Over the years, many users have reached out to us and our partner companies to ask about fixing broken WordPress databases.
Keeping your WordPress website running smoothly requires a healthy database. If your database gets corrupted, then it can lead to many problems, including error messages, white screens, and even a complete loss of functionality.
We have experience with quickly repairing a WordPress database, and we will teach you how to get your site up and running in no time. For instance, you can check the login credentials or use different tools and plugins to fix WordPress databases.
In this article, we will show you how to repair a WordPress database in a few simple steps.
Here’s a quick overview of everything we will cover in this guide. You can click the links below to jump ahead to any section:
How to Tell If Your WordPress Database Needs Repairs
A WordPress database is a collection of all the information needed to run your website properly. This includes all your blog posts, pages, registered users, media files, and settings.
If your database is corrupted and needs repairs, then here are some common signs to watch out for:
White Screen of Death (WSoDs): This is a general term for a situation where your website displays a blank white page instead of its usual content. A corrupted database can be one reason why you’re seeing a WSoD.
Error Messages: You might see error messages related to the database. For example, errors like ‘Error establishing a database connection‘ or ‘Unable to select database’ show that something is not right with the database.
Missing Content or Formatting Issues: If your website’s content appears to be missing or the formatting is out of place, then it could be a sign of database corruption.
Plugin or Theme Malfunctions: Similarly, if plugins or themes suddenly stop working properly, then it’s possible that the underlying database is to blame.
That said, let’s see what could cause your WordPress database to corrupt.
What Causes Damage to WordPress Databases?
By understanding common causes that can damage your WordPress database, you can take steps to prevent them and keep your database healthy.
For instance, problems with your web server, such as a sudden power outage or hardware malfunction, can corrupt your database. Or a malicious attack on your website could target your database, potentially leading to corruption.
On the other hand, if the database credentials (username, password, etc.) stored in your wp-config.php file are incorrect, then it can lead to database connection problems.
Similarly, if your website is trying to use more memory than your web server allows (PHP memory limit), then it can also lead to database errors and potential corruption.
Now, let’s look at different ways you can easily repair a WordPress database.
Important Note: Before using any repair method, it’s essential that you back up your WordPress website and database. This way, if something goes wrong during the repair process, you can restore your website from the backup.
One of the most common and easy ways to repair your WordPress database is by checking the credentials. Usually, incorrect usernames and passwords lead to database connection errors, especially if you recently moved your site to a new host.
The WordPress database credentials are stored in the wp-config.php file. To edit the file, you’ll need to use an FTP client or File Manager tool. If you haven’t edited the file before, then please see our guide on how to edit the wp-config.php file.
Once you open the file, look for the following lines:
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define( 'DB_NAME', 'database_name_here' );
/** MySQL database username */
define( 'DB_USER', 'username_here' );
/** MySQL database password */
define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here' );
/** MySQL hostname */
define( 'DB_HOST', 'localhost' );
Next, you must ensure that the information for the database name, username, password, and database host is correct.
You can confirm this information from your WordPress hosting provider. For example, in Bluehost, you can head to your site’s settings.
From here, switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab and scroll down the Database section.
From here, you can find the username and password in the ‘Current Database’ section. If the credentials don’t match, copy and paste them into a Notepad (.txt) file so you can add them to the wp-config.php file.
2. Access phpMyAdmin to Repair WordPress Databases
If you’re comfortable with databases, then you can use phpMyAdmin to repair your WordPress database. phpMyAdmin is a web-based interface for managing MySQL databases.
First, you’ll need to log in to your WordPress hosting dashboard and head to the cPanel. In Bluehost, you can open website settings, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab, and then click the ‘Manage’ button in the cPanel section.
Next, you will see the cPanel of your hosting provider.
Simply navigate to phpMyAdmin and click the link.
On the next screen, you should see the phpMyAdmin panel.
Now, you can select a database you want to repair from the left column or go to the ‘Databases’ section at the top.
Next, you’ll see different tables in the database. Simply scroll down and click the ‘Check All’ option.
You will also need to click the With selected dropdown menu and choose the ‘Repair table’ option.
phpMyAdmin will now attempt to repair the selected tables. If any errors are found, they will be fixed.
You should see a success message when the repair is done.
Another way to repair WordPress databases is to use a plugin. This method is best if you’re not comfortable editing files or using phpMyAdmin.
There are many WordPress database plugins you can use. For this tutorial, we’ll use the WP-DBManager plugin. It is a free plugin and allows you to perform different actions on the database, like optimization, repair, backup, and more.
Upon activation, you can go to the Database » Repair DB page from the WordPress dashboard.
Next, you can select the tables you want to repair in the database. If you’re not sure which tables to repair, then simply select all of them and click the ‘Repair’ button at the bottom.
The plugin will then attempt to fix your WordPress database and resolve any problems.
4. Use the Built-in WordPress Database Repair Tool
WordPress also offers a built-in repair tool that you can use to fix minor database corruption issues. However, you’ll need to manually edit the wp-config.php file to access the repair tool.
First, you’ll need to open your website’s files using an FTP client or file manager. From here, locate the wp-config.php file, which is typically located in the root directory of your WordPress installation.
Go ahead and open the file using a text editor or notepad file. Next, you’ll need to add the following code snippet just before the /* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */ line:
define ('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);
Once that’s done, you can enter the following URL in the web browser to open the repair tool:
http://www.example.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php
Just remember to replace ‘example.com’ with your own domain name.
Once the tool opens, simply click the ‘Repair Database’ button.
After you’ve repaired the WordPress database, you can remove the code snippet from the wp-config.php file to prevent unauthorized access.
The repair tool doesn’t require users to log in to use it, so leaving the code can lead to security vulnerabilities.
5. Fix WordPress Database from Hosting Service cPanel
You can also access a pre-built repair tool from your web hosting provider’s cPanel to fix corrupted WordPress databases.
First, you’ll need to open the cPanel from the hosting service’s dashboard. For example, in Bluehost, you can open the website settings.
After that, you will need to switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab.
From here, scroll down to the cPanel section and click the ‘Manage’ button.
Once the cPanel opens, scroll down to the Database section.
Next, you can click the ‘MySQL Databases’ option.
After that, you can click the dropdown menu under Repair Database and choose the database to fix.
Go ahead and click the ‘Repair Database’ button to continue.
The hosting service will automatically repair your database.
Once the process is complete, you should see a success message.
6. Using WP-CLI to Repair WordPress Database
For developers and advanced users, there’s a command-line option for repairing the WordPress database using WP-CLI (WordPress Command Line Interface).
WP-CLI is a powerful tool, but it’s also more technical than the other methods mentioned here. If you’re not comfortable with the command line, it’s best to stick with one of the other repair methods.
To start, you will need to access your website’s server using SSH. For this, you will need to know your SSH credentials to perform this step.
If you are using Mac or Linux, then SSH software comes preinstalled. However, Windows users will need third-party software like PuTTY to use SSH. To learn more, please see our guide on how to use PuTTY SSH in WordPress.
Once the installation is complete and you’re connected to your site files, make sure you’re in the directory where your WordPress installation resides.
From here, simply run the following command in your terminal window:
wp db repair
This command will attempt to repair any corrupted tables in your WordPress database.
Bonus: Hire a WordPress Expert for Help
If you’re still having trouble fixing your WordPress databases or performing general maintenance, then it might be time to hire an expert.
With the WPBeginner WordPress Maintenance & Support plan, you will get our expert’s undivided attention. They’ll handle everything from updates to error fixes in the background and ensure your site continues to function without any issues.
Plus, you get 24/7 support and around-the-clock uptime monitoring. Our experts can not only handle database repairs but also optimize your site for speed. This way, you get to deliver exceptional user experience while boosting SEO performance.
Besides maintenance, there are other services you can also use. For instance, we offer website design, repair hacked sites, optimize your site for SEO, and more. Check out all our Pro services for your website.
Have you ever logged into your WordPress dashboard and noticed some of your plugins are randomly missing?
This is a common issue that many users face, and it can have several causes. There could be a conflict between plugins or themes, user roles and permissions might not be correct, or there is malware on your site.
In this article, we will show you what to do when plugins are disappearing from the WordPress dashboard.
Why Do Plugins Disappear From the WordPress Dashboard?
When a plugin suddenly deactivates and disappears from your site, it can leave you stranded. You won’t have the feature or functionality that was added through the plugin.
This could lead to a bad user experience when a visitor tries to use that feature. For example, let’s say you used a contact form plugin to add a form to your site. If the plugin disappears and doesn’t work anymore, then users will see an error when they visit the form page.
There are a few reasons why plugins might vanish from your WordPress dashboard view. Let’s explore the most common causes:
User Permissions: Not all users have permission to manage plugins. If you’re an editor or contributor on a WordPress site, then you might not see the plugins menu one day because your user role isn’t authorized to access it.
Plugin Issues: Corrupted plugin files, conflicts with other plugins, or incompatibility with your current WordPress version can also cause plugins to malfunction or become hidden.
Security Concerns: In rare cases, malicious code injection or compromised website files might hide or remove plugins from your view.
That said, let’s look at different ways to fix WordPress plugins disappearing from the admin panel. You can click the links below to jump ahead to any section:
At times, website owners or clients will prevent other users from viewing and changing the plugin settings so that accidental changes do not break the site or lead to security breaches.
The first thing you can do is check your user role in WordPress. To do that, head to Users » All Users from the admin panel. Under the ‘Role’ column, you should see the user role for different usernames.
If you see that the user role is different or doesn’t have the necessary permissions to view or edit plugins, then you can contact the administrator to have it fixed.
On the other hand, if you are the administrator of the website and there is nothing wrong with the user role, then you can go through other ways to fix plugins disappearing from the admin panel.
2. Deactivate All WordPress Plugins to Resolve Conflict
Another reason a plugin might disappear from the WordPress dashboard is a conflict with another plugin on your site.
The only way to rule this out is by deactivating all the plugins on your website. After that, you can activate each plugin one by one to see which one is causing the issue.
To deactivate all the plugins, simply go to Plugins » Installed Plugins from the WordPress dashboard and select all the plugins by clicking the checkbox. From here, you can click the Bulk Action dropdown menu at the top and select the ‘Deactivate’ option.
If you’re locked out from accessing the WordPress admin panel, then you’ll need to connect to an FTP client or File Manager tool in your web hosting cPanel.
You can also try logging out of your WordPress site and clearing the browser cache to fix disappearing plugins from the dashboard.
Browser cache is a technology used by popular browsers that saves website data on a user’s computer so it can quickly load the site. Sometimes, the browser would have an outdated cached version of your site and may remove the plugin from the WordPress dashboard.
Clearing the browser cache allows your browser to save a fresh copy of the website and store the latest changes. In Google Chrome, you can click the three-dot menu icon in the top right corner and select the ‘Clear browsing data’ option.
Next, you will see the Clear browsing data settings page popup.
You can switch to the Basic tab and click the ‘Cached images and files’ checkbox. You can also select the time range, clear browsing history, and select cookies and other site data.
Once you’ve selected the options, simply click the ‘Clear data’ button.
After that, log in to your website and open the WordPress dashboard to see if the plugin that disappeared has returned. For more details on other browsers, please follow our guide on how to clear cache in all major browsers.
If this doesn’t work, then you can also try clearing the cache in WordPress using the caching plugin or from your WordPress hosting.
Caching in WordPress works similarly to caching in browsers, where a static version of your site is stored and instantly displayed to users. This helps improve the speed and performance of your site.
Usually, your site needs a caching solution like WP Rocket. Some web hosting providers also offer built-in caching solutions, including Bluehost and WP Engine.
If your plugins are not showing in the WordPress dashboard, then you can simply clear the cache in WordPress. For instance, if you’re using WP Rocket, then you can go to its settings and click the ‘Clear Cache’ button.
If you’re using Bluehost as your web hosting provider, you will see a ‘Caching’ option in the top admin toolbar.
Simply hover over it and click the ‘Purge All’ option.
In some cases, plugins may keep disappearing from the WordPress dashboard because malware or malicious code has been injected into your site.
To make sure that your site hasn’t been compromised, you should perform a scan for potential malicious code. There are a number of WordPress security scanners to choose from that help detect malware and hacks on your site.
Once you’ve detected malicious code or malware, you can use the security plugin to remove and clean up your site. After removal, you can access the admin panel and see if it fixed the issue.
Bonus: Hire WordPress Experts to Fix WordPress Issues and Errors
Are you sick of running into problems like plugins disappearing from your admin dashboard? Do you need professional help with fixing errors on your WordPress website?
With WPBeginner WordPress Maintenance and Support, you can hire experts to manage and maintain your website. Our team has over 16+ years of experience and has helped over 100,000 people get started with WordPress.
With our WordPress experts onboard, you will get 24/7 support, uptime monitoring, a comprehensive security check, and troubleshooting for WordPress errors or issues.
On the other hand, if you think you’re seeing an error on your site because it has been hacked, then we can also take care of that. With our Hacked Site Repair service, you can hire an expert to remove malicious code, corrupted files, and malware.
We’ve developed and launched many successful websites from the ground up. So we know that whether you’re an experienced WordPress developer or a beginner, having the right development tool helps you customize your site and add different functionality.
From our years of experience, some of the best development tools we can recommend include Local WP, WPCode, Duplicator, MAMP, and GitHub Copilot.
In this article, we’ll explain everything we learned while testing the tools and narrow down the best WordPress development tools so you can easily find the right one for your site.
Are you in a rush and want to know which development tools to choose? Don’t worry. Here’s a quick overview of the best tools and plugins you can use.
How We Test and Review WordPress Development Tools
To find the best development tools for WordPress, we focused on 5 key areas:
Functionality: We looked for tools that cater to various development tasks, such as creating local development environments, debugging code, automating repetitive processes, easily inserting code into your site, creating backups, and more.
Ease of Use: Is the tool user-friendly and accessible for users of all experience levels? We prioritized tools with simple interfaces, clear documentation, and beginner-friendly features while still offering powerful functionalities for experienced developers.
Integration with WordPress: When reviewing tools, we looked for solutions that integrate seamlessly with the WordPress ecosystem. Seamless integration ensures a smooth development experience and avoids potential conflicts.
Performance: We considered how the tools affect website loading speed, resource usage, and overall user experience. Ideally, the chosen tools should optimize website performance or at least not hinder it.
Community and Support: We also checked if a strong community and support system is available for the tool. A large and active community provides valuable resources and troubleshooting assistance and helps users and developers stay updated on the latest updates and best practices.
Why Trust WPBeginner?
The WPBeginner editorial team has over 16 years of experience in WordPress, digital marketing, website development, and eCommerce. We’ve tried and tested various plugins and software on real websites to find the most suitable ones for our readers’ specific needs.
Local WP (previously known as Local by Flywheel) is a desktop application designed to simplify the process of creating and managing local WordPress development environments.
Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting with WordPress, Local WP offers a user-friendly interface and powerful features to streamline your workflow.
We tested Local WP and found it incredibly easy to set up. Within minutes, we had a fresh WordPress site running on our computer, complete with a custom domain name and SSL certificate. During the setup process, Local WP offers Nginx and Apache servers and different PHP versions to choose from.
Another impressive feature we discovered during testing was the ability to create multisite installations and manage them effortlessly. Local WP also allows you to import existing WordPress sites from live servers, making it perfect for development, staging, and testing purposes.
Pros:
Effortless setup and management of local WordPress sites
Built-in Nginx and Apache servers
Secure development environment with SSL certificates
Support for multisite installations
Easy import of existing WordPress sites
Integration with PHPMyAdmin and WP-CLI
Cons:
Requires some technical knowledge to use advanced features
Why We Recommend Local WP: When reviewing the plugin, Local WP stood out for its ease of use and comprehensive feature set. It’s a perfect solution for anyone who wants to develop and test WordPress sites locally without the complexities of setting up a server.
Pricing: Local WP is a free WordPress development tool.
WPCode is one of the best WordPress development plugins for your website. It allows you to add custom code snippets to your WordPress site without directly modifying your site’s theme files. This keeps your theme safe from updates that might overwrite your code and means that you can make changes without risking breaking your site.
We tested WPCode extensively and found it to be a user-friendly plugin. It offers a feature-rich code snippet manager and library. You can choose from pre-built code snippets and instantly add them to your site.
WPCode provides a code editor with syntax highlighting for PHP, JavaScript, and HTML. This makes it simple to write and manage your code snippets, even for those without extensive coding experience.
Besides that, it offers conditional logic for inserting code based on specific rules, ensuring your scripts only load on the specific pages or sections you need them.
Pros:
Manage custom code snippets without editing theme files
Beginner-friendly code editor with syntax highlighting
Built-in code validation to prevent errors
Insert header and footer code
Create advanced conditional logic rules to load snippets
Cons:
Limited features and functionality in the free version
Why We Recommend WPCode: It is an excellent choice for WordPress users who want to add custom functionality to their site without the complexity of editing theme files. WPCode stood out for its user-friendly interface, comprehensive features, and focus on code safety.
Pricing: WPCode prices start at $49 per year. There is also a WPCode Lite version you can use for free.
It simplifies the WordPress backup process by creating a single downloadable package containing your entire site’s files and database. This package can be easily stored locally or uploaded to cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive for safekeeping.
Duplicator comes in handy if you’re creating themes or testing new WordPress plugins. The plugin ensures you can easily revert to a previous version of your site if needed.
We particularly liked the scheduled backup option, which automates the process and ensures you always have a recent backup in case something goes wrong. With a few clicks, you can simply restore WordPress from a backup and revert changes during development.
Pros:
Creates complete website backups
Offers scheduled automated backups
Simplifies website migrations with a user-friendly process
Supports cloud storage for convenient backup
Offers secure backup encryption
Cons:
Advanced features like multisite and scheduled backups require the Pro version
Navigating settings effectively requires some familiarity with WordPress
Why We Recommend Duplicator: Its ease of use and powerful features make Duplicator a standout choice for WordPress users of all experience levels. Whether you need a reliable backup solution or a way to migrate your site to a new host after development, Duplicator offers a user-friendly and efficient way to get the job done.
Pricing: Duplicator prices start at $39.60 per year, and it also offers a free version.
MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is free and open-source web development software. The best part is that MAMP gets you up and running in minutes, allowing you to focus on building amazing websites locally on Mac and Windows.
We tested MAMP and found that WordPress installation was quick and simple. It just took a few minutes to get the server up and running. It also provides a clean interface for starting, stopping, and managing your server.
You can easily switch between PHP versions, choose between Nginx or Apache servers, and access the MySQL administration panel directly through the application. It also supports additional languages, including Python and Perl.
Pros:
Free and open-source
Easy installation and configuration
Intuitive interface for server management
Supports multiple PHP versions
Built-in virtual host management
Supports additional language other than PHP
Cons:
Less control over the local environment compared to XAMPP
Fewer dashboard options
Why We Recommend MAMP: It is a great choice for web developers, especially beginners, who need a straightforward way to set up a local development environment on their computers. Its user-friendly interface, ease of use, and open-source platform make it an excellent option for WordPress development.
Pricing: MAMP is a free WordPress development tool. However, there is also a premium version.
GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant that acts like your virtual pair programmer. It offers intelligent suggestions to complete lines, functions, or even entire blocks of code. When developing a WordPress site, feature, theme, or plugin, Copilot can save a lot of time and increase productivity.
We tested Copilot across various coding projects and were impressed with its versatility. It seamlessly integrated with our preferred IDEs (integrated development environments) like Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Neovim.
Besides that, GitHub Copilot is particularly great at generating code to reduce the time spent writing repetitive tasks. It even understands natural language comments, allowing you to describe the desired functionality and get code suggestions tailored to your needs.
Pros:
Suggests code completions, functions, and entire blocks of code
Requires a paid subscription (free trial available)
Code suggestions may require review and potential adjustments
Why We Recommend GitHub Copilot: For developers of all levels, GitHub Copilot offers a valuable productivity boost. By automating repetitive tasks and suggesting relevant code, Copilot frees you to focus on the creative aspects of coding.
Pricing: GitHub Copilot is a paid tool, with prices starting from $10 per month. However, there is also a free trial that you can use to get started.
XAMPP, which stands for Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and Perl, is a popular development tool. It is free and open-source, and it allows you to set up a fully functional development environment on your local machine. Using the tool, you can test your code and debug your projects efficiently.
XAMPP takes away the difficulty of configuring individual server components. Its simple interface allows you to easily start, stop, and manage Apache, MySQL, and PHP from a single place.
May require some technical knowledge for advanced configurations
Why We Recommend XAMPP: After testing this tool, we believe it is a great choice for web developers and learners who need a convenient way to set up a local development environment. With its ease of use and comprehensive functionality, XAMPP is a powerful tool that can streamline your development process.
Pricing: XAMPP is a free and open-source development tool.
InstaWP is the next WordPress development tool on our list. It lets you create fully functional WordPress environments for testing themes and plugins or showcasing demos to clients.
The best part is that InstaWP installs WordPress in mere seconds. We were consistently amazed by the speed, allowing us to test multiple configurations quickly. InstaWP also lets you create templates containing your preferred WordPress version, PHP configuration, and pre-installed plugins.
We explored its other features, such as the ability to populate your sites with dummy content, manage backups and migrations, and even control access to your sandbox environments. These functionalities streamline the development process and provide greater flexibility.
Pros:
Incredibly fast WordPress site creation
Easy-to-use interface for managing sandbox sites
Template system for consistent development environments
Optional dummy content generation for realistic testing
Backup and migration functionalities
Cons:
Limited base plan restricts the number of concurrent sandbox sites
Advanced features might require upgrading to higher pricing plans
Why We Recommend InstaWP: Our testing revealed that InstaWP is great for developers, agencies, or anyone who juggles multiple WordPress environments. Its speed, ease of use, and template system significantly reduce setup time and ensure consistency.
Pricing: InstaWP offers a free plan that lets you create 3 temporary staging sites. However, paid plans with more features start at $90 per year.
Theme Check is a free WordPress plugin that acts as your personal inspector, analyzing your theme’s code for quality and compliance with WordPress’s coding standards.
The plugin offers a comprehensive automated test suite that checks various aspects of your WordPress theme.
It checks for common coding errors, ensures proper use of WordPress functions and templates, verifies the inclusion of essential theme files like stylesheet and template files, and even scans for outdated code or potential security vulnerabilities.
We found the tests to be thorough and informative, providing clear explanations for any flagged issues. Plus, the plugin is very easy to use, as you can run the tests from your WordPress dashboard.
Pros:
Catches a wide range of coding and styling issues
Check your theme with WordPress coding standards
Offers suggestions for improvement
Easy to use with clear results
Cons:
Requires some basic understanding of code to fully understand certain explanations
May not catch all potential issues
Why We Recommend Theme Check: For WordPress theme developers, Theme Check is an essential development tool. It streamlines the development workflow by identifying potential problems early on, saving you time and frustration during the submission process to WordPress.org.
Pricing: Theme Check is a free WordPress plugin.
Which Is the Best WordPress Development Tool?
After testing and reviewing multiple tools and plugins, we recommend different solutions for specific situations.
For instance, if you’re looking for a tool to set up and test WordPress sites locally, then we suggest using Local WP. It is very easy to use, and you can create a local site within a few minutes. Plus, it lets you choose the PHP version and server type.
On the other hand, you can use WPCode to add custom code snippets to your site and add additional functionality. The plugin makes it super simple to insert and manage code snippets on your site without risking breaking anything.
Similarly, you can use Duplicator to migrate and back up your WordPress site during the development process.
FAQs about WordPress Development Tools
1. What are local WordPress development tools?
Local WordPress development tools allow you to set up a WordPress environment on your computer, completely separate from a live website. This lets you develop and test themes, plugins, and modifications without affecting a live website.
2 . What are the benefits of using WordPress development tools?
WordPress development tools let you experiment and make changes without impacting a live website. They also increase efficiency by developing and iterating faster in a controlled environment. You can also work on projects even without an internet connection.
3. Which is better, XAMPP or Local WP?
Local WP is simpler and more user-friendly than XAMPP, making it perfect for beginners. XAMPP requires a bit more technical knowledge but provides more control over the local development environment.
Have you ever seen websites that show file icons next to the download links?
Recently, one of our readers asked if it was possible to display attachment file icons in WordPress. You can easily show different icons so that users know which type of file they are downloading.
In this article, we will show you how to add attachment file icons in WordPress.
When You Need Attachment File Icons in WordPress
By default, WordPress allows you to upload images, audio, video, and other documents. You can also enable additional file types to be uploaded in WordPress.
When you upload a file through the media uploader and add it to a post or page, WordPress will try to embed the file as if it is an image, audio, video, or in a supported file format.
For all other files, it will just add a file name as plain text and link it to the download or attachment page.
In the above screenshot, we have added a PDF and a Docx file. However, it is difficult for a user to guess which type of file they would be downloading.
If you regularly upload different file types, then you may want to display an icon next to the link. This way, your users can easily find the file type they are looking for.
Having said that, let’s see how to add attachment file icons in WordPress for different file types.
Method 1: Add Attachment File Icons in WordPress Using Plugin
The easiest way of adding file type icons is by using a WordPress plugin like MimeTypes Link Icons. It is a free plugin that is very easy to use and lets you add icons for different file types.
Upon activation, you need to visit the Settings » MimeType Icons page to configure the plugin settings.
The plugin allows you to choose the icon size, as well as between PNG and GIF icons. Next, you need to choose the icon alignment and which file types will display the icon.
After that, you can scroll down and select icons to display on your website. For instance, there are icons for file types like PDF, PPT, CSV, AVI, RPM, TXT, and more.
Next, you can scroll down to the Advanced Settings section.
Here, you will find the option to show file size next to the download link. It is turned off by default, as it could be resource-intensive.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
You can now edit a post or page and add a file download link using the media uploader. Simply preview your post, and you will see the file icon next to the download link.
Method 2: Using Icon Fonts for Attachment Files in WordPress
In this method, we will be using an icon font to display an icon next to the attachment file link.
Upon activation, you can head to the Settings » Font Awesome page from your WordPress dashboard. Here, you can edit the general settings for the plugin, like choosing whether it should use pro or free icons.
Next, you can edit a post or page where you want to add an attachment link.
Once you are in the content editor, you must enter the HTML code for the icon you want to display.
To find that HTML code, you can visit the Font Awesome icon library website. Simply search for an icon in the search bar and then click on the image.
Next, you will see different variations of the icon and its HTML code.
Go ahead and click on the code to copy it.
After that, you can return to your website’s WordPress content editor and click the ‘+’ sign to add a Custom HTML block.
From here, simply paste the code for your icon into the block.
Once you are done, go ahead and publish or update your page.
You can now visit your website to see the newly added icon for the attachment file type.
Bonus: Sell Digital Files to Make Money Online
Now that you know how to add attachment file type icons, you can go a step further and sell different files as digital downloads. This allows you to make money online or encourage users to sign up for your newsletter in exchange for a free resource.
First, you need to make sure that you are using the right website platform, and since you are reading this article, you won’t be making the mistakes that others do.
There are two types of WordPress software, so it’s easy for beginners to get confused.
First, there is WordPress.com, which is a hosting platform, and then you have WordPress.org, also known as self-hosted WordPress.
We recommend using self-hosted WordPress.org because it gives you access to all WordPress features out of the box. For a comparison, see WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org.
First, you will need a domain name and a web hosting account. But you cannot sign up with just any web hosting company.
You will need a hosting provider specializing in WooCommerce hosting because this is the software you will use as your eCommerce platform.
Usually, a domain name costs $14.99/year, web hosting $7.99/month, and SSL certificate 69.99/year.
This is a lot of money if you are just starting out.
Fortunately, Bluehost, an officially recommended WordPress and WooCommerce hosting provider, has agreed to offer our users a free domain + free SSL and a discount on their WordPress hosting.
Basically, you can get started for $1.99 per month.
Once you have purchased the hosting, then follow our step-by-step tutorial on how to start an online store for complete setup instructions.
Note: Bluehost offers shared hosting plans, which are good for a starter website, but you will need more resources as your auction site grows. When the time comes, you can move to a managed WordPress hosting provider like SiteGround.
You will now have a WordPress website with WooCommerce installed on it. By default, WooCommerce doesn’t allow you to add products for auction on your website.
Let’s change this by installing an auction addon for WooCommerce.
Step 2: Turn Your Ecommerce Store into an Auction Site
YITH WooCommerce Auctions is a paid plugin, and a single site license will cost you $149.99. This gives you access to the plugin download, documentation, and one year of support and updates.
Upon activation, you need to visit the YITH » License Activation page to enter your license key. You can find this information in your account on the plugin’s website.
Next, you need to head over to the YITH » Auctions page.
Here, you can configure the plugin settings.
The default settings will work for most websites, but you can still review and adjust them as needed.
Step 3: Setting Up Auction Payments
Next, you need to set up how you would like the auction winners to pay.
Go to the YITH » Auctions page and switch to the General » Auctions Payments tab.
The first option here is to require a credit card on file for users who want to participate in the auction.
To use this option, you will need the YITH WooCommerce Stripe plugin. It is a premium addon, which will cost you an additional $79.99 per year.
However, the rest of the plugin functionality will work just fine without this plugin, and you can use your WooCommerce payment method as the default option.
Next, scroll down to the Commission section.
From here, you can set a default commission for your auctions. You have the option to choose a fixed amount or set a percentage of the bid to the commission.
Optionally, you can choose to show the commission on the Product page as well as the cart and checkout pages or just on the cart and checkout pages.
Don’t forget to click ‘Save Options’ to store your settings.
Step 4: Adding an Auction Item
YITH WooCommerce Auctions makes it super easy to add an item for auction using the built-in WooCommerce products.
Simply add your auction item as a new WooCommerce product by visiting the Products » Add New page.
On this page, you need to enter your auction item details just like you would add a product. After that, fill out the title, add details, and upload pictures.
Below the editor, you need to select ‘Auction’ from the Product Data dropdown, and you will see settings for the auction item.
From here, you can set an auction starting price, bid up, minimum increment amount, reserve price, and buy-now price.
After that, you need to select the auction dates and times. You can also add an overtime for the auction to offer a grace period after the auction ends.
Once you are satisfied with the settings, click on the ‘Publish’ button to save your changes.
Your auction will now appear on your WooCommerce shop page. Auction items on the shop page will be highlighted with an icon.
You can use the auction plugin to add auction items along with other fixed-price WooCommerce products.
You can also create a separate page to list only the products available for auction. Simply create a new WordPress page and look for the auction blocks in the [+] block panel.
It comes with four blocks to show Auction Products, Auction Active Products, Auction Ended Products, and a separate block to show the Auction bidding list.
Don’t forget to publish the page to make it live on your website.
Step 5: Managing Your Auctions
You can add auction items anytime, and they will start appearing on your WordPress website immediately. However, the auction will not begin until the start time set for it.
This allows you to publish items before the auction begins and use this time to promote items. Once the auction starts, any registered users can start bidding.
The plugin will show an auction timer next to the item. Users can see the current highest bid and add their own bids.
Previous bids will be displayed below with usernames partially encrypted.
You have the option to remove a bid at any time.
Simply edit the auction product and scroll down to the ‘Product Data’ section. From here, switch to the ‘Status’ tab under the ‘Auctions’ panel, and you will see all the bids.
Click on the ‘Delete’ button to remove a bid.
The auction will end depending on each item’s individual auction settings.
If the auction time ends, then the highest bidder’s price will be accepted. If a user decides to offer the buy-now price, then the auction will end, and they will be able to add the product to their cart.
All users who participated in the auction will receive an email notification for each new bid, auction grace time, auction end, and more.
The final email will be sent to the auction winner, informing them that they can now make their payment.
Expert Tip: Emails sent using the default WordPress function often don’t make it into users’ inboxes. Instead, we recommend using an SMTP plugin like WP Mail SMTP to improve deliverability. For more information, see our guide on how to fix the WordPress not sending emails issue.
Step 6: Allowing Other Users to Add Auction Items
If you want to allow other users to add their own products for auction, then you can do that as well. However, the YITH WooCommerce Auctions plugin doesn’t allow users to add their own auction items.
By default, WooCommerce assumes that you are the only seller on your website who can add new products. To change this, you need to make your WooCommerce platform a multi-vendor marketplace.
We hope this article helped you build your own auction site like eBay using WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate step-by-step WordPress SEO guide for beginners to get more traffic to your auction site or our expert pick of the best auction plugins for WordPress.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Are you looking for the best way to add your business address in WordPress?
You can add the address on your contact page or sidebar widget to provide an easy way for users to approach you. This improves customer trust and boosts your SEO.
In this article, we will show you how to properly add your business address in WordPress, step by step.
When and Why You Need a Business Address in WordPress
Usually, most business websites add their address on their contact page using a contact form plugin like WPForms.
This works fine for most websites and online businesses. However, when you have a physical business or store, then it is a good idea to add your address in a search engine-optimized format.
This way, your business will be listed correctly in local search results and help you attract more customers.
You can also add other information like maps, directions, phone numbers, and business hours. This allows users to visit your physical store easily and builds trust with them.
Plus, making it easy for people to find your contact information creates a better user experience.
Having said that, let’s see how to add your business address in WordPress in an SEO-friendly way. We have covered two methods in this article, and you can use the links below to jump to the one of your choice:
Method 1: Add Your Business Address With All in One SEO (Recommended)
If you are looking for an easy way to add your business address, then this method is for you.
All in One SEO for WordPress is the best SEO plugin on the market that comes with a local SEO feature. It lets you add your business information, including address, phone number, email, business hours, maps, and payment methods, to your website in an SEO-friendly way.
Note: AIOSEO has a free plan. However, you will need the Plus plan to unlock the Local SEO feature.
Upon activation, you must visit the AIOSEO » Local SEO page from the WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Activate Local SEO’ button.
Your page will now be reloaded, and you will be able to access all the settings.
Here, scroll down to the ‘Business Info’ section, where you can start by adding a name and image for your business. After that, you can also select your business type from the dropdown menu.
For example, if you have a travel business, then you can select the ‘Travel Agency’ option.
Next, you can add your physical store’s address, including the zip code, city, state, and country.
Once you do that, you can also configure the address format using tags. For example, if you want to display your country and city before the address of your store, then you must add the country and city tags before the other ones.
After that, you can scroll down to the ‘Contact Info’ section and add the email address and phone number for your business.
You can also type in other information like VAT and Tax IDs, currencies and accepted payment methods, and more. Once you are done, go ahead and click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Now, scroll back to the top and switch to the ‘Business Hours’ tab.
Here, you can start by adding labels to show customers when your store is closed or if it’s open 24 hours.
Next, you can add your physical store’s open times from Monday to Sunday.
If your store is closed on the weekends, then you must check the ‘Closed’ box next to these days. Once you are done, click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
If you also want to add a map that can help visitors reach your store, then you have to switch to the ‘Maps’ tab. You will now need a Google API key to add this functionality.
To get the key, visit the Google Maps Platform and click the ‘Get Started’ button.
This will open a new tab, where you must add your country from the dropdown menu.
After that, click the ‘Agree and Continue’ button.
Now, in the next step, you must add your payment information and profile. Keep in mind that your card won’t be charged until you upgrade to a paid account manually.
To add your information, click the ‘+’ button in the payment profile field.
This will open a new prompt, where you must add your name and business address.
After that, click the ‘Create’ button.
Next, click the ‘+’ button in the ‘Payment Method’ field to add your card details.
Once that is done, click the ‘Start Free’ button.
You will now see a popup on the screen asking you some questions about your organization, including your primary goal for using the platform, company size, and the industry you are in.
Simply answer these questions and click the ‘Submit’ button.
Your Google Maps API key will now be created and displayed on the page.
Go ahead and copy this key.
Now, visit your WordPress dashboard and paste the key next to the ‘API Key’ option.
Now that you have added your business address along with other information, open the page where you want to display it in the block editor.
Here, you need to click the add block (+) button in the top left corner and drag and drop the AIOSEO Local – Business Info and AIOSEO Local – Business Hours blocks.
If you have added a map as well, then you can add the AIOSEO Local – Map block.
Once you do that, you can click on the blocks to configure their settings in the panel on the right.
For example, if you don’t want to display your business email address, then you can simply toggle the ‘Email Address’ switch to ‘OFF’. You can do the same for the days in the business hours block.
Finally, click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to store your settings.
You can now visit your WordPress site to see the business address displayed properly.
Method 2: Add a Business Address in WordPress With a Free Plugin
If you are looking for a free solution, then this method is for you.
Upon activation, head over to the Business Profile » Settings page from the WordPress admin sidebar. Here, you can start by selecting the schema type that best describes your business from the dropdown menu.
For instance, if you run an auto repair shop, then you can select that option. The plugin will then create schema according to it. You can also add an image for your physical store and a URL if you allow online ordering on your site.
Next, scroll down and add a name, address, phone number, WhatsApp number, and email address into the different fields.
After that, you can also add the location using Google Maps.
To do this, you must visit the Google Maps Platform and click the ‘Get Started’ button.
You will then be taken to a new screen, where you must select your country and click the ‘Agree and Continue’ button.
This will take you to the next step. Here, click the ‘+’ button in the ‘Payment Profile’ field.
A prompt will now open up, where you can add your business or store’s location and then click ‘Create’.
After that, add your card details by clicking the ‘+’ button in the ‘Payment Method’ field.
Once you do that, click the ‘Start Free’ button.
Google Maps will now ask you some questions about your store or business like your industry, use case, and company size.
Go ahead and enter these details. Then, click the ‘Submit’ button.
Once you do that, a popup will appear on the screen, where the Google Maps API key will be displayed.
Simply copy this key and paste it into the ‘Google Maps API Key’ field in your WordPress dashboard.
Now that this is done, scroll down to the ‘Schedule’ section.
Here, click the ‘Add another opening time’ button.
This will expand the tab, and you can check the boxes for all the days that your shop is open. After that, you must click the ‘Set a time slot?’ link.
This will expand the time settings, and you can add your business hours. Then, you can also change the date and time format according to your liking.
Once you are done, go ahead and click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Now, open the page or post where you want to add your business address.
Once you are there, simply click the add block (+) button to open the block menu. From here, drag and drop the Contact Card block.
Next, open the block panel on the right. From here, you can uncheck the boxes for all the information that you do not want to display on your contact card.
For instance, if you want to hide your fax number, then you can simply uncheck that option.
Finally, click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button at the top to store your settings.
Now, just visit your WordPress website to view the business address and details.
Bonus: Add Multiple Locations Schema in WordPress
If you have multiple physical stores and branches, then you can add local business schema for multiple locations with All in One SEO.
To do this, you must enable the Local SEO feature by visiting the All in One SEO » Local SEO page from the WordPress admin sidebar.
Then, switch to the ‘Locations’ tab and enable the ‘Multiple Locations’ toggle to ‘Yes’.
After that, scroll down to the ‘Advanced Settings’ section, where you can see the permalink AIOSEO will use to show your multiple business locations and location categories.
Next, switch the ‘Enhanced Search’ option to ‘On’ to include the locations in the WordPress search results.
Once you have done that, visit the Locations » Add New page from the WordPress dashboard. This will open the content editor, where you can add a title and description.
Then, scroll down to the ‘AIOSEO’ meta box to add your business name, select a business type (industry), add an image, enter the address for your location, business phone, payment info, the area served, and more.
Finally, click the ‘Publish’ button to store your settings. Now, simply repeat this process to add other locations to your WordPress site.
Over our years of helping small websites and companies grow and compete with the big guys, we’ve learned that the right business tools can make a huge difference in their success.
Whether you are looking for something to help you with email marketing, customer support, customer relationship management, or something else, there are plenty of plugins and software options that can fit the bill.
That’s why we’ve done the research and put together a huge list of the best business tools for small businesses. We’ve broken down everything into different categories so that you can find the best options for your needs.
Quick Pick: The Best Business Tools for Small Business
Here’s how we reviewed different small business tools for this guide:
Real-World Experience: At WPBeginner, we actively run small businesses of our own. We’re involved in starting new projects and managing existing websites, so we’ve used and tested these tools extensively ourselves. We ensure that they meet our high standards of reliability and ease of use.
Comprehensive Research: We perform our own dedicated research to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in each category. We regularly update our recommendations accordingly, holding each tool to a high standard.
User Feedback: We’ve combed through various third-party sites and even performed polls for users to see how they enjoy using these tools.
Why Trust WPBeginner?
At WPBeginner, we’re a passionate team with over 16 years of hands-on expertise in WordPress, design, and online marketing. Our mission is simple: deliver top-notch content and valuable resources to our audience. We achieve this by thoroughly evaluating and reviewing the plugins and software we actually use.
Running a business is no small feat. Luckily, there’s a wealth of online tools available to streamline your workflow and ease your burden. Choosing the right ones can feel overwhelming, though.
At WPBeginner, we’ve been testing and refining our top picks for years, keeping pace with the ever-evolving market. We’ve narrowed down our favorites to a curated list across various categories.
However, it can be a chore to figure out which is the right tool for your business.
Here are just a few reasons to add some of these small business tools to your repertoire.
Increased Productivity: The right tools streamline business processes, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance overall efficiency. This leads to increased productivity among your team members, allowing them to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.
Improved Collaboration: Many small business tools come with collaboration features that facilitate communication and teamwork. This is especially important in modern work environments where remote or dispersed teams are common. Collaboration tools enhance communication, file sharing, and task management.
Enhanced Customer Experience: Tools such as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system help businesses manage customer interactions, track leads, and provide personalized services.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Software with analytics and reporting capabilities provides valuable insights into business performance and customer journey. With accurate data at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions, identify trends, and adjust strategies to align with your business goals.
Time and Cost Savings: Automation tools can significantly reduce the time spent on manual tasks, saving both time and money. You may have limited resources, so software that automates activities allows you to allocate resources more efficiently.
That said, it’s time to cover the best business tools for small businesses. Feel free to use the links below to jump to any section you need a solution for:
Every business needs to build an email list. Sure, you could keep in touch with your customers via social media, but you don’t own the audience there.
An email list is something you own and can continually contact customers or leads anytime.
That’s why you need an email marketing service. These services allow you to send bulk automated emails to your subscribers. Not only that, you can segment users into groups, track their performance, and create marketing workflows.
Constant Contact is the most beginner-friendly and fastest-growing email marketing service out there. It boasts an impressive 97% deliverability rate and offers a handful of time-saving automation that every small business could use.
Out of the many email service providers we’ve tried, we really like the user interface. From the moment you make your account, Constant Contact guides you through their simple process. You can create email newsletters, social media posts, landing pages, and events in minutes.
One of Constant Contact’s most unique aspects is its ability to segment the audience based on engagement level. Sure, it’s got all the standard segmentations, such as dividing contacts by location, membership, sales, email activity, and more.
That said, Constant Contact lets you segment your audience into four categories: most engaged, somewhat engaged, least engaged, and everyone else. For example, your most engaged customers could be your most loyal subscribers, to whom you can send upsell or cross-sell promotions.
Pricing: Plans start at $12 per month. If you need more storage, users, and advanced features, there are also higher-tiered plans.
Pros:
Very affordable pricing
It offers powerful integrations such as Facebook ads and eCommerce platforms.
Constant Contact offers 200+ templates to fit your needs.
Cons:
No advanced dynamic tags.
Why We Recommend Using Constant Contact: You can’t go wrong with Constant Contact as it’s good at just about everything. We especially like that they offer really outstanding customer support via live chat, email, phone calls, and community support, along with a large library of helpful resources. That way, you’ll always get your questions answered.
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is an email and SMS marketing software perfect for small businesses.
One of the best things about Brevo is that you receive unlimited email lists and contacts no matter which plan you choose. With contact segmentation, you can easily target smaller groups and engage them with relevant content.
Their advanced plans go well beyond just email marketing. They offer a sales CRM, live chat, landing page builder, and Facebook Ads integration. That means that for the price you are paying, you’re getting a lot more value than most email marketing services can offer.
Brevo is also known for high deliverability, guaranteeing up to 97%. That’s because they support many setup options, including email API, SMTP relay, webhook, and plugin. This means you can send bulk emails and have more control over your batch sends.
Pricing: Brevo is free to get started. However, their Starter plan begins at $25 per month and has unlimited contacts.
Pros:
You will receive access to an unlimited number of contacts on any plan.
A built-in CRM app is included.
You can send advanced automation campaigns based on list-based behaviors.
Cons:
You have to pay for a higher-tiered plan to get access to more advanced reporting features.
Why We Recommend Using Brevo: We like Brevo as an all-in-one marketing automation software that can do a little bit of everything. For instance, you can send timely SMS messages to promote your products and personalize them accordingly.
Drip is the best email marketing service for advanced users, especially for businesses looking to deliver hyper-personalized campaigns to their audience.
One of Drip’s standout features is its ability to create seamless workflow automation. The visual workflow builder makes it easy to visualize and customize user journeys.
When building your workflows, there are intuitive trigger options based on page visitors, tags, and other on-site behaviors that start the flow. Then, choose from dozens of actions to build the desired automation sequence.
If you’re running an online store, Drip offers integrations for WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify. That allows you to send strategically segmented campaigns to visitors and customers. For example, there are templates for just about everything, including cart abandonment emails and workflows.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $39 per month for up to 2,500 people on your email list. The price increases the more subscribers you have. All plans come with a 14-day free trial.
Pros:
Drip has plenty of merge tags that dynamically replace content within an email based on the info you’ve collected in your contact or lead forms.
You can A/B split test automation workflows to see which one performs better and ultimately provides the best conversion rates.
It offers an eCommerce revenue attribution feature, so you know exactly how much revenue is generated from your email marketing campaigns.
Cons:
Some learning curve is involved. For example, there are countless Liquid tags to learn about, which can be a lot of information if you’re used to using simpler email marketing services.
Why We Recommend Using Drip: At WPBeginner, we switched from MailChimp to Drip largely because of its more advanced segmentation and personalization features. That allows us to send more relevant and targeted campaigns to our readers.
While adding your mobile number to your WordPress site might seem convenient, it’s unprofessional and exposes your personal privacy.
That’s why you want to get a virtual business phone number and use a dedicated business phone service. This is a secure and professional solution. It allows you to:
Make calls over the internet: Eliminate expensive phone bills.
Use call forwarding, routing, and recording: Enhance team collaboration and capture valuable customer interactions.
Track call metrics: Gain insights into wait times, hold times, and call duration to optimize your customer service strategy.
In essence, a business phone service is essential for any business that wants to improve customer service and effectively manage inbound and outbound calls.
Nextiva is the best business phone service, and it makes it easy to manage communication between you and your customers.
The phone service is highly efficient and reliable, and you get helpful features beyond voice calling. There are plenty of features your call team can take advantage of, such as advanced call routing, voicemail to email and text, unlimited free domestic calling, text messages, and more.
Nextiva offers a treasure trove of data to help support your decision-making. You get critical information such as talk time, net promote score, first-time resolution rate, etc. Call center and sales team managers can easily interpret the data and come up with solutions to better improve performance.
If you’re using a traditional landline office phone system, Nextiva makes it easy to transition to a VoIP system. That means you can run your calls over the internet rather than complex landlines. They work with a variety of VoIP phones, headsets, and other call devices.
Pricing: Nextiva pricing starts at $14.95 per month per user for unlimited voice calling.
Pros:
Nextiva provides 99.99% uptime for excellent reliability.
They offer 24/7 customer support, so you always get the help you need.
It’s an all-in-one phone system with a wide range of features to handle both outbound, inbound, and internal team communication.
Cons:
Somewhat pricy, but the value is definitely there for what you pay for.
Why We Recommend Using Nextiva: Nextiva gives you everything you need to handle communication in your business. They offer a comprehensive set of VoIP service features that help you take your customer service to the next level. That way, your agents can work efficiently, and your customers can get their issues resolved quickly.
WPBeginner readers also get a special Nextiva Coupon to unlock an additional 21% off your purchase.
RingCentral is an affordable alternative to RingCentral that offers high-quality business phone services. Despite its cost-effective price, it doesn’t skimp out on quality.
With the entry plan, you get unlimited calls and texts, team messaging, file sharing, and other basic features you need. For smaller teams of 20 people or less, the $20 per user per month price point is a great deal.
We like the call routing capabilities, which allow you to direct callers to various departments and extensions. You can create and manage custom answering rules to ensure you get callers to the right people. You can even route the most important calls directly to your mobile device.
Pricing: Plans start at $20 per user per month, billed annually. Pricing varies depending on number of users and features available.
Pros:
RingCentral comes with video meetings, team messaging, and screen sharing.
It integrates with useful tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft, so you can easily connect data across platforms.
You can enjoy a user-friendly interface that allows you to easily understand where and how to use all of its features.
Cons:
You need to pay for the higher-priced tiers to get access to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu options.
Why We Recommend Using RingCentral: RingCentral is a good beginner-friendly option for small businesses just getting started with phone services. It lacks a few advanced capabilities that Nextiva has but gives you all the essential features needed for any business phone service.
The good news is that WPBeginner users get 33% off when they use our special RingCentral coupon code.
Ooma is one of the top VoIP providers for small businesses. It offers virtual numbers, collaboration tools, call forwarding, voice mail, and more. It’s great for small businesses without IT teams because it provides everything you need in an easy-to-use way.
Ooma features a virtual receptionist feature, which is great for directing calls for your small business. You can easily set up a custom greeting, provide a menu of options that guides callers to the right departments, and send them to various extensions. It also helps to reduce the call load and average wait times, which your customers will appreciate.
Every Ooma plan has a mobile app so that your agents can easily answer or make calls while on the go. You can do all the important tasks, such as checking your voicemail, reviewing stats, and more.
That said, when comparing Nextiva vs. RingCentral and Ooma, this service isn’t ideal for call centers since it doesn’t support desk and conference phones.
Pricing: Plans begin at $19.95 per month per user. No contract is necessary, so you won’t be tied to a year-long commitment.
Pros:
Ooma offers unlimited domestic calling in the US, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Canada.
Pricing is relatively affordable.
Easy to use mobile app.
Cons:
Missing a few advanced features unless you upgrade to the higher plans.
Why We Recommend Using Ooma: We like Ooma because it’s ready to use out-of-the-box. It requires zero technical installation, and just about everything is already configured when installed. They use an auto-configuration technology that automatically detects all the settings needed for your system to work.
Live chat software is a tool that helps connect customers to an actual human support representative so that you can resolve their issues in real time. That way, your customers can get the answers they’re looking for quickly.
They’ll spend less time sifting through your knowledge base and waiting to find a solution.
This goes hand-in-hand with your business phone services. By offering live chats on your website, you provide a more omnichannel customer experience, reducing your call load and average handling time.
Groove is a popular help desk software used by big brands like HubSpot, AppSumo, AT&T, and CloudApp.
It offers all the essential features a small business needs to deliver fast and responsive customer service. These include a knowledge base builder, shared inbox, collaboration and reporting tools, and live chat support.
Using Groove, we quickly realized how accessible the software feels. Think of it like a simple inbox that manages all customer communication in one place. Each conversation can be assigned to specific team members, so it’s clear who’s responsible for managing each conversion. Even better, you can label and assign agents to conversations based on certain conditions, such as department or type of inquiry.
Sticking to the theme of simplicity, Groove makes reporting as easy to understand as possible. Rather than giving you a ton of analytics that may confuse small businesses, they stick to the most important options.
For example, some of the metrics include response time, agent performance, busiest times, customer feedback, number of customers helped, and number of resolutions.
Pricing: Starts at $16 per user per month, billed annually. There is also a free trial available.
Pros:
Groove integrations with the most popular business tools like Shopify, Slack, and Mailchimp.
The knowledge base builder is customizable, and there are time-saving AI writing tools to help you quickly create support articles.
Live chat lets you deliver fast service to customers
Cons:
Groove isn’t the most customizable in terms of layouts and themes.
Why We Recommend Using Groove: Groove ranks as our top choice based on its value and ease of use. The entire system is easy to adopt, so you can better manage your support reps without having to spend a lot of time training them on how to use the software.
Heroic Inbox is the best WordPress-powered help desk and customer support market in the market. It allows you to easily manage customer emails and support tickets right within your WordPress site.
This can streamline workflow by keeping all support-related tasks in one place so you can respond to customer inquiries faster.
After testing the inbox, we found that it comes with all the features you’ll need to manage support emails. For instance, you can create canned responses, add notes to conversations, track your ticket history, and assign messages to team members.
Best of all, it pulls multiple inboxes into one place. Chances are, you may have various inboxes to respond to, such as sales, support, customer service, and partnerships. This allows you to ensure that an important message is never missed.
If you want to add knowledge base capabilities, then you’ll simply need to download Heroic KB, which gives you the ability to add a searchable knowledge base to your website.
Pricing: Starts at $199.50 per year.
Pros:
Manages customer service inquiries directly in WordPress.
You can connect multiple inboxes in one place.
It offers the ability to add notes and assign tickets to users.
Cons:
It doesn’t have live chat capabilities.
Why We Recommend Using Heroic Inbox: Juggling a lot of software can be a problem for a lot of small businesses. With Heroic Inbox, you can manage all inquiries in your WordPress dashboard. Since it lives within the WordPress ecosystem, it also seamlessly connects with other plugins, such as WooCommerce.
LiveChat is an all-in-one customer service software that works seamlessly for WordPress website owners. With over 35,000+ businesses that trust LiveChat, it’s a very popular tool for building live chatbots.
You can create a chatbot that asks the user questions before they’re automatically transferred to the right agent. During the chat, the agent is able to share files back and forth with the customer, send calendar links, or complete a purchase. On top of that, you can set up canned frequently asked questions type of responses to save time.
Beyond that, you can add pre-chat survey forms before and after each live chat session. That way, you’re able to evaluate your sales reps and customer support agents and how they’re performing.
It even integrates with popular tools like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Google Analytics, so you can better understand where your customers are coming from and who they are.
Pricing: LiveChat starts at $20 per person, billed annually, with higher-priced plans that track more users and better features. There’s also a free plugin available.
Pros:
Plenty of integrations to seamlessly connect data across platforms.
You can initiate a chat with a visitor as they are browsing on your site.
There are lots of customization options to help users find a solution.
Cons:
Price can quickly add up for large teams.
Why We Recommend Using LiveChat: LiveChat is an AI-powered help desk software that has a lot of advanced tools to help you sell more. For example, their custom forms, product cards, and AI automation can help turn inquiries into actual sales.
HubSpot Chat is an all-in-one marketing platform that also offers a chatbot builder and live chat feature.
You’re able to customize the live chat design to help route leads and customers to the right person on your team. The live chat widget can be edited to match the look and feel of your brand. You can even send targeted welcome messages on your live chat widget based on segments of your audience or different web pages.
The routing feature works during a chat, where your services team passes a lead to a sales rep. In addition, it provides useful automation features so you can deliver canned responses for faster response times.
Since HubSpot is an all-in-one tool, all chats are automatically stored in the CRM. That means your team will have a clear view of each customer interaction.
Pricing: It’s free to get started. But if you want the suite of marketing tools or CRM, you’ll need to buy the entire package. Prices vary based on what suite you choose.
Pros:
HubSpot Chat is free to use.
You can connect the tool to Slack so your team gets immediate notifications when a visitor requests to speak with your support team.
You’re able to route leads to anyone on your team.
Cons:
It’s missing advanced features such as post-chat survey forms.
Why We Recommend Using HubSpot Chat: We like HubSpot Chat because it offers all the essential features of live chat software and is absolutely free to use. That said, if you want more advanced automation or more sales-related features like product recommendations, then you may want to consider LiveChat or ChatBot instead.
ChatBot is the best helpdesk software for creating AI-generated answers to customer questions.
Where ChatBot stands out is its ability to build visual workflows that help customers get their questions answered and guide them to a sale. It comes with pre-built templates so that you can use them out of the box. For example, after a customer asks a question about a specific product category, you can immediately offer a limited-time discount to incentivize visitors to take action.
If site visitors want to chat with a real person, you can easily forward them to a live customer support representative. That said, the customization options are quite limited compared to LiveChat.
But, when it comes to AI automation, ChatBot can make your life easier. For example, depending on how users interact with your site and chatbot, you can add them to a segmentation and then import them to a CRM or email marketing service. This is great for nurturing leads and sending follow-up emails.
Pricing: Chatbot starts at $52 per month, billed annually or $65 month-to-month. However, there is a 14-day free trial, with no credit card required.
Pros:
ChatBot saves time with its powerful and expansive automation features.
It allows you to segment lists and trigger actions based on visitor behavior.
It integrates with WooCommerce and WordPress.
Cons:
ChatBot lacks high-level live chat features.
Why We Recommend Using ChatBot: If you want to automate your helpdesk and chat support, ChatBot is the way to go. It has many templates that help guide users into a sale.
Managing your team members is arguably one of the most important functions of a business. No matter what type of business you run, you’ll need to pay your employees and manage their hours.
With HR payroll software, you can automatically send out paychecks through bank direct deposit, manage PTO and bonuses, streamline employee onboarding, withhold a percentage for taxes, and more.
When your HR and payroll are organized, employees know what to expect, and you don’t have to worry about running into tax compliance issues.
Best of all, HR software streamlines all the tedious admin tasks that you would otherwise have to do by yourself.
Gusto is the best payroll and HR software that helps you automate both basic and advanced payroll tasks for employees and contractors. With its beginner-friendly approach to payroll management, it’s definitely a tool to have in your corner to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Even if you’re a small business without a full accounting team, Gusto makes it easy to handle payroll. It automatically runs payroll for you as many times a month as you need, and taxes are filed automatically. In addition, it automatically syncs health insurance, workers’ compensation, time tracking, 401K, PTO, and more.
Besides payroll, Gusto makes hiring and onboarding a breeze. There are features like custom offer letters, onboarding checklists, document signing, and even software account creation.
Pricing: Gusto starts at $40 per month, plus $6 per month per additional user you add.
Pros:
Relatively affordable to use.
Very beginner-friendly for both business owners and employees.
Gusto is a self-service tool for employees where they can hop online to check their pay stubs and important documents and request time off without the need for HR to intervene.
Cons:
Gusto is only available in the United States.
Why We Recommend Using Gusto: Gusto is an all-encompassing tool for payroll and HR tasks. You don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty tasks like filing payroll and tracking all the taxes withheld. Plus, its higher plans offer next-day deposits, so employees get paid faster.
BambooHR is an excellent HR software and payroll solution for small businesses. The program is better suited for human resource tasks like compensation, hiring, onboarding, and company culture.
Inside, you get an application tracking system (ATS) that helps you speed up the hiring process and weed out potential applicants who don’t meet the job role requirements. Its automated alert features ensure you stay on schedule and keep candidates in the loop during the hiring process.
Once you’ve made your decision, you can use one of the many offer letter templates that come with auto-fill features so the new hire can sign and accept everything digitally.
That said, Bamboo HR also does all of the essential payroll tasks. It automates tax filing, so you don’t have to do it manually. As a result, you’ll avoid tax penalties and ensure you accurately report your employee earnings and taxes withheld.
Pricing: BambooHR offers free pricing quotes. To receive customized pricing, you will need to complete their contact form.
Pros:
BambooHR offers self-service tools so employees can access information such as tax forms and pay stubs online.
It automates the payroll process to avoid mistakes.
The ATS makes hiring much easier and faster.
Cons:
BambooHR is not as contractor-friendly as Gusto since it doesn’t have many features that cater to freelancers.
Why We Recommend Using BambooHR: BambooHR is a great choice if you have a remote team based internationally (outside of the U.S.). It makes it easy to manage your hiring and payroll across multiple countries.
QuickBooks is a payroll software designed to make life easier for small business owners. It’s primarily used for accounting tasks, allowing you to calculate all your balance sheets and perform payroll.
One key area where QuickBooks shines is that it offers same-day or next-day direct deposit processing, depending on the plan you choose. You also get useful features such as automated tax calculations and payroll, business receipt capture, paycheck creation, and more.
There’s a dedicated mobile app, so employees can easily access their PTO and health information and even look into their paystubs on the go. For administrators, you can manage payroll from anywhere, ensuring your team never misses payday.
Pricing: Price starts at $37.50 per month, plus an additional $6 per additional employee per month.
Pros:
Quickbooks offers a 30-day free trial.
For Elite users, QuickBooks Payroll provides a tax penalty protection of up to $25,000 per year.
QuickBooks Payroll integrates with QuickBooks Online, meaning you get a payroll and accounting system in one.
Cons:
There are limited third-party integrations.
Why We Recommend Using QuickBooks: If you’re focused on getting your accounting and payroll right, then QuickBooks is the way to go. With the tax penalty protection, you’re getting great coverage. That means if you make an error, they’ll not only help you to fix the issue but also cover any penalty and interest fines along with it.
Juggling customer data across scattered Excel sheets can be chaos. You may deal with missed follow-ups, forgotten birthdays, unsent emails, mixed signals, and frustrated teams and customers.
CRM apps eliminate this nightmare. They consolidate all customer data into a single, accessible platform. This empowers your sales, marketing, and customer support teams to:
Effortlessly access information: No more scrambling for details.
Boost efficiency: Automate tasks and free up time for strategic work.
Sales reps can prioritize high-value opportunities and close deals faster. Plus, marketers can leverage customer insights to craft impactful campaigns. Customer support gains a complete view of each interaction, providing exceptional service every time.
HubSpot CRM is the most popular CRM software on the market. It is cost-effective and offers a wide range of features, making it a great choice for most small businesses. You can get started with the free plan, which already gives you access to unlimited users and contacts.
Where HubSpot excels is its all-in-one capabilities. Since it combines sales, marketing, customer service, CMS, and operation hubs, you can easily connect data between departments. For example, you can easily pass contacts from your marketing team to the sales department without having to sync information to another system.
HubSpot is also really easy to navigate. It provides a full picture of customer interactions and comes with customizable reporting dashboards so that you can see how your team is performing. By looking at the opportunities and deal stages, you can quickly see what’s currently in the pipeline and focus on high-leverage prospects who are ready to buy.
Pricing: Hubspot CRM is free to get started. If you want the entire marketing suite, it’s $800 per month for 3 seats, billed annually, and an extra $45 per month per additional user. HubSpot Sales suite costs $90 per month per seat.
Pros:
HubSpot has an easy-to-use interface.
There are tons of features and even apps that you can download to make your experience better.
Visual dashboards and reporting make it very easy to track team performance and spot opportunities for growth.
Cons:
While HubSpot has a very generous free plan, its pricing gets steep quickly if you wish to upgrade.
Why We Recommend Using HubSpot: HubSpot is one of those can’t-miss tools for beginners. Sure, it could be more customizable or offer more affordable plans. But with that said, its free plan is enough to get small teams started.
FunnelKit Automations is the best CRM and marketing automation engine for WooCommerce. It’s filled with a wide range of features to help get your online more repeat sales and higher order values.
Geared towards e-commerce business owners, you have a complete 360-degree contact view of your customers. You’ll be able to see their name, gender, email, tags, lists, geographical location, and custom field data.
In addition to the CRM tool, you can build high-converting checkout pages and flows. The drag-and-drop builder connects with other major page builders, such as Divi, Elementor, Oxygen, and Gutenberg.
Once customers complete the purchase, you can create upsell pages to showcase higher-tier products, increasing your total order value.
Pricing: FunnelKit starts at $99.50 per year. That said, there is a free version as well.
Pros:
You get plenty of automation templates and workflows to increase conversions.
You can view the customer’s complete profile, including purchase history, order placed, etc.
Everything can be tracked, including what pages and workflows led to revenue.
Cons:
You’ll need a mailer plugin, such as WP Mail SMTP, since WordPress isn’t built for high-volume email.
Why We Recommend Using FunnelKit Automation: If you’re running an online store, adding FunnelKit Automation is a no-brainer. Keep your opt-in leads and customers organized so that you can send them more relevant product recommendations.
Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM app for small businesses. It’s an all-in-one sales platform to boost revenue and track all of your leads and customers.
What we like about Pipedrive is its smart, in-platform tips. It comes with a sales assistant that provides performance tips and recommended features to help your team get acclimated to the software. For example, if you’re not sending follow-up emails after demo calls, it might send reminders to your reps.
Pipedrive goes beyond simple CRM with powerful automation features. Imagine automatically nurturing leads with timely emails, assigning tasks, and moving deals through your pipeline.
These automated workflows free up your sales reps to focus on closing high-value deals, not repetitive tasks.
Pricing: Pipedrive begins at $14 per seat per month, billed annually. But there’s a free 14-day trial you can get started with.
Pros:
Fairly affordable to use.
The smart assistant feature helps you improve your team performance.
It has a lead enrichment feature, which scrapes data online to find information about your prospects based on the email you’ve collected.
Cons:
It lacks phone support.
Why We Recommend Using Pipedrive: If you want a comprehensive sales tool to help manage your leads and drive home more revenue, Pipedrive is a solid choice. They offer many AI-powered features to make your life easier and save a lot of time.
Aside from these top business tools that we mentioned above, we also use and recommend the following plugins to better manage our WordPress sites.
WPFormsis the most beginner-friendly contact form plugin used by over 6,000,000 sites. It features an intuitive drag-and-drop form builder, allowing you to build beautiful contact forms, payment forms, user registration forms, multi-page forms, and more.
All in One SEO is a WordPress SEO plugin that helps you improve your WordPress SEO. It provides powerful on-page SEO optimization tools to help search engines better crawl and index your site, among many other capabilities.
SeedProdis the ultimate drag-and-drop page builder plugin for WordPress. With this software, you can design high-converting and beautiful pages that convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. You can create everything from landing pages and custom home pages to 404 pages and more.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It brings the power of Google Analytics right to your WordPress dashboard, so you can get detailed reports of important metrics to see what’s working and what could be improved.
OptinMonster is the best lead generation and popup plugin that helps you convert website visitors into subscribers and customers. With this tool, you can create a wide range of campaigns, including popups, scroll boxes, floating bars, and fullscreen welcome mats.
MemberPress is a popular WordPress membership plugin for building membership websites. It has advanced membership features, including the ability to create gated content, add member levels, accept payments, create members-only forums, and more.
PushEngage is a web push notification software that helps you engage and retain visitors once they’ve left your site. When users leave, you can send them all types of reminders, such as product announcements, blog post notifications, cart abandonment reminders, and more.
WP Simple Pay is the best Stripe payments plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily create payment forms or buttons that accept 13+ payment methods and collect recurring payments.
Smash Balloonis a social media feeds plugin for WordPress websites. It allows you to display custom Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube feeds on your site to boost followers and engagement.
WooCommerce is the world’s most popular eCommerce platform. It is cost-effective, super-flexible, and easy to use for beginners. You can easily create product pages, accept payments, manage orders, and much more. Basically, you can create your entire online store from scratch.
Frequently Asked Questions About Business Tools
What should you look for in a business tool?
The most important factors to consider when selecting a business tool are:
Integration with WordPress: If you own a WordPress site or WooCommerce store, you’ll want a business tool that easily connects the platforms. That way, no crucial information is lost in translation.
Ease of Use: The tool should be user-friendly and have an intuitive interface. Small businesses often have limited resources and may not have dedicated IT personnel, so it’s essential that the tool is easy for anyone on the team to use.
Scalability: Will it be able to grow with your business? Make sure the software can accommodate increasing data, users, and business complexity.
Cost-effectiveness: Evaluate the cost of the software pricing and its value for your business. Consider both upfront costs and ongoing fees. Some tools offer scalable pricing plans, which can be beneficial for small businesses.
Feature Set: Identify the specific features that are essential for your business. Whether it’s task management, CRM, eCommerce capabilities, or content marketing, make sure the service aligns with your business needs.
Customization: Look for a tool that allows some level of customization. This ensures that the tool can be adapted to meet your business’s unique requirements.
Customer Support: Reliable customer support is crucial. Check the availability, response times, and level of support provided. This is especially important when technical issues arise.
Security: Security is vital, especially when dealing with customer data. The tool should adhere to industry security standards and have measures in place to protect your business and customer information.
Mobile Compatibility: With an increasing number of users accessing websites through different devices, the software should be mobile-friendly.
Community and Reviews: Check for testimonials and user feedback to gain insights into the experiences of other small businesses using the tool.
Data Backup and Recovery: Make sure the software has reliable data backup and recovery mechanisms to prevent data loss in case of unexpected events. That said, if you don’t already have a WordPress backup plugin, Duplicator is our go-to recommendation.
Do business tools integrate with your WordPress site?
Yes, the best WordPress plugins should seamlessly integrate with the most popular third-party business tools. However, if there isn’t an integration, we recommend using Uncanny Automator.
It is the best automation plugin, allowing you to create unlimited automated workflows in WordPress. That means you can connect your website to a specific tool to complete an action.
Let’s say every time someone completes your contact form, you want to automatically add those contacts to your prospects list to your CRM tool. You can create an automated workflow through Uncanny Automator that will easily execute that action for you.
Are there any free business tools available?
Yes, many of these tools offer a free version with limited features. That means you can test the product and see if it meets your needs. That said, you can also check out our list of the best free business tools for small businesses.
Just like apps enhance your phone, some of the best WordPress plugins can transform a basic WordPress site into something special. From powerful SEO tools to simple contact form plugins, it’s impressive how a quick ten-second installation can make such a big difference.
Are you looking to engage new users by redirecting them to a different page after they first leave a comment?
Comments are a great way to keep your users engaged and build a strong community around your content. Tiny hacks like automatically redirecting first-time commenters to a thank you page will help you improve the user experience and stand out.
In this article, we will show you how to easily redirect your users’ attention with comment redirects in WordPress.
Why Redirect First-Time Commenters on Your WordPress Blog?
When your WordPress blog has an active and interesting comments section, users will feel more engaged. This can create a sense of community that encourages visitors to stay longer.
Using a comment redirect is an excellent way to recognize first-time commenters and thank them for their interest in your website. For example, you can redirect users to a Thank You page after they leave their first comment. Then, they are more likely to keep interacting with your content and leave more comments.
With that being said, let’s look at how to redirect your users’ attention with a comment redirect. You can use the links below to quickly navigate through the article:
Method 1: Redirecting Your User’s Attention With Thrive Comments (Recommended)
Thrive Comments is the best WordPress comments plugin that allows you to take total control over your blog’s comments, including redirecting new commenters to a page of your choice.
You can learn more about the plugin in our detailed Thrive Comments review. Or if you prefer to use a free plugin, then please see Method 2 below.
First, you need to visit the Thrive Themes website and sign up for an account.
After you’ve done that, you’ll see the account dashboard.
Next, you need to click the ‘Download and install the Thrive Product Manager plugin’ link. This will give your WordPress website access to your Thrive products.
Now, you can install and activate the Thrive Product Manager plugin you downloaded. For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you can navigate to Product Manager in your admin sidebar. You need to click the ‘Log into my account’ button.
Once you have logged in to your account, you’ll see the Thrive Product Manager dashboard.
You need to select ‘Thrive Comments’, then click the ‘Install selected products’ button.
Once the plugin is installed, you will see a success message saying, ‘Ready to use’. Thrive Comments has been successfully activated on your site and is ready for you to configure it.
You can now navigate to the Thrive Dashboard » Thrive Comments page.
This page displays the Thrive Comments menu. You’ll need to expand the ‘Comment Conversion’ section by clicking the arrow on the right.
These settings allow you to choose what happens after a visitor leaves a comment for the first time. There are options to send them a message, share on social media, show them related posts, redirect them to a new page, or display an opt-in form.
Simply click the ‘Redirect’ option, and then enter the URL of the page you wish to send commenters to. The new settings will be automatically saved.
You could redirect users to a simple thank you page with an email signup form, social media links, and your most popular posts. Or you could paste the URL of a landing page, special offer, or a specific lead magnet page.
We include a section at the end of this article with helpful tips on creating a powerful comment redirect page.
To see the comment redirect in action, you first need to log out of your WordPress website. After that, you can go to any post and leave a comment using a random name and email address.
You will be automatically redirected to your selected page when you submit the comment.
Redirecting new commenters to a specific page is just the start of what you can do with Thrive Comments.
Upon activation, you need to visit the Settings » Comment Hacks page to configure the plugin.
The Comment Hacks plugin combines many useful hacks that can improve the default WordPress comment system. You can learn about them in our guide on how to install and set up Comment Hacks for WordPress.
But right now, we will focus on the comment redirect feature in the plugin. Go ahead and click on the ‘Comment redirect’ tab on the settings page.
Here, you need to select a page where you want to redirect commenters after leaving their first comment.
After selecting your page, simply click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Creating a Powerful Comment Redirect Page
The Thrive Comments and Comment Hacks plugins only redirect first-time commenters. This means you only get one shot at leaving a meaningful impression and converting those users into customers or loyal readers.
That’s why we recommend carefully choosing and designing the page that you will redirect commenters to.
First, you will want to set a goal for your comment direct page. This goal could be any task you would like the user to perform.
For example, you might encourage new commenters to buy a product, sign up for your email list, follow you on social media, and more.
Then, we recommend spending some time creating a powerful comment redirect page.
You can design a beautiful custom page using a drag-and-drop page builder plugin. We recommend using SeedProd because it has several ready-to-use page templates that will work perfectly for this purpose.
SeedProd allows you to add blocks for contact forms, social profiles, videos, text, and more.
Now that you know how to use comment redirects, you may like to see some other articles related to increasing user engagement with comments in WordPress:
Are you looking for a way to sell fonts online using WordPress?
Fonts play a crucial role in graphic designing, branding, website building, and other creative tasks. Selling fonts is a great way to make money online, as you can create your own website and target different niches.
In this article, we will show you how to sell fonts online with WordPress.
Why Sell Fonts Online with WordPress?
There is a growing need for fonts, as graphic designers, bloggers, marketers, and business owners of all sizes need a font for their websites. This presents a huge potential opportunity for font designers, as you can easily sell typefaces online to make money.
While it can be a competitive industry, you can find gaps and target a specific niche. For example, you can sell fonts to designers who create logos or target creative artists who create digital art.
Selling online fonts also requires little investment compared to other businesses. To get started, you need only a web hosting platform, a domain name, and an eCommerce platform. For more details, please see how much it costs to build a website.
Plus, you don’t have to worry about storage or restocking with digital products like fonts compared to physical goods.
Now, there are many third-party websites where you can sell your fonts. However, you don’t get complete control over your digital products, and you’d have to share a percentage of your sales with the particular platform.
That’s why it’s better to create your own website to sell digital products, including fonts. You get complete control over your products and the flexibility to sell them however you want. Plus, you don’t have to split the money with anyone.
Which Platforms Should You Use to Sell Fonts Online?
When it comes to selling fonts, you’ll need an eCommerce platform. It will allow you to set up an online shop with a shopping cart, easily upload different fonts, add multiple payment options, and create different pages for your store.
Now, it’s important to select the right platform because moving to another platform in the future can be complicated and take a lot of time and effort.
Some platforms are better suited for physical products, while others are great for selling digital products.
WordPress is the best website builder in the market, and it powers over 43% of websites on the internet. On the other hand, Easy Digital Downloads is the best eCommerce plugin for WordPress for selling digital products like fonts.
Do note that there are 2 types of WordPress software. First, there is WordPress.com, which is a blog hosting platform. Then there is WordPress.org, which is also known as self-hosted WordPress.
To sell fonts online, you will need the WordPress.org platform because it gives you full control over your site.
That said, let’s see how you can easily sell fonts online with WordPress.
Step 1: Setting Up a WordPress Website
To start selling fonts online, you’ll first need a domain name, web hosting, and an SSL certificate.
A domain name is the website address that people will enter on the internet to visit your site. You can think of it as an address to your house but for the internet, like wpbeginner.com.
Web hosting is a place where your website lives online. It’s where all your website files, fonts, and other information are stored. To help you out, we’ve selected the best WordPress hosting services that you can purchase.
One of our top recommended hosting providers is SiteGround. It offers managed WordPress hosting for Easy Digital Downloads (EDD). It comes with a free SSL certificate, EDD pre-installed, all the optimization features, and you get a huge 80% off.
If you opted for SiteGround’s EDD hosting, then Easy Digital Downloads will come preinstalled.
However, if you’re using another WordPress hosting service, then you’ll need to install and activate the Easy Digital Downloads plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Do note that for this tutorial, we will use the Easy Digital Downloads Pro version because it offers more features, payment gateways, and extensions. However, you can use the Easy Digital Downloads Lite version to get started for free.
Upon activation, you can go to the Downloads » Settings page from your WordPress admin panel. From here, you’ll need to enter the license key under the General tab. You will find the license key in the Easy Digital Downloads account area.
Next, you’ll need to scroll down and enter your business information. For instance, you can choose a business name, business type, address, and more.
You can also select the business country and region from the dropdown menu. This will help determine where your business is located and allow EDD to fill different fields automatically.
Once you’re done, click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
Step 3: Adding a Payment Method to Sell Fonts
Next, you’ll need to set up payment methods to accept payments from customers who buy fonts.
By default, Easy Digital Downloads include Stripe, PayPal, and credit cards as payment options.
Simply switch to the ‘Payments’ tab and then the ‘General’ tab in the Downloads settings.
After that, you can check the box next to each payment gateway you want to use on your website.
If you select multiple payment options, then you’ll have to set the default gateway. Simply click the ‘Default Gateway’ dropdown menu and choose the method that will appear default.
We recommend using Stripe, as it lets you accept credit card payments, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. This makes it a versatile payment option for users.
Next, you’ll need to configure each payment option you selected for selling fonts online. Do note that the process may vary for each service.
For example, we will select Stripe for this tutorial.
Simply click the ‘Stripe’ tab under the Payments settings. From here, click the ‘Connect with Stripe’ button.
After that, you can follow the onscreen instructions in the setup wizard to connect your Stripe account with Easy Digital Downloads.
Now, you’ll need to repeat these steps for other payment gateways you added to your digital store.
Lastly, you can switch to the ‘General’ tab and then select ‘Currency.’ Here, Easy Digital Downloads lets you select the default currency for your store.
Once you’re done, simply click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
Step 4: Adding Fonts as Digital Products
Now that you’ve set up a WordPress site and configured Easy Digital Downloads, the next step is to add your custom fonts to the store.
To create a digital product, you can head to Downloads from your WordPress dashboard and then click the ‘Add New’ button.
Next, you’ll need to enter the name of your font. This will appear at the top of the product page, so you’d typically want to use the font name.
Under that, you can also add a brief description of the custom font. Here, you can list out the details of your font, like specification, size, style, weights, variations, and more.
After that, you can scroll down to the ‘Download Details’ section.
Here, you’ll see options to set the price for a single product, bundle, or service. Then, under ‘Pricing Options,’ simply enter the price for your custom font.
If you’d like to price different variations of fonts differently, then you can also enable the ‘Enable variable pricing’ option.
Next, you can head to the ‘Download Files’ section. From here, you’ll need to enter a name for your file and then upload the font zip file.
If you have multiple files, then simply click the ‘Add New File’ button and upload different variations of the font.
The final step is adding a product image for your website. You can click the ‘Set Download Image’ option from the settings panel on the right and upload an image.
We recommend using a picture of the font as the download image. This way, a user will know what the font will look like before purchasing.
When you’re happy with all the settings, you can click the ‘Publish’ button at the top.
You can now repeat this step to add more fonts to your WordPress website and sell them online.
Step 5: Customize Your Font Download Emails
Easy Digital Downloads sends default emails to customers who purchase your fonts online.
However, the default email is plain and lacks branding or a logo.
You can customize these emails in Easy Digital Downloads by adding your own brand name or logo. This helps make your emails stand out and shows a professional touch.
To customize emails, you’ll need to go to Downloads » Settings from the WordPress dashboard and then click on the ‘Emails’ tab.
Here, you can upload a logo by clicking the ‘Attach File’ button.
There are also options to edit the ‘from’ name and email address.
If you scroll down, then Easy Digital Downloads also gives an option to enable WP Mail SMTP.
It is the best SMTP plugin for WordPress that helps email deliverability and prevents your emails from landing in the spam folder or not reaching the customer’s inbox.
When you are done, simply click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
Next, you can switch to the ‘Purchase Receipts’ tab.
Here, you can edit the purchase email subject, heading, and the text of the email.
Don’t forget to save your changes when you are done.
You can also send a test email to see your changes and ensure everything is working correctly. Simply click the ‘Send Test Email’ button, and EDD will send a message to your admin email address.
Step 6: Promote Your Online Font Store
Now that your digital store is ready to sell fonts, you’ll need to promote it to drive traffic and sales.
There are different ways you can start promoting your store. This can include creating a sales page where you list different fonts and adding the page to your website navigation menu. You can also display different fonts on the homepage to improve their visibility and get conversions.
Other than that, creating a WordPress blog can help drive to your website. You can write about different fonts and cover extensive topics, like when to use them or share your own experience.
Easy Digital Downloads also lets you create a purchase button, which you can add anywhere on your site. It is similar to a buy now button, where users can purchase fonts with a click of a button.
Simply head to Downloads from your WordPress dashboard and edit one of the fonts.
Next, you’ll need to scroll down to the Purchase Shortcode section.
You can now add the purchase shortcode to any page or post and allow users to buy the font.
Bonus: Use Plugins and Tools to Promote Your Digital Downloads Store
Besides that, there are lots of WordPress plugins you can use to help promote your online font store. Here are some of the top picks to help you sell digital products:
OptinMonster – It is the best conversion optimization software in the market. You can create multiple campaigns to grow your email list, convert visitors into customers, and reduce cart abandonment.
MonsterInsights – You can use this plugin to set up Google Analytics in WordPress without editing code. It helps track user behavior on your site, shows where visitors are coming from, how your site is performing, and more. You can uncover amazing insights to grow your business and make data-driven decisions.
PushEngage – It is the best push notification software for WordPress. You can use it to send personalized web push notifications and let users know about new fonts, sales, discount coupons, and more.
RafflePress – You can use RafflePress to run viral giveaways. This helps build social followers, grow your email list, build brand recognition, and promote your fonts.
Are you wondering what’s the different between 302 vs 301 redirects?
Redirects are important for providing a great user experience and helping search engines better understand your site. 302 and 301 are types of redirects you can use for different situations.
In this article, we will compare 302 redirect vs 301 redirect. We’ll also show the best practices when using redirects in WordPress.
302 Redirect vs 301 Redirect – What’s the Difference?
Redirection in WordPress allows you to send users and search engine crawlers to a different URL than the one they clicked on.
You’d need to set up redirects if you delete a page on your WordPress site, move to a new domain, conduct A/B experiments, and more.
Without redirects, users would not be able to see the content they requested. Instead, they’ll see a 404 error page, which is bad for your site’s user experience and search engine rankings.
When it comes to setting up redirects, you’ll come across two most common types: 301 and 302 redirects. Let’s look at each one of them and see what’s the difference.
What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. If your website or web page has been moved permanently to a new location, then you can use 301 redirects to point users in the right direction.
For example, when a visitor types your site’s address or clicks on a link, the 301 redirect will automatically change the requested address to the new address.
What is a 302 Redirect?
A 302 redirect also helps point users and search engines in the right direction, but temporarily.
Unlike 301, which is a permanent redirect, 302 redirects are temporary. You can move your website traffic to a new location for a limited amount of time and then go back to the original URL whenever you want.
When Should You Use 301 and 302 Redirects?
Now that you know the main difference between the two types of redirections, you may be wondering when is the best time to use 301 and 302 redirects.
Under certain conditions and the goal you’re trying to achieve, it makes sense to use 301 redirects. While in other situations, it is better to use 302 redirects.
When to Use a 301 Redirect?
Since 301 redirects are permanent, here’s when to use them:
On the other hand, if you don’t want to point your audience to a new page or another location permanently, then it’s better to use 302 redirects. Here are some situations where using 302 redirection makes sense:
Conducting A/B tests for designs, layout, and features of a new website or page
Temporarily redirecting users to a sales page or promotional offer
Send users to the correct version of your website based on their language or location preference
Collect user feedback about a new product or service without impacting your current SEO rankings
Impact of 301 Redirects vs 302 Redirects on SEO
When it comes to using 301 or 302 redirects, you have to consider the impact it will have on your site’s WordPress SEO (search engine optimization).
Search engines work by crawling your website pages using bots and indexing them on the search results. These search engine bots follow links to discover new content and find different pages on your site.
Using the right type of redirection is important if you want to your blog posts to be easily uncovered by search engine crawlers and continue to rank higher on search results.
With 301 redirects, Google and other search engines will know that you’ve moved a site or web page permanently. This way, it will fully pass the link equity or link juice to the new URL. Link equity is like a vote of confidence from other sites that your page is valuable and worth promoting.
On the other hand, if you’re performing a temporary change and don’t want any impact on your original page’s SEO rankings, then it’s better to use 302 redirects. It doesn’t pass the link juice fully and tells search engines that the change is temporary.
How to Set Up 301 and 302 Redirects in WordPress
The easiest way of setting up 301 or 302 redirects on your site is by using a WordPress redirect plugin.
For instance, you can use All in One SEO (AIOSEO) for configuring redirects. It is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and offers a powerful redirection manager tool.
Do note that you’ll need the AIOSEO Pro version to use the redirection manager. There is also an AIOSEO Lite version you can use to get started for free.
First, you’ll need to install and activate the AIOSEO plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you’ll see a welcome screen and the setup wizard. Simply click the ‘Let’s Get Started button’ and follow the onscreen instructions to configure the plugin.
Next, you’ll need to go to All in One SEO » Redirects from the WordPress admin area and click the ‘Activate Redirects’ button.
Once the Redirection Manager tool is active, you can go to the ‘Redirects’ tab at the top.
From here, you can enter the link that you’d like to redirect in the ‘Source URL’ field. Next, enter the new location for the link under the ‘Target URL’ field.
After that, you can click the ‘Redirect Type’ dropdown menu and select 301 or 302 redirection.
Once that’s done, simply click the ‘Add Redirect’ button. You can repeat this step and add as many redirects as you want.
If you scroll down, then AIOSEO will show you a log of redirects you’ve created for your website.
Besides that, AIOSEO also lets you perform full site redirects without any technical knowledge or editing code.
Best Practices for Implementing 302 and 301 Redirects
Setting up redirection on your WordPress website can be complicated. To help you out, here are some best practices to follow.
1. Testing Redirects to Ensure They’re Working
After you’ve set up 301 or 302 redirects, it is better to test each link multiple times.
This is to ensure that the 301 and 302 redirection is working properly. If something goes wrong, then it will be bad for your site’s user experience and SEO rankings.
A simple way to check is by visiting your site in incognito mode and opening the link that you redirected. If it opens the new location, then it means your redirects are working fine.
There are also free tools available on the internet that will check redirection for you. Or you can use the AIOSEO plugin, which shows logs of your redirects inside your WordPress dashboard.
2. Monitoring Redirects for Broken Links
Next, you should also set up tracking for broken links after adding 301 and 302 redirects to your website.
If you moved a web page to another location or send users to a new page temporarily and the redirection didn’t work properly, then it will result in a broken link. As a result, users will see a 404 error page on your website.
Tracking these broken links after 301 and 302 redirection will help you fix them quickly, provide a better user experience, and avoid any impact on your keyword rankings.
The best way to track broken links is by using the AIOSEO plugin. You can enable the ‘404 Logs’ to start monitoring for 404 error pages.
Do note that initially, you won’t see any data because it will only start recording broken links after you enable the setting.
Once the plugin starts gathering information, you can view broken links on your site under the 404 Logs tab.
To quickly fix 404 error pages, you can click the ‘Add Redirect’ option and set up 301 or 302 redirections.
PRO TIP: If you want continuous updates on broken links that aren’t just 404 errors, check out our free Broken Link Checker plugin.
3. Avoid Creating Redirection Chains and Loops
A redirection chain is when you have multiple redirects between the source URL and the target URL. Google officially follows up to 10 hops in a redirection chain. If there are more than 10 redirects, then it could show a redirect error in the Google Search Console.
That’s why it is a best practice to avoid redirection chains and point directly to the new location of a website or page. This is especially important when setting up permanent 301 redirects. Having too many 301 redirects can cause errors and lead to poor user experience.
Besides that, you should also try to avoid redirection loops. It occurs when the URLs in a chain redirect back to itself and creates an infinite loop.
As a result, users and search engines won’t see the intended page and instead view the original page. This could also result in a ‘redirected you too many times’ error.
One way of fixing it is to remove all redirects in the chain and try redirecting to the final destination.
Another best practice for using 301 and 302 redirects is to avoid duplicate content if your site has multiple subdomains.
For example, if your site’s URL has HTTP and HTTPS, www and non-www, capitalized and lower-case URLs, trailing slashes (/), and more.
Although these subdomains point to the same web address, search engines will view them as separate sites. As a result, it could lead to duplicate content issues. To fix this, you can simply redirect all subdomains to a single website URL.
If you are migrating sites and domains, also, you might use a 302 redirect to show Google and other search engines that you’re moving, and the content won’t be duplicated forever.
You will then have to create 301 redirects to tell search engines which is the preferred version of the content you want them to index.
Additional Resources
Here are some more guides and reading material you can go through:
Educational material like homework guides, worksheets, and more.
You can also use the PDF download to create content upgrades for your posts to grow your email list. Additionally, you can even hide the option behind a subscription fee to make money from your website.
Having said that, let’s see how you can add a PDF download for WordPress posts.
Do you want to use PDF downloads to grow your email list? PDF downloads make an excellent content upgrade offer.
When we say content upgrade, this is a marketing term that means the extra content perks you can offer your users in return for their email addresses.
This approach works well because the bonus content adds value to the user experience, and you also get leads in return. Think of it as a content bribe.
Instead of giving PDF downloads right away, you can download and upload PDF files to your website.
Next, you will need OptinMonster. It is the best conversion optimization software that helps you create beautiful marketing campaigns that convert visitors into customers and subscribers.
After signing up with OptinMonster, you will reach your account dashboard.
From here, you need to create a new campaign.
It comes with several campaign types, but for the sake of this tutorial, you need to select an inline campaign.
Choose a template. There are dozens of them. Don’t worry, you can customize them later.
After that, use the campaign builder to design your campaign.
It is an intuitive design tool where you can simply point and click to edit an item or drag and drop blocks from the left column.
You can add a default view, a yes/no view, a signup form or optin view, and a Success view to your campaign using the options at the bottom of the campaign builder.
In the Success view, click on the button within the campaign and then make sure to add the PDF download link in the ‘New Window URL’ field.
Make sure that you have published your campaign.
Next, switch to your WordPress website and install and activate the OptinMonster plugin.
You’ll be asked to connect your WordPress site to OptinMonster.
After that, go to the OptinMonster » Campaigns page and publish the inline campaign you created earlier.
This makes the campaign available on your website.
Next, edit the post or page where you want to add the content upgrade offer.
You need to add the OptinMonster block where you want to display the offer and choose your campaign from the dropdown menu.
Finally, you can now visit your post and page to see the campaign in action.
Don’t forget to fill in the email form and test the download link.
OptinMonster works with all popular email marketing services. It also comes with power display rules that allow you to show personalized messages to users.
There are many ways to monetize PDF content in WordPress. Depending on your business, you can choose one that fits your goals.
1. Create a Subscription Platform
A subscription platform allows you to sell membership plans on your website. Users on a subscription platform can get access to pay-per-view content, bonus downloads, and PDF files.
The easiest way to create a subscription-based community is by using MemberPress. It is the best membership plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily restrict content to paid members.
MemberPress lets you create multiple subscription levels and then restrict access to file downloads and other content based on a user’s subscription plan.
You can accept payments online using Stripe or PayPal. More importantly, you can set up recurring payments to automatically charge users for their subscriptions.
The most direct way to monetize PDF content is by selling it as a digital download.
Easy Digital Downloads is the most straightforward way to sell digital downloads. It is a WordPress eCommerce plugin for selling digital goods like file downloads, eBooks, software, music, and more.
Easy Digital Downloads allows you to add your PDF files as products, which you can then add to your posts or pages.
Plus, each of your digital downloads can have its own product page. Then, users can easily add the downloads to their carts and check out.
Easy Digital Downloads allows you to accept payments using Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and more. For details, see our article on selling digital downloads in WordPress.
We hope this article helped you learn how to add a PDF download for posts in WordPress. You may also want to see our pick of the best PDF plugins for WordPress or learn how to grow your business online without spending a fortune.
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Do you want to add categories and tags to images in your WordPress media library?
Tags and categories can help you organize media files in a way that makes sense to you. This can make it easier to find images when you need them.
In this article, we will show you how to easily add categories and tags to the WordPress media library.
Why Add Categories and Tags to Images in WordPress Media Library?
WordPress comes with a feature called taxonomies, which allows you to sort your posts into categories and tags or create your own custom organization types for your content.
However, the default category and tag taxonomies are only available for posts. This means that these taxonomies can be added to any WordPress post type, including pages, attachments, or any custom post type you may be using on your blog.
When you add an image to your WordPress posts or pages, it is stored in the WordPress media library as an attachment. This means that it is a post type and can have its own taxonomies, too.
Adding categories and tags to your WordPress images can help you find and sort images easily. Instead of looking through your entire image library, you can just search by category or tag.
Having said that, let’s see how to easily add categories and tags to images in the WordPress media library. We will cover two methods, and you can use the quick links below to jump to the one you want to use:
This plugin works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure. Upon activation, the plugin will simply add a Categories tab under the Media menu tab in the WordPress dashboard.
Now, to add new categories for your images, head over to the Media » Categories tab from the WordPress admin sidebar.
Here, you’ll notice that all the categories that you have been using for your posts are displayed in the right column.
You can use these categories for your images. However, if you want to create a new one, then simply type a category name and slug in the ‘Add New Category’ section.
Once you are done, click the ‘Add New Category’ button to store your settings.
Next, visit the Media » Library page from the admin area and click on the ‘Edit’ link under any image where you want to add a category.
This will open the image of your choice on the ‘Edit Media’ page, where you can easily select a category for it from the ‘Categories’ section in the right column.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Update’ button to save your settings.
Once you have added the categories for all the images, you can easily sort them on the ‘Library’ page. To do this, select a category of your choice from the ‘View all categories’ dropdown menu and click the ‘Filter’ button.
Note: Envira Gallery also has a free version. However, you’ll need at least the Plus plan for the plugin to unlock the Tags add-on.
Upon activation, visit the Envira Gallery » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard to enter your license key.
You can get the key from your account on the Envira Gallery website.
After that, visit the Envira Gallery » Addons page from the WordPress dashboard and locate the ‘Tags Addon’.
Once you do that, simply click the ‘Install’ button to unlock the Tags feature.
Upon installation, you’ll also have to toggle the switch to activate the Tags addon.
Next, you can create a new gallery for your WordPress blog or edit an existing one. For this tutorial, we will be creating a new gallery for your WordPress website.
To do this, visit the Envira Gallery » Add New page from the WordPress dashboard. Here, you can start by typing a name for your gallery.
After that, click the ‘Select Files from Other Sources’ button to start adding images from your media library.
To add images from the computer, click the ‘Select Files from Your Computer’ button.
Once you have done that, scroll down to the ‘Currently in your Gallery’ section. From here, you can configure the gallery layout, add a lightbox, create a mobile-responsive gallery, and so much more.
To add tags, simply click on the pencil icon on an image.
This will open the ‘Edit Metadata’ popup on the screen, where you can add a title, alt text, and caption for your image.
You can also add multiple media tags for an image by separating them with a comma. Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Metadata’ button to store your settings.
Just repeat the process to add tags to other images in your gallery.
Then, switch to the ‘Tags’ tab from the left column and check the ‘Enable Tag Filtering?’ box.
This will allow your users to filter all your gallery images using the tags.
By default, Envira Gallery will create a filter for all the tags that you have added to your gallery.
However, if you want to include only specific tags for filtering, then you can also do that by typing those tags in the ‘Tags to include in Filtering’ option.
If you leave this section blank, then all the tags will be filtered. Next, you can also choose the tag position, enable/disable the ‘All’ tags feature, and sort tags according to your liking.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Publish’ button at the top to save your changes.
You and users will now be able to use tags to filter images on your website.
Filtering by Tag in the Media Library
To filter images using tags in the WordPress dashboard, visit the Media » Envira Tags page from the admin sidebar.
Here, you will notice all the tags that you have created are listed on the left, and the number of images with that tag is listed in the ‘Item’ column.
To find the images that have a specific tag, simply click on the ‘Items’ number for that tag.
For example, to find all the images with the tag ‘architecture’, you will have to click the ‘1’ number in the architecture tag row.
This will open all the images with that tag in the media library.
This way, you don’t have to search through all your images to find the ones you are looking for.
Filtering by Tag on the Front End
With Envira Gallery, users visiting your website can also filter images based on their tags.
Keep in mind that this feature will only work if you have checked the ‘Enable Tag Filtering?’ box for the gallery settings.
To enable this feature, you must first add the gallery you created to your website. For this, open the WordPress page/post in the content editor and click the add block ‘+’ button.
Once the block menu opens up, add the Envira Gallery block to the page/post and then select the gallery you created from the dropdown menu in the block itself.
Finally, click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to store your settings.
Now, you can visit your WordPress site to view the image gallery, where you will notice tags for filtering at the top of the images.
Once a user clicks on a tag, only images with that specific tag will be displayed in the gallery.
Bonus: Prevent Image Theft in WordPress
As a photographer or designer, using categories and tags can help you organize and display your images on your WordPress site. However, you may be worried about other people stealing your photos.
This is called image theft, which is the unauthorized use of your images on other websites.
It is a common problem for photographers and graphic designers because even though non-copyrighted image theft is unethical, it is not illegal. This means anyone can copy and sell your images as their own.
However, there are a few tricks that you can use to prevent image theft on your WordPress blog.
The first thing that you should do is disable right-click on your images. This will protect your copyright and prevent users from easily saving your images on their desktops.
You can also add a watermark to your images. Many stock photography websites use this method, which allows you to promote your images while protecting them from being stolen.
To create watermarks for your images, you will have to download the Watermark addon from Envira Gallery.
Do you want to add a simple user ranking system for WordPress comments on your website?
A ranking system can gamify your comments section and motivate more users to leave their thoughts and questions on your website. This can boost engagement and build a sense of community around your brand.
In this article, we will show you how to easily add a simple user ranking system for WordPress comments.
Why Add a Ranking System for WordPress Comments?
Comments help improve user engagement on your WordPress website. By adding a ranking system for these comments, you can motivate users to leave informative and well-written discussion points on your blog.
For example, you can feature the comments you like at the top of the comment section or award badges to the comments of your choice.
Similarly, you can add an upvote/downvote system for users to control comment popularity or bury spam comments at the bottom of the discussion. This can create a sense of community around your WordPress blog and also help you moderate comments.
Having said that, let’s see how to easily add a ranking system for WordPress comments. In this tutorial, we will look at two methods, and you can use the links below to jump to the method of your choice:
Method 1: Add a User Ranking System in WordPress Comments
If you want to add a simple user ranking system to your comments section, then you can easily do this with Thrive Comments.
It is the best WordPress comments plugin on the market that helps you create an interactive comments section by featuring/burying comments, adding thumbs up/thumbs down, awarding badges, and more.
First, you must visit the Thrive Themes website and sign up for an account. Once you do that, head over to your member dashboard.
From here, click on the ‘Download and install the Thrive Product Manager plugin’ link.
Next, open up your WordPress dashboard to install and activate Thrive Product Manager. For detailed instructions, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you must visit the Product Manager tab from the WordPress admin sidebar and click on the ‘Log into my account’ button.
Once you have provided your login credentials, you will see your Product Manager dashboard.
From here, select the Thrive Comments plugin and click the ‘Install selected products’ button.
Next, you can visit the Comments » Thrive Comments Moderation page in the WordPress dashboard, where you will see a list of all the comments on your blog.
From here, you can approve, unapprove, edit, or flag the comments as spam. You can also feature a comment by opening the ‘More’ dropdown menu and selecting that option.
Once you do that, all the featured comments will be displayed at the top of the discussion section. These comments will also have a badge in the top left corner, which will signify their importance.
Afterward, you can visit the Thrive Dashboard » Thrive Comments page from the WordPress admin area and scroll down to the ‘Voting and Badges’ section.
From here, you can add like/dislike functionality to your comments to boost engagement. You can select the ‘Up and down’ option to add thumbs up/thumbs down icons with the comments.
You can also choose the ‘Up only’ option if you don’t want users to be able to dislike any comments on your website.
After that, you can toggle the ‘Users must be registered and logged in to vote’ switch to ‘On’ if you only want to provide this functionality to logged-in users.
Next, you can scroll down and toggle the ‘Award Badges’ switch to ‘On.’ Once you do that, just click the ‘Add New Badge’ Button.
This will open a prompt on the screen, where you can start by adding a name for the badge. After that, you can choose when to award it from the dropdown menu.
For example, if you want to award a badge to a user when they have at least 5 featured comments on your website, then you can select the ‘Featured’ option from the dropdown menu.
Then, add 5 as the value next to the ‘reaches’ option.
After that, you can choose a badge image or upload one from your computer.
Once you are done, simply click the ‘Save Badge’ button to store your settings.
You can then click the ‘Add New Badge’ button again to create a badge awarding system for your comments.
Your settings will be saved automatically.
Now, simply visit your WordPress site to view the badges in action.
In our example, you can see that the comment at the top is featured because it has an icon at the top left corner. You can also see the badge awarded to the users next to their names.
Method 2: Add a User Ranking System in WordPress Forums
If you want to create a ranking system for the discussion forums on your website, then this method is for you.
Upon activation, visit the Forums » Add New page from the WordPress admin sidebar. Here, you can add the name, description, visibility, status, and moderators for the forum you will create.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Publish’ button to store your settings. For detailed instructions, see our tutorial on how to add a forum in WordPress with bbPress.
This plugin will show each forum member’s total rankings, the number of topics they started, and replies.
Upon activation, visit the Settings » bbp user ranking page from the WordPress dashboard and scroll down to the ‘Ranking Calculations’ section.
Here, you will see that the plugin uses the number of topics and replies a user has created to calculate rankings. You can simply check these options to add them as ranking factors.
Now, by default, the plugin offers two ranking levels for comments. However, if you want to add another ranking level, then simply enter the number of levels you want into the ‘Number of levels’ field and click the ‘Save Changes’ button to refresh the page.
Once you have done that, it’s time to configure settings for different levels.
To do this, scroll down to the ‘Level 1’ section and type a name for it into the ‘Rank Name’ field. This will be the name that will appear on the user’s profile.
After that, you must add the number of posts that members must make to graduate from this level and move to the next level under the ‘Up to number’ option.
For instance, you may create a New Member level with an ‘Up to number’ value of 5. This means that anyone who posts 1-5 comments will be a New Member.
You can then also add the URL for the image that will displayed next to the name of all level 1 users. You can get the image’s URL from your media library.
After that, you can also configure the image size, font color, and font size from different settings.
You can then repeat the process to set up other levels on your website. Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
After that, switch to the ‘Badges’ tab from the top. Here, you can select if you want to show multiple badges earned by the users in a row or column.
Next, scroll down to add the number of badges you want to create for your forum next to the ‘Number of Badges’ option. After that, click the ‘Save Changes’ button to refresh your page.
Then, you can add a badge name, paste the URL for the badge image, and choose a font color.
You can then also configure the image size according to your liking. If you don’t want to display an image with your badge, then you can select the ‘Click to display name’ option from the top.
However, you must select the ‘Click to display name on top of image’ option to show both the name and image for your badge.
You can now repeat this process to create as many badges as you want. Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Next, switch to the ‘Display’ tab from the top. Here, you can configure how the user ranking information will look on your forum.
You can now choose if you want to display the topic count, reply count, level symbols, or rank names. Simply check the box next to the information that you want to showcase.
After that, you can add an optional label to help people understand what the different numbers mean.
Next, you can also check the boxes to display level images and badges next to the user’s names.
After that, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
You have now successfully added a user ranking system. You can visit your website to view the users’ profiles in your forum.
Here, you will be able to see their ranking levels and calculations.
You can also award different badges that you created to users on your website. However, keep in mind that you will have to do this manually by visiting the Users menu tab.
Once you are there, click the ‘Edit’ link under any user profile of your liking.
This will take you to a new screen where you must scroll down to the ‘Badges’ section.
Here, check the ‘Click to add this badge’ option for any badge that you want to award the user. Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Update User’ button to store your settings.
You can now repeat the process for other users as well.
Bonus: Add a Points System in WordPress
Other than adding a ranking system for comments, you can also add a points system on your WordPress site to boost engagement.
For instance, you might reward your customers with points upon user registration, purchasing a product, or as part of a loyalty program. You can then award prizes or exclusive content to visitors with the most points.
If you have a membership site, then you can also offer a level upgrade to users with a certain number of points.
You can easily add a points system in WordPress with myCred. Upon activation, simply visit the Points » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard to start choosing a label and image for your points.
For example, you can call the points earned by the audience coins, brownies, jewels, tokens, or anything else that works.
After that, you will have to create user levels, set hooks for the points system, and integrate the plugin with different tools like MemberPress or LearnDash according to your liking.
Once you are done, you can use the different blocks provided by myCred to add a points system leaderboard on your website.
Are you looking for the best WordPress membership plugin to build a website?
Choosing the right plugin is very important for your membership business because a better platform means more growth opportunities.
Luckily, we have made this super easy for you by testing the most popular membership plugins and inspecting different factors like ease of use, features, customization options, and pricing.
In this article, we will compare the 14 best WordPress membership plugins to let you easily create paid membership websites.
Are you in a hurry? If so, then just take a quick look at our top picks to help you make a decision.
How We Tested And Reviewed WordPress Membership Plugins
There are plenty of WordPress membership plugins, but not all of them have the specific features that you may need for creating your membership site.
Some of them are good for selling subscriptions on a single level, while others offer more diverse membership levels and subscription management features.
To give you the best recommendations, we tested some popular membership plugins and paid attention to the following criteria:
Ease of Use: We have picked membership plugins that offer a beginner-friendly interface along with extensive documentation. We have also prioritized an easy onboarding process.
Different Use Cases: We have included plugins that can perform different functions on your site like selling digital products, creating members-only content, building courses, supporting payment gateways, creating an LMS, releasing drip content, and more.
Reliability: For this showcase, we have only included the membership plugins that we have tested ourselves. We also went through some customer reviews to find popular options.
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WPBeginner is a team of experts with 16+ years of experience in WordPress, hosting, SEO, online marketing, and more.
We have thoroughly reviewed and tested each plugin in this list on real websites to give you the best recommendation for all kinds of membership site use cases. For more information, you can see our editorial process.
Having said that, let’s see what you will need to start a WordPress membership site.
Video Tutorial
If you’d prefer written instructions, then just keep reading.
What Do You Need to Run a WordPress Membership Site?
Membership websites are resource-intensive, and choosing the wrong host can hurt your overall performance. That’s why the first thing you need to do is choose the best WordPress hosting that you can afford.
If you are on a budget, then you can start with Bluehost. Their Business Pro plan comes with an SSL certificate, which you need to securely collect payments, a dedicated IP, and a dedicated support line.
If budget is not an issue, and you want the best performance, then we recommend using a managed WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine.
If you don’t already have one, then you will also need to choose a domain name for your website. Here is our guide on how to pick the right domain name for your membership site.
MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market that allows you to sell unlimited membership levels and subscriptions.
It is super easy to set up and can automatically add pricing, login, account, and thank you pages for your users. The plugin also lets you add drip content to your site and create a client portal to manage client resources online.
Other than that, MemberPress comes with powerful access control, allowing you to restrict access to any content, including posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags, files, and more.
MemberPress can also act as a WordPress subscription plugin because it supports both recurring and one-time payments and it can offer monthly, yearly, or even lifetime memberships to your users. This also makes it easy to sell courses online.
It is the best content protection plugin because it allows you to restrict content based on membership level or user role.
The plugin can integrate with AWeber, Mailchimp, Uncanny Automator, and Constant Contact. It also integrates with Amazon Web Services, Blubrry for podcast hosting, and BuddyPress for building an online community.
MemberPress comes with built-in support for PayPal and Stripe payment gateways. The developer plan also adds Authorize.net support.
Some of its other powerful features include a built-in membership management dashboard, customizable coupon codes, email notifications, user registration forms, custom widgets and shortcodes, Rest API for developers, and more.
Cons
MemberPress’s free plan has limited features, and you will need to upgrade to the pro version to unlock more options.
It only supports the three most popular payment gateways. This could be a deal breaker for site owners who live in countries not supported by these payment methods.
Why we recommend MemberPress: MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market. It allows unlimited membership levels, comes with a user-friendly interface, integrates with popular gateways, and also offers content restriction, making it a great all-in-one choice.
Thrive Apprentice is a popular all-in-one membership and online course builder plugin for WordPress. It comes with advanced features and easy access control settings.
It offers a built membership management dashboard where you can easily grant or revoke access to courses, content, or membership products for specific subscribers.
The tool comes with a drag-and-drop builder, customizable certificates, and 55+ course templates that make it super easy to create, sell, and manage online courses.
When we were testing the plugin, we also found out that Thrive Apprentice can track student progress, offer one-time or recurring subscriptions, create landing pages, and build coupons and discount offers for different membership or subscription courses.
Pros
It has a school setup wizard that will guide you through the process of setting up the plugin.
It has powerful content-dripping features that let you unlock content at consistent intervals for students. You can also create multiple drip schedules for the same content.
You can show personalized content for different users to boost engagement and sales. For example, you can display a different course overview or login form for visitors and members.
Thrive Apprentice offers multiple language support, SEO optimization, email notification, and dynamic buttons.
Cons
The plugin does not have a free plan.
Thrive Apprentice only offers built-in support for Stripe payments.
Why we recommend Thrive Apprentice: Overall, Thrive Apprentice is a powerful WordPress subscription plugin that comes with a drag-and-drop builder and premade templates. We recommend it if you want to build and sell courses online.
It allows you to restrict downloads based on membership levels, offer discounts for different memberships, and send email notifications to inform members about important updates or renewals.
Easy Digital Downloads is easy to use and gives you the ability to accept recurring payments. You can use the plugin to sell any type of digital product in WordPress, including eBooks, PDFs, audio files, videos, and more.
Pros
It comes with a built-in shopping cart system that allows your customers to purchase multiple downloads at once.
You can accept one-time payments or easily set up automatic recurring payments on any product, including daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, and annually.
With Easy Digital Downloads, you can accept credit card payments from Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other popular payment gateways like Braintree, with no additional monthly fees.
You can use the EDD Subscription addon to create membership plans with different access levels and the EDD Member Downloads extension to grant access to specific downloads based on membership level.
The plugin also offers built-in reports and analytics to track membership sales and activity.
Cons
While Easy Digital Downloads connects with some popular tools like AffiliateWP to create an affiliate program for your products, it lacks integrations with other popular services.
It has a free plan, but you will need to upgrade to the pro version to use it as a WordPress subscription or membership plugin.
Why we recommend Easy Digital Downloads: It is the best plugin for creating a membership site that sells digital products. It comes with a built-in shopping cart system, recurring payments, and a library of addons to grow your business.
MemberMouse is another powerful, flexible, and scalable WordPress membership plugin. It has many advanced features for protecting your content, selling products, creating courses, and maximizing revenue.
We were impressed by the plugin’s SmartTags, which allow you to display personalized content based on member attributes without using any code. This gives you complete control over how you protect and display content on your site.
Additionally, MemberMouse keeps track of important business metrics like lifetime customer value, retention and churn rates, member engagement, and more.
Pros
With MemberMouse, you can create upsells and cross-sells that your members can purchase in one click without re-entering their credit card information.
The tool lets you offer both free and paid memberships.
It can automatically handle overdue payments so you don’t have to worry about missing out on revenue.
The plugin lets you create and send push notifications to members or specific WordPress user roles based on actions like new members added, memberships canceled, payment received, and more.
It lets you create a dedicated space on your website that is only accessible to members and offer drip content.
Cons
MemberMouse offers limited design options.
It does not have a free plan.
It has limited integration options for payment gateways compared to other plugins on this list.
Why we recommend MemberMouse: It is a powerful WordPress membership plugin for businesses that are serious about growth. If you have a coaching business or a growing membership site, then MemberMouse is the perfect choice.
WishList Member is another flexible WordPress subscription plugin that comes with powerful features to protect members-only content.
It allows you to create unlimited membership levels and offer free, premium, or pay-per-post content on your WordPress blog.
WishList Member even allows you to schedule and release drip content over time, set up recurring subscriptions, and connect with popular email marketing services to build an email list.
Pros
It offers one-click content protection where you can click the ‘Protect’ button right in the WordPress editor to quickly set your content to members-only. It also has a Private Tags feature, which you can use to protect specific sections within the post.
WishList Member has a built-in course builder called CourseCure. It lets you easily build lessons, quizzes, and certificates.
It allows you to show ‘sneak peek’ snippets of your content to non-members and invite them to sign up to see what they’re missing.
You can accept payments from over 20 of the most popular payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net, and more.
Cons
The plugin has a lot of features that can feel overwhelming for beginners.
It has no free plan.
Why we recommend WishList Member: If you want to create members-only content with powerful restrictive features, then WishList Member is a great choice.
It offers drip scheduling, page locks, integrations with a lot of payment gateways, and many advanced features to take your membership site to the next level.
AccessAlly is an elegant and user-friendly membership plugin for creating and selling courses, group coaching, and memberships.
It allows you to create as many membership levels as you want and uses tag-based permission to control access. This makes it easy for members to upgrade or downgrade membership subscriptions on their own.
AccessAlly also comes with a user-friendly builder to create live or drip-fed online courses, detailed reporting and analytics, and a built-in affiliate program.
Pros
AccessAlly offers multiple content delivery options. You can choose from delayed, specific date and time, completion-based unlocking, cohort style, and all-access.
It comes with tons of conversion-focused features, including one-click upsells, order bumps, coupons, bulk course enrollment, abandoned cart follow-up, free trial offers, cross-selling members dashboard, and more.
You can boost engagement for your courses with gamification features like a flexible points system, badges, and leaderboards.
Seamlessly integrates with popular payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal to accept online payments.
Cons
It doesn’t offer many customization options to change the look of your membership site.
There’s no free plan.
Why we recommend AccessAlly: AccessAlly is a powerful plugin for building and scaling a coaching, teaching, or training membership website. It comes with all of the features you need to offer 1-1 or group coaching, including dripped content releases, live group cohorts, bulk course enrollment, and more.
LearnDash is a super flexible and extremely easy-to-use WordPress LMS plugin. It comes with advanced membership modules and tons of integrations to help you create members-only online courses.
LearnDash is quite easy to set up and adding content to it is even simpler. It also comes with advanced tools to easily organize your membership content into levels, groups, and more.
The tool also has a powerful drag-and-drop course builder, pre-designed templates, and completion certificates to help you build and sell courses online.
Pros
LearnDash allows you to easily hide any content and restrict it to different membership groups. It also lets you control when a student gets to access specific lessons.
It comes with a powerful drip content feature, allowing you to roll out content to users at regular intervals or upon completion of levels.
The plugin offers tools to create highly engaging membership sites with quizzes, user badges, course-specific forums, user profiles, and more.
It can track student progress, offer multiple pricing options, and optimize your courses for SEO.
LearnDash also has an amazing set of integrations and payment gateways. You can even connect it to MemberPress, WooCommerce, bbPress, Slack, and more.
Cons
If you are trying to build a membership website without selling courses, then some of LearnDash’s features may not be useful because it is not exclusively a WordPress membership plugin.
LearnDash has no free plan.
Why we recommend LearnDash: It is the perfect solution if you want to sell online courses on your paid membership website. Its extensive set of add-ons and integrations allows you to build a highly engaging platform. It’s also WordPress multisite compatible.
Teachable is an all-inclusive online course builder. It packs a membership website, LMS (learning management system), discussion forum, email marketing, and analytics all into one dashboard.
The tool offers a drag-and-drop builder, course templates, and certificates, and also lets you build quizzes and assessments for students. The students can then submit their work and receive feedback on the same platform.
During our testing, we were very impressed by the flexible drip content feature, which allows you to grant access to content based on a user’s progress or subscription level.
Pros
It is easy to set up and does not require any technical skills.
The software includes built-in tools to quickly create and upload videos, text, PDFs, and more.
It comes with detailed analytics and reports, offers fraud protection, and integrates with flexible payment types like Affirm and Klarna.
Teachable offers discussion forums, quizzes, contact forms, and other features to boost user engagement and build powerful online communities.
Cons
Teachable is not available as a WordPress plugin. Instead, you must integrate it into your WordPress site by adding links or a subdomain.
It includes everything, which makes it more expensive than other WordPress membership plugins.
Why we recommend Teachable: If you want to create a membership site that sells online courses and also has an LMS system, then you can opt for Teachable.
Restrict Content Pro is a robust WordPress membership plugin that helps you build a membership site and restrict content based on different criteria.
You can use the plugin to restrict content to registered users, membership levels, and access levels, as well as target individual pages, posts, custom post types, tags, or categories for restriction.
The plugin allows you to build unlimited membership stages, offer recurring subscriptions, add discount coupons, and create dedicated registration and login forms.
Pros
It lets you create drip content to be released over time.
Restrict Content Pro allows members to manage their subscription and access levels in the dashboard.
It lets you control content access based on individual progress and actions.
It offers reports and analytics, lets you build a referral program, and integrates with email marketing services.
Cons
Restrict Content Pro’s marketing features are not as strong as other tools on this list.
It has a free plan, but most of the features are locked in it. Plus, the free version also has the plugin branding, which can only be removed by upgrading to the pro plan.
Why we recommend Restrict Content Pro: The plugin is a great choice for building a membership website due to its amazing content restriction features, great access control, and seamless integration with WordPress.
SureMembers is another beginner-friendly plugin that can help you build a membership website.
It is easy to set up and can be used to create simple subscriptions or complex membership levels with access rules. You can use it to restrict any content on your website including pages, posts, categories, and tags.
SureMembers also allows drip scheduling and can integrate with email marketing services to help you build an email list.
Pros
It provides detailed analytics so you can track how your membership site is performing.
SureMembers lets you add a paywall, configure menu item visibility, and integrates with a lot of third-party tools like Beaver Builder, Twitter/X, Slack, and YouTube.
It offers amazing customer support and a knowledge base to you help build a website.
Cons
SureMembers does not offer a course builder or community forum features.
Its content dripping feature is not as complex as some of the other tools mentioned in the list.
This WordPress membership plugin does not have a free plan.
Why we recommend SureMembers: If you are just starting to build your membership site, then SureMembers is a great choice because it is super beginner-friendly.
aMember Pro is membership software that helps you create and manage subscription-based websites.
It supports recurring and one-time payments, lets you create multiple membership levels, and can integrate with over 200 third-party apps like affiliate programs, email marketing services, and payment processors.
Additionally, aMember Pro can protect your content, including blog posts, videos, and courses, by only making them available to subscribers.
Pros
It supports about 100 payment systems, including Stripe, PayPal, CoinBase, ccBill, and more.
It is not a WordPress plugin but provides seamless integration with the platform.
aMember Pro is open source and has a user-friendly interface.
It lets you create a members-only area, manage your email list, and provide advanced reporting.
Cons
aMember Pro does not have great customer support and provides limited documentation for the software.
Installing, configuring, and maintaining aMember Pro requires some technical knowledge.
Why we recommend aMember Pro: If you have a small business site and are planning to sell subscriptions, then aMember Pro can be a great choice.
WooCommerce Memberships is another WordPress subscription plugin that is specifically designed to integrate with your WooCommerce store.
It lets you convert your online store into a membership site and create exclusive content that is only accessible to paying members.
You can also show different content to various members based on their membership levels using this plugin. For details, you can see our tutorial on how to create a members-only WooCommerce store.
Pros
Upon integrating the plugin with WooCommerce, you can sell memberships as products.
You can offer free trials and manage user accounts from the dashboard.
WooCommerce Memberships allow you to create exclusive products that are visible and purchasable by members only.
The plugin allows you to give discounted pricing to members and create drip-specific products.
Cons
The plugin is not an ideal choice if you are not already using WooCommerce.
It does not offer a free plan.
It has integrations with a limited number of tools.
Why we recommend WooCommerce Memberships: If you already have a WooCommerce store and are planning to sell courses, subscriptions, or memberships, then this is the best plugin for you.
Paid Memberships Pro is a popular WordPress subscription plugin that lets you create a membership and subscription-based website easily.
It lets you restrict default content and sets a message for users who attempt to access it. It even restricts custom post types and single pages to paying members only.
Paid Memberships Pro allows you to create personalized content and add drip content. While testing the plugin, we were also impressed that it lets you create a dictionary and profile for all the members on your website.
Pros
The plugin lets you build multi-tiered membership levels, set up offline communities, and connect with your subscribers over emails.
It can integrate with payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Braintree. You can also set up one-time or recurring payments.
Paid Memberships Pro lets you create discount offers, view sales and revenue, build landing pages, and manage affiliate programs.
Cons
It has a free plan, but most features are locked in it.
The user interface and setup can be a bit overwhelming for beginners.
Unlike some other plugins on the list, it does not offer advanced reporting and analytics.
Why we recommend Paid Memberships Pro: Overall, the plugin has the basic features you need to build a membership or subscription-based site in just a few minutes.
Ultimate Member is a free WordPress plugin that lets you build online communities, sell subscriptions, and create membership programs.
It also lets you create visually appealing user profiles and enables you to add customer registration and login forms on the website front.
Plus, Ultimate Member has an account management feature where users can see their profile details, update account information, and change passwords directly.
Pros
You can use the plugin to create public or private directories with user listings based on specific criteria.
The plugin allows users to leave reviews and ratings for other members and track social activity on your website.
Ultimate Member can also integrate with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and Mailchimp.
Cons
Integrating the plugin with other tools can sometimes lead to conflicts.
It lacks an advanced reporting feature.
The plugin does not have any customization options.
Why we recommend Ultimate Member: If you are on a budget and looking for a free solution, then Ultimate Member can be a great WordPress membership plugin for you.
Although we don’t recommend S2Member, we’re including it in this list because it’s a popular WordPress membership plugin with over 1.59 million downloads.
It lets you create multiple membership levels with different access controls. You can also customize the registration and login forms, add drip content, and password-protect various pages on your website.
The plugin provides a dedicated dashboard for members to manage their accounts, and also sends email notifications to inform them about any updates.
Pros
S2Member comes with customizable email templates, file download restrictions, protected audio/video streams, and multisite network support.
The plugin integrates with popular payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, ClickBank, and Authorize.net.
Cons
It’s very difficult for beginners to set up S2Member, especially advanced features like content dripping.
The plugin interface is not user-friendly and front-end elements like login and registration pages look outdated.
It has a free plan but most of the features are locked.
Why we don’t recommend S2Member: S2Member is outdated and not intuitive when compared to other membership plugins. We recommend using another membership plugin from this list because you’ll get a better user experience and more modern membership features.
However, if you run a video membership site and don’t care about a user-friendly interface, then S2Member could be a good option. It lets you restrict audio and video content based on membership levels.
Which Is the Best WordPress Membership Plugin?
In our expert opinion, MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market. It has all the features that you need to create a membership site and sell online courses, along with great documentation and support to help you learn the membership software.
If you want a MemberPress alternative, then Thrive Apprentice is a great option. It’s a powerful and easy-to-use membership and online course builder plugin.
Alternatively, if you want to sell digital products on your membership website, then we recommend using Easy Digital Downloads. It comes with powerful features to create and sell digital downloads.
Similarly, if you want to sell subscriptions in your online WooCommerce store, then you can use WooCommerce Memberships.
Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Membership Plugins
Having helped over 2 million WordPress users start their websites, we’ve answered a ton of questions over the years. Below are some of the answers to the most frequently asked questions about membership plugins.
What is the best membership plugin?
Our top 5 choices for the best membership plugin are:
MemberPress – Best WordPress membership plugin (overall).
Thrive Apprentice – Best membership plugin for selling online courses.
MemberMouse – Best membership plugin for creating a coaching membership site.
WooCommerce Memberships – Best membership plugin to sell subscriptions on your WooCommerce store.
No, this question is not a joke. We seriously get this question even after referring people to this guide.
What is the best free membership plugin for WordPress?
While there are free membership plugins available, such as Paid Memberships Pro and WP-Members, they often come with limited features and additional transaction fees.
But, with a premium WordPress membership plugin like MemberPress, you get all of the features you need to build a successful membership site. Plus, there are no hidden fees.
MemberPress also offers a 14-day free trial period so that you can test it out first.
Are you looking for a points and rewards plugin for your WooCommerce store?
Since there are hundreds of reward system plugins available on the market, choosing the right one for your needs can be intimidating.
To help you easily choose the right one for your site, we tested some of the most popular plugins on the market. While testing, we examined different factors like ease of use, features, and pricing.
In this article, we will show you some of the best WooCommerce points and rewards plugins.
In a hurry? No worries! Here are our top picks so you can quickly choose the best WooCommerce points and rewards plugin for your site.
A WooCommerce points and rewards plugin allows you to offer incentives to customers with points for their purchases and actions. These points can then be redeemed for different rewards like free products, discounts, free shipping, and other benefits.
Picking the right plugin for your WooCommerce store can be tricky because there are hundreds of options. To help you out, we tested and reviewed some of the best WooCommerce rewards plugins on the following criteria:
Hands-on testing – Over the last 16+ years, we’ve tested thousands of WooCommerce plugins. We went through multiple WooCommerce points and rewards plugins and shortlisted the 7 best options.
Easy of Use – When testing the plugins, we considered how easy they were to use and configure. We looked for options that were beginner-friendly, offered a simple setup process, and didn’t require coding.
Features and Other Benefits – In addition to offering a reward system for your WooCommerce store, we also looked for other features and benefits.
Why Trust WPBeginner?
At WPBeginner, we have over 16 years of experience in WordPress, design, and online marketing. Our team of WordPress experts extensively reviews each plugin that is featured in this article and thoroughly tests them on real websites. To learn more, see our complete editorial process.
That said, let’s look at some of the best WooCommerce rewards and points plugins.
In our testing, the plugin was very easy to set up. The best part is that you can use the default settings out of the box and start a loyalty program within a few minutes.
Advanced Coupons also makes it super simple for customers to keep track of the points they’ve earned. You can add customizable notices to inform customers about their points, how the reward system works, and how they can easily redeem the points at any time.
Another interesting feature we found during our testing was the different ways you can allow customers to earn points. With a click of a button, you can reward customers for purchasing products, leaving a review, commenting on a blog post, and more.
Besides that, Advanced Coupons offers other features like free gift coupons, BOGO deals, shipping discounts, and more. It also lets you set up conditional logic where a coupon can automatically applied based on products in the cart, subtitle, or recently added products.
Pros:
Create a loyalty program within minutes
Select how customers can earn points
Show personalized notices for points earned
Allow customers to easily redeem points
View reports of points earned and redeemed
Cons:
The loyalty program feature isn’t available in the free version
Why We Recommend Advanced Coupons: After testing different points and rewards WooCommerce plugins, Advanced Coupons is the best option for all types of online stores. It is beginner-friendly and offers lots of features compared to other plugins on the list.
Pricing: You’ll need the Advanced Coupons ‘Plugin Bundles’ plan to access the Loyalty Program option, which will cost $119 per year.
FunnelKit Cart (formerly called WooFunnels) is a user-friendly WooCommerce sales funnel builder. It lets you create high-converting lead pages, upsells, and checkout pages, as well as offer rewards to customers to boost sales.
With FunnelKit, you can gamify the shopping experience for customers. When a user adds items to the cart, they can unlock a special gift when the price reaches a certain threshold. Basically, it lets you add milestone-based rewards and incentives to your WooCommerce cart.
For example, if a customer adds items worth $25, they can enjoy free shipping. If they spend $50 or more, they get an additional 10% discount.
When testing the plugin, we found that it offers 3 types of rewards. These include free shipping, a discount coupon, or a gift.
Besides that, FunnelKit offers other features to boost sales on your online store. For example, you get a template library, pre-built automation options, A/B testing, conversion pixel tracking, integrations, and more.
Pros:
Add rewards to your cart
Easily optimize your sales funnel for conversions
Beginner-friendly to use and set up
Seamless integration with other plugins and themes
A/B test your sales funnels
Cons:
Upsell or cross-sell features are not available in the free version
Limited templates in the free version
Why We Recommend FunnelKit Cart: If you’re looking for a WooCommerce plugin that lets you optimize your sales funnel and add a reward system to cart pages, then we highly recommend FunnelKit Cart.
Pricing: FunnelKit Cart prices start from $99.50 per year. There is also a free version you can use to get started.
Our first impression was that the plugin would be complicated to use. However, that’s not the case. It is very easy to use and offers different settings to customize the points system.
For instance, you can automatically assign points for each purchase or manually award points to different customers. There are 4 types of points to choose from, which include assigning a fixed amount of points, setting a percentage amount, setting a fixed amount based on product price, or not assigning any points.
Besides that, YITH WooCommerce Points and Rewards offers a bunch of extra points options. You can reward customers when they register, first login, referral link signup, customer’s birthday, and more. The plugin also shows custom banners to encourage users to spend more and collect more points.
Pros:
Automatically award points to customers
Show custom banners to encourage more points
Send email notifications to customers regarding their rewards
Allow customers to view and redeem earned points
Easily track users and the points they’ve earned
Award extra points based on user actions
Cons:
There is no free version
Why We Recommend YITH WooCommerce Points and Rewards: It is perfect for anyone who wants to add a reward program to their WooCommerce store. The plugin is very easy to use and offers lots of options to customize the points system.
Pricing: YITH WooCommerce Points and Rewards is a premium plugin that will cost you $139.99 per year.
Points and Rewards for WooCommerce is a free plugin that offers almost all the features you’d find in a premium plugin to create a loyalty program for your eCommerce store.
For instance, you can award points to customers based on different actions like signing up, clicking a referral link, spending above a specific amount, purchasing a particular product, and more.
One feature that stood out for us was that store owners could assign points on previous orders that were fulfilled before installing this plugin. It’s a great way to increase customer loyalty and boost sales.
Other than that, the plugin also offers different user levels and badges to customers. It even offers a spin-to-win wheels option where users can win more points.
Pros:
Simple and easy-to-use plugin
Seamless integration with WooCommerce
Assign points on previous orders
Allow customers to redeem points in the cart or at checkout
Membership system for exclusive offers
Cons:
Doesn’t offer personalized banners
Points expiration and product purchase are not available in the free version
Why We Recommend Points and Rewards for WooCommerce: If you want a free plugin for setting up points and rewards in WooCommerce, then this is the best option. It offers great features that you’d find in different premium plugins.
Pricing: The Points and Rewards for WooCommerce plugin is free to use.
WPLoyalty is a powerful WooCommerce rewards and points plugin that allows you to create customized loyalty programs. It offers lots of features and lets you reward customers for multiple actions.
We particularly like the feature of customized campaigns and rewards. The plugin comes with pre-built campaigns that you can use for your WooCommerce store. For example, you can create a campaign for points for purchase, rewards based on spending, writing a review, birthdays, and more.
Besides that, it is very easy to customize each campaign and set the point system. WPLoyalty lets you add different levels to the loyalty program, set an expiration date, send email notifications, and integrate with multi-currency plugins.
The best part is that you can choose from different reward types. These include percentage discounts, free shipping, free products, and more.
Pros:
Create customizable loyalty programs
Choose from pre-built campaigns
Beginner-friendly to use
Set expiration date for campaigns
Reward customers based on multiple actions
Manage customers and points with easy to understand dashboard
Cons:
The free version has limited features
Why We Recommend WPLoyalty: It is a perfect plugin for new WooCommerce websites that want a premium points and rewards plugin. The plugin is packed with features and offers affordable pricing plans along with a free version.
Pricing: WPLoyalty prices start from $9 per month. There is also a free version you can use to get started.
WooCommerce Points and Rewards is a WooCommerce extension that lets you award points for purchases and other actions performed by a user. It is a basic and clean plugin that makes it very easy to set up a loyalty program.
When testing the plugin, we found that you can only redeem the points for discounts. Unlike other WooCommerce points and rewards plugins, there isn’t an option to offer other incentives to customers.
That said, you can define the value of points for each purchase and action. It also lets you control the maximum discount that can be applied to the cart or any product. Plus, the plugin shows a log of all the points earned by customers and lets you manage them from the WordPress dashboard.
Pros:
Clean and beginner-friendly plugin
Offer points that can redeemed for discounts
Easily manage customer points from your dashboard
Award points for different user actions
Control values of points and discounts
Cons:
Lacks features offered by other premium plugins
Expensive pricing plan
Why We Recommend WooCommerce Points and Rewards: The plugin is great for WooCommerce store owners who want to offer points to customers that can only be redeemed as discounts.
Pricing: WooCommerce Points and Rewards will cost you $159 (billed annually).
Gratisfaction is another free WooCommerce loyalty plugin. The plugin lets you award points to users based on actions and allow them to redeem the points for discounts.
The best part about using Gratisfaction is that it offers a wide range of customer actions for awarding points. For example, you can offer points for subscribing to an email list, sharing on social media, watching a video, and more.
Besides that, you get pre-built templates to create multiple types of programs, including loyalty programs, instant win campaigns, contests, giveaways, and purchase-to-win campaigns.
Pros:
Pre-built campaign templates
Reward points based on different actions
Create multiple campaigns
Lightweight and simple plugin
Cons:
Lacks customization options
Offers only discounts as rewards
Why We Recommend Gratisfaction: We recommend this plugin to anyone looking for a free WooCommerce loyalty plugin and who wants to create other types of campaigns to boost sales.
Pricing: Gratisfaction is a free WordPress plugin.
Which Is the Best WooCommerce Points and Rewards Plugin?
It gives you full control over the points you might want to award for different user actions. For instance, users can earn points for purchasing products, leaving comments, reviewing a product, and more.
Plus, you can offer different incentives like free shipping, free products, discounts, BOGO deals, and other rewards to customers for redeeming their points.
With all these features, affordable pricing plans, a free plugin version, and a beginner-friendly interface, Advanced Coupons is the best solution for creating a loyalty program in WooCommerce.
FAQs about WooCommerce Points and Rewards Plugins
Here are some commonly asked questions about points and rewards plugins for WooCommerce.
1. How do I add reward points in WooCommerce?
There are lots of WooCommerce plugins you can use to create a loyalty program and award points to customers. These can be for performing different actions or purchasing products. We recommend using the Advanced Coupons plugin because it offers a lot of features and is very easy to use.
2. How do I increase sales in WooCommerce?
There are different ways to boost sales in WooCommerce, such as providing discounts, running flash sales or giveaways, and offering points to customers that they can redeem for free prizes.
3. Is Shopify better than WooCommerce?
Shopify is considered to be more user-friendly, but WooCommerce offers more flexibility and features. For more details, please see our comparison of WooCommerce vs Shopify.
Best Guides for Your WooCommerce Store
Here are some additional resources you can go through to take your WooCommerce store to the next level:
Do you want to display the most popular tags used on your WordPress site?
Tags and categories are the two default ways that you can use to sort your content in WordPress. However, categories often attract more attention due to their broader scope, leaving tags with less exposure.
In this article, we will show you how to easily display your most popular tags in WordPress.
Why and When Should You Display Most Popular Tags in WordPress?
Categories and tags are the two default taxonomies used to sort your articles in WordPress. Categories are used for broader topics or sections on your website, while tags are well-suited to specific ideas within the context of your articles.
For example, you might use the ‘travel’ category for all your travel-related blog posts, with tags like ‘Europe’, ‘Asia’, and ‘South America’.
Once you start using categories and tags correctly, you’ll likely have more tags on your website than categories. Due to their broader scope, you can put categories in navigation menus, but your tags may remain less explored by your visitors.
One way to display tags on your website is by adding the default Tag Cloud block by visiting the Appearance » Widgets page.
However, you will notice that this block will show all your tags alphabetically. You cannot rearrange their order or limit the number of tags that are displayed.
You can solve this by displaying the most popular or most often used tags on your WordPress blog. This will allow your users to quickly get an idea of the frequently discussed topics on your site. It will also help them discover more content, which means more page views and user engagement.
Additionally, this can improve your website SEO because tags can give search engines a better understanding of the topics your website covers, helping your content rank higher.
Having said that, let’s take a look at how to easily display your most popular tags in WordPress. We will cover different methods, and you can use the quick links below to jump to the one you want to use:
Method 1: Display Most Popular Tags in WordPress Using a Plugin
If you want to use a plugin to display the most popular tags on your website, then this method is for you.
First, you need to install and activate the TaxoPress plugin. For detailed instructions, you may want to see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, visit the TaxoPress » Terms Display page from the WordPress dashboard. Here, you need to click on the ‘Edit’ link under the ‘Terms Display’ option.
This will open a new page on the screen, where you can start by choosing a title for displaying tags. After that, make sure that the ‘Tags’ option is selected in the ‘Taxonomy’ dropdown menu.
Then, you can pick if you only want to display tags that are used on your pages, posts, or media separately. Alternatively, you can display popular tags for all the post types.
We recommend using the ‘Posts’ option. This will automatically eliminate any tags that you have used for your pages or images.
Next, switch to the ‘General’ tab from the left column and choose the ‘Counter’ option from the ‘Method for choosing terms from the database’ dropdown menu.
Next, simply select the ‘Descending’ option from the ‘Ordering for choosing term from the database’ menu.
Once you do that, you must pick the ‘Counter’ option again from the ‘Method for choosing terms for display’ dropdown menu and the ‘Descending’ option from the ‘Ordering for choosing terms for display’ dropdown menu.
Now, only the most popular tags on your WordPress site will be displayed.
Once you do that, switch to the ‘Options’ tab from the sidebar.
Here, you can add any text that you want to display before or after your list of popular tags.
After that, switch to the ‘Design’ tab and choose the maximum number of popular tags to display on your website.
You can also choose a font size and colors for your tags. Then, go ahead and click the ‘Save Terms Display’ button on the right.
Add Popular Tags to the WordPress Sidebar
Now, head to the Appearance » Widgets page from the WordPress admin sidebar and click the ‘Add Block’ (+) button.
Note: If you are using a block theme, then this method won’t work because the TaxoPress plugin doesn’t offer the ‘Terms Display’ block in the full site editor. In this case, you can use our second method.
This will open the block menu, where you can add the Terms Display block to your website sidebar.
Once you do that, just select the term display that you created for your tags from the dropdown menu within the block itself.
Finally, click the ‘Update’ button at the top to store your settings.
Now, you can visit your WordPress site to view the list of popular tags in action.
Method 2: Display Most Popular WordPress Tags Using Code (Recommended)
If you are using a block theme or prefer to use code, then this method is for you.
You can display the most popular tags in WordPress by adding custom code to your theme’s functions.php file. However, the smallest error when typing the code can make your website inaccessible.
That is why we recommend using WPCode. It is the best WordPress code snippets plugin on the market that makes it safe and easy to add code to your website.
First, you need to install and activate the WPCode plugin. For more information, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Note: WPCode has a free plan that you can use for this tutorial. However, upgrading to the paid plan will unlock more features like conditional logic, CSS snippets, a code snippets cloud library, and more.
Upon activation, head to the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard.
Here, click the ‘Use Snippet’ button under the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.
This will direct you to the ‘Create Custom Snippet’ page, where you can start by adding a name for the snippet.
Next, choose the ‘PHP Snippet’ option as the Code Type from the dropdown menu on the right.
After that, copy and paste the following custom code into the ‘Code Preview’ box:
function wpb_tag_cloud() {
$tags = get_tags();
$args = array(
'smallest' => 10,
'largest' => 22,
'unit' => 'px',
'number' => 10,
'format' => 'flat',
'separator' => " ",
'orderby' => 'count',
'order' => 'DESC',
'show_count' => 1,
'echo' => false
);
$tag_string = wp_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args );
return $tag_string;
}
// Add a shortcode so that we can use it in widgets, posts, and pages
add_shortcode('wpb_popular_tags', 'wpb_tag_cloud');
// Enable shortcode execution in text widget
add_filter ('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');
This code simply generates the top 10 tags from your website in a cloud with the number of posts in each tag. After that, it creates a shortcodewpb_popular_tags and enables a shortcode in the text widget.
Now, you have to scroll down to the ‘Insertion’ section and choose the ‘Auto Insert’ mode. The code will be automatically executed once you add the built-in shortcode to your website.
Once you do that, scroll back to the top and toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch to ‘Active’.
Finally, click the ‘Save Snippet’ button to store your settings.
Add Most Popular Tags in the WordPress Full Site Editor
If you are using a block theme, then head to the Appearance » Editor page from the WordPress dashboard.
This will open the full site editor, where you have to click the ‘+’ button to open the block menu. From here, add the Shortcode block to the page.
Next, you must add the following shortcode to the block itself:
[wpb_popular_tags]
Finally, click the ‘Save’ button at the top to store your settings.
Now, just visit your website to see the popular tags in action.
Add Most Popular Tags in the WordPress Widget Area
If you are using a classic theme on your website, then you can add popular tags by visiting the Appearance » Widgets page from the WordPress dashboard.
Here, click the ‘Add Block’ (+) button to open the block menu and add the Shortcode block to your preferred widget area.
Next, add the following shortcode into the block:
[wpb_popular_tags]
Then, click the ‘Update’ button to store your settings.
Now, go ahead and visit your WordPress site to see the popular tags.
Bonus: Style the Tags on Your WordPress Website
Now that you have added the most popular tags to your WordPress website, it is also important to customize them for the theme that you are using. This will make your tags visually appealing and help grab the user’s attention immediately.
Plus, by using different sizes, fonts, and colors for your tags, you make it easier for visitors to scan and find the tags they are interested in. This can help increase engagement and click-through rates.
For example, if a user is only interested in reading about your articles related to travel, then they can click on that tag to open a list of travel-related articles.
You can style your tags by adding custom CSS to change the spacing between them, add background colors, change the alignment, and much more.
Learn how to use AI for personalized content creation, SEO and customer support. Tom shares how you can get help from AI and LLM in WordPress by using plugins.
Just like apps enhance your phone, some of the best WordPress plugins can transform a basic WordPress site into something special. From powerful SEO tools to simple contact form plugins, it’s impressive how a quick ten-second installation can make such a big difference. 
Learn how to use AI for personalized content creation, SEO and customer support. Tom shares how you can get help from AI and LLM in WordPress by using plugins.