73 items found for ""
- How I saved hundreds of hours by using Elementor?
I hate web development! There you go! I said it finally! Writing HTML script and then writing the CSS stylesheets is the most tedious work I had to do. And if you want to add some more functionality then write some JavaScript too. I come from an Engineering background, where I was doing micro-controller programming. I used to write small and straightforward codes. But when I switched to web development, I had to write big fricking blocks of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Barring JavaScript, logic wasn’t involved in writing HTML or CSS. It was merely a labour work. I had to write the same code blocks again and again. I detested it dearly. Then I started using WordPress Now, WordPress took care of most of the things. Writing HTML for menus and image galleries and stuff like that was not required anymore. But still, to design the body of the page, I had to use the non-intuitive text editor of WordPress. At least, before WordPress, when I used to write HTML in an editor like Atom, it did some work automatically, like closing a tag. But the WordPress text editor is a total dud. You can make it more intuitive, but then you have to install a plugin. And, I hate installing plugins unless they are needed. So, again the time to develop the complete website didn’t improve much. The other option was to get a ready-made theme. I have used my fair share of ready-to-use themes. These themes come with all the bells and whistles. While they seem like an excellent alternative to coding, they actually increase the workload and are not a great option, generally speaking. I have spoken extensively about them in this blog post. No doubt they are an improvement over the vanilla WordPress but the disadvantages, in the long run, outweigh the advantages. Page Builders Most of the themes I purchased from ThemeForest came with a page builder called Visual Composer. So, I wasn’t entirely oblivious to the realm of the page builders. Visual Composer is a great plugin, and it comes with a lot of pre-made widgets. And many people like it. But I somehow never connected with the plugin. I felt it slowed down my website, included a lot of bloated code and the UI isn’t that friendly. I always felt it was not something for me. If I am going to use the page builders anyway, then I want them to be easy to use. Enter Elementor After using so many page builders, I stumbled upon Elementor in a discussion board. There were so many people talking about all the great things in Elementor. I decided to give it a spin. And to my delight, the free version of the plugin was available. So, I downloaded the plugin and straightaway started using it on a project itself. I wanted to check how it works in a live project environment. And it worked perfectly. I created pages in five minutes with the free version of the plugin. Forget paid version where you get many more widgets and pre-made templates. Here is the video where I create a page in WordPress using Elementor. Once I was happy with the free version, I immediately went for the paid version. I purchased the highest version. The costing starts from USD 49 for one site and caps at USD 199 for unlimited sites. A page that required at least an hour of coding started taking around 10 minutes to complete. In my agency, we carry out on an average seven web development projects per month with each containing six pages on an average. Without page builder that would have taken me six websites x 7 pages/website x 4 hours/page equal to 168 hours. That is a lot of time to design the pages because you have other work too, like writing a copy, developing images, optimising the performance etc. With Elementor, the time required reduces to 6 websites x 7 pages/website x 30 minutes/page equal to 1260 minutes, that is 21 hours. That is a time saving of 147 hours or 87.5% reduction. That is a huge time saver. Since we charge our customers per hour, this resulted in a massive decrease in the cost to the customer. And we were able to deliver the projects at a lower price and with the time saved, we took more projects, more significant projects. The most significant advantage of Elementor A website that tells about your products or services is a marketing tool. And when it comes to marketing tools, marketers should be able to use it. And that was the most significant advantage of using Elementor. The marketing teams in my client’s companies were now able to make modifications to the website. This was a big deal for my clients. They didn’t have to run to me for small things, and their marketing team was happy that they were able to make the changes quickly. When should you opt for a page builder? If your website is primarily for marketing, then your marketing team should be able to handle the site. And often marketers are not tech-savvy, so they love working with something like Elementor. If you hate coding, then you should go for Elementor. It will save you a lot of headaches. You will be able to quickly build a website, change page designs, save standard templates that can be used later on. All in all, it is a great tool to have in your armoury.
- 2 Plugins that are making my WordPress site super fast
I am using WordPress for the last seven years. That’s a long period to try out several plugins and themes, encounter problems and solve them. However, one problem that bugged me a lot since the beginning was how should I speed up my WordPress site. I cannot stand a slow loading website. And I don’t expect visitors on my site to wait for 7-8 seconds for the website to load. That load time is just atrocious. To solve the problem of slow loading, I tried multiple plugins, tried using better coded and optimised themes and jumped from hosting to hosting till I found a right combination of optimisation plugins, a good theme and a turbocharged hosting. That’s the trifecta you want to hit. A perfect blend of optimisation plugins, excellent theme and fast hosting is divine and super fast. I have already written about them extensively here . So, today I want to speak about the plugins that sped up my website and will speed up yours too. WP Rocket: WP Rocket is a caching plugin. Caching helps in speeding up our website. Additionally, they also help us in compressing the static files like JavaScripts, CSS stylesheets and HTML. Before I stumbled upon WP Rocket, I used to install W3 Total Cache. That’s one little plugin, and it is available as a freemium version. For pro features, you need to buy their licence. While W3 Total Cache works well, I always found it challenging to configure. There are too many options, and they are confusing at times. And I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy. But even for me, I had to figure out each setting. Once I got the hang of the configuration, I was able to use. But, there was one issue that I was never able to solve entirely, that is modification . Minification is a two-step process. Files are combined, and then redundancy is removed from them. I will explain to you what that means. Let’s say your website required ten different stylesheets. Now what minification does is, it combines all these files. Mind you it combines only the similar kind of data. It doesn’t combine a stylesheet and a JavaScript. So, what happens is you get one file instead of ten different files. That means when your site loads, server has to deliver only one file instead of ten different files. Makes sense, right? Now, the next part is compression. All these files like a stylesheet and a JavaScript contain redundancies. Redundancies can be whitespaces (when we press enter and move on to newline whitespace is created. Or it can only be space we explicitly add between two words or characters). Or it can be the comments or the long variable names in these files. You may be wondering how whitespace is going to slow down my website? Well, with the addition of each character in the file, the size increases. The increase may not be much, but when you have a stylesheet that is 1000 lines long then saving on whitespaces will make your stylesheet leaner. Let me circle back to the original topic. So, W3 Total Cache does provide this minification option. What happens when you combine different files is, your site may not work as expected. Some styles may break, the menu will not open, or the image slider stops sliding etc. Overall user experience breaks down with modification. To solve this issue, you minify only a few files while keeping the problematic files as they are. This can become cumbersome very quickly because generally speaking your WordPress website uses around 20-30 such files. And finding out a right set of files that we can minify becomes a hellish task. This is something I was never able to achieve through W3 Total Cache. But when I installed WP Rocket, minification suddenly became a simple task. I just selected the basic options of minification, and everything worked right out of the box: no elimination process or complicated configuration. Before using WP Rocket, my site was loading in 3-4 seconds. Now, after using the plugin, the site loads in 700-900 ms. Now that is a phenomenal performance. The only downside is WP Rocket is not a FREE plugin. You have to shell out $39 per year for one website. But the speed improvement I got with using this plugin was an investment worth doing. Imagify : While developing a website, we rarely give attention to the size of the images that we are using on the site. Images that we generate on Photoshop or Canva are bloated at times. And using big images slow down the website significantly. Imagine having ten images, 400kb each. The pictures themselves will take 4 Mb size. And that’s not good when we are trying to keep the webpage size below 3 Mb. To solve this problem, export the images from Photoshop that are optimised for the web or otherwise use a plugin that will compress the images. Previously I used to install EWWW Image Optimiser. Now, this plugin is incredible. I still use it on my client’s website where I don’t need too much compression. But it kind of fails to compress big images. This is where Imagify has helped me. It provides three types of compressions—normal, Aggressive and Ultra. Check the following screenshot. This plugin compressed a 500kb image to 37kb using the Aggressive compression. And the best thing is there was no significant visible loss of quality. I mean, I didn’t see any difference between the compressed image and the original one. Using Imagify has helped me a lot. Now my website’s homepage uses 9-10 images on the homepage. But the page size is just 750kb. And that is including all the stylesheets and JavaScripts. The best thing about Imagify is it comes with a FREE plan. Therefore you can give it a try without spending a dime. And I will highly suggest you use it to speed up your website. Closing Thoughts Having a fast website is a necessity. And both of these plugins have helped speed up my website. Give them a spin, and you won’t be disappointed.
- Is WordPress bad for building landing pages?
For the last few years, I have been hearing that WordPress is not suitable for building landing pages, and conversion rate is abysmal with landing pages made with WordPress. So many online coaches are promoting the use of expensive tools for building landing pages while vilifying WordPress. Do you think WordPress is inadequate for landing pages and conversions? Let me answer this question in two parts because building a landing page is one part and making it conversion-friendly is an altogether different matter. And we have to look at these two things separately. Is WordPress difficult for building a landing page? WordPress was never bad for building a landing page. Bad is the wrong word to use here. However, we can say that it was difficult for an average person to create a landing page using it. But this was the case some years back; today we have page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, Divi, Visual Composer and what not. All these are fantastic page builders boasting excellent landing page building capabilities. In fact, with a page builder like Elementor , we get built-in integration with services like ConvertKit, Drip and Mailchimp etc. So, if we ask the question today; is WordPress good for building landing pages? Again I will say, the word ‘good’ is wrong here. We can say with the combination of WordPress + Page Builder; it is now easy for an average non-techy person to build a landing page. So, do I need to purchase any landing page builder like Instapage, Leadpages if WordPress + Page Builder accomplishes the same thing? Let’s, first of all, see, what benefits tools such as Leadpages, or Instapage provide? Done for you, ready to use templates Easy integration with email service providers A/B testing to find out the effectiveness of different versions of landing pages So does the combination of WordPress + Page builders provide this? Page builder like Elementor provides you with quite a few done for you, ready to use templates. But not all of them are landing pages. Elementor does provide some integrations like ConvertKit, Mailchimp and few prominent ones, but these are nowhere as comprehensive as Leadpages or Instapage. A/B testing is also not a feature of all page builders. Divi does provide one out of the box while Elementor does not. But it boils down to what your requirements are Do you need A/B split testing at this moment? Do you need 50+ different landing page templates? Do you need every integration at this moment? Or a simple Mailchimp or ConvertKit integration is sufficient at this juncture. If answers to the above questions are negative, then no, you don’t have to purchase any other tool. WordPress + a Page builder will be sufficient for you. Now that we have seen the first part let’s move on the next section, that is conversion. Do landing pages built using WordPress have bad conversion rates? As far as I am concerned, a tool is rarely an issue when it comes to conversion unless the pages built using a particular tool are slow-loading and do not render correctly on all devices. Let’s see the factors on which the landing page conversion depends Page loading speed: If you are using a slow hosting, poorly coded theme and plugins for your WordPress website, then your landing page will load slowly, which in turn will affect conversion rates. This is where the landing page tools excel because you don’t have to worry about loading speed, hosting, or technical thing as such. An engaging copy will lead to higher conversion. So, here any tool won’t be able to help you if the copy is not engaging enough. Page structure also impacts the conversion. The flow of the landing page is critical in making a page visitor take action. So, WordPress is rarely an issue when we talk about conversions. A landing page is a specialized marketing tool. It is not that easy to build a landing page that converts well. The copy of the landing page, the placements of various blocks, the social proof, a right hook are some of the critical aspects of a well-converting landing page. Many landing pages are built using WordPress by big-name course creators, consultants, businesses. That’s why when someone says landing pages built using WordPress are poor for conversion then that’s not true. A poorly designed landing page will perform poorly irrespective of the tool. Buying Leadpages or Instapage will not magically solve the conversion issue. Yes, these tools will make your life simpler in the first part of building the landing page. But it cannot guarantee you the conversions. We can say that while WordPress might be complicated for a non-techy person to build a landing page without using a page builder. We can make it easier by using a page builder like Elementor or Divi. But saying that landing pages built using WordPress are poor performers is something that is not right. If your landing pages are not converting then, make sure you work on the copy, work on the placement of the blocks, work on the hook. Best of luck building high-converting landing pages using WordPress! Resources: Landing Page Builders: Leadpages Instapage Unbounce WordPress Landing Page Builder: Elementor Beaver Builder Divi
- WordPress Themes: Expectation vs Reality
How do you select a theme for your WordPress website? Let me guess. And let me know if I am wrong. Go to theme marketplaces Search for top-rated themes See the 5000+ various demos that the theme provides. There are 3000+ different layouts for the header, 9000+ layouts for the footer. (Enough sarcasm I guess :D) See which one has all the graphic elements and design that you want You are excited, and you purchase the most beautiful looking theme. But what happens then? You upload the theme and then create the page, assign it as a homepage and view it. But it doesn’t look like at all like the demo. What went wrong? Now you are running helter-skelter looking for documentation. As you read the documentation, you realise there are several customisations settings that you need to do to get the desired look. The whole purpose of buying a prebuilt theme is defeated. The sheer volume of the settings you have to do is overwhelming. How do I know this? Because I have purchased such themes quite a lot of times, and every time I had to jump through various hoops to get the desired look. It’s not what I wanted. I wanted a ‘look and feel’ the same as the demo site. The other option that such themes provide is importing the data that will make my website exactly like the demo. But what happens, in this case, is, there are too many unwanted pages created. It imports too many images that I don’t want in my site. So, the first thing that I have to do now is, get rid of the redundant pages. Setup the menu again. Remove the unwanted images. And if you are not a techie person, this becomes a tedious task. Did I sign up for all this? No. I didn’t. All I wanted was a readymade template where I just had to fill in the blanks and not write the complete essay. When I followed the instructions, did all the customisations, the website still didn’t look like the one shown in the demo. I always had to hack CSS somewhere to get the desired look. I am not saying all the themes are like that. Unfortunately, the themes that I purchased had these issues. So, what do I do now? I avoid the themes that come with all the bells and whistles. One this I have understood from developing over 100 WordPress websites is, don’t go for a theme that is loaded with customisations. What you and I need is a theme that is clean, devoid of any bloat, doesn’t rely on the obnoxious amount of plugins. And if you need to use WooCommerce then a theme that supports WooCommerce. I once purchased a top-rated theme, and when I installed it on WordPress, it asked me to download more than seven plugins because they were needed for the theme to provide all its functionality. And when we are trying to speed up the website , having to install these additional plugins is a big turn-off. Which themes do you suggest? There are a couple of themes that are lean, devoid of bloat and are fast enough to consider. 1. Astra Astra is a theme that doesn’t come with a lot of customisations, which satisfies my criteria for the theme. Additionally, it plays very well with the page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder. Since I use Elementor a lot, this is an additional benefit for me. Astra is compatible with WooCommerce too. So I am covered on that front also. There is a free version of the theme available. More often than not, the free version is sufficient. But if you need some additional features, then you can opt for a paid version. 2. Genesis Framework Genesis is a framework. And multiple themes are built on it. The themes developed by them are slim and are very attractive. This is a costly option, though. The framework itself costs around $60 and then you have to purchase a theme built on top of it. So the whole package goes for around $130. You don’t have any free option for Genesis. But the quality of the theme is so impressive that it’s worth doing it. Closing thoughts Don’t be under the impression that you will be able to develop site exactly as the demo of the premium theme without jumping through some hoops. Also, don’t think that a theme with all the bells and whistles will be easy to use. So, go with a lean theme, and you won’t be disappointed.
- 4 Things that are making your WordPress website slow AF
Nobody likes a slow website. No one is going to wait for 7-8 seconds just for your website to load. Moreover, you are losing on the SEO front too. And if you have built the website using WordPress, then the matter is worse. WordPress makes it super easy for us to make it super slow. New WordPress developers are going to make your website slow. Why? I tell you. Two of the essential parts of a WordPress website are a theme and plugins. It’s effortless for people to go wrong on both of those fronts. Before my rant goes out of hand, let me reorganise myself. So, let’s talk about the four things that are going to make a snail seem to travel faster. 1. Slow Hosting If ‘ Get the cheapest possible hosting ‘ is your mantra, then you are headed for trouble. There is a reason why cheap hostings are cheap. These hosts keep too many websites on one server, and it is bound to make your site slower. If your business requires a strong business presence, I will suggest you get a good quality hosting. Let it be shared hosting. That’s not an issue. But it has to be a good quality one. It should not go down or crash now and then. The support should be knowledgeable. My experience with different hosting I was initially using a GoDaddy hosting. It was a bit slow, but then I never intended to start an online business, and I didn’t know much about the hosting. A year later, I switched to InMotion. I was happy with the hosting. It was faster than the GoDaddy one but almost five times costly. And it wasn’t five times faster. After that, things took a turn for the worse. I got an email from HostGator that they had 50% discount going on the yearly plan. I immediately grabbed the offer as anyway my year with InMotion was almost over. That hosting was so bad; it was so crappy that my website was going down now and then like nine pins. And support? Oh boy! That was one hell of pathetic support. I left that hosting after just three months. I am not sure how HostGator’s quality is now. One important point I want to mention here is I purchased this hosting from HostGator India, which is different from HostGator USA. I have no idea about the quality of HostGator USA. With the issue with this hosting, I moved my website to SiteGround . SiteGround is supremely good hosting. I am delighted with their service. Many of my customers are using SiteGround. It’s almost hassle-free. I have used Bluehost for my clients. And their quality is also good. As far as I know, it’s no SiteGround, but it’s sufficiently good. Currently, my website is on WP Engine. And I couldn’t be happier. My site now loads in just about a second. But WP Engine is not cheap hosting. It costs $35 every month. Compare that with other hosts which cost $2-$3 per month. It’s critical to have an excellent host. My suggestion is don’t be thrifty with the hosting. Don’t go for very high-end hosting like WP Engine or Kinsta initially but get decent hosting. 2. Bloated Theme is one of the prime reason for a slow website I have talked extensively about themes previously here . I won’t reiterate what I had said in the earlier blog post, but the themes that look beautiful and have graphic gizmos in plenty are slow. Most of the themes on various marketplaces add too much of bloat in the html. The sheer amount of CSS and JavaScript files that these themes and their allied plugins use is mind-boggling. These themes provide a ridiculously high number of customisations. Let me tell you these customisations are not good too. But they slow down your website. I have used themes like Avada, Karma and some other themes from marketplaces. The websites made with them look terrific, but they are slow as hell. Since then, I have shifted to the Genesis Framework. Their themes are of very high quality and lean. No doubt they have less number of customisations, but they play very well Elementor . By the way, Elementor is a page builder. Astra is another lean theme. My suggestion for you is don’t look for a theme that provides a maximum number of customisations. Instead, look for a theme that is lean and loads fast. 3. Too Many Plugins We might not even use WordPress if there were no plugins available. Plugins extend the functionality of the website beyond our imagination. There are more than 50000 plugins. And there lies the problem. Not all of them are of good quality. Very few are good. When I say good, what I mean is secure plugins, that are updated regularly and don’t open the website to malware attacks. But man, the good plugins, they are too good. Plugins like Contact Form 7, Elementor, Yoast SEO are the few examples of quality plugins. Coming back to the original point, using too many plugins puts the load on the system. Eventually leading to slow load times. You should use plugins that are essential for your website. Also using non-standard plugins may create conflict between the plugins. Again a bad situation to be in. I have curated a list of 7 must-have plugins for your WordPress website. You can download it here. Don’t use a plugin for every small thing. Like if you want to add some custom CSS, you can do so in the WordPress Theme Customizer. There is no need to get an additional plugin. This is where you will have to tell your developer that you want a lean website and not a bloated one. Lazy developers will take a shortcut and use plugins for the banalest thing. This website is using ten plugins. Thrive Architect for building landing pages Thrive Leads for lead generation Google Sitemap for sitemap generation and submission Pods for creating custom post types Pretty Links for link shortening Antispam Bee to weed spammy comments WP-Rocket for performance optimisation Pixel Caffeine for Facebook Pixel integration Imagify for compressing images Regenerate thumbnails for generating thumbnails of the images I am not using a separate SEO plugin because the Genesis Theme I am using comes with builtin SEO support. Keep the count of plugins to maximum 15 so that you don’t have a slow website. Don’t go overboard with them and install like 30 odd plugins. 4. Big Images Stock images have a high resolution. And with high resolution comes a large size. On average, the images downloaded from sites like Unsplash, Pixabay, iStock or other such repositories have a size of 10+ MB. If we use them directly on our WordPress site, things are bound to get slow. Imagine having five images each with a size of 1 MB (forget 10 MB, even 1 MB is enough). Then your webpage will have a size of 5 MB, and that’s excluding any other files. A webpage that big is not acceptable. Sometimes even the images we download from Canva are big. So make sure to compress the images. You can use plugins like EWWW image optimiser or Imagify or WP Smush. I used to install EWWW, but then I switched to Imagify, which is an excellent plugin. Keep your website to a maximum of 3 MB. After that, even a superfast host may struggle to load the site quickly. So make sure you take care of the above four things, and you will have a faster website at your disposal.
- Plan your website the right way with a blueprint and start developing on your own
You are a coach or a consultant or a small business owner and now you want to take your business online. Probably you want to create a course site or a website where people can sign up for your one on one coaching or group coaching, probably you want to start selling your products or services online. Let me be captain obvious for a minute and say that you need a website to do all those things. Before that download the printable blueprint in the pdf format. We will use it for the next steps. Click here to download the blueprint The two options you have with you are either develop the website yourself or hire a web developer or an agency for that matter. The second option is costly and time-consuming. Because you need to vet good web developers then tell them your requirement and wait for them to complete your website. How about you develop it on your own? You think it’s difficult, because, well, you are probably not a techie . To be honest, you don’t have to be a techie to develop a website. Particularly when you are using WordPress. You can read more on that here. Although you can develop a website on your own, you should not go straight-away to the development part. That’s the avoidable mistake. What’s wrong with going in without a plan It’s an old saying when you fail to plan you plan to fail. What exactly happens, is you have seen quite a few websites of influencers or let’s say successful people in your domain. We try to copy one part from one website, the second part from the second website and so on. What you get at the end is a not-so-good cocktail. You cannot fit a BMW’s front door to a Merc’s front door just because it looks good to you. It has to fit properly. If that was the case, the World’s best football team would have all the best players only. And they will win all the time. You also know, that’s not the case. It’s a team that gels well, where each player has a certain role to play will win a lot of matches. Same goes for website You cannot just mix and match various things just because they look good. And when you don’t have a plan you tend to just mix and match. Never ever copy other websites Each website has a personality. Particularly, a personal website. (No kidding! Captain obvious strikes back!!) When you copy another person’s website, you lose your personality. Don’t do that. So what to do? You must have a plan to start with. A Blueprint. So, today I am going to talk about how to plan your website. Step 1 First of all, decide what pages you require on your website. Whether you require an about us page, a contact us page, a blog page, a services page or a products page. The homepage will always be there. Every page on your website should be important and should contain some useful information. If you don’t have any blog post with you then creating a blog post just for the sake of it, is not helpful for your business. Don’t do anything just because others are doing. Step 2 Once you have a list of pages, start designing them. How? Good question little grasshopper! Take a pen and a paper and start drawing each page. Where the menu should be? Where the logo should be? Decide image placements, content placement, the footer and everything else. Decide what should be the colour palette, decide the fonts. Here is a sample for you You can use Google Fonts to check out various fonts. And use Adobe Color to decide colour palette. Don’t write copy in this step. Don’t write headline, subheadline or anything at all. Step 3 Now write copy 😀 Your designs will have only placeholders. There won’t be any actual copy. In this step, you need to fill those placeholders. Similar to designs you just created, don’t copy the copy. You want your copy a personality. Your first copy will be sh*t AF. But very few people have actually written the first draft well. Honestly, even I am still learning it. And there is no issue with that. We learn with each step. So, don’t worry and write your copy. Use MS Word, Apple Pages or Google Docs to store the various drafts. You yourself will see an improvement in you. Your foundation is ready You have a ready blueprint with you. Now, the design is not in your head, it’s on paper. The copy is not in the head, it’s saved on your computer. All you need to do now is select a tool using which you will develop your website. You can choose WordPress, Weebly, Wix, SquareSpace or something else you are comfortable using. Go ahead and start creating a blueprint for your website. All the best 🙂
- How to schedule appointments using WordPress and Calendly
How many times have you missed your meetings due to lousy scheduling? I know, I have missed many. I have forgotten to attend the meeting or even forgot to remember there is a meeting scheduled by me. Scheduling meetings is a big headache. There are a lot of emails going back and forth, just to set up a simple meeting. But you can simplify this task as there are tools like Calendly, Acuity Scheduling available. These tools allow people to book an appointment or an online meeting without any fuss. There is no long sequence of emails to deal with. In this blog post, we will see how we can use a tool like Calendly , with your website built using WordPress. Calendly is a top-rated scheduling tool that is available for free . For availing premium features, you have to upgrade your account to either pro or premium. But even the pro or premium plans are not that costly. Now, let’s look at the procedure for using Calendly with your WordPress website. Step 1 – Sign up for Calendly To use Calendly, you need to sign up for it. So, go to calendly.com Click on the signup button if you don’t have the account with Calendly. If you already have an account with Calendly, then you can click on signup. Complete the signup process by providing the required details that will come on your screen. Once you signup for calendly, you will be welcomed with the following screen. Now, we are not going to see how you can customize different meetings, or how you can block some time blocks. That information is available in Calendly documentation. Step 2 – Get the embed code. To get the embed code, click on the gear icon on the top right of the meeting. Then click on the Add to website button. You will see the following screen. Depending upon how you want to show your calendar, you can select the desired option. Here I will choose inline embed and click continue. You will find the code once you move on from the previous screen. Copy the complete code; you see in the box. Step 3 – Paste the code. In the last step, you need to paste the code, where you want to display the scheduling calendar. The ideal place would be a new page, where you are allowing people to book an appointment. If you are using Elementor, then add this code, in custom HTML widget, if you are using Gutenberg, then also select the Custom HTML block. If you are using classic editor, make sure, you are pasting the code in Text mode and not in Visual mode. Update the page once you have added the code. You will see something like this This is how you can embed Calendly on your WordPress website. It is straightforward to use and convenient for your customers. If you want to add calendly on your WordPress site in such a way that the calendar will open when a button is clicked, you can watch the following video. So, go ahead, embed Calendly and start booking appointments 🙂
- How not to bloat your WordPress installation with too many plugins?
Plugins. A thing that converts your WordPress website from a dud to stud. WordPress is a blogging tool, and we can add posts and pages quickly using it. You cannot do anything else with the basic installation of WordPress. So, we have to use plugins to extend the functionality of the website. But, plugins are the reason why most of the people turn away from WordPress. And for the right idea too! When I started with WordPress, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of plugins available. I was like a deer in headlights and I had no idea which plugins to use. I mean initially, I just wanted a contact form on my website. But words like Contact Form 7, Pirate Forms, Ninja Forms, Darth Vader Forms and many others started coming my way. How can anyone with little to no knowledge of WordPress, select a plugin from a vast set available? So, what happens is we start installing a bucketload of plugins. We keep on fixing them. What we don’t know as someone new to WordPress is with the installation of each plugin we are substantially slowing down the website. A plugin comes with its CSS and JS files. If you don’t know what they mean, that’s fine. All you need to know is they add the burden on your website. Every time the website loads, the server has to serve that file, so that the plugin will work. Imagine if you are using 30 plugins. Then roughly that will add 60 files. And assuming the plugin is required on all the pages, for each page server has to deliver those files. That means, we have to make sure that we delete the plugins that we don’t need. You can deactivate them, but then, the entries created by the plugin in the database remain. Make sure your housekeeping department of WordPress is working. Not all plugins are for frontend. What does that mean? Well, it means, some plugins do not add functionality that is required by the visitor on your website. Some plugins like a backup plugin are needed by the administrator to take the backup of your website. They do not in any way, improve or reduce the performance of the site that can be experienced by a visitor. Use the plugins fearlessly. Yes, plugins slow down the site. Yes, there are bad plugins. But there are excellent plugins too. And we need them. Without the plugins, your WordPress site won’t account for much. So here is what you should do when Read the description of the plugin. See if it can satisfy your requirement. Check whether the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress What was the last time the plugin was updated? If everything is fine, install it. Use it. If you find it is not satisfying your requirement, deactivate it, delete it. That way, we will make sure our website is not loaded with too many plugins. What to look for in a plugin I check for four things when installing a plugin. Easy to use Secure Provides the functionality I need Updated regularly And how do we find the above information? Well, we can get the above information by reading the plugin description on wordpress.org . Search for the plugin and then click on it on the search page. You can check out the reviews too on this page. You will come to know whether other people are facing some issues. So, this is the process that you should follow while installing the plugins on your website. Keep your website lean; do not overload it with the unnecessary plugins.
- Can you build a sales funnel using WordPress?
Sales funnels are the heart of any online business as they are the gateway to your success. They bring you leads, they give you conversion, they actually convince people who don’t know you to show trust in you, your products and services. The problem is there are many sales funnels builder out there and their cost ranges from $0 to $297 per month and sometimes cost even more. And then it becomes really hard for the new online entrepreneur to select the right funnel builder. And out of this confusion, many of the online entrepreneurs ask ‘Can I build my sales funnels in WordPress?’ Many of them already have a WordPress site, and it’s very natural of them to ask this question. The answer is a resounding yes! Yes, you can build sales funnels using WordPress. Different tools to build sales funnels using WordPress Cartflows Cartflows is one of the popular sales funnels builders. One of the creators of the Astra theme is the co-founder of Cartflows. So, you can guess the quality of the plugin. Cartflow comes in two flavours, one is free and the other one is paid. The free version, in my personal opinion, is not that useful. If you want to leverage the power of sales funnels then you need a paid version. The annual version costs $199 and the lifetime version costs $799. You can know more about Carflows by clicking here. Different features of Cartflows One-click upsells Order bumps A/B split testing Conversion templates Checkout layouts Pre-checkout offers Analytics and reports And your risk is covered because they do offer a 30-days money-back guarantee. Many of my colleagues who were using expensive tools like ClickFunnels have shifted their base to Cartflows and they are happy. Checkout Carflows OptimizeFunnels OptimizeFunnels is part of OptimizePress; a popular name in the WordPress community. To use, OptimizeFunnels, you need to purchase the OptimizePress’ Suite plan. This will cost you $199 per year. You can create the following funnels with OptimizeFunnels Launch Funnels List Building Funnels Sales Funnels Webinar Funnels It’s not very clear from their website, whether they provide features like Upsells, One-time offers, and order bumps. A detailed review of OptimizeFunnels is on the way. Stay tuned for that. For more information on OptimizePress, do click on the button below. Checkout OptimizeFunnels WPFunnels WPFunnels is another good sales funnel builder for WordPress. It costs $97 per month which includes 1 site. Their pricing model is different from 2 of the above tools. The features available in all the 3 plans are the same, what changes is the number of sites you can use it on. So, a $97 plan gives a license of 1 site, $147 will give 5 sites and $237 unlimited site. All these costs are annual and not per month. WPFunnels boasts of Ready to use templates Drag and drop builder Order bump Custom checkout templates One time offers Upsells and downsells Support for Gutenberg and Elementor So, these are the three different tools you can use to build a sales funnel using WordPress. Checkout WPFunnels Please note that I’m not considering tools that are just page builders like Elementor, Thrive and Divi. I’m considering tools that can work as full-fledged sales funnels builder. Why people prefer WordPress over other tools? Let’s look at the different reasons why people prefer WordPress over anything else. Familiarity with WordPress WordPress is easy to use. Many online entrepreneurs have already spent a lot of time using it, learning it and that has made them comfortable using WordPress. I have been using WordPress for almost 10 years now, and while I learned other tools like ClickFunnels, GrooveFunnels, Systeme.io and other such tools, every time I thought man, WordPress is so easy to use. But the thing is, probably ClickFunnels or GrooveFunnels are easier than WordPress to use, but I was so familiar with WordPress, that while learning something new, I was bit apprehensive. Nobody wants to go through the learning curve. Learning something new over what you already know and can use is always preferred. Cost For hosting a WordPress site, all you need is a domain, hosting, a decent theme and an easy to use page builder. This cost is quite controllable; if you decide to go with basic hosting, your cost should not be higher than $150 per year and then for higher-end hosting there is no limit. Whereas, in the case of other funnel builders cost about $97 per month. Now there’s a new kid on the block, Systeme.io, which costs nothing to start with. And, the decision to increase the costs of these tools is complete with those companies. For example, if ClickFunnels start charging $497 instead of $97 then you either pay up the higher cost or you shift all the funnels to a different platform. And no you cannot just migrate them like copy-pasting something. So, the cost is a major factor and one should definitely consider it. So, what are your reasonable options? Personally speaking, even though I’m a WordPress developer, I don’t like to use WordPress for building sales funnels. WordPress is good for building traditional websites and to some extent landing pages. But to build a complete sales funnel using WordPress is not something I’m comfortable with. Because ultimately WordPress is built as a blogging platform. We should not stretch it beyond a limit. Plus there are issues like Site security Frequent backups Ability of the hosting to scale-up when a surge of traffic comes In fact, I have written one article on why ClickFunnels is better than WordPress for sales funnels. This article to be honest is applicable to all the funnel builder tools out there. I’m of the opinion that, you should use something like Systeme.io if you’re just starting out. Because it’s free to use and easy to learn. Sign up for Systeme.io You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars just to build simple sales funnels. So, go ahead and start building your first sales funnel and start making money. All the best to you 🙂
- How to select a web hosting for your WordPress website?
Every WordPress website requires web hosting to store WordPress files and database. However, there are various types of hostings and multiple providers. This makes it very difficult for a beginner to select a proper hosting. In this video, I discuss various types of web hosting available for your WordPress site. This video is part of weekly mastermind for my members. Types of web hosting: Shared Virtual Private Server (VPS) Dedicated Cloud Usually, for a new website, you should go for shared hosting. As your site is new, the traffic will be low in the beginning. Therefore to control the costs, it makes sense to go with shared hosting. Shared hosting allows you to quickly set up your website without putting much burden on your pocket. You can quickly test your blog idea or website with shared hosting. And when you know you are getting a lot of traffic or your current hosting is unable to fulfil the demand, then you can go for other types. If you know from the start you are going to get a high amount of traffic, then I will suggest either go for the Cloud hosting or Virtual private server (VPS). And if you don’t want any headache of installing, managing and any other system-related task with WordPress, then go with a managed WordPress hosting. But, mind you, managed hosting costs a lost. Preferred hosting: Of all the web hosting I have used, Siteground stands out. They have excellent infrastructure and good support. You can purchase Siteground from this link . If you want to go for cloud hosting, you can go for CloudWays. You can purchase CloudWays from this link. And if you want to go for a managed hosting, then you can go for Kinsta. You can purchase Kinsta from this link. You can check out the other tools I use for my business here .
- Save thousands of dollars by replacing Zapier with this
Why do you need Zapier? In our online business, it rarely happens that one tool will suffice all our requirements. We need to use different tools for different purposes. For example, we are using a quiz for generating leads. We are using ‘involve.me’ for creating this quiz. Now, I want to add a person who participates in my quiz to my course hosted on Kajabi. Now, this is not possible, because there is no direct connection between ‘involve.me’ and Kajabi. So, we need some duct tape to connect them together. And, this is where Zapier comes into the picture. Whenever there are a bunch of tools that don’t speak with each other directly, we need to make them speak through someone. And, that someone is Zapier. Why Zapier is prohibitive to newbies? Zapier is one of the very sophisticated tools available to online entrepreneurs that are super easy to use. Anyone with decent knowledge of how to use a browser will be able to connect different tools without any issues. So, what’s the problem? The problem is the number of tasks. Tasks? What’s a task now? What are tasks? Imagine a scenario where you’re receiving the payment through Stripe, and you want to record the payment details in Stripe. But you want to check the country of the person who has made the payment and only if the country is the UK then only you want to push it in Google Sheet. The steps in this workflow would look like the following Payment details received from Stripe Check if the country is the UK If yes push the data in Google Sheet. Here, these 3 steps are 3 tasks. So, if you are processing 500 payments per month, you will use 1500 tasks. And the crux of the matter is Zapier charges you depending on the number of tasks. So, for 1500 tasks you need to pay $59 per month or $39 per month if you prepay for 12 months. Now, imagine if the number of payments goes to 1000, then you would require 3000 tasks, which will cost you $133 per month. You may be thinking, it’s 1000 payments per month, so $133 should not be a problem, right? But replacing 1000 payments with 1000 email ids collected and then justifying $133 per month becomes very hard. People are literally spending hundreds of dollars on Zapier but when you’re small that amount can be prohibitive. What are the alternatives to Zapier? So, what now? Because you need to duct tape various applications, you need something like Zapier. Thankfully there are such three good alternatives. Pabbly The best alternative to Zapier is Pabbly. Pabbly is as easy as Zapier to use, but costs way too little than Zapier. In fact, they are providing a lifetime plan which costs peanuts in front of Zapier. It supports more than 750 applications. And their lifetime deal costs $149 for 3000 tasks per month and 10 workflows. Signup for Pabbly Integrately Integrately is fairly new, and there are some issues with it, sometimes the automation is stuck in the queue and either they are lost or are processed in a batch. However, similar to Pabbly; Integrately costs a fraction of what Zapier costs. Plus their free plan is very generous. Right now it supports 600+ Apps and costs $19 per month for 14000 tasks. Talk about being generous. Integromat The third alternative is Integromat. Another option that costs nothing in front of Zapier. I had used Integromat for one automation. So, I don’t have much experience with it. But for one workflow, it worked perfectly and there was hardly any issue. However, I found it a bit tricky to use. And it wasn’t as easy as Zapier. It costs $9 per month for 10000 operations. So, Why I chose Pabbly? More tasks at less cost Pabbly is providing a lifetime deal. Which I think, you should take it with both hands. It’s designed so beautifully that it could easily charge what Zapier is charging. So, before the lifetime deal goes away and costs increase, you should it. I took it and I couldn’t be happier. Even if you go with their monthly plan, it will cost you just $13 per month for 12000 tasks. Whereas you will be paying $59 for 1500 tasks. You can easily imagine the difference. Internal tasks are not counted One of my gripes with Zapier is they charge for internal tasks. So, what are internal tasks? Condition checking Number extractor Text formatter Currency formatter Webhook Email parser Filter And more such 20+ operations So, in the case of the Stripe payment example, we studied initially, we won’t be charged for the Condition checking task. That is it won’t be counted towards our tasks credit. This is such a big advantage over Zapier. Free webhooks in Pabbly Zapier has tagged some apps and actions as premium. And on the free plan of Zapier (which is useless in my opinion), you cannot use webhooks. I’ll not go much into the details of what are webhooks because this will quickly turn into a tech article. But, in one line we can say after some action the application will send some data to a certain destination. This destination is a webhook. For example, if someone fills a form in GrooveFunnels, it will send the form data to the webhook, which will be captured by this webhook for further processing. So, why webhooks are important? When a new application is developed; rather than developing all the integrations, they provide a webhook that can be consumed by applications like Zapier and Pabbly. In short, webhooks are very important. The problem is Zapier has tagged webhooks as premium. So you cannot use them on the free plan and on the paid plan there are limitations on how many premium apps and actions you can use. That’s not the case with Pabbly. Webhook is not counted towards the credit you have. What should you do? I think if you want to save on future costs and want to use something that will compete with Zapier toe to toe, you should sign up for Pabbly. Trust me, you won’t go wrong. Signup for Pabbly Check our video gallery for videos related to Pabbly
- The simplest way of installing Facebook Pixel on WordPress
Installing Facebook Pixel on your WordPress site should not involve some cumbersome copy-pasting or installing obscure plugins or editing the header.php file. I am going to show you a straightforward process using which you can install the Pixel on your website without pulling your hair. I have installed Facebook Pixel on my website using the same plugin. So let’s start Go to Plugins in your WordPress admin Click on Add New Type Pixel Caffeine in the search box Click Install Now Click Activate Click Setup Now Click Facebook Connect (You should have an ad account in place to do this) Continue with an appropriate Facebook account Click on Ok Select the ad account and Pixel from the two dropdowns and click Apply (You should have already created a pixel, if not then visit this guide by Facebook, Read till Assign, a Partner) Make sure tracking is Active Why do you require Facebook Pixel? This Pixel is a tracking script. This tracking script tracks the people coming on your website. So, assume, you are visiting this page on my website, and my site has Facebook Pixel installed on it. So, what it will do? It will check whether you have a Facebook profile. How does it check whether you have a profile? So, if you are logged in Facebook, you will have Facebook’s cookie in your browser. Using that cookie, Facebook will understand whether you have a profile or not. Once Facebook identifies, you have a profile. It will save your name in some encrypted format in my Facebook ad account. Now, do I get to see your details? NO! I don’t get to see your details. But what I can do with your saved data is, I can run a Facebook ad, targeting people who have visited this particular page. That’s why you need to install Facebook Pixel on your website.