Are you looking for a WordPress voting plugin for your website?
A WordPress voting plugin allows you to easily conduct polls on your website where users can vote. It is an effective strategy to build user engagement while collecting insights.
In this article, we have hand-picked the best WordPress voting plugins that help you easily add voting and polls to your website.
Why Use a WordPress Voting Plugin?
WordPress voting plugins help you build user engagement on your website.
User engagement refers to how users interact with your website. It ensures users spend more time on your website for a more engaged experience.
Businesses that invest in creating meaningful, interactive, and positive user experiences on their website tend to see better user engagement, which leads to higher sales and conversions.
A WordPress voting plugin allows you to improve user engagement by adding surveys, polls, and quizzes to your website.
For instance, if you run a food blog, you can ask users to vote on which recipe they want you to cover next on your blog.
Similarly, if you run an online store, you can ask users to vote on products, participate in surveys, or take a quiz to win discounts.
Here are some of the top benefits of using a WordPress voting plugin:
1. Improved User Engagement – By adding a poll or survey, you allow users to spend more time on your website. This leads to more user engagement and reduces bounce rates on your website.
2. Build a Community – Allowing users to vote and participate on your website gives them a sense of community. It improves your brand recognition and builds your business a loyal following.
3. Gather Feedback – By adding surveys and polls you can collect invaluable customer feedback to help you improve your business.
4. More Traffic and Social Shares – Users are more likely to share viral quizzes and online polls to their socials. This helps you get more traffic and social shares for your website.
That being said, here is a quick list of plugins we’ll compare in this article:
WPForms is the best WordPress voting plugin on the market. It is one of the most feature-rich WordPress form builders and allows you to easily create any type of form, including forms to conduct polls and surveys.
It comes with a drag-and-drop interface where you can create your form easily.
You can point and click to add form fields like multiple-choice checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down fields, Likert scale fields, and more.
Beginners would love the read-made form templates that allow you to quickly load form fields and edit them to your liking.
WPForms also allow you to show poll results in beautiful charts and graphs on the front end.
You can also view survey results with beautiful charts and graphs in the backend.
This provides you with more insights into customer feedback and voting patterns.
RafflePress is a WordPress giveaway plugin with built-in polls and survey features.
Users can join a giveaway or contest by voting in a poll or answering a survey question. This is particularly helpful in boosting user participation by providing users with an incentive to vote in the survey.
RafflePress is built with social and viral capabilities in mind. This allows you to create successful polls and encourage users to share them to gain more entry points.
It is effortless to use, highly interactive, and highly effective in reaching a larger audience.
Pricing: $99.50 for their Pro plan, which includes polls and survey features.
WP-Polls is a free WordPress poll and voting plugin. It is simple and quite basic compared to some other options on the list, but it is comprehensive and gets the job done.
It has a basic user interface that blends in your WordPress admin area. Advanced users can add custom CSS to change the style and appearance of their poll form and results.
You can easily schedule your polls, run multiple polls, sort poll questions and results, and more.
Thrive Quiz Builder is the best WordPress quiz plugin on the market. It allows you to easily create highly interactive BuzzFeed-like quizzes to boost user engagement on your website.
You can also create a quiz to use as a poll or survey, which allows users to vote and see the results at the end of the quiz.
You can choose from various templates for five main quiz types. Each template allows you to customize the quiz screens step by step.
The quiz builder also makes it easy to create branching questions, which is when the next question to be displayed depends on the previous answer.
It also includes built-in features to encourage social sharing inside the quiz screens. Increasing the chances that your users may help spread the word by sharing their voting results.
Pricing: $99 as a standalone plugin. $299 as Thrive Suite Bundle.
Formidable Forms is the most advanced form builder for WordPress. It allows you to create any type of form, including powerful calculators, solution-focused forms, and online polls and surveys.
Formidable Forms comes with a powerful form builder that supports various fields that you can use in your polls. You can use checkboxes, radio buttons, Likert scale, dropdown menus, and more to create your online poll.
It also comes with a Quiz Maker feature, allowing you to turn your poll into an interactive quiz.
Formidable Forms can show poll results in graphs and charts on the front end. It also summarizes form results in graphs and charts in the backend.
UserFeedback is an easy way to collect feedback on your website by running quick polls and surveys.
It is handy for businesses that want to get insights and feedback from users directly.
For instance, you can ask users about your new website design, which products they are interested in, what they would like to read on your blog, and more.
UserFeedback is easy to use and allows you to add any type of form fields to your polls, surveys, or feedback forms.
You can use one of the dozens of templates to add a poll quickly. You can use conditional logic to show users questions based on their answers.
It also comes with smart targeting features, allowing you to choose when to show the form.
UserFeedback integrates with Google Analytics using MonsterInsights, which gives you even deeper insights into customer interactions with your forms.
Lastly, it integrates with Uncanny Automator, allowing you to take advantage of 100+ interactions with all popular third-party apps, CRM software, email services, and other WordPress plugins.
Poll Maker is another option to create polls for your WordPress website. It comes with a modern poll builder that lets you easily design your polls.
It has five poll types and dozens of style options, including seven pre-built themes.
Creating a poll is quite straightforward and easy. You can then add the poll to your WordPress website using a shortcode or a block.
Once a user has submitted a vote, you can choose to redirect them to any page on your website. The plugin also lets you schedule polls, limit who can vote, limit the number of votes a user can add, and more.
Pricing: The basic version of the plugin is free. There is also a pro version starting at $39.
WP Poll Maker is another way to create polls and contests on your WordPress website. This free voting plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create basic polls and surveys for your website.
It includes a poll builder where you can design your poll questions and adjust individual poll settings.
It comes with several templates to choose a style for your theme. Each theme is designed to be engaging and stand out, which helps you boost user engagement.
The plugin allows you to control and limit who can vote in a poll. You can also show live results for each poll, allow comments, or add social sharing features to trigger viral reach.
Pricing: The basic version of the plugin is free, and the paid plan starts at €35.
WP-PostRatings is a WordPress post rating plugin that allows users to vote on a post or page. It is not a poll or contest plugin but if you were looking for a way for users to vote on your articles, then WP-PostRatings is the way to go.
It supports schema.org markup out of the box, meaning the post ratings may appear in search results.
It uses Ajax for voting functionality, ensuring users don’t leave a page when they add their rating.
WP-PostRatings has a rating dashboard where you can see how users voted on your posts, which posts are highest rated, and which posts are the lowest.
The one downside of the plugin is that it requires you to add a code snippet to your WordPress theme. For details, see our article on adding a post rating system in WordPress.
kk Star Ratings is another option to let users rate and vote on your WordPress posts and pages. Unlike other voting and polling plugins, kk Star Ratings only allows your users to rate your posts.
It supports schema.org markup, which enables search engines to use ratings data and show it in search results.
One advantage of using kk Star Ratings is that you don’t need to add custom code to your theme. However, unlike the WP-PostRatings plugin, it only allows you to use Stars as your rating icons.
Pricing: Free with paid add-ons.
Which is The Best WordPress Voting Plugin?
WPForms is the best WordPress voting plugin on the market. It is the best WordPress form builder, allowing you to create beautiful forms with a drag-and-drop tool.
With WPForms Survey and Polls addon, you can create dynamic polls and display results with beautiful charts and graphs.
For contests and giveaways, we recommend using RafflePress, which has built-in social features to make your polls go viral.
How to Create a Successful Voting Page?
Many of the WordPress voting plugins allow you to easily create a voting page on your WordPress site. However, to ensure that users participate in your polls you will need to make your poll questions interesting for your audience.
For instance, you can ask questions suitable for your target audience. You can also use tools like OptinMonster to boost engagement by showing your polls in lightbox popups, slide-in forms, display banner notifications, and more.
Do you want to add Halloween effects to your WordPress site?
Holidays are the perfect time to boost sales, increase conversions, and build brand recognition. Halloween is a particularly fun holiday, bringing you more opportunities to grow your business.
In this article, we will show some neat ways to bring Halloween effects to your WordPress site (no coding skills required).
Why Add Halloween Effects to Your WordPress Site?
It’s that time of the year again. Creatures too vile and horrible to speak of are roaming everywhere. But don’t worry! Your website can be a safe haven from the frightful frenzy.
Getting into the Halloween spirit is a great way to spruce up your website and ramp up engagement with your audience.
Whether you own an online store or a local small business, Halloween is the perfect opportunity to brew up some spellbinding special discounts, giveaways, or contests.
For you, that means more email subscribers and sales to enjoy this holiday season. You can add some tricks and treats to your website by adding Halloween-themed effects to help draw attention to your offers and boost conversions.
Q4 is always the biggest quarter of the year, so why not start it with a bang?
With that being said, we’ve come up with a list of the best Halloween effects to enhance your WordPress website. Feel free to jump around to any method that appeals most to you.
They have three pre-made spooky Halloween-themed templates that you can now use in your campaigns.
The first one is simply called the ‘Halloween’ theme. It has a dark background color, which makes it pop up on all website page colors.
You can use strategic popups on your site to advertise secret Halloween promotional offers for your products or services. This works specifically for Exit Intent popups to help prevent potential customers from leaving your product page without making a purchase.
The second template is called Spooky, with Halloween-themed colors and illustrations.
It comes with a countdown timer, which increases urgency and brings a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out), compelling visitors to act now.
The last Halloween template in OptinMonster is the Spooktacular offer.
This is a floating bar template that displays at the bottom of the page, ensuring all important promotions are highly visible to visitors as they scroll through your website.
It is especially effective for drawing attention to limited-time offers for your WooCommerce store.
You can connect all popups to your email marketing service and customize them to your own liking using OptinMonster’s drag-and-drop builder.
Apart from that, you can use it to offer holiday discounts, create Yes / No campaigns, and trigger it on any page of your website.
2. Add Halloween Decorations to Your WordPress Theme
If you don’t want to modify your existing design but still want Halloween effects, then this method is for you.
First, you need to install and activate the Halloween Panda plugin.
Upon activation, the plugin will add a new menu item labeled Halloween Panda to your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking on it will take you to the plugin’s settings page.
It comes with different decorations like a floating bar, monster fall (like snowfall but with pumpkins and bats), and scary popups.
3. Gamify Your Site with Spooky Wheel of Fortune
OptinMonster comes with over 50 ready-made templates you can use for campaigns. Spin to win optin campaigns can help to engage visitors and get them interacting with your website.
A wheel pops at any point during their visit. Users spin the wheel to see what type of prizes they can win. Once they land on a wheel, they can only access their treat by entering their email address.
To create this Spooky Wheel of Fortune, you can upload a cartoon Halloween background image. Then, go ahead and change the font to ‘Lakki Reddy’ and customize all the colors to fit in with the Halloween theme.
You can even add a ghost icon in the center of the wheel.
Also, make sure to customize the wheel options to anything Halloween-related. For example, changing the options to say ‘Trick’ or ‘Treat’ could be a fun way to gamify their experience.
To do this, you would click on the wheel in the builder and click on ‘Customize Wheel Sections.’
Then, you can adjust the text and coupon codes.
You can even adjust their chances so they always land on a ‘Treat’ and never a ‘Trick.’ That way, they always have a reason to convert into a customer.
4. Redirect Lost Visitors with a ‘Pumpkin Boogie in Session’ 404 Page
You can add Halloween effects and themes to just about any page on your WordPress site, even your 404 page.
The easiest way to customize your WordPress theme is with theme and page builder. SeedProd is the best page builder plugin for WordPress there is. Unlike other page builders, this plugin lets you build custom pages without writing any code.
It features a drag and drop interface with hundreds of ready-made templates so you can create custom landing pages, homepages, sales pages, and even custom WordPress themes.
404 pages help you redirect visitors who land on a page that no longer exists. It’s a great opportunity to send them back to an important page so they can focus on finding what they were looking for in the first place.
To add the ‘Pumpkin Boogie in Session’ 404 page, you can simply add a new 404 landing page.
Then, find a GIF of a pumpkin dancing and add the shortcode to SeedProd builder. From there, customize the text and buttons to fit your style.
And SeedProd lets you add animations as well. So, if you want to enhance your visual effects, go ahead and add a fade-in animation.
All you need to do is click on the element you want to add the effect to.
Then go to Advanced » Animation Effects.
5. Add a ‘Spooktacular Savings’ Pricing Page
Adding Halloween effects to your pricing page is a good way to drive home the point that you’re offering special discounts and deals. For example, you could create a limited-time Halloween sale just for your email newsletter subscribers.
With SeedProd, you can add a pricing table that helps customers see how much they are saving.
You can use the ‘Creepster’ font to add a gothic style to your header text. Then, all you need to do is find a simple Halloween background to use. Freepik is a great resource where you can find Halloween themes to add to your page backgrounds.
6. Skyrocket Your Email List with Halloween Giveaways
Kickstart your seasonal marketing campaigns with a Halloween-themed giveaway. This is where participants must complete a task for a chance to win a prize. Often, you’ll ask participants to submit a photo, follow your social media accounts, or share your post.
Most eCommerce websites and small businesses run online giveaways as part of their marketing campaigns. That’s because it’s much more cost-effective than running paid advertisements.
Also, giveaways can help brands grow their audience and generate leads. When you give freebies, your audience feels compelled to return the favor with purchases.
Simply create the giveaway. Then, you’ll want to add your prize and entry options.
Also, decorate the form by throwing in background images and form images to fit the Halloween theme. You can even change fonts and update the button colors.
7. Run a Halloween Costume Contest
Everyone loves to dress up for Halloween. It’s the one time of the year you can wear the wackiest, silliest, or most horrific costumes and get away with it!
So why not turn it into a game that helps you make more sales?
All you need to do is create a new campaign in Rafflepress. Choose the prize you want to give. Then, add a description of the prize and a Halloween-related image with text explaining what the contest is about.
In the example above, we’ve given people three ways to enter:
Post and tag us with your costume
Write a review of our product with a picture
Join an email newsletter
Be sure to add different ways people can participate in the contest, even if they’re unable to participate in the costume contest or another way.
8. Create Holiday-Themed Surveys & Polls
Now that you have your audience captivated with Halloween effects on your website, you may want to engage them so they spend more time on your website.
Quick polls and surveys can help you do that. For example, you can run a poll asking users about what types of Halloween products they’re most likely to purchase this year. This gives you important information you can choose to better market to your potential customers.
The easiest way to add polls and surveys in WordPress is by using WPForms . It is the best WordPress contact form plugin in the market and allows you to create beautiful forms using a drag-and-drop builder.
You’ll need the Pro plan to access their surveys and polls extension. Once you have installed it, go ahead to WPForms » Add New page and select from Survey or Poll form templates.
Once you select a template, WPForms will load it in the drag-and-drop form builder. After that, you can add, remove, rename, or rearrange fields with a simple point and click.
While surveys work great, it does require time and effort for users to complete. In that case, you may want to consider installing the UserFeedback plugin from MonsterInsights.
This powerful plugin makes it effortless to ask visitors just about anything you want by creating pop-ups to collect real-time feedback about your website. You can ask questions such as what types of products they would want to buy, what type of content they are interested in, and more.
9. Add a Free Halloween Countdown
Another way to build excitement for an upcoming holiday is by adding a simple countdown timer.
It works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure. Simply add the shortcode [hcount] to any WordPress post, page, or custom HTML widget, and it will start showing the countdown timer.
10. Use Halloween Themed Fonts
We have mentioned a couple of these already, but one of the best ways to add Halloween effects to your WordPress site is by using spooky typography during the holiday season.
Google Fonts has some really cool fonts that you can use.
We experimented with Shojumaru, Bungee Inline, and Ranchers. They looked great for headings, but we do not recommend using them for paragraph text as this would make the smaller text a bit difficult to read.
Canva is the perfect place to create images that will stimulate your readers’ imagination and creativity. Halloween is a very visual holiday, so you’ll need graphics to accompany your holiday-themed campaigns.
Canva is simple and easy to use, even if you’re not a graphic designer. Anyone can make professional-looking Halloween-themed graphics with it.
You can simply use ready-made templates, illustrations, backgrounds, icons, and fonts with an easy drag and drop tool.
You can also use a special Halloween theme for your website. This is a bit drastic, and we don’t recommend doing it on an established site because it will completely change the appearance of your pages and maybe functionality.
You can create a similar effect using your existing theme by adding a background image, changing its colors, or customizing your site with SeedProd.
However, if you’re creating a limited-time or new WordPress site, you can pick a dark WordPress theme to create a horror movie atmosphere on your website. You can revert back to your original theme after the Halloween.
Here are a few free themes that we found interesting.
Zombie Apocalypse is a basic blog theme with a dark horror-themed background and colors. It has drips of blood splattered throughout the page, providing a chilling atmosphere for those who dare to visit.
If you have a hardcore audience who’s comfortable with horror-like design, you may consider the Zombie Apocalypse theme.
Blackoot Lite is a dark WordPress theme with a haunted feel to it. It is suitable for simple blogs, photography websites, or small business websites. The theme comes with a sidebar with widgets, an optional footer, and two custom menu locations.
And when Halloween is over, you’ll want to move off of the Halloween effects and choose one of the overall best WordPress themes to ensure your site is beautiful and user-friendly all year.
Do you want your articles to appear in Google answer boxes?
Google uses answer boxes to answer questions directly on the search results page. Getting featured in them can help you get more organic clicks and boost website traffic.
In this article, we will explain how to make your WordPress website’s content appear in Google answer boxes.
What Is a Google Answer Box?
The Google answer box is part of Google’s knowledge graph. It is an algorithm that tries to answer user’s questions right on the search page like a featured snippet, and it appears at the top of the page.
Google uses carousels, side boxes, lists, tables, and answer boxes to display the most relevant information at the top. This information is gathered from various sources, and the algorithm decides which results should be displayed inside an answer box.
According to research done by Advanced Web Ranking, answer boxes have an average click-through rate of 32.3%. This makes them extremely important for your WordPress SEO strategy.
How Google Displays Information in the Answer Box
The purpose of answer boxes is to offer instant information to users. This works particularly well when people are looking for factual data like public figures, distances, conversion rates, scores, and similar information.
If users get the exact information they need, then they can move on and search for something else. For many queries, Google can just display a sidebox from the web’s most reliable knowledge sources, like Wikipedia.
In a way, it might sound like Google is trying to keep all the traffic for itself. However, not all users are looking for information that Google’s knowledge graph can answer with accuracy.
If a user’s keywords require an opinionated, well-thought-out, or research-based answer, then Google relies on other web sources.
If you are among the top 10 results for a keyword, then you are already closer to appearing in a Google answer box.
Google answer box results change quite often, and you can easily appear as the best answer by simply improving your WordPress website content.
Let’s explore a number of content optimization steps that you can take to appear in the answer box. You can click the links below to jump to our different tips:
The purpose of answer boxes is to provide quick answers to users.
To help grab a Google answer box, you will want to make sure that your article answers a specific question as early in the article as possible. You also need to make your answer short, concise, and easy to understand.
You can also add a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section to your blog post and pages. This will allow you to answer as many questions as possible for a particular topic and increase your chances of getting featured in an answer box.
If you are using All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO), then it is super easy to add a FAQ section to your content. AIOSEO is the best SEO plugin for WordPress, and it automatically optimizes your site for featured snippets.
Another advantage of using AIOSEO is that it lets you easily add FAQ schema in WordPress. FAQ schema is a smart markup code that allows Google to identify a FAQ section in your content.
As a result, Google may reward you by listing your site in answer boxes, people also ask sections, and other rich results.
2. Include Keywords in the Form of Questions
It also helps to include your keywords in the form of a question followed by a short answer. After that, feel free to add as much detail to your answer as you want.
Adding more information will allow you to use the keyword throughout the article. You can even use the article to answer other questions your users may have about the same topic.
To find keywords that are in the form of a question, you can use any keyword research tool.
For instance, we recommend Semrush as it shows a lot of information about a search term. This includes questions about the topic, which you can include while writing the article.
Expert Tip: Looking for a free way to do keyword research? Our WPBeginner Keyword Generator tool can help you find hundreds of keyword ideas in just seconds.
Users love properly formatted content because it helps them quickly get the information they need. You can publish informative content in a viral listicle format that is easier for visitors to consume and share.
For example, here’s how Google picked numbered bullets from OptinMonster’s exit-intent popup hacks article and showed it as an answer box / featured snippet in the search results.
Google understands that list and table formatting makes content easier to read and tends to highlight the websites that use this formatting.
This does not mean that you must always use one of these formats to write your articles. However, if using formatting can help your users get to the information quickly, then it’s a good idea to use it.
In other cases, Google will use descriptions from your list post and show them in answer boxes.
For example, Google picks small details from our article about WordPress form plugins and displays them in the search results.
4. Optimize Content With Data-Driven Decisions
Data is the most important thing you need if you want to create an effective content strategy. Without knowing information about your visitors, you won’t be able to write content that they want to read.
This is where Google Analytics comes in. Its detailed data helps you understand your audience and plan accordingly.
You will need MonsterInsights to properly track user engagement in WordPress. It is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market, and it will help you learn where your users are coming from and what they do while they are on your site.
These stats provide you with a clear picture of what’s already working on your website. You can then expand on it and make informed decisions for better SEO.
5. Optimize Your Page’s Meta Description
A meta description is a brief description explaining what your page is about. It is added in the <head> section of your site’s HTML. At times, Google will use it as an answer and show it in its answer boxes.
You can easily add meta descriptions to your articles by using the All in One SEO plugin. When you are in the content editor, simply scroll down to the AIOSEO Settings meta box and enter a meta description.
Make sure that your meta description includes your target keyword. It also needs to explain what questions or topics this particular page or post will be answering.
6. Follow SEO Best Practices
Apart from answering user questions, you also need to make sure that Google can find your content and understand it easily.
This means you still need to optimize your posts for SEO just like you would normally do:
Include your keywords in the SEO title, description, and keywords.
Add your focus keyword in the content and sub-headings in your article.
Yes, absolutely. As we mentioned earlier, the click-through rate for results in the answer box is way higher than other content. Depending on the topic and your content, it could go as high as 51.2%.
However, we do not recommend you overthink it. The purpose of answer boxes is to help users find information quickly. If you focus on answering questions through helpful and informative content, then search results will start picking up your content.
Google’s search features are always changing. There are no shortcuts that will help you win forever. But building your website as an authority/reliable source of useful information will help you win in the long run.
Are you looking to improve the customer experience in your online store?
When you take time to understand your customers’ needs, you can improve their journey from first discovering your site to making a purchase. By optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey, you can increase conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction, and boost profits.
In this article, we will show you how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store, from beginning to end.
What Is a WooCommerce Customer Journey?
‘Customer journey’ refers to a customer’s entire experience when they visit your WooCommerce store, including all of their interactions with your brand.
Optimizing the customer journey involves understanding each stage and ensuring that the customer has a seamless and enjoyable experience throughout.
These are the five stages of the WooCommerce customer journey:
Awareness stage: Make it easier for potential customers to find your online store and learn more about your business.
Consideration stage: Make it easier for your customers to find and learn about the products they need.
Decision stage: Optimize your checkout to encourage your customers to make a purchase.
Service stage: Improve your after-sales communications, express your appreciation for the sale, and better support your customers.
Loyalty stage: Build long-term relationships with customers through excellent customer service, personalized recommendations, and loyalty rewards.
In short, you should simply look at your online store from your customer’s point of view and then make it awesome.
How to Optimize the Customer Journey for Your WooCommerce Store (12 Tips)
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store.
We will share actionable tips on how you can improve the customer journey at each stage. You can use the quick links below to jump to the different parts of our tutorial:
Here are some tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the awareness stage.
1. Understand How Your Customers Find You
The first thing you need is to see the journeys your users take before they make a purchase in your online store. This is where customer tracking can help.
The best way to set up WooCommerce customer tracking in Google Analytics is using MonsterInsights. It is the best analytics solution for WordPress and has a User Journey addon that can help you plan how to improve the user journey in your online store.
After that, you can see the path each customer took before buying your product. You get to view the pages they visited, where they clicked, and how much time they spent on a page.
This is really useful information to better understand your customers. You can see which product categories are performing the best and where customers are leaving your store during the purchase process.
It’s important to do search engine optimization (SEO) for your online store so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This will make it easier for potential customers to find you when searching for products and solutions that you offer.
Improving SEO involves writing SEO-friendly product titles and descriptions, using product categories and tags, adding alt text to product images, and much more.
We recommend using All in One SEO because it’s the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and is used by over 3 million websites. It will help you to optimize your entire store for SEO and get found by more customers.
Here are some tips for optimizing the customer journey in your WooCommerce store during the awareness stage.
3. Design an Eye-Catching Product Page
When a visitor clicks on a link to your website on Google or Facebook, you want to give a good first impression. You can do that by creating product pages and landing pages that are optimized for sales.
This is where SeedProd comes in. It is the best WordPress page builder on the market that allows you to easily create landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and even completely custom WordPress themes.
SeedProd comes with dozens of ready-made templates that are already optimized for higher conversions. Plus, it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that you can use to customize your landing pages.
SeedProd also includes a WooCommerce integration that allows you to add eCommerce elements to any page.
For example, you can display featured products that you want to upsell, product grids, add-to-cart buttons, and more.
You can also customize your WooCommerce product search results to help your customers find what they are looking for quickly and easily.
By default, WordPress and WooCommerce have a limited search function. That’s a problem because if your customers can’t find what they are looking for, then they may not come back to your online store.
We recommend using the SearchWP plugin. It’s the best custom search plugin for WordPress and is used by over 30,000 websites.
5. Keep Your Visitors Coming Back With Push Notifications
Push notifications are automated messages that show up in your customers’ browsers even after they have left your WooCommerce store.
You can use drip campaigns with multiple push notifications over time to promote products, build a relationship with your customers, increase sales, and get visitors to return to your store.
The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It’s the best web push notification software, and it is used to send over 15 billion push messages every month.
Customer reviews are a powerful form of social proof that can make your business seem more trustworthy and encourage people to buy from your online store.
But collecting, managing, and formatting customer reviews takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why we recommend using a customer review plugin to add different types of reviews to WordPress.
Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro allows you to show reviews from Yelp, Facebook, Google, and TripAdvisor. That way, you don’t need to install any extra plugins.
Next, you will want to help customers get through your checkout and buy your products. Here are our tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the decision stage.
7. Improve Your Checkout
You can easily personalize the purchase experience in your WooCommerce store using FunnelKit, a WordPress sales funnel builder and optimization plugin.
For example, it comes with a One-click Upsells feature, which allows users to add products to their carts on their way to the checkout.
You can also add one-click order bumps to your checkout for increased conversions.
FunnelKit lets you customize the user journey with pre-checkout offers, custom checkout form layouts, beautiful templates, and more.
On average, 60 to 80% of people who add items to their cart don’t actually buy the products. This means that if you have an online store, then you are losing out on a lot of sales.
Often when a customer has added a product to their shopping cart, they will need some reassurance that they are making the right decision. This often leads to cart abandonment.
It allows you to create beautiful popups, countdown timers, slide-in forms, and more to nudge users in the right direction.
For example, OptinMonster can tell when a customer is about to leave your website and display a popup offering free shipping or a discount before they do.
You can learn how to grab your customers’ attention with targeted messages at just the right time in our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup.
Provide Great Customer Service
After customers have bought items from your WooCommerce store, you will want to give them great customer service to keep them coming back. Here are some tips for optimizing the service stage of the customer journey.
9. Follow Up With Your Customers
When running a WooCommerce store, your customers will receive different transactional emails. These emails help them get order confirmations, track their order statuses, get invoices, learn about how to return a product, and find more information about your online store.
By default, the design and layout of emails sent by WooCommerce are plain and generic. When you customize these emails, it helps to build trust with your customers, boost brand awareness, and get them to return to your store.
It includes a growing library of pre-built WooCommerce email templates that are proven to get results. And you can use the visual email automation builder to make any changes that you need.
What makes FunnelKit Automations really powerful is the custom goals-driven email automation builder. It shows you in-line analytics for each email.
For example, here is a screenshot of a workflow for sending out a thank you email after a customer’s first order.
As your online store grows, it’s important to provide good customer service. This leads to repeat sales, which means more profits for your business in the long run.
One way to do that is to add live chat to your website. This will let you interact with the people who visit your website, answer their questions, and solve their problems in real time. This can get you more sales and encourage existing customers to stay loyal to your brand.
The easiest way to add a live chat feature to your website is by using LiveChat Inc. It is one of the best live chat solutions for WordPress, and we use it on our own OptinMonster site.
The LiveChat WordPress plugin is free, although you will need to buy a paid subscription to the LiveChat service.
Another option is to automate live chat by using Chatbot.com, the best AI chatbot software for WordPress. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills to use it.
Finally, it’s important to turn your users into long-term and happy customers. Here are a few ways to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for the loyalty stage.
11. Reward Loyal Customers
Creating a loyalty program can keep customers coming back to your online store and keep them away from your competitors. It can also be a great way to reward your best customers and make them feel valued.
You can give customers points for buying products and services, but also for creating an account, placing their first order, signing up for your email newsletter, and spending over a certain account.
It’s super easy to create a WooCommerce loyalty program using the Loyalty Program for WooCommerce plugin. It allows you to set up a loyalty program in just minutes and reward customers for buying products, leaving customer reviews, and more.
Adding gamification so that your customers are rewarded after they take certain actions on your website, like leaving a product review, posting a comment, or buying a product.
12. Automate Your Store and Focus on Your Customers
There’s a lot to keep track of when running an online store. Luckily, you can automate tasks to save time and money so you can focus on your customers while growing your business.
For example, you can use automation tools and plugins to send SMS messages to your customers, automate your payment processes, use social proof to increase conversions, automatically display your best product reviews, and much more.
Do you want to add a cookies consent popup in WordPress?
Your WordPress site may be setting cookies on your visitors’ browsers. However, the European Union’s law requires websites to get user consent before setting any cookies on their computers.
In this article, we will show you how to add a cookies popup in WordPress.
Why Are Cookie Popups Necessary?
Browser cookies are small files containing data sent by a website to store in a user’s browser. Most WordPress websites set cookies for various purposes.
For example, by default, WordPress uses cookies for authentication purposes to store session information for logged-in users. It also sets a cookie when someone leaves a comment on your site.
Apart from these, WordPress plugins can also set their own cookies to store different information or recognize repeat visitors.
While cookies are extremely useful, they can also be used to collect information about a user and share it with third-party advertising platforms.
That’s why in Europe and a few other countries, website owners are required to let users know about their usage of cookies. If your website targets audiences in those regions, then you need to show a cookie consent disclaimer.
The easiest way to do that is with a WordPress GDPR plugin. Cookie Notice and Cookiebot are two of the most popular cookie notification plugins and are compatible with many other popular WordPress plugins.
That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily display a cookie consent popup in WordPress.
Upon activation, the plugin will start to display a basic cookies popup to your visitors right away without any additional configuration. The default message is suitable for most websites.
If you’d like to customize the notification, then you need to visit the Cookies menu item in your WordPress dashboard.
From here, simply scroll down to the Notice Settings section.
On this page, you can customize the popup message and button text.
While it’s not as easy to set up as Cookie Notice and won’t work unless you sign up for a free Cookiebot account, it does offer some additional customization options.
Once activated, a new Cookiebot section is added to your WordPress dashboard. You’ll need to navigate to Cookiebot » Settings in your WordPress dashboard to configure the plugin.
If you don’t already have a Cookiebot ID, then you’ll need to sign up for one by clicking the ‘Create a new Account’ button.
Next, the Cookiebot website will open in a new tab on your browser.
Go ahead and enter your email address and password. You’ll also need to click the terms of service, privacy policy, and DPA checkbox.
Once that’s done, you can click the ‘Create Account’ button.
Next, you’ll see Cookitbot settings. Go ahead and add your website URL under the Domain name field. In the free version, you can only add 1 domain name.
After that, you’ll need to switch to the ‘Your scripts’ tab.
From here, simply copy the ‘Domain Group ID.’
Next, you can head back to the Cookiebot settings in your WordPress dashboard.
Under the General Settings tab, scroll down to the Connect your Domain Group section and enter the ID under the ‘Add your Domain Group ID’ field.
Once that’s done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the top.
If you scroll down, you’ll see more settings. For instance, the plugin lets you select a language. By default, it will be set to ‘Autodetect,’ but you can click the dropdown menu to change it.
You can also select Cookie-blocking mode. We recommend using the ‘Automatic cookie-blocking mode’ as the plugin will block all cookies except those that are strictly necessary until a user has given consent.
You might like to check ‘Auto-update Cookiebot’ option in the Advanced Settings tab.
This way, the plugin stays up to date with any changes in GDPR legislation.
For testing purposes, you should also enable the ‘Render Cookiebot CMP on front-end while logged in’ option.
If you leave it disabled, then you won’t see the popup when you’re logged into your WordPress site.
After you’re done with the settings, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom.
Customize Your Cookie Popup Notice
We’re not finished yet, but we’re getting close. To finish configuring Cookiebot, you now need to return to the Cookiebot website.
Next, you’ll need to navigate to the Banner tab on the Cookiebot website.
Here, you can choose a template, edit the position, and appearance of the popup.
You’ll be able to see the changes by clicking the Preview button or returning to your website.
If you notice that the wording used in the popup doesn’t match the reasons your website uses cookies, then you can change it.
You’ll find the settings to do this by navigating to the Content tab on the Cookiebot website.
You might also want to add a cookie declaration to your website’s privacy policy. If you haven’t already created a privacy policy page, then you can follow our guide on how to create a privacy policy page in WordPress.
You need to start by navigating to the Declaration tab on Cookiebot’s website. By default, the cookie declaration uses Cookiebot’s default wording.
If you need to customize the message because your website uses cookies for a different reason, then you need a premium Cookiebot subscription.
Alternatively, you can just type your own declaration into your privacy policy, but you’d miss out on features such as links where visitors can change or withdraw their consent.
In this tutorial, we’ll add the default declaration to our privacy policy. You just need to edit your privacy policy and insert the shortcode[cookie_declaration] where you want to display the cookie declaration.
To see the declaration you need to save and preview the page.
This is how the first few paragraphs look on our test website.
Bonus: Improve GDPR Compliance with MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best analytics solution for your WordPress site. It’s also the simplest way to improve your compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations.
That’s because MonsterInsights offers an EU Compliance addon that works out of the box. It will automatically change your analytics settings to help you stay in compliance with privacy laws.
The EU compliance addon is included in the premium plan. The best thing is that it automatically integrates with both Cookie Notice and Cookiebot.
Once MonsterInsights is installed and set up, you’ll need to install and activate the EU Compliance addon.
You can do that by navigating to the Insights » Addons page in your WordPress dashboard. Next, find the EU Compliance addon and click on the ‘Install’ button.
The addon will be automatically activated.
You can check this by going to the MonsterInsights » Settings page and switching to the ‘Engagement’ tab.
When you look at the EU Compliance section, you will see that the addon has been turned on.
If you click the down arrow on the right side of the screen, then you can see a detailed list of the configuration changes the addon has made to your website.
For instance, you can see that it automatically anonymized IP addresses in Google Analytics, disabled demographics, and interest reports, disabled UserID tracking, and much more.
Next, you can scroll down to see MonsterInsights compatibility with different cookie plugins like Cookie Notice and CookieBot.
MonsterInsights will automatically make changes to the Google Analytics tracking code if any of the plugins are installed on your site. This way, it will wait for consent before tracking users in Google Analytics.
We hope this article helped you add a cookie consent popup to your WordPress site.
Do you want to better understand your website visitors?
By figuring out the intent of your visitors, you can offer what they’re looking for. This helps you create more helpful content, improve your website experience, offer the right products, and more.
In this article, we will show you how to understand WordPress website visitors’ intent and also share helpful tips.
What is Website Visitor Intent?
Website visitor intent simply refers to what a user is trying to do or find on your WordPress website, or why they clicked on your site in search results in the first place.
To better understand what is a visitor or user’s intent, you can break it down into 4 types:
Navigational – When a user searches for your brand name in the search engine to find the website URL or visits your site to find a link to the contact form, then this is called navigational intent. For instance, a visitor might be looking to fill out a contact form and get in touch with you about guest posting.
Informational – This is when people are in the research phase and are looking for information about a product or service. Informational intent allows visitors to gain more knowledge about a topic or solve a problem. For example, a user might be looking for an article to learn more about your software before making a purchase.
Commercial – A user might visit your website to compare different products and services. When this happens, then the visitor intent is said to be commercial. The purpose of the visit is to find out which product or service is better and which they should buy.
Transactional – When someone visits your site to make a purchase, then the intent is transactional. Users are in the final stage of buying a product or service. They can also visit your site or online store to find discount coupons and deals before purchasing.
Why Understand WordPress Website Visitor Intent?
As a website owner or a marketer, trying to understand visitor intent is like reading minds. It uncovers a wealth of information that can help grow your business.
If you have a WordPress blog, then you can find out which content your visitors like. This way, you can create content that your audience prefers and boost your website traffic.
Similarly, understanding visitor intent on a WooCommerce can help you better understand your customer’s needs. You can offer products that people are looking for and get more conversions.
Knowing user intent can also help improve your website experience. You can see the path a user takes on your website before converting. This way, you’ll be able to fix any issues, like making the checkout process straightforward or providing a table of contents in an article for better navigation.
That said, let’s look at how you can better understand website visitor intent. You can click the links below to jump ahead to any tip.
Uncovering the true intention of users and why they’re on your website can be challenging.
However, there are many WordPress plugins and tools that you can use better understand your audience and their behavior.
Here are a few ways you can learn about your website visitor’s intent.
1. Ask Users for a Quick Feedback
The easiest way of understanding your visitors’ intent is by asking them for feedback. You get to know what your audience is looking for on your website and uncover their pain points.
For instance, if you have an online store, then you can run surveys to find out what buyers are actually looking for or where they are satisfied with their purchase.
Similarly, you can also get feedback on your articles and landing pages. This helps you figure out whether the content you’re creating is helpful for users. You can then tweak your content to match the correct intent.
For example, a user might be visiting with informational intent and looking for basic information about your service. However, if you show an article that has a transactional intent, then the user might not be satisfied and would eventually exit your site.
MonsterInsights runs a quick survey and asks its visitors what content it should create. This is really useful in coming up with new content ideas.
The best way of adding collecting feedback from your audience is by using the UserFeedback plugin. It is a free and powerful plugin that lets you launch surveys and get quick feedback in real-time.
The plugin comes with built-in templates and questions that help create a quick feedback survey. There is also a UserFeedback premium version that offers more templates, questions, and customization options.
For example, you can choose templates for website experience, post-purchase review, competitive research, NPS survey, and more.
2. Add Interactive Polls to Understand Visitor Intent
Another way of quickly understanding your WordPress website visitor intent is by adding interactive polls on your site.
While surveys can be open-ended, polls are focused. You can show multiple options for users to choose from, show a rating scale, or show a simple yes/no question. The highest votes for an option will help you uncover the intent behind using your website.
Once you know why people use your website, you can then divide them into different segments. This will help you send targeted push notifications, show personalized campaigns, and display relevant content.
3. Track the User Journey of Your WordPress Forms
If you have different forms on your website, then wouldn’t you want to know how users interact with them and what’s their intent when submitting one?
Forms are a great way to stay connected with your users. They help you get feedback from people, resolve their queries, collect online payments, accept file uploads, gather leads and newsletter subscribers, and more.
However, some users fill out forms while others don’t. By tracking the user journey, you can see the steps people take before submitting a form.
This way, you’ll learn a lot about user behavior and what compels them to fill out forms on your website. Using the insight you get from understanding your visitor’s intent, you can create forms that help gather more leads and grow your business. Plus, you’ll also be able to reduce form abandonment.
The best way to track the user journey of your WordPress forms is by using WPForms. It offers a User Journey addon that shows where a user came from and which pages they visited before submitting a form.
4. Setup Customer Journey Tracking on Your Online Store
You can also track customer journeys on your eCommerce store and learn more about your visitors’ intent. Customer journey tracking will help you see which pages each user visited, how long they stayed there, and what they did before completing a purchase.
This will help you uncover transactional intent and see the reason why people are buying some products but not others. You can then improve your sales funnel and optimize it for more conversions.
Plus, you’ll see how users navigate your website. Using this information, you can uncover the navigational intent of users and make it easier for them to find the right products, smoothen the checkout process, optimize the product pages, and more.
With MonsterInsights, setting up customer journey tracking is very easy. It offers a User Journey addon that automatically works with popular eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce, MemberPress, Easy Digital Downloads, and more.
You can then view a report inside your WordPress dashboard and learn more about the path your customers took.
Simply select a transaction ID to view the entire journey of the customer.
In the screenshot below, you can exactly see on which page the customer arrived, which pages they then visited, and how long they stayed there before buying a product.
Next, you can discover website visitor intent by looking at how they interact with your WordPress site.
For instance, you can see where they click, which pages they visit the most, which files they download, which videos they watch, and more.
You can track all this using MonsterInsights. It is the best Analytics plugin for WordPress and makes it very easy to install Google Analytics in WordPress without editing code.
The plugin automatically sets up advanced tracking in Google Analytics for you. The best part, you can see reports in your WordPress admin panel and better understand your visitors.
For instance, MonsterInsights tracks outbound links and affiliate links on your site. This helps understand user behavior and lets you see where they click.
Similarly, you can uncover your most important pages.
MonsterInsights shows the top pages and posts that people visit on your site. Using this insight, you can uncover content that your audience likes.
If you have videoes embedded in your content, then MonsterInsights can also help see which videos get the most engagement. For instance, if an informational video is getting more plays, then you can create similar videos to attract more visitors.
In the report, you can see the number of plays, average watch time, average percentage watched, and completion rate for each video. To learn more, please see our guide on how to track video analytics in WordPress.
Besides that, you can also use MonsterInsights to better understand your visitors by tracking file downloads, viewing top traffic sources, finding which region your visitors are from, and more.
It even shows which device and browser your visitors use, which marketing campaigns are performing the best, and top referral sources.
6. See What Search Terms People Use on Your Website
Do you have a search feature on your WordPress website? If so, then you can understand user intent by finding out what search terms people use on your site to find products, services, and content.
You can use SearchWP to uncover the search terms people use on your website or eCommerce store. It is the best WordPress search plugin that lets you customize your search on a WordPress site.
You can create custom search engines and algorithms to include custom fields, tables, categories, tags, documents, products, and more in the search process.
With SearchWP, you’ll get to see stats inside your WordPress dashboard. It will display all the queries and the number of times users searched them on your site.
7. Use SEO Tools to See the Search Intent of Keywords
Aside from tracking site searches, you can also look up keywords people use on search engines to find your website. While this may not show user behavior on your website, but it reveals a key part of user intent.
For instance, let’s say a user enters a search term on Google looking for information about your products. Instead, you’re offering them a sales page with transactional intent that has limited details about the product. This will be bad for your WordPress SEO and user experience.
Understanding the search intent of a keyword helps you fulfill your visitor’s needs. You get to see what type of content to create or products to offer.
To start, you will first need to see what keywords people are entering in search engines. You can do that by using Google Search Console. It is a free tool by Google that helps monitor your site’s presence in search results.
Next, Search Console will show all the keywords your site is ranking on. If you’re using MonsterInsights, then you can see the Search Console report inside your WordPress dashboard.
It will show the number of impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and average position for top 50 Google search terms people use.
After you’ve uncovered the keywords people are searching for, the next step is to perform keyword research and figure out their user intent.
You can do that by using an SEO tool like Semrush. It is a powerful tool used by SEO experts, marketers, and business owners. Simply enter the keyword in the tool, and you’ll see different variations.
It will also show the intent behind each search term. For instance, if the intent is informational, then your users are looking for answers to a specific question or topic. Or if it is transactional, then people are looking complete an action like purchasing a product or service.
You can then use these details to create the right content and satisfy user intent. In turn will help you rank higher on Google, better assist your visitors, and boost conversions.
Alternative Method: To get more keyword ideas for your website, you can use WPBeginner’s Keyword Generator Tool. It will show over 300 search term ideas to target on your site.
Are you looking for a way to shorten your WordPress website links so you can track clicks when they’re shared?
If you have long and unreadable URLs on your website, then a URL shortener can reduce them to a few characters. This makes it easier to share them on any platform. You can also track how many times they’re clicked and more.
In this article, we will show you the best URL shorteners for WordPress to track links.
What is a URL Shortener and Why Use It on Your Site?
A URL shortener is a tool that helps convert long WordPress website links into short and shareable links. It simplifies complex URLs that are hard to read by reducing a few characters and turning them into small links.
When a user clicks the shortened URL, they’re redirected to the correct page. They use 301 redirects, which tell search engines that the link is permanent and not going anywhere. Using a 301 doesn’t affect your WordPress SEO.
Short URLs are really useful for sharing content on social media. Some social media platforms like Twitter offer a limited number of characters that you can use. If you have a lengthy link, then it can take up a lot of space.
Using a shortened URL helps save valuable character space that you can use to write compelling copy, get more clicks, and boost engagement. For example, on WPBeginner we use a custom short URL to share content on Twitter.
Besides that, you can use URL shorteners to convert affiliate links into more readable links.
Affiliate links are usually lengthy, hard to remember, and contain your affiliate ID or username. This makes them complex, and it looks something like this:
You can convert them into shareable and branded links using a URL shortener. Some tools even let you cloak affiliate links and make them look more professional, like:
https://wpbeginner.com/refer/productname
The best part about using URL shortener tools is that they also track the number of clicks. This way, you can see which link gets the most clicks.
That said, let’s look at some of the best URL shorteners for your WordPress website.
1. Pretty Links
Pretty Links is the best WordPress URL shortener plugin and the most popular affiliate link management tool. It helps shrink long and complex links into shortened URLs with your brand name.
You can use the plugin for links outside your website. For instance, you’ll be able to cloak affiliate links and turn them into readable URLs. This makes it a great tool for creating shareable links for different platforms, like social media.
When shortening a URL, Pretty Links gives multiple options for redirection. You can select 302 and 307 temporary redirects, 301 permanent redirects, and more.
Using Pretty Links, you can manage all your shortened URLs from the WordPress dashboard. In the premium version, there are options to group links into categories and tags.
The plugin offers other features as well, like an auto-linking feature. You can add affiliate links for certain keywords and the plugin will automatically insert them in the content.
Pretty Links also helps track the number of clicks for each shortened URL. It shows a report inside the WordPress dashboard, displaying the browser, operating system, timestamp, host, URI, and other data for each link.
Recommended For: Pretty Links is the best tool for anyone looking for a complete link management solution for their WordPress site. You can easily manage affiliate links, cloak and brand them, shorten any URL on your site, and track link clicks.
Pros:
Beginner-friendly plugin for creating custom links
Easily manage and organize your URLs from the WordPress dashboard
Cloaks complex affiliates links
Use the auto-linking feature to automatically add links to specific keywords
Offers social sharing buttons to easily share short links
Seamless integration with other plugins like MonsterInsights
Cons:
It doesn’t offer an automatic link uncloaking feature for Amazon
You cannot check if a link is broken before publishing it
Pricing: Pretty Links premium version prices start from $99.50 per year. However, there is also a free version of Pretty Links you can use to get started.
Bitly is one of the most popular URL shorteners in the market. It helps you create short links, QR codes, and link-in-bio pages. The tool is very easy to use, and you get started for free.
To shorten a URL, simply enter the link, and Bitly will create a short link for you. In the free version, you will get a URL with a ‘bit.ly’ domain name, and it will look like this: https://bit.ly/3YqTCEH.
If you upgrade to the premium version, then you add a custom domain and remove Bitly branding from the links. At WPBeginner, we also use Bitly to create custom short URLs for our site.
Bitly makes it very easy to track individual links and get analytics inside your account dashboard. For instance, the tool will show the link clicks, the technology used by your users to click on the short URL, and the location from where you get the most clicks.
There is also offers Bitly’s WordPress plugin. It is a free plugin that lets you shorten a link for selected post types. You can also view the number of clicks from your dashboard for each shortened URL.
Recommended For: Bitly is perfect for free users who want to give link-shortening a try, as well as enterprises that want a robust link-shortening and tracking tool. You can easily create short links and QR codes for your business. Plus, it offers detailed analytics and reports for link clicks, QR code scans, country-level data, and more.
Pros:
Create short and custom links in a few clicks
View link click reports from your Bitly account dashboard
Offers a free WordPress plugin
Lets you create QR codes for links
Offers 1 link-in bio page feature
You can connect a custom domain with Bitly
Cons:
The free version has limited features
It uses Bitly branding in short links in the free plan
You cannot schedule or auto-link URLs to keywords
Pricing: Bitly offers a free version that lets you create 10 short links and QR codes per month. However, there are paid plans that start from $8 per month.
ThirstyAffiliates is the best link management plugin for WordPress that lets you cloak your affiliate links. You can turn long, unshareable affiliate links into beautiful short URLs that are easy to read.
We’ve been using ThirstyAffiliates on our websites, including WPBeginner for over 5 years.
The plugin lets you manage all your links from your WordPress dashboard. You can easily create branded links, add them to your content, and arrange and organize links into categories.
The plugin even tracks your links and shows reports inside the WordPress admin panel. You get to see full statistics of how your shortened links are performing and see top-performing affiliates.
ThirstyAffiliates also integrates with MonsterInsights, so you can track them in Google Analytics. It also tracks geolocation and shows which region you get the most clicks from.
ThirstyAffiliates is more than just a URL shortener. You can use it to auto-insert affiliate links in the content, import links, check links with 404 errors, schedule affiliate links, and more.
Recommended For: If you’re an affiliate marketer or a blogger using WordPress, then ThirstyAffiliates is for you. It’s very easy to use, and you can shorten any URL in just a few clicks. ThirstyAffiliates is also a great alternative to Pretty Links. You can see our comparison on Pretty Links vs ThirstyAffiliates for more details.
Pros:
Very easy to use and shorten URLs
It lets you choose a prefix for your links
Easily manage all your links from a single place
Allows automatic keyword linking
Offers smart uncloaking feature for Amazon Associates links
It automatically checks links for 404 errors
Cons:
Dashboard reports are not that detailed
It doesn’t integrate with eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce
The free version is great but offers limited features
Pricing: ThristyAffiliates premium plans start from $79.50 per year. There is also a ThristyAffiliates free version you can use to get started.
URL Shortener by MyThemeShop is a free WordPress plugin that helps create short links for your website. It is a beginner-friendly plugin that’s lightweight and won’t slow down your website.
You can easily create a short version of your URLs and share them on social media. The plugin also helps trim long links of external sources. This makes your links more readable and shareable.
URL Shortener by MyThemeShop offers multiple redirection types to choose from. It lets you select between 301, 302, and 307 reductions. You can manage all your short links from your WordPress admin panel and also organize them into different categories.
The best part is that it also tracks all your URLs and shows the number of clicks. This is really useful if you have affiliate links and want to see which affiliate is getting the most clicks and generating revenue.
Recommended For: If you’re just starting a new website and looking for a free WordPress plugin to shorten URLs and track them, then URL Shortener by MyThemeShop is the best choice. It lets you customize your short link, pick a redirection type, and offers multiple features for free.
Pros:
User-friendly and lightweight plugin
Offers auto-linking feature in the free plan
Organize your links into categories
Open short links in a new tab or window
Add nofollow tags to your affiliate links
Cons:
Click tracking report shows limited information
Doesn’t integrate with analytics plugins like MonsterInsights
You don’t get a link scheduler or broken link checker
Pricing: URL Shortener by MyThemeShop is available for free.
URL Shortify is another free WordPress URL shortener plugin and is a great alternative to URL Shortener by MyThemeShop and Bitly’s WordPress plugin.
You can easily create short links from your WordPress dashboard, select redirection type and even group links into categories. The plugin also lets you enable the option to automatically add nofollow and sponsored tags to your links.
During our testing, what made URL Shortify stand out was its dashboard reports. It shows more details compared to other free options on your list.
For instance, you’ll see click history, top locations, referrers, devices, browsers, platforms, and more. The report also shows details of each click, so you know how your short URLs are performing.
Recommended For: URL Shortify is a good free solution for affiliate marketers, bloggers, podcasters, and anyone looking to manage links on their WordPress site. The biggest draw is for people who want detailed reports inside the WordPress admin area.
Pros:
Easily customize your short links using your brand
Automatically create short URLs for your posts and pages
Manage and organize links from the WordPress dashboard
Track link clicks and get details analytical reports
Integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
Cons:
There is no broken link checker in the free version
WP.me Shortlinks is a URL shortener by Jetpack. It lets you create short URLs from the WordPress content editor, so you can easily share them on different platforms.
Jetpack is a plugin suite that offers different features. However, its core focus is on performance, security, and marketing.
You’ll need to manually activate the WP.me Shortlinks tools from Jetpack settings. Once that’s done, you can access it from the content editor by clicking the Jetpack icon and heading to the Shortlink option. The tool creates short links using the wp.me domain.
While the tool is straightforward to use, it doesn’t offer a lot of features that you’ll find in other plugins on our list.
For instance, you don’t get a dashboard to manage your short links, select redirection type, add your custom domain to short links, remove wp.me branding from links, and auto-link URLs to specific search terms.
You also don’t get built-in dashboard reports to see link click stats. You’ll need to manually set up link click tracking in Google Analytics.
Recommended For: WP.me is a great tool if you’re already using Jetpack on your WordPress site. This way, you can quickly shorten URLs from the content editor.
Pros:
It comes prebuilt in the Jetpack plugin
With Jetpack, you get a whole suite of plugins along with a URL shortener
Easy to use and can be accessed from the content editor
You can use it for free
Cons:
It doesn’t offer a custom branding option for short links
No option to select the redirection type
You cannot set up auto-link to keywords
There is no dashboard to manage and organize short URLs
You don’t get built-in reports to track shortened URLs
Pricing: WP.me Shortlinks is available in the free version of Jetpack. However, there are also premium plans that start from $4.95 per month.
TinyURL is a URL shortener software you can use to create short links and QR codes. It is a great alternative if you don’t want to use a WordPress plugin or Bitly and just want to quickly condense long URLs.
The best part about the tool during our testing is that you can create unlimited short URLs in the free version. This makes a budget-friendly option for new websites and beginners. However, your links with TinyURL branding in the URL.
To add your own brand name in the links and access analytics, you’ll need to upgrade to the premium version. This will unlock reports where you can see URL click history, dashboard report, time chart of clicks over time, map of where people click your links, and more.
Recommended For: TinyURL is a budget-friendly option for businesses looking for a premium URL shortener. You can customize links using your domain or subdomain while tracking link clicks.
Pros:
Very easy to use and create short URLs
Short links don’t have an expiration date
Easily manage your links from the TinyURL dashboard
Affordable pricing plans
Cons:
The free version has limited features and functionality
No integration with WordPress plugins or analytical tools
You cannot auto-link, auto-cloak, or schedule short links
Analytical reports show basic information
Pricing: The base software is free to use. However, you’ll need a paid plan to remove TinyURL branding and view reports. The premium plans start from $9.99 per month (billed annually).
Which is the Best URL Shortener for WordPress?
After reviewing multiple plugins and tools, we recommend Pretty Links as the best URL shortener for WordPress.
It is packed with features and helps convert long and complex URLs into readable and shareable links. The plugin is super easy to set up and use.
You also get a handful of redirection types to choose from, use the auto-linking feature to automatically add links to your content, and manage all the short URLs from your WordPress dashboard.
Besides that, Pretty Links helps track link clicks. You can integrate it with MonsterInsights to track clicks in Google Analytics as well.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for an external tool that shortens links and also offers a WordPress plugin, then you can use Bitly.
FAQs about Best URL Shorteners
Here are some of the most common questions people have about URL shortener tools:
1. Which is the best free URL shortener?
From our testing, we recommend Pretty Links and Bitly as the best free URL shorteners. Pretty Links is great for WordPress sites looking to manage their affiliate links and track them. Bitly is great if you just want to shorten a few URLs.
2. Are URL shorteners good for SEO?
URL shorteners won’t impact your WordPress SEO and website visibility if they’re used wisely. Short links don’t pass the link juice entirely, so you shouldn’t use them as the main form of creating links for your website.
3. Do short URLs expire?
Some short URLs expire while others don’t. It usually depends on the URL shortener you’re using. For instance, custom links created using TinyURL don’t expire.
Do you want to learn how to track third-party domain requests in WordPress?
If your website is slow, then visitors may leave before it even has a chance to load. However, even if you’ve optimized every part of your website, third-party domain requests can still have a big impact on your page loading times.
In this article, we will show you how to track third-party domain requests in WordPress.
Why Track Third-Party Domain Requests in WordPress?
By reducing your page load times, you can improve the user experience, get more visitors, and boost your WordPress SEO. There are lots of ways to speed up your website, including optimizing your images and choosing the best WordPress hosting.
However, third-party domain requests can also affect your site’s performance even with the best hosting and optimization.
A third-party domain request loads content or resources from a location outside of your domain. Some common examples include content from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, advertising networks including Google AdSense, and even some WordPress comment plugins.
A large number of third-party domain requests can slow down your website. However, sometimes even a single third-party request can block the rest of the page from loading. When this happens, WordPress will connect to the third-party URL and download all the required content, before loading the rest of your page.
With that being said, let’s see how you can speed up your website by tracking and optimizing third-party domain requests in WordPress.
How to Identify Third-Party Domain Requests in WordPress
The first step is identifying all the third-party domain requests your site is making, using Pingdom. Pingdom is a popular performance monitoring tool that allows you to monitor your WordPress server uptime. It can also show all your site’s third-party domain requests.
First, you need to visit the Pingdom website and paste your domain name into the ‘URL’ field. Then, click on ‘Start Test.’
After a few moments, Pingdom will show a breakdown of your site’s performance. To see all the third-party domain requests, scroll to the ‘File Requests’ section.
Here, you’ll see the content type, URL, and size of each request.
To find the third-party requests, simply look for any items that don’t begin with your site’s domain name.
If you want to learn more about a request, then simply hover your mouse over its bar in the waterfall chart.
Here, you’ll see all the steps that WordPress takes to get content from this third-party domain including making a DNS lookup, SSL handshake, and downloading data from that domain.
Pingdom also shows how long each step takes, so you can identify the domain requests that make the biggest impact on your site’s performance.
If you don’t recognize a third-party service, then just paste its URL into a search engine such as Google. Often, this will bring up links to documentation, pages, and forums where you can learn more about the domain.
How to Optimize Third-Party Domain Requests
Once you’ve identified the third-party domain requests that are hurting your website’s performance, there are a few different ways to optimize those requests and boost your WordPress speed.
The method that works best for you may vary depending on how your WordPress website is set up, the requests it makes, and other factors. With that in mind, simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the method you want to learn more about.
This isn’t a good option for all WordPress blogs, but removing one or more third-party requests can have a huge impact on your page loading times.
You may have added a domain request by accident, or you might have changed direction so a particular third-party request no longer works well for your business.
For example, you may have originally added Google AdSense but now make more money selling WooCommerce products on your online store. By removing Google AdSense, you might improve your store’s performance to a point where you get lots more sales, and make far more money compared to showing online ads.
Here, there’s no easy solution that will work for all websites. With that in mind, you may want to try removing different services and content from your site, and then tracking the impact this has on important metrics such as your conversion rates.
If you do decide to remove feature and plugins that make third-party domain requests, then it’s smart to back up your WordPress website. This allows you to quickly restore your website if you encounter any errors, or simply realize you made a mistake.
You may also want to put your site into maintenance mode while making this change, just in case it breaks your website.
The steps for removing third-party domain requests will vary depending on the request.
However, you can often find detailed step-by-step guides in the documentation for the related service, plugin, or software, or by typing your search query into Google. For more on this topic, please see our guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support and get it.
Method 2. Remove Unnecessary WordPress Plugins
Plugins are a huge reason why WordPress is so popular. With the right plugins, you can add missing features, extend the built-in functionality, and turn your WordPress blog into any kind of website.
However, some WordPress plugins make a lot of third-party requests and may even slow down your website. You might be completely unaware that these requests are even happening.
With that in mind, it’s a good idea to go to Plugins » Installed Plugins in the WordPress dashboard, and remove any plugins that you no longer need.
You can even try replacing multiple smaller plugins with a single WordPress plugin. For example, there are countless SEO plugins and tools on the market, but AIOSEO is a complete SEO toolkit that performs a long list of important SEO tasks.
Method 3. Preconnect to Important Third-Party Domains
Another option is to connect to the external domain right at the beginning of the page loading process. When a browser preconnects to an external domain first, it can often download the third-party content much faster.
Just be aware that preconnecting to an external URL takes resources away from loading the rest of your page. If the external resource isn’t crucial, then prioritizing it in this way may hurt the user experience by delaying the rest of your content.
To use the preconnect method, you’ll need a list of all your third-party domain requests. If you haven’t already, then you can get this information using Pingdom, and by following the process described above.
WPCode is the best code snippets plugin that allows you to add custom CSS, PHP, HTML, and more without putting your site at risk. You can also enable and disable your code snippets with the click of a button.
First, you will need to install and activate the free WPCode plugin. For more information, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, go to Code Snippets » Add Snippet.
Here, you will see all the ready-made WPCode snippets you can add to your site. These include a snippet that allows you to completely disable comments, upload file types that WordPress doesn’t usually support, disable attachment pages, and much more.
Simply hover your mouse over the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option and click the ‘Use snippet’ button when it appears.
On the next screen, you need to type in a title for the code snippet. This is just for your reference, so you can use anything you want.
Then, open the ‘Code Type’ dropdown and choose ‘JavaScript Snippet.’
With that done, you’re ready to add each domain that WordPress should preconnect to.
For example, in the following code snippet we’re preconnecting to Google Fonts.
In the code editor, simply add each external URL that you want to use.
With that done, go ahead and scroll to the ‘Insertion’ settings. Here, select ‘Auto Insert’ if it isn’t already selected.
You can then open the ‘Location’ dropdown and choose ‘Site Wide Header.’
When you’re ready to make the code snippet live, scroll to the top of the page and click on the ‘Inactive’ toggle so it changes to ‘Active.
Then, click on the ‘Save Snippet’ button.
Method 4. Implement DNS Prefetching
DNS prefetching allows you to perform a DNS lookup in the background before the visitor needs the linked content or resource. This is particularly useful for third-party resources that are used across your website, such as Google Analytics, Google Fonts, or your WordPress Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.
To use DNS prefetching, simply create a new JavaScript snippet using WPCode, and by following the same process described above.
With that done, add each domain name that you want to prefetch using the following format:
After entering this information, add the code to your site-wide header by following the steps described in Method 3, and then publish the code snippet.
Method 5. Host Resources Locally
When used correctly, preconnecting and prefetching allow you to make third-party domain requests without impacting the visitor experience. However, where ever possible you should try to host resources and content locally.
Retrieving content from a local server is typically much faster, and it’s easier to improve that content’s performance. For example, you might use a caching plugin, or set up a CDN.
There are lots of different WordPress plugins and services that can help you host content locally. For example, if you want to use custom typography then you can host local fonts in WordPress rather than loading them from a third-party such as Google Fonts.
If you’re using Google Ads, Google Analytics, Campaign Manager, or other popular free Google products, then you can host the gtag.js script locally on your own server using MonsterInsights with the Performance Addon.
By replacing external domain requests with local resources, you can often improve your website’s performance without compromising on its features and content.
Method 6. Use Lazy Loading
Instead of loading all your content at once, lazy loading downloads only the content visible on the user’s screen. It will then load more content as the user scrolls down the screen. This can make it seem like the page is loading faster.
WordPress will lazy load images by default, but depending on their location it may help to lazy load externally hosted content too. For example, if you want to embed YouTube videos in WordPress blog posts, then you can choose a plugin that has lazy loading built-in.
Other plugins such as Smash Balloon YouTube Feed come with built-in caching and delayed loading for the video player. This can improve the perceived page load times, even when you’re showing content from third-party websites.
Do you want to perform a User Experience (UX) audit of your WordPress website?
User experience is an important factor in the success of a website. A good user experience can lead to more conversions and sales, while a poor UX can cost you money.
In this article, we will show you how to easily do a UX audit of your WordPress website step-by-step.
Here is a quick overview of all the steps we will cover to perform a UX audit on your WordPress website:
User experience or UX describes the feelings and opinions that users have while using your website.
A pleasant user experience means users find your website easy to use and helpful.
By contrast, a poor user experience means users find your website difficult to use and can’t do what they want to do.
Creating a good user experience allows you to help users make the most out of your website. This eventually leads to conversions, sales, and business growth.
On the other hand, a negative user experience can cause visitors to leave your website without signing up or buying something in your online store. This causes you to lose potential sales and customers.
How to Perform a UX Audit of Your Website
As a business owner, you need to regularly check your website to make sure that it offers a good user experience.
This practice is called a UX audit. You can perform a UX audit by yourself using a combination of tools (you may already be using some of them).
During this process, you will look for issues that may negatively affect user experience on your website. When you find a problem, you can document it and then start fixing it.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Step 1: Define User Goals and Objectives
First, you need to put yourself into users’ shoes to understand what they are looking for when they reach your website.
For instance, if your website is an online store selling pet toys, your audience’s goal is likely to look at pet toys, read customer reviews for those products, and make a purchase.
Similarly, if you run a how-to blog, then your audience’s goal would be to read a tutorial and learn how to do something.
Understanding what your users want to achieve will allow you to help them better.
This exercise allows you to better understand users and their expectations of your website. Most importantly, it helps you figure out the goals and objectives of your target audience.
You can then analyze your website using these personas to see how quickly your content, products, and services can help those users.
Step 2: Test Your Website for Usability Issues
Testing your website for usability helps you quickly find problems that could destroy the user experience.
However, many issues often go unnoticed by website administrators until a user reports them. Users are more likely to switch to your competitor’s website than tell you about issues on your site.
Luckily, there are plenty of excellent tools that you can use to quickly detect potentially harmful usability issues on your website.
PageSpeed Insights (Free)
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool lets you quickly examine a URL for performance and usability issues.
It runs tests on your website and then presents the results for both mobile and desktop devices by assigning each one a score.
This score is given in four categories:
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
It also tests for Core Web Vitals, which are a set of website performance metrics that Google considers essential to a website’s overall user experience.
When you run the test, the language may initially sound too technical. However, you will also find links to resources explaining these concepts in beginner-friendly terms with tips on resolving each issue.
Automated tools can help you catch many problems. However, they are not perfect and may not be able to identify many common UX problems.
If you have a small website, you can go to each page to manually review it yourself. However, it is impossible for most medium to large websites to do this manually.
So, how do you find pages with poor UX?
One easy way to find these pages is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market that allows you to see where your users are coming from and how they interact with your website.
Note: There is also a free version of MonsterInsights that you can try. However, we recommend upgrading to the paid version and unlocking the full potential of the plugin.
Upon activation, the plugin will run the setup wizard and help you connect WordPress with your Google Analytics account.
However, you will need to enable it for your website manually.
Start by visiting the Insights » Addons page in your WordPress admin dashboard to install and activate the eCommerce addon.
Next, you need to enable enhanced eCommerce tracking in your Google Analytics account. Go to your Google Analytics dashboard and select your website.
From here, click on the ‘Admin’ button in the bottom left corner.
On the next screen, you will see different Google Analytics settings.
Under the ‘View’ column, just click the ‘Ecommerce Settings’ link.
On the next screen, simply turn on the toggles next to the ‘Enable Ecommerce’ and ‘Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting’ options.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button when you are done.
Check Low Conversion Pages for UX Issues
Poor user experience is one of the main reasons for low conversions, abandoned carts, and high bounce rates.
You can view your conversion tracking reports in MonsterInsights to find pages with low conversions and higher bounce rates.
Simply go to the Insights » Reports page inside the WordPress admin area and then switch to the ‘eCommerce’ tab.
From here, you can see an overview of your top-performing products and conversion sources.
For advanced reports, you need to switch to your Google Analytics account and go to the Engagement » Pages and screens tab.
From here, you can sort the pages by conversion rate to see the pages with the least conversions.
Using Google Analytics, you can also track pages with the highest bounce rates, the least amount of time spent on them, and more.
For more conversion tracking options, you can see our complete guide on WordPress conversion tracking. It will also show you how to track form conversions, affiliate link conversions, and more.
Step 4: Ask For User Feedback
As you can see, many UX audit activities involve automated tools, analytics reports, and manual testing.
The entire point of the UX audit exercise is to improve user experience. So, why not just ask your users what they think?
Asking for user feedback can get you accurate input from real visitors about your website. It can help you find specific problems and fix them more easily.
Note: There is also a free plugin called UserFeedback Lite that you can try. We recommend upgrading to the Pro version to unlock the full potential of the plugin.
UserFeedback allows you to quickly run surveys and collect user feedback on your website. It also lets you show the surveys to the right users at the right time.
For example, you can show surveys to users on the pages with fewer conversions or display a feedback form to users on mobile devices.
Website speed is a major contributor to user experience. Slow sites cause poor UX and prevent users from moving forward and accessing your content.
The tools we mentioned earlier, like PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals, can help you evaluate the performance of your website.
However, if you are using MonsterInsights, then you can also run a website speed test inside your WordPress admin area.
Simply switch to the Insights » Reports page and then open the ‘Site Speed’ tab.
The report will run the same tests as PageSpeed Insights and show you a report. It will also give you practical tips to improve website performance.
Fixing Performance and Speed Issues
The easiest way to fix most performance issues is by simply installing a WordPress caching plugin.
We recommend using WP Rocket, which is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market. It lets you easily optimize your WordPress website without learning the technical stuff.
Upon activation, WP Rocket will start caching your website’s content.
Unlike other caching plugins that generate a cache when a user visits your website, WP Rocket automatically starts creating a cache in the background.
This means each new user on your website will see a cached version that loads much quicker and improves user experience.
You can learn more by reading our tutorial on setting up WP Rocket with more detailed instructions.
If caching doesn’t immediately fix your website speed, we recommend following our complete WordPress speed and performance guide. It includes step-by-step instructions on how to optimize your website speed.
Step 6: Evaluate Website Navigation
Users expect your site to have a navigation menu with the links they need to find the information they want.
Sometimes, a website may not have a navigation menu that helps users reach the page they want. This leads to a poor user experience, and visitors may leave and try some other website.
You need to make sure that your website has a straightforward navigation menu that takes users to the critical areas of your website.
Adding a search bar to your website’s header or navigation menu can also improve user experience. If users can’t find a link quickly, then they can try searching on your website.
However, the default WordPress search is not very good.
Instead, we recommend using SearchWP. It is the best WordPress search plugin on the market and quickly improves the search experience on your website.
SearchWP allows you to make everything on your website searchable, including custom fields, eCommerce attributes, custom tables, categories, tags, and more.
A lot of the time, poor user experience is caused at the end of a conversion path.
For instance, you might have users trying to submit your lead capture form, but something is stopping them from doing so.
Luckily, you can run split tests and manually test elements on your website to identify and fix problems.
Run A/B Split Tests to Figure Out UX Issues
An easy way to test your conversion elements is by running A/B split tests.
An A/B split test allows you to create two or more versions of a page with slight differences. It then shows users a different version randomly.
You can then compare the results to find out which variation of the page performed the best among your users.
The easiest way to run these tests on your WordPress website is by using Thrive Optimize. It lets you quickly create and run A/B tests on your WordPress website.
First, you will need to install and activate Thrive Optimize plugin. You can purchase the plugin with Thrive Architect or get it with Thrive Suite bundle.
Next, install and activate the Thrive Product Manager plugin on your website. You can download it from your Account Dashboard on the Thrive Themes website.
Upon activating the plugin, you need to go to the Product Manager page in the WordPress admin area.
Next, you need to check the ‘Install Product’ box under the Thrive Optimize and Thrive Architect products.
After that, click on the ‘Install Selected Products’ button to continue.
After installing the plugins, you will need to create or edit a post/ page and then click on the ‘Launch Thrive Architect’ button at the top.
This will show a popup where you can choose how to edit the page.
You can edit the page as a regular page using your theme template or as a landing page with a custom template.
If you choose a pre-built landing page, then you will be asked to choose a template.
Thrive Architect comes with dozens of beautiful templates for various niches to choose from.
After that, you will be able to edit your page in Thrive Architect’s page builder.
It is an intuitive design tool where you can point and click on any element to edit it or click on the ‘+’ button to insert new elements.
Once you have finished editing your page, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Work’ button to store your changes.
After that, click on the ‘A/B’ button in the right column to create a new A/B test.
To run your A/B test, you need to have at least two versions of a page.
On the next screen, click on the Add New Variation button to create a new version of your landing page.
It will now create a new variation, and you can start editing it using the Thrive Architect.
Make the changes to the page you think will work better than the previous version.
After that, simply click on the ‘Save Work’ button to store your changes, and then click on the ‘A/B’ button again.
You can choose how much traffic you want to send to each page variation and then click on the ‘Set Up & Start A/B Test’ button at the top.
This will bring up a popup where you can configure the A/B test settings.
You need to give your test a title and description. Afterward, you can turn on Automatic Winner settings and set minimum requirements for a variation to win.
Click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
Finally, you will be asked to choose a goal for the test. For example, if it is a product page, then you may want to choose ‘Revenue’.
Finally, click on the ‘Start A/B Test’ button to finish the setup.
Thrive Optimize will now start showing the two variations of the page to your users and keep track of user interactions on the page.
You can view the test results anytime by visiting the Thrive Dashboard » Thrive Optimize page.
Once the test has run its duration, you can see which page has performed better for conversions or the goals you set during the test. You will then be able to make changes to improve the UX on your website.
A lot of time, you may not be able to run A/B split tests for all your pages. Luckily, there are other ways to test whether conversion elements on your pages are working.
Website owners are often just looking at the static representation of their website and not interacting with it like a real user would. That’s why many interactive failures go unnoticed for a long time.
This is when you will need to do some manual work. You can try to imitate a user journey as best as possible to complete a conversion.
For instance, if you run an eCommerce store, you can start from the page where your users usually land. Afterward, look at product pages, add items to the cart, and complete the checkout.
Within your UX audit, you must test all your forms, cart functionality, and checkout experience by interacting with those elements like a customer.
A user flow is a customer’s journey across your website. A user will usually take a predictable path to different areas of your website until they buy something or submit a form.
The best way to track user flows is by using MonsterInsights. It comes with a User Journey addon that allows you to see every step of a customer’s journey throughout your site, including the pages and products they looked at and how long they were there.
Note: You will need at least the Pro plan of the plugin to use the User Journey addon.
After setting up MonsterInsights, you need to go to the Insights » Addons page. From here, locate the User Journey addon and then install and activate it.
Now, MonsterInsights will show the user’s journey on individual orders. For example, in WooCommmerce, you can go to WooCommerce » Orders page and click on an individual order.
On the order details page, scroll down to the MonsterInsights User Journey section.
This will show you all the user interactions on your site with their times and durations.
If you are not using an eCommerce platform, then you can still track the user journey for your WordPress forms.
If you are using WPForms to capture leads, then it comes with user journey tracking that helps you track which path a user took to submit the form.
Like conversion elements, other areas of your website could disrupt user flow and block the path that leads them to become a customer.
You will need to manually evaluate user paths in Google Analytics to see where their journey abruptly ends. You can also simulate the user paths to see if you can come across a usability issue preventing the user from going forward.
Step 9: Evaluate Website Content Quality
Visual elements are not the only things that create a good or bad user experience.
Your website content plays a significant role in convincing users to stay on your WordPress blog or website and look around. It also helps search engines find your content more easily and send more visitors to your site.
We recommend performing a complete SEO audit of your website and optimizing your content for SEO.
All in One SEO comes with built-in SEO analysis, a headline analyzer, and site-wide SEO audit tools. All these features help you improve the quality and discoverability of your content.
You will also need to evaluate your content. For example, if a particular page is not ranking or converting well, then consider making it more comprehensive by adding more helpful content.
Don’t forget to check your content for spelling and grammar mistakes. They could make your website seem unprofessional and create a bad user experience.
We recommend using Grammarly. It is the best AI-powered writing tool that helps you automatically correct spelling and grammar mistakes.
Grammarly also has a free forever plan with spelling and grammar checks. However, we recommend buying a paid plan to unlock more powerful features.
Are you looking for the best way to gather useful feedback about your WooCommerce store from your active customers?
User surveys can help you get valuable information so you can use it to make data-driven decisions. For example, they can help you find out how to improve your sales funnel or why your customers bought a particular product.
In this article, we will show you how to easily create post purchase surveys in WooCommerce.
Why Use Post Purchase Surveys in WooCommerce?
If you have a WooCommerce store, then you may be wondering what your customers think of your products and online store. There’s no easy way to find out without actually asking them.
Luckily, you can use a WordPress survey plugin to collect real user feedback quickly and easily. This feedback will help you discover the ‘why’ behind every website visitor’s action. This is something you can’t learn from Google Analytics alone.
When creating your customer survey, make sure you don’t add any unnecessary questions. The questions you ask should get you the most valuable information and insights.
Here are some examples of questions you can ask your customers after checkout:
How long have you been a customer?
How did you discover us?
Was our pricing page easy to understand?
Which of our products have you used?
How satisfied are you with our products?
Have you needed to contact customer service?
Do you have any additional comments or suggestions?
By asking for user feedback after each WooCommerce purchase, you will learn ways you can improve your sales funnel to boost user experience and increase sales.
When you know the why or the intent behind users’ actions, you can easily figure out why your visitors buy or do not buy your products.
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to easily create post purchase surveys in WooCommerce. We will cover two different methods:
Method 1: Creating Post Purchase Surveys Using UserFeedback
UserFeedback is an easy-to-use survey plugin by the MonsterInsights team. It lets you ask your website visitors questions and collect their feedback in real time. It also makes it easy to add the survey to specific WooCommerce pages, such as the order confirmation page.
UserFeedback includes a Post Purchase Review template to give you a head start in creating your survey. Plus, you can customize how your popup surveys look so that they completely match your brand and site design.
Note: There is a free version of UserFeedback that you can use to get started. However, you will need the features of the Pro version to create a post purchase survey.
Setting Up the UserFeedback Plugin
Once the plugin is activated, the setup wizard will automatically launch. Click the ‘Start’ button to begin the setup.
Next, you will be prompted to create your first survey to show you what the plugin is capable of.
We won’t be using this example survey, so you can go ahead and use the default answers.
You can choose from a few pre-written questions or create your own question. You will also be able to change your questions at any time.
For this tutorial, you should simply click the ‘Next Step’ button to continue.
Next, you will see the option to enable specific UserFeedback features, depending on your license level.
Go ahead and enable the features you want or that your license level allows.
Once you have done that, you need to click the ‘Next Step’ button at the bottom of the page.
Now, you can enter the email address where you want the survey responses to be sent.
Since we won’t be using this survey, you don’t need to make any changes and can simply click the ‘Next Step: Publish’ button.
In the final step of the setup wizard, the features and addons you enable will be installed.
Then, you can click on the ‘Exit to dashboard’ button at the bottom of the page.
You will see the sample ‘First Survey’ that you created with the wizard.
Now you can unlock the Pro features of the plugin. You need to enter the license key that was emailed to you when you purchased a UserFeedback plan.
You will need to navigate to UserFeedback » Settings in the WordPress admin area. Once there, simply paste your license key into the field and click the ‘Verify’ button.
Make sure you click the ‘Save Settings’ button once you have done this.
After that, you can enable the Pro features by going to the UserFeedback » Addons page.
For each addon, you will need to click the ‘Install Addon’ button, followed by the ‘Activate’ button that appears.
This is important since the Additional Templates addon includes a Post Purchase Review template, and the Question Types addon allows you to add star ratings and more. Other addons allow you to further customize your survey form.
Now that you have successfully installed the UserFeedback plugin and its addons, you are ready to create your post purchase survey.
Creating a Post Purchase Survey Using UserFeedback
To create a new survey, you need to return to the UserFeedback » Surveys page and click the ‘Create New’ button.
This will show you dozens of survey templates that you can use as a starting point.
You need to scroll down until you find the Post Purchase Review template and then click it.
A new survey will be created for you. Some helpful questions have already been added.
You can change any question’s type and title by simply pointing and clicking.
Each question has a Settings tab where you can set the question as ‘Required’. The Logic tab lets you show or hide the question based on the customer’s previous answers.
With UserFeedback, you can ask unlimited questions and receive unlimited responses. You can ask all types of questions, including multiple-choice and free-form questions, and even capture emails and collect star ratings.
You might like to add some of the questions we listed at the beginning of this article. To add a question to your survey, simply click the ‘Add Question’ button after the last question.
When you choose a question type from the dropdown menu, a new question will be added.
After that, you will be able to add a question title. Depending on the question type, you can then customize the question in other ways, such as labeling checkboxes or radio buttons.
Tip: The ‘Preview’ link at the top of the page doesn’t just preview the form but also allows you to customize its colors.
You can also create a custom thank you message and redirect users after their submissions.
When you have finished editing your survey questions, just hit the ‘Next Step: Settings’ button. This will open the Settings page, where you can customize your survey even more.
Next, in the ‘Targeting’ section, you can select what types of devices and pages you want your survey to appear on. You can display the survey on all device types or create different surveys that target desktop and mobile users.
Next, you can scroll down to the Pages setting area. This is important because it allows you to choose where the survey will be displayed.
The default setting is ‘All Pages’. This will display the survey on every page of your online store. However, we only want to survey customers after they have made a purchase.
In this case, we should display the survey on the order confirmation page that is displayed after checkout. This page is also known as the WooCommerce thank you page.
To target this page, you will need to select ‘Page url is’ from the dropdown menu. After that, you should type ‘order-received’ in the next field.
This works because the setting matches partial URLs. The full URL will change with each transaction but will always contain the characters ‘order-received’.
You can also scroll down to the ‘Behavior’ section. Here, you can configure settings like:
Display Timing – When the survey will appear on the page.
Display Length – How often the survey will appear to website visitors.
Survey Run Time – How long the survey will appear on the designated pages.
In addition, you can enable or disable the ‘Start Survey Minimized’ option.
This displays a less visible version of your survey instead of automatically opening the first question.
Once you are done changing the settings, you can click the ‘Next Step: Notifications’ button.
This will take you to the Notifications page, where you can choose to send yourself an email with each new response to the survey. Simply leave the ‘Send Email’ toggle switched on and then enter one or more email addresses.
You can also enable conditional logic to trigger email notifications when visitors respond to your questions in a certain way.
For example, you might only want to receive an email if the user checks a box labeled ‘Do you want a callback?’
For this to work, your survey needs to contain at least one question with a radio, checkbox, NPS, or star rating question.
After that, click on the ‘Next Step: Publish’ button to continue.
Publish Your Survey
Lastly, there’s an option to schedule the survey for a later date and time.
If you are ready to publish your survey immediately, then go ahead and click the ‘Save and Publish’ button.
That’s it! You’ve successfully created a survey form.
Now when your customers purchase items from your store, your survey will pop up on the order confirmation page.
Tip: You may not see the customer survey when you are logged into WooCommerce. You will need to open your online store in a new incognito window or a different web browser.
Viewing Your Survey Form Results
Once you start getting responses, you can analyze them right from your WordPress admin dashboard using easy-to-read reports.
Simply navigate to UserFeedback » Results to see the total responses, impressions, and more details.
Method 2: Creating Post Purchase Surveys Using WPForms
WPForms is the best WordPress contact form plugin on the market. It comes with a powerful surveys and polls addon, which allows you to quickly create highly-engaging survey forms.
It lets you combine the Surveys and Polls addon with powerful WPForms features like conditional logic, multi-page forms, custom notifications, email integrations, and more.
Note: You will need the Pro plan because it includes the WPForms Surveys and Polls addon. WPBeginner users can use our WPForms coupon to get 50% OFF on all WPForms licenses.
Once the plugin is activated, you need to go to the WPForms » Settings page and enter your license key. You will find this information in your account on the WPForms website.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Verify Key’ button.
Once you have done that, you should head over to the WPForms » Addons page and scroll down to the Surveys and Polls addon.
Go ahead and click on the ‘Install’ addon button to install and activate the addon.
Now you are ready to create the post purchase survey form.
Creating a Post Purchase Survey Using WPForms
You need to visit the WPForms » Add New page to create a new form. This will launch the WPForms form builder interface, and you can choose from different pre-built form templates.
First, you should provide a title for your survey form at the top of the page.
After that, you need to choose a template. Start by clicking on ‘Addon Templates’ to list templates that are compatible with the Surveys and Polls addon.
Then you need to click the ‘Use Template’ button on the Survey Form template. This will load a sample customer feedback form template with several fields already added to it.
You can just point and click to edit the fields, rearrange them with drag and drop, or remove them from the form. You can also add new form fields from the left column.
WPForms supports all commonly-used form fields, including dropdown, radio buttons, checkboxes, Likert scale, text input, rating scale, and many more. This makes it super easy for you to build highly-interactive survey forms.
There is some conditional logic already built into the form. For example, the ‘How can we improve?’ field will only appear if a user selects 1 or 2 stars in the ‘Your Experience’ field.
You can see this by selecting the ‘How can we improve?’ field and then clicking the ‘Field Options’ tab on the left, as seen in the image above.
If some of your customers log in to your online store, then you can make their life easier by auto-filling some of their information from their user profiles.
For example, to auto-fill their email address, you need to click on the Email field, then click the ‘Field Options’ tab on the left. Once there, just click on the ‘Advanced’ tab to show the advanced field options.
You will notice a field where you can set a Default Value for the email field.
You can enter information from their profile automatically by clicking on ‘Show Smart Tags’.
Now you simply click the ‘User Email List’ option, and the {user_email} smart tag will be entered into the field. This will automatically add the email address for logged-in users.
You can also easily remove any fields that you don’t need on the form.
For example, if you would like to remove the ‘Name’ field, then you should point at that field with your mouse and then click the red Trash icon that appears at the top right of the field.
If you would like to add more questions, such as the ones we listed at the beginning of this article, simply drag a new field onto the page and then customize it.
Once you have created the form, you need to click the orange ‘Save’ button at the top of the page to store your form settings.
Next, you can go to the Settings tab and select ‘Confirmations’ in the WPForms form builder.
Here, you can choose whether to show a message or a page or even redirect users to a URL when they submit the survey form.
Besides that, the WPForms Notifications tab lets you edit the notification settings so that you get email alerts when a user fills out your survey.
You can now click on the close button to exit the form builder.
Adding the Survey Form to a Custom Thank You Page
If you have gone through the trouble of creating a custom WooCommerce thank you page, then you can easily add your post purchase survey to it using a shortcode or a block.
Note: Whether you are using the default thank you page or a custom one, you can also display the survey as a popup using a plugin. See the next section for details.
You will find the shortcode you need by visiting the WPForms » All Forms page.
Alternatively, if you created your custom thank you page using the block editor or a page builder plugin like SeedProd, then all you need to do is drag the WPForms widget onto the page and then pick the survey form you just created from a dropdown menu.
Once you have saved your custom thank you page, your customers will see the survey after checking out.
Automatically Showing a Survey Popup Using OptinMonster
You might prefer to have the survey pop up automatically over the order confirmation page, similar to what happens with the UserFeedback plugin in Method 1.
Note: In this tutorial, we will use the free OptinMonster plugin because it does everything we need. However, with a Growth subscription, the premium version of OptinMonster has much stronger integration with WooCommerce.
Upon activation, the OptinMonster setup wizard will start.
Simply follow the onscreen instructions to set up OptinMonster on your website and create a free account.
Once you complete the setup, you will find yourself on the OptinMonster dashboard.
You will see a welcome message, a link to the OptinMonster user guide, and a video to help you get started.
Now you will need to scroll down until you find a box where you can create a new popup.
Simply click the ‘Create New’ link.
You will now see a collection of popup templates. Since our popup will just contain our post purchase survey, we will use the minimal Canvas template.
You can find this template by typing ‘canvas’ into the search field.
When you point your mouse over the Canvas template, two buttons will appear.
You can create your popup by clicking the ‘Use Template’ button.
You will see a popup asking you to give the campaign a name.
You can type in ‘Post Purchase Survey’ and then click the ‘Start Building’ button.
The OptinMonster builder will open with your selected template. You can see a preview of the popup on the right, and there are blocks on the left that you can add to the popup.
You need to find the WPForms block and drag it onto the page.
You can now select the survey you want to add.
Simply click on the name of the WPForms post purchase survey that you created earlier. The WPForms shortcode will be added to your popup.
There is still a placeholder image and text block on the page. These can be safely deleted.
When you hover your mouse over the image, a purple toolbar will appear. You can delete the image by clicking the Trash icon. You will be asked to confirm the deletion.
You can delete the text block that says ‘Drag blocks and elements to start building your campaign’ in the same way.
Your finished popup should include just the WPForms shortcode. This is a good time to save your work by clicking the ‘Save’ button at the top of the screen.
Your next job is to click the ‘Display Rules’ tab and set how and where the popup will be displayed.
The first rule determines when the popup will be shown. The default value is after you have been on the page for 5 seconds. This will work for most online stores, but you can change the value if you like.
Now you need to scroll down to the second rule, which you will find just below the ‘AND’ label.
The default value is to display the popup on every page of your WordPress website. You need to change this so that it only displays the post purchase survey on the order confirmation page.
To do this, you need to click the dropdown menu for ‘is any page’ and select ‘contains’ instead.
Another field will appear, and you need to type ‘order-received’ here.
This rule will match the confirmation page URL. Although the URL changes with every transaction, it will always contain the characters ‘order-received’.
Now you can click the ‘Next Step’ button to determine what happens when the conditions in those two rules are met.
The default settings here will display the popup without any effects or sound. If you would like to add an effect or sound, just use the dropdown menus.
Once you are finished, you need to click on the ‘Next Step’ button. You will see a summary of the display rules you just created.
Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.
Finally, you can click the ‘Publish’ tab at the top of the screen and then click the ‘Publish’ button under ‘Publish Status’. This will push the popup live on your online store.
You can now close the OptinMonster builder by clicking the ‘X’ icon in the top right corner.
Your customers will now see the post purchase survey whenever they finish checking out. Here’s how it looks in our demo store.
Viewing Your Survey Form Results
WPForms shows survey results in beautiful charts and graphs. You can also print survey results and export them to your favorite spreadsheet software.
To view your survey results, you need to visit the WPForms » All Forms page and click on the ‘Survey Results’ link below your survey form.
On the results page, you will see your survey responses displayed in an interactive chart and tables.
You can export responses to a single question and the entire survey.
On the top, you will see options to switch to different chart types and export options.
You can save individual survey results in JPEG, PDF, and Print formats to easily share them on presentation slides, blog posts, or social media.
Would you like to know what visitors do on your membership site before they sign up?
When you track your customers’ journeys in MemberPress, you can discover the steps they take before deciding to purchase a membership. This information can help you optimize your site for better user engagement and increased conversions.
In this article, we will show you how to track customer journeys using MemberPress.
Why Track Customer Journey Using MemberPress?
When you are running a WordPress membership site, your customers will need to purchase a user account to access certain benefits, such as exclusive content, premium newsletters, online courses, or digital downloads.
For example, it allows you to accept payments, add membership levels, create gated content, restrict access based on different membership levels, make members-only forums, and more.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could see the path your MemberPress customers take before making a purchase? You could see which pages they land on, follow their journey as they navigate to other parts of your site, and even see how long they spend on each page.
This information can give you insights into your customer’s behavior that you can use to offer a better user experience on your WordPress website, as well as boost your sign-ups.
That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily track MemberPress customer journeys. Here are quick links that you can use to jump ahead to any section:
Tracking MemberPress Customer Journeys Using MonsterInsights
The fastest and simplest way to set up MemberPress customer tracking is with the MonsterInsights plugin. It lets you view your Google Analytics traffic and visitor statistics right from the WordPress dashboard.
The plugin offers an eCommerce addon. This feature automatically detects MemberPress and other eCommerce plugins. Then, it starts tracking customer behavior in Google Analytics.
It also comes with a Customer Journey addon that allows you to see users’ behavior before they sign up.
Note: You will need the Pro plan to access the eCommerce and User Journey addons that we will use for this tutorial. However, there is also a MonsterInsights Lite version you can use for free.
Upon activation, you will see the welcome screen and the setup wizard. Simply click the ‘Launch the Wizard’ button and follow the on-screen instructions.
Bonus: Switch to Google Analytics 4 Using MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights also helps you set up a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property through its Dual Tracking feature. GA4 is the latest version of Google Analytics.
If you haven’t created a Google Analytics 4 property yet, then we encourage you to do it right away.
Once you have configured Google Analytics on your website, the next step is to install the eCommerce addon.
To do that, you need to visit the Insights » Addons page and navigate to the ‘eCommerce’ addon. Simply click the ‘Install’ button, and the addon will automatically activate.
As soon as it is activated, the addon will begin to gather data. You will find this data in the MonsterInsights eCommerce Report.
You can access the report by navigating to Insights » Reports and then clicking on the ‘eCommerce’ tab. You may need to wait up to 24 hours to see any metrics.
Enabling Enhanced eCommerce Reporting in Google Analytics
The next step is to enable eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics. eCommerce tracking is not enabled by default in Google Analytics, so you must manually turn it on.
First, you will need to head over to your Google Analytics account dashboard and click the ‘Admin’ option.
Next, you need to click on the ‘Ecommerce Settings’ option.
It is located in the View column.
On the settings page, just click the sliders under ‘Enable Ecommerce’ and ‘Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting’ to turn them on.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button when you are done.
Now that you have enabled the enhanced eCommerce settings in Google Analytics, you can head back to your WordPress website dashboard.
Simply navigate to Insights » Settings and then click the ‘eCommerce’ tab.
Next, you will need to make sure that the ‘Use Enhanced eCommerce’ option is enabled under the eCommerce Tracking section.
MonsterInsights will now automatically detect that you are using MemberPress and start recording analytics.
Installing the User Journey Addon in MonsterInsights
Now that Google Analytics is tracking your MemberPress site, the next step is to enable the MonsterInsights Customer Journey addon.
This addon will allow you to see the steps each customer takes before making a purchase in MemberPress, such as the pages they visit, the time spent on each page, and more.
First, you will need to go to Insights » Addons from your WordPress admin panel. Next, navigate to the User Journey addon and click the ‘Install’ button.
The addon will automatically activate and start tracking your customers’ journeys.
Viewing MemberPress Customer Journeys
The User Journey addon is now active. Once a visitor purchases a membership on your site, their customer journey will be automatically recorded and saved.
You might be wondering where to find that information.
Simply navigate to MemberPress » Transactions to see a list of your MemberPress orders.
You can see the details of a transaction by clicking its transaction number in the first column.
Now, you can simply scroll to the bottom of the transaction details to find the ‘User Journey by MonsterInsights’ section.
You will be able to see each step the user took along the way to purchasing a membership.
This includes the time they viewed each page, the titles of the pages they visited with a link, and the time they spent on each page. You will also see the total number of steps and time a user took before becoming a paying customer.
That’s a lot of information about the journeys your visitors take to become paying members. How can you use all of that data?
Using Customer Journey Tracking in MemberPress
Now that you are tracking MemberPress customer journeys, here are a few suggestions for using that data to improve your website and increase conversions.
Is there a post or page on your website that many visitors read before purchasing a membership? You can increase your sales and conversion rates by sending more traffic there.
For example, you can add more internal links to that post or page from other posts on your website.
You can also look for users who purchased a membership taking fewer steps or less time. Do they have anything in common so that you can start to target similar users?
For instance, are they from a similar location or age group? Or did they come from the same referral source?
You can also look at all of the pages your visitors are reading. What do most users want to know before they make a purchase? Can you simplify their journey by offering that information on a single landing page that tells them everything they need to know?
As you take time to study customer journeys in MemberPress, you will learn more about your online sign-up process and sales funnel. You can use that knowledge to improve the user experience and increase sales.
Are you looking for a way to manage ads in WordPress with AdSanity?
Selling advertising space is one of the best ways to make money online. However, creating, adding, and tracking your ads can become time-consuming and complicated.
In this article, we will show you how you can easily manage ads in WordPress using the AdSanity plugin.
Why Manage Ads in WordPress Using the AdSanity Plugin?
Like billboard owners, many website and blog owners make money online by selling advertising space. However, WordPress doesn’t come with an easy way to manage your ads.
Most WordPress themes don’t even have space where you can show advertisements. By default, you will need to edit your theme files to insert ad code into WordPress.
This advanced WordPress ad management plugin allows you to show ads anywhere on your website using ready-made blocks, widgets, and shortcodes. You can even tell AdSanity to show a random ad to visitors without writing a single line of code.
AdSanity comes with built-in reporting and scheduling. It also supports self-hosted ads, HTML5 ads, and external ad networks like Google Adsense.
With that being said, let’s see how you can make money online by managing ads with the AdSanity WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to go to AdSanity » Settings in your WordPress admin dashboard. Here, select the ‘Licenses’ tab.
You can now go ahead and add your key to the ‘License’ field. You can find this information under your account on the AdSanity website.
With that done, click on ‘Save Changes’.
Now, you are ready to create ads for your WordPress website. To get started, go to AdSanity » Create Ad.
To start, you will need to add a title by typing it into the field that shows ‘Give this ad a title’. Visitors won’t see this information, so it’s for your reference only.
Next, it’s time to choose an ad type. Your options are Ad Hosted On-Site, External Ad Network, and HTML5.
If you are just getting started, then it’s a good idea to try different types of ads. You can then look at the results and prioritize the types that make the most money.
With that in mind, let’s look at each option in detail.
Ad Hosted On-Site
To start, you may want to build and host your own ad on your website. By selling ads on your WordPress blog, you get to keep all the profits.
You can also use self-hosted ads to promote your own content. This includes products you sell in your online store or your upcoming webinars, conferences, and other events.
To create a self-hosted ad, select the ‘Ad Hosted On-Site’ tab. After that, you can open the ‘Ad Size’ dropdown and choose a size from the list.
Larger advertisements are more likely to catch the visitor’s attention but can also distract from your site’s content.
After making a decision, you will need to type a URL into the ‘Tracking URL’ field. This is where visitors will go when they click the ad.
By default, the URL will open in the same browser tab. However, you may want to open it in a new tab, particularly if the advertisement is linking to someone else’s website.
For example, if you are linking to an affiliate marketing partner, then you will typically want to check the ‘Open in a new window’ box.
Once you have done that, it’s time to upload the image that AdSanity will show to visitors.
Simply select ‘Set an image’ and then upload a banner or other ad graphic.
Finally, you may want to type some information into the ‘Notes’ field.
These notes will only be visible to people who have access to the WordPress dashboard, so it’s perfect for writing quick reminders.
If you run a multi-author WordPress blog, then you can even use the ‘Notes’ field to communicate with other users.
External Ad Network
While you can sell advertising space directly to other businesses, many website owners use an advertising network instead. These networks are often hassle-free because you don’t have to deal with advertisers or worry about collecting money.
Instead, the network decides which ads to place on your site, collects the payment, takes their management fee, and then sends you the rest.
If you are using an advertising network, then click on the ‘External Ad Network’ tab.
Once you have done that, it’s time to copy the advertisement code provided by your network. The steps will vary depending on the network you are using, but you will often find the ad code by logging into the account you have created with that network.
When you have the code, simply paste it into the ‘Ad Code’ box.
Finally, you can type any extra information into the ‘Notes’ field.
HTML5 Advertisements
If you want to create multimedia ads featuring a mix of animations, audio, video, and other content, then AdSanity has full support for HTML5. This means you can create engaging, interactive ads using HTML5 and then upload those files to AdSanity.
To add an HTML5 ad to your WordPress blog or website, simply select the ‘HTML5’ tab.
You can now type in a title for the ad.
After that, click on ‘Choose File’ and then select the HTML5 file you want to use.
With that done, you need to open the ‘Ad Size’ dropdown and choose how big or small the HTML5 ad should be.
When creating an HTML5 advertisement, we recommend using one of the ‘Responsive’ size options, as these tend to look the best.
Finally, you may want to add some notes by typing them into the ‘Notes’ box.
Step 2: Organize Your Advertisements Into Ad Groups
As you create self-hosted, external network, or HTML5 ads, it’s a good idea to organize those advertisements into groups.
For example, you might create a ‘holiday advertisements’ group for all the campaigns you run during the holiday season. This can make it easier to find a specific ad, even if you have created lots of advertisements for WordPress.
To create an ad group, click on the ‘Add New Group’ link. You can now type in the title for it.
By default, all of AdSanity’s groups are parent groups. If you want to create a child group instead, then simply open the dropdown that shows ‘Parent Group’ by default.
You can then select the group you want to use as the parent.
When you are happy with how your advertisement group is set up, click on the ‘Add new Group’ button to save your changes.
To add a self-hosted, external, or HTML5 ad to a group, simply check that group’s box.
Step 3: Publish or Schedule a WordPress Ad With AdSanity
When you are happy with your ad, it’s time to make it live. If you want to show the ad right away, then simply click ‘Publish’.
Another option is to schedule the ad so that it will appear on your site automatically later. This allows you to schedule all your campaigns in advance, which is a great option if you run lots of campaigns or you are a busy business owner with limited time.
To schedule an ad, click on the ‘Edit’ link next to ‘Publish forever.’
You can now set the date and time when the ad will go live.
You can also choose when the ad gets removed from your website.
If you want to keep the ad on your site indefinitely, then click on the ‘Publish Forever’ button.
When you are happy with your schedule, simply click ‘Publish.’
Step 4: Placing the Ad on Your WordPress Website
The next step is placing the ad on your online marketplace, store, or website. You can use shortcode, but using the ready-made AdSanity blocks is typically easier.
To add an advertisement to a page or post, simply open that post or page for editing. Then, click on the ‘+’ button.
To start, type in ‘AdSanity.’
You will now see all the different AdSanity blocks that you can use.
To add a specific ad, select AdSanity Single Ad.
You can now open the ‘Select an ad’ dropdown and choose the advertisement that you want to show. You can also change the ad’s alignment using the ‘Align’ settings.
Another option is to show advertisements from the same ad group. This allows you to display multiple related ads on the same page or post.
To do this, click on ‘AdSanity Ad Group’, which adds the block to your layout.
You can then open the ‘Select an ad group’ dropdown and choose the group you want to use.
You can also pick how many ads to show in the block and how many columns to use in the advertising area.
Finally, you can show a random advertisement from a particular group using the AdSanity Random Ad block. This is useful if you have created many different ads but have limited advertising space on your website.
In the popup, simply click the ‘AdSanity Random Ad’ block.
You can now open the ‘Select an ad group’ dropdown menu and choose the group that you want to use.
Once again, you can change the advertisement’s alignment using the small icons in the ‘Alignment’ section.
When you are happy with how the page or post looks, either click on ‘Publish’ or ‘Update’ to make the advertisement live.
You can also add the AdSanity blocks to any widget-ready area in your WordPress theme. For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to add and use widgets in WordPress.
Are you using a block-based theme? You can also use the full-site editor to add an AdSanity block anywhere on your website.
Finally, you can embed a single ad on any page, post, or widget-ready area using a shortcode. Simply head over to AdSanity » Manage Ads and find the ad that you want to show.
You can then go ahead and click on ‘[shortcode]’. This will copy the ad’s shortcode to your computer’s clipboard.
Now, you just need to add the shortcode to your website. For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress.
Step 5: Monitor Your WordPress Ads Using AdSanity and MonsterInsights
After publishing one or more ads, it’s important to do conversion tracking. This allows you to see what’s working and what isn’t. By continuously monitoring and fine-tuning your ads, you should get more clicks and conversions.
If you are showing HTML5 ads or ads from an external advertising network, then you will need to set up AdSanity’s Google Analytics Tracking Addon. This allows you to track views and clicks on these advertisements.
Simply install and activate the plugin, and then follow the onscreen instructions to set up the add-on. If you are using MonsterInsights, then the AdSanity Addon will recognize the connection as soon as you authenticate your Google account, which makes the setup process much easier.
For self-hosted ads, you can simply go to AdSanity » Reports in your WordPress dashboard.
Here, you will find the following information:
All-Time Summary: The total views and clicks across all your ads, plus the total click-through rate.
All-Time Top 10 Clicks: The 10 ads that have got the most clicks.
All-Time Top 10 Click Through Rate: The 10 ads that have the highest interaction rate based on their display rate. Here you will also find the total views, clicks, and the click-through rate.
All-Time By Ad Group: The 10 best-performing ads in each ad group, based on views, clicks, and click-through rate.
Do you want to know why your website visitors abandon your site?
Ever wished there was an easy way to read your website visitors’ mindsWITHOUT learning telepathy or using an expensive user survey tool that costs a fortune?
If you’re like me and most other smart website owners, then you have at least wished for this solution a couple of times in your WordPress journey.
Today, I’m excited to share the launch of my free UserFeedback plugin, which enables you to collect real user feedback quickly and easily.
We built this tool because we want to know the “why” behind every website visitor’s action that Google Analytics won’t tell you.
When you know the why or the intent behind users’ actions, you can easily figure out why your visitors buy or do not buy your products.
Background Story
In 2016, I acquired a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, completely revamped it, and launched it as MonsterInsights.
The goal of this plugin was to help users make informed decisions by showing them the data that matters to their businesses.
For example, you can easily see which products or pages are the most popular or where your most profitable traffic comes from.
As the plugin grows, I often get asked by our users: is there a way to understand the intent of every website visitors’ actions?
When you know the intent … the “why” behind users’ actions, you can figure out why customers purchased from you or, better yet, why they did NOT purchase from you.
Unfortunately, Google Analytics only tells you half the story: “What is happening on your website?”. It’s not built to answer the other half of the question: “Why are your visitors doing that?”
In fact, most of the customer feedback tools in the market charge exorbitantly high prices, which aren’t affordable to small businesses.
After a lot of thought and consideration, we decided to release a brand-new plugin called UserFeedback, which enables you to understand user intent by collecting real time feedback from them.
With UserFeedback, you can:
Create a demographic survey to fill out your buyer personas
Ask website visitors to leave their phone number for a callback
Run customer satisfaction surveys to see what buyers think about your products
Run product surveys to find out what buyers are actually using your products for
And so much more
What is UserFeedback?
UserFeedback is a free and powerful WordPress plugin that lets you launch in-the-moment surveys to collect quality feedback from your website visitors.
It comes with built-in templates and questions to make creating feedback surveys quick and effortless, including:
Website feedback/experience
Ecommerce store survey
NPS survey
Post purchase review
Product usage survey
Competitive research
And so much more!
Anything you’ve ever dreamed of being able to easily ask your customers, you can ask with UserFeedback.
In combination with a powerful analytics tool like MonsterInsights, website owners can finally see both the “why” and the “what” of their users’ behavior on their WordPress websites.
When you have direct access to your visitors’ wants and needs, you can make changes that will take your website and business to the next level.
My plan is to continuously add more helpful templates and addons to make UserFeedback even more powerful and essential to understanding your website visitors.
Collect Feedback in Minutes, not Hours
UserFeedback makes it super easy to launch a survey in minutes, not hours. Its 20+ survey templates give you a head start, so you don’t always have to start a feedback survey from scratch.
Each of those templates is pre-designed for different user needs. Based on your requirements, choose the right template, make quick changes, and publish it on your website.
For example, the Website Design Feedback template comes with a star-rating question, whereas the NPS Survey template lets your users grade their loyalty on a scale of 1 to 10.
The best part is that you can build and preview your design within the dashboard.
Get Best Results with Laser Targeted Surveys
UserFeedback enables you to display the right surveys at the right time to the right users. Here are some targeting options you can use for the best results.
Logged in status: Choose to show your surveys only to logged in or not logged in users.
Page URL: Show it only on certain pages
Traffic source: Display it based on the traffic source, like organic traffic, PPC ads, social media, and so on.
Device type: Choose which types of devices the survey should appear
Display timing: Choose the right time to show the survey.
Exit intent / scroll targeting: You can show it to users who abandon the site on desktop or show when a user scrolls halfway down the page.
And much more…
Now that you know how UserFeedback works, let’s take a look at how our customers are using UserFeedback to grow their businesses.
1. Focus on What to Prioritize Next
Are you looking to redesign your website? Wondering how to improve your website copy to boost sales and conversions?
One of the best things about UserFeedback is that it lets you collect feedback score on every page of your site. That way, you can quickly find pages that aren’t resonating well with your audience and prioritize those pages while redesigning.
2. Get Feedback to Validate Your Plans
Pushing out new changes on your site can be intimidating. It’s especially true when you change the pricing plan on your website.
With UserFeedback, you can validate your plans with a survey and learn what users think about your latest plans.
3. Boost Profit by Reducing Customer Churn
UserFeedback comes with several targeting options, including exit intent. This targeting option helps you understand why users are leaving by collecting feedback at the exact moment when people churn.
4. Collect a Constant Stream of Great Suggestions
Do you want to encourage users to provide you with suggestions to improve your product?
One of the reasons most people hesitate to provide feedback is that it’s not easy to do so. With an on-site survey, you can make it convenient for them to send you feedback. Plus, you can collect a constant stream of suggestions to improve your product.
5. Fix the Problems Before They Develop
The biggest benefit of collecting feedback is that it helps you quickly identify problems before they develop. That means you can quickly rectify your problems before your customers start complaining about it.
Get Unlimited Everything – Questions, Responses, and Sessions
A big reason why we built UserFeedack is that most feedback tools are just too expensive. They slow down your site and charge you based on the number of responses and sessions …
Let’s take a look at how UserFeedback surveys compare to another feedback tool, Hotjar.
As you can see while the basic plan is free, it only allows you to get responses for up to 35 daily sessions.
On the other hand, UserFeedback lets you ask unlimited questions and get unlimited responses without a daily session limit!
What’s Coming Next for UserFeedback?
UserFeedback is a great tool that helps you uncover more insights about your website visitors that Google Analytics won’t tell you. I’m extremely pleased with the community response so far, as everyone is loving the new features.
We have lots of great features coming, including:
Customizable survey designs so you can fully tweak them to match your website’s colors, fonts, and personality.
Advanced integrations to automatically let you send a special email, add entries to a spreadsheet, and so on.
Additional prebuilt templates to collect feedback for a variety of additional websites.
We’re truly building something special here. If you have ideas on how we can make the plugin more helpful to you, please send us your suggestions.
As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner, and we look forward to continuing to serve you for years to come.
Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi Founder of WPBeginner
P.S. Want us to acquire or invest in your WordPress business? Learn more about the WPBeginner Growth Fund.
Are you looking for the best affiliate link management plugin for your website?
The right affiliate URL management plugin will help you add relevant links to your site, so you never miss a chance to make money. They’ll also make it easier to monitor, update, and fine-tune your links to get as many sales as possible.
In this article, we will compare Pretty Links vs ThirstyAffiliates, to help you decide which affiliate plugin is right for your website.
Why Use an Affiliate Link Management Plugin?
Affiliate marketing is where you earn a commission every time someone buys a product using your unique referral link. It’s a great way to make money online without having to create and sell your own digital downloads or physical products.
However, it’s not enough to simply add affiliate links to your site. To get sales, you need to place those links in the right place and show them to the right people.
It’s also important to monitor the number of click-throughs and conversions, identify any broken links, update outdated URLs, and much more.
This can take a lot of time and effort, which is why so many marketers use an affiliate link management plugin. The right plugin can help you better manage your affiliate links, and even help automate certain processes like contextual linking.
In this Pretty Links vs ThirstyAffiliates guide, we’re comparing two of the most popular affiliate plugins to see which is right for your website. Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the feature you want to compare.
An effective link management plugin is a must-have for any affiliate marketer. With that being said, let’s start with an overview of these two popular link management plugins.
ThirstyAffiliates – Overview
ThirstyAffiliates is an affiliate management plugin that allows you to replace ugly affiliate URLs with branded links.
It has everything you need to make money online blogging with WordPress including link scheduling, Google Analytics integration, automatic keyword linking, geolocation specific links, and an automatic 404 checker.
You can also organize your links into categories, so it’s easier to work with lots of different affiliate partners.
Note: We have been using ThirstyAffiliates on our own websites including WPBeginner for over 5 years.
Pretty Links – Overview
Pretty Links is also a popular affiliate link management plugin for WordPress that’s trusted by over 200,000 websites.
You can use Pretty Links to replace long and complicated affiliate URLs with cleaner, more memorable alternatives. These links are easier to post on social media, podcasts, forums, and many other platforms.
You can even create links that originate from your domain name, so they seem more trustworthy to security-conscious shoppers.
In addition to link cloaking, Pretty Links is a complete affiliate link management tool that has tons of advanced features including automatically adding links to your site and detailed conversion reports.
Affiliate Link Management
Affiliate links are a great way to monetize your WordPress blog or website. However, maintaining those links can take a lot of time and effort, especially if you’re a small team. If you don’t manage your links effectively, then you may miss opportunities to make money.
Here’s a look at how these plugins can help you manage your affiliate URLs.
ThirstyAffiliates – Affiliate Link Management
ThirstyAffiliates allows you to manage your links from a single location in your WordPress dashboard. This can save you a ton of time if you ever need to update those URLs.
For example, if an affiliate partner changes a link, then you can simply edit the URL once in the WordPress dashboard, and ThirstyAffiliates will automatically redirect to the new URL across your entire WordPress website.
ThirstyAffiliates’ also support categories, which work in a similar way to post and page categories in WordPress.
This helps to keep your links organized, no matter how many affiliate partners you work with.
However, there’s no way to add tags to your links.
Pretty Links – Affiliate Link Management
Just like ThirstyAffiliates, Pretty Links provides a single location where you can manage all your affiliate links.
Again, this means you can edit an affiliate link once, and Pretty Links will apply the change across your entire WordPress website.
Although Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates handle link management in a very similar way, Pretty Links does have some extra features. To start, you can add both categories and tags to your affiliate links.
It even has a separate section where you can manage all your affiliate tags.
This can be particularly useful if you have lots of different affiliate partners or a ton of links that you need to keep organized.
Pretty Links also has a ‘Notes’ section for each link where you can leave reminders for yourself, or even notes for other people.
In this way, you can communicate with clients, guest bloggers, partners, and anyone else who shares the WordPress dashboard with you.
Winner – Pretty Links
If you’re looking for a tool to help you perform essential link management, then both plugins are a great choice.
Both Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates will save you a ton of time with link management, no matter how many URLs you add to your online store, blog, or website. However, Pretty Links has a few extra features that can help you organize your links, so it has a slight edge over ThirstyAffiliates in this area.
Link Checker
Broken links are bad news for any website, but 404 errors cost affiliate marketers money.
When a visitor clicks on an affiliate link, it typically means they’re thinking about buying the product. If they get a 404 error, then you’ve missed out on a potential sale.
As an affiliate marketer, you need a link management plugin that helps you fix broken links before they start costing you money. Here’s what both plugins have to offer.
ThirstyAffiliates – Link Checker
ThirstyAffiliates has an Automatic 404 Checker that scans your site and then reports any problems. It will show information about each link in the ‘404 checker’ area of the WordPress dashboard.
You can check for broken links by visiting this tab, but ThirstyAffiliates will also notify your site admin about any broken URLs it discovers. However, there’s no option to send these email notifications to a different email address, which may be a problem if you share the WordPress dashboard with other people.
The Automatic 404 Checker also isn’t enabled by default, so you’ll need to go into the plugin’s settings to activate it.
ThirstyAffiliates also allows you to check the health of specific links as you’re adding them to your online marketplace or website.
This allows you to verify that a link works before publishing it.
Pretty Links – Link Checker
Pretty Links has a Link Health feature that scans your site and creates weekly reports about any broken links it discovers.
However, just like ThirstyAffiliates, you will need to go into the plugins’s settings to enable this feature, as it doesn’t run by default.
Unlike ThirstyAffiliates, Pretty Links prioritizes the links that get you the most conversions, by scanning your best-performing links first. This feature is particularly useful for large sites that have hundreds or even thousands of affiliate URLs.
You can see the Link Health report in the WordPress dashboard, but Pretty Links can also notify you about broken links via email. By default, Pretty Links will email your site admin but you can change this to any other address in the plugin’s settings.
Winner – ThirstyAffiliates
Both of these plugins allow you to identify and fix broken links without having to manually track 404 pages in WordPress.
However, ThirstyAffiliates lets you check that a link is working before publishing it, simply by clicking a button. This is a quick way to avoid 404 errors happening in the first place, which gives this plugin a slight advantage over Pretty Links.
Link Scheduling
Scheduling helps you create automated workflows for your affiliate website. This is important for busy website owners who don’t have time to enable and disable affiliate URLs manually.
It’s also useful if your affiliate partners run sales and other time-sensitive promotions, as you can organize your campaigns in advance.
Let’s see how these plugins compare when it comes to link scheduling.
ThirstyAffiliates – Link Scheduling
With ThirstyAffiliates, you can set the date and time when your affiliate URLs will go live.
You can also create redirects for any visitors who click your affiliate URLs before they’re active, or after they’ve expired.
For example, you might show a custom landing page explaining the promotion has ended, and suggesting some alternatives affiliate products visitors may want to buy instead.
In this way, you can improve the user experience and possibly even turn 404 errors into sales.
Pretty Links – Link Scheduling
Unlike ThirstyAffiliates, Pretty Links doesn’t allow you to schedule when your links will go live. However, you can set links to expire automatically on a specific date or after a certain number of clicks. This is perfect if you want to use FOMO to increase conversions.
Similar to ThirstyAffiliates, you can automatically redirect visitors after a link has expired. For example, you might use a page builder plugin to design a custom Sorry page, or you can forward them to an alternative affiliate product.
Winner – Tie
If you like to plan your affiliate campaigns in advance, then this is a good reason to choose ThirstyAffiliates over Pretty Links. However, if you want your links to expire automatically after a certain number of clicks, then this is very easy to set up using Pretty Links.
URL Cloaking
Link cloaking is where you replace complicated affiliate URLs with user-friendly links that have your own branding. This makes the links look more trustworthy, which encourages shoppers to click on them.
Cloaked links are often shorter, so they’re also easier to share on social media. In addition, link cloaking hides your affiliate ID, so it’s more difficult for malicious third parties to hijack your links and steal your commissions.
Since it’s such an important feature, let’s compare how ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links handle affiliate URL cloaking.
Pretty Links – URL Cloaking
Every time you add a link to Pretty Links, you have the option to set up link cloaking. Simply type in the original link and the cloaked URL that you want to use instead.
You can then choose between various redirection types, including 301 redirects, 307, and JavaScript redirection.
You can then mark the links as no-follow or sponsored, so you’re in complete control of your WordPress SEO.
‘Sponsored’ tells search engines that the URL is a paid placement or advertisement. Although no-follow and sponsored links are similar, ‘sponsored’ helps search engines understand this is an affiliate URL, so it’s a great example of Pretty Links paying attention to the finer details.
Sometimes you may need to pass a parameter to the target URL, such as a coupon code or customer ID. With Pretty Links, this is as simple as checking a box.
ThirstyAffiliates – URL Cloaking
Similar to Pretty Links, ThirstyAffiliates makes it easy to cloak your affiliate URLs. In fact, the process is practically identical as you simply type in the original link and the URL you want to use instead.
You can also easily change whether the cloaked link opens in a new tab, mark URLs as nofollow, and pass query strings to the destination URL.
However, ThirstyAffiliates only allows you to set up 301, 302, and 307 redirects, so you have fewer options compared to Pretty Links.
If you want to mark affiliate links as sponsored, then you’ll need to add this as an additional rel attribute tag in the plugin’s settings.
This is much more difficult than how Pretty Links handles sponsored links.
On the plus side, ThirstyAffiliates has a unique smart uncloaking feature that helps you follow Amazon’s terms and conditions. The Amazon Associates Program forbids using any kind of redirection including link cloaking. If you ignore this rule, then you may get banned from their affiliate program.
Even better, if you add all your Amazon links to the same category, then you can enable automatic clink uncloaking for that entire category.
Now, any Amazon links you add to your website will be uncloaked by default. This is something that Pretty Links doesn’t offer, and it’s a very attractive feature for anyone who uses Amazon affiliate links.
Winner – ThirstyAffiliates
No matter whether you choose Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates, you’ll get advanced link cloaking features.
For the typical affiliate marketer, ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links have everything you need to create more shareable, user-friendly, and safe links. However, if you plan to use lots of Amazon links, then ThirstyAffiliates’ automatic link uncloaking is a must-have feature.
Automatic Keyword Linking
It’s easy to overlook an opportunity to add affiliate links to your blog posts. This becomes a bigger problem if you run a multi-author WordPress blog or have guest bloggers.
Both Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates can scan your site for specific keywords and phrases and then convert them into affiliate links automatically. Let’s take a closer look at how both plugins handle automatic keyword linking.
Pretty Links –Automatic Keyword Linking
When you add a new URL, you can type in an unlimited number of keywords and phrases. Every time you use these words in your posts and pages, Pretty Links will insert the affiliate link automatically.
Even better, Pretty Links will scan your older content for these keywords and phrases. If you’ve already published some content, then you can start earning money from your back catalog without having to manually update any posts.
Pretty Links also has a settings tab where you can control exactly how this auto-linking works on your site.
This includes setting a limit for the number of affiliate URLs that Pretty Links can add to a single page, so the links don’t distract from your content or annoy your visitors.
Pretty Links can also add a disclosure to every page where it auto-inserts an affiliate URL.
Undisclosed links can create a legal nightmare, so Pretty Links can earn you extra income without risking any fines or damaging your reputation.
ThirstyAffiliates – Automatic Keyword Linking
ThirstyAffiliates works in a very similar way, as you can add keywords every time you create a link. ThirstyAffiliates will then automatically add the link to every page or post that features that word.
Just like Pretty Links, ThirstyAffiliates lets you limit how many affiliate links it will add to a single page or post.
However, unlike Pretty Links it allows you to set a global limit in the plugin’s settings and a limit for a specific affiliate link.
In the plugin’s general settings, you can also disable auto-linking on your homepage and archive pages. You can also disable auto-linking for your pages or posts.
Often, sales pages and landing pages have their own clear call to action. Affiliate URLs can distract from that CTA, so this is an easy way to disable them across all your pages.
These extra settings give you much more control over how auto-linking is used on your WordPress website.
Once you’ve set up auto-linking, it can be difficult to keep track of all the affiliate URLs across your website. With that in mind, you may want to look at the Link Inserted Scanner, as it lists every page and post that uses a particular affiliate link.
This is a simple but effective way to keep track of your URLs, even when using the auto-linking feature.
Winner – Tie
Auto-linking can help you earn extra commission so it’s a must-have feature for all affiliate marketers. Although ThirstyAffiliates has some extra settings, both Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates have everything you need to automatically add affiliate URLs to your content, while still keeping control over your links.
Affiliate Marketing Reports
It’s important to monitor how your affiliate links are performing. In this way, you can see what’s working and not working, and then adjust your affiliate marketing activities to get the best results.
Let’s see how ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Links stack up in terms of affiliate marketing reports.
ThirstyAffiliates – Affiliate Marketing Reports
ThirstyAffiliates has a reporting dashboard that spans multiple tabs. Here, you can see the total clicks on your different affiliate links and identify your top-performing URLs.
Some links may get more engagement from certain geographical locations. To help you spot these trends, ThirstyAffiliates has a Geolocation Report that tracks link clicks based on the visitor’s location.
Depending on the data, you might decide to show different content to users, based on their geographical location.
For more detailed information, we recommend pairing ThirstyAffiliates and Google Analytics. After making this connection, ThirstyAffiliates will send all its data to your Google Analytics profile.
You can even cross-match the information against your Google Analytics data. In this way, you can get a detailed insight into the people who convert, including the devices and operating systems they’re using, and how they arrived at your site.
This is how we use ThirstyAffiliates on WPBeginner to get maximum insights.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it can be difficult to set up. For that reason, we recommend using MonsterInsights. It is the best analytics solution for WordPress users and can show all your ThirstyAffiliates and Google Analytics data inside the WordPress dashboard.
Pretty Links – Affiliate Marketing Reports
Unlike ThirstyAffiliates, Pretty Links doesn’t show you data automatically in a reporting dashboard. Instead, you’ll need to generate custom reports by selecting the links you want to analyze. You can start by generating standard reports, which show the total clicks and unique clicks on each affiliate link.
This is useful to know, but clicks don’t necessarily mean sales and affiliate revenue. With that in mind, you can also create conversion reports, which show the total conversions and the conversion rate for each link.
Unlike ThirstyAffiliates, there’s no way to explore your data based on geographical location by default. However, Pretty Links does integrate with MonsterInsights and Google Analytics.
This allows you to take the built-in Pretty Links reports to the next level and access more detailed information, including where visitors are located.
MonsterInsights will even send real-time data to Google Analytics, so you can track clicks as they’re happening.
Pretty Links also has a unique auto-trim clicks feature that automatically filters known robots and unidentifiable browser clients from your click data, stats, and reports. This can greatly improve the accuracy and quality of your reports.
Winner – Pretty Links
Both of these plugins provide easy access to all the information you need to make decisions based on real data, especially if you’re using a plugin such as MonsterInsights. However, Pretty Links’ auto-trimming feature can significantly improve the accuracy of this information, so it’s our top pick when it comes to affiliate reports.
Professional and Community Support
Both Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates are easy to use. However, even experienced affiliate marketers need help from time to time, so let’s compare their support options.
Pretty Links – Professional and Community Support
If you prefer to find answers yourself, then Pretty Links has detailed online documentation and a blog where you’ll find step-by-step guides covering everything from how to use specific Pretty Links features, to general advice on running a successful affiliate site.
If you want one-on-one support, then you can submit a ticket to their Premium Support Request page.
According to Pretty Links, you can typically expect a response within 1-2 business days.
If you don’t have a support license, then Pretty Links encourages you to reach out using their contact form or post to their support forum on the official WordPress repository.
The Pretty Links team members are very active on the free forum and respond quickly to user questions. If you plan to join the conversion, then we recommend reading our guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support and get it.
ThirstyAffiliates – Community and Professional Support
If you choose ThirstyAffiliates, then you’ll have access to a huge knowledge base covering both the free and premium versions of the plugin. There’s also a blog where they regularly post affiliate marketing tips, along with step-by-step guides on how to use ThirstyAffiliates.
Similar to Pretty Links, this may be all the information and resources you need to answer your questions and solve any problems you have.
When it comes to one-to-one support, premium customers can submit a ticket and get a response within 24-48 hours. Again, this is very similar to the level of support we see from Pretty Links.
If you have the free plugin then you can use the ThirstyAffiliates contact form, or post to the ThirstyAffiliates support forum. The ThirstyAffiliates team actively monitors this forum and responds to questions quickly, so this is a great resource for anyone using the free plugin.
Winner – Tie
When it comes to support, both plugins offer plenty of options. After comparing and contrasting all of the free and premium support, we’re confident you’ll have no problems getting the help you need, no matter whether you choose Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates.
Price Comparison
To help you build a successful affiliate marketing business, it’s important to find a plugin that fits your budget. Let’s see which plugin offers the best value for money.
Pretty Links – Price Comparison
Pretty Links has three pricing plans, which seem to target beginners, affiliate marketers with multiple websites, and established marketers who have up to 5 websites.
If you’re a new marketer with a single WordPress website, then the Beginner plan ($99.50 per year) has everything you need to get started. In fact, the only difference between Beginner and the more expensive plans is the number of websites you can use Pretty Links on.
If you have multiple websites, then you’ll need to upgrade to Marketer, which allows you to use Pretty Links on two websites for $149.50 a year.
If you own more than two websites, then Super Affiliate is the most expensive plan ($199.50 per year) and allows you to use Pretty Links on up to 5 websites.
ThirstyAffiliates – Price Comparison
Just like Pretty Links, the only difference between the different ThirstyAffiliates plans is how many sites you can use the plugin on.
If you’re a new affiliate marketer with a single website, then the Basic plan should have everything you need, for $79.50 per year.
If you have multiple websites, then ThirstyAffiliates does represent better value for money. Their Plus plan allows you to use ThirstyAffiliates on up to 5 websites, for $129.50 per year.
If you have more than 5 websites, then the most expensive ThirstyAffiliates plan is priced at $199.50 per year, but you can use it on up to 10 websites.
By comparison, Pretty Links’ most expensive plan is also priced at $199.50 per year, and you can only install the plugin on 5 websites.
Winner – ThirstyAffiliates
If you own a single website, then both Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates offer similar features, for a similar amount of money. However, if you own more than 2 websites, then ThirstyAffiliates seems to offer the best value for money.
In fact, if you have more than 5 websites, then you’ll almost certainly need to use the ThirstyAffiliates plugin.
Pretty Links vs ThirstyAffiliates – Which is Right for Your Site?
If you’re looking for an affiliate link management plugin with advanced auto-linking features, then both Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates are great choices.
Both plugins can help you unlock extra revenue while saving you a ton of time. By allowing you to auto-link keywords and manage your links from a single location, Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates make affiliate marketing easy, no matter whether you’re a hobby blogger or an experienced business owner.
The affiliate marketing plugin that’s right for you will vary depending on your website, your affiliate partners, and the specific features you need.
With that being said, each plugin has its own strengths and drawbacks. If you want to schedule links in advance, then we recommend using ThirstyAffiliates. If Amazon is your main affiliate partner, then ThirstyAffiliates’ smart link uncloaking is a must-have feature that can help you comply with Amazon’s terms and conditions.
If you’re worried about bots or malicious third parties affecting the accuracy of your data, then the auto-trimming feature in Pretty Links is perfect. We’ve seen this feature significantly improve the accuracy of affiliate reports, so it’s a must-have if you want precise data.
If you’re comparing different website builders, then you may have come across the sentiment that WordPress is hard to use.
WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder powering over 43% of all websites on the internet. However, some people complain that WordPress is more difficult to use than solutions like Squarespace and Wix.
In this article, we’ll address the myth of why WordPress is so hard, and share the tricks, tools, and techniques you can use to harness the full power of WordPress without any difficulties.
Why is WordPress So Hard?
Over 43% of all websites on the internet are built on WordPress. This might make you wonder:
Why are so many people using a difficult platform?
Unlike website builders such as Squarespace, WordPress is completely open source, customizable, and flexible. You can use WordPress in any way you want, which might sound confusing for new users.
This is particularly true if you’ve previously used a website builder like Wix.com. These platforms typically have limited features and control exactly how you use their tools. This might make it seem like that they’re easy to use, but they are also very restrictive.
With the right techniques, tools, and information, WordPress is just as easy as any website builder, but without any of the restrictions.
By choosing WordPress, you’ll get the freedom to use any web host and domain provider, so you can update, customize, and extend your WordPress website in exactly the way you want.
In the official WordPress repository alone, you’ll find over 60,000 free plugins that can add all sorts of features to your website. Think of plugins like apps in your iPhone except they’re for your websites.
When it comes to designing your site, you can use any free or premium theme, or even use drag & drop page builders to create a completely unique design.
There are no provider terms and conditions to follow, and you own all the content on your site.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at why nearly half of all website owners in the world ignore the myth that WordPress is hard to use and choose WordPress as their platform.
WordPress Isn’t Hard (But Here’s How to Make it Even Easier)
At WPBeginner we don’t believe that WordPress is hard. However, if you don’t have the right tools, tricks, and know-how, then WordPress can feel more complex than it actually is.
With that in mind, let’s see how you can make WordPress easier. You can use the links below to jump to any section of the post.
By choosing the best WordPress hosting, you can set your site up for success. The right host will provide exactly the features you need to build and run a successful WordPress website, even if you have no previous experience.
Some hosts even perform crucial WordPress maintenance tasks such as creating backups, adding security plugins, and installing updates. This will make WordPress feel effortless.
For example, Bluehost is a well-known WordPress hosting provider that automatically installs and set up WordPress for you when you sign up.
From time to time, you may encounter problems or have questions.
A good host will offer support over email, phone, live chat, and other channels so you’ll have no problems getting your site back on track.
As the world’s most popular CMS, there are lots of companies that offer WordPress hosting. For that reason, we’ve done the research and created a list of the best web hosting companies to help you find the provider that’s right for you.
Here are the top WordPress hosting companies that we recommend:
Bluehost – great for beginners – includes free domain.
Hostinger – growing fast in popularity due to affordable prices, fast speed, includes free domain.
The best part about WordPress is that you can easily add any feature to your site using plugins, without hiring a developer.
There are eCommerce plugins to help you create an online store, plugins that turn WordPress into a membership site so you can sell courses, add smart lead generation forms to grow your business, improve your SEO rankings, and much more.
In fact, there are over 60,000 free plugins in the official WordPress repository alone, so you’ll have no problems finding a plugin that meets your exact needs.
Just like plugins, there are countless free themes to choose from. In fact, there are over 10,500 free themes in the official WordPress repository alone.
It’s important to choose a theme that looks good, has the features you need, and is also high quality. To help you make the right decision, see our guide on how to select the perfect WordPress theme.
When building your site, you’ll create posts and pages using the WordPress block editor.
If you’re using a block-enabled theme such as Divi or Astra, then you can also add content using the full-site editor.
This editor allows you to completely change the theme layout and add new sections to your website without writing any code.
This is a great start, but it can be very basic and has a limited number of features.
We still recommend using a page builder plugin such as SeedProd. SeedProd allows you to create completely custom page designs and comes with ready-made blocks that you can drag and drop anywhere on your site.
This includes advanced blocks like countdown timers, contact forms, Google Maps, payment fields, and much more.
After adding a block to your site, you can customize it using the settings in the left-hand SeedProd menu.
Most visitors will find your site through search engines like Google. To help search engines show your content to the right people, you’ll need to work on your WordPress SEO.
SEO is a huge topic that often includes technical tasks such as adding rich snippets schema markup to your site.
Thankfully, there’s a WordPress plugin for everything and SEO is no exception. There are lots of different WordPress SEO plugins and tools you can use for individual tasks, but we recommend AIOSEO as it’s the complete SEO toolkit for WordPress.
AIOSEO comes with powerful features including breadcrumb navigation, advanced eCommerce SEO support for WooCommerce, local SEO, an internal link assistant, and much more. This means you don’t have to set up and learn multiple SEO plugins.
AIOSEO also scans your pages and posts as you’re writing them and creates a checklist of ways to improve its SEO.
To provide a good experience, your website needs to load quickly.
WordPress is already optimized for speed and performance, but there are lots of tricks and tools that can make it run even faster. With that in mind, we’ve created the ultimate guide to boost WordPress speed and performance that has everything you need to know.
Set up an Automated Security Plugin
WordPress is secure software, but hackers are always coming up with new ways to break into sites and steal data. To help new WordPress users keep their sites safe, we’ve created an ultimate WordPress security guide.
Sucuri tracks everything that happens on your site, including failed login attempts and any changes to the WordPress files.
It also scans for malware and monitors whether your site appears on any blocklists, as this may mean there’s a problem with your site’s security.
If it finds an issue, then Sucuri will notify you automatically. In this way, you can protect your site without having to perform any manual checks, or learn complicated security tools.
As a website owner, your goal is to get people to your site and keep them engaged. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.
Analytics allow you to make decisions based on real data. For example, you can track website visitors and see the content that gets the most engagement. You can then create more of this popular content.
You can also see how long visitors stay on your site and the bounce rate, which is the percentage of users who exit your site on the first visit. You can use this information to increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate in WordPress.
Google Analytics is an important tool, but it can be complicated to set up. For that reason, we recommend using MonsterInsights.
Spambots and malicious third parties can easily flood a site’s comment section with links to malware and low-quality pages. This can hurt your website’s reputation and may even affect its SEO.
You can moderate comments in WordPress directly from the dashboard, including manually approving and blocking comments, or even deleting them completely.
However, moderating every single comment can be time-consuming, especially as your site grows and attracts more visitors.
WordPress is open-source software so anyone can see and edit its code, or even add their own PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. It may sound complicated, but there are lots of reasons to add custom code to WordPress.
WPCode is the best code snippets plugin for WordPress and allows you to add custom PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML without editing any theme files.
WPCode also has a built-in library of snippets that you can add to a site with just a few clicks. Even if you’re a beginner with no coding experience, WPCode makes it easy to add custom code in WordPress in a safe way.
Keep Your WordPress Site Up-To-Date
It’s important to keep your themes, plugins, and core WordPress software up-to-date. Hackers try to exploit known errors and vulnerabilities in outdated software, so if you fall behind then your site could become an easy target.
Some updates even add features that make WordPress easier to use. For this reason, it’s important to update WordPress core, update your WordPress plugins, and install the latest version of your theme.
Some web hosts will install these updates for you automatically, especially if you’re using a managed hosting provider.
WordPress is secure and reliable software, but it’s still a good idea to create regular backups.
Accidents and mistakes happen, such as deleting important content or editing the wrong page. Malicious third parties may also try to break into your site and delete your content.
By creating regular backups, you can always recover a working and error-free version of your website. Even if the worst happens and you lose all your data, you can simply restore your WordPress website from its latest backup.
They may be important, but many website owners overlook backups until it’s too late.
The good news is there are many free and paid WordPress backup plugins that can do the hard work for you. We recommend using a premium plugin like Duplicator Pro as it can create backups automatically.
For added security, Duplicator Pro will save your backups to popular online storage solutions like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Amazon S3. This means you can log into these services from any location, and get access to a working copy of your website.
For this reason, many website owners don’t take the time to learn more about WordPress. We think this is a big mistake.
By continuing to learn you can often make WordPress even easier to use. With that in mind, here are just some of the free resources you’ll find on WPBeginner:
WPBeginner Blog. This is where we publish our WordPress tutorials, how-tos, and step-by-step guides. We have a huge library of free content, and we’re publishing new information all the time.
WPBeginner Dictionary. Complicated terms and technical jargon can make WordPress seem a lot harder than it is. For that reason, we’ve created a directory that covers all the WordPress lingo.
WPBeginner Videos. Our step-by-step WordPress 101 video tutorials have everything you need to get started with WordPress.
WPBeginner on YouTube. Enjoyed our WordPress 101 series and want to learn more? You’ll find over 900 more videos on our YouTube channel covering everything from SEO, to common WordPress errors and how to fix them, how to embed dynamic social media feeds on your site, and much more.
WPBeginner Engage Group. The largest and fastest-growing WordPress group for non-techies and beginners on Facebook. Here, you can connect with over 91,000 WordPress users, ask questions, and get support from the community.
Consider Hiring a WordPress Maintenance Service
The tips and tricks in this guide will make WordPress feel effortless, even if you’ve never created a website before.
However, if you’re looking for the ultimate hassle-free experience then you can always hire a maintenance service to take care of WordPress for you. This includes creating backups, installing updates, performing SEO audits, upgrading your site’s security, finding and fixing broken links, and more.
These services are perfect for first-time WordPress users or anyone who finds that day-to-day website maintenance takes too much time. If you want to hire a WordPress expert, then see our pick of the best WordPress website maintenance services.
Are you looking for a WordPress plugin to show WooCommerce products in a grid?
Showing your products in a grid view provides a better user experience for customers. With the right plugin, you can easily customize and style your product category grid.
In this article, we will show you the best product grid plugins for WooCommerce.
Why Use a Product Grid Plugin for WooCommerce?
When you’re creating an online store, it is important to showcase your best products and make it easier for customers to view them.
With the right WooCommerce plugin, you can easily display multiple products or features from a single product in a grid view. This provides a better user experience and makes it easy for customers to interact with your products.
Besides that, a product grid plugin also offers more flexibility for customization. You can easily adjust the grid, choose the number of rows and columns, change the color, and more.
Some plugins will also let you add category filters. This way, users can simply search for a product and view them in a grid rather than explore each product in your WooCommerce store. It helps boost conversions and increase sales.
That said, let’s look at the best product category grid plugins for WooCommerce.
SeedProd is the best WordPress website builder and landing page plugin. It is used by over 1 million professionals.
The plugin offers a drag-and-drop builder that lets you create custom themes and page layouts. You get prebuilt templates and lots of customization options.
In the page builder, SeedProd offers exclusive WooCommerce blocks to customize your product page. You simply drag and drop the products grid block on your template.
The plugin lets you choose the number of columns in the grid. It also offers options to filter products and show all products, best-selling products, top-rated products, and more. Besides that, you can select the order of the products based on date, title, rating, ID, and more.
Other than that, SeedProd offers other blocks for customization. For instance, you can add images, optin forms, countdown timers, contact forms, and more to your product pages.
It also easily integrates with email marketing tools to help you collect leads and grow your email list.
Pricing: SeedProd prices start from $39.50 per year. There is also a free SeedProd Lite version you use to get started.
MonsterInsights offers a Popular Posts feature that lets you show your best-selling products in a grid view. You get to choose from prebuilt themes for your product grid.
The plugin also shows a preview of your theme. Besides that, you get plenty of customization options.
For instance, you can change the color and size of the title, prices, and ratings. It also gives you the option to select a layout for your grid, choose product count to display, and more.
Other than that, you can also exclude certain products or product categories from appearing in the MonsterInsights popular post widget on the page.
ProductX is another popular product grid plugin for WooCommerce. It lets you create WooCommerce stores using the drag-and-drop builder.
There are different blocks you can use to customize your store. Plus, the plugin offers a template toolkit, so you can quickly select a design and edit it according to your requirements.
ProductX offers different product category grid blocks. You can choose from 3 different variations to display products in a grid view. Besides that, there are multiple settings to edit the design of the product grid.
Other features offered by ProductX include advanced product filters, a progress bar, product comparison, whitelist items, and much more.
Pricing: ProductX is a paid WordPress plugin with prices starting from $49 per year for 1 site.
YITH WooCommerce Best Sellers is a great plugin to have on your online store and display top-selling products in a grid layout.
The plugin is easy to use and offers different options to customize your product category grid. For example, you can change the text, ratings, colors, and other details of any product in the grid. Plus, you can choose the number of rows and columns to display.
Using YITH WooCommerce Best Sellers, you can show your most popular products or top-selling product category. There is also a best-seller badge you can use to highlight a product and get more conversions.
Pricing: YITH WooCommerce Best Sellers will cost you $59.99 per year.
If you’re using Instagram shopping to sell products online, then you can easily display items on your WordPress website using Smash Balloon’s Instagram Feeds plugin.
You can simply connect your Instagram account with the WooCommerce store. After that, display product feeds as grids, carousels, masonry, and other layouts.
The plugin also lets you link each Instagram post to a page on your WooCommere website. This way, users will land on the product page and easily make a purchase.
With Smash Balloon, you get full control over the appearance of your social media feeds. There are options to change the width, height, number of images, and more for your Instagram shoppable feed.
Pricing: You can get Smash Balloon Instagram Feed plugin for $49 per year.
The plugin offers built-in themes for carousels and grids. Plus, it lets you customize the grid by choosing the number of products to display per page, showing a header title, and controlling the image sizes. The plugin also gives you settings for selecting columns and rows and enabling pagination.
You can then choose which products to show in the grid. There are multiple options to choose from, like the latest products, older products, and featured products. After creating the product grid, you can easily add them anywhere on your WooCommerce store using shortcodes.
Besides that, there are options to show different badges on products. For instance, you display a sales badge, featured badge, discount badge, and sold-out badge in your product grid. You can also edit the style settings and change the product title font, color, ratings, and more.
Pricing: You can use the Product Carousel Slider & Grid Ultimate for WooCommerce plugin for free.
Grid/List View for WooCommerce is the next product category grid plugin on our list. The plugin is a great free solution for business owners looking to create simple product grids and lists.
You get to choose from 2 default styles, which include a grid or list layout. Besides that, there are basic options to customize your product grid. You can choose how many products to display and where to position the product count.
Sadly, there is no drag-and-drop customization option as you’d get in SeedProd. However, the plugin offers a wide variety of buttons to choose from for your WooCommerce product grid.
Pricing: Grid/List View for WooCommerce is a free-to-use plugin.
If you have different product categories on your WooCommerce store, then all you have to do is install the plugin and use shortcodes to display the products.
There are no customization options or additional settings that you’ll find in your WordPress dashboard. Everything is controlled through shortcodes. You can use different shortcodes for choosing the number of columns, order of product categories, design of the product grid, and more.
However, if you’re looking for more customization features and ease of use, then you can use any other plugin on our list, like SeedProd or MonsterInsights.
Pricing: You can get started with Product Categories Designs for WooCommerce for free.
Which is the Best Product Grid Plugin for WooCommerce?
In our experience, SeedProd is the best product grid plugin for WooCommerce. It is super easy to use because it offers a drag-and-drop builder with lots of template customization for your site and pages.
You can create stunning WooCommmerce pages with customized product grids that will help boost conversions. The plugin also offers tons of options to edit and change the appearance of your product category grids.
That’s not all, SeedProd also integrates with popular email marketing services, which helps grow your email list.
Bonus: If you’re looking to grow your WooCommerce store, then we also recommend that you try FunnelKit. It’s one of the best WooCommerce plugins to grow your store revenue.
Do you want to make sure that your WordPress site is properly optimized for search engines?
Going through a search engine optimization (SEO) checklist can help you follow best practices and ensure you don’t miss out on small details. This way, you can rank higher on Google and grow website traffic.
In this article, we will share a WordPress SEO checklist for beginners.
Why Follow a WordPress SEO Checklist?
Search engines are often the largest source of traffic for many websites. However, the idea of optimizing your site for WordPress SEO can be intimidating, especially for beginners.
There are many technical terms, SEO tactics, and new trends that can put off new website owners from optimizing their sites and ranking higher in search engines.
This is where a WordPress SEO checklist can help you out. It covers all the basics and makes sure you follow SEO best practices. Plus, there are many tools and plugins that can optimize your site and take care of technical SEO for you.
You can use the checklist by going through each point step by step. After that, make changes to ensure search engines can easily crawl and index your content.
That said, let’s look at the WordPress SEO checklist for beginners. Here are all the things we’ll cover, so you can simply click the links below to jump ahead to your preferred section:
An SEO plugin can help configure your WordPress site for search engines. It ensures that you follow the best practices and handles all the technical SEO optimizations.
It is also the SEO plugin we also use on WPBeginner.
AIOSEO offers lots of powerful features. For instance, you can use it to create an XML sitemap, add schema markup, integrate social media, breadcrumb navigation, TruSEO On-Page analysis score, robots.txt editor, local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, link assistant, track broken links, and much more.
You can also use AIOSEO to conduct an SEO audit. The plugin will monitor and highlight crucial issues. Plus, you’ll get actionable insights for resolving these issues and boosting organic traffic on your site.
Next, you’ll need to set up different search engines’ webmaster tools, like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yandex Webmaster Tools.
These free tools help you track your site’s organic search performance. You can use them to see which keywords people are using to find your website, check rankings, submit sitemaps, uncover errors that might be preventing your site from ranking in search engines, and more.
For example, Google Search Console shows which pages are indexed in the search results. You can then find out why Google doesn’t index other pages, fix any issues, and submit pages for indexing.
You can follow these guides to add your WordPress site to each webmaster tool:
Another vital tool to set up on your WordPress website is Google Analytics. It is a free tool that shows how people behave on your site, where they’re coming from, which pages they view, and a lot more.
Google Analytics can help you track your WordPress SEO efforts and see the number of visitors that come from organic searches. It is an excellent tool for tracking website traffic and keeping an eye on all the traffic spikes and dips.
Besides that, you can use it to find high-converting pages and improve their SEO, look for opportunities to boost organic traffic, track 404 errors, and more.
The easiest way of setting up Google Analytics in WordPress is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Analytics solution for WordPress, and you don’t have to edit any code or hire a developer to configure Google Analytics.
The best part, you can get started with the MonsterInsights Lite version for free to add analytics to your site. The plugin also offers a premium version and helps set up advanced tracking features like eCommerce tracking, form conversions, and more.
Keyword research is a technique that content creators and SEO experts use to discover topics your audience is interested in using search engine data.
Many beginners will use their best guesses to come up with topics that they think people might like. Instead, you should do proper keyword research and find search terms for each page on your website.
It is important that you define a primary target keyword for your blog post or landing page. Having too many different search terms can make it harder for search engines to understand the content.
You can use many keyword research tools to find a primary search term. We recommend Semrush because it offers in-depth keyword data, keyword position tracking, competitor analysis, related keywords, questions, and more.
5. Use LSI Keywords and Check for Keyword Stuffing
Now that you’ve found a focus keyphrase for your content, the next thing to do is find Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are related search queries to your primary keyword.
The easiest way of finding LSI keywords is through Google Search. Simply scroll down to the bottom of the search results and see the ‘Related searches’ section.
You can then use these terms throughout your content and cover the overall topic in depth. This also helps search engines better understand your content.
That said, it is vital that you don’t stuff the keywords. Using the exact search term repeatedly doesn’t provide a great reading experience for users, and search engines are pretty clever at detecting keyword stuffing.
6. Optimize Your SEO Title and Meta Description
The next WordPress SEO checklist item is whether your SEO titles and meta descriptions are optimized.
The title of your WordPress blog post or product page plays an essential role in search rankings. A compelling title will encourage the user to click on the link.
The meta description also provides more information to users about the page and helps improve the organic click-through rate (CTR). As more people click on your site’s link, it will send a positive signal to Google and help you achieve higher rankings.
It is an SEO best practice to include the primary keyword in your SEO title, meta description, and URLs. Plus, you should ensure that your titles are not more than 55 characters and meta descriptions are not more than 155 characters. Otherwise, Google will truncate your headline and description.
If you’re using AIOSEO, then you can use the headline analyzer to create engaging title tags. It shows a score for your headline and offers tips for improving your SEO title.
You should also optimize the URLs of your blog posts and landing pages for SEO.
Creating short and descriptive permalinks helps searchers to understand what’s the page about in the search results. Besides that, it is also a good practice to include the primary keyword in your URL.
For example, here is what an SEO-friendly URL should look like:
On the other hand, here’s what a URL that’s not optimized for SEO would look like:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/articles/651472
You can change these in your WordPress permalink settings.
8. Make Sure to Add Alt-Text to Your Images
Optimizing your images for search engines is also important in WordPress SEO. One way of doing that is by ensuring that your photos have descriptive alternative or alt text.
Alt text helps Google and other search engines understand the image’s subject matter. This way, your pictures can appear in Google Images and help you get more organic traffic.
In WordPress, you can easily add alt text to your images. When you upload a picture in the WordPress content editor using the Image block, you’ll see the Alt Text option in the settings panel on the right.
You can also go to Media » Library from the admin panel.
After that, simply select any image and enter the ‘Alt Text’ in the right side panel.
Aside from that, you can also use an image compression tool to reduce the size of your pictures. This will help your site to load faster and provide a great user experience.
Note: Using the block editor to add alt text will only add it to that specific use of the image. If you want to add the same alt text to the image no matter where on your site it’s used, use the media library.
When going through the WordPress SEO checklist, another important thing to check is the internal links in your content. Internal links are pages you link from your own website.
Search engines use these links to find and index content on your website. It also helps pass authority from one page to another.
Additionally, it assists your visitors in navigating your website, reading related posts, finding sources for statistics, and discovering old articles and pages.
If you’re using AIOSEO, then you can use its Link Assistant feature to uncover internal linking opportunities. It will show orphaned pages with no internal links, provide suggestions and anchor text, and allow you to insert links in a single click.
When checking for on-page SEO, it is essential that your content is easy to read. It plays a massive role in getting higher rankings because blogs that are easier to read often rank higher than those that are hard to read.
Studies show that people spend less than a second deciding whether to exit or stay on the page. This means they scan through your content, and you have a very short time to convince them to stay on your website.
By improving the readability of your content, you can help users quickly scan your articles. A simple way of doing that is by grouping sections of your content under headings (H2, H3, H4, and so on).
Besides that, you can write short sentences, use bulleted lists, break long chunks of paragraphs into smaller paragraphs, and add a table of contents. Adding images, videos, and other multimedia can also enhance readability and make your content more engaging.
With AIOSEO, you can analyze readability issues inside the content editor and get suggestions on improving your content.
You can also use grammar checker tools like Grammarly to make sure your content is free from spelling mistakes, missing punctuation, and grammatical errors.
11. Ensure that Search Engines Can Easily Find Your Website
Now that your content and on-page SEO is optimized, there are a few technical elements you should also check as part of the WordPress SEO checklist.
First, you should make it easier for search engines to find your website and index your site. WordPress has a built-in option that stops search engines from crawling your site. If it is enabled, Google and other search engines will not list your site in the search results.
You can check this by heading to Settings » Reading from your WordPress dashboard, and scrolling down to the ‘Search engine visibility’ section. Just make sure that the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ option is not checked.
Another way you can help search engines find content on your site for crawling and indexing is by creating a sitemap.
An XML sitemap tells search engines about the most important pages on your site, so they can quickly discover new content and index them in the search results.
With AIOSEO, it is very easy to create a sitemap. The plugin lets you set up sitemaps for videos, news, RSS feeds, and HTML.
Next, your WordPress website speed is critical in ranking higher in Google. That’s because page load time is now a ranking factor, and Google will rank faster-loading sites higher compared to slow-loading sites.
A simple way of checking load time is by using MonsterInsights. It lets you run a website speed test and shows a Site Speed report inside your WordPress dashboard.
You can see an overall score for mobile and desktop, along with other important metrics for measuring how fast your site loads.
The plugin also shows suggestions and benchmark goals for improving each metric. For example, you can use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve site speed,
The last WordPress SEO checklist item you need to check is whether your site is mobile responsive.
Google has now gone mobile-first. What that means is that it will use your site’s mobile version for indexing instead of the desktop version. You will lose out on higher rankings if your site is not mobile-ready.
The free tool will analyze your site and tell you whether the website is mobile-responsive or not.
You can simply enter your site’s URL in the tool and click the ‘Test URL’ button.
If your site isn’t mobile-ready, then you can start by changing the theme. There are many responsive WordPress themes designed for mobile. You can follow our guide on how to change a WordPress theme without losing data or traffic.
Are you looking for the best practices to maximize the SEO benefits of internal links?
Internal links play an important role in search engine optimization (SEO). They help search engines discover your content and rank them higher in search results.
In this article, we’ll list the best practices to use for internal linking for SEO.
How Does Internal Linking Improve SEO in WordPress?
Internal links are links between posts on your own website. Having internal links is important for your WordPress SEO. They help search engines like Google crawl your website and discover new content to index and rank.
Generally, the more links a page has pointing to it, the more likely it is to rank higher in search results. That means that you can use internal links to point to important pages on your site as a way to increase their traffic.
That being said, let’s take a look at the best practices for improving SEO by adding internal links in WordPress. Since this is a comprehensive guide, we have included a table of contents for easier navigation.
We recommend that you make a habit of linking to your older articles from your new articles.
It’s a great way to develop a contextual relationship between your new and old posts. It also allows you to pass relevant link juice to your older articles.
Because internal links play such an important role in SEO, we have even made it part of our pre-publish blog post checklist for WPBeginner writers.
You can also edit your older articles to add links to your newer content whenever you publish. Many successful bloggers dedicate time to adding internal links that point to new articles on a weekly or monthly basis.
This will help you boost your pageviews, increase the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.
WordPress makes it easy to search for your old posts right inside the post editor. Simply select the text you want to link and click on the link button in the toolbar that appears.
A text pop-up will appear below your highlighted words. Then, you can start typing to search for the older articles you want to link to.
2. Monitor Your Internal Link Performance in WordPress
It’s helpful to see your website’s SEO performance in terms of links by using a tool such as the Links Report in Google Search Console. This is a helpful starting point for working out how to improve internal linking on your site.
The Links Report will show you how many pages are linking to this page. You can compare it with other pages and see whether pages with more internal links are ranking higher than posts with many internal links.
Just make sure you are only linking to the article when it makes sense. Adding links where they don’t make sense creates a bad user experience.
Another way to monitor the impact of internal linking is to see which keywords are gaining or losing position. All in One SEO makes this extremely easy with the Search Statistics feature.
Once you connect the plugin with Google Search Console, All in One SEO will fetch your Google Search Console data and present it under All in One SEO » Search Statistics.
The keyword positions chart shows a graph of your site’s keyword positions.
Below this, you’ll see the Keyword Rankings overview box. This shows your top 10 keywords, and if you use them for internal links they are very likely to be clicked.
3. Improve Your WordPress Site’s Internal Linking With a Plugin
If you’re not sure which posts you want to link to, then you will often find it faster to add internal links in WordPress using an internal linking plugin.
We recommend using All in One SEO. It includes a unique Link Assistant feature that lets you add links to your old and new content without having to open up the post. Plus, it provides link recommendations, detailed link reports, and much more.
Link Assistant will crawl every link on your website and then show a comprehensive list report.
The report will show you an overview of the links with total counts for internal, external, and affiliate links. It will also show you the number of orphaned posts that have not yet been linked to from another post or page.
You can switch to the Links Report tab for detailed information on all your links. Here you’ll see a list of all your posts and pages with columns for internal, external, and affiliate links.
It will also show a number of suggestions where you can add links.
For more details, you can click on the right arrow button next to a post or page. This will show all links organized in different tabs. From the suggestions tab, you can quickly view link suggestions and add links without directly editing a post or page.
Link Assistant also helps you discover more internal linking opportunities.
You can switch to the ‘Linking Opportunities’ tab to see suggestions about how to improve the internal linking on your website, and also see the list of orphaned posts so you can add links to them.
Another plugin useful for internal linking is Semrush SEO Writing Assistant because it can help you keep track of links inside your article.
For example, it lets you know when your article has too many or too few internal links and also suggests ways you can improve your links.
This tool also comes in handy if you have other authors working on articles. Editors can quickly see if the article includes internal links to other posts on your website.
4. Display a List of Your Most Popular Posts in WordPress
You can use a WordPress popular posts plugin to point users toward the articles that other users have already found helpful. These plugins automatically create a list of internal links to your most popular content.
Popular posts are usually your most successful content, which means they are more likely to increase user engagement, conversions, and sales. They are also a good opportunity for internal linking to your other less popular articles.
For example, MonsterInsights has a feature that allows you to show your popular articles anywhere on your WordPress site. You can use also use inline popular posts to show articles inside your content.
If you want to show articles in the sidebar or at the end of your content, then you can select the Popular Post Widget. MonsterInsights even lets you display your top-performing products anywhere on your eCommerce store.
5. Create List Posts That Roundup Other Articles in WordPress
Another way to increase the number of internal links on your WordPress blog is to create roundups of your existing content. You do this by creating a new post that mentions your best articles on a certain subject to give a detailed overview of the topic.
In fact, you’re reading a post like that now.
Luckily, there are some plugins that make this job easy. For example, WP Tasty Roundups allows you to quickly repurpose your existing content into beautiful roundup posts that rank in search results.
All you need to do is type one or two keywords into the built-in search functionality, and the plugin will automatically pull images, titles, descriptions, and links from relevant posts into your roundup list.
6. Get Google Sitelinks for Your WordPress Site
Sitelinks are a feature on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) where additional sub-pages appear under a website in the search results.
These are often internal links to the most popular pages of that website.
The top 3 spots on Google get the most clicks. When sitelinks are shown for a website, it takes up the same amount of space as three regular search listings.
Having this much screen space dedicated to your site significantly increases your overall click-through rate. Simply put, more visitors will visit your website from the keyword.
While there is no guaranteed way to get Google to show sitelinks for your website, it certainly helps to create lots of internal links to your most important posts and pages.
7. Preload Links in WordPress for Faster Loading Speeds
Link preloading is a browser technology that will load links in the background before a site visitor clicks them. This makes your website seem faster, which can improve SEO.
Because loading speed is one of the top indicators for search engine rankings and user engagement, when your internal pages are preloaded, your visitors are more likely to stay on your website longer.
They are more likely to view more pages because they’re loading instantly.
The easiest way to preload links is by using the Flying Pages plugin. It simply adds intelligent preloading to make sure preloading won’t crash your site or even slow it down.
Broken links are bad for your website’s SEO. Search engine crawlers find new content on your website by following internal links, so a broken link can stop them from indexing a new post.
They also negatively impact user experience because broken links will return a 404 error. If a visitor clicks on a link and is unable to find a page they’re looking for, then they may leave.
AIOSEO offers a powerful redirection manager that helps track 404 errors on your website and lets you set up permanent 301 redirects to fix broken links.
9. Update Internal Link URLs When Moving a Site to a New Domain
If you ever move your WordPress site to a new domain name, then it is important to update all internal link URLs. Otherwise, you will have lots of broken links.
You should start by changing the WordPress address and site URL by visiting the Settings » General page from your WordPress dashboard.
But you will also need to change the URLs of every internal link added to your posts and pages.
10. Use MediaWiki Syntax to Quickly Add Internal Links to WordPress
If you want to make internal linking a habit, then it helps to use the most efficient method. Since WordPress 6.0, WordPress has supported standard MediaWiki syntax to quickly add internal links when creating or editing a post.
You can now quickly add links by adding two square brackets followed by the post title. The animated gif below shows you how easy this feature is to use inside WordPress.
The link will automatically add the correct URL to the post, and use the post title as an anchor link.
If you know the title of a post (or even just part of it), then using the double square bracket method is the fastest way of creating an internal link.
11. Track Which Internal Links Are Clicked in WordPress
One of the best ways to uncover how users interact with your website is to track which internal links your visitors are clicking. Tools such as MonsterInsights can help you see which internal links your visitors are the most interested in.
You can then use these insights to improve the way you add internal links to your posts and pages.
You can also use All in One SEO to enable breadcrumbs for your WooCommerce products. For details, see the fifth tip in our guide on WooCommerce SEO made easy.
