If you’re setting up a WordPress website, you may need help with its aesthetics. WordPress website design companies can help ensure that your site will look great on all devices and provide a strong user experience (UX). However, there are a lot of options, and you might not be sure which WordPress design agency to […]
The post 14 Best WordPress Website Design Companies (And How to Choose the Right One) appeared first on Hostinger Tutorials.
Whether or not you’re in the website business, chances are high that you’ve heard of WordPress at some point. The reason is simple: it’s the most used platform to build websites. With 43% of the market share, it seems like every other website you come across is built with WordPress. In this post, we’ll explain what WordPress is, its features, the types of sites you can create with it, and its benefits. Let’s dive in.
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that is built using PHP and MySQL. It is open-source, which means everyone can use it. It’s also constantly improving, which makes this a reliable option for building your website.
WordPress mainly focuses on the backend of your website. It creates the foundation for you to build the front end of your website. These are the two important things needed to have a functional WordPress backend on your website:
WordPress core consists of the files and code needed for the WordPress installation. Without WordPress core, your website won’t work. These need to be installed before anything else.
There needs to be a database supporting your website as well. Luckily, most good hosting providers come with one-click WordPress installs. During this install, they automatically generate a database for your website. If you were to install WordPress on your website manually, you’d need to create the MySQL database as well.
WordPress is owned and operated by Automattic. It was created in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress grew mainly because of its open-source nature. Because of the community of developers contributing to WordPress, it grew into the most-used platform for creating websites nowadays.
As mentioned before, WordPress is open-source. This means anyone can use it and modify it to their convenience. This makes WordPress a go-to for building a wide variety of websites. Generally, WordPress is used mostly by:
We’ll get into the advantages of WordPress further down the post, but let’s highlight some key functionality of WordPress. Once WordPress is installed on your website, you’ll get access to the WordPress dashboard. This is what that looks like:
You’ll navigate different parts of your website using the sidebar on the left.
WordPress is very intuitive. It provides you with a streamlined structure you can use for your website. There are some recurring post types that you might need for your website. Pages is one of those. Think of it this way: whatever type of website you create, chances are high that you might need more than 1 page. Some websites have hundreds of pages on them.
The need for multiple pages creates an organized way to create and organize them. That’s why there’s a custom post type assigned for pages. You can add a new page and manage the existing pages in this area. You can perform bulk actions, set parent pages, and more.
The same counts for posts (particularly helpful if you run a blog or blog area on your website), and projects.
Grouping these under a particular custom post type also helps you style them. You can create templates and assign them to a specific post type. Many premium themes, like Divi, provide you with a Theme Builder that allows you to do just that. You get to style every aspect of your website and basically create your own “theme,” in many cases, without needing a single line of code thanks to full site editing.
WordPress themes allow you to give your website a unique look. There are thousands of free themes that you can install directly through the WordPress dashboard, or you can install a premium theme, such as Divi. There are themes for nearly any type of website, including business, blogging, real estate, directories, and ecommerce websites.
WordPress plugins allow you to add extra functionality to your website. Thousands of plugins are available in the WordPress repository or by third-party developers. Each one has a specific focus and depends on what type of site you need, but there are some essential plugins that any WordPress website owner can benefit from. These include plugins for SEO, backing up your website, caching, analytics, and adding social media.
You can also create dynamic menus for your website, which is useful for learning management systems and membership sites where you want to restrict content at the user level. These can include menu items for logging in and out, ecommerce menu links, and more.
WordPress comes with a media gallery where you can add images, audio and video files, pdfs, and more to use within your website. You can also edit media files and add metadata for titles, captions, alt tags, and more through the media gallery. If you want added functionality for your files, you can install one of these media gallery plugins.
When talking about WordPress, we usually refer to WordPress.org (unless specified otherwise). While these two come from the same source, they have some notable differences. We have a separate post that goes into detail on what the differences and similarities are.
But in short, WordPress.com is entirely separate from WordPress.org. It is a hosting plan provided by the creators of WordPress.org, Automattic, and is a suitable solution for bloggers starting small. WordPress.com is much more limited than WordPress.org, with many more rules for ad placement, themes, plugins, and more.
WordPress.org, however, refers to the WordPress open-source software you can install on any website you build, no matter what hosting provider you choose. You also own your website and its data, and you can easily transfer it to another host if you want to. It’s the most-used content management system (CMS) in the world and is highly customizable.
Whether you’re a beginner or not, you can build a wide range of websites using WordPress. Let’s go through some of the most popular options WordPress is used for.
Those embarking on a new business venture or needing a good platform to build on will love WordPress. As mentioned previously, it’s open source, so there are a ton of plugins and themes, like Divi, to help you stand out from the crowd. In addition to that, it’s SEO-friendly, has great support, and is mobile-friendly. Because of this, Google loves it. Using an SEO plugin like Rank Math, you can easily add keywords, metadata, and schema to help your business rank higher in the search engine ranking pages (SERPs).
WordPress is the way to go to sell products on your website. Thanks to plugins like WooCommerce, you can easily add physical or virtual products. Plugins, such as Dokan, will allow you to create a complete marketplace that enables users to create their own stores within your site. There are also ecommerce or WooCommerce-specific themes, like OceanWP that come with WooCommerce and a payment gateway pre-installed so you can get your site up in a few minutes.
When WordPress was introduced in the early 2000s, it was primarily a blogging platform. Therefore, it’s an excellent platform for communicating your message. You can write and publish posts within minutes and easily share them on your social media platforms for greater exposure. Although there are other blogging platforms, such as Blogger and Medium, no other platform is as customizable.
Using WordPress to showcase your work is a great choice if you’re a photographer, graphic designer, or web developer. Out of the box, WP allows you to embed videos, image galleries, and other media, so creating a portfolio website is a breeze. You can use a generic WordPress theme to feature your work or a portfolio theme, such as Bridge, to give the world a glimpse into your creative body of work.
In addition to more broad-spectrum websites, WordPress can create the most elaborate learning management systems. With LMS plugins such as LifterLMS or Learndash, you can create courses, quizzes, and lessons, add a paywall, and sell access to your content.
Alternatively, you can create an LMS using Divi, using one of our layout packs, and the Restrict Content Pro plugin.
WordPress is a great choice if you’re looking to build a membership website. Through a membership plugin such as MemberPress, you can create membership levels, assign content to those levels, and make money.
Forums are excellent for building an online community of like-minded individuals. Using WordPress and a forum plugin like CM Answers, you can easily bring your forum to life in a few steps. CM Answer’s PayPal and Stripe integration allows you to monetize your forum, providing a good way to earn extra income.
There are many reasons why WordPress is the most popular tool to build a website. Let’s go through some of the most important ones.
First of all, WordPress is free. It’s open-source, so you won’t have to pay a dime for it. To create a website that matches all your criteria, however, you’ll likely need to buy premium products that go with your WordPress website.
So, yes, WordPress is free, but depending on your customization needs, there are hidden costs like themes and plugins. And let’s not forget hosting. Any website you want to share with the World Wide Web must be hosted somewhere. Some free hosting options exist, but you’ll most likely want something more fitting. If you’re looking for a suitable host, make sure to check out our top recommendations when it comes to WordPress hosting.
As previously mentioned, WordPress comes with nearly unlimited customization options. WordPress is the most customizable CMS on the market, using themes, plugins, custom CSS, and HTML. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned web developer, you can use WP to build the website of your dreams.
Another benefit of WP is its ease of use. For new users, there is a learning curve. That said, it doesn’t take long to learn WordPress. Once you get the hang of creating posts and pages, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to build a website.
While the platform does have a slight learning curve, there are countless tutorials and blogs out there (like ours) to help you along the way. This is especially true for our own theme, Divi, which has an extensive documentation library with more than 90 easy-to-follow tutorials that will help you become a WordPress guru in no time.
One of the reasons WP is so popular is because of its SEO-friendly nature. Out of the box, it comes with features that make Google happy. For example, WP alerts Google whenever you upload new content to your website. Because of this, WP websites are more likely to get a bump in the SERPs faster than a static HTML site would. Combining WP’s built-in features with a quality SEO plugin like AIOSEO allows you to add keywords, metadata, and rich snippets. You can also add a good SEO tool to track your keywords, analyze rankings, and look for opportunities to improve your search engine rankings.
WP is pretty speedy out of the box. That said, it will need some help if you use video, images, or other media content. Thankfully, there are excellent speed optimization plugins, such as WP Rocket, that will make your website a speed demon. Another way to ensure your site’s performance is by choosing a fast WordPress host.
Choosing the right hosting is one of the most important decisions you’ll make for your website. With the right hosting, your website will be fast, secure, and stable. Without one, you risk losing visitors due to slow loading times. Not only that, you expose yourself to malware, bots, hackers, and downtime.
WordPress hosting is a type of hosting that is optimized for WordPress. Generally, WP hosts use specific technology geared towards WP websites, which includes the necessary security, speed, and performance requirements. Most quality hosts include one-click WP installs, backups, free site migration, caching, and security features such as a web application firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, and malware detection.
Several types of hosting are available for WordPress, including shared, managed, cloud, and VPS. Small informational sites may be able to get away with shared hosting, but for those looking to build their business over time, it’s a good idea to choose a host that can grow with you, like SiteGround or Cloudways.
There are dozens of hosts available for WP, but we highly recommend a few.
SiteGround is our go-to for hosting. It’s optimized for WordPress, is based on Google Cloud, and has speed enhancements like caching, a free CDN, and custom PHP to improve page loading speed. You can’t go wrong with an affordable starting price of $14.99 monthly and features such as free migration, SSL, and business email. They also offer advanced security features, including daily backups, malware and DDoS protection, and a web application firewall.
Pricing: Starting at $14.99 per month.
Founded by the same people who created WordPress, Pressable is the ultimate solution for managed hosting. They offer a 100% uptime guarantee, so you’ll never have to worry about your site going offline. Additional features include a proprietary CDN to enhance site speed and an automatic server failover that switches your site to a new server at the first sign of trouble. There’s also 24/7 support, daily performance monitoring, free backups, staging and SSL, and hack recovery assistance should you need it.
Pricing: Starting at $25 per month.
The last host on this list is well-suited for site owners who plan to grow their business over time. Based on a modular pricing structure, Cloudways allows you to choose your server’s location, the amount of ram and bandwidth you need, as well as storage. The interface does take some getting used to, but we have extensive tutorials to help you along the way. Even though it’s considered managed hosting, more advanced users will appreciate being able to configure their server settings themselves.
Pricing: Starting at $12 per month.
By now, it is probably clear that WordPress is a community effort. Many users use WordPress daily, and countless WordPress creators try to help those users build the website they need. Let’s look at some of the best WordPress themes and plugins you should check out if you’re new to WordPress.
Just like there are different types of websites, different themes fulfill the needs. Generally, you get the option between two types of themes:
Especially the latter option is popular nowadays and usually goes hand in hand with a visual builder like Divi.
Depending on what type of theme you’re looking for, you can browse through our different posts with recommendations. Some of the most popular theme types are mentioned here:
Every WordPress website has at least one plugin installed on it! But preferably, you’ll at least go for security and SEO plugins. There are other optional WordPress plugins, such as a YouTube plugin.
You can view all the top recommended plugin posts here. Make sure you pick out the plugins you need. In this case, more isn’t better. You want to prioritize the speed of your website, so carefully curating the plugins you decide to use on your website is a must!
We hope this post has helped you understand what WordPress is. One thing is for sure: WordPress is here to stay, and with its easy learning curve, understanding at least the basics is a must. You can build any website you imagine with WordPress, and it’s open source! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment in the comment section below!
Featured Image via Kris_Anfalova / Shutterstock.com
The post What is WordPress? Start Here (2023 Beginners Guide) appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
Explore our in-depth WP Engine review to uncover the advantages of choosing this top-tier managed WordPress hosting solution. From unparalleled speed and robust security to 24/7 expert support, WP Engine stands out as a premier choice for WordPress websites. Dive into real-time performance data, exclusive features, and see why WP Engine is a game-changer in the hosting world.
The post “WP Engine Managed WordPress Hosting Review” first appeared on WP Mayor.
Streamline your vendor sign-ups for local events using Notion WP Sync and Advanced Custom Fields. This comprehensive guide provides a step-by-step tutorial on setting up these tools on your WordPress site, creating a custom vendor sign-up form, and managing your vendor data directly from Notion. Transform your event management process with this powerful integration.”
The post “Mastering Event Management: Synchronizing Notion and WordPress for Enhanced Community Engagement” first appeared on WP Mayor.
Adding live chat functionality to your WordPress website is easy and quite beneficial. Live chat has evolved considerably in recent years by incorporating powerful communication and automation features similar to popular AI chatbots. Whether you’re looking to boost sales conversions or integrate AI into your customer service process, using a live chat plugin or software on your WordPress site can be crucial to success. In this guide, we’ll show you the benefits of live chat, walk through how to add live chat to your website and look at the options available with live chat and WordPress.
Many rewards come with using live chat functionality on your website. Here are a few examples of what they can allow you to do:
Interact With Your Customers in Real-time – As the name implies, live chat takes place in real-time. Therefore, you can meet the needs of customers and visitors to your website as they come to your site. Your storefront may have set hours, and your phone line limited hours, but you can serve your customers at any time when they interact with your live chat.
Provide High-Quality 24/7 Support to Visitors to Your Website – If someone lands on your website after hours, your live chat can still service them. You can give your customers the help they need without getting out of bed through AI and automated responses.
Increase Conversions and Add Leads to Your Sales Funnel – Many live chat plugins allow you to add forms and collect information about customers who use the chat. To nurture later, you can retarget and add these customers’ information to your CRM, mailing list, or sales funnel.
Powerful AI Features for Various Automated Solutions – With the advancement of AI, some live chat solutions provide much deeper functionality and can help you create automated human-like conversations for a better customer experience.
I’m sure you get to experience other benefits of live chat first-hand once you add it to your site. On that note, let’s get to it!
Now that we’ve seen some of the benefits of live chat let’s look at how we can bring this feature to your WordPress website.
If you’re unsure which platform to use, check out our list of the best live chat plugins. There, you’ll find several plugins that could meet your specific needs. We’ll use the Tidio platform for this walkthrough, as it has a good mixture of features, support, and positive reviews.
We must create an account before we add our Tidio live chat to our website. Visit Tidio and create your account by entering your email, website, and password.
Once you have created and verified your account, you’ll see the Tidio dashboard.
Now, we’ll move to our WordPress site to install and connect our Tidio account to our website.
To install the Tidio plugin, hover over the Plugins menu item. Then, click Add New. Search Tidio in the plugin search field. Click Install Now next to the Tidio card.
Afterward, click Activate to complete the installation of the plugin.
Now that our plugin is installed, we can connect our website to our Tidio account.
Notice we have a new menu item just for accessing our Tidio settings.
From your WordPress menu, click Tidio. Then, click on the Login link under the signup form.
Enter your Tidio account credentials and click Login.
Once logged into your account, you can start your chat widget’s customization process.
To begin, you’ll need to create a new project in Tidio. Click on the Create One text link and give your new project a name.
After creating and naming your new project, you’ll have the opportunity to customize your chat widget.
You can assign a name to your chat agent and choose a solid or gradient color scheme. Additionally, you can set your chat language and upload a custom avatar to your chat widget.
Now, click on the blue Continue button. You’ll now be faced with a short questionnaire. This will help Tidio know how to personalize your experience as you maneuver through the platform.
Select the focus, add the number of agents, select your industry, and finally, the number of inquiries your site gets. Next, you’ll want to set up your welcome message. You can customize your message to say something that is on brand with your website by clicking the Customize this message text link.
After setting your welcome message, click on the blue Install Widget button.
You’ll be redirected to your WordPress website once you click the Install Widget button.
As with WordPress, testing the new feature you’ve added to your website is a good practice. To do this, navigate to your homepage and see if the Tidio chat widget appears on your homepage.
Try sending yourself a message to see what that process looks like for your guests.
Now that we know our chat is installed and working on our WordPress website let’s look at some advanced settings and features we can implement with Tidio.
With your new live chat installed, responding to visitors on your site is very simple. As you log in to your Tidio dashboard, you’ll see the mailbox icon in the top right. This is where you can see visitors on your site in real-time and respond to their messages. You can also see your chats on social networks should you connect them to your Tidio account.
Tidio comes packed with templates that you can use to increase sales, generate leads, and solve your customers’ problems via live chat. To access these templates, click on the robot icon from the left-hand menu. Here, you can customize your automated responses for a smoother WordPress live chat experience for your customers.
You can access more complex features and settings of Tidio by clicking the gear icon at the bottom of the left-hand menu. Your frequently asked questions can be answered with custom canned responses. Under the General heading, click on the Canned Responses menu link. This is where you can edit and add new preset answers to your customers frequently asked questions. Here, you can refine your live chat process by having a library of premade responses that can solve your users’ questions on the fly.
Notifications can also be customized when using Tidio. You can choose how you’d like to be notified when a visitor lands on your website (email or web notification), and you can also determine what actions trigger notifications and the web notification sound.
AI chatbots can help make customer service a breeze, and Tidio is on the front lines of adding AI to the WordPress live chat sphere. With a Tidio+ plan, you can implement their AI chatbot Lyro, which can help you create innovative chat experiences for visitors to your website.
Further customization options for your widget are also available within Tidio’s advanced settings. Change your widget’s screen position, appearance, and more. Additionally, you can add custom branding to your widget, like your brand’s colors and logo, to mesh your chat widget with your WordPress website’s theme.
While your live chat allows for 24/7 contact with your customers, you may want to set hours of operation for your chat widget. Tidio enables you to customize your operating hours individually for each day of the week. Additionally, you can customize your away message or attach a lead form that appears when a visitor encounters your site after hours.
That’s it. Now, your site is equipped with live chat!
Tidio is a solid WordPress live chat plugin. However, you may need a different set of features that it may not cover. Here are some other WordPress live chat plugins and solutions that may be a better fit for your needs:
For more, check out the best live chat software options out there.
Live chat adds a powerful interactive feature to your WordPress website. Giving your customers a way to connect with you anytime is a great way to nurture client relationships and increase conversions. With the power of AI, the options are endless in the many ways you can customize your WordPress live chat process. Tidio is a great option to power live chat on your WordPress website. From AI to customizable automated messages, easy widget styling, and email marketing tools, Tidio is a solid choice to bring live chat to your WordPress website. Live chat functionality has come a long way. Now, you have a large selection of live chat tools that you can bring to your website. Have you added live chat to your website? What platform did you use? Let us know in the comments section below!
The post How to Add Live Chat to Your WordPress Website in 2023 appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
Is WordPress a CMS? The short answer is yes, WordPress is a CMS. However, the long answer is that there’s more to it than that. In this in-depth write-up, we’ll get into the nittty-gritty details and share some interesting facts about WordPress that you might find useful.
The post Is WordPress a CMS? Here’s What You Need to Know appeared first on Themeisle Blog.
There are many reasons why you may want to create a dedicated website for your videos. Perhaps you’re selling a course that you want to put behind a paywall. Maybe you’ve created a video series or podcast that requires its own branded home. Or maybe you just want to create an immersive environment for users to consume your video content, without the typical distractions of YouTube.
Whatever your goal, you can take two approaches to achieve this. You either use the automatically generated pages from a video hosting service or e-learning platform, or you build a dedicated website then embed your videos across it.
If you don’t want the hassle of maintaining a website, this is the way to go. By using a video hosting service or e-learning platform, you can easily store your videos. These services are also useful if you want out-of-the-box monetization options for a video course.
Vimeo offers two ways of building out a quick video website:
Sprout video offers a lightweight CMS that can be used to create a video website with multiple pages – and applied sitewide to a custom domain of your choice. It’s a great choice if you want a simple plug-and-play solution, and you have a fairly large library of video content that you want to categorise by topic.
If you have some CSS and HTML skills, you can customize Sprout video’s CMS somewhat. However, at that point you may be better off building a custom solution with WordPress.
Wistia Channels is a great solution if you have serialized video content that you’re publishing regularly, like a podcast. Channels allows you to combine audio and video, and create a branded landing page that looks a bit like a video streaming service. Plus, it includes unique pages for each video.
You can run Wistia Channels on a standard Wistia account subdomain URL. But you can also embed it into any page on an existing website, if you use a simple JavaScript embed code – thereby straddling the options of video hosting service vs. own website.
For video courses and courses that include videos alongside written content in particular, Kajabi is a great solution. It allows you to build a quick video website that you can easily monetize. Kajabi has a very simple WYSIWYG CMS that doesn’t require any web development skills to use. Plus, it can be integrated with an existing website.
If you’d like to do something more custom, or integrate your videos as part of a bigger web experience, you could consider creating a website with a more traditional CMS before embedding your videos. The advantage of this is not only in being able to build something precisely to your design and structure specifications, but also in having a web property capable of driving traffic from organic search and organic video sources.
In the vast majority of cases, the best CMS for creating a video portfolio, series or course website will be WordPress. With thousands of video gallery plugins and integrations with all the major video hosting platforms, WordPress gives you all the options you need for a custom video website. Plus, it’s very simple and requires little technical know-how. You can very simply include videos from almost every platform in any page you created with the Gutenberg editor. Meaning: video can be part of the fabric of your WordPress site out of the box.
And if you use WordPress, you can also use the Yoast Video SEO plugin! The video SEO plugin ensures that your videos are indexed in Google, so you can drive more traffic to your website through video search.
If you want to integrate your videos more elaborately within your chosen page types, there are a lot of great options out there.
LearnDash is a great plugin for a course-type video execution. It allows you to include videos from any source, like YouTube or Wistia, then create user playback triggers for course progression.
As with the standalone solution, Wistia Channels works really well as a way of creating a video gallery within any other page or page type. It creates unique URLs for every video within the gallery. These URLS are indexable by Google, which is great for your SEO.
This plugin is a bit like a mini CMS within a CMS. It allows you to build a fairly feature-rich video gallery experience within a WordPress website, bringing in videos from YouTube and elsewhere. All-in-one video gallery is a reasonable solution if you want a simple and traditional catalogue of your videos within a single page.
In conclusion: building a video website is fairly straightforward and shouldn’t feel intimidating. Whatever your needs, there are great options out there.
Read more: How to stop videos negatively impacting Core Web Vitals »
The post How to create a video website appeared first on Yoast.
A contact form is an excellent way to gather information from visitors to your WordPress website. Whether you want to capture orders, survey responses, or job applications, adding a WordPress contact form is an effective way for website visitors to contact and interact with you and your brand online.
There are many platforms and online tools available that allow you to create forms. Many modern platforms provide an easy-to-use interface, reporting, and analytics, among other features. However, using a WordPress contact form, you can have all these features and more within your WordPress interface. Here are some other benefits you can gain using a WordPress contact form:
We’ll use the popular and feature-rich WPForms Contact Form plugin to add a contact form to our WordPress website. We begin by installing the plugin onto our website.
First, log in to your WordPress dashboard, and hover over Plugins. Then, click Add New and in the search box, enter WPForms. Click the Install button to begin the plugin installation process.
Finally, click the blue Activate button to complete the installation of the WPForms plugin.
Now that the plugin is installed and activated, you can see that a new menu item has been added to your WordPress menu.
WPForms gives you multiple places to add a new form once you navigate to the dashboard. We’ll start by clicking the orange Add New button at the top of the dashboard.
The form-building process in WPForms starts by naming your form and choosing one of the many templates available. To name your form, enter a title within the Title text box. Then select your form template. We’ll build a custom form for our tutorial, so let’s select the Blank Form template.
After choosing the blank form template, you are presented with WPForms’ beautiful drag-and-drop builder. From the left-hand side, you’ll find your field types.
Even with the free version, you are given several form field types that can empower you to create stunning forms. We’ll create a simple contact form and use the name, email, dropdown, and paragraph text fields for our form.
Now that we have our form fields selected, let’s look at some of the customizations we can make with WPForms.
Firstly, let’s click on the Name form field. Next, we’ll select the General tab from the Field Options for this form field. Now, we’ll change the format of this field and select First Middle Last. Finally, we’ll toggle the Required Form field. This means that we’ve made it mandatory to have this form field filled.
Next, let’s click on the Advanced tab. Let’s add placeholders to our name fields by filling in the placeholder field with our chosen text.
To adjust our email field first, click on the email field. Then, click on the General tab. For this field, let’s add an email confirmation option (meaning users must confirm their email by entering it twice). We do this by toggling the Email Confirmation Field.
For our dropdown field, let’s click on the field to begin. Then, click on the General tab. Now, we add a label to the form field so that our users know the purpose of this dropdown. Finally, we’ll add our options to this field.
Lastly, we’ll move on to our final form field, the paragraph field. Click on the form field, then click on the General tab. Assign the field a label. Now that we’ve made edits to the form fields within our contact form, let’s adjust the form settings to match our needs.
To adjust our form settings, click on the Settings icon from the left side of the form builder. Then, click on the General tab. This tab allows you to edit the form’s general settings, such as its name, description, tags, etc. We will go ahead and change the text on our submit button. Scroll down to the Submit Button Text text box. Then, enter Send Message.
Additionally, we’re going to change the processing text for our form. Add your chosen text to the text box. In our case, we edited it to Sending Message.
WPForms has built-in security; however, if you have another provider you’d like to use, you would use the Spam Protection and Security tab to integrate your chosen spam and security provider with your form. We’ll use the native provisions WPForm has in place for our form now.
Now, let’s add some notifications to our form. This means we’ll receive an email when a visitor comes onto our website and sends us a message through our form. To enable this, first, click on the Notifications tab. Then, let’s change the Email Subject line to New Website Form Message. Also, let’s adjust the From Name to a name we’ll recognize in our email inbox. With the pro version of WPForms, multiple notifications can be added in the future.
Finally, let’s send our website visitors a confirmation that we’ve successfully received their form entry. To do this, click on the Confirmation menu option. Then, adjust your confirmation message in the textbox. You can also redirect users to another page on your website or show another page in addition to showing an on-screen message.
After making all these changes to your form, click the orange Save button at the top right-hand corner of the screen. With our form created, let’s add it to our page!
To add your form to your page, create a new page on your website or edit an existing page. Let’s create a new page for our contact form. First, hover over the Pages menu option, then click Add New.
After we are directed to the default WordPress page editor, give your page a title. Then click the black plus icon to open the library of available blocks. Search WPForms and select the WPForms block.
Select your form from the dropdown of forms available.
With your form selected, we can start styling it from within the Block Editor.
WPForms makes it very easy to style your contact form. While you can use CSS, you can also use the simple tools within the Block Editor to edit and style your form.
Within the editor, you can change the color of form fields, form field size, and much more with just a few simple clicks. This is what our form looked like before adding our styling edits:
After styling, this is what our form looks like. Notice the submit button has changed color, and edits have been made to the border of the form fields. Don’t forget we can also assign CSS classes to each aspect of our form and use CSS to customize our form further.
With our form customized and our fields in place, we’ve successfully created our first WordPress form! Here are some tips and tricks you should remember while building your contact form.
Contact forms allow you to add a dynamic connection with visitors to your site. However, there are some tips you should remember as you plan on building your site.
Think Outside the Box
Though we made a simple form in this tutorial, WPForms and other contact form plugins have hundreds of templates you can use to create a wide array of forms. Forms aren’t just used to collect contact information but can be vital to successful your business. You can create surveys, take polls, and generate quotes for clients with many WordPress form builders. Using a contact form to collect product personalization requests is even possible. Also, don’t be afraid to get creative in the way that you use forms on your website.
Keep Your Form Secure
Spammers will use any means to achieve their tasks; one method is online contact forms. However, a security feature like Akismet or Recaptcha can help keep your form content and email address secure. Don’t forget to keep your form security tight as you add forms to your website.
The Power of Integrations
Integrations are where using a native WordPress contact form shine. You can create custom email subscription forms that automatically populate your email marketing solution (like Mailchimp). Your form can be connected to your CRM, allowing you to nurture leads effectively. WordPress contact forms instill trust in your customers as they look and feel like your website. Your form becomes a powerhouse that populates different aspects of your business while keeping your processes seamless and streamlined.
Customize Your Form Notifications and Emails
Remember to customize your notifications and emails if you’re sending notifications to yourself or your visitors. Adding your brand colors, changing boilerplate text, and more makes your website visitor feel trusting of your brand. Additionally, if you’re redirecting people to different pages after form submission, ensure these pages give your customers all the information they need to embark on their next steps with your website.
Think About User Experience
Building a conversion-optimized form ensures that your visitors successfully fill out and submit your form. Creating straightforward and easy-to-understand forms helps guide visitors to a successful form submission. Consider adding tooltips, descriptions, directions, and placeholders that inform your customers about your form’s different fields and sections, providing them with a seamless and frictionless process to completing your form.
Consider Accessibility
While not often discussed, accessibility is approaching the forefront of web design. Consider how other users may interact with your forms through alternative means. Ensuring that labels, ARIA, tab sequences, and more are in place helps those who may use the internet differently also to use your website and ultimately experience the interactive element of your website in a way that works best for their needs.
Here are some alternative contact form plugins and platforms to test out.
A contact form is a powerful tool that every website should have. Not only is it a way for your clients to contact you, but it’s a way to add an interactive element to your website. With a plugin like WPForms, which comes with a drag-and-drop builder, crafting highly-functional and beautiful forms is simple. Integrations, notifications, and security are features that make building a native WordPress contact form a mainstay in the website-building process. To further your research, check out our list of the best contact form plugins you can add to your following website. How do you add contact forms to your website? Is there a plugin that you like that you’d want us to learn more about? Let us know in the comments section down below!
Featured Image via Viktoria Kurpas / shutterstock.com
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Your choice of WordPress theme plays a significant role in how your website looks and functions. Many multipurpose WordPress themes offer a bit of everything, which can make them over-complicated and challenging to customize. For most projects, a simple WordPress theme is the better choice. There are thousands of premium and free themes available that […]
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WordPress is one of the best platforms you can use to build a membership website. With all the themes and plugins available, you have full control over building various types of membership sites. In this guide, we’ll walk through the benefits of a membership site, some prerequisites to consider before building one, and a simple step-by-step process to building your own.
A membership site is a website that provides exclusive, private content to subscribers. This content could be in the form of videos, blog posts, courses, or other perks. When building your WordPress membership site, there are several features that you should include to provide your community with a positive experience. Firstly, your WordPress membership website should have a page that lists and describes the various membership levels and perks that come with each level.
This will help your community assess the membership type they would like to join. A signup form allows your members to join your website and can be customized to match your membership offerings or collect certain information that you will need from your member.
A login form ensures that only your members can access your gated content, making it a staple in every membership website. After logging in, your site can give members a place to manage their membership. They can upgrade their plan, manage their information, and perform other maintenance tasks there.
The main attractiveness of building a WordPress membership site is providing private content to your members. You can use a membership site to sell courses, downloadable music, software, and more. This exclusive content is only available to those who have created their account and logged in to your website. Now that we know what some of the features of a WordPress membership site are, let’s look at some of the reasons why you may want to invest the time in building one.
Building a membership site is quite a process, but it has several rewards you may want to consider as you embark on this journey. Some key benefits include:
Now that you know why you should consider building a WordPress membership site, here are a few things to have on hand as you start your quest.
Before building your WordPress membership site, these are the tools and actions you should take to ensure that you have a successful website build:
With all the necessary prerequisites for your membership site in place, let’s take the plunge and see step-by-step what we need to do to make this a reality. Since we are going to be concentrating on membership for this guide, you may need to check out our complete guide on how to make a WordPress website beforehand. This tutorial will show the critical steps to building a membership site using the top-rated membership plugin, MemberPress. However, these steps will also apply when using other membership plugins.
From your WordPress dashboard, hover over the Plugins menu option. Then, click Add New. Since MemberPress is a premium plugin, you must download it from your member portal before uploading it to your WordPress website. Once you’ve downloaded your ZIP file, click the Upload Plugin button. Then, upload the MemberPress ZIP file. Click the Install Now button.
Once the plugin is installed, click the blue Activate Plugin button to complete the installation of MemberPress.
With your plugin installed and activated, we can move to the next step, setting up our packages.
Your memberships are the backbone of revenue generation for your membership site. To add a new membership in MemberPress, click on the Memberships text link to create your first membership level. Here, you can give your membership a name and description and set up your term.
Your membership term establishes how much you’ll charge your customers, the frequency they’ll be charged, and how long their access lasts. Give your membership a name, add a description, and set your new membership level’s pricing and billing terms. Additionally, you’ll need to set up the types of members that can subscribe to this level. Scroll down to the Membership Options tab. Click on the Permissions tab. This is where you can assign certain member groups within your WordPress site to this membership level. With this setup, click the blue Publish button to activate this membership level.
Your payment method will be used to process and bill your clients. Popular payment processors for digital products include Stripe and PayPal. To access and add payment gateways to your MemberPress install, click on Settings. Then, click on Payments.
As part of the planning process for your membership site, it’s good to have your payment processing account set up and connected to your bank account. You can add multiple payment methods to your membership site. This helps give your community options when paying you for access to your exclusive content.
An essential part of a membership site is setting up your access rules. These rules allow you to determine who can access your content, what conditions they need to meet, and how your content is dripped or dripped to your members. In MemberPress, click on the Rules text link from the MemberPress menu to start creating your content rules.
MemberPress has over ten rules that you can use to determine what type of content you’d like to protect. These include but are not limited to all content, post categories, courses, custom URIs, custom post types, and more. Additionally, it has four types of access conditions that you can use to determine who has access to the protected content within each rule.
Once you’ve created the access rules for your content, you’ll need to decide whether to drip your content or have your content have an expiration date. You can set these factors up in the Drip/Expiration box. The Rules pages are where you create the best access conditions that you’ll need for your WordPress membership site. Once you’ve created your membership rules, publish them by clicking Save Rule to make them active.
With your membership levels created and rules in place, it’s now time to create your gated content! With MemberPress, any content on your website can become members-only. Blog posts or courses, custom post types, and everything in between can be protected by the rules set up in MemberPress. As long as your content matches the rules that you’ve set, it’ll be hidden from the public and only available to those who have an active membership to your website.
In addition to your members-only content and essential website pages (homepage, about, contact, etc.), a membership site will require pages specific to the membership process. Your membership plugin may generate some pages, while others must be manually created. Example membership-specific pages include:
Members use the login page to access their profile and exclusive content on your website.
By default, MemberPress uses the ReadyLaunch login page template. However, you can create a custom page on your website to act as your login page by using blocks or a page builder plugin.
The registration page is the first entry point into your membership site. While plugins like MemberPress give you direct links to the registration pages of your different membership levels, you may need other tools to spruce up your pages.
Click on Groups from the MemberPress menu to create your first group of membership levels. This will also create a default pricing page where all the pricing plans within said group are listed for your customers to subscribe to your membership.
After a member has subscribed to your website, they are typically presented with a thank you page. This page may show their transaction details, information about their membership level, and the next steps in the membership process. MemberPress allows you to present your thank you page in two ways: through a global thank you page or custom pages according to each membership level.
Finally, the account page is where your members can update and change their membership.
Members can see their active subscriptions on their account page, edit their profile, change their password, and more. Providing your members with a way to make amendments to their account allows them to control their membership while saving you from manually updating their files.
Using a page builder is a straightforward way to build stunning and high-converting registration, login, and profile pages for your memberships.
Here’s an example of the page builder Divi working with MemberPress to create a custom registration form for a monthly membership. Page builders allow you to bring your branding and unique style to your membership site, increasing brand awareness and instilling confidence in potential community members. Many popular page builders have modules and elements like login boxes, registration forms, and more that you can brand beautifully to match your website while creating a visually appealing WordPress membership site for your community.
With your plans created, it’s time to add your registration page and a login button to your menu. Using a plugin like Login or Logout Menu Item brings this automated functionality to your WordPress membership site. Also, it makes it easy for your members to access their content without using the default WordPress login screen.
Using a plugin that allows the link in your menu to change whether a member is logged in or out adds an excellent user experience. Additionally, Adding the link to your custom registration page is a great way to increase the number of people who sign up to your WordPress membership site, as it is easy for them to sign up and join your community.
After all your hard work, testing your WordPress membership site is advisable. Testing your process allows you to see where there might be bottlenecks in your workflow and allows you to fix them before showing your site to the world.
Setting your payment gateway into test mode is a great way to see how your new WordPress membership site functions. To do this, click on the Settings menu item. Then, click on Payments. Switch your payment gateway to testing. This alone can help you test your email notifications, refine your payment process and check if your rules work correctly. For testing MemberPress, you’ll also need to be logged in as a member, not an administrator. So testing in a private browsing page or as a test account is recommended to get the full experience that one of your subscribers will go through.
Last but certainly not least, you should style your new WordPress membership site. MemberPress has a built-in styler called ReadyLaunch, where you can set your logo and brand colors. To access ReadyLauncher, click on the Settings menu link. Then, click on ReadyLaunch.
Although the built-in design functions of a WordPress membership site plugin are helpful, depending on the theme or page builder you’re using, you can use your imagination and design a highly visual membership site for your customers.
Page builders like Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, and more have deep integrations with some of the top membership plugins. Combining the power of a page builder with your membership plugin can help you beautifully style your WordPress membership site.
For more, check out how to build a membership site with Divi.
While MemberPress is a solid choice when building a WordPress membership site, there are plenty of other choices that you can consider when building your website. Always keep the needs of your subscribers as well as the type of content that you’ll be providing in mind when choosing this critical piece of your new website:
Building a WordPress membership site can be daunting. However, we hope we’ve broken it into manageable pieces with this guide. At its core, a WordPress membership site will bring your community together and can provide you with a way to make money online. Your website’s foundation (domain and hosting) is critical as you build your site. Additionally, your choice of membership plugin can make or break your WordPress membership site. MemberPress is an established WordPress membership plugin with excellent reviews, an expansive feature set, and solid technical support. Building your WordPress membership website with it is a good choice. You can also lean on many alternatives if you require a different approach for your site. With the right tools and a solid plan, building a great WordPress membership website you and your community will enjoy interacting with is possible.
The post How to Create a Membership Website in WordPress (2023 Guide) appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.