosting plan. That’s an 81% discount on hosting for our readers.
So you can get started for as low as $2.24 per month.
To start, you’ll need to visit the Hostinger website and click the ‘Claim Deal’ button.
Next, Hostinger will ask you to select a pricing plan and click the ‘Add to Cart’ button.
We recommend that you start with the ‘Premium’ plan, but you can always upgrade to another plan later on.
On the next screen, you’ll need to select a hosting time period. For instance, you can choose to host for 1 month, 12 months, 24 months, or 48 months.
The 48 months plan gives you the best discount and maximum saving.
After that, you can create a new account on Hostinger.
There is also an option to log in using your Google or Facebook account.
Next, you will need to enter your personal details and select a payment method.
From here, simply complete the payment process and finish your purchase. After completing the purchase, you can go ahead and create a new website.
Simply head to the ‘Websites’ tab from your Hostinger dashboard. From here, click the ‘+ Create or migrate a website’ option.
This will launch the website setup wizard by Hostinger.
Next, you can choose the type of website you want to create. There are multiple options like online store, blog, business, portfolio, and others.
To create a news website, go ahead and select the ‘Blog’ option.
In the next step, Hostinger will ask if you’d like to create a new site or migrate an existing website.
Go ahead and select the ‘Create a new website’ option.
Next, Hostinger will ask you to select a platform for your news website.
You will have to choose the ‘WordPress with AI’ option and click the ‘Select’ button.
After that, Hostinger will require setting up login details for your WordPress account.
Simply enter an administrator email and select a password. Once that’s done, click the ‘Continue’ button.
In the next step, Hostinger will ask you to automatically install specific WordPress plugins on your website.
You can simply choose the plugins you want and click the ‘Continue’ button. Or skip this step and install plugins later on.
After that, Hostinger will show different website templates to choose from.
You can simply skip this step and choose a news theme later on for your WordPress site.
In the next step, Hostinger offers you the option to automatically create a few pieces of content using AI. You can add a brand name and description and let ChatGPT handle the rest.
Or you can skip this step and create content for your news website later on.
After that, Hostinger will ask you to select a desired domain. You can claim a free domain, buy a domain, or use a domain name that you already own.
For this tutorial, we will select the ‘Claim a Free Domain’ option.
After choosing a domain name, the WordPress installation will start.
To view your newly created site, you can go to the ‘Websites’ tab from your Hostinger dashboard.
Go ahead and click the ‘Admin Panel’ option to open the WordPress admin area.
This is where you can choose a theme for your news site, install and manage plugins, add content to posts and pages, and more.
Choosing a Theme for Your News Site
Now that you’ve created a news website using WordPress, the next step is to choose a theme. Choosing the right theme is essential, as it should display your latest and trending news prominently while making the reading experience pleasant.
WordPress offers over 11,000 free themes to choose from. To add a theme, simply head to Appearance » Themes from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Add New Theme’ button.
Next, you’ll see different WordPress themes.
You can filter them by ‘news’ and choose the one you like.
If you’re looking for a beginner-friendly theme to get started, then we recommend Astra. It has many customization options and is a perfect choice for news websites.
The best part about using Astra is that it supports popular page builders out of the box. Plus, it’s optimized for WordPress SEO (search engine optimization) and ensures fast performance.
With Astra, you get multiple templates for a news site. You can simply select one and customize it. For instance, here’s a preview of a news template offered by Astra.
On the other hand, you can also create a custom news theme using SeedProd. It is the best WordPress website builder that lets you create a theme without editing any code.
There are plenty of templates to choose from and different customization options. The best part, SeedProd offers a drag-and-drop theme and page builder, so it’s very easy to edit your site.
WordPress offers 2 default post types called posts and pages. Posts are part of the blogging functionality. On the other hand, pages are static content used for different landing pages, like an about us or contact us page.
To start adding content, you’ll need to use the WordPress block editor (also called Gutenberg).
Unlike the old Classic editor, you get modern features and more flexibility in creating content in the block editor. It makes it very easy to format text and add media like videos and images to your content.
We recommend starting with the static content, as it will not change on a regular basis. There are pretty common kinds of static content that almost all websites on the internet share.
These include a contact form page, an about us page, a privacy policy page, a terms of service page, and more.
For instance, here’s a preview of what the Contact Us page from OptinMonster looks like. You can use a page builder to create custom landing pages just like this.
Next, you can start creating news articles as blog posts.
We recommend publishing new content on a frequent basis. Large news sites post multiple news articles daily. You can start with a few posts per week and then gradually increase the frequency.
Customizing and Adjusting Your News Website Settings
After adding content to your WordPress news site, you can tweak different settings on your site and customize its appearance.
Let’s look at some of the things you can adjust on your site.
1. Edit the News Website Title and Tagline
You can change the site title and add a tagline to your news site.
The site title will be the name of your website, like WPBeginner. While the tagline helps describe your website briefly.
Simply go to Settings » General page from the WordPress dashboard. From here, enter the site title and tagline.
Note: If you’re using an SEO plugin like All in One SEO (AIOSEO) or Yoast SEO, then leave the site title field blank. Otherwise, the plugins will override the title text for better search engine optimization.
2. Create Categories to Organize Your Content
WordPress categories are a powerful tool that helps sort your content. Users can quickly view news from different regions, industries, or topics by navigating different categories.
Categories also develop a proper structure for your site. This is great for your site’s SEO, as it helps search engines understand what your page is about.
You can easily create categories and subcategories by going to Posts » Categories from the WordPress dashboard. Then, enter a name and click the ‘Add New Category’ button.
The navigational menu helps your readers to browse your site. It also lets you organize your content and make it easy for users to access important articles and pages.
For example, The Guardian shows a menu at the top of its website where you can access content based on different categories, like news, sports, culture, and lifestyle.
Many news themes come with built-in menus, and you can also create your own using WordPress’s powerful navigation menu system.
You can allow users to leave comments on your news article and participate in discussions. This is great for boosting engagement on your site.
However, if you don’t have comment moderation enabled, then it can lead to a lot of spam on your site.
To ensure that comments don’t automatically appear on your site, head to Settings » Discussion from the WordPress dashboard. Next, you’ll need to scroll down to the Before a comment appears section and click the ‘Comment must be manually approved’ checkbox.
Optimize Your WordPress News Site for Search Engines
The next step is to ensure that users can easily find your news website on the internet. This is where optimizing your site for search engines is essential.
You can drive a lot of traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. By optimizing your content, you can rank higher in search engine page results and get more people to visit your news site.
The best part is that WordPress is SEO-friendly out of the box. However, you still need to ensure that your site is optimized correctly.
The easiest way to do that is by using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin. It is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and helps you configure your site for search engines without hiring a professional or any technical knowledge.
AIOSEO offers powerful features like TruSEO on-page analysis, rich snippets schema markup, XML sitemaps, breadcrumb navigation, social media integration, and more. It handles all the technical SEO optimization for your WordPress news site.
Besides using AIOSEO, you can also ensure that you’re following the basics of SEO. For instance, check your site is visible to search engines, your site has an SEO-friendly URL, you’re using HTTPS, adding internal links to your content, and more.
To ensure your news site is properly optimized, please follow our step-by-step guide on WordPress SEO.
Submit Your WordPress News Site to Google News
Aside from following the basics of SEO, you can go a step further and submit your site to Google News. This can skyrocket your website traffic, attract a new audience, and build authority.
Google News is a news aggregator that shows the latest stories and news from different sources. Getting your site featured in Google News can improve visibility and also help capture the Top Stories featured snippet.
Before submitting your site to Google News, you’ll need to ensure that you follow Google News policies. For example, your content should not be dangerous, deceptive, hateful, sexually explicit, violent, or manipulative.
Once you’ve followed all the policies, you can use the AIOSEO plugin to set up a news sitemap. The news sitemap helps Google to quickly discover your content and show it in the news section.
After creating a sitemap, you can head to the Google Publisher Center website.
Here, you can enter your news site’s URL and follow the onscreen instructions to submit it to Google News.
Did you know that 70% of people who visit your news site will never come back again?
You can change this by using OptinMonster. It is the best lead generation and conversion optimization software for WordPress. OptinMonster lets you create popups, spin-to-win campaigns, floating bars, and more. Plus, it offers powerful display rules, allowing you to show the campaigns to the right audience at the right time.
For example, you can offer free resources, coupons, discount deals, and other incentives in exchange for users’ email addresses.
Once you start getting subscribers, you can build an email list and set up a newsletter to send the latest news, trending stories, and more. This will help bring people back to your site and build authority.
Website push notifications help you stay in touch with your audience after they’ve left your site. They get a higher engagement rate compared to social media or email.
You can use PushEngage to get started. It is the best push notification software for WordPress. It is super easy to use and helps set up automated campaigns, create segments for different subscribers, detailed analytics, and more.
You can send notifications to inform users about new articles, breaking news, the latest trends, and more.
Another way to grow your website traffic is by sharing content on social media platforms.
For instance, you can send out a tweet on X (formerly known as Twitter) about the latest news and share news articles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more.
You can also add social sharing buttons on your site so visitors can share the news with their friends and followers.
With WordPress, there are ways to automate the process and automatically share content to social media when they’re published. Simply use Uncanny Automator to create automated workflows and integrate social media profiles with your website.
Once you start adding more content and attracting more visitors, you can take your news site to the next level.
Here are some tips for boosting engagement on your website.
1. Adding a Scrolling News Ticker in WordPress
A scrolling news ticker is a single line of text that appears continuously across the screen and shows small snippets of information.
For instance, you can use it to show breaking news, sporting results, live financial and currency information, weather, discount deals, upcoming events, and more.
The easiest way of adding a scrolling news ticker is by using the Ditty plugin. It is a free plugin that is very easy to use and set up. For more details, please see our step-by-step guide on how to add a scrolling news ticker in WordPress.
2. Show Popular and Trending News Articles
Another way to boost engagement on your site is by displaying popular and trending news articles within or at the end of your content
You can also show related news articles and other blog posts on similar topics within your content. This makes it easier for users to discover new content and stay longer on your site.
You can curate news from multiple sources and display them on your site as an aggregator.
News aggregators are useful for many niches and allow users to view news from their favorite websites in one place. It also lets you make money online by selling subscriptions, advertisements, and sponsorships.
Some popular news aggregators include Feedly, Google News, and Alltop. You can also create your own news aggregator site using a plugin like WP RSS Aggregator.
We hope this article helped you learn how to make a news website step by step. You may also want to see our ultimate guide to boosting WordPress performance and the best WordPress plugins to have on your site.
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.
Recently, one of our readers asked us how they can prevent overselling out of stock items in their online store.
When a customer purchases an item that isn’t available, it can lead to disappointment, loss of trust, and a negative user experience. However, you can reduce refunds and improve customer satisfaction by not allowing out of stock items to be sold.
In this article, we will show you how to easily prevent overselling out of stock items in WordPress, step by step.
Why Prevent Customers From Buying Out of Stock Items in WordPress?
If you have an online store, then overselling out of stock items can lead to customer disappointment and complicate order fulfillment.
For example, if you sell clothes and a customer places an order for a shirt that isn’t available, then you may have to manually adjust orders, track down a replacement, or contact the customer about product substitutions.
This can damage your brand reputation heavily and users may even leave negative customer reviews on your WordPress site.
By improving your inventory management, you can ensure that you always have the items customers want and can inform them if they go out of stock. Doing this will boost your sales, reduce complaints, and enhance your store’s credibility.
Having said that, let’s see how to easily prevent overselling out of stock items in WordPress with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and WP Simple Pay.
You can use the links below to jump to the method of your choice:
You can easily prevent overselling products by visiting the WooCoomerce » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard and switching to the ‘Products’ tab.
Once you do that, click on the ‘Inventory’ link. This will open some new settings on your page where you must check the ‘Enable stock management’ option.
After that, scroll down to the ‘Notifications’ section and check the ‘Enable low stock notifications’ and ‘Enable out of stock notifications’ options.
You will now receive an email notification when a product has low stock or goes out of stock.
Now, you can add the email address where you want to receive these notifications next to the ‘Notification recipient(s)’ option. You can also add multiple email addresses by separating them with a comma.
Next, you can add the low stock threshold according to your liking. You will be sent an email when the product stock reaches this amount.
For instance, if you are selling a customized jewelry piece and have set the low stock threshold to 2, then you will get an email when your store has only 2 of the jewelry pieces left.
Next, you will see the ‘Out of stock threshold’ option, which you can leave as is. This setting will change a product’s status to ‘Out of Stock’ automatically once the stock reaches zero.
Additionally, you can check the ‘Hide out of stock items from the catalog’ option. This means that out of stock items won’t be displayed in your shop’s product catalog when users browse through your store.
Then, you can also configure the ‘Stock display format’ option from the dropdown menu.
For instance, if you want to show the stock quantity of each product to your users, then you can select that option.
You can choose the ‘Only show quantity remaining in stock when low’ option if you want the users to know when only 2 items for that product are left in the inventory. This option can create a sense of urgency among visitors and may encourage them to buy your products.
However, if you don’t want to display stock quantity at all, then you can pick the ‘Never show quantity remaining in stock’ option.
Finally, click the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.
Now you must visit the Products » All Products page from the WordPress dashboard to configure the stock quantity of individual items.
To do this, click the ‘Edit’ link under any product.
This will open a new screen, where you must scroll down to the ‘Product Data’ section and switch to the ‘Inventory’ tab.
Next, check the box next to the ‘Stock management’ option.
This will open some new settings and you can start by adding the quantity for the product you are editing. For instance, if you are selling a blue colored hoodie and have 10 items of it in stock, then you can add that value next to the ‘Quantity’ option.
Once you do that, you must select the ‘Do not allow’ option for the ‘Allow backorders?’ setting.
Backorders are like pre-orders for out of stock items. Now, customers won’t be able to place orders for unavailable items and there will be less chance of user dissatisfaction.
After that, you can add a low stock threshold for the product. If you don’t configure this setting, then the storewide low stock threshold that you configured earlier will be applied for the individual product.
Finally, click the ‘Update’ button at the top to store your settings. You have now successfully prevented overselling out of stock products in WooCommerce.
Prevent Overselling Out of Stock Items in Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is the best WordPress plugin for selling digital products like music, eBooks, spreadsheets, software, and more.
Usually, vendors do not need to create a purchase limit for digital files. However, if you are selling items on your such as tickets to an event with a specific limit or an expiration date, then you will have to prevent overselling sold-out tickets.
You can easily do this using the plugin’s Purchase Limit extension.
Once you have done that, visit the Downloads » Extensions page from the WordPress dashboard.
Here, you must locate the ‘Purchase Limit’ extension and click the ‘Install’ button under it.
After that, go to the Downloads menu tab from the admin dashboard. Here, you will see a list of all the digital downloads you created for your site.
Simply click the ‘Edit’ link under the product where you want to set a purchase limit.
This will open the block editor, where you must scroll down to the ‘Download Details’ section.
Here, you can type the number of tickets or copies of the digital product that you are selling under the ‘Purchase Limit’ option.
For instance, if you have ten tickets to sell for an event, then you can add 10 as the value in the field. When your store sells these 10 tickets, your purchase button text will change to ‘Sold Out’ automatically.
This way, you won’t be able to oversell out-of-stock products to customers.
If you have added multiple price options for your digital product, then you can also set different purchase limits for various packages.
For example, if you have 10 normal tickets and 5 VIP ones to sell for an event, then you can set different purchase limits for them.
You can also check the ‘Disable product when any item sells out’ option. This feature is only available if you have multiple pricing plans for a product.
This means that your product will be removed from the catalog once it sells out.
Finally, go back to the top of the page and click the ‘Update’ or Publish’ button to store your settings.
You have now successfully prevented overselling your out of stock digital product.
If you want to set a default purchase limit for all the digital products on your website, then you can do that by visiting the Downloads » Settings page and switching to the ‘Misc’ tab.
Next, click on ‘File Downloads’ to open more settings on the page.
From here, set a default limit for all your products by typing a value next to the ‘File Download Limit’ option.
This will be the maximum number of times each file can be purchased and downloaded from your site. Once that limit is reached, the product status will then automatically change to ‘Sold Out’.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Prevent Overselling Out of Stock Items in WP Simple Pay
If you use WP Simple Pay on your website, then this method is for you.
WP Simple Pay is the best WordPress Stripe plugin on the market that makes it super easy to add a payment form to your website.
It is an ideal choice if you have a membership site that accepts subscription payments or if you host workshops like cooking lessons, dance classes, coding, and more.
You may have a limited number of subscriptions to offer or a limited number of openings for your class and do not want to oversell your services or subscriptions. In that case, you can easily avoid overselling using WP Simple Pay’s purchase restrictions feature.
Note: WP Simple Pay has a free plan but you will need the pro plan of the plugin to unlock the purchase restrictions feature.
Upon activation, a setup wizard will be launched on the screen where you must click the ‘Let’s Get Started’ button.
You will be guided to the first step, where you must add your license key and click the ‘Activate and Continue’ button.
You can find this information in your account on the WP Simple Pay website.
Next, you have to connect your Stripe account with the plugin.
To do this, click the ‘Connect with Stripe’ button.
After that, you must log in to your Stripe account to connect it with WP Simple Pay. Once you do that, you must configure the other setup wizard steps.
Next, visit the WP Simple Pay » Add New page from the WordPress admin sidebar. This will take you to the ‘Select a template’ page where you can click the ‘Use Template’ under any template.
For this tutorial, we will be creating a simple payment form.
This will launch the form builder, where you can start by adding a title and description for your form.
After that, you can select ‘On-site payment form’ as the type and then switch to the ‘Payment’ tab.
Here, you can scroll down to the ‘Price Options’ section and add an amount for your product or service.
You can also add multiple price options by clicking on the ‘Add Price’ button.
Then, you can scroll down to the ‘Payment Methods’ section and check the box next to the payment method you want to add to your site.
You can add AliPay, Klarna, AfterPay, and any other methods that you like.
Once you have done that, you can switch to the ‘Form Fields’ tab to add, rearrange, or delete fields in the form according to your liking.
Next, switch to the ‘Purchase Restrictions’ tab and check the ‘Hide the payment form after a set number of payments’ option.
Once you do that, type the number of subscriptions that you want to sell with your form.
For example, if you run a dance class and have room for 15 students only, then you can type the number 15 into the ‘All payments count towards a single limit’ field. This means that once 15 users fill out your form and pay the fees, the form will be hidden from other users, preventing overselling.
However, if you have multiple pricing plans in your form, then you can select the ‘Each price option has its own limit’ option and add the availability number for individual pricing packages.
Next, you can switch to the ‘Payment Page’ tab and check the ‘Enable a dedicated payment page’ option.
You can now create a custom page for your payment form by adding a permalink, color scheme, image, and footer text. Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Publish’ button to store your settings.
You have now successfully prevented overselling your membership subscriptions or classes with WP Simple Pay.
Bonus! Inventory Management Tips for Your Online Store
Apart from preventing overselling out of stock products, here are some other inventory management tips that can help boost traffic to your online store and lead to more conversions.
For instance, you should regularly count your physical inventory to avoid any discrepancies between your online store record and actual products. You can also categorize your products based on popularity, value, and lead time for better management.
You must also analyze the past sales trends in your store to predict future demand and adjust your inventory levels accordingly. You can easily do this using MonsterInsights, which is the best analytics solution on the market.
The plugin can show you an overview report for metrics like total sales, revenue, average order value, and conversion rate. You can adjust the reports to analyze older data by setting a custom date range easily.
Some other tips for better inventory management include adding discount offers for less popular items and organizing your inventory according to product type.
Using all these tips will help you get ahead of your competitors and ultimately get more sales.
We hope this article helped you learn how to prevent overselling out of stock items in WordPress. You may also want to see our beginner’s guide on how to increase WooCommerce sales and our top picks for the best WooCommerce themes for your store.
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.
Are you wondering if WordPress is good for eCommerce and what the pros and cons are?
WordPress is the most popular website builder platform and is the most recommended platform to start an eCommerce business.
In this article, we’ll explore if WordPress is good for eCommerce and what the pros and cons of using it are.
Why Use WordPress for E-commerce?
WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder, powering more than 43.1% of all websites on the internet. A large number of these websites are eCommerce stores.
The massive popularity of WordPress makes it the most recommended eCommerce platform to start your business.
Some of the most compelling reasons for using WordPress for eCommerce are:
Freedom – You own your eCommerce store, and no third party controls how you run it.
Massive community – Using WordPress, you become part of a huge online community of business owners running their businesses on WordPress.
Wider Availability – WordPress supports more payment gateways than any other eCommerce platform. It also supports multilingual eCommerce stores in most currencies and locales.
Growth Hacking – Being the most popular solution, it has integrations for most marketing and growth hacking tools you may need. This makes it super easy for you to grow your eCommerce business over time.
For more details, look at our complete WordPress review for more in-depth coverage of its advantages and disadvantages.
What are The Pros and Cons of Using WordPress for E-commerce?
Like every business decision, you would want to consider the pros and cons of using WordPress as your eCommerce platform.
Let’s look at some of the most important pros and cons of using WordPress for your eCommerce business.
Pros of Using WordPress for Ecommerce:
1. WordPress is Free
WordPress software is available for free. You can download, customize, and use it anywhere you want.
You’ll still need to pay for eCommerce hosting, domain name, and add-ons. For more on this topic, see our explainer on why is WordPress free, what the costs are, and what’s the actual catch.
2. Zero Transaction Fees
Unlike most other eCommerce platforms, WordPress does not charge you for transactions. The only fees you pay for transactions are to your payment service provider (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) and your bank.
3. You Control The Costs
With WordPress, you control the costs. You can choose your hosting service, premium add-ons, and marketing tools.
With this freedom, you save a ton of start-up money, which you can then invest in growing your business and making more sales. For more details, see our article on the cost of building an eCommerce website.
4. Thousands of Plugins
WordPress has over 59,000 free plugins. Think of plugins as apps for your eCommerce website. You can install one when you need a certain feature, like adding a contact form or customizing the shopping cart experience, among others.
With so much choice, you can add almost any feature to your eCommerce store with just a few clicks. Look at our expert pick of the best eCommerce plugins for WordPress for some inspiration.
5. Countless Payment Gateways
WordPress supports all popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and more. It also supports lesser-known payment services and countless regional payment service providers.
You can add as many products to your website as you want and make as many sales as you can. Unlike many other eCommerce platforms, WordPress doesn’t restrict you to a set number of products or sales.
8. You Own and Control Your Website
Many online eCommerce platforms have terms and conditions that allow them to shut down your eCommerce website at any time, with or without a reason. They can hold your data and any unprocessed transactions.
With WordPress, you own and control your website. Even if, in rare circumstances, a hosting company terminates your account, you can easily use a backup to transfer your website to a different hosting company. You own all your data, transactions, and payments.
Cons of Using WordPress for Ecommerce
Now, so far, we have covered the advantages of using WordPress and they are plentiful.
However, WordPress has its disadvantages as well, and it is best to keep them in mind.
1. Comes with a Slight Learning Curve
WordPress comes with a slight learning curve. Like any new software you use for your business, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with WordPress and how it works.
Luckily, WPBeginner got you covered. We have free step-by-step WordPress video tutorials made specifically for WordPress beginners. These courses will get you up to speed much more quickly.
Most beginners who start a WordPress business quickly graduate to advanced-level users with some hands-on practice.
2. You Manage The Software Updates and Backups
Like any software or app, WordPress regularly releases updates. As the website owner, you are responsible for installing these updates to keep your website secure and access the latest features.
It is just as easy to install updates in WordPress as on your phone or computer. You’ll get a notification about a new version, and then you just click a button to install it.
Similarly, you are also responsible for keeping backups of your website. This allows you to easily move your website, secure your data, or restore it in case of a hosting failure.
Luckily, there are excellent backup plugins for WordPress, like the Duplicator Pro. Once properly set up, it will automatically make regular backups and store them on the cloud.
It will also help you restore your website with just a few clicks or move it to a different hosting company if needed.
3. Scalability May Increase Costs
We recommend all new businesses start with a low-cost hosting plan from companies like Bluehost and Hostinger.
Unlike other eCommerce platforms, this flexibility helps you save a ton of money when starting your business.
However, as your business grows, your website will need more server resources. You’ll need to upgrade to a managed hosting service like SiteGround or WP Engine.
This will increase your costs. However, the upside is that your business will now be able to afford these extra costs, and it will still be cheaper than other eCommerce service providers.
4. You Are Responsible for Security
Like updates and backups, you are responsible for keeping your website secure.
Now, this may sound a bit tricky, but luckily, many WordPress hosting companies also take excellent measures to protect sites hosted on their servers from malicious attacks.
Both, Cloudflare and Sucuri provide a website firewall that blocks malicious traffic even before it reaches your website.
What Kind of Ecommerce Solutions Available in WordPress?
When comparing eCommerce platforms, you’ll notice some of them are good for selling specific types of products and not so great with others.
For instance, Shopify is great for selling physical products that require shipping but not for selling online courses.
In comparison, WordPress is the only eCommerce platform that is equally great for selling all types of products and services using its powerful add-ons.
Here are some of the top eCommerce solutions you can use with WordPress, depending on your business.
WooCommerce – Available as a free WordPress plugin, WooCommerce is the world’s #1 eCommerce platform. It allows you to create any type of online store and can be used to sell physical goods as well as digital products.
MemberPress – A powerful eCommerce solution that helps you sell subscription based products like online courses, premium content, pay-per-view website, memberships for communities, and more.
Easy Digital Downloads – Made specifically for selling digital products like software, ebooks, music, digital art, and more.
WP Simple Pay – Selling a handful of products or services? WP Simple Pay makes it easy to accept online payments without using a shopping cart plugin on your website.
WP Forms Payments – Allows you to accept online payments by creating your own custom payment forms. Perfect for selling individual products, services, online bookings, and more.
How Does WordPress Compare to Other Ecommerce Platforms?
WordPress compares neck and neck with all top eCommerce platforms and outperforms them in flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and broader availability.
What Does WordPress Do Better than Other Ecommerce Platforms?
WordPress is better at saving you costs when starting an eCommerce business. You can start with the bare minimum and only pay for tools/services you need.
WordPress doesn’t charge you for individual transactions. This makes it easy for you to create a sustainable business plan for growth in the long run.
It doesn’t limit the number of products or sales you can make. Many top eCommerce platforms will force you to upgrade your plan once you reach a certain threshold of products or sales.
You own all your website and its data and can move it to any other hosting platform or eCommerce solution when you need it.
For details, take a look at these comparisons with individual platforms.
How to Start an Ecommerce Business with WordPress?
To start your eCommerce business with WordPress, you’ll need to make a WordPress website.
There are two types of WordPress available.
First, there is WordPress.org, which is the WordPress software that we talked about in this article and what we recommend. Then, there is WordPress.com, which is a hosted website platform like Wix or Squarespace. For details, see our article on WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org.
To start with WordPress.org, you’ll need a hosting account and a domain name.
Normally, pricing for starter hosting plans starts at $7.99 per month (usually paid annually), and domain name costs around $16.99 per year.
Luckily, Bluehost has agreed to offer WPBeginner users a generous discount on hosting with a free domain name. Basically, you can get started for $2.75 per month.
If you sign up with Bluehost, they will automatically install WordPress for you. All other hosting companies also offer a 1-click WordPress installer, which you can find under your hosting account.
Are you looking for some WordPress code snippets to use on your website?
Adding code snippets to your WordPress site allows you to build unique designs and functionalities that may not be possible with themes and plugins. Snippets can also improve security on your website and make the admin dashboard more user-friendly.
In this article, we will share with you our list of the most useful WordPress code snippets for beginners.
Why Add Code Snippets in WordPress?
If you have a WordPress website, then adding some useful code snippets to your theme files or a code snippets plugin can help you unlock limitless customization and make your site stand out.
You can use custom code to tailor some specific elements on your website. For example, you might change the text selection color in WordPress by adding a simple CSS code snippet.
Other than that, snippets can help you expand your coding skills and use the vast library of code snippets that are shared by the WordPress community for free.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the most useful WordPress code snippets for beginners. You can use the quick links below to jump to different parts of our tutorial:
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a file format that defines vector graphics using the XML markup language. This format allows you to enlarge images without losing any quality.
These files are smaller and more lightweight than JPEG or PNG, helping you boost your website speed.
However, WordPress does not allow SVG file uploads by default because SVGs can contain malicious code that compromises site security.
With that in mind, if you still want to upload SVG files on your website, then you can add the following code snippet to your site:
/**
* Allow SVG uploads for administrator users.
*
* @param array $upload_mimes Allowed mime types.
*
* @return mixed
*/
add_filter(
'upload_mimes',
function ( $upload_mimes ) {
// By default, only administrator users are allowed to add SVGs.
// To enable more user types edit or comment the lines below but beware of
// the security risks if you allow any user to upload SVG files.
if ( ! current_user_can( 'administrator' ) ) {
return $upload_mimes;
}
$upload_mimes['svg'] = 'image/svg+xml';
$upload_mimes['svgz'] = 'image/svg+xml';
return $upload_mimes;
}
);
/**
* Add SVG files mime check.
*
* @param array $wp_check_filetype_and_ext Values for the extension, mime type, and corrected filename.
* @param string $file Full path to the file.
* @param string $filename The name of the file (may differ from $file due to $file being in a tmp directory).
* @param string[] $mimes Array of mime types keyed by their file extension regex.
* @param string|false $real_mime The actual mime type or false if the type cannot be determined.
*/
add_filter(
'wp_check_filetype_and_ext',
function ( $wp_check_filetype_and_ext, $file, $filename, $mimes, $real_mime ) {
if ( ! $wp_check_filetype_and_ext['type'] ) {
$check_filetype = wp_check_filetype( $filename, $mimes );
$ext = $check_filetype['ext'];
$type = $check_filetype['type'];
$proper_filename = $filename;
if ( $type && 0 === strpos( $type, 'image/' ) && 'svg' !== $ext ) {
$ext = false;
$type = false;
}
$wp_check_filetype_and_ext = compact( 'ext', 'type', 'proper_filename' );
}
return $wp_check_filetype_and_ext;
},
10,
5
);
You can add this code to your theme’s functions.php file or use a code snippets plugin like WPCode. Later on in this article, we will show you exactly how to do this.
By default, WordPress shows an admin bar at the top of your website to all the logged-in users like subscribers, authors, editors, and any other user roles.
This admin bar can direct them to your WordPress dashboard, where they can make any changes to your site depending on their user permissions.
However, it can be a bit distracting when you are looking at the front end of your website because it can sometimes overlap with design elements like the header.
To disable the WP admin bar, simply add the following PHP code snippet to your WordPress site:
/* Disable WordPress Admin Bar for all users */
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );
Upon code execution, the admin bar won’t display on the website’s front end.
WordPress displays the current WordPress version number on your website for tracking.
However, sometimes, this footprint can cause security leaks by telling the hackers about the WordPress version in use. The hackers can then target known vulnerabilities in specific versions.
To remove the version number, add the following code snippet to your website:
RSS feeds allow users to receive regular updates about your WordPress blog with a feed reader like Feedly.
This can help promote your content and drive more traffic to your site. By adding featured images or thumbnails next to the posts in the RSS feeds, you can make the feed visually appealing and further improve the user experience.
You can easily show posts thumbnails in your RSS feeds by adding the following useful WordPress code snippet:
/**
* Add the post thumbnail, if available, before the content in feeds.
*
* @param string $content The post content.
*
* @return string
*/
function wpcode_snippet_rss_post_thumbnail( $content ) {
global $post;
if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ) {
$content = '<p>' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) . '</p>' . $content;
}
return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_excerpt_rss', 'wpcode_snippet_rss_post_thumbnail' );
add_filter( 'the_content_feed', 'wpcode_snippet_rss_post_thumbnail' );
This can make your feed more engaging and bring back visitors to your site.
When you log in to your WordPress dashboard, you will be greeted with a ‘Howdy’ followed by your display name at the top right corner of the screen.
This greeting may not sound natural to you or look outdated, or even a bit annoying.
You can easily change the greeting in the admin bar by adding the following code snippet to your WordPress site:
function wpcode_snippet_replace_howdy( $wp_admin_bar ) {
// Edit the line below to set what you want the admin bar to display intead of "Howdy,".
$new_howdy = 'Welcome,';
$my_account = $wp_admin_bar->get_node( 'my-account' );
$wp_admin_bar->add_node(
array(
'id' => 'my-account',
'title' => str_replace( 'Howdy,', $new_howdy, $my_account->title ),
)
);
}
add_filter( 'admin_bar_menu', 'wpcode_snippet_replace_howdy', 25 );
Once you add the code, you must also add a greeting of your liking next to the $new_howdy = line in the code.
XML-RPC is a core WordPress API. It allows users to connect to their websites with third-party services.
For instance, you will need to enable XML-RPC if you want to use an automation tool like Uncanny Automator or a mobile app to manage your website.
However, if you don’t want to use any of these functionalities, then we recommend disabling XML-RPC to prevent hackers from gaining access to your website.
Hackers can use these vulnerabilities to find your login credentials or launch DDoS attacks.
To disable XML-RPC, you can use the following code snippet on your website:
Excerpts are the first few lines of your blog posts displayed under the post headings on your WordPress home, blog, or archives page.
You may want to shorten your excerpt length to create a sense of intrigue among users and encourage them to click on the post to find out more. Similarly, you can also increase the length to give more context and key information to readers without having to click on the post.
To change the excerpt length, just add the following code snippet to your website:
add_filter(
'excerpt_length',
function ( $length ) {
// Number of words to display in the excerpt.
return 40;
},
500
);
By default, this snippet will limit the excerpt to 40 words, but you can adjust the number on Line 5 to whatever works best for your blog.
WordPress automatically updates its core software, plugins, or themes to reduce security threats, malware infections, website breaches, and data theft.
However, automatic updates can sometimes introduce compatibility issues or break your website in rare situations.
In that case, you can use the following code snippet to disable automatic updates:
This will disable all the WordPress automatic updates for the core software, themes, and plugins. For detailed information, see our tutorial on how to disable automatic updates in WordPress.
How to Add Code Snippets in WordPress (Easy Method)
Now that you know the most useful WordPress code snippets for beginners, you can easily add them to your theme’s stylesheets or functions.php file.
However, remember that the smallest error while typing the code can break your site and make it inaccessible. Plus, if you switch to a different theme, then all your custom code will be lost and you will have to add it again.
It is the best WordPress code snippets plugin on the market that makes it super safe and easy to add custom code to your website.
Plus, the plugin also comes with a library of over 900 code snippets, including all the ones that we have mentioned above. For more information, see our complete WPCode review.
Note: There is also a free WPCode plugin that you can use. However, upgrading to the premium plugin will give you access to a cloud-based snippets library, code revisions, and more.
Upon activation, visit the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard.
This will take you to the snippet library, where you can add custom code to your website by clicking the ‘Use Snippet’ button under the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet) option.
However, if you want to use a premade code snippet, then you can simply click the ‘Use Snippet’ button under that option.
If you are adding a custom code snippet, then you simply need to paste it into the ‘Code Preview’ box.
Then, scroll down to the ‘Insertion’ section and choose the ‘Auto Insert’ mode. The code will be automatically executed on your website upon snippet activation.
Finally, visit the top of the page and toggle the inactive switch to active. After that, just click the ‘Update’ button to store your settings.
You have now successfully added the code snippet to your WordPress site.
Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Code Snippets
Here is a list of some questions frequently asked by our readers about using custom code and code snippets in WordPress.
How do I display code on my WordPress site?
If you write blog posts about technical topics, then adding code snippets to your posts can be useful. To do this, you must open the page/post where you want to display the code snippet and click the add block ‘+’ button.
Once you do that, just insert the Code block from the block menu and then add your custom code into the block itself.
Finally, click the ‘Publish’ or ‘Update’ button at the top to store your changes.
How do I create a WordPress website from scratch without coding?
If you want to create a website from scratch without using any code, then you can use SeedProd.
It is the best WordPress page builder on the market that lets you create custom themes and landing pages without any coding.
The plugin comes with 300+ premade templates, a drag-and-drop builder, and numerous advanced blocks that allow you to build an attractive website with just a few clicks.
Are you a new WordPress.org user who wants to learn how to edit your WordPress site?
Here at WPBeginner, we have helped millions of beginners build their websites using WordPress, which is the most popular website builder on the market. If you need help with editing your website, then you have come to the right place.
In this article, we will show you the basics of editing a WordPress website.
An Overview of Ways to Edit a WordPress Site
As an open-source content management system, WordPress has a lot of features to build and edit your website.
If you installed WordPress recently, then you may have come across Gutenberg, which is WordPress’s drag-and-drop block editor that allows you to customize a page or post. This feature is pretty easy and beginner-friendly.
You may have also seen the Full Site Editor.
This is an extension of Gutenberg that lets you use the block editor to customize block-based WordPress themes.
That said, if you use a classic, non-block WordPress theme, then the FSE won’t be available to you. Instead, you will have to use the WordPress Theme Customizer.
This feature doesn’t come with a drag-and-drop function, so it’s not as user-friendly. You have to edit your theme using some menu settings in the left-hand panel.
If you need more customization options that aren’t available in WordPress’s built-in features, then you can install a page builder plugin like SeedProd.
This is what we usually recommend to WordPress beginners. Like Gutenberg, SeedProd has a drag-and-drop feature. However, it offers more ways to get creative, like animation effects and more content block options to build your pages.
Some WordPress users also use the Classic Editor. It’s WordPress’s legacy page and post editor that looks a bit like a document editor.
This feature is no longer enabled by default in the latest WordPress versions. However, some people still use it because they are more familiar with it and want to keep their current website designs.
In this article, we will show you how to edit different parts of your WordPress website using the editors we’ve mentioned.
One of the first things you should do after installing WordPress is to choose and customize your theme. We will show you 3 ways to do that.
Customizing a Block Theme With the Full Site Editor
Full Site Editing was introduced in WordPress 5.9. It’s designed to make it easy to edit WordPress block themes using the block editor.
One tell-tale sign that you are using a block WordPress theme is you will see Appearance » Editor in your WordPress admin area. If you see Appearance » Customize instead, then you can skip to using the Theme Customizer.
If you want to find some free options, go to Appearance » Themes. Then, click ‘Add New Theme.’
After that, just switch to the ‘Block Themes’ tab.
You will then see dozens of block themes on your screen. For installation instructions, check out our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress theme.
Once you have the theme installed, you must go to Appearance » Editor.
Now, you will see the main Full Site Editing dashboard. You can then edit your theme’s navigation menu, styles, pages, templates, and patterns.
We will discuss these topics in the rest of the tutorial, but we will show you briefly how to change the style of your theme.
To do this, click the ‘Styles’ menu.
Now, you will see a list of the color scheme and typography pairings provided by the theme.
Every time you click on a style, the interface will preview it for you.
Once you are satisfied with your choice, just click ‘Save.’ Alternatively, you can create a custom style.
Customizing a Classic Theme With the Theme Customizer
If you use a classic WordPress theme, then you will work with the Theme Customizer to edit it. Simply head to Appearance » Customize from the WordPress admin area to access it.
Now, what you can customize here varies by the theme you are using.
For instance, if you have the Astra theme, then you can customize the style of your entire website, header, footer, sidebar, page, logo, and so on.
For this reason, we recommend reading your theme’s documentation for more instructions.
Our guide on the Theme Customizer can give you more detailed pointers.
Once you’ve made your changes, you can preview the website in different screen resolutions. Then, you can hit the ‘Publish’ button at the top to make your edits live.
One downside of the Theme Customizer is its user experience isn’t as flexible or easy as the block editor. If you feel this way, then we recommend using the next method instead.
Customizing a WordPress Theme With a Page Builder Plugin
Many WordPress users who aren’t satisfied with the platform’s built-in design features use a page builder to edit their site. This is a WordPress plugin that can replace the default editor for designing different parts of your website.
Most page builders come with a drag-and-drop functionality, so they are just as easy to use as the block editor. What’s more, they come with more page blocks and templates to personalize your website.
Out of all the page builders we’ve tried, we find SeedProd to be the best. It comes with 300+ templates for various industry categories, from eCommerce and accommodation to services.
Note: While SeedProd comes in a free version, we recommend upgrading to the Pro plan to access the Theme Builder. This is what we will use in this tutorial.
To use SeedProd, you will need to install the WordPress plugin first. After that, go to SeedProd » Settings to activate your Pro plan license. Simply insert your license key and click ‘Verify Key’ to complete this step.
As you can see, there are many theme template kits available, from online stores to service sites. Feel free to use the filtering and sorting settings to find the right one for your needs.
Once you’ve made your choice, just hover over the theme template and click the orange checkmark button to use it.
Now, just go back to the Theme Builder page and select a theme template you’d like to edit.
For demonstration purposes, we will show you how to edit the style of your SeedProd theme template. To do this, locate the ‘Global CSS’ theme template, hover over it, and click ‘Edit Design.’
You are now inside the SeedProd page builder and can customize your theme template’s style. Here, you can change your website’s colors, fonts, backgrounds, buttons, forms, and layout.
Let’s see how to change the theme’s default font. To do this, open the ‘Fonts’ menu. Then, just choose one of SeedProd’s many font and color options for the heading and body text.
All the changes you make will show up automatically in the right-side preview.
Once you are happy with the style, just click ‘Save’ to make these changes official.
Then, you can go back to SeedProd » Theme Builder and turn on the ‘Enable SeedProd Theme’ toggle in the top right corner.
If you have updated WordPress to the latest version, then most likely, you will use the Gutenberg block editor to edit a page or post.
You can create a new page by going to Pages » Add NewPage. This will automatically make an entirely blank page and direct you to the block editor.
On the other hand, if you want to edit an existing page, like the homepage or blog page, then you can go to Pages » All Pages. Hover your cursor over the page you want to edit, and then click ‘Edit.’
Alternatively, there is also the Quick Edit feature.
This allows you to modify the page’s title, URL slug, and last modified date.
You can do various things with the Quick Edit feature.
Examples include setting a password for the page, making it private, assigning it as a parent page, changing the page template, allowing/disallowing comments, and changing the page status.
To create a new post, simply head to Posts » Add NewPost to make a new blank post and edit it using the block editor.
Like before, you can edit an existing WordPress blog post by hovering your cursor over the selected post and clicking ‘Edit.’
The Quick Edit feature for posts is similar but with some minor differences.
Typically, you will start by clicking the ‘+’ add block button in the top left corner.
This is where you will find all the available blocks from WordPress and the plugins you use.
You can then drag and drop a block to the main editing area.
After that, you can use the block’s toolbar and settings sidebar to configure the block’s style, dimensions, spacing, and more.
If you have installed a WordPress plugin, then you may also see some settings below the editing interface.
For instance, the All in One SEO plugin will show you a section where you can optimize the page or post’s meta title and description for search engines.
We have plenty of guides for you to learn more about editing posts and pages, so be sure to check them out:
After that, just create a new post or page by going to Posts » Add New Post or Pages » Add New Page, and the Classic Editor will show up on your screen.
Unlike the block editor, you won’t add blocks to insert content into your page or post. Instead, you can only type text, format it using the controls at the top of the editing panel, and add media files to your content by clicking on the ‘Add Media’ button.
At the bottom and the sides of the editing interface, there are settings to publish the page/post, set the page or post’s categories/tags, upload a featured image, and so on.
You can also switch between the visual and text editing modes. With the second editor, you can modify the post or page’s HTML code.
How to Edit a WordPress Page With a Page Builder
If you already use a page builder like SeedProd to edit your theme, then you can use it to edit a page as well. This way, you can maintain your design’s consistency throughout all of your pages.
You will need to create a new page and open the block editor. If SeedProd is active, then you will see a button at the top that says, ‘Edit with SeedProd.’ Go ahead and click on it.
You can also do this with an existing page. However, do note that the content will not be transferred over, and you will have to create the page from scratch.
In the page builder, you will see that the SeedProd theme’s header and footer have been added. All you need to do is start building the page.
First, choose one of the 8 layouts to use on the page.
On the left-hand side, you will find all the blocks and sections that you can drag and drop onto the right-hand side, which is the template preview.
You can use these to insert content into the page.
Whenever you click a block or a section, the left-hand side will show the available settings to customize the element.
In the screenshot below, you can see that clicking on the Text block will make the block settings appear. You can customize the text, insert dynamic content, edit the HTML, change the alignment, and so on.
Once you are done editing the page, don’t forget to click ‘Save’ to make the changes live.
If you want to create a custom landing page from scratch, then you can also do that with SeedProd. All you need to do is go to SeedProd » Landing Pages. Then, click the ‘+ Add New Landing Page’ button.
Alternative: Thrive Architect is another great page builder option for designing attractive and conversion-focused landing pages.
How to Edit a WordPress Header, Footer, and Other Template Parts
You may also want to edit the WordPress header, footer, sidebar, and other parts of your theme template.
These are sections on your site that are not part of the main page or post content. However, they are essential for giving additional information or helpful navigation.
How you can edit these sections depends on what theme you are using, so let’s go through each option.
How to Edit a Block Theme’s Header, Footer, and Other Template Parts
If you have a block theme, then you can use the Full Site Editor to edit your theme’s header and footer.
In the Full Site Editor, a header and footer are considered template parts. These are also known as WordPress patterns (a set of reusable blocks) that appear throughout your website.
Other examples of a template part include the comment section and the post meta.
For the sake of example, we will show you how to edit your WordPress header, but you can repeat these steps with other template parts.
First, go to Appearance »Editor. Once you are in the Full Site Editor, just click ‘Patterns.’
You will now see a list of patterns provided by your WordPress theme.
Go ahead and scroll down to the Template Parts section. Then, select ‘Header’ and click on the Header template part.
Now, you need to click the pencil button next to the Header text.
This will open the block editor.
The block editor works the same way with template parts as it does with pages and posts. You can add various blocks to the header, configure the block, and update the changes when you are done.
Headers usually include a Site Logo (or the favicon), so feel free to add that here, too.
If you want to completely change how the header looks but don’t know where to start, click the ‘+’ add block button in the top left corner.
Then, navigate to the ‘Patterns’ tab and click ‘Headers.’ You will find many ready-to-use header layouts there.
Once you are done changing the header, click ‘Save.’ Since the header is a synced template part, all the changes you make here will apply across all pages that use the header.
Now, if you want to create a new header or any other template parts rather than editing the existing ones, you can go back to the ‘Patterns’ page. After that, click the ‘+ Create pattern’ button and select ‘Create template part.’
In the popup, give the template part a name and select the type of template part.
Then, click ‘Create.’ You will then be directed to the block editor and you can edit the template part like usual.
How to Edit a WordPress Header, Footer, and Other Widget-Ready Areas in a Classic Theme
In a classic theme, a WordPress widget is basically a block that you can add to widget-ready areas, like headers, footers, sidebars, and so on.
Every classic WordPress theme has different widget-ready areas. Some may include a sidebar, and some may not. So be sure to check your theme’s documentation for more information.
To use widgets, you have to go to Appearance » Widgets. Here, you can add, configure, and remove blocks in the available widget-ready areas.
How to Edit a WordPress Header, Footer, and Other Template Parts With a Page Builder
One of the benefits of using a page builder is you will have more options to customize headers, footers, sidebars, and other parts of your theme.
If you use SeedProd, you can go to SeedProd » Theme Builder. We will assume that you have installed a theme template kit from earlier.
The kit usually includes various theme templates. This may be a built-in page template, like a 404 or single post, or a part of a page, like a header, footer, pricing tables, and so on.
Go ahead and hover over a theme template. Then, click ‘Edit Design.’
Now, you can edit the header the same way as you would with a page.
Let’s say you want to add your social media links here. What you can do is hover over the header until the blue border appears and click the ‘+ Add Row’ button. Then, go ahead and select a row layout.
In our example, we want to add one more column so that the header can fit the image, menu, and social media links. That means we will need three columns in one row.
You can then drag and drop the blocks from the top row to the new row.
After that, just delete the top row so that your new row becomes the new header.
Now, just look for the Social Profiles block in the left-side panel.
Drag it into the right column, and you are done.
For more information about editing template parts, you can read these WordPress tutorials:
A navigation menu makes it easy for visitors to explore all your content without getting lost on your website. That’s why it’s important to design a menu that shows your essential pages and links to other relevant information.
If you use a block WordPress theme, then you can select the ‘Navigation’ menu from the Full Site Editor page.
If you use a classic WordPress theme, then you can go to Appearance» Menus. This is a dedicated page for you to add, arrange, and remove pages/posts and links to your menus.
Toward the bottom, you can change the links’ font size, spacing, divider, and alignment.
Don’t forget to click ‘Save’ to make the changes live.
How to Edit a WordPress Site With Code
If you are comfortable with code, then you can also use custom code snippets to edit your WordPress website. That said, we only recommend this method if you have the right technical know-how to avoid breaking your website.
One way you can edit a WordPress site with code is by adding CSS, which is a stylesheet that can change how HTML looks on the front end.
Classic theme users can go to Appearance »Customize and find the ‘Additional CSS’ field in the Theme Customizer.
Here, you can insert CSS code to style different HTML elements like colors and fonts.
This may be handy if your theme’s built-in options aren’t enough for your needs.
As for block theme users, you cannot add custom CSS within the Full Site Editor.
Instead, you have to go to the URL below to open the Theme Customizer and find the Additional CSS field. Make sure to replace the domain name with your own.
Another way to add CSS is with CSS Hero. This plugin makes adding custom CSS to WordPress themes easy, even for beginners. If you are interested in using it, then just check out our CSS Hero review.
How to Edit WordPress Theme Files
At times, some tutorials may require you to edit your WordPress theme files to make changes beyond what your built-in theme features allow. In this case, we recommend:
Creating a child theme first. This is like a copy of your WordPress theme that you can safely customize with some coding.
Backing up your website. It’s a good measure to do so that you can restore your website to a previous version in case of errors.
Editing a WordPress theme file requires going to your WordPress file directory from the backend. To do this, you will need to open your hosting provider’s file manager or connect to your website with an FTP client.
If you use Bluehost, then you can go to your dashboard and open the ‘Websites’ tab. After that, click ‘Settings’ on the website for which you want to open the theme files.
Now, simply scroll down to the ‘Quick Links’ section.
Then, click ‘File Manager.’ If you’re not sure where your root folder is, you can check the ‘Document Root’ function to see its path.
Once inside the file manager, you can go to your website’s root folder (usually named public_html).
Then, head to /wp-content/themes and find your current theme folder.
After that, you will find all of your WordPress theme files, which you can edit using a text editor.
Here are some things you can do by editing WordPress theme files:
If you want to add new custom code rather than editing the code that is already within your theme files, then we recommend using WPCode. It’s the best WordPress code snippets plugin for easily inserting and managing custom code snippets.
With this plugin, you won’t have to worry about accidentally breaking your website. WPCode will let you know if there are errors in the code and deactivate it. Plus, you can create PHP shortcodes for inserting custom content into your website.
To see WPCode in action, you can check out our full WPCode review in the WPBeginner Solution Center.
What Is the Best Way to Edit a WordPress Site for Beginners?
For beginners, we always recommend installing a page builder plugin like SeedProd to edit WordPress websites. The reason is that it’s just as easy to use as the block editor yet gives you much more control over your website design.
If you don’t want to use a plugin, then the next best thing is a block theme with the Full Site Editor. This feature is not entirely developed yet because WordPress is constantly working on the Gutenberg project. But as of now, it’s pretty user-friendly.
The Theme Customizer is not as flexible as the Full Site Editor because it lacks drag-and-drop functionality. That’s why we suggest classic theme users install SeedProd to improve their user experience.
As for coding, we only recommend it if you have created a child theme and backups of your site to avoid errors. But with the WPCode plugin, adding custom code to edit your WordPress site is much safer and won’t cause any errors or break your website.
If you are passionate about fashion and style, then you may have already seen some top fashion bloggers and influencers on Instagram or other social media platforms.
Fashion blogs not only provide a platform for bloggers, but they also bring lots of opportunities for these content creators.
You might be surprised to discover how fashion bloggers make money from their blogs. According to Harper’s Bazaar, designers and top brands spend over a BILLION dollars each year advertising on Instagram alone.
That means that fashion blogging provides an excellent opportunity to make money online.
Top Fashion Blog Examples That Are Crushing It
Apart from making money, a fashion blog allows you to express yourself more creatively. Here are some of the top fashion blog examples you can follow for inspiration:
One thing you’ll notice about each of the top fashion blog examples above is that they all have their unique voice, personality, and taste in fashion. These fashion bloggers bring their unique perspectives to highlight their favorite products, merchandise, and brands.
If you believe that you have a unique take on fashion and style, then you should start a fashion blog.
While setting up the fashion blog part is easy, like all essential things in life, making a blog popular and monetizing it requires effort.
However, if you do it right, then you’ll undoubtedly find the experience to be rewarding and fulfilling.
What You’ll Need to Start Your Fashion Blog
First, you need to choose the right platform to build your own fashion blog. You have plenty of choices, but each one of them has its own pros and cons (see our comparison of the best blogging platforms).
For example, you could start a free blog on a platform like WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger, and so on.
These are called free blogs, and they are very limited in terms of features and flexibility when it comes to growing your personal brand. The most important limitation is your ability to make money from your content.
What about Starting a Fashion Blog with Instagram?
Instagram is awesome, but you don’t own it. You can build a huge following, which can go away immediately if Instagram decides that your content violated one of their policies.
We are not saying that you shouldn’t use Instagram.
You must use it to build a large audience, but you will need a central platform that you can control where you can keep your audience coming back for years to come.
The best way to build your fashion blog is by creating your own website with complete ownership and full control.
Now, the question is, how could a beginner with no knowledge of coding build a website?
This is where WordPress.org comes in. It is a powerful website builder that gives you absolute control and full ownership of your website and its content.
Keep in mind that it’s important not to confuse WordPress.org with WordPress.com since they are two different platforms. (See our comparison of WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org for more details).
There are three things you need to start a fashion blog using WordPress.org:
Domain name – This will be your website’s address and what users will type in the browser to visit your blog (For example, wpbeginner.com).
Web hosting – This will be your blog’s home and where you will store all your website files.
Your undivided attention for 30 mins
Yes, you can start a brand new fashion blog in 30 minutes, and we will walk you through the whole setup step by step.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Setting Up a Fashion Blog Using WordPress
A domain name typically costs $14.99 / year, and web hosting normally costs $7.99 / month.
That’s a lot for beginners who are just starting.
Luckily, our friends at Hostinger are offering a free domain, a free SSL, and an 81% discount on hosting to our readers.
Basically, you can get started for as low as $2.24 / month.
NOTE: At WPBeginner, we believe in transparency. If you sign up with Hostinger using our referral link, then we will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you (in fact, you will save money and get a free domain). We would get this commission for recommending just about any WordPress hosting company, but we only recommend products that we personally use and believe will add value to our readers.
Let’s go ahead and set up your web hosting + domain so you can get started.
First, you need to go to the Hostinger website and click on the ‘Claim Deal’ button.
Next, you will be asked to choose a plan. We recommend the Premium plan. You can always upgrade later if you need to.
Next, you’ll be asked to choose a hosting period.
The 48-month period gives you the best discount.
After that, you will fill in your personal information and choose a payment method.
Proceed with the payment to complete your purchase.
Upon completing the transaction, you will be able to select your desired domain name during the hosting setup process.
A domain name is your website’s address, and this is what your users will type in their browsers to visit your fashion blog.
You need to choose a domain name that reflects your personal voice. It should be unique, creative, and interesting. For more details, see our tips on choosing a great domain name for your website.
Once you have purchased hosting, the next step is to install WordPress.
Simply go to the Websites section in your Hostinger account dashboard and click ‘Create or migrate a website.’
This will bring up a website setup wizard. You will be asked what kind of website you want to create (like an online store, business, blog, and so on).
Choose ‘Blog’ for now to continue.
On the next screen, you will be asked if you want to create a new website or migrate an existing website.
Click ‘Select’ under the ‘Create a new website’ option.
After that, you will be asked to choose a platform.
You need to select ‘WordPress with AI’ to continue.
After that, the setup wizard will guide you to set up your WordPress website step by step.
Simply follow the on-screen instructions to finish the setup.
Once finished, you can log in to your WordPress website from your hosting account dashboard.
This will bring you to your WordPress website’s admin dashboard.
It will look something like this:
Now that you have WordPress installed, you can start working on your fashion blog.
Choosing a Design for Your Fashion Blog
A blog about fashion and style shouldn’t have a plain-looking business or blogging layout. Your website needs a design that represents your unique sense of style and creativity.
Most fashion bloggers are not website designers, so how do you create a website design that is unique, elegant, stylish, and creative?
Luckily, there are thousands of pre-made WordPress templates that you can choose from.
We have hand-picked the best WordPress themes for fashion blogs that you can check out. All of the themes in the list feature creative designs with flexible options to easily make them uniquely yours. Most importantly, all of them are responsive (aka mobile-friendly), which means they look good on mobile and tablets as well.
Each of these themes comes with its own settings page. This is where you will set up the theme, add your website logo, choose colors, and select basic settings.
Depending on which theme you choose, you will find tons of customization options. We recommend striving for simplicity in your website’s design for a cleaner look.
Add Useful Content to Your Fashion Blog
Once you have a functioning design, you can start working on content. We recommend adding the static content first.
Static content refers to non-changing pages that are common among all websites on the internet. These include a contact form page, an about us page, and a privacy policy page.
If your theme includes a page builder plugin, then you can use it to create other static landing pages as well.
Next, you will want to start adding articles/blog posts to your fashion website. See our guide on how to add a new blog post in WordPress and learn how to utilize all the features.
Now, this is where you will develop your own voice. Your blog posts need to be entertaining, informative, and helpful.
We recommend choosing a consistent frequency for your articles. Busier and larger websites post new content every day. You can start by adding a few posts per week and then gradually increase your frequency to daily updates.
To come up with regular blog post ideas, you can visit popular blogs in the fashion industry to gather inspiration. See what these top blogs are doing and replicate it on your blog.
We are not saying that you should just steal/recreate the same content.
You just need to gather topics, collect ideas, and get inspiration. After that, you should use those ideas on your blog by adding your unique voice, style, and flavor to it.
Once you start adding useful content, the next step is to make sure that users can find your website when they search for fashion topics online.
Here is how you ensure that your website gets visitors and those people actually engage with your content.
Start Working on Your Website’s SEO
Most popular blogs get a lot of their traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. Marketers use SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, to optimize their websites for higher rankings in the search results.
WordPress itself is quite SEO-friendly out of the box, but there are still things you can do to optimize it further.
For more details, follow our step-by-step WordPress SEO guide for improving your website rankings.
Improve Website Speed
Speed is one of the most important factors that affects the user experience on your website. It also affects your website’s search engine rankings, as Google considers speed one of the top ranking factors.
You can make your website significantly faster by implementing certain performance tweaks in WordPress. We have created a complete step-by-step guide on how to speed up WordPress and boost performance.
Track User Engagement
Actions your users take after arriving on your website are called user engagement. A highly engaged audience means more page views and more success for your fashion blog.
MonsterInsights helps you track your website traffic using Google Analytics. It shows where your users are coming from, what content is popular on your blog, which products make the most profits, and more.
Ever wondered how fashion bloggers can afford their clothes, makeup, and accessories? Actually, they don’t have to.
Most successful fashion bloggers promote sponsored content where brands pay them to advertise specific products.
Paid and sponsored content is the major source of revenue for many fashion bloggers. Here, we will list the most effective ways you can start making money from your fashion blog when you’re first starting out.
1. Display Ads Using Google AdSense
Most websites on the internet rely on ads to generate revenue. Google AdSense allows you to easily display ads on your website and make money from your blog even when you’re just starting.
Affiliate marketing allows you to recommend products you love. You get a referral commission when your users purchase a product after clicking on your link.
To make money with affiliate marketing, you will need to find fashion products and brands with an affiliate program.
The biggest affiliate partner you can sign up for is Amazon Affiliates. They have tons of products in fashion, clothing, and accessories that you can recommend and get paid for.
Instagram is arguably the top social network for fashion and style influencers. You will need to join Instagram and start posting content with relevant hashtags to make sure that your posts reach the right audience.
The best way to come up with an Instagram strategy is by following other top fashion blogs on Instagram. Study their posts, descriptions, and hashtags, and try to replicate the same effect with your Instagram posts.
You should also network with other influencers and do S4S, share for share, campaigns. In this strategy, each party will share the other’s Instagram posts and tag them. It helps both people increase their following.
You can also reach out to brands, fashion startups, and agencies to partner with them. The best way to find which companies are doing blog promotions is to keep an eye on top fashion bloggers and their Instagram posts.
For more ways to generate revenue from your fashion blog, see our guide on proven ways to make money from your blog.
Mastering WordPress Skills
WordPress is easy to use and beginner-friendly. However, whenever you start using a new platform, there are always new things to discover and learn. This is where WPBeginner can help.
WPBeginner is the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners. We have lots of helpful content that is created specifically for beginners, business owners, and bloggers.
To expand your WordPress skills, you should check out:
WPBeginner Dictionary – Our WordPress glossary is the best place to familiarize yourself with the WordPress lingo.
WPBeginner Videos – New WordPress users can start with these videos to master WordPress.
WPBeginner Blog – The central place for all our WordPress tutorials and guides.
WPBeginner Engage – Our Facebook group, with more than 97,000 WordPress users who can give feedback and help you with your blog.
You can also subscribe to our YouTube Channel, where we regularly upload new video tutorials to help you learn WordPress.
We hope this article helped you start your fashion blog and make money from it. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress security guide to keep your blog safe and our expert pick of the best WordPress plugins to grow your website.
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.
Are you looking for ways to increase WooCommerce sales?
A successful online store needs to continuously find ways to increase WooCommerce sales. However, sometimes, it may not look as easy as you would like it to be.
In this article, we’ll share tested and actionable tips on ways to quickly increase WooCommerce sales with little effort and no special skills.
Why Optimize WooCommerce to Increase Sales?
According to Forbes, e-commerce sales grew by 10.8% in 2023. In the US alone, eCommerce sales are expected to cross over $1.1 Trillion in 2023.
As more and more transactions are moving online, there is a ton of room for your eCommerce business to grow and capture your share of the pie.
WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform in the world. It is super easy to use and incredibly flexible to build any kind of online store.
Out of the box, WooCommerce gives you plenty of tools to increase sales. However, there is so much more you can do.
Make a faster online store
Improve your store’s shopping experience.
Optimize your sales funnels
Create a frictionless checkout experience for your customers.
Not optimizing your WooCommerce store to increase sales is like leaving money on the table.
Many of these tips don’t require technical or coding knowledge and can be easily implemented in your WooCommerce store.
That being said, let’s look at some of the most actionable and practical tips to increase WooCommerce sales.
First, you need to make sure that your online store is running on the best WooCommerce hosting platform available.
An unreliable hosting platform can affect your store’s performance, slow it down, or cause frequent downtimes. This affects your store’s user experience, SEO, and sales.
Switching to a better WooCommerce hosting plan gives your store stability and a performance boost, which ultimately leads to better user experience and higher conversions.
If you are just starting out, then we recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the officially recommended WooCommerce hosting providers.
They are offering WPBeginner users a generous discount, with a free domain and SSL certificate.
Basically, you can get started for $2.75 per month.
However, if your WooCommerce store is already up and generating revenue, then you may consider upgrading to a managed WordPress hosting plan on SiteGround or WP Engine.
Need help moving your WooCommerce store to a new host? See our tutorial on how to easily move WordPress to new host for step-by-step instructions.
2. Improve WooCommerce Performance
Slower websites are one of the top reasons for lower conversions and sales.
A recent case study of eCommerce websites uncovered that a one-second delay in page load could reduce conversions by up to 7%.
WooCommerce runs on top of WordPress, which generates content from a database when users visit your store.
If more users visit your website at the same time, then this adds more load on your hosting server, which slows it down and causes you to lose potential sales.
Luckily, there is an easy way to mitigate this issue by using a caching plugin on your WooCommerce store.
It is super easy to set up. Once you install and activate the plugin, it will automatically start building a cache in the background.
WP Rocket will also detect that you are using WooCommerce and apply eCommerce settings. For instance, it will exclude checkout, cart, and account pages from the cache.
While caching alone will give your website a significant performance boost, there is a lot more you can do to speed up your WooCommerce store.
For more details, see our complete WordPress performance guide for beginners, which has more tips to improve WooCommerce speed.
3. Set up WooCommerce SEO
More than 85% of consumers search before making an online purchase.
Organic search results get 20x more clicks than paid ads, and they cost way less (because they’re almost free).
This is why you need to focus on improving WooCommerce SEO to get more sales on your website.
Now, WooCommerce itself is very SEO friendly, but there is a lot more you can do to get more organic traffic and increase sales.
It is super easy to use and makes technical SEO simple for beginners. Once set up, it would automatically assign the correct Schema markup for your product pages.
For more details, see our complete WooCommerce SEO guide, which has more detailed instructions.
4. Use Proper Schema Markup for Products
Schema markup is a special type of HTML code that you can add to your WooCommerce store and tell search engines more about your content or products.
Search engines like Google can then use this data in search results. Such search listings are called rich results or rich snippets.
These listings get more prominently displayed and get more clicks, which ultimately brings more sales to your WooCommerce store.
All in One SEO already comes with built-in support for Schema markup. However, many beginners don’t realize how powerful this tool is, and they end up not utilizing it to its full potential.
First, you need to visit the All in One SEO » Search Appearance page and then switch to the Content Types tab.
From here, you need to scroll down to the Products section and click on the Schema Markup tab.
Make sure that it is using Product as the Schema Type. This will be the default setting for any WooCommerce products from now on.
After that, when you edit any product on your WooCommerce store, the schema type will already be set.
You can check this by going into the content editor for a product, and then scrolling down to the AIOSEO Settings section. Then, just click on the Schema tab.
Make sure that the Product is selected in the Schema In Use section. You can click on the Generate Schema button to select a different Schema if you need. You can use more than one schema type if you need to, but that doesn’t happen often.
Click on the Edit button next to the Schema type to see the information you are providing as Schema markup.
By default, the plugin will auto-generate data from your product content to use in schema markup.
You can switch the Autogenerate Fields option to ‘No’ and review all the data manually.
From here, you can provide schema details manually.
Product category pages can be an important source of traffic for many online stores.
All in One SEO allows you to easily optimize your product category pages.
Simply go to the Products » Categories page and click on the Edit link below a category that you want to optimize.
On the edit screen, scroll down to the AIOSEO Settings section.
From here, you can provide an SEO title and description and choose a social media image.
7. Ranking for Local Search Results
According to research, more than 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information.
Even for online shopping, customers may add location along with their keywords to ensure a quick delivery.
If you have one or more retail locations, then ranking for local SEO will bring you more targeted traffic with higher purchase intent.
You will need All in One SEO’s Local SEO addon to set up your online store for local SEO.
Simply go to the All in One SEO » Local SEO page to activate the Local SEO feature.
Once activated, you can go ahead and add your business information.
You can provide your business address, logo, map location, and other information.
The phone number you provide here may appear in search results with a call button. You should use a proper business phone number to easily manage customer calls.
Next, you need to switch to the Opening Hours tab. Here, you can provide your business hours.
If you need to display map locations on your website, then you can switch to the Maps tab and provide the Google Maps API key.
8. Reduce Cart Abandonment with OptinMonster
Once users have added products to their cart, you would want to make sure that they complete the checkout to make the purchase.
Luckily, there are tools like OptinMonster. It is the best conversion optimization software for WooCommerce and helps you convert website visitors into paying customers.
OptinMonster comes with Exit Intent popups that help you show custom messages to users when they are about to leave.
Among other tools, it includes countdown timers (to create urgency), gamification popups, email marketing integration, slide-in popups, and more.
It comes with dozens of templates, all highly optimized for sales and conversions.
It also includes full WooCommerce support and allows you to create a custom shopping cart experience for your users.
You can use WooCommerce blocks and add them to your pages.
With its powerful drag-and-drop tool, you can create a custom cart page without writing any code.
Plus, you can use the cart page to upsell products, offer discounts, display countdown timers, and more.
10. Upsell on Cart, Checkout, and Thank You Pages
Have you noticed how all the big eCommerce giants like Amazon try to upsell products when viewing your cart, checking out, or after you have made the purchase?
That’s because research has proven that if customers are shown the right products when they are about to pay, they are more likely to add them to the cart.
This is also the reason you see random things at the checkout counters of all the retail shops as well. Many of us can probably recall a recent time when we added one or more products to our cart while at the counter.
It is very effective, and you can easily implement it in your WooCommerce store to boost sales.
You can create custom cart, checkout, and thank you pages in SeedProd.
It comes with powerful WooCommerce blocks, allowing you to use their drag-and-drop page builder to create custom pages. You can show custom product grids, add countdown timers, offer discount coupons, and more.
A recent survey found that more than 51% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email.
Email is preferred over social media, mail, phone calls, or even text messages.
As an eCommerce store, if a customer doesn’t make a purchase and leaves, you have no way to reach out to that customer.
That’s more than 70% of all your website traffic.
Email marketing allows you to reach potential customers and stay in touch with your existing customers.
The easiest way to get started with email marketing is by using Constant Contact.
It is the best email marketing service for small businesses and beginners. It is easy to set up and comes with powerful tools you’ll need to grow your WooCommerce store.
Push Notifications are browser notifications that allow you to send messages to users even when they are not visiting your website.
They work across devices (mobile and desktop) and are highly effective in increasing page views and sales.
The easiest way to get started is by using PushEngage. It is the best push notification service on the market that is beginner-friendly and incredibly powerful.
PushEngage comes with targeting rules that allow you to send personalized notifications to users at just the right time.
For instance, you can set up cart abandonment campaigns, new product announcements, trigger notifications based on user activity, and more.
Users are more likely to buy something when they see other people doing the same.
In psychology, this behavior is known as fear of missing out or FOMO, and it causes anxiety about missing out on something exciting and trendy.
In marketing, it is easy to trigger this effect by using social persuasion. There are several ways you can use these persuasion techniques to boost sales.
The easiest way would be by using TrustPulse. It is the best social proof app for marketers and eCommerce stores.
It allows you to show customer activity on your site with targeted notifications. Users will see what other, real people are doing and purchasing on your site.
You can display notifications on precise locations like product pages, sales campaigns, or landing pages. You can also trigger them based on user activity.
Do you want to display WordPress photos in columns and rows?
By default, WordPress adds images in a vertical column on top of each other. However, if you are adding multiple photos to a blog post, then this doesn’t look very clean and requires a lot of scrolling for your users.
In this article, we will show you how to easily display WordPress photos in columns and rows.
Why You Need WordPress Photos in Columns and Rows
By default, when you add multiple images to a WordPress blog post, they would appear right next to each other or on top of each other.
This doesn’t look very good, and your users must scroll a lot to view multiple images and photos.
You can easily solve this problem by displaying photos in rows and columns using a grid-based layout. This way, images will appear in a compact layout and improve user experience on your website.
If you have a photography website, then you can show your portfolio in a more engaging way. Or you can show more product images on an online store by displaying them in rows and columns.
Having said that, let’s take a look at how to display WordPress photos in columns and rows manually or use a WordPress plugin. Simply click the links below to jump ahead to your preferred section.
1. Display Photos in Columns and Rows without Plugins
This method does not require installing a plugin on your WordPress website. If you don’t add multiple photos too often, then this would work just fine for you.
You can manually add images to a column block or use the default gallery block in WordPress.
Adding Images to a Column Block
First, you need to create a new post or edit an existing one where you want to display your photos. Once you’re in the content editor screen, click the ‘+’ button to add a column block.
Next, you can choose the number of columns you’d like and its layout.
For instance, you can choose a 50/50 ratio, 33/66 ratio, 25/50/25 ratio, and more.
After that, you can add an image block to each column.
Simply click the ‘+’ button and select the ‘Image’ block.
Next, you will need to add an image to the block.
You can click the ‘Upload’ button to add an image from your computer or select the ‘Media Library’ option to use an existing picture.
Once the media library opens, simply select your preferred image and click the ‘Select’ button.
One of the image optimization best practices is to add an alt-text to your image. This allows search engine bots to understand your picture and show it in image search results.
You should now see your image in one of the column blocks.
Now, you can do the same for other blocks in the column and add more images.
Adding Images in a Gallery Block
WordPress also offers a default gallery block that you can use to display images in columns and rows.
To start, click the ‘+’ button and add a Gallery block in the content editor.
Next, you’ll need to upload images or choose from the media library.
For this tutorial, we’ll choose the ‘Media Library option.
From, simply select the images you’d like to add to your gallery and display them in rows and columns.
Once you choose the images, click the ‘Create a new gallery’ button.
Next, WordPress will ask you to enter captions for each image and rearrange the order of the pictures.
After doing that, simply click the ‘Insert gallery’ button.
You should now see your images in the gallery block.
You can adjust the number of rows by clicking the slider in the Settings panel on the right.
Once you’re done, simply publish your post to view images in columns and rows.
Simply visit your site to see them in action.
This method would work for most beginners. However, if you run a photography blog or often share photos on your website, then this method lacks several important features.
For example, the appearance of photos relies on your WordPress theme and you are limited to that one particular layout and style.
Your images will not open in a lightbox popup and users will have to load them as a new page and then hit the back button to return to the original page.
For a more professional and beautiful user experience, you should try the plugin method.
2. Display Photos in Columns and Rows Using a Plugin
The best plugin to add photos in columns and rows is Envira Gallery. It is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin that is super easy to use and offers lots of features.
First, you must install and activate the Envira Gallery plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit the Envira Gallery » Settings page to enter your license key. You can get this key from your account on the Envira Gallery website.
Now, you are ready to create beautiful image galleries.
Simply head over to Envira Gallery » Add New from the WordPress dashboard to create your first gallery.
First, you’ll need to enter a name for your gallery at the top. From here, you can select and upload files from your computer, or you can select from the WordPress media library.
After uploading your photos, you’ll see them appear in the gallery settings box below.
Next, you need to click on the ‘Configuration’ tab to customize how you want to display your photos.
Envira Gallery lets you choose different gallery layouts. To show images in rows and columns, you can select the grid, mason, and square layouts.
After selecting the layout, you can click the ‘Number of Gallery Columns’ dropdown menu and choose how many columns you’d like to show.
If you scroll down, then you’ll see more options to customize your gallery. For instance, there are settings to edit the dimensions and size of your gallery.
After that, you can click the ‘Publish’ button to make your photo gallery ready to be added to your WordPress site.
Now, you need to edit a post or create a new one. Once you’re in the content editor, simply click the ‘+’ button to add the ‘Envira Gallery’ block.
From here, you can click the dropdown menu and select the gallery you created earlier.
You can now save your post and preview it to see your photos in columns and rows in a beautiful mobile-responsive photo gallery.
Now when your users click on a photo thumbnail it will open up in a beautiful popup. They will also be able to browse images without leaving the page.
Bonus: Create a Custom Theme with Image Columns & Rows
You can also create custom WordPress themes that have a placeholder for adding images in columns and rows.
The best way to create a custom theme is by using a SeedProd. It is the best drag-and-drop website builder that offers prebuilt themes and lots of customization options.
You can add a column block to your landing page designs using SeedProd and add images to rows and columns. SeedProd even comes with a built-in Gallery block that you can use for this.
Are you looking for some user experience feedback questions to ask your visitors?
By asking user experience feedback questions, you can better understand your users’ needs and expectations, identify areas that need improvement, and measure overall customer satisfaction. This can help you gain a competitive advantage over other websites.
In this article, we will share some of the best user experience feedback questions to ask website visitors and show you how to survey users in WordPress.
Why Ask User Experience Feedback Questions in WordPress?
If you have a WordPress website, then asking users for feedback will help you gather insights into their needs, preferences, and dislikes. This is essential for improving your website’s design, content, and functionality to align with user expectations.
Feedback can even reveal website areas that can be optimized to increase conversions, like improving the checkout process. You can then implement these suggestions to generate more leads and make more sales.
Additionally, asking for user experience feedback can also boost user engagement by showing visitors that their feedback is valued and you are actively working to improve your content.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the best user experience feedback questions to ask your website visitors.
User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors
Here are some general questions that you can ask your visitors to learn more about the UX of your website.
1. How would you rate the overall usability of our website?
If you have a WordPress blog, then asking users to rate the overall usability of your website can help you quickly and easily see if your website is doing well or if it has areas that need improvement.
It can also help you track your website’s progress over time as you make changes to improve the overall user experience.
Once you ask this question, you can also add a follow-up question that asks for the user’s reason for the rating that they gave. This will help identify patterns in usability issues and make it easy to troubleshoot those problems.
2. How would you rate the overall speed and responsiveness of our website?
A website’s speed is one of its most important factors because fast-loading page times can improve the user experience, increase pageviews, and boost your WordPress SEO.
You can gauge user satisfaction and engagement by asking users to rate your website speed. For example, if your visitors are giving you low ratings, then it means that your loading times are too long, and people are leaving your site frustrated.
3. What suggestions do you have for improving our website?
By asking users to provide suggestions for improving your website, you can identify usability issues that may have been overlooked by your developers.
For example, a call to action (CTA) on your website may not work, which has caused a lot of users to leave your site frustrated.
We recommend asking this question in a feedback form after users have provided a rating for the overall website usability. This question can help you find out about this issue and also show users that you care about their opinions and experiences.
4. What is your first impression of our website’s homepage?
The homepage is the introduction to your website and is usually the first page that visitors interact with. This page should create positive emotions in users and encourage them to explore your site.
By asking users about their first impression of your website’s homepage, you can assess if the page is effectively communicating your website’s purpose. It can help gain insights into the user’s impression of your branding and overall homepage look.
Asking users what they dislike about your website can uncover specific issues that are causing frustration and dissatisfaction among your visitors and customers.
For example, you might discover that users are annoyed by the number of ads on your site or intrusive popups.
Once you have identified these issues, you can fix them to prevent users from abandoning your website. This can lead to better user loyalty, improve the user experience, and even help increase conversions.
6. What changes can we make to our website design?
By asking for user suggestions, you can gain more ideas for design elements and aesthetics that were overlooked when you were creating your pages.
Visitors can also provide suggestions that will ultimately help improve the user experience. For example, some people may find it difficult to use your navigation menu. This can give you the idea to make your navigation menu more visible and easier to navigate.
Additionally, this user feedback can help you stay up-to-date with the current website design trends and update your pages to match them.
User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask WooCommerce Store Customers
If you have a WooCommerce store, then asking these questions can help improve the user experience in your online store.
1. How was your shopping experience today?
Asking users this question immediately after purchasing can help you gather feedback about the customer’s experience.
It will also help you better understand the overall customer journey, from browsing through your products to completing checkout. This question will reveal patterns, trends, and any errors that are repeatedly being faced by your customers that need to be fixed or improved.
2. What can we do to make our product(s) better?
Asking users for suggestions to improve your products allows you to gain insights into your customers’ unmet needs. This lets you understand the type of solutions that your users are looking for and potentially come up with new features for your products.
This can help you gain a competitive advantage over other online stores by letting you tailor your products to meet users’ needs and expectations.
3. Did you find the information you were looking for on our product page?
This question improves the user experience by helping you identify information gaps. It determines whether your product page effectively communicates the necessary information to help users make informed decisions.
This allows you to understand the type of information that the users want to see for a product and change your pages accordingly.
4. Were you looking for anything today that you couldn’t find?
Asking visitors if they were looking for something they couldn’t find allows you to broaden your store’s scope by taking user ideas into account and adding those products to your inventory.
For example, if you sell clothes online, and users on your website answered that they wanted to find matching accessories with their clothing items, then you could expand into jewelry as well.
5. Was there anything that made you cancel your order?
Customers cancel their orders for several reasons, like high shipping costs, delayed shipping, unexpected charges, or issues during the checkout process.
By asking this question, you can identify the main reason for users canceling their orders in your online store.
For example, if many customers are canceling their orders due to shipping delays, then you can improve the shipping process to reduce delays and improve customer satisfaction.
6. What is the one part of our checkout process that we should improve?
Your store’s checkout process should be seamless to provide a top-notch customer experience. By asking users this question, you can gain a variety of perspectives and identify common issues in the checkout section.
7. What was your main concern or fear before purchasing this product?
By asking users this question, you can find out the potential barriers to purchase and take steps to address those issues on your site.
For instance, you can improve your product messaging and positioning to encourage more users to complete their purchases.
It is also a good idea to create a personalized user experience by setting up personalized recommendations, addressing customer concerns proactively, and offering customer support to boost engagement and satisfaction.
User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors on Mobile
The majority of your users will access your website using mobile devices. These are the user experience feedback questions you can ask visitors to improve your website on mobile.
1. Was our website easy to navigate on mobile?
Over 55% of your website traffic will come from mobile devices. However, your website will look different on mobile due to a smaller screen size and a touch-based interface.
Asking users how easy it is to navigate your site on a mobile device can help identify any design issues that are causing people to leave your site unsatisfied. For instance, you may need to use a responsive WordPress theme and other responsive design elements.
This will help you optimize your site for mobile navigation and can ultimately lead to more conversions.
2. Were any parts of the page not visible or hard to see?
A mobile device’s small screen size can limit the amount of information displayed on a page and make your site look crowded.
3.Did you find the website’s blog posts easy to read on your mobile device?
Blog posts can look different on mobile devices because the text is smaller and the images are more compressed, giving the page a cramped look.
By asking users if they could easily read your posts on mobile devices, you can identify parts of your content that may be difficult to read.
You can then change the font size, break up paragraphs, and use an uncluttered layout to make your blog posts more readable. For more details, just see our guide on how to improve readability in WordPress.
How to Add a User Experience Feedback Prompt in WordPress
You can easily add a quick user experience survey on your WordPress website with UserFeedback. It is the best WordPress feedback plugin on the market that comes with 25+ premade survey templates and lets you ask unlimited questions.
Plus, the plugin offers different types of questions that you can ask, including multiple-choice questions, an NPS survey, a quick rating question, radio buttons, email captures, or an open-ended question for feedback.
Note: UserFeeback also has a free plan. However, we will be using the premium plan to unlock more features.
Upon activation, visit the UserFeedback » Surveys page from the WordPress admin sidebar and click the ‘Create New’ button.
This will direct you to the ‘Select a Template’ page, where you can choose any of the premade templates.
Since you want to ask for user experience feedback, you can select the ‘Website Experience’ template.
This will take you to another screen where you can start creating a user experience feedback survey.
By default, the website experience template asks users to rate their experience on your website. If you want, you can change the question from the text field and then choose a question type from the dropdown menu.
You can add checkboxes, radio buttons, star ratings, text fields, and more.
Once you do that, click the ‘Add Question’ button to add another question to the user experience feedback survey.
This will expand another prompt on the screen where you can add another question.
For example, if you asked users to rate the website user experience in the first question, then you can ask users about everything they think needs to be improved on your site.
After that, you can select ‘Long Answer’ as the question type so that users can answer without any word count restrictions.
You can then switch to the ‘Preview’ link at the top to customize your user experience feedback prompt.
Here, you can change the color scheme, button color, widget color, and text color for the prompt. Once you do that, just click the ‘Next Step: Settings’ button.
You will now be taken to the ‘Settings’ page, where you can start by scrolling down to the ‘Targeting’ section.
Here, you can choose the device type where the survey will be displayed. For example, if you created this survey to gather insights into your performance on mobile devices, then you can select the ‘Mobile’ option. The survey will then only be displayed to the visitors browsing your site on their mobile phones.
After that, you can select the ‘All Pages’ option if you want to display the survey on all the pages and posts on your website.
However, if you want to display the survey on a specific post or page, then you can select the ‘Advanced’ option.
Then, you can specify the conditions for the survey display from the dropdown menu.
For instance, if you want to display the survey on a single page, then you can select the ‘Page URL is’ option from the dropdown menu on the right and then add a page URL into the field on the left.
Next, scroll down to the ‘Behaviour’ section to configure the display timing of your user experience feedback survey.
Here, you can decide when the survey will appear on your page, how often it will be displayed, and how long it will run on your website.
Once you have done that, simply click the ‘Next Step: Notifications’ button.
On the new page, you must toggle on the ‘Send Email’ switch and then enter the email address where you want to receive notifications every time a website visitor completes your feedback survey.
After that, click the ‘Next Step: Publish’ button.
Now that you are on the ‘Publish’ page, simply toggle the ‘Survey Status’ switch to ‘Publish’ to activate your survey.
If you want to schedule your survey for a later date, then you can do that by toggling the ‘Schedule for Later’ switch and adding a specific date and time.
Finally, don’t forget to click the ‘Save and Publish’ or ‘Save and Schedule’ button to store your settings.
You can now visit your WordPress site to view the user experience feedback survey in action.
Once the survey is published, you can easily view its results by visiting the UserFeedback » Results page from the WordPress dashboard.
You will now be able to check the number of responses, impressions, and all the answers provided by your visitors. This can help you improve the overall user experience of your website.
Bonus: How to Do a UX Audit of Your WordPress Site
Apart from gathering feedback to improve the user experience, it is also important to do a UX audit of your website. This means testing your site to see if there are any usability issues that you can fix.
This is a crucial step to ensure that your site is efficient and provides a high-quality experience.
To do a UX audit, you should first be able to recognize your target audience and understand their needs and preferences. Then, you can move on to finding pages on your website with poor user experience.
To do this, you can use MonsterInsights, which is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market. It lets you see where your users are coming from and how they interact with your website. MonsterInsights also allows you to see pages on your site where you get conversions.
Upon installing and activating the MonsterInsights plugin, all you have to do is visit the Insights » Addons page from your WordPress admin sidebar to install and activate the ‘eCommerce’ addon.
After that, go to the Insights » Reports page and switch to the ‘eCommerce’ tab. You will now be able to overview your top-performing products and conversion sources. This will also help you identify the pages and products where you don’t get many conversions.
Additionally, your UX audit may involve optimizing your website’s speed and performance, making your navigation menu simpler, testing conversion elements, and more.
