In this article, we’re going to talk about WordPress plugins, and specifically, the one we consider the BEST solution for backing up WordPress sites. Unlike other articles around the web, this is one we’ve used for 5+ years (after trying almost everything on the market) across 1000s of websites: BlogVault
We’ve tried pretty much every plugin on the market and settled on BlogVault.net – we’ve done 100s of successful restores (big and small single file restores) and used it on over 2000 sites both for our SEO agency and in other services like WPSpeedFix.com our site speed optimization service.
Below we’ll explain why we chose Blogvault specifically, the features that tipped the scales and why you might want to consider it. Your backup needs may differ from ours as a web agency so if you’re shopping for a WordPress backup solution make sure you check out some of the other popular options on the market including:
Why backup up all? Well good question. In as nutshell – if your site is commercial in nature then no doubt a lot of time, energy, effort and money has gone into building the site. Dataloss does happen and hacked WordPress sites is a very common problem. A backup plugin or solution is effectively an insurance policy that protects the valuable asset that is your website.
Also, your SEO and Google rankings are directly tied to the content on your website – if you lose that data then you’ll lose those rankings.
Important Backup Plugin Features
Lets talk through the key features we looked for in a backup plugin and why. We’re a web agency and managing 100s of sites on a daily basis so our needs might be a little different to yours.
Important to note here that you should NOT choose a solution based on price or whether the plugin is free. Free is not really free if you need to restore the site and can’t – remember your SEO rankings, your marketing, your enquiries, calls and sales are all tied to your website so even if it’s only down for a single day that’ll likely cost you a whole bunch of money!
We recorded a short 5 minute audio of these points to talk through WordPress & also Woocommerce backups, click play below to listen:
Click play to here about backup plugin features in more detail
1. Do you need realtime backup capability?
BlogVault offers realtime backup capability in some of its higher plans. What is realtime backup capability? It basically means that changes to the site are being backed up as they happen.
This is particularly important for Woocommerce and Membership sites where changes are happening 24/7, all hours of the day and night as opposed to a typical backup that happens only once a day. If you’re only backing up your Woo website nightly you can potentially lose upto 24 hours worth of data with a successful restore.
The realtime version of BlogVault will back up any changes as they happen – as soon as an order comes through, when users make comments or when you get new membership signups! There will be a little lag (a few minutes or so) for the backup to happen as the change queues the backup which then needs to pull the updated files and database changes from the site, but the changes are being backed up as they occur.
This is probably the biggest reason why we love BlogVault as for our agency business we manage a number of Woocommerce sites and a handful of membership sites with changes happening 24/7
2. Do You Know What Your Backup Plugin is NOT Backing Up?
This is another really important reason! Pretty much all backup plugins have exclusions, which means they have things that they don’t back up – things like log files, or cache files, for example.
This also goes for hosting providers – they say they’re doing backup, but if you read the fine print you’ll likely find that they’re not backing up MP3 files, or MP4 video files, for example. So they usually have a long list of things they don’t actually back up, tucked away somewhere.
**IMPORTANT NOTE HERE – never rely solely on a web hosts backup solution. There’s a rule with backups, two is one and one is none which is a fancy way of saying have 2 backup solutions. Without visibility into the hosting provider’s backup solution you have no idea whether or not the backup is actually working.
An example where backup exclusions *almost* screwed us…
We’ve had a bad experience with VaultPress, another backup plugin where we *almost* lost the members database for a membership site.
Unknown to us, VaultPress wasn’t backing up any database tables that didn’t start with the prefix “WP_” (by default WordPress database tables have names like wp_posts, wp_options and so forth).
The particular site we wanted to recover had a whole bunch of tables starting with DAP_, which related to a membership site plugin, Digital Access Pass.
In this case, at least we were fortunate that the hosting provider had another backup which we could use to fill in the gaps, but it was definitely a bit of a scare! The website in question was a really important site, a membership site (DidgeridooDojo.com in case you’re wondering, 10000+ users in the DAP database), and we got very close to losing a serious amount of data there.
An important lesson learned that has no doubt saved us many times since. It’s important that regardless of what solution you use, you’re aware of any exclusions in the backup software.
A BlogVault feature we love is that it will specifically tell you what it is and what it’s not backing up, and it will give you the option to include database tables and to include files that it has automatically excluded.
This is another important reason why we love using BlogVault and why it stands out from other similar plugins.
If you have a custom WordPress solution where folders are sitting outside the regular /wp-content folder this feature is really key as most backup solutions won’t pickup those folders by default.
Screenshots below of the include/exclude screens for both files and database tables.
One feature we love is that it tells us exactly what it’s NOT backup up. In this screenshot the red folders are excluded from backup. If we want to backup them up we can click to select them (click image to enlarge)
This screenshot shows us the database tables Blogvault is NOT backing up, again you can click to select them and back them up. In this case they’re log tables we don’t need a copy of. (click image to enlarge)
3. Reliability, Alerting & Offsite Storage
We strongly recommend you use a cloud based backup solution.
A lot of other plugins, like Updraft and Backupbuddy, are not really cloud-based – they’re really more like standalone plugins that can backup to cloud based services like Amazon S3 and Dropbox.
The problem with that is that there’s no real monitoring capability, so there’s no real alerting if something goes wrong like the plugin being disabled, you’re effectively flying blind.
The bottom line is this – we’ve never had a backup issue with BlogVault. BlogVault is a cloud-based service which always tells us when the plugin might be disabled or disconnected. So if something fails, or the site hasn’t been backed up in 24 hours or a few days, it will tell us.
Other Backup Plugin Features
Blogvault provides other important metrics around site performance, uptime and reliability (click to enlarge)
The team behind BlogVault has been expanding the product over the last few years – there’s a bunch of other handy features that are fantastic and help us monitor the health of the sites we’re managing – elements like uptime, performance and reliability.
The screenshot above gives you a quick overview of the features. The features we like are:
Staging Sites – They’ve got a staging functionality built in. A staging site is a website clone where you can test changes, updates and essentially do risky things that might break the live site.
Plugin Updates – You can also deploy patches from the BlogVault console, so it has almost become like a management tool.
Site Migrations – You can do site migrations with it – we use it all the time to migrate sites, and not just for backing up. A lot of hosting providers use it as well: WP Engine, Cloudways, and a few others are actually using a white label version of BlogVault plugin to do backups.
Malware Scanning – They’ve got some additional options concerning malware; they’ve got malware scanning, with which they can scan for malware, hacked sites, and things like that.
There’s a bunch of other minor features that might be useful; for example, you can give user’s access, that sort of thing.
In short, BlogVault is a fantastic plugin – they’ve also got a free trial so you can give it a try and test it out for yourself, log into the console and get comfortable with it (it’s really easy to use, not technical at all). And please don’t hesitate to give us your feedback once you’ve tried it – we’d love to hear it! You can post in the comments below and let us know what you think once you’ve given it a try!
If you want to check out WordPress & Woocommerce backup plugin alternatives to BlogVault we can recommend UpdraftPlus and BackupBuddy
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
At WPSpeedFix.com, our site speed optimization service, (through which we’ve worked on just over 3000 sites so far, optimizing them for speed) we often receive questions concerning WordPress themes. A lot of the time it all boils down to which WordPress themes are the fastest.
In this post we share the fastest WordPress themes we’ve found in 2019.
Below we share the fastest WP themes and frameworks we’ve found and also give you a brief overview of some of their individual features.
If you want to skip all that and just want to know which themes are the fastest, it’s these four:
Generatepress – a theme that’s very lightweight and built for speed. The developer of this theme set out to build something that’s lightning fast. Part of what makes this theme so fast is the fact it doesn’t rely on Jquery, which means it’s light on Javascript so it renders faster AND makes Google Pagespeed Insights very happy.
Astra – this is another lightning-fast theme and also has some really awesome child theme options. Like the Generatepress theme, it also doesn’t rely on Jquery – it’s a little more feature heavy so can have a bit more javascript.
Genesis Framework – this one’s one of the oldest themes on the internet and also always has been super-fast. A version 3 of this theme was released recently, and it contains inbuilt AMP support.
Flatsome, the fastest theme for Woocommerce – definitely the fastest Woocommerce theme we’ve stumbled upon. It has a lot of features, operates with lightning speed, and also has some friendly Woocommerce optimizations, like for example lazy-loading.
Why Speed Matters
A fast website is very important. Speed impacts Google rankings, and also Google likes faster websites, so it’s definitely better for SEO. Fast sites rank higher, or to be more specific – slow sites don’t rank as high and they get a ranking penalty.
But what’s even more important than rankings and traffic is conversion rate. People get pretty frustrated with slow websites, and as you yourself might also know, when a website is slow you’re pretty quick to click away and go elsewhere. And that really has a heavy impact on the conversion rate and the number of enquires in sales and calls, or whatever the website’s generating.
So both traffic and conversions are affected by speed, which means – speed is important!
How Theme Speed Factors into Overall Site Speed
Two words: Render speed. Getting the stuff from the web-servers is one part of speed, and the second part is how quickly the site actually renders. A fast WordPress theme both renders fast and is quick to download. Its actual file size is much smaller, so the amount of stuff to download is much smaller, and its speed of rendering is much faster.
What Makes a Theme Fast – HTML, JS, CSS, jquery or no jquery
It’s basically smaller – smaller in weight, which means it has less code. It has cleaner CSS – the style sheets are much cleaner, and there are also fewer CSS files, which means there’s less to download and process, and there’s less javascript. There’s not that much stuff to process: there are fewer javascript files to actually download.
All of this translates to faster download from the server and faster render, so the amount of time it takes the browser to actually assemble the page and show it
If we want to get more into the technical stuff, we have to mention jquery. Jquery is a javascript library, and themes that are based on it basically go slower. The reason for this is that the device has to do more processing. So typically where the internet speed might be more variable or slower (the speed is tied to the reception – how strong the cell phone signal is), and there’s less CPU power available versus the desktop computer. That renders speed in the amount of javascript work the device has to do a really key part of how fast the site wall renders. So themes that don’t rely on javascript, which can render without javascript will load faster.
Testing Speed
Just be mindful when it comes to theme speed. You’ve probably read a few articles on theme speed. A lot of them will have tested demo sites or demo themes and will have speed test results of themes, but they’re not a good indication of theme speed. The reason why the testing of a demo site is problematic is that you don’t know where they’re being hosted – typically they’re on cheap hosting providers and they’re also highly unlikely to be speed optimized. This means that the tests aren’t really valid – they’re using demo themes or child themes, and they’re not actually live sites, and they kinda don’t mean anything. So, they’re worthless in terms of gauging how lightweight a theme is.
So the main things are: jquery or no jquery, how much javascript it requires in general basically – the more features the theme has, the more javascript is required. A lot of the themes in this list have a lot of features, but you can turn most of them off. Things like Google Maps integration, Vimeo and YouTube integration, things like that – they all require javascript libraries which slow down the theme. So the ability to turn them off will actually make these themes faster.
Once again, keep it in mind that those speed test you encounter on the web are pretty much useless, in fact, worse than useless because quite often something will look faster than it actually is in real life.
If you want to do speed testing, we have a test tool we’ve built for our speed fix agency, WPSpeedFix, so you can access that at SiteSpeedBot.com, if there’s a site you want to test. It’ll give you detailed recommendations on speed that you’ll probably won’t find elsewhere. Other tools on the internet don’t probe or test a lot of the things we do, things that really matter in 2019, on the modern web.
There are a few other considerations, besides speed, when you’re thinking of selecting a theme:
Gutenburg support – the new WordPress 5 editor. Generally most of the up to date themes will support Gutenburg, but not all, so if that’s important to you, keep it in mind. If they don’t support Gutenburg, you’re going to have to use another plugin to disable that new WordPress 5 builder
Custom code
Child themes – if you’re running a child theme or you want to use a template off the shelf, some of them have better-looking child themes or off the shelf templates than others.
Woocommerce – whether or not you’re running Woocommerce – some of the themes are going to look better or function better than others with Woocommerce – so keep that in mind if you’re running Woocommerce from membership sites. On this list, we’ve got fast and fastest WordPress themes, and actually some of the fast, rather than the fastest ones, will work better on a Woocommerce site, so just keep that in mind as well.
Ease of development/familiarity with the theme with your developer
Fastest Themes
The themes listed here are hands-down the fastest themes on the market you can currently find. It you want lightning fast WordPress theme, then you should definitely go with one of these.
Superb performance and super versatile. If you use its WordPress Customizer options (of which there are many), you can adapt GeneratePress to any kind of niche. Also, if you’re ready to pay for the premium version, lots of pre-built demo sites, which you’ll be able to easily import, will become available at your disposal. Definitely one of the fastest WordPress themes you’ll be able to find, no argument about that.
The developer of this theme, Tom Usborne, has concentrated on creating a clean, lightweight code. The theme is under 30kb, doesn’t have any dependencies (that also includes jQuery), and it’s simply designed to perform really well in general.
Another very popular option, similar to the GeneratePress theme. Astra also doesn’t rely on jQuery, while also being pretty lightweight at just 50kb. It’s also a very customizable plugin – if you want, you can import one of the numerous free demo websites that are built with either:
Elementor
Beaver Builder
Gutenberg (the WordPress block editor)
Brizy
If you wish, you can also tinker with things yourself, using tons of the options available in the real-time Customizer.
Genesis is also among the most popular WordPress themes out there, and is often used by a number of professional bloggers on the internet. It’s a lightweight theme – less than 30kb in size, with lots of SEO-friendly features and very responsive design. It’s also Gutenberg ready and contains one-click demo import.
The best-selling Woocommerce theme – this theem is deeply integrated with the e-commerce platform for WordPress, thus providing users with the best e-commerce features and functionality.
A very powerful theme with a great design, it’s also a very fast one that allows for a great online store experience.
This theme offers a variety of options for customization – it integrates a large element library and a powerful live page builder. It’s also got more than 300 layouts that are pre-defined, as well as sections that allow you to replace the demo content with your own one.
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Fast themes
The themes listed in this section are popular themes which are still fast but don’t fall in the category of the fastest. We’ve decided to include them as well because they allow for more flexible styling and child themes since they are less constrained by the super lightweight code of the fastest themes.
Divi is without a doubt one of the most successful themes on the market – the Divi theme itself has about 500 000 users! This is a powerful and flexible theme, coming with its own page builder that’s made in the form of drag-and-drop page builder. It’s also updated very regularly, which means new features are being constantly introduced.
This is a multi-purpose theme: it will allow you to build any kind of website you want: business sites, portfolios, blogs, online shops (it fully integrates with Woocommerce), and more. It’s a theme that’s very easy use, meant to serve different purposes; it’s also got customization options that allow for some very creative page designs which you can make at will (you’re able to control colors, fonts, and other design elements). Divi has very responsive layouts which make it work on practically any device.
This one’s a number one seller on the ThemeForest market place, the most famous online selling spot for themes. This theme is very convenient for people that don’t have any coding or developer’s knowledge, which means it can help users of any level to build the website they want very easily.
It’s a fully customizable theme (it’s got thousands of customization options), meant for different site purposes. You’re able to change all design elements via the user interface. It also contains hundreds of pre-made page designs.
One of the most flexible WordPress themes, great for the more creative people behind WordPress websites who want full control of their site. The Bridge theme comes with a wide range of modules, and also premium plugins that allow for an even better customization experience. It’s got lots of customization options that are built-in and which can be accessed through the Customizer.
Bridge is the kind of theme that contains: Slider Revolution, Visual Composer, Timetable Responsive Schedule and much more. There are over 350 demo options with which you can start building your site; this theme will also allow you to combine elements from different demos.
It also comes with multi-purposed modules – you can use them for online shops, as well as magazines, blogs, and a lot more.
This is a very powerful theme for creating sales pages, landing pages, membership portals, as well as blog pages and training areas. In fact, it’s one of the best themes that you can find out there for sales pages!
It also comes with a plugin version, which also means that, if you opt for the plugin, you won’t need to change your current theme.
With Optimizepress you can also create webinar pages, download pages; it has Overly optimizer which lets you create cool looking popups for your website. It includes integrated SEO features.
Another streamlined option that has the same basic approach such as GeneratePress and Astra. It has a lightweight base theme that allows for customization of any niche that you can imagine, although it’s not as lightweight as the other two mentioned.
The same as Astra, OceanWP is also offering demo sites which are pre-built and which you can import if you don’t plan on starting from scratch.
Another flexible drag and drop functioning page builder, one that works on the front end of your WordPress website. Regardless whether you’re a beginner in the IT world or an experienced professional, Beaver Builder will provide you with enough control and flexibility, as well as easy to use features and options for those that want to build a unique site of their own.
If you’re using a page builder plugin, such as Elementor, and you also want the fastest possible basis for your site, then the Elementor Hello theme could just be the right option for you.
A mega barebones theme that gives you the necessary functionality you’ll need in order to work with your page builder, although it doesn’t include some of the more detailed customization options you’d get with another theme (since you’re supposed to use Elementor to handle that).
That being said, the Elementor Hello is not a theme you’ll use all by itself. But, as was mentioned above, if you’re already using Elementor Pro for theme building or page building, this can be a superb option that will give you the biggest performance-optimized basis possible, so it can withstand that theme building functionality.
Some Final Notes
Speed is only one element of marketing, and as long as you have one of the themes on this list, the site will run fast enough. If you want it to run as fast as humanly possible, if you’re trying to squeeze every last drop of speed out of the site, then, by all means, go with the fastest one, but keep it in mind that marketing is not just about speed. The design and the style of the site actually probably matters more than it being milliseconds faster from another theme.
Also, keep in mind that some themes will support more customization than others (aka CSS that’s more workable than others’). And, if you’re working with a developer, some developers will be familiar with certain themes – Divi, for example, is a very, very popular theme, and they’ll probably have a lot of experience working with that theme. This means that they’re comfortable with it, they understand it, whereas if you throw them in front of a brand new theme, it might take more work to achieve the result you actually want because they’ll have to do more research.
If you have any questions about this article, please post them in the comment section below; we’ll be happy to come back to you and elaborate, as well as provide more info on whatever you want to know on the fastest WordPress themes. Thanks for reading!
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
If you’re on this page no doubt you already know that website speed is important – Google rewards faster websites (or more accurately, punishes slow sites with poor rankings) and your customers and prospects want a fast site too. You know yourself when a site is slow to load you quickly lose patience and click away right?
As part of our agency work we started doing site speed optimization to the point where we now have a completely separate business that focuses solely on WordPress Site Speed Optimization – WPSpeedFix.com
Since we started that business in late 2015 we’ve optimized just shy of 3000 sites so have deep experience in what works and what doesn’t when it comes to fixing slow sites and optimizing their loading times.
In this post we’ll share the best WordPress Speed Optimization Plugins, Tools & Resources that we recommend and use on a daily basis, some free, some unpaid and definitely a one or two you haven’t thought about before.
Table of Contents
1. Caching
Apart from having a high quality web host, caching plugins are a key component in getting WordPress loading lightning fast.
Caching pre-builds your website’s pages before you even receive a request from a visitor. With a cache in place, all the MySQL database lookups and PHP processing required to generate your HTML pages is done before the visitor hits the website. When the visitor’s web browser requests a page the HTML file is sitting on the web server ready to go which can often cut seconds from the load time.
There are plenty of caching plugins out there and we’ve pretty much used them all. The three below are what we use and recommend on an ongoing basis.
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) is one of the fastest caching plugins BUT it can be very complex. Unlike most other plugins, W3TC focusses exclusively on caching and skips other features like Lazy Loading, Database Optimization and so forth.
W3TC supports more advanced memory caches such as Redis and Memcached and both Object and Database Caches whereas most other caching plugins only support Browser and Page Caching.
These more advanced caching methods are important on high traffic sites especially Woocommerce sites that are database heavy and intensive.
BEST FOR:
Zero budget optimizations (Free is a great price!)
High traffic sites or database heavy sites where database and object caching is more important
Technical users who want granular control over caching settings
The WP Rocket plugin is an easy to use plugin and is a great option if you’re not super technical and DIYing your site speed optimization.
It is a paid plugin (pricing starts at $49) but it’s ease of use and simplicity makes the price tag well worth it. There’s also an unlimited site license developer option so if you’re a web designer or agency managing a lot of sites the price versus value proposition is great (we’ve paid for the developer license for years and is well worth it)
Some of the features WP Rocket offers over and above W3TC are lazy loading (albeit there’s a standalone free WP Rocket Lazy Load plugin you can use with W3TC), database optimization (can be done with the free WP Optimize plugin also) and some granular settings around DNS prefetching.
BEST FOR:
DIYers and less tech savvy users
Simple sites where only Page Caching is required
Web designers and agencies that manage a lot of sites and need an optimization solution that is fast and cheap
Swift Performance is one of the newer caching plugins on the marketplace and it sits somewhere between WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache.
Where WP Rocket is quite simple with a simple interface, Swift has some advanced caching options that neither WP Rocket or W3TC offer.
Some additional features in Swift include Image Optimization (which brings NextGen Image Optimization), Whitelabel capability which is great for agencies and designers and the premium option offers some advanced speed optimizations like HTTP2 push and Woocommerce Ajax session caching.
There’s also both free and paid options so you can give Swift a test drive at no cost before deciding to fork out any $$$
Right now Swift is the best performing plugin on the marketplace and if we had to recommend one plugin Swift would it.
BEST FOR:
Both the DIYer and developer level optimizer
Optimizers who are focussed on Google Pagespeed Insights Score & Lighthouse
We often encounter people that are obsessed with getting an XYZ score on a speed testing tool, or ones that aim for a loading time of under 1 second but completely ignore the quality of their web host. Uptime is at least as important as speed if not even more important.
Downtime means ZERO speed – preventing downtime is even more important than the overall operational speed of the site!
Most poor quality, cheap shared hosts have several hours per downtime per week. In some cases several hours per day.
We strongly recommend you run uptime monitoring on your site so you get a clear picture of the reliability of your web host.
The uptime software we use and recommend is UptimeRobot.com – there’s a fantastic free option that monitors your site on 5 minute intervals but we use the paid option (dirt cheap) that monitors on 1 minute intervals.
Hosting is the basis of everything you set out to do on the internet. Your SEO and Google rankings, your Adwords and Facebook ads, as well as the enquiries, calls and emails your site generates – all of them are connected to the quality of your hosting provider.
If you’re afraid of choosing a more expensive hosting provider – don’t be! Hosting that’s faster and more reliable will, in the end, bring you more profit and will easily pay for itself. The reason for this is simple enough – it’ll provide you with more enquiries, calls and sales that’ll come through your website.
The problem is that most people base their hosting choices on the price that’s being offered, and this isn’t really the best criteria, because it comes down to this: when it comes to hosting, you get what you pay for. And while price may be one of the criteria included in choosing a hosting provider, it shouldn’t be the only one, or the main one. If you do the math, you’ll see that the difference in price between a good host and a bad one isn’t that big – it comes down to a couple of lunches a month.
There are four hosts that we use ourselves and recommend to clients on a daily basis:
Siteground – this is one of the fastest cPanel hosts in the world (also one of the cheaper good hosts out there)
Cloudways – offers dedicated, speed optimized VPS servers, just without the complexity (starts at $10 USD/month)
WPX Hosting – high-quality managed WordPress hosting, a nice balance of speed and price; it has data centers in the US and UK.
Kinsta – premium managed WordPress hosting, best suited to serious sites
This is also one of the more unusual recommendations we’ve included in an article that deals with speed optimization plugins. But, we do think that similar to website uptime (or downtime), having a good quality backup plugin is extremely important as well.
It’s very likely that at one point your site is going to experience the following: it’s going to get hacked, will face a problem of a technical nature, or something will be deleted by accident.
This is where a good quality backup comes in the picture – not having one means that if something of the above happens, you’re most likely going to lose data and won’t be able to recover part of it.
And when it comes to hosting providers, a lot of the time we see how they wash their hands clean when it comes to any kind of data loss. Sure, your hosting provider can provide backup, but if something goes wrong, they’ve got terms and conditions that protect them from liability. In the end, it’s you and your business that’s going to suffer if you don’t have good backup options.
The rankings of your website, as well as traffic, and ultimately the income it generates are all connected to the structure and content of the ste. We’ve realized that a whooping 90%+ of the site’s we work on don’t have any real backup system, which is a crazy and an unnecessarily daredevilish move. Your site’s content is a valuable asset and you should protect it accordingly.
You can find dozens of backup plugins on the market – we’ve also tried most of them and we can safely say there’s one that really stands out. The plugin that we’ve been using for the past 5 years now is BlogVault. This is a paid plugin but it’s definitely worth paying for – in fact, it’s almost nothing compared to what even a day of downtime will cost you.
Here are the main reasons why we love BlogVault so much:
Realtime backup capability
Some of the higher level plans that BlogVault offers provide a realtime backup solution – this means that any changes that occur on your website are being backed up as they happen. This is a superb option for Woocommerce and membership sites where changes occur constantly, and where nightly or daily backup just won’t suffice.
Informs you of its actions
This tool will actually let you know what it’s NOT backing up. We actually stumbled upon BlogVault after bad experiences with VaultPress – it wasn’t backing up all of our files and all the tables in the WordPress database. We found out about this during a restore – fortunately the hosting provider also had a backup to plug the gaps.
In fact, all backup plugins will skip some files. VaultPress, the one we were using back then, wasn’t backing up MP3 audio files, Mp4 video files or any WordPress database table that didn’t start with WP. We were actually very lucky not to suffer a permanent data loss.
BlogVault is great because it allows you to see which database tables and files it’s NOT backing up. It also gives you the option to select them for future backup.
It’s reliable
BlogVault is a cloud-based backup solution and will let you know whenever the plugin goes offline, isn’t able to do backup or has another type of issue. Lots of tools, such as Backupbuddy and Updraft, don’t have very good alerting options and it often happens that the backup remains broken for weeks before anyone actually notices anything.
Sites that are image-heavy also experience slow loading times. In fact, image size is one of the main culprits behind the decreased loading speed of your site. That’s why considering doing image compression might just help boost your site’s speed and also considerably affect and reduce your site’s resource requirements.
Image compression basically means that the file size of the original image on your site is being shrunk to a smaller file size. There are lots of image compression tools on the internet – most of them will provide you with pretty similar results by the end of the compression, but not all of them go by this the same way.
There are two types of image compression: lossless and lossy. When you’re about to choose the type of compression you want to make, make sure to choose lossless compression, and not the lossy type, because the difference can be significant. Let’s have a brief look at how they differ:
Lossless – this means that the file size, in the end, will be smaller, but that the image quality will be the same (this type is the one we recommend)
Lossy – the file size will be smaller in the end, but the quality of the image is going to be reduced as well. (not recommended for business-oriented users)
We always recommend that you don’t set out to sacrifice the quality of the images on your site over a gain in loading times. Bad image quality can reflect on your business and it’s never going to be good for marketing.
And while we’ve tried many image compression plugins ShortPixel is the one we use and recommend daily. It’s fast, reliable and also supports webp images so we can implement NextGen image optimization which is critical to reducing page size as much as possible.
Speed testing your site is the number one thing you need to do before setting out to improve your site’s speed. It’ll provide a benchmark against which you can measure subsequent changes in the speed and it’ll allow you to see if you’re moving in the right direction.
You can find a lot of speed testing tools that’ll help you see how your website fares. For WPSpeedFix.com, our site speed optimization service, we were using the speed test tool Pingdom (tools.pingdom.com); it was our primary speed testing service for over a year but it has many gaps so decided to build our own tool, which you can check out SiteSpeedBot.com
SiteSpeedBot will provide you with detailed recommendations many tools do not including HTTP2 support, as well as HTTP2 push support, which is something that other test tools simply don’t do. SiteSpeedBot also measures a number of speed metrics that are important on the modern web, such as DNS hosting speed and TTFB.
Some other tools that we have used are:
GTMetrix.com – might just be one of the most well known speed testing tools on the internet. It’s certainly a good tool, but it’s starting to show its age. For example, many of the recommendations that are given, are, in fact, already out of date on the modern web. Also, it seems that their servers are often overloaded, making the speed tests seem slower than they actually should be.
Tools.pingdom.com – as we said above, we used to use the Pingdom speed test tools for WPSpeedFix.com in the past. Don’t get us wrong – it’s still a pretty good tool, although it was updated in the last 12 months, and now its recommendations are not as good as they were before and don’t go into much detail.
Google Pagespeed Insights – this one is a pretty useful tool, one that Google provides. A lot of marketers and techs are obsessed by Pagespeed score; the truth is, however, that it often doesn’t correlate to actual speed. Pagespeed is still a useful tool, although it’s important to keep in mind that it measures speed only partially. A large part of its score comes from the comparison it makes putting your site against a technical checklist. The problem is that, in a lot of cases, it doesn’t take into consideration some practical limitations of the site’s coding and design. One of its speed testing components also does a fine job at completely ignoring the geographic location of the site, so you can expect the scores to vary quite a lot, depending on where the test was being made from, where is the geographic location of your hosting, and also how packed the internet is at the time of the testing.
7. Database Optimization
It so happens that, with time, the WordPress database bloats, meaning that its overall file size becomes a lot bigger than the amount of data that’s actually being stored in it.
WP Optimize is a plugin that is able to help remove this so called bloat. It will allow you to run SQL database optimizations inside the WordPress backend console.
By using this tool, we often succeed in reducing the size of the WP database by a couple of hundred megabytes.
Sidenote: WP Rocket and Swift Performance have a built in database optimization function, which means you won’t need this tool if you’re already using on of them.
WordPress has quite a few different features and integrations that are often called legacy (aka old) features or features that most people don’t use anymore.
One of these features is the xmlrpc.php API, one that allows for remote publishing. This feature is commonly under attack by hackers, as well as automated bots that are looking for security holes in WordPress instances; it can take a rather large amount of CPU power on your hosting account.
Perfmatters.io is a plugin that will allow you to disable a lot of these features. So, if you want to be serious about your site’s speed optimization, then it’s definitely worth a look.
9. Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a technique for viewing content on a particular page, whereby the content (usually images and videos) outside the initial viewable area of the webpage (known as the content above the fold) is not being loaded until the user scrolls further down the page.
This technique is especially important to take into consideration for websites that are particularly loaded with images. Lazy loading has a considerable effect in reducing the weight of the initial page load without having to interfere with the functionality of the page itself.
We use the free lazy load plugin from WP Rocket – this is also the one we recommend. An important reason why we like this plugin over other such plugins is because it’s actively maintained (or kept up to date!) by WP Rocket’s team AND it honors the <picture> HTML tag/element, meaning it’s compatible with the image optimization technique that uses the .webp file format, the one we were talking about in section five, and the one we implement using the plugin from ShortPixel.
Have in mind that a lot of lazy load plugins don’t honor the <picture> tag, or are simply not aware of it, which means once they’re used, they will essentially disable any .webp image optimization.
The full WP Rocket caching plugin has this feature built in; so, if you’re already using that plugin, you can just enable lazy loading from there.
10. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – Why We Don’t Use AMP & You Shouldn’t Either
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. In short – do not use them!
AMP is widely promoted in articles around the web. Unless there’s an SEO reason to use AMP (News sites potentially get an SEO benefit) then you shouldn’t use AMP for site speed.
AMP pages load fast because they’re a stripped down version of your main website and Google is using Edge Caching on their network to deliver the pages faster to users.
You can achieve all this yourself without relying on Google using a fast WordPress theme that doesn’t rely on Jquery (see our Fastest WordPress Themes here) and by stripping out all the unecessary Javascript from your pages.
We have some other issues with AMP, besides the one mentioned above, issues that have a lot to do with conversions and CRO. Using AMP basically means you’re giving up the control of your webpage to Google; and this is not something you want to do in a world where you actually want to rely less on them, not more. If you’re an aggressive marketer, you certainly wouldn’t want to hand wholesale control of the mobile version of your site to Google – trust us, it’s a bad idea.
What are your favorite plugins?
We sincerely hope that this article was a helpful guide in your search on how to speed up your WordPress site. Feel free to leave us comments documenting your experience in using and implementing the plugins and tools we elaborated on in this article.
If you’re looking for speed optimization make sure you checkout WPSpeedfix.com.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Faster WordPress loading times are important for all types of websites but for an ecommerce business they’re even more important as they’re tied directly to the performance of your site.
Faster page loads improve user experience and the way visitors interact with the site itself, thus influencing (and boosting!) sales and retention rates. You probably already know this if you’re on this page.
We’ve optimized 3000+ sites through our WordPress Speed Optimization Service WPSpeedFix.com and have deep experience with Woocommerce speed and speed optimization. In this post you’ll find the fastest themes we’ve found for Woocommerce sites.
Sidenote before we get into this – generally the most important part of site speed is a fast and stable hosting provider. The theme is important but not as important as the host you’re on. If you’re working on your site speed it’s worth checking out this article on the fastest and best WordPress hosting providers.
If you want to skip all the fat and just want to get to the meat and potatoes, here’s the top 4 themes for Woocommerce we’d recommend:
Generatepress – a theme that’s very lightweight and built for speed. The developer of this theme set out to build something that’s lightning fast. Part of what makes this theme so fast is the fact it doesn’t rely on Jquery, which means it’s light on Javascript so it renders faster AND makes Google Pagespeed Insights very happy.
Astra – this is another lightning-fast theme and also has some really awesome child theme options. Like the Generatepress theme, it also doesn’t rely on Jquery – it’s a little more feature heavy so can have a bit more javascript.
Genesis Framework – this one’s one of the oldest themes on the internet and also always has been super-fast. A version 3 of this theme was released recently, and it contains inbuilt AMP support.
Flatsome, while the themes above have Woocommerce support Flatsome is probably the most feature packed and is built specifically for Woocommerce. It has a lot of features, operates with lightning speed, and also has some friendly Woocommerce optimizations, like for example lazy-loading.
Table of Contents
What Makes a Theme Fast or Slow?
Faster themes are smaller in filesize (so there’s less to download), have less code (so they process faster on the server), have cleaned CSS and inline CSS where important (so the site renders faster) and rely less on javascript (so there’s less work for the device CPU to do).
All of this translates to faster download from the server and faster render, so the amount of time it takes the browser to actually assemble the page and show it is less.
Slower themes typically have a LOT more javascript to download and often use several off the shelf libraries and APIs, such as Google Fonts and Google Maps APIs which aren’t necessarily optimized for speed.
It’s important we talk about Jquery too. Jquery is a javascript library that many themes rely on to drive more advanced features – many page builder themes rely heavily on javascript. Jquery powered themes need to download and execute this library before the page will render adding a delay and extra processing overhead.
Typically a Jquery powered theme will never get 100 score on Google Pagespeed Insights because the Jquery javascript library is rendering blocking.
Perhaps the most popular WooCommerce theme on the internet – at least according to the large WordPress themes market, ThemeForest, where it’s a No. 1 bestseller.
This is a superb WordPress theme, that offers a very user-friendly experience. It offers a fantastic balance of features versus speed and if you’re looking to build a large website is a fantastic option.
Flatsome contains the ‘Revolutionary Page Builder’, which functions with drag and drop and was specially made for this theme. This page builder greatly facilitates the website building experience – you can easily build grids, sliders, content blocks, you name it. It gives you all the flexibility and creative potential you need in creating a modern and functional e-commerce website. The option of live previews, based on the WordPress customizer, gives you an immediate insight into the customizations and changes you’re making to your site.
Here’s a summary of some of Flatsome’s features that might catch your eye from a single glance:
Complete control of typography
Optimized for mobile devices
One-click demo content
A very fast multipurpose theme, that combines the best trends in online store design, with great support for other website uses as well
An inbuilt page builder that allows you to build whatever you want
Highly customizable e-commerce theme
A great theme especially dedicated to WooCommerce sites with deeper WooCommerce support
One of the most popular WordPress themes in general, this one’s also a theme that’s particularly suitable for a WooCommerce website. It’s a super light theme (coming under 50kb!) and doesn’t depend on jQuery, which is a great plus – and also the reason why it’s being listed here.
Flexibility is one of the greatest assets of this theme – you can combine whatever designs you want with ease and compatibility. Another thing is its full WooCommerc support – Astra will let you do personal customization of your store through the real-time WordPress Customizer.
This theme has a free basic option and a premium one for bigger and more complex business enterprises. If you opt for the premium option, the Astra Pro, you’ll get plenty of superb WooCommerce features such as:
Pre-built WooCommerce demo sites
Infinite products scroll
Numerous store layout options
Two-step, free from distractions, checkout options (all you do is check a box in the Customizer section)
Off-canvas menu for product search/filter
Built-in quick view functionality for products
Special sales bubble icon which marks products on sale
Cart icon slide-down which allows people to check their carts without having to do a page reload
Like the Astra theme, GeneratePress also doesn’t rely on jQuery, making it one of the fastest WordPress themes out there. This is a versatile, performance-optimized multipurpose theme, also has built-in WooCommerce support. The plethora of options on its WordPress Customizer allows the user to adapt GeneratePress for different kinds of niches.
This is another pretty lightweight theme, coming in just under 30kb, without any dependencies (such as jQuery mentioned above).
The premium version offers a great deal of pre-built demo sites, and they’re all easy to import the moment they become available to you.
It might not offer as many options as the Astra theme or the OceanWP (which we’re going to tackle next), but it’s definitely a theme that still manages to provide you with a well-designed store that will look great for your shoppers and will provide them with a more than satisfactory user experience. For example, you’ve got options such as:
Add to cart AJAX button that’s got a rather nice sticky panel – this appears at the top of the page in question once a potential shopper adds an item in their cart
Shopping cart icon with a drop-down option which you’re able to add to your menu
Checkout mode that’s distraction-free
Options that allow for control of the appearance of upsells and related products
Customizer options with which you can control WooCommerce styles and layout
GeneratePress is a theme that has both a free and premium version, which is, of course, a better choice when it comes to better and more complete WooCommerce functionality.
Similarly to Astra and GeneratePress, with the same basic approach, OceanWP is another streamlined, multipurpose WordPress theme. Although it’s not as lightweight as the other two themes mentioned here, it still has plenty of customization options and fares especially well when it comes to WooCommerce support. It has one of the most detailed and nuanced WooCommerce integration and supports options like:
Pre-built WooCommerce demo sites which you can import at will if you don’t want to build ones from scratch
Sales badges
Shopping car icon with dropdown option
Checkout that’s distraction-free and includes a multi-step approach
Product quick view
Details about sticky products
Cart and filter options with an off-canvas menu
Plenty of layout and style options that are part of the WordPress Customizer
Like most such themes, this one also has a free limited version, as well as a more feature-rich premium one.
Shoptimizer is a premium, performance-optimized theme for e-commerce, a product from CommerceGurus (the same people that are behind Create and Code theme shop). Unlike the themes listed so far, this is a theme that’s designed only for WooCommerce sites, which means it’s not a multipurpose one. Shoptimizer is great when it comes to emphasizing two aspects of the e-commerce enterprise, namely performance, and conversion rate – both very important for an online business.
With great design, and following the best e-commerce conversion rate optimization practices, this theme includes options such as:
Optimized, distraction-free checkout
Timers for sale countdowns (countdown timers or limited stock)
Trust badges – an option that allows you to easily display trust badges on your checkout pages and your cart
Sticky product details available with a scroll option – it sticks important product details to the top of the page, as the users continue to scroll down the page
Option for adding conversion-boosting microcopy under the Add to Cart button
The feature ‘Request a callback’ for individual products (this one’s a great option for products that are expensive)
Elementor built core pages – this option allows you to edit the core pages with an easy to use drag-and-drop editing technique
This theme offers a very alluring option if you want a stellar looking site, that is designed on a very sound e-commerce basis.
As we mentioned above, Shoptimizer is a premium theme, which means it only comes as a paid plugin.
Like the Shoptimizer theme, WoonderShop is another one that’s full-on concentrated on WooCommerce websites, with a focus on crafting a foundation that’s conversion-optimized, all for the best possible user experience for your e-commerce site. It’s especially convenient for mobile devices.
A theme that’s made to be easily customizable, it contains the visual Customizer and an integrated SiteOrigin Page Builder which enables a very easy, drag-and-drop editing.
WoonderShop also comes with three different “skins”, so it can help you in the appearance of your store. Its WordPress Customizer also contains plenty of style controls.
Some of its most attractive features are:
The mobile-first design will ensure that visitors coming through their mobile devices have a superb shopping experience.
Distraction-free checkout so you don’t have to worry about losing shoppers
Trust badges
Key e-commerce functionality
Built in cross-selling widget which displays products that are frequently purchased together or products that are related
Built-in AJAX product filters which help eliminate page reloads
Auto-complete product search
AJAX add to cart functionality which uses a dropdown cart to show the product
It’s designed to be focused on performance, meaning its default Google PageSpeed score is in the high 90s
Contains search autosuggest meant to enable potential buyers a more precise shopping experience
WoonderShop, like Shoptimizer, also only comes in a premium version.
A powerful and very flexible theme, even though it’s not the fastest on our list, it’s still fast enough to provide a well-optimized e-commerce website. Divi is also one of those themes that’s considered among the most successful themes on the market – and with 500 000 users (and still counting), it definitely has the users to back that up!
Divi comes with its own drag-and-drop page builder and it’s also being regularly updated, which means the developers are introducing new features all the time.
This is another multi-purpose theme that allows you to build whatever kind of website you want: from online shops (it integrates fully with WooCommerce) to business sites, portfolios, blogs, and much more. Divi makes the act of designing the pages for your online store super easy and creative – it’s got plenty of options for customization (it allows you to control colors, fonts, and other design elements). This theme has very responsive layouts, making it very functional and convenient to use on practically any device.
Along with the impeccable WooCommerce functionality and numerous options for customization, Divi also contains a Shop module that lets you incorporate your WooCommerce products and pages into the designs you’ve created, with the help of the in-built Divi Builder page builder.
The Divi theme is available as part of the $89 Elegant Themes membership.
This is, in fact, the default theme that comes along with WooCommerce. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s so popular, but that’s not the only reason – it’s also very successful in helping your store load rather quickly to boot.
You also won’t have to worry about any lack of basic functionality – coming from the very source of the WooCommerce team, it’s a very solid example of good WooCommerce code practices.
Granted, Storefront is rather basic in its aesthetics – a kind of a plain Jane when it comes to looks. However, you can certainly find lots of Storefront child themes and change that plain ol’ look. Some of these child themes are free, but most of them cost $39.
So, this is where we conclude our top recommendations for the fastest WooCommerce themes. This is by no means a complete list, but it’s certainly a good starting point for your next e-commerce enterprise. If you have any questions or suggestions concerning WooCommerce themes, you can leave them in the comments section below.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Quick note before we get into this content: If you’re on this page you’re no doubt somewhat technical, you know what DNS hosting is and why it’s important right?
(DNS hosting speed is a key component of website speed, so much so that we including a DNS hosting speed probe in our website speed test tool at https://app.wpspeedfix.com)
We’ve worked with several thousand sites through our agency (this site), our site speed optimization business (WPSpeedFix.com) and our small hosting company (WPAlpha.com) – in 99.9% of cases we use Cloudflare.com for DNS hosting.
Cloudfare is consistently the number 1 performing DNS hosting provider worldwide as rated (and continually tested) on DNSPerf.com
The free plan is all you need and you don’t have to use their CDN or security features if you don’t need.
What is DNS hosting?
DNS is one of the most important components of network architecture and the backbone of modern network communications. If it wasn’t for DNS, we’d have to memorize all the IP addresses of the websites we want to use by heart!
One of the ways computers communicate with each other on the internet is through IP addresses, and DNS is a way of addressing computer services. Since we use names of sites rather than IP addresses, if DNS somehow fails we wouldn’t have a way of finding those IP addresses, and thus we’d also be prevented from accessing services on the internet. DNS is the factor which makes the internet service virtual and thus making the IP address not as significant. It also means that if a particular internet service changes their IP address, but keeps its name, probably nobody’s going to notice. This is because of DNS – it makes it much easier to change, move and add services on the internet.
The Importance of DNS
DNS is also important in terms of security.
By using a high-quality DNS hosting provider you’ll be more protected from potential DDoS (aka ‘distributed denial-of-service’ attacks) since they’ve got better and more reliable DNS redundancy. This is the backup mechanism or failsafe solution for DNS outages which may happen as a result of, as we mentioned, DDoS attacks, infrastructure failures, and also configuration errors. In cases like these, a single dedicated DNS server is not enough – you’ll need multiple DNS providers in different networks that’ll ensure DNS availability and cut down the risk of DNS availability. Sure, redundant DNS servers may not be the cost-effective option you’ve been looking for, but it certainly is a very effective way of sustaining DNS availability and mitigating the consequences of DDoS attacks. Just think how bad it would reflect on your website if it becomes inaccessible!
If you’re looking to expand your website, choosing a high-quality DNS host may be like getting a new best friend! You’ll get better reliability, speed, security, and redundancy. DNS (which actually stands for Domain Name Systems) hosts are able to spread your website across servers in different, separate locations, thus optimizing your site’s access for you as well as your clients, users, visitors, shoppers – you name it!
DNS hosting comes in different packages and options. Most of the DNS hosting providers charge for their services, but there are some good quality hosts which are free. A third option is also the option to self-host – but, this would require a high-level of technical IT knowledge and is reserved only for the people that have the time and to either get into it or develop it more. For all the other mortals out there, there’s plenty of great DNS hosting providers that’ll do a perfect job of maintaining your site’s functionality for you!
These (and more) are the reasons why we’ve prepared this article with the best DNS hosting services, where we’ve included both free and paid (premium) versions of it, so you can have a better overview of what’s offered on the market right now and help you make a choice that’ll suit your needs and expectations best.
Before we begin with the actual hosting providers, though, and the information on them, we’d like to say a few more words on the important factors you should focus on when choosing a DNS host.
What to Look for in a Good DNS
As we mentioned earlier, choosing a good DNS hosting provider is critical for your site’s reliability, speed, security, and redundancy, since DNS affects all of these. R
Reliability
This is definitely one of the most important factors when it comes to choosing a DNS provider. This is where it all comes together – the fact that you know your DNS host won’t let you down if or when something happens to your site. Reliability is a factor that encompasses all the three, highly important factors mentioned above.
Redundancy
If you’re running an online business, even a single point of failure is simply unacceptable. In the same way it’s important to store site backups offsite, it’s also very important to use multiple DNS providers. Even though DNS hosting providers have the option through which you can configure secondary nameservers, still nobody can guarantee that all of their services won’t be affected if something happens. You don’t want to put all your valuables in one house, even if you use different corners of it!
What is commonly done, then, is to have a primary and secondary DNS provider. That would mean that the Zones records from your site are synchronized from the primary to the secondary DNS provider. So, if you experience a lookup fail and it times out to the first DNS server, it queries the next DNS server until the correct IP address is returned. If it’s not able to resolve, the notorious “This webpage is not available” page error shows up.
However, DNS cache is done by ISPs, and this means that if your primary provider goes down, it’s still going to try to query the first DNS server for some time before doing a query for the secondary one. You can fix this quickly and simply if you temporarily change the TTL (time to live) setting for the DNS record, and direct your site’s traffic to the secondary DNS server till the outage gets fixed.
Generally speaking, it’s usually better to maintain a longer TTL for DNS records, since this would mean the DNS will be cached by your ISP. But not only that – this also means that users and page visitors might not notice if your DNS provider goes down for a short period of time.
Speed
Speed is another important factor when it comes to choosing a good quality DNS host. If you opt for a fast DNS hosting provider, then you’ll definitely see how there’ll be less of a latency period between the DNS lookup and TTFB. You can do a test of the DNS lookup time and TTFB with a website speed test tool. If you need help with this, you’re more than welcome to check out our own speed testing tool, the SiteSpeedBot, which is fresh out of the oven!
And just like with CDNs (or Content Delivery Networks), DNS hosting providers also have multiple POPs. Generally speaking, the more locations there are, the better it is since this would mean that a DNS server closer to the visitor is more likely to exist – and it’s not to be taken for granted since it will help decrease the lookup time. You’ve got to remember, however, that ISPs also cache the DNS, which means that, by setting a longer TTL you’ll also get fewer queries to your DNS servers.
Security
In the past couple of years, DDoS attacks have been reported in 76, and have exceeded 23,000 on an annual level. These Distributed Denial-of-Service (what the abbreviation DDoS stands for) attacks are a type of DOS attack which attempts to make a certain network source or machine unavailable. These attacks usually involve more than one unique IP address – in fact, thousands of them! – and often do a spoof of DNS queries.
As you can see, this is also one of those instances where using multiple DNS providers can prove to be of vital importance for your site.
Some of the DNS hosts which are free are also equipped with features that include firewall policies, rate limiting, filtering, and also blocking, all of them helpful in alleviating and preventing DDoS attacks. Being signed up on multiple DNS providers also means that if one is taken down following a DDoS attack, you’ll always be able to rely on your secondary DNS provider for backup.
Best Paid and Free DNS Hosting Providers
Okay, now that we’ve covered the basics on DNS and DNS hosting requirements, we can get down to the actual providers and give you a little bit of info and insight into each of them. So, here’s a rundown of the best FREE and PAID DNS hosting providers currently on the internet.
According to dnsperf.com, CloudFlare is the fastest DNS hosting provider in the world. They’re also one of the largest DNS hosting providers with a free plan. Another thing is that CloudFlare is one of the most affordable DNS provider options on the internet, which makes it probably the most popular one as well. It fares very highly in online reviews as a top-rated DNS hosting provider service. CloudFlare also has the highest query speed worldwide.
One of the main and most beloved assets of this provider is its speed. CloudFlare is definitely on the very top when it comes to speed, outstripping all of its competitors, even when it comes to premium DNS providers.
CloudFlare is, however, a managed DNS host, and that means that you as a user won’t have much control over it. This might be a pass for some website owners who prefer to exercise more control over their sites. If that’s the case another DNS host from thyis list can be more suitable.
But, another great thing about CloudFlare is that it’s equipped with additional security features like blocking, filtering and rate-limiting.
And even though we put it in the free section, CloudFlare also comes with a pro plan, which is 20$ a month, and a business plan that starts at 200$ a month. For a lot of businesses, though, the free version would be just enough.
You might’ve heard this name tied to domain registration, but Namecheap also offers some neat free DNS hosting services that feature DynamicDNS. Their free DNS can be a great backup or secondary DNS hosting provider, in addition to your primary one.
It’s got a free DNS management feature, which is open for the public and doesn’t require purchasing a domain name from them. Some of the key features Namecheap offers (alongside the fully functional DNS) are email forwarding, dynamic DNS, URL forwarding with no ads, as well as advanced records like SRV, among many others.
They currently support A/AAAA/CNAME/NS/MX//TXT/SRV DNS record types. One of the main reasons why Namecheap is on this list is because they’ve got secure and reliable name servers located in different geographic locations, which also means an additional helping hand in increasing your site’s performance and speed. They also have a DNS management console that’s easy-to-use, which will allow you to fully manage your DNS settings.
Hurricane Electric IS provides a completely free DNS hosting service, providing you with strong connectivity throughout the whole world. They’ve got a network that’s made up of more than 60 POPs, which is able to support IPv6 everywhere.
Hurricane Electric DNS also allows for a low TTL, something which a lot of free DNS hosting providers don’t offer. It’s also got some really nice DNS management features.
A slight downside might be its interface – it’s a tad old and kinda not in line with contemporary trends in web design. However, it’s a very solid DNS provider, trusted by many website owners because it’s run by a reliable and well-known internet company.
BuddyNS is a great secondary free DNS hosting provider. It also fares among the friendliest and easiest to use hosting services. BuddyNS offers a simple, reliable, secure service that has optimal performances.
It’s got the automatic synchronization feature, which masters in the course of 10 minutes, but also immediately if you use SyncNOW! and NOTIFY. BuddyNS has a 100% uptime since inception, with 8 POPs throughout the globe. It also has a cPanel/WHM integration.
Operating since 1997, Dynu is a free dynamic DNS service provider. Like CloudFlare, it also offers free and premium versions, the premium containing certain additional features.
The free option is not to be underestimated though – it will provide you with plenty of reliable DNS uptime managed through servers located in a number of places throughout the globe. This implies that top-level domains will also work, regardless of whether they belong to one country or another.
The forever flee plan includes 4 domains, 4 subdomains, 4 MX records, 4 custom DNS records, 4 web redirects, and also certain offline settings. The records which they include are the following: A, AAAA, CNAME, PTR, TXT, SPF, SRV, HINFO.
Its DDNS client is free to download, and it’ll run in the background, automatically updating the
DNS record once your IP address changes.
The free version allows all the services to be available for just one subdomain. Email service, domain registration, and SSL certificates are some of the stuff that is included in these services. The paid version will give you all the services for an unlimited amount of subdomains.
Rackspace is another provider that offers free hosting services and management. This is a free hosting service, but only to current customers. This provider holds a very impressive track record of uptimes, even with just 5 or 6 POPs.
Rackspace’s main features include flexible access and load balancing, as well as automated migrations and IP Anycast routing. These features are easily set up through their RESTful API and their cloud control panel. Their easy-to-use interface is another great asset.
Rackspace is one of those providers that allows you to have complete control of your DNS. Thanks to their API and Cloud Control Panel, you’ll be able to do various tasks such as modifying, removing or adding domains, records, and much more.
Another very solid free DNS hosting provider, CloudDNS has servers that span the continents of Australia, Asia, North America and Europe (4 DNS servers). In its DNS network platform, it also employs 3 Zones, Dynamic DNS, Round Robin (RR) architecture, 3 Mail forwards, support for native IPv6, as well as unlimited requests or records.
ClouDNS is claiming 100% uptime, and it has a very easy to use interface for zone management and Dynamic DNS support. Their online ticket system also works pretty well if you run into any problems with your DNS server.
Recently they’ve also introduced premium plans that have GeoDNS and DDoS protected servers.
GeoScaling handles up to 1 million DNS requests in a month, meaning it’s got some nice things to offer and should definitely not be overlooked. They are all for optimal user experience, which is why they’ll redirect your users by AS number, uptime, country, custom rules and also server load.
With their low TTL, the updated records are always available live online in less than 5 minutes. GeoScaling supports several types of normal records, with the inclusion of SRV (Service Record). They also offer Dynamic DNS support, allowing you to upload, import and also paste BIND zone files.
With another easy to use interface, you’ll successfully add and update DNS records without having to reload the web page. And, any change that might happen is going to be propagated to the nameservers immediately.
The Paid Ones
Ok, so the list of best free DNS hosting providers is by no means exhaustive, but we’ve tried to make an overview of the best ones currently on the market. They are definitely the ones you should pay attention to if you don’t know where to look or are split in between choices.
Next, we’re going to go over the best DNS hosting providers that have premium versions or only paid plans. Brace yourselves for some pretty neat DNS hosting features and benefits!
The WordPress name is usually not immediately connected with DNS hosting, but it certainly does offer this service for the users that get a domain name. WordPress has, in fact, one of the most reliable and also one of the fastest query speeds in the world (currently in third place in the world, according to dnsperf.com).
WordPress offers options for public or private domain name registration. With the public registration, your contact information can be looked up by anyone. The private registration option allows for the information to be hidden from anybody that wants to find it. Still, you will get to enjoy all that comes with WordPress domain registration.
When it comes to pricing, WordPress offers some very fair prices, compared to its competition. 13$ per year is indeed a reasonable DNS service price, which amounts slightly more than a dollar per month.
Dyn is among the oldest DNS hosting providers on the internet, which means it’s got lots of credibility to its name. It’s mostly considered as an enterprise DNS provider, which means their clients are mostly business or professional websites.
Along with its hosting services, Dyn offers a bunch of other benefits like better site improvement with data and analytic services.
Their cheapest plan starts at 5$ per month, making it a very affordable DNS hosting plan when compared to other similar companies.
If you’re in more for the managed service, you can get it by adding just 2$ more dollars a month. If, however, you want more query capacity, records, and domains, you will need to pay starting from $35 a month (and upwards).
Perhaps not the first name that comes up once you search for a DNS provider. This is no surprise since Edgecast’s primary function was as a CDN provider. In 2013, however, it branched out to include DNS services as well.
The Edgecast Route (also known as a Verizon Route, since Edgecast is now a division of Verizon) is one that’s based on Edgecast’s own, internal DNS technology. By adapting their own internal technology for a wider clientele, Edgecast is underscoring the reliability of its services.
Pricing is a bit different in this company, although it’s still got a price list that’s one of the most affordable ones out there. Edgecast, in fact, doesn’t have a fixed price for all DNS services; it actually bases its prices on the number of zones in question, the number of queries, as well as the number of DNS health checks that the service is receiving per month.
The pricing is also dependent on your choice – whether you want a standard DNS routing or an advanced one with benefits like geo-blocking, for example. The pricing usually somewhere around $0.40 per million queries, which is not expensive really, especially not when it comes to an enterprise DNS provider.
DNSMadeEasy is another DNS hosting provider that ranks among the ones with the highest speed. It’s been on the market for a while now, and it’s got a reputation behind its name, managing over 800.000 domains, and working with clients such as Tumblr, Hyundai, DuckDuckGo, Sega, eHarmony, Under Armour and many others. DNSMadeEasy is a premium DNS provider and considering what you’re getting, it’s a very affordable one, as well – it offers a lot for what you pay.
They offer three paid plans – and the great thing is, for most sites out there, the small business plan will work perfectly. It costs $29.95 for a whole year, and it includes 10 domains, 400 records, and 5 million queries per month. The second business plan starts at $59.95 for the whole year, while the corporate plan is the most expensive, starting from $1499.95 per year. But, as we mentioned earlier, for most small or mid-level online businesses the basic plan would work just fine.
Another great thing about DNSMadeEasy is the feature two-factor authentication which is a big deal for a lot of website owners. Domains are pretty important because one of the things you’d definitely wouldn’t want to happen to your website is somebody hijacking it by redirecting your DNS records somewhere else. And DNSMadeEasy has two-factor authentication included in every one of their three plans.
And, last but not least, it’s also got a pretty neat 30 free testing period, in which you can decide whether this hosting provider will work best for your website or not!
Conclusion
Well, that about concludes our list of best free and paid DNS hosting providers! As we said, this list is by no means exhaustive, but we did try to point out the DNS providers you should definitely have in mind when making your decision.
In order to choose the best DNS host, it’s good to have several aspects in mind, as well as the primary needs of your website, and the way you want to lead your hosting. So, for example, you should ask yourself whether you prefer a managed hosting – or maybe you’d want more one that’ll allow you more control over your site. Pricing is also very important for some people, so you should also have in mind whether you can afford the option you want or not. You should also have a general overview of the features you’d like to be included in the hosting plan, as well as optimal speed and reliability in general.
We understand that the choice out there is vast and that choosing a suitable DNS hosting provider is no easy task. But, we hope we made some things a little bit easier for you in this article, and also saved you a little bit of time!
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Years ago we published a blog post about Fixing Slow WordPress Sites and Optimizing WordPress Site Speed and ultimately created a whole business out of it specializing in WP Site Speed Optimization.
Today we’ve now optimized well over 3000 sites at WPSpeedFix.com. We regularly get asked about Shopify Site Speed, Fixing Slow Shopify Sites and Optimizing Shopify Site Speed so thought it was time we created a post on it.
While WordPress and Shopify are very different, the same site speed optimization principles apply and the approach we use for optimizing WordPress and can applied to achieve similar results with Shopify.
In this article, we’re going to talk about optimizing Shopify websites for speed, breaking down some key principles, share our speed optimization process and give you some of the advanced site speed optimizations we’ve developed that apply across all sites, regardless of which CMS you use – many of which you won’t find anywhere else on the web.
Sidenote: while we still only do WordPress speed work, the team at www.SpeedBoostr.com specialize in Shopify speed. If you’re just looking for someone to take care of your Shopify speed work, head over to their site and drop them a line about your site speed.
Table of Contents
1. Speed Test Your Site To Get a Baseline Before Making Changes
Before doing anything its probably wise to do some speed testing and get a baseline measure of your site speed as it stands today. There’s many tools out there that’ll measure site speed, these are the few that we use on an ongoing basis.
SiteSpeedBot.com
There are several good speed testing tools that you can find online, but we weren’t entirely happy with them, which is why we decided to build our own. You can check out our own speed testing tool here:SiteSpeedBot.com.
We built this tool to probe for the most important site speed optimization elements that other tools don’t – optimizations like HTTP2 protocol support, HTTP2 push support, lazy loading and nextgen image optimization.
The tool was also designed to give you practical and detailed recommendations that are easy to understand and implement.
We also keep a 12 month history of any speed tests you run which you can access at https://apps.wpspeedfix.com/domain/YOURDOMAIN.com (switch out your domain), for example https://apps.wpspeedfix.com/domain/treetribe.com
Google Pagespeed Insights
Google Pagespeed Insights is another speed testing tool that you can use for your Shopify site but please keep in mind that Pagespeed Insights focuses more on the site render speed and heavily marks down sites that rely heavily on Javascript (as most Shopify sites do).
**ALSO, you’ll probably see a much lower mobile score vs desktop score – this is because the mobile test is emulating a CPU limited mobile device on a very slow 1.6mb/second internet connection.
Pagespeed is still a useful tool, though it’s important to keep in mind that it only partially measures speed. A large chunk of its score comes from comparing your site against a technical checklist which in many cases doesn’t take into account the practical limitations of the site’s code and design. Also, its speed test component completely ignores the geographic location of the site’s hosting, which means scores can vary wildly depending on the location where they’re being tested, where your hosting is geographically located and how busy the internet is at the time of testing.
SpeedBoostr Shopify Analyzer
Just like us, the guys at SpeedBoostr created their own speed test tool to specifically analyze Shopify Site Speed – you can check that out here.
Be Mindful of how you interpret speed test results!
It’s important to review site speed tool results with the context of your site in mind – you may see warnings that might be irrelevant to your site or have zero meaningful impact on speed in the real world.
Also, some tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom include a speed grade as well as some recommendations such as “remove query strings from static resources” that are completely irrelevant on the modern web and some cases will actually break your site.
On most tools, unless your site has been built from the ground up to achieve a high score on that tool you can’t realistically attain a 100 score or A+ grade without breaking your site or partially breaking your site.
Almost daily we see sites where someone has been obsessed with Pagespeed score and eneded up with a broken render or what’s called a “flash of unformatted content” where your site appears broken for 1-3 seconds while the elements are loaded – they achieved a higher speed grade but in the process broken their site.
In any case, we don’t care about grades, what we actually care about is the raw load time in seconds and we want that as low as possible. It’s possible to have a high grade or high score in many of these tools and actually still have a slow site. Ultimately we really don’t even care about speed, what actually matters is conversion rate, which brings us to the next point.
Remember, the speed of all pages matters!
When you’re testing your site remember, the speed of all pages matters! We so often see people obsessed with achieving a particular Pagespeed score or load time who completely miss the fact that the speed of all yours pages matters!
Depending on the site of your site is may not be practical to test every individual page on the site but at a minimum we suggest testing at least the top 10 pages of your site as that is where speed improvements will have the biggest impact.
Uptime & Reliability is at least as important as speed
Uptime and reliability is at least as important as speed, after all, downtime is zero speed!. While Shopify sites tend to not have many outages they do happen and other elements like domain name registration and DNS hosting (we’ll explain that further below) can also impact uptime and reliability.
Whenever we talk about speed with customers we always recommend using uptime monitoring – Uptimerobot.com have a free plan that tests at 5 minutes so there’s no excuse for not getting this in place – we use the paid plan which tests at 1 minute intervals.
2. Remove Apps You Aren’t Using
A really simple optimization is to remove any apps that you’re not using. A lot of the time the reason behind the slow speed performance of Shopify sites, particularly older ones, has to do with apps.
Every app you install is essentially adding code to the website. They usually add some JavaScript and CSS files to drive whatever the functionality is the app provides. Each one of those files has to be loaded by a visitor to the site and then processed by the web browser as well.
So, a simple first step that will only take 5 or 10 minutes is to run through the site and just do an audit on all the apps you have installed. Anything you’re not using actively, remove it!
Look At Theme & Template Settings Too
It’s also worth going your theme settings and disabling any of the special features you’re not using. Many features will add JavaScript files and more weight to the theme or the template whenever it loads.
Third Party Tracking Codes & Marketing Tools Should Be Reviewed
Technically not apps but third party tools and tracking codes essentially have the same impact on speed – you should also look at all the third-party marketing tools and code that you have embedded in the website. Those can be things like Hotjar, Lucky Orange, Crazyegg and similar marketing, livechat and analytics tools.
What we typically find is that a lot of the time people add all these things to their website use them for a while and cancel accounts but leave the code still embedded in the website. In some cases it might also be worth redoing embed codes as quite often vendors will release new versions of embed codes that are faster and lighter.
So, that would be pretty much it for the first step of Shopify optimization. But before we cross over to the second one, let’s recap:
Go through all the specific Shopify apps you have installed on your site and audit them.
Make sure to remove or delete the ones you’re not actively using.
Look at all the third-party code that you’re using – which, granted, might not necessarily be an app, but it’s still something embedded in the website (marketing codes, AdWords codes, email marketing codes, those kinds of stuff).
Go through your theme or template and turn off any features that you’re not actively using.
Okay, so that’s pretty straightforward – it’s going to take you five or ten minutes and, depending on how old your site is, it may have a meaningful impact on its speed.
Now, let’s move on.
3. Move Third-Party Code to Google Tag Manager
The next step is to move any of the third-party code that you’re using into Google Tag manager.
As your site develops and matures over time, different marketing codes or analytics codes, and tracking codes get added to the site. This, in turn, can make it a bit messy and you end up with code all over the place.
This second step kind of goes hand-in-hand with the last one. Using tag manager makes all this third party code easier to manage AND you can also conditionally load it, that is load it only on the pages where you need that code. This makes it a bit easier to manage. Also, as time goes on, it becomes easier to see what code is in there, as well as what code you are using or not using.
Lazy Loading or Deferring the Livechat Loading
Most sites use some sort of live chat app or the Facebook Messenger app and that’s basically an application loading inside the website. This means that there’s a lot to load and that it’s definitely going to slow down the page a bit. Pretty much all live chat apps are slow and heavy as they load a lot of files.
What we typically do with our WordPress customers at WP Speed Fix is take that live chat code and move it into Google tag manager and we add a 5-7 second delay into the trigger.
What happens then is that the page can load without the live chat, nice and fast, and once the user has been on that page for 5 seconds, the Google tag manager will fetch that code for the live chat and it will then fire it. This it doesn’t have any meaningful impact on how the live chat functions from a visitor perspective because most people aren’t hitting a web page and firing up the live chat straight away but it does impact load speed substantially.
This is particularly true for e-commerce sites where people are clicking through pages quickly. Removing that live chat, which is very heavy, will make their experience much faster, and the pages will be much lighter. Some live chat apps are up to half a megabyte in size and have 10 to 15 files that they need to load, particularly the free live chat apps and Facebook Messenger widgets.
So, two steps here:
Implement Google tag manager – move all your marketing codes, third-party tracking codes and everything else into tag manager.
Lazy load your livechat – move your live chat code or messenger code into the Google tag manager and add a 5 Second firing delay into it. **Make sure you test this as there are a handful of tools that this does not work for – Intercom is one tool this doesn’t work with as it expects to load with the initial pageload.
4. Make Sure Primary Domain is Set
Okay, this is a very simple one: make sure all the domains are redirecting to the primary domains under the domain settings inside Shopify.
You’d be surprised at how often people miss this step – it’s one of those that things happen when the site goes from development to live and the settings are never turned on. But it’s actually a very simple step – and super-important for both SEO and speed. There’s a screenshot below that highlights where to do this.
5. Use Cloudflare for DNS Hosting
Okay, here’s a more complicated step that a lot of people actually miss when it comes to site speed optimization: use good quality DNS hosting!
For our site, we use Cloudflare for DNS hosting and we suggest you use Cloudflare for your site as well. If you go to DNSperf.com, you can see how all the top DNS hosting providers out there rank – from fastest to slowest. Cloudflare is pretty much always the number 1 fastest DNS provider.
What is DNS Hosting?
DNS stands for Domain Name System. The DNS server turns a web address into an IP address. So, when someone types in your domain name into their web browser, the first thing that happens is that the web browser does a DNS lookup against your DNS hosting.
If you’re using the DNS host that came with your domain name (which is very common – that might be Bluehost or Namecheap or HostGator or GoDaddy), chances are that it’s adding a delay, meaning you have some speed issues right there.
If you’re using a poor quality DNS host it might actually be a couple of hundred milliseconds for that DNS to resolve and respond so that’s 0.1 or 0.2 of a second speed difference simply because your DNS hosting is performing poorly. It’s even worse if you’re targeting international traffic – it’s not unusual for us to see the DNS hosting take half a second or 1 second to resolve where the DNS hosting provider is international to the visitor.
For example, we’re based in Australia and quite often DNS hosting providers that are based in the US will take half a second to respond. Cloudflare is a global provider and doesn’t have this problem as they have more than 150 locations worldwide.
The free Cloudflare plan is all you need for the DNS hosting – you can run Cloudflare in DNS only mode which turns off the CDN and security features which Shopify mostly has covered as part of their platform.
6. Lazy Loading
Another way to optimize your Shopify site is to use lazy loading.
Lazy loading is a technique whereby anything that is outside the initial viewable area on a web page (typically called ‘above the fold’ or “viewport”) is not loaded until the user scrolls further down the page. So anything below the fold (or any images below the fold specifically) are not going to be loaded initially.
Lazy loading is a particularly powerful speed optimization for image heavy pages like catgeory or collection pages as well as pages with video.
Using lazy loading for a YouTube video slims it down to about a hundred kilobytes (from roughly 0.5mb) and the rest of that player only loads if someone clicks on the play button, so, Lazy loading for images and YouTube videos can significantly speed up the site and slim down pages.
Using lazy loading can significantly reduce the number of files that are initially loading on a page, as well as the size of the page. Many modern themes or templates have this functionality already built in so it’s worth digging through the template settings and if the option is available, turn it on. The guys at Speedboostr have an article that digs into Shopify Lazy Loading in more detail.
A note here – in Pagespeed Insights lazy loading is called ‘deferred image loading’, but it’s the same thing as lazy loading.
7. Image Compression and Optimization
Alrighty, so let’s talk a little bit about image compression and optimization. There are a few steps that are important here, but let’s talk about compression first.
What do we mean by image compression? Image compression is basically taking the image in its original size and then reducing its file size without impacting its quality. Now, there are two levels of compression:
‘Lossless compression’, which means zero reduction in the quality of the image, as well as smaller file size.
‘Lossy compression’, which means there is some reduction in the quality of the image, as well as even smaller file size.
When we optimize images we never use lossy image compression – if you’ve spent any time looking at speed articles around the web many of them will recommend lossy compression – this is a mistake, DON’T DO IT!
We always use lossless compression because we never want to sacrifice the quality of the images on our site for a marginally better reduction in file size – ultimately we optimize site speed to make our marketing perform better and improve our conversion rate.
Good quality product photography is really one of those key things that sets websites apart and can be a real conversion booster and while the quality difference between lossy and lossless might not be evident at a quick glance, there will be a reduction in the image vibrancy, colors and quality if you use lossy compression.
Bottom line – you never want to sacrifice the image quality for a small reduction in file size. There is an app called Crush.pics designed specifically for Shopify that will compress the images for you – it will run them through a compression algorithm, making the images smaller.
Size your images appropriately
Another thing you need to pay attention to when you upload images to your site is to make sure that they’re the size required for the page. This is a very common issue we encounter – images sized incorrectly.
So for example, the space for a image on a page might be something like, let’s say, 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels high. We’ll often see people upload images that are 2,000 pixels wide, which is huge – just too big for the space required. You want to make sure that before you upload images, they are sized correctly or approximately around the size where they’re going to be on the website.
Use JPG as the default image (if you don’t need image transparency)
There are two main file formats for images that people use on the web right now: JPEG and PNG. PNG files can be “transparent” which means they have no background and are quite often a lot larger than JPEG files, because the JPEG has a different compression algorithm.
When you’re saving images for your site, we want to use JPEG as our file format if we don’t need transparency. JPG files will usually be smaller than the equivalent quality PNG file.
Compress images BEFORE uploading them!
When you’re preparing images to upload to your site it’s worth running them through an optimizer on your PC – generally we use a free application called Imageoptim (https://imageoptim.com/). You just run the images through it and they compress very quickly. Afterward, we’ll use the Crush.pics compression application inside Shopify which might squeeze a bit more out of them.
NextGen Image File Formats
There’s also something called next-gen image file formats.
You might have seen this on Google Pagespeed Insights. There are several next-gen image file formats – right now .webp is the most popular. Webp files can be 25 to 50 percent smaller than the file size they originally had, so that’s another fairly significant image size reduction.
The problem right now webp image files is that not all browsers support them, which means you can’t just change all images on your site to .webp, they have to be served up in a particular way. In July, Shopify Plus stores started automatically supporting webp image files. It’s likely that Shopify will soon start rolling this out for all Shopify stores.
While .webp or Nextgen image optimization is a huge speed optimization it’s really important to do these other initial optimization steps first because that will make the webp files even smaller.
8. Use a Fast Theme/Template
Alrighty, let’s talk about your Shopify theme or template now.
It’s probably unrealistic to consider swapping out the theme or template for an existing store or a well-established store. It’s a big deal to swap the template and while it certainly does have an impact on speed and loading time the amount of work to swap over to a faster template or theme for an established site is probably not worth it.
Now, if you build a site from scratch, it’s probably worth building on one of the faster themes. Out of the Sandbox provides you with some of the fastest Shopify themes currently on the market.
When we’re talking about themes and templates, there are really two different ways through which the theme speed is really being affected:
The first one is the number of files required to drive the theme or template, needed to download the JavaScript files and as well as other CSS files that build the theme itself. So that’s one way that things can be fast or slow. The less files there are, the less resources the theme uses to render and generate whatever it needs to generate on the screen, and the faster it will be.
And then the cleaner the CSS and the less JavaScript that’s used, the better, since that will also affect the render speed.
There is a JavaScript library called jQuery, and there are a lot of themes and templates that use jQuery to basically build the look and feel of the website. jQuery is quite heavy and large when it comes to downloading. In fact, a lot of themes use jQuery – it’s not a bad thing, but it does impact speed; this means that themes that don’t rely on jQuery will run faster and then themes that have more optimized CSS will render faster in the browser as well.
Those are the two ways themes affect speed. How clean the code is, how many JavaScript files are getting downloaded, and the reliance on JavaScript for generating what’s on the screen, as well as the features that the theme has and the associated JavaScript files that download the drive of those features. Then there’s also the all-around effect of all this, generally how efficient it is, how clean the CSS code is – all those things affect the render of the page itself.
To remind you again, Out of the Sandbox offers you a selection of some of the fastest themes currently on the market. You’re more than welcome to check them out and pick one that’s most suitable for your site and your business. We wouldn’t suggest swapping themes if your site is already established. If you’re setting one up from scratch, however, or rebuilding the site, it’s definitely worth considering building on some of the faster themes on the market.
8. More Advanced Optimization
NOTE: These are developer-level optimizations so quite a bit more technical. You will need to have solid knowledge in website development to implement them since they’re not really your easy-peasy DIY stuff.
1. The first one is pretty simple – check the JavaScript console for errors!
JavaScript errors are going to slow things down and can break the render of the side or break the site in weird ways.
This is a fairly simple issue – it’s not unusual for JavaScript files to be out of date or not loading properly. There are some errors in the code which are actually relatively easy to fix.
2. Lazy loading the live chat tag manager
We talked about this in the tag manager section, but just to reiterate, we’re going to go over it here one more time as well.
Moving the live chat code into tag manager and adding a delay to it – a five-second delay – will make the pages much faster (it’s actually very easy to do that), and it doesn’t really affect how live chat works. So, that’s definitely something worth considering, particularly when it comes to an e-commerce environment where people are clicking through category pages and looking up a lot of products. Making each page much lighter initially can make a big difference to the user experience. This makes lazy loading the live chat tag manager an important step to cover, which can have a huge impact across all speed testing tools, as well as the user experience of speed on the site.
3. Conditional loading
Conditional loading basically means that you’ll only be loading the files needed for a particular page.
This is a fairly advanced feature and it differs largely on a site by site basis. This can be a powerful optimization, particularly if your site has a lot of heavy marketing and analytics code. An easy way to conditionally load third party scripts is using tag manager but conditional loading can also be implemented inside Liquid files.
4. Using pre-loading, pre connecting and something called just-in-time pre-loading
Adding pre-loading commands or lines into the HTML to load stuff and connect to servers before those resources are required can also make things faster. Particularly if you’re loading from a lot of third parties using pre-loading directives in the head of the site can speed things up and really eliminate some of the lag for those third-party resources.
Just-in-time pre-loading: there are a lot of libraries out there now that will preload HTML files on the site, as a user clicks over the link. So, before they actually click on the link, the browser goes and fetches that page in the background, and it caches it. The experience from a user perspective is that those pages load much faster and much snappier. The pre-loading library we prefer is the library from Instant.Page
5. Speeding Up Redirects & Filtering Garbage Traffic with Cloudflare
Speeding up redirects from http to https and non-www to WWW URLs can improve the users perception of initial site load time greatly. What we often do is use Cloudflare in front of a site and use the page rules inside Cloudflare, do things like faster redirects from non HTTP URLs to HTTPs.
We also use Cloudflare to filter a lot of garbage traffic. Often we’ll show captcha messages to countries or to visitors from countries where spam typically comes from and we’ll often block SEO crawlers from Semrush and Ahrefs which also hammer sites.
Additionally, allowing those crawlers to crawl the site can give competitors data about the site that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get. So blocking those crawlers also blocks some of the functionality and those SEO tools.
6. Minifying & Combining CSS – it probably won’t make a difference
Let’s talk a little bit about things that probably don’t really matter in terms of speed. Minifying CSS and JavaScript won’t make much of a difference to speed, generally speaking.
In fact, you’re very likely to see a lot of speed tools recommending you to minify CSS and JavaScript. In the real world, however, that won’t make much of a difference, because the files that are coming out of the hosting are compressed anyway by gzip.
Then we also have removing query strings from static resources, an old speed recommendation that doesn’t really matter on the modern web and can actually break Version Control for some Content Delivery Networks.
Those are two things you’ll see in some speed test tools, particularly older ones that actually don’t really make a difference anymore. This also means that they can probably be safely ignored in most cases.
Some Final Words
So, thanks for pushing through this, it’s been a long one! Nevertheless, we hoped we helped you go through some of the speed issues you’ve been having with your Shopify site and again, check out the guys at www.SpeedBoostr.com as there’s some great content there that digs into Shopify site speed even further.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
A WordPress website and a WiFi connection – that’s all it takes to put your website/online business, but also your customers and their private data at risk from potential privacy breaches, cyber-attacks and the like.
Protecting your website is especially important if it’s your primary source for generating revenue. If this is the case, then surely the last thing you want to happen to it is to be hacked because of a lack of proper security. Having all this in mind, it’s always better to be safe than sorry, right? And this is precisely where VPN comes in the picture to save the day.
This is an article we’ve made where we cover the best free VPNs currently on the internet. We’ve also included information about what exactly a VPN is, how important it is for WordPress and also how you can get a free VPN for all of your devices that are connected to the internet.
So, first thing’s first – let’s start with a bit of 101 info on what a VPN actually is.
What Is a VPN and Why You Should Use it for WordPress?
The connection between the visitors of your WordPress website and your server is being secured by several tools. One of them is the SSL certificate, whose function is to encrypt browser sessions on the level of the server. A CDN plugin can be used if you want to add an extra encrypted server layer between the visitors of your site and the site itself.
With all these tools that provide a secure browsing experience for your site’s visitors, it’s also important to not forget the devices that you use and how they should be protected as well, both for you and for your customers.
VPNs help you to do precisely this.
What is a VPN?
VPN is an abbreviation for “Virtual Private Network”. It works in the same way as does the CDN or SSL certificate, which means it adds a layer of encryption between two sides or entities.
A common example of this is when VPN-induced encryption occurs between a private network (which serves to manage your online session) and the devices you’re using to work on the internet (this can be a computer, smartphone, a tablet and the like). When you enable a VPN session and then head out to visit a website (like, say, the WordPress login), what the VPN server does is it encrypts the information that is passed between the device that you use and the site that you visit.
To some people, this might seem like a bit too much, but it’s actually pretty important and shouldn’t be neglected, especially not from people that don’t work from an office of an employer. This is because a lot of employers take extra precautionary measures to make sure the data that is shared through their company (circulating between employees, clients, management, business partners, prospective hires, and a lot more) is going to be properly protected. And they manage to do this by using a very strict security protocol. Sometimes employees, which are allowed to do business off the company’s site, can receive access to the VPN of the company they work for and therefore keep all of their sessions safe.
But, if you work from home, or you use remote locations like, for example, coffee shops or coworking spaces, libraries or some vacation apartment, you rely on public WiFi which allows you to connect to the internet and also to WordPress. And even if you’ve thought a little bit about security and have bought a more professional WiFi package for home use, there’s still no guarantee that it’s going to be completely safe from attacks or security breaches, without the extra protection the VPN offers.
If you connect to and work on WordPress using public WiFi, it means that you work by using an internet connection that’s not secured. It also means that getting a VPN is more than a good idea – it’s a necessity. If you’re having concerns over the cost of including an additional tool to all the other stuff you’re already using for your business, you needn’t worry. This article is about the best free VPNs, especially for people that use WordPress and want to protect their devices.
Before we begin with the actual list for the best free VPNs you can currently find on the market, let’s talk a little bit more why it’s important to use VPN when you’re using WordPress.
Why You Should Use a VPN for WordPress?
The key benefits of using a VPN for WordPress ultimately come down to two words: security and privacy.
Security
Having a VPN by your side can make all the difference when it comes to properly securing your website. By using a VPN you’ll be able to protect your site from anything prying or malicious on the internet that has been trying to wiggle its way in through the devices that you use.
The VPN also helps in protecting everything you do in WordPress – it does this via its encrypted layer, which manages to keep hidden away all the info you put into WordPress: login credentials, uploaded documents, credit card information, etc. And even if your devices do somehow suffer an attack from hackers, malware, bots or the like, it will have an additional defense layer which will ensure that they’re being kept away from WordPress and all the important content you have on it.
Privacy
Privacy is equally important as security (in fact, they have to be considered together, alongside one another). VPNs also help to protect the identity of the user of WordPress.
How do they do this? VPNs use a tool for geolocation that manages to hide your IP address. What you basically do is choose to connect to one of the servers the VPN service offers (and there’s plenty of them to go around with!), which are dispersed around the world. This is the way the VPN hides your IP address and location, thus making it very, very, very difficult for potential hackers attempting to intrude into your device and also your WordPress working space.
So, by combining the SSL certificate, CDN, anti-malware software and security plugin of your WordPress site with a solid VPN service, you will ultimately have a very sound and downright unbreakable web security strategy and structure on your hands.
What Are the Free VPN Features You Should Be Looking For?
As with many other online tools, whether they be for managing security or enhancing/simplifying site functionality, you’re presented with a choice between a premium version and a free one. Of course, most of the time the premium versions offer precisely what their name says they do: superb security and privacy features and options, 24/7 customer support, and many other things.
But, if you happen to find the right free VPN, it can get very, very close to a premium one in terms of features and security and privacy performance. You have to have in mind, though, that there will be some sort of a tradeoff between you and the free VPN company, since you’re asking them for access to their network which is secure so you can protect your own work.
And so, before we begin with the actual list of the best free VPNs for users of WordPress, we wanted to quickly go over the features you should be looking for in free VPNs. Have in mind that some of the best free VPNs out there might be missing parts of these features, or fail to deliver them as completely or as good as their premium versions or counterparts, while others might operate by selling your data. This is why it’s important to set aside some time and think about the most important features for you when it comes to choosing a VPN provider.
Free VPN Features You Should Be Aware Of
Connection protocols like OpenVPN and SSTP that provide fast and secure browser sessions.
Bandwidth or data caps which are common if you’re using free VPNs.
Quantity of devices you’re allowed to connect the VPN to.
Guarantee that all browsing session logs will be destroyed and not saved anywhere, which means that their records couldn’t be hacked and used as a tool to enter your site.
Inclusion of ads which is the way the VPN service makes money (this is a common thing for VPNs providers that don’t offer premium plans).
Complex data encryption that provides the right level of security for your needs.
Internet kill switch which gives you the ability to disconnect a session to a website immediately and permanently.
Support for the kinds of devices on which you plan to use the VPN.
Installation and session configuration should be easy to handle.
A wide variety of server locations, giving you greater choice options from which you can hide your IP address.
Quantity of server locations that provide redundancy if one server happens to get overloaded with traffic and becomes too slow to use.
A reminder from before: a free VPN will most likely include some sort of a tradeoff deal for at least one of the features mentioned above. This means that if:
You prefer not to be shown advertisements as you work through the VPN;
Or you’re anxious about connections which are too slow and hinder you from doing your WordPress-based tasks done properly;
And you’re not willing to compromise certain aspects of your work that are in conflict with the restrictions of free VPNs
then perhaps a free VPN might not be the best choice for you.
Put in another way, if you’re in need of an advanced functionality when it comes to security, privacy, and speed, and you also prefer to have as much control over it as possible, then you should definitely consider purchasing the premium versions of VPN providers.
Of course, there are some good quality, well-known VPN providers that have worked great for many people on the internet and might as well work perfectly for you too. Next, we’re going to cover these best free VPNs and offer you the choice to find the best and most suitable one among them.
Best Free VPNs for WordPress Users
A small footnote before we begin with the list of the best free VPNs: it’s evident that you can find lots of well-written reviews and decent ratings covering VPNs for devices that work on Mac, Windows, iOS, as well as Android. However, you’ll have to be careful when it comes to the details in each of these reviews and ratings.
Let’s take an example: when you search for a VPN, a lot of the times the results you’ll find in Android and iOS stores have to do with VPN proxies. And sure, a proxy will manage to hide your IP address, but it doesn’t fare as well as a real VPN when it comes to the security part. Also, be careful with the “free VPN” label, since some of them market themselves as free but offer this for a very limited amount of time, which means you’ll only get free access for a couple of days, and then you’ll get charged for using them.
So, we’re not going to waste your time any further, next we’re going to focus on the 6 best free VPNs for WordPress users. We’ve selected these free VPNs having in mind the features and criteria we mentioned above.What we tried to do is include as many free VPNs that contain as many of the desirable features listed above as possible.
Whether you are a professional user of WordPress or just a regular person using the internet that simply wants to be secure at all times, the free version of the Hotspot Shield VPN service provider might just be the thing for you.
Hotspot Shield uses 128-bit and 256-bit AES, so-called military-grade encryption throughout its server network. Their service also includes a killswitch that gives users the choice to terminate browser sessions with WordPress in a simple and more secure way.
The free plan of Hotspot Shield VPN does come with a bandwidth cap, but unfortunately, the limits of it are not specified on their website.
Hotspot Shield says that it’s not storing your IP session data (aka the browsing session logs), but it is true that it makes use of it – this, however, is done anonymously and is used only for internal research purposes.
The free VPN version of this provider is available for the platforms of Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, and it only allows the use of one device at a time.
If you’re interested in server locations, you won’t get much with the free version of the Hotspot Shield. By getting the free plan, if you’re in the US, you’ll simply get a different IP address from your own, which is also located in the US. If you want a choice of servers that spans more than 20 countries you’ll have to upgrade to the premium versions.
This VPN provider does include ads in its service.
Even though it has its flaws, as we saw from the features list above, Hotspot Shield is still one of the best free VPN providers you can get on the internet right now. And although it does include premium plans, if you’re currently trying to save up and cut corners a little bit, their free VPN is going to do a good job in encrypting and protecting your internet activity.
TunnelBear is another good quality VPN provider that offers a free plan as well. The company that has created TunnelBear is, in fact, the software security giant McAfee which means you’re in for a very solid VPN service whose creators really know what they were doing in terms of security and privacy.
One of the best things about it is that it’s constantly improving its service when it comes to the security of user sessions. It actually requires very little personal data when it comes to the sign-up process, which means it’s become more secure than ever, and that is very telling for a free VPN provider.
Also takin into consideration its superb technology for adblocking for Chrome, you could very well say it’s one of the best free VPNs for Mac and Windows users.
TunnelBear provides you with AES 256-bit encryption, making sure your session data is safe and protected. Its servers are marked as lightning-fast, although there is a download limit to the service.
You will get a free 500MB of data with the installation, and you can get 1GB if you’re willing to tweet about it.
TunnelBear doesn’t keep your logging sessions, which is another great thing about it. The platforms this provider is available for are Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. The free version can be used on a limited amount of devices.
Users of TunnelBear can choose locations of servers in over 22 countries.
TunnelBear also does a great job when it comes to blocking ads. TunnelBear’s adblocker works magic by attempting to block all ads from ever reaching your browser.
Simply put, this a great free VPN that does a very fine job when it comes to security – it’s very adamant in not keeping your user logs, which is a great, great plus! Of course, the settings options can be better, which is always a flaw in free VPNs, and the download limit and number of connected devices all have limitations unless you opt to get one of their premium versions of their VPN service.
If you want your free VPN service to come with extra strong security, lots and lots of data, as well as unlimited bandwidth, then look no further, because Windscribe might just be the perfect provider to give you this.
Windscribe VPN uses an AES-256 cipher, SHA512 auth, and 4096-bit RSA key encryption, meaning you’re very much on the safe side when it comes to this VPN provider.
Users of Windscribe that use their free plan will be able to get up to 10GB of data a month. Windscribe’s Cruise Control service has an automatic configuration able to connect you to the available server closest to you so you can get the best speeds possible (the free version gives you 8 server locations).
Windscribe doesn’t track your session logs and it requires only a username and password for signing up, giving you full-on discretion. With the free service, you also get a built-in ad blocker and firewall protection.
Winsdcribe is available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, and it offers both a desktop VPN as well as a browser extension. We recommend that you get both of them and thus have the security for your platform while also blocking the ads in your browser.
Winsdcribe has rightly earned its place on our list. They have great support and guides for getting started, making encryption of your internet activity a breeze. Of course, since it’s a free VPN service, there are restrictions on server locations as well as connection control. And, if you happen to be located outside of Europe, North America or Hong Kong, unfortunately, you won’t be able to use the Windscribe’s free plan.
Hide.me VPN gives you all the basic stuff you need when you sign up for a free VPN service. If, as a WordPress user, you don’t require a lot more than Gigabit speed and encryption of browsing sessions, Hide.me will provide you with everything you need.
Hide.me VPN is using AES-256 encryption, which manages to protect both your individual devices and also your home router. It offers all major protocols with the inclusion of IPsec, OpenVPN, and SSTP.
A very neat thing about the free version of this VPN provider is that it doesn’t have any bandwidth caps, although there are some limits when it comes to data transfer (you will get 2GB of data transfer).
This provider gives you 99.9% uptime, which means there won’t be any concern over frequent dropping out of sessions or instances when the VPN becomes extremely slow in times of peak activity.
Hide.me is very proud to state that it absolutely doesn’t store or sell any session data, which means it has a top-notch security protocol. It’s available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android platforms. The free plan allows you to choose only one simultaneous connection at a time.
By using the free plan, you can choose between 5 server locations worldwide. The Hide.me VPN doesn’t include any ads, which is another plus on its side.
Sometimes, the name of the VPN provider is very telling of its abilities – Speedify, in this instance, is no exception! This is a VPN service that will give you great performances when it comes to speed and connection since it has more than 1,000 servers spanning over 50 countries. And it’s also not stingy when it comes to security. You’ll be able to enjoy a security system offering you full encryption.
Speedify allows you to use multiple connections so you can enhance speed – like, let’s say, for both Wi-Fi and 4G data connections when you’re using a mobile device – which means you can expect excellent speeds. The only problem is that by using mobile-data, you risk your carrier’s allocation being eaten up if it’s capped on a monthly basis.
By getting the free plan from Speedify, you’ll be able to receive 5GB of free data every month, refreshing itself every 30 days. A slight downside to this VPN provider is that it’s based in the US, which means it’s automatically a subject to federal search warrants, so have that in mind as well.
SurfEasy is a VPN service that was initially created only for Mac users, but has now spread on all major platforms (Windows, iOS, and Android). Having this in mind, you can imagine that SurfEasy might just be the best free VPN provider for the Mac platform.
This is a VPN service that doesn’t fall short on security (SurfEasy’s servers are using bank-grade encryption) and which comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means that you can rest assured it work productively from wherever you want. Whether you’re doing it more on-the-go, or from home, it won’t make much of a difference.
If you’re worried about any ads, don’t be! SurfEasy uses superb adblocker technology, so you needn’t worry about any third-party presences chasing you and following you around the web during your browsing and working sessions.
SurfEasy doesn’t limit you in terms of your bandwidth use, although there is a data limitation of 500 MB when you’re using the free plan.
You also won’t need to worry about any session logs – logs are never stored with this VPN because of their no-logs policy.
With this VPN provider, you’ll be able to switch your location and mask your IP with just one click – you’ll be able to choose from servers located throughout 28 places around the world.
Some Final Notes
So, what can we say is the bottom line for the best free VPN services? Surely, they all come with their pros and cons, and their unique sets of features. What does this mean?
It means that what might seem like the fastest or most secure free VPN provider might not be in fact one and the same for all users. A lot of it comes down to your own particular location, as well as the availability of VPN servers. So, next time you go over these 6 best free VPNs listed above, make sure to start with the location first, since it will help you filter down your choices more effectively.
The security of your WordPress site should be a number one priority, especially if the website is your primary source of money-making. The internet is a vulnerable place and subject to many prying eyes and malicious attacks, making your WordPress site and server vulnerable as well, which is why it’s so important to secure your browser and the devices that you use – and as soon as possible.
From our list of best free VPNs you can see that this is, in fact, not that hard to do – on the contrary, it’s quite easy to set up a free VPN, quickly and simply, without having to pay for anything.
If you’re looking for more thorough protection and security and have a larger business that involves more clients and employees, than it would also be a good idea to think about a premium version of a VPN service. If you’re based in Australia, check out our list of best VPNs for Australia here. But whatever you set out to do, don’t forget to get yourself a VPN.
Indeed, one question remains in the end: why cut back on security and privacy when you can easily get a VPN service for free?
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Mobile responsive websites are a must as we reach the end of the second decade of the new millennia. It’s no wonder, then, that businesses that thrive online have to locate part of their strategies to being readily available, adaptable and fully responsive for mobile devices as well. And this is not only enormously important for users of that website or business; it also has to do with Google requirements and rankings.
In short, what we’re trying to say is that you shouldn’t put your business under risk by consciously or unconsciously neglecting users that interact with your site primarily through mobile devices.
But, the action of making your site mobile responsive is not something that can be done magically and perfectly in an instant. First, you need to do a little bit of thinking before you set out to purchase the necessary plugin, the one you deem best for your site and your online business enterprise. Maybe you already like some of the elements present in your current mobile version of your site but are not fond of some other ones that you want to change. Or you want a mobile site but don’t want an app – all of this is a sign that there are different types of mobile plugins and all of them offer sometimes more sometimes less similar features and options, as well as a bunch of different interfaces you could use for your mobile site.
For example, you could opt for having only a mobile website (also called a responsive website), where the content of your site won’t change – it will only get adjusted for a flawless viewing on mobile devices.
Another example is the mobile app, aka turning your website into an app. This is very different from the responsive website, and it requires a different program to do this. Generally, turning your website into a mobile app will require mobile features with more power than the regular mobile websites.
A third case is when WordPress mobile plugins are used only to change the mobile menu, for the simple reason that a lot of mobile sites have less than satisfactory looking mobile menus.
Having all this in mind, we think it’s a good time to continue over to a selection of the best WordPress mobile plugins. All of them somehow differ one from the other, and our job is to point out the differences, as well as their strengths and their weaknesses. Your job is to choose the one you think it’s best for your site and your business. All of them, however, have somehow earned their spot on this list as best WordPress mobile plugins.
It’s not for aught that WPtouch has been deemed the most popular WordPress mobile solution eight years in a row now. When it comes to high-quality WordPress mobile plugins, then WPtouch always finds its place among the top ones. This is largely because the whole operational mechanism behind this plugin works quickly and efficiently in turning regular websites into super functional mobile interfaces.
What’s the magic WPtouch here, you might wonder? Well, one of the key ingredients certainly is the speed with which this plugin does all of it. WPtouch will manage to change any kind of WordPress theme you have installed on your site and make it usable and highly functional on any type of mobile device.
WPtouch also considers Google Mobile Test when turning your site into mobile responsive one – and it doesn’t let it go without making damn sure that your site will pass Google’s test with more than satisfactory results. This, in turn, also allows you to leave worries about your SEO rankings aside – all you get to do next is to think about making future improvements, without worrying about whether you’ll be able to maintain their hard-earned rates.
The WPtouch plugin comes in two main versions: a free one and premium ones. The free version allows you to make changes to the mobile site without any technical or programming knowledge. It also renders a very user-friendly, fast loading and overall very good looking mobile responsive site that will look perfectly on any type of small mobile device. You can find the free version here.
The premium versions of this plugin are meant for more serious WordPress users, especially for those who really want to put emphasis on the mobile versions of their site. WPtouch’s premium version offers a greater variety of high-quality mobile themes, as well as certain types of extensions that are designed to incorporate advertisements into your mobile site with more ease and less effort required. What’s more, the premium version also offers you web font controls, caching options, as well as direct and full-on support from the developers of this superb plugin.
The premium version is found on their website – the lowest-priced plan starts at $79 for a whole year and is valid for only one WordPress site. We think that the value of this plugin compared with its price is pretty decent, especially if you’re a more professional WordPress website owner, if you want a multisite support, and also if your business depends largely on your online site and you want to expand it to mobile sites as well, without losing on functionality and aesthetics.
Why Get WPtouch?
Well, the reasons are many, and we saw some of the above. The first thing is that this plugin works super quickly, even in its free version, when it comes to converting your site into a mobile responsive one. You don’t need to be an IT genius to understand the workings of the WPtouch plugin – through the Settings page in the dashboard of WordPress, you can intuitively navigate your way through the plugin and use it as you please.
We also saw that, given the price-value ratio, the premium versions aren’t as expensive as you would expect them to be coming from such a high-quality plugin such as this one. You’ll get full on developers support, the ability to use it on multiple sites, a variety of wonderful themes you could use, advanced-level typography, as well as useful extensions for advertisements you can place on your mobile site.
WPtouch gives you plenty of tools to tinker around in the mobile menu of your site. It also allows you to customize how you view your site through a particular mobile browser. So, for example, it will give you the chance to choose which of the browsers you want your mobile site to support.
Another great thing about this plugin is how successfully it manages to replace themes that are responsive but rely on heavy image files, as well as CSS and JavaScript. WPtouch is made to be lightweight and super-fast and is bound to satisfy even the pickiest of users.
Jetpack, a WordPress plugin provided by Automattic (uh, yeah, only the guy(s) behind WordPress itself!), is another great mobile plugin. And since it’s coming from the Automattic folks, it also means that it comes with a bunch of already included tools, so you won’t have to be bothered and install additional plugins.
Jetpack will give you a collection of features and tools spanning from social media to security, as well as advertising, marketing, and design. Besides all of these alluring options, Jetpack offers a mobile theme as well, which is also why it’s present on this list!
If you happen to have Jetpack installed on your WordPress website, then you can activate the mobile theme in the Jetpack settings area. The way the theme works is that, once it detects a mobile device, it overrides the current theme.
Jetpack is a very solid WordPress mobile plugin, partly because it has a bunch of settings that allow you to adjust the look of your website and tweak it the way you want it to look on a number of smaller-sized devices.
Another great thing about Jetpack is that it has both a free version and premium ones, and the premium ones are very, very affordable, starting from $39 per year!
Jetpack is one of the most reliable WordPress plugins you can find on the market, working flawlessly for mobile devices as well. It provides a simple mobile theme, but one which allows you to customize it by will and tweak it whichever way you want to suit your enterprise.
Why Get Jetpack?
Jetpack has a great, highly functional mobile interface and it’s designed to be lightweight and fast so the users of your site can have the best online experience.
Another pro is that the mobile theme is completely free in Jetpack, meaning you won’t have to purchase the premium versions in order to get it. You simply download Jetpack from the WordPress vault and within a matter of minutes and a couple of clicks you’ll have it up and ready, perfectly implemented on your site.
Maybe some users will want a little bit more fancy theme design (some people might find the Jetpack theme basic), but this isn’t necessarily a con. Jetpack provides a very modern and contemporary look to its mobile theme, and once you actually see it on a mobile or tablet browser, you’ll be convinced how good and fitting it actually looks.
What else to say? Jetpack also features lazy loading inside its plugin package, meant for images that are being loaded on the mobile theme. Lazy loading is a perfect option for site optimization and speed because once a visitor checks out your page and scrolls through the mobile version of the site, the images present on it won’t actually load until the visitor reaches them. Thus, lazy loading manages to save you up a lot of potential waste of resources, which, in turn, makes your site much faster than it would be without it.
A lot of people will like the fact that Jetpack’s mobile theme places the sidebars of your page automatically below the main content, which means they’ll still be present on the page without making a mess and clutter around the usual one-column mobile devises format.
You’ll also find how Jetpack supports custom backgrounds and headers, so you never lose control over the individuality and particular feel of your site.
The WordPress Mobile Pack is known for its offer of the so-called ‘progressive web applications’. The progressive web apps are, in fact, apps that are fast and reliable, which include a bunch of desired features of the likes of push notifications and mobile interface smooth animations.
Have in mind, though, that these are not apps in the classical sense, like the ones we’re used to getting from the app stores on our smartphones. Instead, these are conceived as regular mobile websites that load through the browser of the user/visitor. Then why are they called apps, you might ask? Developers call the apps for the simple reason that you are allowed to choose from several different templates that blend in with the user interface of an Android or iPhone app.
Considering all this, if you want a real app to use for your WordPress site, then it might be a good idea to look for another type of mobile plugin. But, the themes are still beautiful, regardless of the type of app. Also, the design of this kind of app is bound to make your site even more unique when compared to other responsive themes present on the mobile plugins market.
Another alluring thing about the WordPress Mobile Pack is that it has a free version that you can find and download here. It offers a fine selection of features (quite a rich one for a free pack!) and it’s quite simple to set up and make your mobile WordPress site upgraded and smoothly running in no time. If you want more stuff than what the basic and free version offers, like, for example, more customization options as well as a big collection of app themes, you can, of course, purchase one of the premium versions, which start from $99 per year.
What the WordPress Mobile pack does is it attempts to mimic a particular app as much as it can, in the best way possible. It does this by subtly making users save the mobile version of your site to their phone’s home screen for future uses.
This mobile pack also includes a default theme that has six different cover pages made to rotate so your mobile site always looks fun, new, alluring, but at the same time also recognizable and itself.
The pack also allows you to make adjustments from the WordPress dashboard to stuff like fonts, colors, and your own logo as well.
Why Get the WordPress Mobile Pack?
Well, first of all, by getting the core plugin, you also get a very fine selection of basic features for which you won’t have to pay a single dollar. If you happen to want additional items, elements, and features – like, for example, monetization options or unlimited push notifications – you can, of course, upgrade to one of the premium versions of this mobile pack.
Now, some people might be skeptical when it comes to this WordPress pack since it’s not providing you with a real app, but a mimic of one, we think there shouldn’t be much room for doubt. The templates included work superbly to render the look and feel of a regular app that we have on our phones. You’ll be able to send push notifications and ask the users of your site to save the link of the mobile version on their smartphones. The themes that you’ll find included will all look more like an app than like a mobile website, guaranteed!
This mobile pack also gives you the option to decide which posts and pages you want to be shown on the mobile site. So, if, for example, you don’t want to show certain features on the mobile site separately because they are already present in headers, footers or elsewhere, you’ll have the option to simply not show them and make your mobile site look more elegant and less cluttered!
This WordPress mobile pack also makes it possible for Google Analytics to integrate with your mobile site, giving you the chance to make distinctions between who is visiting your mobile site and how many of them are visiting the mobile site versus the regular desktop site.
As the name of the plugin itself says, WP Mobile Menu is one of those super-useful plugins for people who want to put special emphasis on fixing up their website’s mobile menu. This is the kind of plugin that will allow you to have both a wonderfully responsive website and a highly functional, modern mobile menu! Menus, in fact, are pretty important for mobile websites, since it’s the primary way visitors navigate the site – that is unless they get to click on the links or call to action buttons. Large icons, menu text, buttons and a smooth slide-in effect are all desirable features in a good looking, functional website mobile menu.
And WP Mobile Menu packs a serious punch when it comes to mobile menus! You can create or customize some very nice menus with this plugin. It also gives you the control for managing background images, Google Fonts, as well as naked headers and much more. If you want, you can also configure the menu with three levels of depth, or just do minor tweaks but still keep your desktop website look.
You can download the basic WP Mobile Menu plugin for free right here and there won’t be any limitations in terms of the number of websites you want the plugin to be used for.
There are also premium versions of this plugin, the cheapest one starting from $4.99 per month, giving you the options of menu item icons and header search, as well as over 2000 icons. The most expensive premium version is the Enterprise one which is $29.99 a month which features a personal success manager, a private Slack channel and special rates for custom development. There is also a Business or WooCommerce plan, going by the rate of $7.99 a month, which is a great option for people with online businesses since it has a menu cart icon, a mobile product filter, a sliding cart and a cart total in the footer.
Why Get the WP Mobile Menu Plugin?
The WP Mobile Menu plugin is the perfect solution for website owners who are already more or less content with the look and functionality of their site but want to make some improvements in the mobile menu. This way you won’t have to be afraid that you’ll meddle too much with other aspects of your mobile site, and focus solely on fixing up the menu itself.
As we said earlier, you can find the basic plugin for free at the WordPress depository. You are also able to get three premium versions, among them a WooCommerce version as well, where you can add shopping carts.
The core plugin is free, but you have other options like a Professional version or an eCommerce version for adding items like shopping carts or cart total on the mobile version of your site. Some of the premium versions include Google Fonts as well, and more than 2000 icons you can choose from so you have the chance to create a more visual and alluring menu than usual. For example, you can use the so-called ‘naked header’ or a transparent header, but also a menu type that uses an image as a background.
With the free plan, you also get three depth levels, while you get two more with the professional plans. The free plan also offers branding of the menu, enabling you to use your company’s logo as well if you want. And, if you want to omit certain pages or elements from the desktop version of your site into the mobile version, then you can do this very easily with this plugin.
By using these features you’ll get an outstanding mobile interface for your site that will surely set itself apart from a lot of other mobile sites out there.
The Max Mega Menu plugin is a plugin that will help you to convert any type of WordPress menu already in existence into a mega menu. What is a mega menu you might ask? A mega menu is a menu that shows all of the options present on a particular page, even if there are lots of them. This makes the Max Mega Menu one of the best plugins for online magazines or online businesses.
When you set out to use this plugin, you will see how your desktop menu will be converted into a mega menu; then you will also get the chance to choose which posts and pages you want to be shown on the menu, and also customize them at will.
This plugin is truly the best one when it comes to mega menus on mobile versions of WordPress sites. But, you have to keep in mind that you’ll have to have an already established responsive mobile site on which you can build, customize and tinker with your mega menu.
The Max Mega Menu plugin is very easy to use and doesn’t require any particular coding knowledge. You can build and customize your menu with the help of the drag and drop tools, and that’s about it! With this plugin you’ll also be able to include WordPress widgets into the menu and buttons that redirect to other pages that are part of your site; you can even include animated menu styles and flyouts if you want to!
Like most of the plugins included on this list, the Max Mega Menu also has a free version and premium ones. If you’re just starting out or want to cut costs for your mobile site, then the free version will be just enough. If you’re more serious about your site and want extra features to customize the mobile interface of your site even more, you can upgrade the Max Mega Menu for $29 (valid for one site), $49 (valid for 5 sites) and $99 (valid for 99 sites) a year, depending on the premium version. As you can see, the premium versions are quite affordable, giving you extra features like Google Fonts, support for WooCommerce, sticky menu and a lot more.
Why Get the Max Mega Menu Plugin?
This is by far the best plugin you can find on the market right now that does a great job when it comes to turning WordPress menus into mega menus. It gives you the chance to control and customize your own mega menus and tailor them to the needs of your own mobile site.
These types of mega menus will also allow you to include WordPress widgets in the area of the menu, which means you’ll be able to put a customized code or an image through the widget option in the menu itself. The free version also allows you to add icons to the menu, so you won’t need the premium ones for that.
The menus can be used on mobile, but also desktop versionsl. There are also options for flyouts, fades, and animations.
The AppPresser is a very nice presence in the WordPress mobile plugins environment because it differs from a lot of plugins that tend to make mobile app versions out of a WordPress desktop site. This plugin actually makes real apps that get linked to your website. This is very different and a much better solution than the RSS feeds a lot of other mobile plugins use because you get to have a real app out of your site, which can also be present in the app stores of Android or iPhone.
However, this plugin is oriented mainly towards website builders and developers with experience. If you’re not one of those people, then maybe you should check out some of the other plugins on our list or ask the AppPresser team for custom-built apps. If you are still interested, though, please continue reading on.
The AppPresser gives you the opportunity to make links to plugins such as BuddyPress and WooCommerce since it has several integrated WordPress plugins in its features package. In the final app product, you can also get features like device camera uploads and push notifications.
The pricing of this app is unsurprisingly higher than other mobile plugins, especially because it’s oriented towards developers and web experts. The basic plan starts from $249 a year, the Business one is $499 a year, and the Business Plus starts from $599 a year
Why Get AppPresser?
Well, if you are a developer, AppPresser will help you transform a whole WordPress site into a highly functional, good looking mobile app. The app can thus be saved on people’s smartphones, and can also be present in app stores.
It also includes integrations for highly popular and frequently used WordPress plugins, such as LearnDash, BuddyPress, and, of course, WooCommerce.
This app isn’t valuable only because it will make your desktop WordPress site function as a blog feed on mobile devices. It actually works as a very powerful tool that collaborates with other popular plugins and makes your site a very well made smartphone app.
With the AppPresser you’ll also get templates and custom pages and be able to customize at will, without sticking solely to the content already present on your site.
This plugin also includes an app tester through which you can run the app of your site (on your phone), thus testing all you want to test and see how the buttons and the pages work out in the actual app.
The AppPresser also includes an online dashboard through which you can manage all the apps of your clients, and you can operate it through your desktop.
The AppPresser plugin makes great apps for both the iPhone and Android operating systems. In its program, it uses a carefully combined set of features which seamlessly integrate with the current plugins you have on your site. All of this will make your site highly functional, while also looking very good on a mobile app.
Conclusion
With these five WordPress mobile plugins, you will be able to create a superbly functional mobile website out of a regular desktop one. Some people require different WordPress mobile apps for different issues and aspects of their mobile sites they want to work on. That is why in this list we included six different WordPress mobile plugins, all selected from the top of the mobile plugin world.
So, before we conclude with our topic, we’d like to do a small recap of the ones listed here and give you the gist of each of them.
If you want to final a plugin that will satisfy your general needs for a responsive site, then you should definitely consider the WPtouch. It has everything it takes to create a great mobile site.
The Jetpack plugin will give you the chance to create a mobile feed cleaner than everyone else’s out of your WordPress blog.
If you want to have a mobile website that will have the functionality of an app, then definitely consider the WordPress Mobile Pack.
If you want to concentrate more on the mobile menu and leave the other elements of your mobile site undisturbed, then check out WP Mobile Menu.
If you want a plugin that will help you make a real mobile app from your desktop WordPress page or an RSS blog feed mobile page, then definitely go with the AppPresser.
And, finally, last but not least, if you need to make mega menus, both for the desktop and mobile version of your site, and want to leave other aspects of the site as they are, then get the Max Mega Menu plugin.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive when it comes to the best WordPress mobile plugins out there, but we tried to pick the best of the best and give you a very refined selection of them. We sincerely hope that we did our job well and that you won’t have much trouble with finding the perfect one for your WordPress site!
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As people of the 21st century, we can confidently say we live in a hypermobile and hyperconnected age. Mobile devices have become ubiquitous and downright indispensable for a functional daily existence.
Mobile phones and other such tools have become the new pocket computers – they’re becoming more and more powerful, with ever more programs, gadgets, options and performance strength built into them. Our mobile phones nowadays are playing the role of what was once the mp3 player, the portable camera and video, the video game platforms and a bunch of other separate tools and devices. Your mobile phone allows you to order food, get entertained any minute of the day, as well as to get all the world’s information and current news in a manner of seconds.
And because we’re getting more and more dependent and hooked on our mobile phones, the demand for better and better operativity and performance is becoming more and more adamant and necessary. Mobile devices carry an ever bigger potential than previously thought. This also means that when it comes to the WordPress platform, website owners mustn’t forget about these types of devices as well. WordPress is a very versatile and ever-changing platform that constantly does something new and mobile themes aren’t an exception here. There is a bunch of great mobile-responsive themes made by WordPress developers that you simply must check out if you’re even a tiny bit serious about your WordPress website.
So, stick around and make sure you go through all of the best WordPress mobile themes for 2020 we’ve specially selected for you!
Uncode is beyond a doubt one of the best WordPress mobile themes you can currently find on the theme market. It’s a superbly modern, built to be extremely lightweight and extremely fast.
Unicode is built with a top-notch HTML5 and CSS3 code that also, in turn, powers a bunch of custom-developed shortcodes based on Bootstrap.
You can be rest assured that this theme is going to be continually updated (it has an impeccable record so far!), which allows it to always be on a top performance level, with the best technological tools built into it and articulated through it. Unicode is a great theme if you want to use it for social media as well, since it’s extremely dynamic and powerful in itself, as well as totally flexible and interactive for all those intricacies of chat messengers, social media feed information and so on. Its smooth and superbly elegant design makes it one of the best mobile-responsive and mobile-friendly themes for WordPress. Unicode is a multipurpose website theme, which means you can use it for numerous website purposes, and since it’s so flexible and interactive, it will fit perfectly into whatever kind of work you’re doing.
One of the great assets of Unicode is that it has a Visual Composer that’s enhanced with Unicode’s exclusively made add-ons. It also has full compatibility with WPML (the WordPress MultiLingual plugin) even just out of the box, as well as complete WooCommerce integration.
Uncode also features some pretty neat premium sliders which you can see and try out throughout its numerous specially designed demo websites, but also its page templates and layouts designed in the most professional way. All of this makes Unicode arguably the most responsive mobile theme out there, ready to tackle any mobile visual environment that comes its way.
If you want only the best for the mobile version of your WordPress site, then Unicode is definitely the ideal theme for sites and applications that strive to be mobile-friendly as well. Unicode will manage to satisfy all the needs of your mobile-friendly site, giving you all the necessary features for a superb functionality such as extreme touch and swipe friendly elements, as well as off-canvas mobile menus. So, the next time you think about building the perfect mobile-friendly site, with all the elegance, functionality and cutting edge features you can ever find, be sure that Uncode will more than certainly give you all of that and more!
Kalium is a very impressionable WordPress theme that is bound to make its users fall in love with its looks (but also its smarts!) instantaneously!
Like the Uncode, this is also a very modern and very versatile, multi-functional WordPress theme that works superbly and effortlessly on mobile devices as well. Once you purchase this very fine theme, you’ll see updates are being kept in check regularly and with diligence of the most professional kind. All of this will simply make sure that your site is always equipped and ready for the newest technological occurrences on the modern internet – both for WordPress and mobile devices in general.
Some of the newest features that were implemented in recent times are applications like SoundCloud, but also VK Icons, New Default Fonts, Content Dividers, Widgets for Blog Posts and Pricing tables – all of which will make your site perform impeccably in front of even the most demanding of users.
With the Kalium theme, you can sleep easily knowing that the whole of your WordPress website will be mobile responsive. Seen through the numerously scaled screens on the various brands of tablets and mobile phones, your site will not lose a touch of its originality, usability or functionality. All of this is super important both for new, but also already well-developed businesses since a superbly functional site practically does the job by itself in keeping established customers engaged, as well as drawing in potential new ones. With a theme like Kalium, your view count and your bottom line will never have to suffer again! A functional and easy to use website is important for all demographics out there.
The Kalium theme also incorporates the .po and .mo files which allow for all of your site’s valuable content to be effortlessly displayed in whatever language you want. What’s more, every one of your site’s features will have their own shortcode.
If you want a more direct experience of the theme you can check out their live preview. The Layer Slider Plugin is one of the most innovative features of this theme that will serve as another argument on why you should definitely consider the Kalium theme as something more than just your regular well responsive WordPress mobile theme. The Layer Slider Plugin gives all the creative freedom to users so they can make great designs of content sliders and galleries. Try it out for yourself and see all the super creative, extremely pretty effects that will come out of it!
Divi – a big name among the WordPress themes, is without a doubt one of the biggest allies of website owners and developers. You simply can’t go wrong with this theme because time and again it has proven itself to be the backbone of lots of amazing sites present on the internet for quite some time now.
Divi is also one of those themes that gets constantly updated and is keeping up with all the technological developments and trends on the vast theme market. Some of its greatest assets are its elegance and simplicity of design. The individual blocks design allows all of the elements present on your screen to be organized into these individual separate blocks. With these small chunks of content, people will find it super easy to follow the organization of your page and all the amazing stuff you have to offer.
The streamlining of visual customization makes it all the easier to organize content since it requires only changing the order of some of the blocks that display it.
Divi is also one of those themes that are very friendly for less technically versed people, meaning you don’t have to be a full-on developer in order to have more control in the arrangement and creativity of the organization of your page. Divi does away with the need for knowledge required for programming, making it possible for everyone to design a beautiful, highly functional and super successful website.
Divi doesn’t have a focus on a specific professional niche, making it a very adaptable and versatile responsive theme. Divi allows your content to be accessed as easily and as fully from any device you could think of: whether it’s a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, a PC or any other type of device that is able to show you content and connect to the internet – it’s going to look perfect at any time!
The premade demo themes will show you some of the possibilities the Divi theme offers, and from then on you’re free to create your own unique site that will suit all of your business’ needs!
Gillion is the WordPress mobile theme for online magazines, blogs, but also online stores.
A simple and easy to use theme, Gillon gives you fifteen demos and lots of page layouts you’ll be able to choose from once you purchase it.
Gillon also has the WPBakery page builder which is a very versatile builder, offering you tons of creative opportunities for customization. With it you’ll be able to tweak your site whichever way you want to, but also create unique, custom-made layouts without using any type of code whatsoever!
Other neat assets this theme offers are stuff like multiple header layouts, social media integration, twelve custom widgets, reviews, and also sticky navigation. Also, Gillion is a theme that’s made to be optimized for fast loading speeds, and for search engines as well.
The video tutorials included once you purchase this theme will be of great use once you start tinkering with this new theme and start to customize and organize your site the way you want it and the way it suits the ideas and products on it! Gillion allows you to do all of this and more!
A modularly designed theme, with highly efficient code and very adaptable, the Soledad theme can thus fit into any type of website you intend to launch or effectively reorganize or redo an existing one. It’s especially suitable, though, for people who want to focus more on online magazines as well as blog types of WordPress pages.
Soledad offers you more than 250 built-in Live Customizer options, initially also includes more than 250 different Home Demo websites, and gives you more than 100 slider and blog combinations.
A truly compact theme, with an intuitive interface made for the ultimate user experience, you’ll be able to tinker with this theme without any greater effort and tailor it according to your own tastes and needs.
Developed on a Bootstrap network, Soledad’s modular design makes it highly responsive for all types of devices. You can use any type of browser you want, or any type of platform, look at it through a bunch of different screen resolutions and sizes, and you can rest assured that your content will not flinch! Every bit of text-picture combination will stay in place, making it the perfect theme that’s mobile-friendly for online magazines and blogs! The touch and swipe features will make the user experience even easier and even more alluring than you could ever think. Their demos will also help you in setting your own future page.
Jevelin is another premium WordPress theme that is multi-purpose and fitting for every type of website, so regardless of whether you’re into e-commerce or blogging, it’s still going to be highly functional and super responsive on all devices. This theme is modern and visually appealing and, once you purchase it, it includes lots of plugin compatibility within it.
The Jevelin theme contains the MegaMeny – more advanced panel customization, which gives you the chance to use moveable headers and footers, as well as blog and portfolio layouts.
It has more than 40 shortcodes and layouts which are designed to be highly flexible. Its powerful page builder along with its adaptability for different image sizes on different screens makes Jevelin one very, very responsive theme.
Jevelin includes the Parallax effect for backgrounds and videos, and also includes RTL support and WPML – the texts can be translated with internal files. The buttons and widgets offer you a pristine opportunity to connect with different types of social media.
The integration of Contact Form 7 enables the Jevelin theme to make highly intuitive and quick forms. With the Slider Revolution you can make superb photo galleries that even some specially designed photo gallery themes can envy!
What’s more, the Jevelin theme contains WooCommerce plugin support, which is going to help you up with any kind of online business enterprise you set your mind to do!
Another highly successful WordPress mobile responsive theme, the X Theme has made sure to be the immaculate companion to sites that count on being visited particularly on mobile devices. Whatever kind of website you have, you can be sure that it will look spotless on any screen size, operating system or web browser, for that matter. The X Theme will also allow you to seamlessly organize and update your content, even if you’re constantly on the move.
You won’t have to worry about missing a wider audience since the X Theme also has integrated social buttons within its design, so your visitors, clients or followers can easily distribute, share and communicate your WordPress content on social media.
One of the biggest assets of the X Theme is its wonderful icon font selection (two sets and a total of 400 icons). You can see the full mobile responsiveness of this theme in the way these icon fonts (much like the rest of the layout) seamlessly adapt to all screen sizes.
And with the premium WooCommerce plugin, you won’t need to fear of missing out any potential customers that prefer to spend money through their mobile devices. The X theme makes online selling on people’s smartphones the easiest feats of all. Don’t miss out on this plugin!
Avada is another big name on our list, like Divi or Uncode, and it holds a striking number of copies sold from its theme – more than 150.000 if you cared to know! This is, of course, more than justified, having in mind the sheer versatility of the theme, along with its high functionality and responsiveness, making the Avada theme one of the most adaptable and efficient ones on the market.
Regardless of your niche, this theme can be used on any type of website. The Avada theme allows you the pleasure to personalize and customize your own site easily, without a fuss and with great results and responsiveness. It is carefully designed as to not require any knowledge of coding or web development out of the site’s owner when setting out to tinker with this theme and use it however you want.
Avada is fully functional with all major web browsers and it works seamlessly when it comes to compatibility and resizing of images and content on different devices.
The One Click Demo Importer is one of the best characteristics of this theme – it makes the setting up of a page the quickest and most fun task of all! Demos like these serve as the perfect basis from which you can launch your site, without having to think about every little detail concerning it. And that, in fact, is one of those features that makes all the difference between a high-quality responsive theme and an average or less than average one.
The Salient theme is one of those themes that manage to get under your skin in no time without you even noticing, and that definitely says something about how user-friendly this theme is!
Don’t be fooled by its seemingly simple design – this theme has a lot to offer! Its Visual Composer tool will give you all the creative freedom you need, but also the control in navigating through the chaos of your own content. The Drag and Drop options allow you to easily and neatly organize whatever you want to put on your site by dragging different elements across the screen, without worrying that you’ll make too much of a mess of it. The Options Panel offers a superb user-friendly interface. You won’t need any tech-savviness for this theme and no programming knowledge whatsoever, because Salient takes all the burden upon its shoulders. All you get to do is to use your creative spirits and focus on making your site all the more alluring and unique!
The Salient theme includes a variety of amazing fonts, more than 600 of them! It also has all the color customization options you could ever imagine, and more! If this doesn’t float your boat, then maybe the fact that this theme is also Retina-ready will change your mind!
The Salient theme has proved itself to be highly responsive for WordPress mobile sites – by using this theme, you won’t have to worry ever again that whatever you’re displaying is going to get somehow twisted or ruined on differently sized screen resolutions, devices, and web browsers. The ThemeNectar slider will provide perfect support for video backgrounds. With this theme, you also get impeccable swipe screen functionality, limitless Instances loop, and full-screen options.
Some Final Words
Thanks for sticking around folks! We sincerely hope we greatly eased your quest in finding the best WordPress mobile theme for your site and your enterprise! We’ll make sure to keep you updated with all the new ones that will show up – in the meantime we highly recommend the ones on this list and we’re more than certain that you won’t go wrong with either of them!
Sites that are highly responsive for mobile devices can make a huge impact on the number of visitors and followers, as well as the growth of the number of your customers! Don’t underestimate the power of mobile themes!
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It goes without saying that image compression is important for WordPress sites or any sites for that matter – but it won’t hurt to stress it once more. However you choose to look at it, images are important – for your site’s front end design, for its functionality, and just for overall good looks.
With a good combination of images, your site can look like a million dollars, and still be managed with a limited budget. If your site happens to be eCommerce, (where you sell your products online predominantly or exclusively), then the presence of images is even more critical.
But, images can also be a tad demanding on your website. If they’re not (properly) optimized, they can be pretty heavy and make your site heavier than necessary as well. This, in turn, will also make your site slower, which can definitely affect your site’s user-experience and user-retention. Bad for business indeed.
All of this (and more!) only goes to show how important it is to properly optimize the images on your site. Site problems like too much bandwidth suction or taking up too much server space usually have to do with your images. Images can sometimes take half of the overall weight of the site and that’s a pretty serious weight issue.
But, fortunately, when it comes to image optimization and image compression for WordPress, there are plenty of great solutions out there right now.. You can make your images significantly smaller without losing on their quality, and further optimize your site for speed.
In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the best image compression and image optimization plugins for WordPress currently on the internet. Read on and find the plugin of your choice!
NOTE: If you have a particularly image-heavy website, consider using cloud compression. This kind of image compression is able to give you more resources for the compression process itself – more than a plugin ever could. Have in mind, though, that cloud-based image compression is more expensive than plugins.
What Exactly is Image Compression?
Image compression describes the process of shrinking that happens to the original file size of your site’s images. You can find plenty of tools on the internet that do image compression for WordPress, and while most of them will give you similar results in the end, not all of them will get you there in the same way.
Image-heavy sites usually experience slow page loads. When doing site optimization, one of the first things you need to think about is to lower the image size of your site’s images. Image compression is sure to boost the loading speed of your WordPress website and also take a load off the resource requirements of your site.
Basically, there are two types of image compression: lossless and lossy. We recommend to always choose lossless compression (not lossy!) because there is a big difference between them. Lossless compression means that in the end, you will get a smaller image file size, with the same quality of the image as its original size.
Lossy compression reduces the size of your site’s images as well, but it also means a reduction in quality. This can be especially tricky for people that have online businesses that rely heavily on website images. That’s why we always advise people to never sacrifice the quality of the images on their site in favor of faster loading times. Bad image quality is really bad for marketing and it’s very likely to reflect on your business further on.
ShortPixel is one of our favorite image compression plugins for WordPress. It’s a plugin that stands out from all others. ShortPixel will help you optimize your site’s images by doing resizing and compression without any loss of image quality. It’s an easy-to-use image optimization tool for WordPress, which will let you choose between lossy and lossless image compression.
This plugin works really fast (which is one of the reasons why it’s our favorite!), making it very well suited for people who want to do image optimization in bulk, but also WordPress website owners that have particularly image-heavy sites. With ShortPixel you definitely won’t experience any delays or slow bulk image optimization.
There are a lot of things to say about this image optimization plugin. For example, we simply mustn’t forget to mention how great ShortPixel is when it converts images in the PNG file format. The great thing about it is that it does the converting automatically, which means it doesn’t keep the transparency feature of PNG.
Plenty of sites on the internet use PNG images, which are actually much larger in size than the alternative JPG file formats. ShortPixel helps you convert the PNG images on your site, turning them into great quality JPG files, reducing the overall size of the pages of your site without any loss of quality whatsoever.
But there’s another thing ShortPixel is so good at. Namely, that’s the WEBP file format, a relatively underused image file format that actually manages to reduce the size of your site’s images even further, and without affecting their quality.
Images that are in the WEBP format are 2 to 5 times smaller than images in the PNG and JPG formats. The only problem with WEBP is that not all browsers support it. You can read more about this in our article on Next-Gen formats. You can also find out more about the WEBP format here.
ShortPixel is a plugin that has a free plan – which allows you to optimize 100 images each month, but it also has monthly and one-time plans ( which you can find more about in ShortPixel’s pricing section). It also gives you the chance to get dedicated servers with 4, 8 and 24 cores.
The image compression service provided by Tiny PNG has both an online tool for compressing images and a plugin that you can find on the WordPress depository.
Tiny JPG is a free online tool that enables you to reduce the image size of your site’s images and compress both JPEG and PNG files. The plugin helps you integrate your WordPress site with this image compression service.
Like most of the image compression plugins out there, this tool will change the size of your images automatically when you upload them on WordPress, and it will do the same for already existing images – one by one, or in bulk, depending on how you choose to do it.
How does this plugin work?
Well, once you upload a particular image on your WordPress site, each image also gets uploaded to the TinyJPG or Tiny PNG service for analysis the image processing is done on their servers. The analysis allows for the best possible optimization to be applied to your site’s images, based on the particularity of the image. The resized image is then returned to your WordPress site, replacing the image with the original size.
According to their own statistics, JPG images and PNG images are compressed to more than 70%, without any noticeable loss in quality. This kind of size reduction will significantly lighten your site and also give it more bandwidth and more storage space.
With this tool, you’ll be able to do adjustments to the images’ width and height, preserve metadata, and also pick the compression sizes (thumbnail, medium, or full size). You can also compress animated PNG images.
Once you download the plugin you’ll be able to get a free API key which, similarly to ShortPixel, gives you 100 free images a month. If you want to compress more than 100 images a month, you’ll have to pay a small fee. You can also do bulk optimization to all the images present in the media library of your WordPress site. If you have a WordPress multisite, you can configure the API key in your wp-config.php file, which means you won’t need to get multiple API keys.
Optimole is also called the image optimization plugin on autopilot. This is so because Optimole works smoothly and almost undercover since once you download it and install it, it will run quietly and consistently in the background without you noticing.
It features a fully automatic image optimization service and it optimizes the images according to the browser and viewport of the visitor. This means that no image on your site will ever be served larger than it should be and it will depend on the visitor’s internet connection.
This plugin is completely cloud-based, saving up a lot of treasured CPU from your server, and also making your site faster in the process.
The automatic WordPress image optimizations are powered by Cloudfront’s CDN service, which means that your images won’t load slowly under any circumstance.
Optimole also gives you the option for tracking and monitoring, so you can see the particular details of your images’ optimization process, as well as the space being saved. This plugin also includes the option of lazy loading, so your website’s loading times can become even faster (Optimole’s lazy loading feature won’t require any jQuery or heavy JavaScript libraries).
This is a very easy-to-use plugin with a user-intuitive interface and configuration process that’s compatible with new, modern, and popular page builders online. The setup process is really easy – you just need to get the API key and you’re done. Once you have the key, you gain access to the plugin through your own WordPress dashboard, where you can view all of the optimized images there. You can also modify their settings, like for example the resizing of large images, image replacement, the quality of the compression, and lazy loading. Optimole has its own dashboard outside of WordPress. If you go there, you’ll be able to find more info about your optimized images, like monthly reports and optimization sizes.
One of the best things about the Optimole plugin is that it supports all image types, which means that among them you can also find support for Retina and WebP image files. It offers lossy and lossless image compression.
This plugin has a free version which you can find on the WordPress repository page. What you get is 1GB of images per month, 5GB viewing bandwidth, automatic responsive images, smart lazy loading, and 48h email support.
Not bad for a free version, right? If you want to go with the premium, you’ll either have to set apart $9 each month for the Personal plan, $29 for the Business plan, while you also have the Flexible option if you want to have a custom-made image optimization plan.
If you haven’t heard of the Imagify WordPress image optimization plugin yet, then maybe you’ve already heard of the team behind it. Yes, we’re talking about the guys over at WP Rocket, one of the best WordPress caching plugins you can find on the internet!
Imagify has a lot of attractive features, as well as all the basic ones no solid plugin can do without – such as image resizing and bulk compression, and also the choice between lossy and lossless image quality.
Interestingly, Imagify gives you the option to choose between three types of image compression, depending on the type of website you have.
Normal – this is an option that includes a lossless type of image compression that won’t affect the quality of your image in any way.
Aggressive – this is also the lossless type of image compression, but the difference is that you will notice a small reduction in the quality of your images. This small reduction of quality may or may not be that noticeable, so consider it if you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of quality for the sake of more speed and overall page optimization (but, as you remember, we kinda advised you against it in the introduction to this article).
Ultra – this is the most radical of their image compression algorithms, and it’s lossy. Bear in mind, however, that besides making your images as small as they can be, it’ll also cause a reduction in quality.
If you’re not content with one of your choices, you can always use Imagify’s backup option and restore the original image so you can run it through another compression type which you’ll be more satisfied with.
Imagify supports image files like JPG, PNG, as well as GIF files. Also, you’ll be able to find support for Magento, PrestaShop, Joomla, and Shopify.
Imagify offers different types of paid plans, but there’s also a free version that lets you convert 25MB of images each month (which translates to about 250 images). The paid plans start at $4.99 per month for only 1 GB of data, and then go up to $69.99 for 50GB of image data per month.
This one is also pretty easy to use – you just need the API key and you’re good to go. Similarly to Optimole, Imagify also gives you the chance to test on an image compressed in several different ways and compare it on their visual comparison tool present on their website. This way you can see directly how the different compression types actually look like.
This is by far the most popular image optimization and image compression plugin for WordPress, with more than 1 million active installations as we speak. It’s an easy-to-use plugin, made by the developers’ team at WPMU DEV to quickly optimize your WordPress site’s images.
This plugin offers you a free and a paid version. The free version you can download from the WordPress repository. The paid version is actually a bunch of tools and plugins (among which WP Smush) that will be quite useful for your WordPress site if you want to get plugins in bulk. The paid version costs $49 a month.
In the free version of WP Smush, you get to optimize images on your site only with the lossless compression (if you want the lossy one, you’ll have to upgrade to the premium version). You also get the lazy loader option, as well as the option to optimize up to 50 images in bulk. You’ll also be able to do image resizing (set max-width and height parameters), and quickly locate those images that are constantly making your site go slower.
WP Smush is a multisite compatible plugin, which means you can use it if you have multiple integrated sites on WordPress. The free version of this plugin gives you the option to optimize images up to 5MB in size. You’ll also be able to detect images with incorrect sizes and get tips for properly scaling your site’s images. What’s more, you’ll be able to optimize images even if they’re not located in the Media Library of your site. The API that WP Smush uses is from the WPMY DEV’s own reliable servers, which means super-fast image optimization.
One of the best things about this plugin is that it also supports the up and coming WEBP image format, which you can use to convert regular images into the next-gen image format (recommended by Google), and save significantly in size while maintaining the same high image quality of the original.
WP Smush is made to be user-friendly, which means that it’s pretty easy to configure and set up. With this plugin, you’ll be able to optimize your site’s images directly from the WordPress Media Library.
WP Smush is a good-quality image optimization plugin for WordPress, making the image compression process a breeze. Also, if you want a bunch of good-quality plugins for security, marketing, SEO, backups, and branding, you can purchase the full package for $49 a month and save yourself the trouble and also save up some money in the long run.
Conclusion
So, image optimization matters quite a lot! Not only does it speed up the loading time of your WordPress site, but it also takes a significant load off the server supporting your site.
The most frequent image types are PNG and JPG images, but as we saw, WEBP is gaining more and more traction since it allows for an even smaller image size while maintaining the high level of image quality of the original image. So keep an eye out for this one!
We also saw that there are two image compression types: lossy and lossless. The lossless one is the one we recommend since it doesn’t make the image lose its original quality, while it does achieve a significant reduction in size.
Remember, the quality of your images is still important and shouldn’t be sacrificed for better page loading speeds. Good image quality makes your site look professional, well-designed, and well-taken care of. And all of these characteristics are a winning combination for any online business!
Of course, there are plenty of image compression tools on the internet right now, but we chose these 4 WordPress image optimization plugins specifically because we thought they stood out from the rest, and we thought they made a great combination – performance-wise and price-wise (which is something pretty hard to find!).
We hope we helped you out in your dilemmas about which one you should choose for your site. In the meantime, we’ll definitely be on the lookout for some more great image optimization plugins for WordPress, so stay in touch!
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Time and money usually go together – it’s a rule in business, as it is a rule in life. And it’s a rule in eCommerce as well.
Wonder how much revenue you lose for every additional loading second of your site? You lose 7% with each second that your site takes to load! So if a site loads in 7 or 8 seconds, it means that it can potentially lose around 50% of its revenue!
What this means is that site speed is an essential component of a successful and quality online business.
NOTE: If you want to make a speed testing of your site, you can use our own speed tasting tool app.wpspeedfix.com and see how your site performs as well as the improvements you need to make in order to make it even faster!
As you can see, one of the most important and best ways to speed optimize your Shopify site is to use a fast theme.
Table of Contents
What Affects the Speed of the Theme?
There are two important ways in which the speed of the theme can be affected:
The first has to do with the number of files that are required to drive the theme, as well as to download the JavaScript and CSS files responsible for the architecture of the theme. The equation is simple here: as long as there are more files in the theme, it’s going to be slower. Also, how clean the CSS files are and how much JavaScript is used also affects the speed of the theme.
The use of jQuery. jQuery is a JavaScript library that is used by themes to build parts of the website (particularly the visual ones). The problem with jQuery is that it’s kinda heavy, so themes that don’t use it will run faster.
These are important criteria to know when looking for a fast Shopify theme. Out of the Sandbox does a great job when it comes to this – their themes are one of the fastest themes you can currently find online. Light, fast and highly functional we greatly encourage you to take a look at them on their website (while we’re also going to tackle two of them here).
The Fastest Shopify Themes in Detail
That being said, let’s finally have a look at the fastest Shopify themes for your eCommerce site!
A game-changer, as they call it, the Flex theme is one of the newest Shopify themes (released in August 2019) from Out of the Sandbox team of developers who have a terrific streak of creating fast and gorgeous-looking themes for Shopify.
The Flex theme was built on the ideas of the highly successful Turbo theme. The team behind it did a very good job asking users what they want to see improved and then implemented all of that into the Flex!
This theme is designed to give you more control over your online store and offers you a wealth of options to choose from and customize your site at will.
The multiple layout and section options, additional granular settings control and easy implementation of custom CSS are all included in this mighty package of one of the best and fastest Shopify themes out there. With Flex as your wingman, you’ll be able to configure your Shopify site in numerous ways!
Flex gives you the option to choose between 12 styles. You can get a taste of them through the demo shop and see which one you like best! This is truly the theme for any type of eCommerce site. Whether it’s clothing, shoes, accessories, jewelry, arts and crafts, items for interior design, or tech gear, it will all be perfectly rendered with this theme!
Key Features
The fellows over at Out of the Sandbox have come up with the Demo Shop Import Feature, which allows you to get started on a theme much faster than usual! This feature allows you to fast track a shop setup based on a demo shop of your theme. This will apply all of the settings, layouts, sections, and content of the theme (used in the demo shop) to your own theme.
Four header styles;
Four footer styles;
Three product page layouts;
Mega Menus and dropdowns;
Control over margins;
Width settings;
Background gradients;
Unique button styles;
Product sale stickers;
Testimonials;
Text columns with icons;
Sticky bottom bar.
Easy customization with multiple layout options
The almost unlimited number of customization options will allow you to be as creative as you want with your Shopify site.
You can start from the beginning or use the already pre-built six demo shop layouts for building your homepage – either way, it’s all been designed to be as easy and versatile as possible!
Advanced CSS
The advanced CSS options of Flex allow you to add customized CSS elements to different sections directly through the theme editor.
This means that you won’t have to leave the page when creating new CSS classes or target other elements within the section you’re in.
Icons & elements
You can add visual elements to your site by using Flex’s versatile icon library. You can use them for different sections and parts of your site like, for example, for the Announcement Bar, the new Icon Bar, as well as the Featured Promotions, and Text Columns with Icons.
Pricing
The Flex theme costs $450 which implies a one time purchase and 1 year of free updates through Out of the Box’s free Theme Updater App (Basic Plan).
You also get a 14-day refund period if you don’t like the theme.
Final Verdict
Speaking as a whole, this is one of the best and fastest Shopify themes you can find on the market! If you want to have a top-notch eCommerce site that you’ll be able to customize at will, as well as always have your back covered with a high-quality developer’s team and customer support, then you should definitely not miss out on the Flex theme!
Okay, so next on our list is the Turbo theme. You can’t mention Flex without mentioning Turbo, right?
The Turbo theme is another popular choice among users from the team behind Out of the Sandbox.
You might’ve guessed already, at least judging by the name, but this is THE theme for the optimal speed performance of your Shopify site. The extraordinary loading speed of the browser and the functionality of the caching will make your eCommerce site super-fast, resulting in satisfied visitors and even more satisfied potential customers!
This is a theme that gives you plenty of features that others simply don’t have. Among them are functional sidebar filters, product sorting, and also color swatches below the product thumbnails. Turbo also provides you with full-width banners on your collection pages.
Key Features
Six different styles;
Dynamically minified HTML;
Lazy loading, optimized images responsive to all screen sizes;
Instantaneous page transitions for ultra-fast navigation;
Accelerated Quick View functionality;
Predictive (live) search;
Mobile responsive – enhanced mobile browsing performance;
Highly configurable full-width slideshow and banner image sections with multiple action buttons, text, and color settings;
High-impact promotional sections with a wide variety of display options;
Versatile navigation configuration, including multiple menus and options for logo alignment;
Extendable mega menu with multi-column submenus;
Dismissable promotional banner;
Interactive and animated mini cart;
Multiple, configurable page templates for more advanced layouts;
Expanded styling options for newsletter signup;
Video banner section that supports YouTube, Vimeo, as well as native MP4 videos.
Sport and Ludicrous Speed modes
As we mentioned earlier, the team behind the Turbo theme designed it with the goal of it being a fast theme. This is arguably the best theme optimized for speed that you can find out there!
That being said, this theme includes two options from the performance setting (located in the theme editor) that you can choose from Sport and Ludicrous.
The Sport option will give you all the performance-enhancing features you’ll need for your site, such as smart image loading, infinite scroll and ‘load more’, refined quick shop, ‘minified’ CSS and HTML. There’s only one exception to this and it’s the page preloading option.
But, this is where Ludicrous comes up! The Ludicrous option gives you the full package including the option for preloading pages.
So if your site experiences technical difficulties with the Ludicrous mode, stemming from certain third-party apps or custom-made code, then you can always turn to the Sport mode.
Pricing
The Turbo theme costs $350, and it’s the same pricing principle as it was for the Flex theme – one-time purchase and 1 year of free updates through Out of the Box’s free Theme Updater App (Basic Plan).
Plus, you get a 14-day trial and refund period in which you can try it out and see whether you really like it.
Final Verdict
Turbo is a fully-loaded theme designed for shops with high volume and large catalogs (with the inclusion of Shopify Plus merchants).
However, it can also be used for any kind of shop size that wants great loading speed, high functionality, superb user experience, and a cutting edge visual design.
Shella is a multipurpose Shopify theme that’s super-fast and highly responsive, sporting some premium features for a really solid price.
This theme is marketed as a theme that’s predominantly oriented towards fashion sites, mostly meaning apparel, shoes, and accessories, but it’s definitely more than capable of operating other types of eCommerce stores. The newest update of the theme includes 4 new skins who are just perfect for furniture, electronics, cosmetics, and cookware online stores!
Regardless of the type of online business you have, Shella is the flexible theme every eCommerce entrepreneur will love. A lot of it has to do with its pre-built content, in fact. Shella comes with more than 80 pre-designed pages and 15 different homepage variants!
With an elegant and minimalist design that can easily fit your particular business, this is a theme that’s regularly updated so it’s always up to date with the newest stylistic and developers’ trends.
Key Features
10 different skins for different types of online stores: furniture, cosmetics, computers, kitchen, Christmas, boutique, jewelry, books, one product, gadgets;
13 different collection pages including Catalogue Mode, Left and Right Sidebar, 2, 3 and 4 items per row, etc;
6 different product pages;
7 different page types for your eCommerce blog;
4 types of galleries (2 types of Masonry and 2 types of Grid);
Unlimited colors option – you get hundreds of color options, as well as to control the color of every element of your theme.
RTL Support
Expand your business worldwide and speak your customers’ language! Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu are the most widespread RTL writing systems right now and Shella supports all of them!
Layouts and product display
The Shella theme also gives you the option for layouts with full-screen sliders, as well as video players on which you can show your products.
With this theme you definitely won’t be short of options for displaying your products. The variety of eCommerce templates will allow you to customize both the individual product pages, but also the product category pages.
Customize your own pages
Don’t want to use the pre-built content? Then feel free to use the builder tool and make custom designs at will. You can also design unique banners, custom slideshows, your own color schemes and make your store stand out in the vast sea of online businesses.
Pricing
You can purchase the Shella theme from the Envato market for $54 (regular license), while the extended license costs $4444. With that, you get future updates and 6 months’ support from MPIthemes, the team behind the Shella theme. You can also extend your support to 12 months which will cost you an additional $14,63.
Shella is also available as a WooCommerce theme.
Final Verdict
Shella is an SEO optimized theme that’s one of the fastest on the market. Speed will help you improve your rankings in Google’s search engine and will definitely make up for more satisfied customers, which is why Shella is a great choice for a theme.!
Well, we just had to include Shopify’s best seller for 2019! Yes, Fastor is the one. It’s a great, cutting edge Shopify theme that’s super fast and offers plenty of features that’ll make your head spin!
Fastor is another theme that can be used on different types of eCommerce sites. It has whooping 87 pre-made demos ready to be used at any moment! You can use them for online stores selling sports equipment, electronics/computer, lingerie, jewelry, other types of fashion apparel and accessories, toys, games, cleaning equipment, fine living, architectural services, baked goods, even martial arts, you name it!
This easily customizable theme will give you all the freedom you need to design your own site style, but also to tinker with the pre-built demos if you’re not really in the mood for building styles from scratch.
Key Features
LTR & RTL language support;
Bootstrap-based theme – Fastor was built based on Bootstrap 3;
Compressed code – the content of CSS and js files are placed in a single file, with deleted spaces, all of which makes your site load much faster;
Video tutorials from the theme’s developers which will tell you everything you need to know about the installation and configuration process of this theme;
SEO optimized theme – the structure of the theme is made in SEO standards;
Cart reminder;
Countdown timer;
Age verification;
Facebook chat;
Revolution Slider;
Dynamic checkout;
360-degree product view;
Unlimited variety of colors – you can change the color of whatever element you want in your store, as well as set an image of choice as your own background;
More than 600 Google fonts;
More than 57 pre-made skins;
10 custom hover effects for your banners, and a live preview in the admin panel;
Ability to upload your own cart and hover icon.
Have Your Visitors Search Your Store the Easy Way
The live search option also has an auto-complete feature which really helps visitors out in entering the right info so they can find particular products on your site.
Another option gives you the ability to customize the settings for product filters and make it even easier for shoppers when they’re searching for a specific item.
Clean, Speed Optimized Code
Fastor is a theme that’ll provide your visitors and your customers with a super-fast site loading experience. It contains a clean, compressed code that’s specifically designed to make your site load as fast as possible. CSS and js files are put in one file and don’t contain any spaces, making your site load super-fast.
Built-in Popups Tool
Use the notification option to engage users and improve your customer conversion rates. With the popups tool you’ll be able to show visitors new products and bring them to their attention. You’ll also be able to encourage them to share the products you’re offering on various social media platforms.
Pricing
Fastor is sold on the Envato market and the regular license costs $56, including future updates
and 6 months support from roartheme, the team behind the plugin. If you want additional support up to 12 months you’ll have to pay another $15.38.
The extended license costs $2800.
Final Verdict
Fastor is a versatile Shopify theme that provides for a premium speed optimized user experience. As a site owner, it gives you plenty of room for choice and options for customizations so you can create a unique and recognizable style for your eCommerce venture.
Fastor has lots of impressive features that we didn’t have space to cover here. As we mentioned above, it’s a multi-concept theme, meaning it can be used for a variety of specific businesses. And it can also be used for a more general-type of store with more general-looking layouts that can fit all kinds of businesses if that’s closer to your own online venture.
Whatever it is, Fastor has you covered with speed, functionality and style!
Conclusion
So, folks, this is where we end this article on the fastest Shopify themes. We know the list is small, but we made sure to include the best of the best on the online themes market.
In any event, we have to say a few more words about Out of the Sandbox themes before we finish. We encourage you to check out not only the themes we mentioned in this article but also the other themes on their site. There’s a wide variety of them and believe us, you won’t go wrong with any of them!
Having an eCommerce store is not an easy feat and you need the best of tools and themes by your side in order to create a fast, modern and highly-functional site. Top that with a top-notch marketing strategy and you’ll have yourself a successful business in no time!
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
If you happen to be coming from Australia, you certainly appreciate a good VPN! Australians regularly rely on VPN networks for various reasons: from access to streaming services (some of which aren’t originally available in Australia) like Netflix or Hulu, to concerns for privacy and security, for which VPNs provide some degree of relief – to say the least.
Why Should You Use VPN in Australia
Like a lot of countries around the world, Australia is also not excluded from the threats of cyberattacks, surveillance from the state, censorship, as well as content restrictions.
Australia has often been among the last places of priority for video or music streaming services, as well as video game developers when it comes to distributing their new products to an English-speaking market. And all of this translates into the fact that if you happen to have an Australian IP, then you’re oftentimes limited when it comes to streaming your favorite TV shows, or your favorite music, as well as playing games online, among other stuff.
This has brought waves of illegal internet activity known as piracy or downloading or illegally streaming copyrighted material. That’s why, in December 2016, the Australian federal court ordered ISPs (or internet service providers) to block many popular torrent sites such as Torrentz, ThePirateBay, TorrentHound, IsoHunt, SolarMovie and others.
Another bummer is that there’s an additional tax to pay for purchases from Netflix or Steam. The so-called Online Goods Tax – also known as the Netflix Tax – demands an extra 10% for digital goods which people in Australia buy from non-Australian internet vendors. And Netflix used this quite well by constructing a new pricing structure for this region, increasing one tier of their subscriptions by 20%! And to make matters worse, compared to the offers of TV shows and films in the US, the Australian Netflix falls significantly short.
A third and equally important issue is surveillance and censorship. Just last year, Freedom House managed to compile a list of laws that impose censorship and state surveillance, granting state agencies a rather large amount of power and authorization for prying in the domains of your private life. This means a less than satisfactory record of data-retention laws. Take for example the Australian Data Retention Act which requires mobile carriers and internet service providers to record and retain the personal data (including emails, location, texts, phone calls) of their customers for two whole years!
And last but not least is the problem of cybercrime, for which Australia is among the top 10 most targeted nations. And considering the ubiquitous WiFi hotspots all around the country, this adds another reason for using a VPN on the already pretty long list.
And, if you happen to be somewhere abroad, you’ll also sometimes need a VPN to get access to your favorite stuff hosted in Australia! So, let’s go over the main reasons why you should use a VPN in Australia:
Access to content that’s restricted to specific countries and locations.
Circumventing the infamous Netflix Tax
Avoiding to use piracy sites as well as being subjected to the Australian Site Blocking Bill and Data Retention Law
Making sure your privacy is being protected from the prying eyes of state surveillance and telecommunication services
Safe internet connection and protection of your data from hackers and cybercrime in general
If abroad, being able to access content in Australia
The simple joy of being anonymous on the internet
Criteria for Ranking
The selection of VPN networks for Australia on this list is based on the following criteria:
Fast speeds and wide server availability, with locations that are outside the so-called ‘14 Eyes Territories’.
Transparent zero-logs privacy policies and great security record.
Cross-platform clients that are user-friendly.
Reliable, consistent, and reproducible performance when it comes to unblocking content with geographical restrictions and P2P file-sharing.
The best ratio of value and price offered, as well as a reputation for excellence.
Selection of the Best VPNs for Australia
Finally, we come down to the actual VPN services. What follows is a list of the best VPNs for Australia that are currently present on the market. Each of them has its pros and cons, and it’s up to you to decide which one you think will work best! So let’s get down to it!
This is definitely one of the best VPNs that you can use right now. It holds more than 5000 servers, in over 60 countries, and it maintains a very adamant attitude towards the zero-logs, pro-privacy stance. NordVPN is actually one of the rare providers that’s able to bypass the VPN blocks coming from Netflix consistently and reliably. Their servers located in Australia do a great job when you need to access Australian content from somewhere abroad. Also, they allow torrenting on all of their servers.
NordVPN supports whatever protocol you desire, with the inclusion of OpenVPN. It also manages its own DNS servers in order to avoid leakage. NordVPN has a basis in Panama, meaning it’s not being subjected to the 14 Eyes Territories’ surveillance laws and practices, and also has relatively soft laws concerning piracy. With this provider, you’ll also find a kill switch, double encryption, VPN into Tor, making for one very safe surfing experience that’s protected from prying eyes!
NordVPN is super-fast and has an unlimited bandwidth, which means you’ll be able to freely enjoy gaming, P2P torrenting, and also HD video streaming. Have in mind though that double encryption connections can be slower than the AES 256-bit.
The software suite is definitely one of the most intuitive ones out there, and it comes pre-configured, which means you can effortlessly pick the super-fast servers meant for gaming or streaming content, or you can choose the super-secure ones if you happen to be working with some sensitive data. You’ll also find that it offers cross-platform support, and you’ll be able to use it on a maximum of six devices.
Pricing
NordVPN comes with 4 pricing plans:
The monthly plan is $11.80
The 1-year plan is $6.90 per month
The 2-year plan is $3.93 per month
The 3-year plan is $2.94 per month
Of course, if you’re up for it in the long run, the 3-year plan is by far the best value for money, and it also has a refund policy of 30 days if you’re not content with the service!
Overall Impression
NordVPN offers a great value-for-money option for a VPN provider. It’s very reliable, has very solid security and privacy features, and can be used on 6 devices at the same time, with lighting-speeds.
Based in Panama, it has a zero-logs policy and robust encryption, a wide selection of servers, superb customer service, P2P that comes with unlimited bandwidth – and it also accepts Bitcoin!
One of the few flaws that we could find in this otherwise superb provider is that it doesn’t block ads and that the double encryption affects speed. But that’s about it!
CyberGhist is among the best VPNs out there, with over 3.900 servers worldwide, in over 61 countries. CyberGhost puts a strong emphasis on unblocking popular streaming services, of the likes of Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. But, it also supports torrenting, having a dedicated “Torrent Anonymously” option in its apps, which makes it rather popular with torrent users as well.
It’s also pretty budget-friendly, offering great options for a very affordable price (for details on pricing, see below).
CyberGhost is also among the VPN providers that have excellent speeds. It has a download rate with an average of 75 Mbps across locations worldwide – with servers in North America, Asia and Europe. The only slowdown you might notice is if you’re on a gigabit ethernet connection, although the available bandwidth should be more than enough for an average user.
From the protocols, you’ve got OpenVPN, IKEv2, or L2TP at your hand; you can also allow CyberGhost to choose for you. IKEv2 establishes the connections in the quickest way, working best for mobile devices that often temporarily lose connection or switch between mobile data and WiFi. If you plan on using the Exceptions feature, you’ll be required to use OpenVPN.
CyberGhost doesn’t log the activity of the user – and it also doesn’t record IP addresses. It does keep some connection logs, but none of them can be tied back to the individual user. Payment and registration details aren’t connected to the VPN service; plus users are given an anonymous ID.
CyberGhost apps are available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android.
Pricing
It also has four pricing options:
1-month plan – $12.99 per month (billed monthly)
1-year plan – $5.99 per month (billed yearly)
2-year plan – $3.69 per month (billed yearly)
3-year plan – $2.75/mth (billed yearly)
Overall Impression
Another provider that offers a great value for the price, CyberGhost is also user-friendly; it’s especially easy to set up the apps for people that encounter VPN providers for the first time and ones that are less tech-savvy. Super-fast server speeds and very substantial security and privacy features (zero logs and DNS leak protection). It also works very well with most of the popular streaming services.
Some of the flaws of CyberGhost would be perhaps that for some people it might be overly user-friendly, and hence a bit frustrating for more versed users, because of the lack of configuration options. It also doesn’t have any dedicated apps for routers or Linux.
ExpressVPN is another VPN provider that’s considered among the best ones on the market. With its 160 server locations, spread out in 94 countries and enabling unlimited speeds, it has proudly earned its way to the top of VPN service .
ExpressVPN is doing superbly when it comes to anonymity on the internet – it doesn’t do any traffic data logs (zero-log policy) or DNS queries. It also supports torrenting (P2P unlimited) – being based on the British Virgin Islands certainly helps, since that territory is exempt from the notorious 14 Eyes surveillance and anti-piracy laws. If you’re into gaming as well, it also does a great job at providing consistent and reliable lighting fast speeds.
ExpressVPN also uses military-grade AES-256 encryption, SmartDNS, and OpenVPN protocol, which means you’ll be able to unblock streaming services easily and without effort, on any platform you want! It can unblock content on streaming services such as Netflix (managing to unblock both the US and Australian catalogs), Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Showtime, Sling TV, DAZN, and BBC iPlayer.
ExpressVPN’s apps are available for Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux (command line) as well as some WiFi routers.
Pricing
ExpressVPN is somewhat pricier than the other high-ranked VPN providers on our list.
1-Month plan – billing $12.95 per month ($12.95 every month).
12-Month plan – billing $8.32 per month ($99.95 every 12 months).
6-Month plan – billing $9.99 per month ($59.95 every 6 months).
Each of the plans comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Overall Impression
ExpressVPN is another top, high-quality VPN provider. It has pretty much all you could wish for in a VPN service: cross-platform apps that are pretty intuitive and flexible; it also comes with a kill switch so your IP address will never get exposed, as well as auto-connect and a DNS leak protection.
Fast servers which provide high-quality streaming, downloading and superb gaming experiences (has unlimited bandwidth). Supports P2P torrenting, and has very tight privacy settings – zero-log policy, great encryption, OpenVPN, BVI jurisdiction, and it negates the mandatory ISP data retention. It also accepts bitcoin.
Some of the rare flaws that this VPN service has is that for some users it might not seem as configurable as other VPN providers or as they would like. It also doesn’t block ads and is available for installing only on 3 devices. Also, some users may find the pricing a tad more expensive than other similar VPN providers.
Nevertheless, it is a very reliable and worthy purchase, even if you do spend a buck or two more!
Surfshark is a relatively new VPN provider on the market, still in the process of expansion, but with great potential. It has more than 800 servers in over 50 countries throughout the world, and as a smaller provider, it works perfectly for unblocking content that’s region-blocked, such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and BBC iPlayer.
Surfshark offers very solid encryption that will work great in protecting you from intruding privacy laws. It offers some extra features which can help the user bypass these highly problematic privacy laws, such as the Camouflage mode, for example, which will hide the using of VPN from your ISP. It has the option for a kill switch (which is a great plus!), preventing the possible moments of IP exposure if there’s a sudden drop in the VPN connection.
Surfshark also allows torrenting, P2P filesharing on all of their servers, and it does a great job of not keeping any logs when it comes to your online activity.
And probably the greatest thing about this VPN provider is that it can be installed on an unlimited amount of devices! This makes it a great choice for families, for example, since everybody in the family can connect however many devices they want to just one account. And the amount of devices that Surfshark currently supports is incredible. You’ll be able to find the so-called ‘native apps’ for every major platform there is, but also apps for gaming consoles and smart TV.
Surfshark’s apps are available for:
macOS
Windows
Linux
Smart TVs like FireTV, Apple TV, as well as Other TVs
Phones & Tablets: iOS and Android
Consoles such as Xbox and Playstation
Chrome and Firefox
Pricing
Surfshark’s pricing plans are pretty budget-friendly. They offer three plans – monthly, yearly and bi-yearly:
1-month plan – $11.95 per month (billed every month)
24-month plan – $1.99 per month ($47.76 for 2 years, billed every 24 months); the 24-Month plan includes the biggest savings and is fully refundable for 30 days. (right now you can use the coupon: sharkstart and get the plan with this current price)
12-months plan – $5.99 per month ($71.88 for 1 year, billed every 12 months)
With every plan, you get a 30-days guarantee of your money back!
Overall Impression
Still new on the market and in the process of expanding, Surfshark has so far shown itself to be a very solid and promising VPN provider. It does a great job at unblocking streaming sites that are quite popular nowadays, sites of the likes of Netflix, Hulu, CBS, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video and also BBC iPlayer.
It also allows for torrenting and P2P activity. Like most VPN providers on this list, it has great customer support with live chat available 24/7. And, of course, one of the best things about this provider is the unlimited number of devices that can be connected under one account, which ultimately makes Surfshark a superb budget option, one that can be shared with family and with friends that you trust.
Some of the flaws of Surfshark can be its relatively smaller network of servers compared to other VPNs on this list, as well as the occasional slowness of its servers.
But, overall, it’s a very decent VPN provider that certainly deserves a chance!
Another great choice for a VPN for Australia, IPVanish boasts with over 40,000 shared IPs, more than 1,300 VPN servers in more than 75 locations around the globe (including Australia), with unlimited bandwidth. IPVanish also owns all of its physical servers. This means that you can expect only the fastest connections when it comes to this VPN provider – whether you’re streaming in HD, playing games online, or doing P2P file-sharing. Traffic that comes from torrenting is allowed on all of their servers. And even though the company is based in the US, it still has a zero-log policy which is pretty strict.
IPVanish is a rather feature-rich software that works cross-platform. It has 256-bit AES encryption, unlimited bandwidth, and SOCKS5 web proxy.
Pricing
Like most VPN providers, IPVanish also comes with three pricing plans and it is a relatively affordable provider compared to other similar ones on the market. The plans are the following:
1-month plan – $10.00 per month ($10.00 billed monthly)
3-month plan – $8.99 per month ($26.99 billed every 3 months)
1-year plan – $6.49 per month ($77.99 billed annually)
All of the plans include a 7-day money-back guarantee
Overall Impression
Another great option for a VPN provider, IPVanish offers the essentials: security, protection, reliability, speed. Great for torrenters and P2P file sharing (unlimited bandwidth), although it’s US-based, it has a very strict zero-logs policy. With its super-fast connection and protection from DPI, as well as SOCKS5, OpenVPN, 256-bit AES encryption, you don’t have to worry much about any privacy breaches. The fact they own their servers is another great asset of this provider – it means great speeds and also that no third parties will be able to manage your data.
Its cross-platform software is very intuitive and the interface easy to use. It’s got reliable customer support 24/7.
IPVanish allows for 10 10 simultaneous connections on multiple devices, which is a pretty solid number compared to other providers.
One of the few cons that this provider has is that you can’t sign-up with Bitcoin, and the apps also don’t work in China.
Up until recently they weren’t able to unblock Netflix, but that has changed – now the unblocking can work if you connect to servers that are in the US, ones located in Las Vegas, Dallas or Chicago.
Super-secure and perfect for torrent users, if your privacy is a top priority, then don’t miss out on this one!
Conclusion
As we’ve seen so far, having a VPN in Australia is a pretty good idea. A high-quality VPN provider will help you protect your privacy on the internet, especially because Australia has some rather strict data retention laws which can pose a serious threat to personal online privacy. This is also why you should be extra careful and use a VPN when connecting to the internet on WiFi spots that are public.
A good VPN will also allow you access to content which is often geographically limited or blocked, or one that has special taxation requirements (like the notorious Netflix Tax, for example). Having a VPN service won’t make you feel like you’re constantly missing out on excellent TV-shows that other parts of the world are freely enjoying at the moment.
The same goes for online games and torrenting. Good quality VPNs will give you the best speeds and unlimited bandwidth, making for one flawless gaming experience!
All of these reasons and more is why you can’t just purchase any kind of VPN service provider that you stumble upon on the internet. What you should do instead is look for a high-quality VPN provider, one that’s reliable and consistent in the services and options that it offers, as well as one that has a spotless record of encryption, zero-logs policy, kill switch (recommended), as well as other tight, security options and precaution measures.
And this sort of brings us to the end of this article – of course, our list of the best VPNs for Australia is by no means exhaustive, and if you have a suggestion in mind, or have used ones which you think belong on this list, please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments section.
Otherwise, we hope we have provided enough help when it comes to choosing a VPN provider for Australia, by giving you the characteristics of each of the best ones, their best assets, but also their potential weak spots and flaws. Now, the only thing you need to do is make a final decision and choose the one you see fit for your particular needs!
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Speed is one of the most important components when it comes to the optimization of your website. Fast websites, with a superb, modern front-end website design, will greatly contribute to the success of an online business or an online enterprise.
Nowadays, the fast-paced environment of the internet demands that apps and tools function at ever-faster speeds, and it’s crucial to have optimal website performance. A website’s slow loading times and low functionality can also designate its quick end, and this is all the more dangerous if it means the end of a business! But, there is no alternative – visitors get frustrated if they wait too long for the page to load, and they’re very likely to go and search somewhere else.
If you’re a website owner who’s looking to improve the performance of a slow-loading website, then you must already know that speed is definitely something that sells!
Super-fast loading speeds boost sales and amplify visitor engagement and retention. Also, website response that feels instantaneous will lead to higher conversion rates.
The Importance of Speed Testing a Website
But, in order to have a faster website, you first need to know how much of an improvement you need to make. This is where speed testing tools step in. Testing your site’s speed is one of the most important first steps you need to do when setting out to improve its loading times. What speed testing does is it enables you to set a benchmark which will help you measure the changes you intend to make to your site – basically, it gives you a solid starting point for the direction of any planned improvements.
Ideally, you want your site to run under one second in the country where it’s being hosted. One second (maximum) is the time where the page load still feels instant. Although speed varies for of a number of factors – for example, marketing tools and other types of tracking software – you can still aim for about 1.5 seconds of loading time which is well within the margins of acceptable loading time.
So, in order to make it a little bit easier for you, we’ve compiled a list of the best and most well-known speed testing tools you can find and use on the internet right now.
Note to have in mind: When testing your site’s speed, it’s always a good idea to do a couple of speed tests and average them out – since results can vary from test to test. This has mainly to do with DNS caching, CDN caching, and WordPress caching, but lit can also be a result of external calls to third-party resources and APIs impact. So, once again, don’t shy away from doing multiple tests in order to get the most truthful result!
How to Read Basic Speed Test Parameters
Before we begin with the actual list of speed testing tools, we’d like to briefly mention the most important parameters that are present in a good chunk of speed testing tools out there. What follows are the most important elements of any speed test that you need to pay attention to:
URL (or your website’s address) – when it comes your site’s URL, it’s important to remember to always use the site’s primary web address, which means always put the www in front of it. A lot of the times, people simply drop the www mark, which can add a 1 to 2-second delay to the speed you’re running. The reason for this is that the website is, in fact, loading by default, aka with the www in front of its address.
Test From – also a very important detail to remember. The ‘Test From’ part designates the place/country where the speed test is being run from. Always opt for using the country from which you get most of your visitors. This means that you should expect around 0.5 to 1 seconds of slower loading times in places outside the country your website is being hosted in.
Load Time – this one is probably the most important metric. The aim is the under-1-second loading time when the page load is beginning to feel instant. That being said, a 1.5 loading time is not bad at all either.
Page Size – this section marks the total size of the page tested. Of course, the smaller the page, the better the loading speed time – usually, a site that’s heavy with images will weigh from 1 to 2mb. It’s not uncommon to see pages ranging from 5, 10 and even 15mb, which can render them pretty slow on a standard internet connection.
Requests – here, much like the page size, lower is also better. Most of the sites considered fast will have from 50 to 100 requests. Once you cross the 200 requests mark, though, you’ll notice how the site begins to feel really slow, and this is especially noticeable on mobile devices which have less CPU power able to process all those requests.
First things first, let’s introduce you to our own new speed testing tool -it’s fresh out of the oven and ready to take its place among the best speed testing tools on the internet.
We recently realized that all the other tools we’ve been using so far for our WordPress optimization agency WPSpeedFix, weren’t doing it for us anymore. We’ve been using Pingdom for over a year, and although it’s a great speed testing tool on its own, we wanted something more and a little bit better. So we decided to build our own!
We highly encourage you to try out our tool for the site you want to test. SiteSpeedBot will provide you with detailed recommendations when it comes to improving the speed of your website, including a lot of stuff that you won’t find in other speed testing tools out there. These are probings and testings of a lot of things that really matter on the modern, 2019 web.
If you opt for using SiteSpeedBot, you’ll see how it provides you with more details and recommendations on HTTP2 support, as well as HTTP2 push support, which is something that many other test tools around simply don’t do. SiteSpeedBot also measures a number of speed metrics that are important on the modern web, such as DNS hosting speed and TTFB.
Our tool gives you these initial first four sections or parameters to consider: Page Size, Total Load Time, Number of Requests, and TTFB (time to first byte). You can, of course, go into more detail about your page with the more elaborate sections which are:
Improve page performance – here’s where we inform you about the site’s overall performance and give you suggestions on what you need and can improve on it.
Summary – here you can find the first four initial sections we mentioned above, along with the DNS Resolution Time (or DNS speed), SSL negotiation time, Connection Time, Wait time, and Receive time.
Other metrics section – here you can find information about whether the server supports HTTP2 protocol, as well as HTTPS; the number of CSS files, whether your site supports Next-gen images, as well as whether you’re on a slow or a fast hosting provider, and the detection of lazy loading, among other info.
Response codes
Hosting provider details
Image compression test – here we analyze the images on your site, their weight, as well as the potential weight-saving you can achieve by image compression
Waterfall view
Content size by content type and by domain with requests by content type and by domain
You can take our speed test from four different locations:
Pingdom is one of the most well-known speed testing tools on the internet. A Swedish-based company, Pingdom actually offers several different services, but it’s arguably most famous for their free speed testing tool. This was our favorite speed testing tool for over a year until we decided to build our own because we figured we weren’t entirely content with it and some figures were lacking – for example, the performance grade doesn’t really correlate with performance; many other recommendations they have are also out of date. But, don’t get us wrong, Pingdom is still a great speed testing tool to use.
Its popularity is due, in part, to the fact it’s so easy to use. Since not all WordPress users are also web performance or web optimization experts, oftentimes other such tools on the internet can be rather overwhelming.
Like most speed testing tools, here you will also need to enter your site’s web address (or URL), as well as the location you want the test to be done from. It’s best to choose the location which is closest to where your site is being hosted.
Their speed test reports are split initially into four sections: performance grade, total load time, total page size, and also the number of file requests which can be further elaborated into what’s called the waterfall analysis (or the waterfall chart).
Additional and more detailed information is provided below the initial four sections. This means you’ve got a nice overview of what you need to pay attention to in order to improve page performance, and also sections on content size by type and domain, as well as requests by type and domain. Thus you can effortlessly compare the CDN asset size of your website with the one of your domains, you can also compare the number of requests by domain, as well as the type of content on your website which has had the most requests.
The Pingdom speed test tool provides you with several locations you can use to test your website’s speed:
Asia – Japan – Tokyo
Europe – Germany – Frankfurt
Europe – the United Kingdom – London
North America – USA – Washington D.C.
North America – USA – San Francisco
Pacific – Australia – Sydney
South America – Brazil – Sao Paolo
One of the current downsides of this speed testing tool is that it was updated sometime in the past 12 months and now its recommendations have lost their quality. Also, it doesn’t go into much detail on them either.
GTmetrix is another well-known speed testing tool and, alongside Pingdom, is also one of the most frequently used ones on the internet. Similarly to Pingdom, GTmetrix is a tool that’s fairly easy to use by people that aren’t that versed in the technicalities and intricacies of WordPress websites.
GTmetrix combines results from Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow in order to generate a score, as well as recommendations for your website. It assigns your site a grade that goes from A to F. The reports that it generates are split into five different sections: PageSpeed, YSlow, Waterfall chart, Page Load Timings, Page Load Video and Filmstrip, and Report History (page timings, page sizes and request counts, and Google PageSpeed and YSlow Scores). For a more detailed insight into most of these sections and additional options, you will have to go through free registration (there’s also a GTmetrix Pro version for larger and more complex websites).
With the free registration, you can do the test from seven different locations (otherwise it only gives you the one in Vancouver, Canada):
Dallas, USA
Hong Kong, China
London, UK
Mumbai, India
Sydney, Australia
São Paulo, Brazil
Vancouver, Canada
You can also choose the browser you want to do the test with, Chrome or Firefox (both Desktop versions – the mobile ones are only available in the premium plans). And, you can also make tests and compare website performance against different connection types (such as dial-up vs. cable) and see the effect it has on your page loads. Some other more advanced features are the video playback, with which you can analyze where, in fact, does your bottleneck occur; you can also run Adblock plus. By disabling the ads you can see to which extent they affect your site’s page loading.
This tool, however, is starting to show its age a little bit. Many of the recommendations are out of date for the 2019 modern web, and it seems as if their servers are often overloaded, which makes the speed tests seem slower than they should be.
Granted, Google PageSpeed Insights isn’t, in fact, a website speed testing tool in the sense that the other above mentioned tools are. This means that it’s not really going to provide you with lots of data and suggestions you can use to fix your site’s slow loading times. There are, however, still some relevant reasons why it’s a good idea to check out this tool from Google.
Google’s results matter because Google is the one that’s actually creating the search rankings whose top you’re trying to reach. So, when Google find some issue in the website performance, it’s definitely worth taking it seriously.
PageSpeed Insights is also one of those tools that’s easy to use. Like the other speed testing tools listed here, it also only requires your site’s URL (web address), and after a very short time, it generates both mobile and desktop versions of your site’s performance.
This tool grades your website on a scale from 1 to 100. And so, the higher the number is, the better your site has been optimized. A good benchmark is a score of 85 – this means that your website is performing quite well. Some recommendations for making improvements to your site (not as many as in the other testing tools, as we said before) are advice on image optimization and minifying CSS, for example.
This is what Google PageSpeed Insights measures about your site and what you need to pay attention to if you want to improve its performance:
time to above-the-fold load: this is the time that has elapsed from the moment a new page is requested by a user, and to the moment the browser renders the above-the-fold content.
time to full page load: the time that has elapsed time from the moment a new page is requested by a user to the moment the browser fully renders the page.
The mobile report has an additional category called “User Experience”, which is included in your site’s scoring. Included here is the size of your tap targets (buttons and links), your viewport configuration, as well as the eligible font sizes.
Google PageSpeed Insights test provides you with lab and field data. Lab data has to do with issues concerning performance, whereas field data consists of performance data in real-time which your visitors experience.
This speed testing tool is most favored and used by small and middle-range businesses, but also independent website owners who are looking for a straightforward and easy way to keep up with optimal website performance.
A small note on Google PageSpeed Insights: a lot of marketers and techs are often obsessed by the PageSpeed score. However, in reality, this score doesn’t really have much to do with actual speed. While PageSpeed Insights is still a pretty useful tool, you have to have in mind that it only measures speed partially.
A large part of the score generated comes from the comparison that has been made by putting your site against a technical checklist. What’s problematic about this? In a lot of cases, it doesn’t consider certain practical limitations of the site’s coding and design. Another problem is that one of its speed testing components also completely ignores the site’s geographic location, which means you’ll probably encounter scores that vary quite a lot. This will depend on where the test was being made from, the geographic location of your hosting provider, and also how busy the internet is at the time of the testing.
A Few Final Notes
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, a well-optimized website can make all the difference for the users that visit your site and interact with it. Having a fast website is one of the most important things you have to consider as a website owner, especially if you’re managing an online enterprise. And one of the first steps you need to take when it comes to your site’s optimization is making a speed test.
A fast website is better for SEO, period. Speed can impact Google rankings, and Google itself likes faster websites. Slow sites don’t rank as high as fast(er) ones, and they also get a ranking penalty.
And perhaps even more important than traffic and rankings is the conversion rate. Interacting with websites nowadays has become lightning-fast and people get more and more frustrated and dissatisfied with slow websites, making them click away to go somewhere else pretty quickly if the website they’re trying to access is not almost immediately responsive.
This, in turn, has a rather heavy impact on the conversion rate and the number of enquiries in sales and calls, or whatever it is the website’s generating. Summarized, it goes like this: traffic and conversions both are highly affected by speed, which is why speed is so important in the end.
If you want a thorough, detailed and professional speed optimization service with lots of experience behind it, make sure to check out what we have to offer at WPSpeedFix.com. We’ve worked on over 2000 sites so far, optimizing them for speed. You don’t have to let your slow website hurt your Google rankings and make you lose customers by the minute anymore. We’re able to transform a frustratingly slow website to one that will load in under 2 seconds – potentially even faster on a high-quality hosting provider.
You can also check out some of our articles that deal with the optimization of WordPress sites, listed below:
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
A study from WordStream found that “the top 10% of landing pages are converting at a rate 3 to 5 times higher than the average.” This means that by having a couple of landing page versions, you could reach a higher conversion rate and generate much more revenue than usual.
New times come with new marketing challenges. Nowadays, acquiring leads and converting them to customers has become a more important thing than just generating traffic.
And this is where the concept of “landing pages” comes in the picture of digital marketing strategies.
What Do We Mean By Landing Pages?
Landing pages are website pages that are customized and specifically created in order to target particular visitors. These are pages where, simply put, your visitors first land on your site. They’re usually designed according to the demographic, the specific interests and previous shopping histories of the visitors.
Landing pages are designed with two main purposes in mind:
draw in as many possible leads as they can,
bring visitors’ conversion rates to the max.
What Are Landing Page Builders?
Most of the time, landing page builders come in the form of software tools. They provide you with plenty of options and features so you can successfully build a customized landing page for different types of visitors.
Landing page builders allow you to build professional-looking landing pages without any in-depth knowledge of web design and programming. This way you can have more control over the look of your site and ultimately save more time and money that you would usually give to other IT technicians and web developers/designers.
Best Landing Page Builders
Granted, there are a lot of landing page building tools out there and it’s difficult to choose one without wasting too much valuable time and energy.
That’s why we made sure to look more closely at landing page builders on the internet market and select the best ones that we think will answer to multiple and different needs to different users.
That being said, let’s finally look at the best landing page builders currently on the market!
Unbounce has been on the online market for quite a long time. Ten years of marketing strategies and helping website users with their online businesses have given enough credibility to this software company to last another ten years.
In fact, this was the first software of its kind to grace the world of the internet!
You can use Unbounce to build and test custom-made landing pages, as well as website popups and sticky bars. It allows you to improve the post-click conversion rates of your site and to launch more campaigns, easy and fast.
The team behind Unbounce boasts with more than 650 million conversions and still more to come!
But don’t take us for our word – let’s actually look at some of the features they offer.
Key Features
The Unbounce has a drag and drop editor which is easy to use and very intuitive.
The Unbounce software offers a large number of options and features for customizing your site’s landing pages:
Ability to add a custom HTML and CSS;
More than 100 high-converting templates to choose from;
Ability to design a template from scratch;
Ability to duplicate and edit your most successful landing pages for future campaigns;
You can copy and paste elements from different landing pages to save time;
You can add custom JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to any page for extra functionality;
Unbounce’s script manager will also allow you to apply your custom scripts through multiple landing pages;
Ability to create a mobile responsive version of all your landing pages;
Ability to create AMP landing pages that load 85% faster than regular mobile ones. You can also customize your mobile pages;
Ability to access more than 850,000 free images from Unsplash from inside the Unbounce Builder;
Unbounce allows you to automatically optimize your image for a faster site loading;
You can easily embed videos anywhere on your landing page.
You can find even more valuable features in the Unbounce features section because we can’t possibly cover everything in our article.
Popups and Sticky Bars
Popups and sticky bars are also there to enhance your conversion rates and make your site even more engaging. Unbounce offers you a variety of ways to customize and control the popups and sticky bars on your site.
Popups give you more opportunities for conversions. You can create new and different popups with the drag and drop principle and have them published on your site in no time.
Unbounce allows you to decide who you want to target to see your popups and also choose when you want them to appear. Also, popups are a great option for any kind of new promotions, discounts, and coupons you have to offer.
Sticky bars are there to remind visitors and customers of anything you deem important at all times while they scroll through your site. They stick around the bottom or top edges of the page and make sure your customers don’t lose track of the important campaigns or offers you want to inform them about.
Another great thing about sticky bars is that they also engage quite well with Google’s mobile ranking signals. You can be certain that your sticky bars will allow for an SEO-optimized and mobile-friendly browsing experience.
Pricing
Unbounce has three pricing options:
Enterprise
This option costs $399 per month if paid annually, and $499 if paid monthly. The Enterprise plan is designed to suit the individual needs of the users who purchase it. With it, you’ll be able to partner with a dedicated launch specialist and a customer success manager in order to maximize your ROI (return of investment).
It includes more than 375 landing pages and more than 40 pop-ups and sticky bars.
Premium
This is the recommended plan from the Unbounce team. It costs $159 per month if paid annually and $199 if paid monthly. With it you get 150 landing pages and 16 pop-ups and sticky bars. You also get a bunch of other features such as AMP landing pages and client sub-accounts.
Essential
This is the perfect plan for users who are just getting started with their site and need the essential features for building their landing pages and generating their first conversions.
It costs $79 per month if billed annually and $99 if billed monthly. It includes 75 Landing Pages and 8 pop-ups and sticky bars.
Final Verdict
Unbounce is by far one of the best landing page building tools you can find on the internet. Being first in the business is no small matter! With 10 years of experience, it includes a comprehensive variety of options and features which allow you to easily build highly customized landing pages, whether you’re an experienced web developer or a newbie at website matters.
It’s also one of the more affordable such tools out there compared to other software of its kind, especially when you take into account the sheer volume of the features it offers.
Instapage is another top-notch landing page builder on the same level with Unbounce. It’s one a pretty popular software for customizing landing pages on the internet because of its fast and easy-to-use editor and the feature-packed overall package.
Key Features
More than 90 customizable templates;
Built-in AMP support for a superb mobile experience;
Thor Render Engine, a unique patented technology from Instapage that will provide you with much faster landing page loading speeds;
Intuitive drag and drop builder for a highly customizable landing page;
Integration with Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and Facebook;
Option to add custom-made code to the landing pages;
CRO functionality & heatmap tracking – Instapage allows you to track clicks, mouse movements, scroll depth and use dynamic text replacement;
Ability to create scaled landing pages with the reusable page blocks which you can update globally with only one click;
Unlimited A/B testing;
Conversion analytics;
Sub-accounts and team member accounts;
Integration with Zapier, Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot.
Pricing
Instapage offers two plans and a 14-day free trial with access to all the features in the Business plan and 2500 unique visitors.
Business
This plan gives you all the basic tools you need for building and optimizing your new customized landing pages.
It costs $149 per month if paid annually and $199 if paid monthly.
Enterprise
The Enterprise plan is designed for more advanced users in mind, offering more features than the Business plan and a custom provision of services according to each user’s individual and particular needs.
It doesn’t have a fixed price – you will have to contact the Sales department for more information on this.
Final Verdict
This landing page builder can be used by marketers and entrepreneurs with no coding knowledge whatsoever. It sports an intuitive, fast and powerful editor that will allow users to create their desired landing pages with just a few clicks in a couple of minutes.
Leadpages is another popular provider for landing page building tools. It’s not only a landing page builder software but also a lead generation platform that allows users to create whole websites focused on conversions.
Leadpages is another such platform that has been long on the market, one of the first landing page builders in the field. It has everything you need to create highly optimized, customized and responsive landing pages and thus convert more customers, get leads and integrate on all the important online platforms.
Key Features
Built-in conversion guidance.
Leadpages has technology that will predict the performance of your site even before publishing it. It’ll also tell you what you need to do to tweak it a little and make it even better.
Unlimited lead collection & traffic – they put no limits on web visitors or lead collection;
Unlimited page publishing – you can create dedicated landing pages without worrying about publishing limits or bandwidth exceedings;
Great page loading speeds.
Leadpages boasts with 2.4 seconds faster loading times of the landing pages and a performance score that’s 30% higher than other quality page builders in the field. All of this ultimately contributes to more customer conversions, leads, sales, as well as a higher PPC ad quality score.
Drag and drop builder and customization that doesn’t require any coding;
More than 200 templates you can use anytime;
Mobile responsive templates and landing pages;
Ability to add a countdown timer, video player, Calendly schedule, OpenTable reservation widget, all within the drag and drop builder;
Better site optimization through the ability to run A/B split tests on any of the landing pages;
Leadpage offers a huge list of integrations that connect your lead generation tools and marketing automation platforms. Among them are Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, Salesforce, ZoHo CRM, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads, Shopify, MailChimp, SendInBlue and many many others.
Pricing
Leadpages has 3 pricing options.
Standard
This one costs $25 a month if billed annually and $37 a month if billed monthly. It’s valid for 1 site and it gives you options like free hosting, ability to build landing pages, use popups, alert bars, have unlimited traffic and leads, have free custom domain (only if you purchase it annually though), lead notifications, email, more than 40 standard integrations, ad builder for Facebook and Instagram.
Pro
This one costs $48 a month if billed annually and $79 a month if billed monthly. It’s valid for 3 sites and it has the same features as the Standard plan with additional ones such as online sales and payments, unlimited A/B split testing, email trigger links, 10 opt-in text campaigns.
Advanced
This one costs $199 a month if billed annually and $321 a month if billed monthly. It’s valid for 50 sites and besides having all the Standard and Pro features, it also has advanced integrations, 5 pro-sub-accounts, 50 extra opt-in text campaigns. If you purchase this plan you’ll also be able to meet 1-on-1 with a Leadpages launch specialist who will guide you in setting up your account.
NOTE: If you choose to be billed monthly you won’t be able to get the Free Domain Option present in all pricing plans who are billed annually.
OptimizePress is a landing page builder specifically designed for WordPress sites.
The newest version, OptimizePress 3, is a redesigned and updated tool for successfully building landing pages and converting customers in WordPress. It’s really easy to use, and even though it may not offer the same level of customization options and features as the other tools on our list, it’s still worth a shot.
Key Features
More than 40 landing page templates;
Ability to build templates from scratch;
Email integration with popular platforms like ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Drip, and Mailerlite;
Ability to add conversion-optimized sections;
WordPress theme optimized for building the email list;
OptimizeLeads – lead generation platform and a funnel builder (available only in higher plans);
Mobile responsive templates;
Easy ways to create opt-in forms.
In just a few clicks you’ll be able to create opt-in forms and get all the data you want and need from your visitors. You can also connect with the email marketing service and save your subscribers for future marketing.
Fast loading of the landing pages.
Unfortunately, there’s still no A/B split testing and checkout builder which are expected to be added in the future.
Pricing
OptimizePress 3 has three pricing plans.
Essential
The Essential plan is for those who are just getting started. It costs $99 a year and is valid only for one site. It includes features such as: ability to build unlimited pages, unlimited leads and traffic, SmartTheme WordPress marketing theme, cloud access to more than 100 templates, more than 20 premium Integrations, email support, and more.
Business
The Business plan is the most popular choice and it costs $149 a year. It’s valid to use on up to 5 personal sites and it includes all the features from the Essential plan with a few extras such as: priority email support, access to premium templates, access to more than 1 million free photos by using the Unsplash integration, and the OptimizeUrgency scarcity add-on.
Suite
This plan is meant for, as they say on their site, “elite marketers”. It costs $199 per year and you’ll be able to use it on up to 20 sites. It includes all that is included in the Essential and the Business Plus plan with the addition of OptimizeLeads (their own hosted opt-in form software), the OptimizeFunnels funnel builder and OptimizeCheckouts.
Final Verdict
If you want a simple, easy to use and budget-friendly landing page builder solution for WordPress, then you should definitely consider getting the OptimizePress 3.
Conclusion
Landing page builders are pretty necessary if you want a good marketing strategy – they’ll help you generate more leads, will lead to higher conversion rates among customers and will also help you in building email lists.
But, of course, successful sites and landing pages take effort to get built and we understand that sometimes it’s no easy feat. Luckily though, there are ever better tools on the internet market right now that’ll make things a helluva lot easier than you think.
We made sure to select only the best ones, so by the end of this short list you can be sure you’re in the company of greats!
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Funnel software, or an automated marketing funnel, is vital for any business looking to make sales. A marketing funnel is exactly what it sounds like: a system that “funnels” people through your sales process until they ultimately convert, typically into paying customers.
Why Do You Need Funnel Software?
Funnel software can help all kinds of online businesses to make their funnels automatic, operating seamlessly.
Here are some of the things it can do for your business:
It can help you create opt-in forms which you can use to get emails for your email marketing list;
You’ll be able to customize email marketing campaigns for every step of your customer’s buying course;
You can use it to upsell present customers or convert visitors by setting up sales funnels;
Introduce affiliate programs;
You can easily introduce new products to sell to current customers.
Best Funnel Software and Tools
Let’s look at the best funnel software and tools currently on the market!
ClickFunnels is one of the best-known names in the field of funnel software. The popularity of this tool is mostly due to its easy to use, drag and drop builder and the fact that it can be used to build successful funnel pages by people who have little to no coding knowledge.
ClickFunnels also provides you with some great sales funnel examples which are super-helpful for beginners in the field. The builder has a help button in case you get stuck somewhere in the building process. It takes you straight to the info base where you can find common issues or it opens a chat with an agent if you have a more specific issue.
Key Features
Popup editor within the landing page editor – this allows you to see how the landing page will look and work once you publish it.
Drag and drop page editor.
Smart shopping cart with 1-click upsells.
Email and Facebook Marketing Automation
Simple and intuitive dashboard for better organization.
Cookbook section with a bunch of tutorials for users that are just starting out or need fresh new ideas
Pricing
ClickFunnel has three pricing plans:
The Standard plan – costs $97 per month and it includes 20 funnels and 100 sub-pages within each funnel.
The Platinum plan – costs $297 per month includes an unlimited number of funnel templates and sub-pages within the funnels.
The ClickFunnels Collective plan is the third plan, of which we still don’t know much about, other than it’s supposed to be coming soon!
You also get a 14-day free trial before purchasing one of the plans.
Final Verdict
ClickFunnel is a popular solution for new users that are just entering the field of funnel software. It gives you all the essential options you need to build funnel pages and sub-pages and acquire your first leads as well as successfully raise your conversion rates at the beginning of your eCommerce ventures!
GetResponse offers a great software package for people that want to have several different marketing options in one program.
Want tools that’ll help you grow your audience? Check! Want them to help you sell and promote your products, services and whatever it is that you’re providing on your site? Check!
Key Features
Ready-made, automated sales funnel generator
Ability to build landing pages (you’ll be able to choose between a variety of landing pages and newsletter templates)
Ability to automate your emails,
Ability to sell your products through GetResponse; you can also integrate your account if you have one on an eCommerce platform such as Etsy, Stripe, Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop.
Ability to recover abandoned orders.
Easy setup and easy to navigate.
You can see all the stages of your funnel as well as the conversion rates in a clear and fast way.
Webinars – you can run free or paid webinars that are seamlessly integrated with your pages and emails.
The Basic plan – this one costs $15 per month if paid monthly, $12.30 if paid yearly, and $10.50 if paid bi-yearly. It starts from a list size of 1000 and can go up to 100.000. This is valid for all plans. Bear in mind that it’s gonna cost you more, though. This list includes options like email marketing, autoresponders, unlimited landing pages and unlimited automation templates, sales funnels (1 funnel), unlimited lead funnels, Facebook ads and the selling of online products.
The Plus plan – it costs $49 per month if paid monthly, $40.18 if paid yearly, and $34.30 if paid bi-yearly. Besides the options featured in the Basic plan, this one also gives you: automation builder (5 workflows), webinars (maximum of 100 attendees), simple CRM, contact scoring & tagging, sales funnels (5 funnels), coworking option for 3 users, webinar funnels (5 funnels).
The Professional plan – this plan costs $99 per month, $81.18 if paid yearly, and $69.30 if paid bi-yearly. It includes all the options from the previous two plans, the Basic and the Plus one, as well as a set of its own such as: paid webinars, unlimited automation builder, webinars with maximum 300 attendees, unlimited sales funnels, unlimited webinar funnels, coworking option for 5 users.
The Enterprise plan – this plan costs $1,199 per month, $839 if paid yearly, and $719 if paid bi-yearly. This plan is valid for a list size of over 100.000. It includes all the features from the previous plans and then some: transactional emails (this is a paid add-on), account manager, a dedicated IP address, deliverability consulting, single sign-on (SSO), webinars for maximum 500 attendees, email campaign consulting.
GetResponse offers a 30-day trial for all of their plans.
Final Verdict
GetResponse is a quality solution package for all your marketing woes. It allows you to create and facilitate campaigns on and for social media, create landing pages for particular types of customers, create webinars, email automation, and of course, their newest and hottest feature – autofunnel!
Kartra is another software package that includes a bunch of super-helpful marketing options for your site.
Starting from landing page builders, CRM, email marketing and automation, to video hosting, Kartra’s got you covered on everything that counts.
Kartra has a really nice way of organizing your first meeting with this software and its dashboard. It has a checklist that takes you through the steps necessary for doing whatever it is you need to do with it.
It’s simple, effective and clear – Kartra’s dashboard organization will certainly help you save you plenty of time in the end.
Key Features
Landing page builder
Lead database (CRM)
Email marketing and automations
Opt-in forms
Ticketing and live chat
Video hosting and
Checkout forms
Lead tagging – this allows you to subgroup your prospects as they go through your funnel.
Pricing
The main plans offered by Kartra are the following:
The Starter plan: costs $89 per month billed annually/$99 billed monthly. With it, you get: a maximum of 2500 leads, 15.000 emails per month, 50GB bandwidth per month, you’ll be able to host 100 pages, sell 20 products, have 2 membership sites and 1 custom domain.
The Silver plan: it costs $149 per month billed annually/$199 billed monthly. This plan includes a maximum of 12.500 leads, 125.000 emails per month, 125GB bandwidth per month, you can host an unlimited number of pages, and sell unlimited products, unlimited membership sites, and also have 3 custom domains.
The Gold plan: costs $249 per month billed annually/$299 billed monthly. This plan features a maximum of 25.000 leads, 250.000 emails per month, 200GB bandwidth per month, the ability to host an unlimited number of pages, sell an unlimited number of products, have unlimited membership sites, as well as 5 custom domains.
The Platinum plan: it costs $379 per month billed annually/$499 billed monthly. With this plan you can sell an unlimited number of products, create an unlimited number of pages, have up to 500.000 emails, and up to 50.000 contacts.
The Diamond plan: costs $519 billed annually/$699 billed monthly. With this plan you can have up to 1.000.000 emails, up to 100.000 contacts, you can sell an unlimited amount of products, and create an unlimited amount of pages.
Final Verdict
Similarly to GetResponse, Kartra is another solid product that offers a variety of digital marketing services that will help you make successful funnels and campaigns along with a bunch of other tools to complement all that and make for one flawless online marketing campaign.
Unbounce is one of the oldest digital marketing software packages on our list and it’s also one of the best in its field. It has consistently held its ground throughout the years and every year it seems to get better and better at what it’s doing.
Unbounce will give you all the tools you need to create landing pages, funnels, and campaigns after your own taste. With features such as popups and sticky bars and the limitless ways to control and integrate them on your pages, you’ve got a mighty ally in the digital marketing business by your side.
Key Features
Over 100 templates you can choose from and make a creative and unique campaign that will stand out.
Popups and sticky bars – different ways to control and customize them for higher conversion rates.
Option for duplicating and editing your most successful landing pages so you can use them in future campaigns;
You can add custom JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to your site’s pages for additional functionality;
You can apply your custom scripts through multiple landing pages;
Mobile responsive landing pages
Ability to create AMP landing pages that load 85% faster than regular mobile ones.
Customization for mobile pages;
You can access more than 850.000 free images from Unsplash inside the Unbounce Builder;
Unbounce allows you to automatically optimize your image for a faster site loading;
You can easily embed videos anywhere on your landing page.
Pricing
Unbounce has three pricing options:
The Essential plan: costs $79 per month if billed annually and $99 if billed monthly. It includes 75 Landing Pages and 8 pop-ups and sticky bars. This plan is mostly oriented towards users who are starting out with a new site and are in need of good-quality basic features for building great landing pages, creating funnel campaigns and thus achieving their first conversions.
The Premium plan: This is the recommended plan from the Unbounce team. This plan costs $159 per month if paid annually and $199 if paid monthly. It includes 150 landing pages and 16 pop-ups and sticky bars, but this is not all. You will get plenty of other features such as AMP landing pages and client sub-accounts.
The Enterprise plan: This option costs $399 per month if paid annually, and $499 if paid monthly. The Enterprise plan is a custom plan for the particular needs of individual users. This plan includes partnering with a dedicated launch specialist and a customer success manager, there to help you out in the process. This plan includes more than 375 landing pages and more than 40 pop-ups and sticky bars.
Final Verdict
You simply can’t go wrong with the software from Unbounce. This software gives you the opportunity to easily launch campaigns, make funnel pages and increase your site’s post-click conversion rates.
Whether you have years of developer’s experience or are just starting out, Unbounce won’t discriminate against you! It has all the complexity to satisfy everybody’s thirst for tinkering, and at the same time, it’s incredibly simple to use.
Wishpond offers you a set of marketing tools that will help you scale your business quickly and easily, without any expert IT knowledge.
With Wishpond you can be sure that your email and marketing automation will be in safe hands. You can use it to easily create landing pages, social media contests, and popups.
They have plenty of visually attractive templates, and all of them are easy to configure. Also, the marketing automation offers you a wide palette of options you can choose from to tailor your online marketing campaign.
Another great thing about this tool is that it allows you to easily integrate with email marketing tools such as MailChimp and ActiveCampaign.
Key Features
Easy to use drag and drop editor for building landing pages.
Built-in popup tool – this way you can convert more of your site’s visitors. You can add popups, welcome mats, slide-in popups, and opt-in bars.
A/B split testing – this way you can track your site’s progress in real-time.
Ability to create custom form fields.
Mobile-responsive pages.
Personalized weekly email reports so you can always keep track of your site’s progress and see what you can improve every week.
Advanced automation workflow.
Pricing
Wishpong has three pricing plans:
The Starting Out plan: This plan costs $49 per month, billed yearly. It includes an unlimited number of landing pages, an unlimited number of social contests and popups. You also get email drip campaigns, marketing automation, an unlimited number of user accounts and a maximum of 1.000 leads.
The Everything You Need Plan: This plan costs $99 per month, billed yearly. This plan has everything included in the Starting Out plan as well as features like A/B testing, custom CSS & Javascript, API access and a maximum of 2.500 leads. This plan is the most popular of the list.
The Rapid Growth plan: This plan costs $199 per month, billed yearly. It has all the features from the previous two plans and also first-in-line customer support as well as implementation coaching (of $1.500 value). It starts at 10.000 leads and it goes up to 1.000.000. But, have in mind, the bigger the number of leads, the bigger the price as well.
You can try out all of these plans also come with the 14-day trial period.
Final Verdict
Wishpond offers a variety of useful tools for building a solid marketing strategy for your online venture. It’s an affordable solution for people who are just starting out, but also professionals in the eCommerce sector.
Conclusion
So, we hope that by now we’ve convinced you why it’s important to use funnel software for your eCommerce venture. But convincing is only the first step. Choosing a good funnel software is equally important.
On this list, we made a small, but feature-packed selection of the best digital marketing software currently on the internet. These top-notch platforms and companies offer superbly designed software that will make generating leads, converting visitors, promoting and selling your products, as well as gaining more and more followers a much easier feat.
We hope that some of it will catch our eye (although all of them are great at their job in their own ways) and that your next successful digital marketing strategy will start with one of our selections. Cheers to that!
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500 Internal Server Error is a really common error message and can mean a number of things.
It’s a type of information that belongs to the category of the ‘HTTP status codes’, which basically provide you with information about the success of an online request.
If the online request is successful, everything flows smoothly, but if it’s not, you get a type of HTTP status code. In this case, that’s the 500 Internal Server Error.
The problem is, these kinds of error messages are generic – they can be a bit vague, meaning you won’t always know where the problem lies and why that particular request wasn’t successful. And this is particularly true for the 500 Internal Server Error message.
This is a type of HTTP status code that gives you the info that during connection to the server, an error has occurred, which also means that the page requested cannot be accessed. But, it actually won’t tell you the full story or, in other words, it won’t tell you why this happened in the first place.
This is a common problem and error so we decided to put together a short article and cover the basic info on why this might happen and what are the typical sources of these kinds of errors as well as how to do some basic troubleshooting.
Table of Contents
1. Check the .htaccess File for Potential Errors
Errors in the htaccess file is the most common reason for “500” server errors.
This file is a key configuration file on Apache web servers which means the presence of even one simple, but wrong character in this file can crash your site immediately and cause the WordPress 500 Internal Server Error.
A simple fast way to diagnose if this is the problem is to connect to the files of your site using either FTP or your web host’s control panel again or some sort of file manager.
Once you locate the file, rename it temporarily. If you find out that the site manages to load after the error message disappears, then this means that you’ve found the root cause.
Now that you know this is the root cause you can troubleshoot the .htaccess file directly. One way would be creating a new .htaccess file using the default configuration from WordPress.org here. Alternatively, digging through your renamed htaccess file and removing an unusual code would be the other way to do it – if you’re not a tech personal option 1 is going to be the better path here.
2. Ask your web host for support
So, as we said, the WordPress 500 Internal Server Error is a generic HTTP status code on the failure of server connection, and it can mean lots of things.
Sometimes the simplest path to a solution is to ask for help. Instead of messing around for hours the simplest solution might be to just hit up your web hosting support team and ask them to fix it for you.
If you’re not technical you could spend hours troubleshooting this issue and still not find a fix or worse, break your site or accidentally delete content permanently.
3. Check your plugins & theme
If it’s not your htaccess file that’s the problem and you don’t want to ask your host for help then next up would be to check the active plugins.
Quite commonly a poor plugin update or a new plugin installed can introduce this issue.
An easy quick first diagnostic step would be to rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to something like /wp-content/plugins-renamed using FTP or a file manager which essentially disables all the active plugins.
If this make the error go away then you know it’s a plugin problem, if the error persists then it’s not your plugins and wise to rename the folder back to the original /wp-content/plugins
If the plugins folder is the issue then creating a new /wp-content/plugins folder and moving each plugin back from /wp-content/plugins-renamed will allow you to check one by one which one is the issue.
In a similar way to your plugins, your theme could also be the cause of this issue but this is quite rare. Removing your theme folders from /wp-content/themes in a similar way to the plugins folder will disable the active theme BUT this is probably one of the last options to try given how rare this would be the issue.
3. Check your server log
99.9% of hosts will give you access to the Apache or web server logs. The error log or access will often tell you the root cause of the 500 error and allow you to trace it back to it’s source.
4. Check your functions.php file
functions.php is a file that usually sits in the same folder as your theme and most often where custom code is added. (More details on functions.php here at the WordPress codex)
This file functions in a similar way to a WordPress plugin so dodgy code and code with typos in the functions.php file can cause problems here. Usually the best approach is to remove custom code added to this file temporarily. If the error message disappears you know this is the root cause.
5. Check your wp-config.php file
wp-config.php *usually* sits in the root WordPress folder. It’s a configuration file that WordPress relies on to tell it where to find the database tables and other critical information about the site configuration. (More on wp.config.php here on the WordPress codex)
Again, bad code in here, typos and incorrect settings can cause problems. This file can be complex so troubleshooting settings in it is really outside the scope of this article but making sure there’s no typos in there and the quotes characters used (these: “code here”) to wrap settings are correct. Quite commonly when copying and pasting code from Notepad or other text editors these characters can be changed slightly and cause problems.
5. Delete the /wp-content/cache folder
If your WordPress site has been optimized for speed at all then you’ll likely be using caching plugins.
These plugins typically store their data in the /wp-content/cache folder and occasionally they can cache bad or corrupt data.
A simple way to clear this cache is just to rename or delete this folder. Renaming is usually faster so if you rename to /wp-content/cache-OLD or something like that it’ll immediately bypass any of this cached data. If this solves the problem then delete the cache-OLD folder when you get a moment.
If the problem happens again shortly after deleting this folder it could be a case where one of your caching plugins has an incorrect setting.
6. Check if the WordPress Core is Causing a Problem
It so happens to be that the core installation of your WordPress site is a potential place for issues connected to the 500 Internal Server Error. This can happen for different reasons. You may be missing some types of files, while others may simply be corrupted or changed. That’s why it’s a good idea to make sure there’s nothing wrong with your core WordPress installation, so you can rule it out as the culprit behind the 500 error message.
Reinstalling the core of WordPress is kind of the nuclear option so probably wise to use these steps as a last resort AND do a backup first.
Below you can see the steps you need to take to remove and re-install WordPress core files manually:
Download the latest WordPress zip (or tar.gz) file.
Unpack the downloaded zip file.
Deactivate the plugins.
Delete the old wp-admin and wp-includes directories on your web host (you can do this through your shell access or through your FTP).
Using your shell access or your FTP, proceed to upload the new wp-admin and wp-includes directories to your web host, putting them in place of the directories which were previously deleted.
Upload the individual files from the new wp-content folder to your already existing wp-content folder, overwriting the existing files. NOTE: NEVER delete your existing wp-content folder. NEVER delete any files or folders in your existing wp-content directory (with the exception of the one that’s overwritten by new files).
Upload all new loose files from the root directory of the new version to your existing WordPress root directory.
NOTE: Make sure to replace all of the old WordPress files with the new ones in the wp-admin and wp-includes directories, as well as sub-directories, but also in the root directory (such as index.php, wp-login.php etc.). You won’t have to worry about your wp-config.php; it will remain completely safe.
Be careful and pay attention when you start to copy the wp-content directory. Note that you should only copy the files from inside this directory, rather than replacing your entire wp-content directory. This is practically where all your themes and plugins “live”, which means you’d definitely want to keep them. If you’ve made customization of the default or classic themes without changing their names, then make sure not to overwrite those files, because if you do, you will lose your changes. (If you want to compare them for new features or fixes, though, then that’s a different matter.)
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Creating a WordPress site requires a certain amount of meticulousness – you need to implement a variety of elements for your site to work properly and seamlessly.
Caching plugins, security plugins, drag, and drop page builder plugins, live chat plugins, image optimization plugins, eCommerce plugins, you name it! There’s plenty of them to think of and sometimes it’s also pretty easy to forget some of them.
Well, the contact form plugin might just be one of those – a plugin that allows your customers to reach your customer service through email.
You might think that this type of plugin is not a priority in contemporary WordPress sites, but you could be mistaken. Let’s see why it’s actually a good idea to have one on your site.
Why Install a Contact Form Plugin?
Not all people want to use chatbots when they’re trying to utilize your customer service or call the line reserved for customers. Some of them, in fact, would rather use the good old email and send their complaints or questions right to your site’s email inbox.
And this is precisely where contact form plugins can come in handy. These kinds of plugins allow customers to quickly send emails where they can elaborate on their issues, while also allowing the company to answer their complaints or questions in a reasonable amount of time.
Contact form plugins can also help to prevent spam and help create more space for interaction with your customers which is always a plus, for any type of business.
But not all contact form plugins are the same. Some are more nuanced with features, some are more simple, some are cheaper, some are free, and some are more expensive and premium. It all depends on the needs of your site and your business, and, of course, on your budget.
What to Look for in Contact Form Plugins?
More basic contact form plugins for WordPress have the essential features for your customers to communicate with you via email. They implement only the necessary fields and just the very basics when it comes to design tools.
Contact form plugins that are more expensive and more advanced are, of course, richer in features and fields; they include a larger selection of design tools, use stuff like conditional logic, and also have more options for file submission.
Contact form plugins can have much more than the features included here, so let’s take a look at the essentials you should be looking for in this type of plugin:
Spam protection – custom forms are a good way to ensure protection from spam.
Conditional logic – ability to hide or show elements like certain fields, buttons, and form sections. This will be based on what the user/customer themselves selects on the contact form, and is a useful feature for directing customers to the right department.
Custom forms – branding and design tools, different options, multiple fields.
Visual builders (can also be drag and drop editors, but it’s not completely necessary)
Mobile responsive – you definitely want a contact form that will look great on all mobile devices.
File submission – let your customers upload different types of documents (textual or visual ones – such as a screenshot, for example, which can be very helpful when there’s a problem).
Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins (Free and Paid)
Now that we covered the basics when it comes to contact form plugins, let’s get down to business! We present to you the best free and paid contact form plugins for 2020.
Gravity Forms is the perfect combination when it comes to a customer form plugin that’s bound to satisfy all tastes. It has user-friendly tools, but it’s not only oriented towards beginners – it also features advanced tools for the customer support section in different types of sites.
It also has a very clean interface, includes frontend file uploads, as well as multi-page forms and conditional logic.
Key Features
Lots of documentation – you get a starting guide, add-ons info, documents about developers, as well as some popular features.
Supports a variety of add-ons and external integrations, such as Dropbox, GetResponse, Freshbooks, AWeber, Stripe, MailChimp, and PayPal Pro.
Great price-per-value ratio.
Access to 30 and more form fields.
Built-in conditional logic.
Supports file uploads and email notifications.
‘Save and continue’ option.
Ability to perform advanced calculations which are based on the submissions of users. This is a very useful option if you’re an owner of a real estate or a finance-related site.
Option for limiting the number of form submissions and option for scheduling of forms.
Option for frontend submissions of user content.
Pricing
The standard, basic package of Gravity Forms, for $59 a year, includes a license for 1 Site, as well as unlimited forms and entries, the aforementioned conditional logic and multi-page forms, file uploads and automatic updates, standard support, and basic add-ons of the likes of ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Postmark, MailChimp, HubSpot, and others.
The priority support is only available if you go with the most expensive plan ($259 per year,) so that would send you to the front of the line.
There’s no live chat or phone support, but as you’ll see with most contact form plugins, those aren’t really necessary.
Jetpack is a well-known plugin among WordPress users, particularly because it’s created from the fellows that made WordPress.
This is truly an all encompassing plugin – from caching and anti spam support to social media tools and of course, the contact form.
Some of you may already have this plugin on your WordPress site, and since you’re in need of a contact form on your site, it’s definitely worth trying out Jetpack’s version of it.
Jetpack allows you to position the Add Contact Form button at the top of every post and page in your WordPress dashboard. All of this makes it easier for you to insert a contact form wherever you want on your site.
Key Features:
As a WordPress user you may already have the Jetpack plugin installed on your site. It doesn’t interfere with other plugins or affect the performance of your site, and doesn’t slow it down like other plugins can.
One-click ‘form insert’ button that makes it all the more easy to implement contact forms on your site’s pages.
You’re able to receive email notifications to an address of your preference.
You can adjust all the form settings straight through your page editor. You can adjust things like form fields, the subject field, email address, and others.
This is a plugin that’s superbly integrated with Akismet so you can be rest assured that every form submission is going to be free from spam.
Jetpack has a great contact form option that’s perfect for blogs and small(er) businesses. It’s more basic but it has everything you need and it won’t cause any conflicts with the other elements on your site.
Pricing
Jetpack is a free plugin that you can download at any time from the WordPress depository.
Ninja Forms is a contact form plugin that offers both a free and a premium option for its users, depending on their needs.
This plugin is known for its neat interface allowing you to easily and quickly build contact forms of your own liking, without any limitations when it comes to fields, forms, and emails received. Another great thing about building your own forms is that you can save them for later use.
Key Features
More than 40 add-ons! Among them are multi-part forms, conditional logic, front-end posting, option for different layouts and styles, and option for file uploads.
With Ninja Forms you’ll easily be able to integrate your forms with platforms like MailChimp, AWeber, and Campaign Monitor.
Through your forms, you can directly collect your payments. You can use PayPal Express or any of the other numerous payment options to do this.
You can connect with Zapier and remove the majority of limitations when it comes to different types of integrations and automation.
You can also connect to a favorite CRM, such as SalesForce.
Very good price for the stuff that it offers.
Pricing
Ninja Forms offers a basic contact form kit on the WordPress depository page. Granted, the features are kinda basic, but unless you have a big business or multiple sites that need more complex contact form options, you’re perfectly fit to use this version.
Ninja Forms also offers premium versions of its plugin:
Agency – $499 per year – this is the most expensive option and is intended towards big companies. It offers an unlimited number of sites, all CRM integrations (Salesforce, Zoho, Insightly and much more), SMS and slack notifications, advanced analytics, more options and platforms for email marketing such as ActiveCampaign, CleverReach, and lots more options.
Professional – $199 per year – this includes use for 20 sites, more payment options, more integrations, and more options for clients and users.
Personal – $99 per year and it has all the essentials you need (form building options, single site use, priority support, email marketing, and PayPal Express)
À la carte – $29 – $129 per year – this is an option that allows you to have a custom-made set of features, and pay only for the ones you truly need for your site.
This one’s more recent on the contact form plugins market – a plugin that’s entirely built in the WordPress Customizer. What does this signify? Well, it means that you don’t have to get used to a new interface. Instead, you can work through your site’s WordPress dashboard.
It’s worth mentioning that the designers behind this plugin are the fellows from The Theme Foundry, long-time successful creators of quality WordPress themes.
HappyForms is a plugin that just won’t let you down. It’s very lightweight which means it won’t meddle with your site’s performance and won’t slow it down in any way.
Key features:
Drag and drop form builder from the WordPress Customizer.
You can receive messages and notifications through email. They’re also being copied into your WordPress admin dashboard.
It includes one-click honeypot and Google ReCaptcha spam prevention.
Shortcodes that allow you to easily put forms on your pages and posts. You can also have widget areas with the help of shortcodes.
Great price for the paid version.
Just one slight note: there’s a kind of watermark, saying “powered by HappyForms” located at the bottom of the form. If you don’t want to have this on your contact forms then you might want to consider looking at another plugin.
Pricing
HappyForms offers a free version of its plugin that you can find on the WordPress depository.
It also has three premium one time purchase plans:
Starter – old price was $69, currently it’s $20 off, making it $49. This is viable for one site only. With it you get 1 year of updates, conditional logic, dashboard analytics, ability to send PDF attachments, multi-page forms, ability to save abandoned responses, limit the number of responses, log IP addresses, import and export tools, reCaptcha integration, and more.
Business – old price was $129, currently it’s $30 off, making it $99. It’s viable for 5 sites. You will receive 1 year of updates, all the features from the starter pack along with reCaptcha, Mailchimp, Stripe, and PayPal integrations.
Professional – old price was $289, currently it’s $40 off, making it $249. It’s viable for an unlimited number of sites. This plan gives you 1 year of updates, and all the features from the previous two plans.
You’ve probably already heard about HubSpot, the software that offers you a comprehensive list of tools for digital marketing, sales, and service software. Well, now they also have a free plugin that among other things, enables you to build contact forms as well.
The HubSpot WordPress plugin includes a versatile lead generation dashboard. You’ll be able to find tools like slide-ins, pop-ups, and different types of forms – contact forms, exit intent forms, as well as a contact database and insights on leads for the first week of your site’s activity. HubSpot gives you all of these lead capture tools for free, working out of the box without any problems, easy to use by everyone.
Key features:
Super-intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
Designed to be compatible with other contact plugins such as Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms.
Analytics built into the plugin immensely useful to analyze your site’s most popular pages.
Unlimited number of submissions and fields.
You can manage your contact database easily with the seamless CRM integration.
The QuForm plugin is a bit different than the other plugins on our list. It’s actually a plugin that was designed to construct different types of forms, from highly simple ones to more complex and advanced forms with lots of fields and features (and it’s especially good at these ones).
QuForm has a very solid, intuitive drag and drop editor that’s certainly worth the money. Combine that with plenty of other options (think about nineteen element types!). What’s more, QuForm offers mobile-responsive webforms, so your contact forms can look perfect on all devices, besides desktop ones.
Key features:
This is a performance-optimized plugin, which means it won’t interfere with other plugins or slow down your site in any way.
The QuForm plugin includes six filters and nine validators.
You pay one time fee for the plugin which can save you lots of cash in the future.
This plugin also includes an enhanced file upload tool, which is immensely helpful when it comes to customer support and engaging/working with clients in general.
You’ll be able to use conditions and see certain elements automatically whenever a specific reply has been made through your contact form.
The inclusion of reCAPTCHA will protect your contact forms from spam.
Inside this plugin you can find 19 element types.
This plugin also includes several form themes.
Pricing
QuForm doesn’t have a free version of its plugin. It has two premium versions intended for one-time purchase.
Regular Licence for one time fee – $29. You can use this plugin on one site only. With it you get an unlimited number of forms, 6 months support from ThemeCatcher, future updates, Mailchimp, and Zapier add-on.
Extended Licence for one time fee – $145. This licence is required if the end user must pay to use the end product. It includes an unlimited number of forms, 6 months support from ThemeCatcher, future updates, Mailchimp and Zapier add-on – basically all the features that the regular licence includes.
WPForms plugin is considered a very beginner friendly plugin, actually one of the best such plugins on the market right now. A lot of this has to do with the superbly designed drag and drop editor that makes it super-easy for you to create contact form plugins.
Another great thing about this plugin is the comparatively low price for a wealth of features, and of course, the free version which is just perfect for small(er) websites.
Key features:
You’re able to easily integrate your contact forms with platforms such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, AWeber, and GetResponse.
WPForms also integrates with Zapier.
WPForms allows you to split the long forms into more pages.
You can embed your forms anywhere you want.
You’ll be able to hunt down more leads through the partial entry form tool.
You can use the geolocation data to gain more info about your users.
Very reasonably priced premium version.
Mobile responsive contact forms.
Forms that are made to use conditional logic based on user-response.
You can view all submissions in one area through the entry management.
You can enable your users to submit files from the frontend.
WPForms includes form templates if you don’t want to be bothered to create custom-made contact forms.
Pricing
WPForms gives you both free and premium versions of their product.
You can download the free version of this contact form plugin on the WordPress depository.
The premium plans are:
Elite – 599$ per year – this is a good solution for business owners. With this option you’ll get an unlimited number of sites, premium support, ActiveCampaign integration, WordPress multisite support, client management, and a lot more other features.
Pro – 399$ per year – this plan is oriented towards more professional site owners. You can use it for up to 5 sites, and it gives you plenty of integrations (Zapier, Stripe), option for PayPal, form landing pages, conversational forms, surveys and polls, geolocation, user registration, post submissions, priority support, etc.
Plus – 199$ per year – this is an upgrade of the basic plan; you can use it for 3 sites and it includes features like MailChimp and AWeber, GetResponse, CampaignMonitor and Drip integration, newsletter forms.
Basic – 79$ per year – provides you with all the essential tools to build your online contact form. It’s viable for one site only, and it includes updates, downloads, support, conditional logic, spam protection, file uploads, multi-page forms, form templates, advanced fields, as well as unlimited forms and entries.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, there’s a variety of contact form plugins on the market right now. This is only a small selection of them, but nevertheless a very thoughtfully and carefully made one.
Choosing a contact form plugin doesn’t have to be an activity that takes you a lot of time if you follow our guide. Whether you’re a blogger, freelancer, own a small company, or own a larger business, here you can find the right plugin for your line of work and your budget.
Contact form plugins are a good idea to have on your site – it adds a flair of professionality to whatever it is that you’re doing online. It also means that you’re willing to engage with visitors and customers/clients and listen to what they have to say or suggest.
That’s why you shouldn’t waste a second more – go over this list once more and choose your favorite contact form plugin!
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Although there are plenty of them out there, really good SEO tools are hard to find nowadays. SEO reporting tools are indispensable for a successful digital marketing campaign – both on the web and on social networks.
Essentially, SEO reports are used to inform clients, colleagues, or stakeholders on how a website is performing in search engine results. But SEO reports are also your main opportunity to show the value of your work, strengthen your work relationships, and keep clients paying for your services.
Having a cutting-edge set of analytical and SEO tools is a key feature of any successful search marketing campaign.
And although there are countless SEO tools to choose from, users get a certain advantage by knowing which will work best for specific needs. The following 15 analytics and SEO reporting tools are among the best free and paid tools available to get any SEO campaign on the right track. Whether you’re doing SEO on your own, or your want to work with an SEO agency like us, its important to use some of these tools to track the success of the campaign.
Table of Contents
Best Website Reporting Tools in Detail:
Here are the best website reporting tools for a great digital marketing campaign you can find in 2020.
Website: AgencyAnalytics.com – use the coupon code AA_PARTNER_93798 to get 50% off on signup.
Agency Analytics is one of the best SEO reporting tools on the internet. Built specifically for agencies in mind, it integrates with more than 40 platforms so you can have the complete marketing dashboard and produce thorough and accurate analytics for your clients.
Let’s peek into the key features of Agency Analytics:
SEO Keyword and Rank Tracking Capability
This tool provides accurate daily monitoring of rankings on Google (along with Google Local and Google Mobile) and Bing, as well as global and local tracking of keywords for any language.
You’ll be able to concentrate on the searches that bring traffic to your client’s site, as well as monitor daily and monthly changes for each keyword used in your clients’ marketing campaigns (or your own). This way you’ll know which keywords work and which need to be improved.
Multiple locations are supported – you can track keywords in as many locations as you want and need in your campaign. You just need to put in the country, state, city or ZIP code, and you will have info in no time.
What’s more, there’s also an easy way to manage all the keyword rankings by using custom tags. You can make keyword lists and organize them into categories.
With the Track Position History you’ll have an overview of the ranking performance of your past SEO campaigns, which is a great feature for comparing and gaining insight into the ranking fluctuations over a course of time.
Whitelabel Dashboard and PDF reporting
With the Avanser dashboard you can add your own logo (branding and colors included) to the reports and whitelabel customized PDF reports to your clients.
Google Adwords PPC Integration
Agency Analytics also features whitelabel Google Ads reporting, including PPC metrics (clicks, impressions, conversion rate, cost, CPC), keyword reporting for every term that induced impressions or clicks, campaign analysis, and conversion tracking of key performance data for click-through and view-through conversions.
With the automated reporting system, you can build client PPC reports in a couple of minutes, without any spreadsheets, allowing you to put them on autopilot.
You can also come up with a PPC margin, aka configure a single markup for all accounts or a custom one for particular clients.
Facebook Analytics and PPC Integration
Along with the other whitelabel options noted above, you’ll also be able to do whitelabeling for Facebook Ads reporting, aka Facebook analytics. You can monitor the Facebook performance by tracking conversion metrics based on your client’s campaign, advertisement, and ad set.
With the detailed PPC metrics, you’ll be able to analyze impressions, cost, click-through rates, and many other parameters.
You can do a breakdown of your client’s audience dividing them by gender, age, and location.
The intuitive dashboard will give easy access to clients to the cost per conversion (ROI) rates.
Google Analytics Integration
With the Google Analytics dashboard, you’ll be able to generate streamlined reports for all types of clients. You can make clear visualization through a variety of graphic options and formats, as well as divide data by channel so you can determine the most significant traffic sources for your clients.
You’ll be able to group visitors by demographics: age, gender, location, as well as the device they’re using and uncover any hidden traffic.
With customized report layouts, you can highlight parameters that are super-important for your clients, like conversions, goals, and revenue.
Report Scheduling Capability
Agency Analytics also includes a report scheduling capability. Through the report design wizard, you’ll be able to create a scheduled (automated) report. You can do this in the campaign where you want to do the report.
Pricing
Costs for Agency Analytics are starting from $49, which is the lowest plan (Freelancer), paid monthly. If paid annually it costs $39. With it, you get 5 campaigns, 500 keyword rankings, and 10,000 site audit pages.
The other two plans are the Agency plan, $149 paid monthly ($119 yearly), with 15 campaigns, 1,500 keyword rankings, and 30,000 site audit pages, and the Enterprise plan that costs $399 per month ($319 per year), and it includes more than 50 campaigns, more than 4,000 keyword rankings, and more than 100,000 site audit pages.
Raven Tools is another popular SEO reporting tool on the market. It’s a cloud-based SEO platform designed for a variety of users – freelancers, agencies dealing with digital marketing, as well as small and large scale businesses. With it, you can track keywords, do backlink research and competitors research, manage link building, and more.
SEO Keyword and Rank Tracking Capability
Raven Tools will provide you with daily, weekly and monthly rank tracking for individual SERPs like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, and Yandex.
You can base the rank tracking on the type of device used, language, zip code; you can also upload lists of keywords – like, for example, you can do a copy-paste of hundreds of keywords in rows, or type in one keyword and start with the keyword rankings tracking.
With this tool, you’ll also have access to past ranking data so you can compare it with current rank progress. Raven Tools allows you to easily visualize the marketing reports, and easily follow the comparison metrics with your competitors.
Whitelabel PDF reporting
Through the WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) Reports option, a reporting tool you have all the freedom to customize, you’ll be able to create PDF and HTML reports. You can use all the data integrated into the Raven Tools platform into your reports, and of course, here you have the option to whitelabel it.
Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics PPC Integration
Raven Tools gives you the chance to access data from more than 30 platforms, among them Google Adwords, Google Search Console, Google Ads, Bing Ads, Twitter and of course, Facebook Ads.
By using the intuitive reporting dashboard, you’ll be able to choose the metrics you want to see shown, and make custom reports with super-accurate analytics.
Raven Tools have consolidated the variety of tools they have on disposal into one so you don’t have to be bothered to go across platforms all the time.
The PPC marketing reports offer insight into the number of clicks as well as the cost per click and the overall performance of yours or your clients’ ads.
Report Scheduling Capability
In Raven Tools, you can do the report scheduling again through the WYSIWYG Reports tool. You can do this by first building the report, then setting the report frequency and choosing the date range. So, every day, week, month or quarter of a year, this tool will automatically make a new report, based on your set preferences. It will also be available for automatic email sending, HTML or PDF format to anyone who needs to see it.
Pricing
The costs for purchasing Raven Tools start from $109 per month paid monthly or $79 per month paid yearly – this is the very basic plan with 20 domains/campaigns, 4 users, and 15,000 position checks.
The other plans continue over with $199 ($139), $299 ($249), and $479 ($399) per month.
You can try all four plans for free with the 7-day free trial.
Supermetrics is a platform that offers a variety of professional tools for automatic PPC and SEO reporting, as well as web and social networks analytics. Used by more than 400 000 marketers throughout the world, it’s definitely a tool to consider having as your assistant in digital marketing campaigns.
It’s a good choice for startups, digital marketing agencies, eCommerce businesses and other types of companies that want to do their own digital marketing analytics.
SEO Keyword and Rank Tracking Capability
Supermetrics will give you rank tracking data from Google Search Console. You can use Google Sheets to build queries that are actually going to use Google Search Console data.
This way you can record accurate keyword rankings, for your campaign’s landing pages and raise your site’s organic traffic.
Whitelabel Dashboard and PDF Reporting
You will be able to whitelabel your reports through Google Sheets by replacing the Supermetrics logo standing initially on them.
You can export your PDF reports by using Windows Excel 2007 or a newer version.
Google Adwords PPC Integration
Supermetrics has made pulling Google Ads data easy and simple. With the use of segments, sorting, filters, as well as date ranges, you can make detailed and informative reports and get data from hundreds and thousands of Google Ads in one take.
You can use the two Google Ads reporting templates:
The In-Depth PPC Report for Google Ads;
The Paid Mixed Channel Report.
Google Analytics Integration and Facebook Analytics and PPC Integration
Supermetrics also integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics and Facebook Ads. You can use sorting and date ranges along with filters and segmenting for accurate reports and analysis. Like with Google Adwords, here you can also pull data from thousands of Google Analytics accounts in one take. You can also easily link your data with other sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Bing, and LinkedIn.
There are two Facebook Ads reporting templates you can use:
Facebook Ads Overview Template;
Facebook vs. Google Ads Reporting Template.
Report Scheduling Capability
Supermetrics offers the scheduling of reports options at specific intervals. You can easily do this by using the “Schedule refresh & emailing” feature in Google Sheets, and set up your own schedule for automatic queries and their regular updates.
Pricing
Supermetrics has different prices for different products. Supermetrics for Google Sheets starts from $99 per month.
Supermetrics for Data Studio starts from $39 per month.
Supermetrics for Excel starts from $99 per month.
Supermetrics for BigQuery starts from $190 per month.
Semrush
Semrush is a powerful SEO toolkit that has more than 20 tools up its sleeve. It will give you access to a huge keyword database (just remember 8.3 billion keywords in 118 countries around the globe) to SEO optimize your site and get organic traffic.
Semrush is a great toolkit for PR professionals, as well as SEO and PPC professionals and social media managers because it offers a variety of management tools for backlinking, on-page SEO analysis, rank tracking, as well as an SEO audit tool.
SEO Keyword and Rank Tracking Capability
This reporting tool allows you to monitor local, regional, and national positions of search engines for any keyword you can think of. You can do keyword research, track positions for keywords and discover local competitors, group desired keywords with the help of tags, as well as tag different kinds of devices.
Whitelabel Dashboard and PDF reporting
Semrush also allows you to white label the SEO reporting and analysis. With Semrush’s PPC data, you’ll be able to provide valuable analytical information to your clients without the need to go over your budget. This, in turn, will also help you maintain a high ROI.
Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics PPC Integration
Like any high quality SEO reporting tool, Semrush gives you all the tools you need to properly improve and optimize your Google Ads strategy. You can export your custom-made campaigns from the Google Ads and AdWords Editor and upload them directly into Semrush.
Semrush’s user interface allows you to analyze all the data from your website in one location. You can easily connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to Semrush and have everything in one place.
With the Social Media Tracker you can keep an eye on social media metrics necessary for a successful social media campaign on Facebook.
Report Scheduling Capability
Semrush also allows you to receive automated PDF reports straight in your email inbox daily, weekly, and monthly, any day you want!
Pricing
Semrush has three pricing plans:
Pro – 99.95$ per month
Guru – 199.95$ per month
Business – 399.95$ per month
Wrapping up
Finding the most effective and relevant SEO tools to perform analytical tasks and reporting can be intimidating, but it is always worth the effort when the right tools are available. Everything from keyword searches to social media optimization for campaigns requires specific tools geared toward accomplishing tasks effectively. Thanks to a wide range of analytical and reporting tools like the ones given here, SEO and analytics can be less time-consuming and more rewarding.
And that concludes our list of the best SEO reporting tools currently on the market. We made sure to carefully select the tools we’re really content with, ones that contain all the necessary features for a well-made digital marketing campaign. Cheers to your next successful online venture!
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
There is no doubt that ecommerce is booming! Statistics tell us that the Global ecommerce sales in 2019 exceeded $3.5 trillion, with an increase of 18% from the year before. It’s expected that ecommerce sales will nearly double by 2023.
Choosing which platform to build your online store on top of is an important choice and can often make or break an ecommerce business. The features of the platform, SEO-friendliness, easy of use and ability to integrate with various payment providers are really important features.
Too often important technology decisions like this come down to price with the assumption cheaper equals better but that’s definitely not the case here.
As an agency, we’re well versed in ecommerce having directly optimized 100s of stores of all sorts of platforms as well as built a 100+ ecommerce sites from scratch. The goal of this article is to highlight the pros and cons of the most popular ecommerce platforms on the market and help you make an informed decision as to which is the best choice for your business.
Shopify is probably the best solution for you….
This article is quite long and goes into a lot of detail comparing different features etc.
If you’re not sure which to choose from, Shopify is *probably* the best ecommerce platform to for you ESPECIALLY if you’re new to ecommerce or selling online.
It has everything you need out of the box, is super simple to use even for a non-technical person, has a HUGE app store so almost any functionality you can think of will be available via an app and the starting price is dirt cheap at $29/month. There’s also a free trial available (no credit card required) so you can try it out without committing any money!
Note that we’ve also included free platforms in this post as well BUT you’ll still need to pay for hosting, support and so forth so while those platforms technically are “free”, there are costs you’ll incur elsewhere.
Before we dive into the reviews, let’s briefly go over some essential features you need to look for in your platform of choice.
Shopping Cart Plugins and Add-ons
An online store without a shopping cart is, well, a not very efficient online store. Shopping carts simplify the payment process, allow online shoppers to add or remove more than one product at the same time, keep their products in one place, give you information on cart abandonment so you can send automated emails to remind your customers to complete their purchase, and has many more benefits that improve both the user experience and the functionality of your store.
Since there are so many options, the most important things to consider when choosing a shopping cart plugin and add-ons are:
an easy-to-use interface,
secure and well-established payment gateways,
and customizable options.
Choice of Templates and Themes
When it comes to templates and themes, most ecommerce platforms offer both free and premium (paid) options. While the free ones can be all that you need to set up your store, the premium options offer more diversity and design choices, so look for a platform that gives you enough of both.
You should look for templates and themes that are:
Mobile-friendly;
With simple check-out;
With aesthetically pleasing designs;
Offer a fast loading time;
Compatible with the ecommerce plugins you need.
Mobile-Friendliness
Given that 60% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, you need to choose a mobile-friendly platform where your customers will experience a safe purchase with just a few clicks.
Security
Your online store is a complex system with multiple components interacting with each other (the server, web apps, users, a network connection), and all these activities can make your website vulnerable to threats. That is why, when choosing an ecommerce platform, choose one with security features such as:
encrypted payment gateways;
SSL certificates;
shipping method extensions;
authentication protocols.
Customer Support
Customer support is another essential feature that you need from your ecommerce platform. There are a lot of elements in your online store that need to function properly so your customers have a great user experience and your online store runs smoothly. Considering that these platforms are not perfect and can be susceptible to external attacks, you should always consider the platform’s customer support before you commit. Ideally, the ecommerce platform should offer 24/7h customer support (via phone, live chat, or email, or a combination of these modes).
The Best Free Ecommerce Platforms in Detail
1. WooCommerce
Woocommerce is a free, simple, and powerful ecommerce platform that can be installed as a plugin on your WordPress site. It’s mostly used by small and medium-sized companies and it offers a variety of features and extensions that’ll help you run a professional ecommerce store. You can log in from one centralized account, where you can observe everything from one dashboard, and have full control over the management of your purchases, tickets, and subscriptions.
Since it’s targeted towards entrepreneurs with no coding experience, WooCommerce offers a simple and intuitive interface with flexible customization.
Your customers will have various payment options to choose from, from major credit cards to online credit processors such as WooCommerce Payment, Square, PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, and others. It has no setup charges and no monthly fees, however, you need to have a WordPress hosting, and if you want to add functionality to your online store, you’ll have to purchase additional extensions, premium themes, and extra plugins.
WooCommerce also charges for transactions. The rate is 2.9% = 30¢ per transaction for U.S issued cards, plus 1% for transactions for non-U.S issued cards.
Since it’s a free plug-in, this ecommerce platform does not have a dedicated customer support service, but it offers LiveChat via the free application, and has a robust community of developers that are keen to help.
WooCommerce is one of the best ecommerce platforms in 2020 that you can get for free, with a market share of 28.24%.
Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform targeted towards developers and small businesses. This online store builder is considered one of the best ecommerce platforms because it gives you the most freedom to set up your shop. However, you need to be experienced in coding or hire someone who is.
It’s highly optimizable and has integrated checkouts, payments, shipping modules, and PCI Compliant Payment Solutions, but then again, you are responsible for setting them up.
Unlike WooCommerce, Magento doesn’t offer a single solution to its users, instead, it offers two different versions suitable for different businesses. If you have your own hosting, Magento open-source is free and it’s intended for developers and small businesses. There is no direct support line, but if you are working on maintenance with a developer, then they should have your answers related to your question.
On the other hand, the Magento Commerce platform has a license fee, offers professional support, and is intended for larger organizations. Although the code base of these two versions is the same, Magento Commerce offers more built-in features, hosting and better support for its users.
Magento Open-Source supports a variety of payment gateways and it doesn’t charge transaction fees, but if you run a Magento online store, you‘re the one who will pay the transaction fees for the payment processors. Currently, Magento holds 3.4% of the market share worldwide, so it’s no wonder that it often makes its way into “best ecommerce platforms of 2020” lists.
Pros
Open-source with a lot of freedom;
Secure and supports a variety of payment options and online credit processors;
Supportive community;
SEO friendly;
Extended functionality via an app marketplace;
Integration with other 3rd party providers.
Cons
Requires coding skills;
Doesn’t offer hosting.
Best for: Entrepreneurs and developers with coding experience.
Pricing starts from: The open-source Magento is free to download, and the unmanaged hosting starts from $10 and go up to $250.
If you’re even slightly familiar with the best ecommerce platforms, you must have heard about Shopify. After all, it’s considered one of the best ecommerce platforms by many, so let’s see why this is.
Shopify is very easy to use. It has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and additional plugins that you can download from the Shopify App Store. You’ll get 9 free templates that you can use, but you can always pay for the premium templates which are quite versatile and easy to set up.
You’ll be able to print shipping labels and your customers will receive automatic tracking updates for their orders. Shopify also offers shipping discounts since it’s partnered with DHL, UPS, USPS, Canada Post, and Sendle.
When you set up your online store with this platform, you can choose between several different options for selling your products.
Online (via your online store);
In person (via Shopify’s POS app);
Directly on Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, and other channels;
Add a custom “Buy” button on any website.
Shopify offers 24/7 customer support and a safe and in-house payment processing platform that is integrated with most of the major credit card gateways. The transaction fees depend on the plan you choose, and you can try it out for 2 weeks completely free of charge before you make your final decision.
Shopify is one of the three most popular ecommerce platforms with a market share of approximately 11%
Pros
Sheer variety of useful features;
Good inventory system that helps you run your store smoothly;
Possibility to sell across multiple channels;
A lot of third-party apps which extend the functionality of the platform;
Printing shipping labels;
24/7 customer support (email, live chat, and phone).
Cons
Allows only two stores under one domain;
Doesn’t offer many free templates;
Transaction fees for using a third-party payment gateway.
Best for: Small, medium, large business.
Pricing starts from: the “Basic Shopify” plan starts from $29 per month, the more advanced “Shopify” plan starts from $79 per month, and the “Advanced Shopify” plan starts from $299 per month.
BigCommerce is another great and reliable store builder that made our list of the best ecommerce platforms in 2020. Similarly to Shopify, BigCommerce offers 12 free templates and a lot more reasonably priced and sometimes discounted premium templates.
However, unlike Shopify, BigCommerce offers an unlimited number of user (staff) accounts. So, if you have more than two people managing your online store, you’ll certainly appreciate this feature. BigCommerce has an easy-to-use interface, but it doesn’t automatically categorize products based on a name or a tag. This process can be a bit demanding since you have to manually assign the categories to your products.
One of the most praised features of BigCommerce is its built-in abandoned cart saver, which automatically sends a series of customizable emails to shoppers who don’t finish their checkout process. It’s so useful that BigCommerce claims it helps recover 15% of lost sales on average. This option comes with the “Plus”, “Pro”, and “Enterprise” plans.
BigCommerce also offers 24/7 customer support via chat, email, and phone.
BigCommerce supports most payment gateways, while the processing fees for debit and credit cards begin at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for all plans.
Pros
The platform allows you to add variations to individual products;
Built-in abandoned cart saver (not an option in the Standard plan);
Supports different payment gateways;
Allows you to connect to a POS software system of your choice;
Advanced analytics.
Cons
Limited amount of free templates;
Does not automatically categorize products based on a name or a tag;
Fewer apps than its competitors.
Best for: Small, medium, and large businesses.
Pricing starts from: The“Standard” plan starts from $29.95/mo, the “Plus” plan starts from $79.95/mo, the “Pro” plan starts from $299.95/mo, while the “Enterprise” plan is based on sales volumes.
If you’re looking for a user-friendly ecommerce platform with drag-and-drop features, look no further than Wix. It’s great for beginners and those with no coding knowledge, and you can experiment with an abundance of free templates that are broken down by best industry fits. If the free templates aren’t enough, you can always purchase the premium plans, some of which are quite reasonably priced.
There’s a theme for every niche, and once you find the one you like, you can easily customize it and make it your own. But if you like Wix and want to start selling products, you will have to buy one of the premium plans which include web hosting as well as a free domain for a year.
Although it might be perceived as basic, this ecommerce platform offers an extensive App Market with more than 250 apps that cater to different types of businesses and offer powerful solutions even for the more demanding store owners. This is one of the reasons why many consider Wix as one of the best ecommerce platforms on the market today.
Wix also offers unique customer support via the resourceful help center, the user-friendly chatbot, email, and phone.
Wix provides three payment options: credit cards, PayPal, and manual (cash or money transfer).
Pros
Easy to use with free templates;
A flexible website builder that allows you to move elements around;
Ability to add animation;
Artificial design intelligence;
Automatic backup of your website;
Extensive app market;
Free hosting for a year.
Cons
More expensive basic plan than its competitors;
Once you choose a template you can change its design but you can’t change the template.
Best for: Individual entrepreneurs, small, and medium-sized companies.
Pricing starts from: The “Basic Domain” plan is $4.50 per/mo, the “Combo” plan is $8.50 per/mo, the “Unlimited” plan is 12.50 per/mo, and the “VIP” plan is 24.50 per/mo.
Volusion is an easy-to-use ecommerce platform and a website builder with 11 free and 34 paid professionally-designed themes that you can easily customize. Unlike its competitors, you don’t need to purchase expensive add-ons through a separate web store to enrich your store because Volution has most of the features a store owner needs. This is exactly what makes this platform great for so many.
You can check the incoming orders on your mobile device via their app and send emails to consumers who didn’t finish their checkout process. This is not an automated process so you have to do it manually, which might be a bit frustrating, especially if you have a lot of unfinished purchases in your store.
The good thing is that if you encounter any problems, you can always contact their 24/7 customer support. You can do this via email, chat, or phone, or watch their instructional videos which you can find on their site.
Volusion supports more than 30 different payment processors, still, the only built-in ones are PayPal and Stripe. There are no hidden transaction fees with this ecommerce platform, while the credit card processing fees Volusion charges are similar to their competitors, 2.15% + $0.34 for US cards and 3.96% + $0.34 for non-US cards.
Pros
Easy to access from mobile devices;
A lot of free features;
Simple and intuitive design suitable for beginners;
Great knowledge-base/help center;
Lots of payment methods;
Great analytical tools;
Mobile app.
Cons
Expensive starting plan;
Product limits with cheaper plans.
Best for: Beginners, small, and medium-sized companies.
Pricing starts from: the “Personal Plan” starts from $29/mo; the “Professional” plan from $79/mo, and the “Business”’ plan starts from $299/mo.
Squarespace is the most used ecommerce platform in the world with a total market share of 17.69%. Due to its beautiful design and various capabilities, it’s currently considered one of the best ecommerce platforms, which is why we have it on our list.
You can start with any website template and customize it until you create your dream website that satisfies your needs.
Given the creative potential it holds, Squarespace is perfect for artists, designers, photographers, and everybody else who wants to create a unique edge for their store.
The interface is easy to use and it allows you to set up products, manage your catalogs, track orders, administer your customer base, and much more. You’ll get a web hosting and a domain, but if your domain is registered to a third-party provider, you can easily transfer it or connect it to Squarespace. When you do the transfer, you’ll be able to manage all your domain settings and billings from your Squarespace account.
With Squarespace, you can upload as many physical products as you want, and if you buy the advanced plans, you will be able to open the option for subscription selling. You’ll also get abandoned cart recovery, customizable discounts, banners, pop-ups, and other features with promotional value.
Squarespace has a 24/7 customer service, although it’s mainly email-based. The live chat is available only from Monday until Thursday.
Squarespace is available with monthly and annual payments. The yearly plans come with a free domain for a year. The transaction fees apply only to the Business plan (3%) and the credit card processors fees apply as usual.
No support for third-party apps, plugins, and extensions;
Lacks phone support.
Best for: Beginners, artists, small, medium-sized, and big companies.
Pricing starts from: the “Personal” plan is $12/mo, the “Business” plan is $18/mo, the “Commerce Basic” plan is $26/mo, and the “Commerce Advanced” plan is $40/mo.
ThriveCart is a pilot shopping cart software with a one-time lifetime fee of $495. It’s an easy-to-use software that creates bumps to checkout pages, sends automated emails to consumers who have abandoned their shopping carts, creates an affiliate program for your products, split-tests your cart, and entices your customers to buy using countdown timers.
ThriveCart is also conveniently integrated with most email software, payment processors, webinars, and membership platforms.
This pilot software only gives you 4 optional templates. And while you can customize the content of the page, you can’t change the overall appearance of the template. Even though some don’t find them very stylish, they all give you different but functional checkout experiences, such as one-step checkout, two-step checkout, embeddable checkout, and pop up checkouts.
ThriveCart does automatic tax collection on sales, and unlike other shopping carts, it offers integration with Zapier. Because of its unique capabilities, ThriveCart is also considered one of the best ecommerce platforms for 2020.
ThriveCart offers customer support via a ticketing system that works from Monday to Friday, 9 am to 6 pm, and their average replay is within 24h.
Pros
One-time lifetime fee;
Easy to use;
Intuitive affiliate management system;
1-Click upsells and bump offers;
Affiliate programs;
Integration with Zapier.
Cons
Lack of templates;
No advanced drag-and-drop customization available;
No advanced support to recover failed payments.
Best for: Beginners, small, medium-sized, and big companies.
Ecwid is best known as an ecommerce plugin that lets you add a store to an existing selling website that gets a fair amount of traffic. But Ecwid can also be a standard ecommerce platform where you can set up an online shop and organize your products in catalogs, add photos, define shipping rates, accept credit card payments, and more. However, this option, known as “Instant Sights”, is a very basic, one-page functionality that sellers who still haven’t finished developing their full site usually use.
The plugin is very suitable for small and medium-sized businesses that want to add an online store option to reach more customers. It can be added as a widget and is easily installed as a plugin.
Because of its multifunctionality, Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, eBay, Facebook, and other platforms include Ecwid in their app stores. This ecommerce platform also provides the point-of-sale (POS) option, which allows you to sell even in physical locations.
Since it doesn’t work as a regular store builder, Ecwid comes with a design that’s integrated with your website. While you can customize some options, others are built-in and might not be suited to your preferences.
This ecommerce plugin also comes with a number of management tools that help you run your store smoothly (inventory tracking, promotion, and discounts, shipping options, abandoned cart saver, etc).
In addition to the many helpful resources found on their website, Ecwid also offers a live chat and email support system, while the Business and Unlimited plans include phone support as well.
Ecwid doesn’t charge transaction fees but offers fewer payment options than its competitors.
Pros
Easy way to turn your website into an online store;
Beginner-friendly;
Extensive tools for selling and managing sales across multiple stores;
POS functionality;
Free plan;
The plugin is available for Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, eBay, Facebook;
The “Instant Sites” option is great for those who want to set up a store quickly.
Cons
limited design;
A limited number of apps;
Small-scale tools.
Best for: Beginners, small, and medium-sized companies.
Pricing starts from: the “Venture” plan is $15/mo, the “Business” plan is $35/mo, and the “Unlimited” plan is $99/mo.
If your customers are getting tired of going through different landing pages, automated email, and inflated ecommerce stores, Samcart is an ecommerce platform that offers one simple page to turn your visitors into buyers. It’s a fully-fledged shopping cart software equipped with tools that will help you upgrade your business.
Samcart offers templates with a drag-and-drop content builder with which you can create beautiful 1-click pages. This web-based checkout platform, besides the optimized checkout templates, also offers the option to upsell, order bumps, and payment plans designed to engage your subscribers and increase your profits.
You get 18 nicely designed templates and the number keeps on growing. Once you choose a template, you can customize the header, footer, colors, buttons, add bullet points to describe the product, and customize it in whichever way you want. The templates are very functional for mobile devices which guarantees a user-friendly shopping on mobile devices.
This ecommerce platform also offers a cross-selling strategy, combining the main product with other useful auxiliary products. If you have a great percentage of abandonment rate, then this ecommerce solution will give you the option to run A/B and live split testing so you can experiment with the templates and see which one is most suitable for your needs.
Using Samcart will also protect you from subscribers with expired credit cards and declined payments, because if such a case occurs, Samcart will send an email to the customer to update their payment data. If the customer fails to do it, the platform will automatically cancel the subscription.
Samcart can be integrated with your favorite tools like Zapier, ActiveCampaign, Wishlist, Mailchimp, and many more.
They offer a 14-day free trial with a money-back guarantee and an email or chat support that works from 9 am – 5 pm during weekdays.
Pros:
Simple and high-converting checkout pages;
Advanced sales funnel feature (bump offers and upsells);
Abandoned checkouts feature;
Integration with Zapier and other tools.
Cons:
Some steps can get tedious when adding products and services;
Support only via email and chat on weekdays (9 am – 5 pm).
Best for: Beginners, small, and medium-sized companies.
Pricing starts from: The “Basic” plan is $19/mo, the “Pro” plan is $99/mo, and the “Premium” plan is $199/mo.
We hope this guide will help you choose the best ecommerce platform for your needs. As you can see, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the “What’s the best ecommerce platform in 2020” question. The answer depends on what you want to accomplish with your online store. Every ecommerce platform offers something that its competitors don’t, and each is more suitable for certain types of businesses, so go over our reviews carefully and choose the right option for your store.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing services, built with small businesses in mind. But like every service, Mailchimp is not perfect and has its limitations. Especially after the company changed its pricing plans and removed its direct integration with Shopify, more and more people are looking for Mailchimp alternatives.
If you’re one of those people and don’t want to dig through the plethora of email marketing services to find the best solution for you, we’re glad you’ve made your way here. We created a list of fantastic Mailchimp alternatives that are just as good, if not better, especially for businesses that want to grow.
But before we dive in, let’s see what you should have in mind when choosing a Mailchimp alternative.
Table of Contents
What Makes (For) a Good Mailchimp Alternative?
Mobile-friendly templates and design options
Adequately designed emails tell a lot about the quality of your service. Quality content matters, but the design of your emails is just as important. So, when choosing an email marketing service, make sure that it offers you a variety of beautifully designed mobile-friendly templates that are suitable for your industry. If there are customizable templates, even better.
Integration with third-party applications
The best Mailchimp alternatives should be able to align with your customer relationship management software (CRM) but also with your ecommerce platform, social media, and web analytics. This will allow you to access the necessary data to create your marketing campaigns and better target your customers and potential customers.
Analytics and reports
A successful marketing campaign is impossible to create without good analytical reports with lots of variables, and this is exactly what the best Mailchimp alternatives should have. You should be able to access some key metrics like how many emails are actually opened as opposed to deleted, what part of your audience actually engages with your brand, whether they read your emails on their computer and laptops or on their mobile devices, and so on.
Automation
One of the essential features that the best email marketing solutions have is automation. Building strong relationships and engaging with your customers is everything, and this is exactly what automation can help you with. From sending promotional coupons and surveys to creating fully-automated email campaigns, automation can get you new leads as well as help you re-engage a lost lead.
Segmentation and personalization
Not all emails should have the same message because not all customers buy the same products or have the same buying behavior. Personalized emails are much more effective than generic emails, so look for an email marketing service that’s able to segment your audience based on criteria such as demographics, click-through rate, geolocation, and so on, so you can effectively target the right people.
ConvertKit is an easy to use mailing solution that offers subscription management, segmentation, form building, email editor, and plenty of other features that will help you grow your website. Bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers will especially find it useful, so if you’re an online creator, you should definitely consider it.
Key Features:
Creating beautiful emails can be done quickly and effortlessly with ConvertKit’s email editor. You’ll be able to format the text in any way you want, add images, clickable CTA buttons, signatures, use some of their templates, create broadcasts, create a newsletter sequence, and more!
Subscriber management is an analytical tool that keeps track of the most important subscriber metrics. Unlike most Mailchimp alternatives that use lists to manage subscriptions, ConvertKit uses email tags and gives you the option to choose as many tags as you like.
The email segmentation option allows you to deliver personalized content to your audience. You can split your audience into different groups according to factors like their subscription date, location, purchase behavior, and so on, and send them content they’d most likely enjoy reading.
Landing pages and subscription forms are two extremely useful features. In 2019, ConvertKit added 14 new landing page templates and 2 new forms that are more attention-grabbing and unique, and best of all – customizable.
ConvertKit also allows you to create complex autoresponders in an easy manner. You can create a sequence of automated emails that, based on certain triggers, will be automatically sent to your subscribers.
Pricing:
Concerning pricing, you can choose between two plans. The “Free” plan is…well, free, and suitable for websites with less than 1.000 subscribers. The second plan is the “Complete” plan that manages more than 1.000 subscribers for $29/mo and gives you the full potential of this email marketing tool.
Another great Mailchimp alternative is Sendinblue. This email marketing solution can help you sell more, engage your subscribers, and grow your business. It’s a great choice for experienced entrepreneurs who either don’t have the resources or don’t want to create complex marketing campaigns.
Instead, Sendinblue provides you with tools that allow you to tailor personalized marketing campaigns based on your customers’ behavior. And it definitely deserves its place on our Mailchimp alternatives list.
Key Features:
Sendinblue’s intuitive email editor allows you to customize your newsletters through the HTML builder. You can choose between the several customizable templates and change the colors of the links, add captions to images, edit borders, colors, and fonts.
The dynamic content viewer feature showcases blocks of content to users depending on their demographic data or past behavior. This option allows you to easily create multiple customizable emails to target different groups of customers at the same time.
Automated emails. You can use this feature to grow your business and strengthen the relationship with your customers by welcoming new subscribers to your community, reminding your customers to complete their purchase, even congratulating their birthdays.
If you want to tailor content for specific users based on demographic data, page views, clicks on products, past purchase behavior, and so on, you’ll appreciate the segmentation option.
When it comes to analytics, Sendinblue does track sends, bounces, opens, and clicks according to location. But this is all the data you’re gonna get.
Pricing:
Sendinblue has 5 plans ranging from $25 to $66/mo. As most Mailchimp alternatives, this one also offers a free but limited plan.
Pros:
Free plan;
Intuitive and customizable interface easy to set up and configure;
This cloud software platform gives you the email marketing and sales automation tools you need to create a wonderful customer experience. Being one of the best Mailchimp alternatives, ActiveCampaign provides you with a series of useful features that are suitable for B2B and B2C marketers as well as entrepreneurs with experience in email marketing due to its advanced functionalities. If you are a beginner in email marketing, then the other options on this list might be better.
ActiveCampaign is not just an email marketing tool. If you choose their priciest plan, you’ll also get a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Key Features:
You can create 6 different marketing campaigns: standard campaign, automated campaign, auto-responder campaign, split testing campaign, RSS triggered campaign, and date-based campaign.
There are several templates you can choose from, created by ActiveCampaign’s designers, but you can always create your own custom template in the template library.
The segmentation feature is what’ll bring more personalization into your marketing. The great thing about ActiveCampaign is that you have access to the segmentation builder anywhere on the platform, as opposed to other platforms where it can be accessed in one place only.
The dynamic content feature allows you to be very specific when targeting your customers and presenting them content that changes according to their consumer behavior, preferences, and interests.
Depending on the plan you choose, you could also use the contact management features such as searching, deleting, merging, updating, and managing your contacts, and collecting user data.
ActiveCampaign’s 6 pre-build automation templates are adapted to detect cart abandonment, engagement, upselling, and product reviews.
Pricing:
The prices range from $15 for the “Lite” plan, $70 for the “Plus” plan, $159 for the “Professional” plan, and $279 for the “Enterprise” plan. ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan.
Pros:
Powerful automation;
Dynamic personalization;
Good reports in areas such as click-maps, geo-tracking, and page visits;
If you are coming from a different platform, you can migrate to ActiveCampaign for free;
Integration with third-party apps and built-in CRM;
Bento is an all-in-one marketing platform that provides high-grade, enterprise tooling for half the cost of most of the email marketing platforms on this list. As one of the best Mailchimp alternatives, Bento is designed to work very well with Shopify, WooCommerce, Ruby on Rails, and other ecommerce platforms via their web snippet, which is super-easy to install, and Zapier.
So, what makes Bento better than Mailchimp?
Well, Bento is not your regular email marketing tool. Apart from doing Mailchimp’s job, which is practically email marketing, Bento is also a CRM tool that covers your whole customer experience from beginning to end. It ensures that your customers have a great experience while on your site, and sends you data that allows you to track that experience. You get automation, tracking, messaging, live chat, and reporting. And on top of all that, your site will become faster because you won’t have to install any live chat, email marketing, or pop-up tools.
No wonder Bento made it on our best Mailchimp alternatives list.
Key Features:
Plug-in installation. This plugin takes a minute to install. You can either install it by copy-pasting the script on your preferred platform, or if you are using Shopify or Ruby on Rails, you’ll have a 1-click option on the menu. When you install Bento, you will immediately see all the possibilities it brings to the table.
Bento offers real-time event tracking that will help you better understand the behavior of your customers and the intent behind their every action.
The detailed user and usage analytics are very helpful for creating segments and delivering personalized and refined marketing content.
You’ll get to automate your SMS, email, and chat messaging. Even creating your customer database is automated – all you need to do is provide your customers’ emails and Bento will add detailed information to their profiles.
Before you start your campaigns, Bento offers you the option of A/B testing to see which content performs better.
Bento gives you three different ways to communicate with your customers: email, SMS, and live chat.
All plans come with unlimited sites and team members. With the “Base” plan, which costs $15/mo, you will be able to track up to 3,000 contacts, and after you go over the 3,000 contacts limit, you will be charged on a per-contact basis ($0.005 per contact per month). If you want to add additional functionalities to your account and unlock the full potential this platform offers, it will cost you an additional charge to your monthly invoice i.e 10,000 contacts at $0.01 on your $0.005 Base Plan + $0.005 Email Marketing Plan.
Klaviyo is another email marketing solution that pops-up as one of the best Mailchimp alternatives. Most of the ecommerce marketing software offers you a choice between effective or fast-moving, but Klaviyo combines these two and provides you with powerful functionality without sacrificing the time it takes some other platforms to impact even your non-engaged customers. This marketing solution can be integrated with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and other ecommerce platforms.
Features:
Klaviyo offers a drag-and-drop email composer that comes with pre-built email templates. Even if you don’t like the designs, the easy-to-use drag-and-drop email composer lets you create your custom email with ease.
Integration with Shopify. Klaviyo works best with Shopify because of its deep integration, meaning that Klaviyo can analyze much of the data that your Shopify account has generated. This data can be used for advanced and in-depth automation and targeting.
With the segmentation feature, you can target your consumers based on their purchases, spending habits, the products/services they’ve seen on your website, and so on.
Klaviyo can create segments automatically, so you don’t have to waste time manually assembling lists.
With Klaviyo’s analytical tool, you can measure how much revenue you’ve generated from specific marketing campaigns and promotions.
With the pre-built autoresponders, you can target abandoned carts and follow up on post-purchases to enlarge your email flow and engage your customers even more.
Klaviyo offers email and live-chat support. But the live-chat support is available from Monday to Friday between 9 am and 5 pm.
Pricing:
Klaviyo includes a free account option for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, however, as soon as you reach this limit, Klaviyo will increase the pricing from $20/mo for 300 subscribers to $1.700/mo for 150,000 subscribers.
Pros:
Simple email builder;
Flexible ecommerce platform integration;
Great analytical capabilities and reports;
Dynamic automation and flows;
Segmentation based on a number of dynamic properties;
AWeber is one of the better Mailchimp alternatives worth considering. This email marketing solution is best known for how easy it is to use, as well as for its valuable features suitable for smaller and medium-sized companies. You can create mailing lists, design newsletters, automate your emails, and receive detailed statistics about your email marketing campaigns, among other things.
Key Features:
You can easily manage your subscribers via their automation features, but know that you should create your mailing list manually. As you continue with the input of contacts, AWeber will also provide you with auto-suggestive options for organizing your mailing list, such as tags, past behavior, campaigns, etc.
When you collect your subscribers’ contact details and create your mailing list, AWeber will give you all the search options and filters that will help you customize your campaigns.
You can send your subscribers automated follow up messages, also referred to as autoresponders, that you can schedule at any time you want. The former is a great option for welcoming new subscribers or thanking them for making a purchase, while the latter is perfect for informing them about upcoming events, special deals and discounts, and so on.
You can create your own email template using the HTML builder, as well as pre-made templates with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor so you can create customizable content.
Creating an automated campaign with AWeber is easy. You can do it by selecting the tags you’ve created for your customers and just drag-and-drop the contacts to your campaign. Based on the links they click on and the emails they open, you’ll be able to create automated sequences.
Although it provides fewer options then its competitors, the Sign-up form AWeber offers is very functional.
Analytics. AWeber collects information from your subscribers and stores it under the Reports tab. AWeber also gives you a good visual representation of your performance data and enables you to track the performance of your individual campaigns.
Besides the metrics such as opens and clicks, AWeber provides you with more robust tracking metrics such as conversations, revenue over time, sales in a specific period, etc.
Pricing:
AWeber doesn’t offer a free trial and the pricing ranges from $19 per month, $49 per quarter, and $194 per year.
Campaign Monitor is another great email marketing platform that made the best Mailchimp alternatives list. This email management solution offers a very solid range of features, and when you take into account its robust capabilities, it’s no wonder that this email marketing solution is used by inexperienced and experienced marketers alike. Campaign Monitor has a well-organized but not very aesthetically-pleasing user interface. It might not be up to par with its competitors in this regard, but it offers usability that goes beyond aesthetics. Let’s go through the features and see what all the fuss is about.
Key Features:
The drag-and-drop email editor is very useful – you get to add elements like CTA buttons and images to your emails. You also get email templates suitable for a variety of purposes like product launches, feedback, sales, welcoming emails – you can use them all.
You can preview and test your email campaigns to ensure their success.
Time scheduling your emails is another available option, but it’s limited to the more expensive plans.
When it comes to subscriber management, Campaign Monitor allows you to import your contacts from other email marketing solutions and update your subscribers’ information, get their historical records and data regarding their interaction with your emails, delete a subscriber, and more.
With the sign-up forms your subscribers can sign you to your newsletter. You can either use their pre-made designs or create one yourself. You can also add subscribers from one sign-up form to multiple lists.
Creating autoresponders, often referred to as triggered or automated emails, is another thing you can do so that your subscribers receive an email every time they do a certain action (that you set yourself) like subscribing to a newsletter, abandoning their cart, etc.
Campaign Monitor also gives you the option to design smart transaction emails which your customers will get after purchasing a product or a service, as a way to thank them and remind them that the product is on its way.
Pricing:
Campaign Monitor comes with three plans. The “Basic” plan is $9/mo, the “Unlimited” plan is $29/mo, and the “Premier” plan is $149/mo.
Mautic is an open-source marketing automation software that anyone can use for free. You can create landing pages, create autoresponders for unique customer experience, segment your audience, and track your website visitors and marketing activities, among other things. Since it’s an open-source email marketing solution, Mautic is most suitable for tech-savvy companies that don’t want to spend a lot and marketing solutions and marketers with coding and email marketing experience.
Features:
Mautic is self-hosted, with a strong supportive community and regular updates. The updates are very important since users report for occasional bugs. However, compared to the pricey alternatives, Mautic provides functionality that is essential for email marketing and it does that without a licensing fee.
Mautic has an appealing choice of templates that are customizable and easy to use.
You have full control over your data and don’t have to worry about breach of privacy.
You get a customizable, intuitive, and easy-to-use contact timeline that allows you to better understand each click, subscriber, product purchase, email open.
Mautic offers static and dynamic segmentation. The static segmentation is not filter based and adding contacts to the different segments must be done manually. The dynamic segmentation is automatic and based on the filters applied to the segment.
With the fluid and easy to use drag-and-drop campaign builder you can visualize your marketing plans and create the email templates you want.
Mautic is the only open-source solution that supports automation. Their automation tool is straightened with flexible contact management, making your campaign workflow very productive.
This Mailchimp alternative also gives you dynamic content features, which are very useful for personalizing your subscribers’ landing page experience.
Pricing:
Mautic is open-source so it’s free to use.
Pros:
Free and open-source;
Simple and customizable templates;
Drag-and-drop campaign builder;
Advanced segmentation options;
Productive automation feature and flexible contact management;
Dynamic content features.
Cons:
Absurdly, the negative sides of Mautic are closely related to their positive sides. For instance, maybe you will have full control over your data, but the big databases with larger lists will demand bigger storage capacities.
Mautic demands developer skills, and if you don’t have these skills they can provide you with experienced developers who will work on your email marketing for a price that might be just a bit cheaper than the paid versions.
The users of Mautic sometimes report for occasional bugs.
Malerlite provides you with all the latest marketing features that help you grow your subscriber base. This software that made our Mailchimp alternatives list has well-organized navigation that helps you make the most out of the features it offers. You can create 4 types of quick and personalized email campaigns, including regular campaigns, A/B split campaigns, auto resend campaigns, and RSS campaigns. It’s intended for beginners who want to dive deep into an email marketing solution such as this one.
Key Features:
You can create campaigns and build and edit beautiful newsletters with the practical drag-and-drop editor. There are different types of blocks divided into separate categories that enable you to add surveys to your emails, as well as CTA buttons, all kinds of links, social media buttons, images, signatures, and many more elements
Even though the free plan doesn’t include free templates, the vast choice of templates offered by the paid plan features beautiful designs and excellent functionality.
You can do advanced segmentation and target different subscribers based on the criteria you set. You can segment your audience based on their interests and purchase behavior, demographics, email engagement, and more, or you can add several conditions at once.
Mailerlite sends you email newsletter reports so you can track your campaigns and your subscribers’ activity with metrics such as email activity, bounces, unsubscribe count, and spam complaints, among others.
Mailerlite offers an optimizable and SEO friendly landing page and has great functionality for optimizing pop-ups and forms that will allow you to enrich your email lists.
There are several pop-up templates that can be used for newsletters, sign-ups, discounts, and other customizable content.
Mailerlite’s automation features enable you to set up emails that will be sent after your subscribers take a certain action, like signing up for your newsletter or abandoning their cart. The automation features can also be used to add customers to segments and guide them during their purchasing journey.
Pricing:
Mailerlite offers a free plan and several paid plans. Depending on your number of subscribers, Mailerlite plans range from $10 to $50.
Drip is an ecommerce customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Once you get your store plugged into Drip, you will be able to connect with even more marketing channels (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce) to gather data in order to create a better customer experience. Drip has the capacity to hold a lot of data because it’s designed to let businesses see what their customers are interested in buying, what items they click on, how better to engage with them, etc. Based on this data, Drip allows businesses to get in touch with their customers on a more personal level through intelligent marketing automation. No wonder it made our Mailchimp alternatives list.
Key Features:
Drip has segmentation capabilities that are impressive and have the capacity to keep tabs on all your customers. Drip also allows you to label each customer’s action with a number of tags based on events, locations, dates, views, purchases, and other niche tags. This segmentation can later be used to appropriately target your audience with personalized and relevant campaigns.
The lead scoring option keeps track of your customers’ behavior and it deduces or adds points to their score based on their actions. Based on their behavior and actions, you can rank your customers and figure out who your best leads are.
With Drip’s email marketing automation feature, you’ll never have to manually send batches of emails ever again. Simply choose the triggers, and the software will get the job done with the autoresponders option.
This ecommerce CRM software has an intuitive and easy to navigate dashboard that won’t slow you down when you want to reach out to abandoned cart emails or create personalized email campaigns.
Support. Drip has a large community of users and a lot of helpful resources in case you get stuck.
Pricing:
Drip offers a free version for websites with up to 100 contacts, and after that, the pricing goes from $49/mo for 2.500 subscribers, $99/mo for 5.000 subscribers, etc.
If you have a growing number of subscribers and your budget doesn’t allow for a costly email marketing service, you’ll love Sendy. Sendy is a self-hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via the Amazon Simple Email Service (SE). This is one of the best Mailchimp alternatives because you can send an authenticated bulk email with excellent deliverability at a low price.
Key Features:
Sendy is a self-hosted application that runs on your web server and needs to be downloaded and installed. The installation is easy and can be done in several steps. Since this Mailchimp alternative is hosted on your server, there are no monthly fees, you just pay for it once, and emails are sent via Amazon SES that charges $1 per 10.000 emails.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is the most notable Sendy feature. This is a cloud-based email sending service designed for marketers and developers who want to send notifications and transaction emails to their subscriber base. This service is reliable and cost-effective for businesses of all sizes that use email to keep in touch with their customers.
Sendy also provides you with analytical tools that give you visually pleasing reports based on your email campaigns’ results. You’ll get charts and data on all opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, and countries.
The segmentation options allow you to create segmented lists of subscribers inside your email list based on different criteria.
With the autoresponders feature, you will be able to set up a series of emails and start campaigns at the time interval you set.
You can easily manage your email list and subscribers. You can import new subscribers, delete subscribers, create custom fields, create a custom subscribe or unsubscribe confirmation page, create thank you emails, and much more.
Third-party integration. Sandy can be integrated with any third-party developers like WordPress, Magento, and Zapier.
Pricing:
Concerning pricing, Sandy can be yours for a one-time payment of $59.
Moosend is another email marketing platform that won’t break your bank but it’s good enough to be on our best Mailchimp alternatives list. This solution has intelligent marketing automation and website tracking that can increase your productivity and quickly enlarge your revenue. Moosend provides you with easily manageable email campaigns and a responsive newsletter that will engage your subscribers base more than ever. You’ll get valuable features, excellent marketing automation, and an award-winning user interface.
Key Features:
Moosend offers free, mobile-ready newsletter templates that you can customize in any way you want. The templates provide a library of stock images and have integrated proofreading tools.
Moosend also has a flexible email builder that allows you to create the content in any way you find suitable.
You can manage your email lists, build personalized emails, and manage the email deliverability.
Moonsend’s automation features allow you to create trigger-based emails to your subscribers to turn subscribers into customers, improve your customer retention rates, create more personalized content, and more.
With the analytical reports, you can monitor your user’s behavior and track your marketing campaigns in real-time.
This platform also offers A/B testing to ensure the success of your campaigns.
The cart abandonment feature delivers messages when a buyer leaves your online store without completing the purchasing procedure.
Moosend automatically recommends products to your customers based on their viewing or purchase history.
Pricing:
This Mailchimp alternative offers three distinct types of plans. A “free” plan, with restricted features, a “Pro” plan for $10/mo, and an “Enterprise” plan which is a custom plan.
Pros:
Friendly interface;
Nice templates suitable for mobile devices;
An integrated proofreader;
Flexible design, segmentation, and customer support;
Great automation and cart abandonment feature;
A/B testing;
Affordable.
Cons:
Need to pay extra for landing pages;
Absence of integration with Saas.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
In the past few years especially, online courses have become a very popular solution for people to learn new skills without breaking the bank. Learning management systems, including WordPress LMS plugins, allow educational institutions, corporations, as well as individuals to create, document, track, report, automate, and deliver educational, training, learning, and development courses and programs.
The best WordPress LMS plugins are suitable for schools, universities, non-profit organizations, individual educators, as well as companies that want to offer training or onboarding programs to their employees, or educate their customers on how to use their services or gain further knowledge about their products.
And being one of the best platforms for creating and selling courses online, WordPress offers some amazing LMS plugins that include some very valuable features.
But what are the best WordPress LMS plugins to create and sell courses online nowadays?
We’ll go over the 7 best LMS plugins for WordPress, but first, let’s see what key features you need to look out for in your LMS plugin of choice.
What to Look for in the Best WordPress LMS Plugins
By exploring the features the plugins we’re about to review offer, you will be able to notice the full potential of the LMS plugin that catches your eye. Not all features will be necessary for what you want to accomplish though, so here are some key features the LMS plugin of your choice should offer:
Solid Course Page Builder
Choose a plugin with an intuitive page builder, preferably with a drag-and-drop interface, that’s easy to use and will allow you to upload different file types (PDFs, videos, documents, audio files, and other content), use a premade template, and structure the course however you want.
Course Progress Information
This feature will enable your students/trainees/employees to follow their progress and have an overview of their productivity.
Content drip
With content dripping, you will be able to adequately reveal your teaching materials as the course progresses.
BuddyPress and bbPress Integration
These plugins are necessary for creating forums and intimate social networks that will serve as tools for improving the communication between the participants and teachers.
Payment Gateway Support
Choose an LMS that supports most payment getaways, given that the more options you offer, the easier it would be for your course participants to pay for their course.
Automated emails
This is another important feature that can be used to notify students about completing an assignment, changes in the courses, various offers and reminders, etc.
Badges and certificates
If you plan to incorporate a rewarding system into your course and give participants badges and certificates after a completed course, this feature is a must.
The Best WordPress LMS Plugins in 2020
Now let’s go over the 6 best WordPress LMS plugins and outline their most important characteristics and features, so you can make an informed decision and choose the best LMS plugin to create and sell courses online.
LearnDash is one of the most trusted WordPress LMS plugins and a number one choice of Fortune 500 companies for creating and selling courses online, including major universities, training organizations, and accomplished entrepreneurs. Developers and designers also continually choose LearnDash as the primary LMS plugin for their clients. Let’s go over some of its most interesting features.
Key Features
Powerful Course Builder. The drag-and-drop course builder allows you to easily create multilayered courses or even re-use content for different courses by renaming the labels from “Lessons” to “Modules” and spin-up the courses.
Break-up Courses Into Lessons, and Lessons into Topics. Customize your course to your heart’s content. On top of creating courses and lessons, you can also create lesson topics for each lesson you offer which are 100% optional.
Create Customizable Quizzes. Customize your quizzes with a single answer option, multiple choices, sorting, matching, fill in the blank, free text, essay questions, and more options. You can also enforce quiz timers, use question banks, and include any type of media in the questions and answers.
Drip-Feed Content. LearnDash enables you to either deliver all your lessons at once or choose the drip-feed feature and schedule the lessons at a specific time with a specific amount of material, to have better control over the tempo of the class. LearnDash allows two options for scheduling, the first one being “X Days After Enrollment” and the second “Specific date”. Choosing either of these options will drop the content automatically to your participants and notify them about the availability of the material.
Forums. Forums encourage both participants and teachers to engage in a dynamic conversation about the course. You can limit participation, add and exclude people from the forum, and even create private or public course specific forums.
Gradebook. With the gradebook option at LearnDash, you can automatically create a custom grading scale, sync the quizzes and assignment grades, manually grade the submitted assignments, have a grade weighted, and issue learner report cards.
Certificates and Badges. You can customize certificates and badges and add the participant’s name, the course’s name, date stamps, quiz scores, average score, and any other element that you’d like.
Plus Features
Focus Mode. This unique feature among LMSs creates an environment where course participants can eliminate distractions and focus on the course by removing the main navigation, sidebars, and footers from the screen, among other elements. The feature also allows the course creator to add their own logo and brand colors.
Course Points. This feature allows you to add points for completed courses to each participant so they can unlock new courses based on the points they’ve earned.
What Makes LearnDash a Great WordPress LMS Plugin?
You can use LearnDash to create and sell courses online whether you have coding experience or not, thanks to the user-friendly interface that you can master even if this is your first time using an LMS. As you can see, there are plenty of valuable features that’ll help you create the course just as you’ve envisioned it. Furthermore, since LearnDash is a self-hosted LMS, you will be able to have full control over your content and website architecture.
Monetization Options
LearnDash allows you to set course prices and collect money through PayPal, Stripe, or 2Chekout. You can also set LearnDash to maximize your revenue through recurring payments and subscriptions and ensure that participants maintain their course access only if they make their monthly payments. Furthermore, LearnDash supports integration with WordPress’ shopping cart.
Pricing
This LMS plugin offers three pricing options. The “Basic” plan costs $159 per year, the “Plus” plan is $189, and the “Pro” plan $329. The plugin doesn’t offer a free version but has a 30 days money-back guarantee option.
LifterLMS is one of the most flexible WordPress LMS training websites. This is an affordable all-in-one LMS system to start, run, and grow your business while having full control over your customizable courses and membership websites.
LifterLMS is the number one choice for entrepreneurs, developers, designers, and IT professionals, even beginners who want to build beautiful and high-value online courses and membership sites. People who have outgrown a hosted platform and look for more powerful control over their course and better customer support also tend to migrate to this solution.
Key Features:
Drag and Drop Course Builder. The easy to use course builder enables you to easily create and manage the structure and outline of your courses by simply dragging and dropping elements into the course.
Free Plug-ins. Besides the add-on for payment gateways, all other add-ons for LifterLMS are free.
Multimedia Lessons. Besides text, you can embed various multimedia files into your lessons like video, audio, images, etc.
Quizzes. You can create or customize dynamic multimedia quizzes to reinforce learning or test your course participants’ knowledge.
Drip Content. LifterLMS allows you to have full control over your content, protect your students’ focus and future revenue by making lessons available either at a specific date or X days after their enrollment or course start date.
Payment gateways and marketing. With LifterLMS you get a variety of marketing and money-making tools for collecting payments, like multiple payment getaways, WooCommerce integration, coupons, etc.
Student Dashboard. This feature will help your students track their activity and progress, like their grades, memberships, certificates, etc.
Multi Instructor. If you teach in teams, this feature will allow you to create multi instructors and even assign multiple instructors to a specific course.
Download Lessons. Your students will have the opportunity to download worksheets, ebooks, PDFs, audio, and other files from your course for offline learning.
What Makes LifterLMS a Great Learning Management System?
With LifterLMS’ flexible drag-and-drop course builder, you can create beautiful online courses or advanced membership-based multi-instructional training. You can also sell your courses, engage with every participant, and drip content at a specific date.
The core plugin is free and enables you to start creating your online courses immediately, however, the moment you want to do something extra (take payments, offer certificates, etc.) you will have to buy some of the upgraded packages. Keep in mind that the premium plans offer strong support with coaching and webinars that will help you set up your courses as a professional. Lifter is a top-class WordPress LMS plugin that delivers, which is why we highly recommend it.
Monetization Options
LifterLMS gives you several options for monetization so you can build a strong income-generating teaching business or a membership site. You can own your platform and revenue with simple conversation-optimized credit card payments. You can change your courses or memberships with one-time pricing, adjust your account for recurring payments, and create payment plans. LifterLMS includes an access engine called Access Plans and supports payment with PayPal.
You can also sell subscriptions, offer free courses and coupons, create course bundles, and offer private coaching. This LMS offers native sales pages with a beautiful design where you can choose what details to collect from your learners as they enroll in your program.
Pricing
LifterLMS offers 3 premium plans: “Individual Add-ons” for $99 each per year; “Universal Bundle” for $299 per year, and “Infinity Bundle” for $999 per year.
LearnPress enables schools, universities, and organizations to offer flexible learning options for students. You need no coding experience to use this plugin because of the easy-to-use interface and numerous features that’ll help you create an online school, an online course, or various educational programs. The free version offers several free add-ons, however, if you fully want to enjoy the opportunities that this plugin provides, you will have to go with one of the Premium versions. Let’s go over some of its features.
Key Features:
WordPress Multisite. LearnPress supports WordPress multisite so you can create WP based LMS with multiple sites.
Create Course – Easy to Use Interface. You’ll get a beginner-friendly interface where you can create, edit, and manage your full curriculum layout. You can import and export courses from other websites that use the same plugin.
Manage Course. This LMS enables you to have full control over your course. You can share the created content, manage your course participants, review statistics and detect trends, and more.
Communicate With Your Students. This LMS plugin gives you the option to create forums where you can communicate with your students and instructors with ease. You can pose and discuss questions, or post information so your students are up to date with the latest developments.
Free add-ons. The free LearnPress version provides you with free add-ons for improved teaching and learning. With these add-ons, you can review courses, export and import courses, enroll students, create a fill-in-the-blank type of questions, and do much more.
Premium Add-ons. The premium add-ons come with the paid LearnPress plans which will enable you to use the full capacity of this LMS plugin. With the premium features, you can give assignments, add points, create certificates, assign multiple instructors to one course, use PayPal, WooCommerce and Stripe, grade tests and quizzes, export results, and so on.
What Makes LearnPress a Great Learning Management System?
The great thing about LearnPress is that it works with all WordPress themes. Its premium plans are quite affordable, compared to other WordPress LMS plugins, and suitable for beginners who’ve never used a LMS before. There are plenty of add-ons that you can get for free as well as premium add-ons that’ll enable you to create any type of course you want.
Monetization Options
LearnPress supports payment gateways such as PayPal, WooCommerce, Stripe, Authorize.net. 2Checkout, Amazon Payment, and some others. Moreover, this LMS is translated into 8 languages including French, Indonesian, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Dutch, and of course, English.
Pricing
You can use the Free version, including the free add-ons, to create a basic online course. You will have to pay for the extended features though. This takes us to the second plan “Theme Bundle” starting from $49 – $69, which also comes with a variety of free add-ons. The most premium version is the “Pro Bundle” plan that you can get for $249, including all the premium add-ons we mentioned before.
Tutor LMS is a free plugin similar to its bigger competitors but with unique features for building courses. It’s a very secure platform with a growing list of integrations with e-commerce plugins, page builder plugins, and the list goes on. Since it’s an LMS plugin from Themeum, you’ll get strong theme support and a great modern interface. Their drag-and-drop course builder and the front end interface offer a beginner-friendly and esthetically pleasing experience. One of the most unique things about this plugin is that you can sell your courses through your site and give each instructor commission based on their contribution to the sales.
Key Features
Intuitive Course Builder. Tutor LMS lets you detailed courses in an easy manner using the user-friendly interface.
Smart Course and Lesson Manager. These features will help you set up, control, and manage your instructors, students, and courses with ease.
Frontend Student Dashboard. Each student registered in your course will have a frontend dashboard to see their results, progress, notifications, announcements, and other things that will make their online learning experience one of a kind.
Teacher Profiles and Panel. This feature will allow you to have control over your instructors’ profiles. For example, you can set up registration forms and approve instructors for a course, review instructors’ profiles, and so on.
Multimedia Attachments. With this feature, you can attach your videos and other multimedia courses on Vimeo, YouTube, and other video platforms. You can also set an instructional video at the start of your course.
Question Patterns. There are over 10 unique question types that this LMS offers which you can add to quizzes to make them more fun and challenging.
Questions and Answers. This feature enables students to pose questions about the course before enrolling, as well as improve communication between students and instructors.
Email Notification. With the automated email Tutor offers you can send notifications to your students and instructors about course enrolments, course competitions, quizzes, and assignment notifications.
What Makes Tutor LMS a Great Learning Management System?
This relatively new LMS plugin maybe doesn’t offer as many features as its competitors, but the ones it offers are really valuable and probably all you need. It has a great content management system, excellent theme support, easy-to-use interface, and offers a commission-based system for your instructors. So if you have several instructors working on your courses and you want really polished themes offered by Themeum, Tutor LMS might be right for you. The free version is pretty generous, however, if you want the full capacities of the features, then you will have to go with the premium version. We recommend that you go ahead and give it a spin.
Monetization Options
With the WooCommerce integration, selling your course will be made much easier. The marketing functionalities this e-commerce platform offers are very unique and will give your business a competitive edge. You can also set commission allocation. You can easily set the percentage of earnings distribution and other fees that need to be deducted, while having a detailed report over your finances, with a good graphical representation and advanced filters to choose your options.
Pricing
There is a free version of Tutor LMS that you can try out. Concerning the paid options, Tutor LMS starts at $149 per year, but you do get a free trial if you’re not sure whether it’s the right LMS for you.
Sensei is a WooCommerce extension. Even though it doesn’t need a WooCommerce theme to function properly, it does work perfectly with all WooCommerce themes. Since the integration with the themes is seamless, you won’t need to spend time and money on developers to make it look great. Let’s go over some of its key features.
Key Features:
Drop-Down Course Builder. With the drop-down course builder, Sensei gives you two options for creating your course – modules and lessons. Modules are similar to sections because each course contains several modules, and each module consists of several lessons. Beware that this isn’t a drag-and-drop course builder, so these two options might be limiting for some users.
Quizzes. Sensei doesn’t fall short to its competitors when it comes to creating quizzes and assessments. It offers several quiz options, while quiz grading can be set to automatic or manual.
Analytics. With the tools for analytics, this LMS will give you all relevant information on which you can base your scoring from tests, quizzes, presentations, and participation.
Certificates. Sensei will give you the option to award your students with customized certificates for the completion of a course.
Media attachment. You can provide your students with additional learning materials by attaching and uploading the reading material in a separate Course Media or Lesson Media section.
Content Drip. Besides the attachments, you can also provide your students with timely material as their course progresses.
Course Participation. With this feature, all course participants will have a full preview of how many students participate in the course.
What Makes Sensei a Great Learning Management System?
Being part of a big e-commerce platform has its own advantages. When you use Sensei, you use all the benefits that WooCommerce offers, like seamless integration with WordPress, easy monetization with WooCommerce, no coding experience, plus you get marketing tools to promote your courses. Sensei also provides automatic as well as a manual grading system and modularization of courses so you can maintain your course hierarchy.
The only place where this WordPress LMS doesn’t shine is the number of integrated themes offered by WordPress. So if you don’t mind the limited possibilities of the themes, go ahead and give it a go!
Monetization Options
Because it’s a WooCommerce extension, Sensei gives you great options for selling and monetizing your courses. You can set Sensei to give one-time payment options with several payment getaways. WooCommerce also allows you to add the WooCommerce Membership and WooCommerce Subscription plugins and ease your payment system even more.
Pricing
You can try Sensei for free to see whether it works for you, but if you want to continue using ti, its price starts from $129 per year with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
WP Courseware is the oldest WordPress LMS plugin. It’s another LMS plugin on this list that’s completely suitable for beginners mostly due to its intuitive course builder where you can easily design and set up your course. Unlike Sensei, there is no revenue sharing but a flat fee for participation and all earnings go to you. This method provides you with full control over your course, so if this is what you’re looking for, let’s take a look at the most important features you’ll get.
Features
Drag-and-Drop Interface. With the simple drag-and-drop interface, you can easily rearrange your course content, move elements around, and lay out your course in minutes.
Video-Ready. WP Coursework allows you to host your course videos on fast platforms such as Vimeo, Wistia, or S3 Media Maestro, and of course, YouTube.
Drip Content. You can gradually release content to your students based on when they sign in to the courses. You can also launch a course before you’ve finished creating all the modules.
Notification and Automation. You can send automated notifications and emails to your students, run your courses on autopilot, and include automated quiz grading.
Transparency. Once you purchase the annual license fee, you have no additional monthly fees, and you keep everything you earn because you don’t share the revenue.
Quizzes and Surveys. This LMS plugin will give you many options for advanced quiz question types. It also gives you timers, retake limits, and surveys. Each course has a grade book with a detailed record of all your students.
Instructor Role. If you give privileges to your instructors, they can also create, edit, and manage their courses and students.
Certificates. This feature allows you to give rewards to your students in the form of a certificate for the completion of a course. The certificates are customizable and can be downloaded in PDF form.
What Makes WP Courseware a Great Learning Management System?
WP Courseware is best suited for entrepreneurs, corporate training departments, educational institutions, and other organizations. You’ll get all features for one price and you don’t have to purchase additional software only to find out that you need to purchase something extra. And you do keep everything you earn since there is no revenue sharing. There are 271 great features making WP Courseware a complete online course solution. It’s the oldest WordPress LMS plugin that has survived all its competitors, which says a lot!
Monetization Options
You’ll find it easy to bundle courses, take payments, charge subscriptions, receive payments in installments, or offer courses for free. With WP Coursework, you also don’t have to worry about extra processing fees for credit cards, because you don’t have to wait for 30 days to get paid. All you have to do is connect your WP Coursework to PayPal and Stride and the finances will be directed to your account. Moreover, WP Coursework invests in your reputation by giving you free publicity, increasing your Google rating, and sending offers to students.
Pricing
There are three pricing plans you can choose from. The “Teacher” plan is a two-site license for $129 per year. The “Professor” plan is a ten-site license for $149, and the “Guru” plan is a 25-site license for $199. There is no free version but you can check the demo version on their site.
Good LMS has plenty of great features that will help you create and sell the course online with ease. You’ll be able to create beautifully designed courses, pose quizzes and questions to your students, and monetize your teaching efforts. It’s the most affordable plugin on this list, so if you’re looking for a great LMS plugin but you currently don’t have a lot of funds to invest in one, the Good LMS might be the perfect solution.
Key Features
Subsections with Sub-Quizzes. You can create quizzes and set the percentage of answers the students need to answer to pass the course. You can also set the number of days the students need to wait before they continue with the next section.
Course Curriculum. The course curriculum is a nice and simple way to divide and display the lectures so the students and the instructors know the pace of the course and plan their time accordingly.
New Process Line. This LMS plugin also gives students a course process line by clearly outlining the completed lessons and the lessons on which they are about to embark.
Course Certificates. You can create custom certificates and course badges that can be awarded to your students.
Coupon Code Creator. Share coupons with your audience to attract more students.
Setting Commissions Rates for Instructors. This LMS plugin will give you the option to set commission rates for your instructors and share the revenue created by your courses.
What Makes Good LMS a Great Learning Management System?
With Good LMS, students have a clear overview of their lesson plans, the duration of the lessons, and the price of each individual course directly on their landing page. Besides transparency, this LMS plugin allows the teachers and instructors to create and award custom certificates, as well as leave comments and rate the courses. You can set commission rates for your instructors, include non-English content to attract more students, and create unlimited online courses. And you get all this for a very low price, compared to the other LMS plugins on this list.
Monetization Options
Good LMS offers a flexible and efficient payment management system. Students can pay via PayPal, Stripe, Paymill, or Authorized.net directly from the site or make a bank transfer and provide you with the proof of payment. You can also deliver coupons with special offers to attract new students and offer your current students an incentive to stay and engage with the course further.
Pricing
The plugin can be purchased for a one-time fee of $32. The price includes regular updates and 6 months of support from a developer on their team. The support can be extended to 12 months for an extra fee of $10.13.
Which WordPress LMS Plugin is Right For You?
With so many LMS plugins for WordPress, it’s quite difficult to say which one is the best. However, if you fully understand the scope of your needs and have a set budget, it will be easier to make a choice.
We hope that this article helped you in your quest for the best WordPress LMS plugins and you’ll choose the the right course builder for your needs. You can also check out our reviews for the fastest WordPress themes as well as the best WordPress contact form plugins.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Search engines are the starting point in almost all of our buying decisions, or more precisely, 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. This is why, today, it’s hard to imagine that one can sustain a business without a solid online presence. But, how do you stay visible in the virtual space with such fierce competition? With the help of the best local SEO tools, of course.
There are some promising tools that can help you dominate search engine results. However, with so many options on the market, finding the right tools for your specific needs can be a bit tricky.
As an SEO Agency with more than a decade of experience, we’ve helped a lot of businesses optimize their SEO rankings, and today, we’ll share with you the best local SEO, Google Maps, and Google My Business (GMB) tools that we know can help you bring new leads.
Keep reading to find out the benefits of using local SEO tools and our honest reviews of the most useful local SEO & GMB tools and their essential features. Finding the perfect software or tool for your business won’t seem so intimidating or time-consuming once you have our article to guide you.
Why Are Local SEO Tools Crucial for Your Business?
Before we get into the reviews, let’s first take a short detour and discuss how businesses benefit from a powerful local SEO strategy.
We assume you’re already familiar with SEO to some extent, but in case you want to refresh your knowledge you can go over the SEO basics here. The difference between traditional SEO practices and local SEO is that while SEO tries to improve your website visibility on a global scale, local SEO focuses on searches in a certain territory and maximizes the chances of you connecting with them.
The main advantage of local SEO is that 80% of local searches convert to customers, making it one of the most effective methods of boosting foot traffic, sales, and revenue.
Generally, as local SEO is a subset of traditional SEO, both approaches use the same strategies (SERP features, organic listings, ads), although local searches have unique features that local SEO can take advantage of.
When searching for a local business or service, what comes up in the results is something called the Local SEO 3-pack. This is a map with three businesses that fit your search query. Google generates this list of potential businesses using the information from Google My Business profiles, which is where local SEO tools work their magic in getting your business in one of those three slots.
Aside from managing GMB (Google My Business) profiles, local SEO focuses on local review sites, local keyword optimization, local directories, and filling important contact details.
Local Viking is by far the best Google My Business management and monitoring tool we’ve found, so we highly recommend it. While it’s relatively new on the market, it has quickly gained popularity and manages over 50,000 listings globally. On top of that, Local Viking regularly adds new features, so you won’t be disappointed.
The company started working in 2018, first as a GMB posting tool and later as a comprehensive GMB management software integrating GMB reviews, photos, attribute editing, and so much more. The main purpose of Local Viking is to help you increase visibility and revenue among locals who search for your type of product and services.
All of the features and services that Local Viking offers can be divided into three main categories: posting, managing, and tracking services.
While you’ll get unique and advanced features in each category, the main feature that sets Local Viking apart from the competition, and our favorite, is the GeoGrid rank tracker. Thanks to the tracker, which includes geospatial data, you can get really granular ranking info showed in a precise grid size over your location.
Key Features We Loved:
The ability to schedule GMB posts, both one-off and recurring;
The review, monitoring, and alerting feature;
The ability to lock changes made to GMB listings or revert changes thanks to the ART feature (Automated Reversion Technology), which prevents you from getting malicious GMB edits from those sneaky competitors;
Other Features Include:
The location content calendar where you can see and easily track all of your GMB content (even from multiple locations) in one dashboard;
The listing management tool, where you can track property insights and make quick changes to the location data from a single dashboard regardless of how many GMB properties you have;
The ability to schedule bi-daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly keyword refreshes;
Maps and local rank tracking, where you can monitor how your location ranks in Google Maps and your listing in both maps and organic search results;
The ability to automatically embed latitude, longitude, keyword, and other data into your images before scheduling them directly from the dashboard; This feature prevents losing metadata, which frequently happens when using 3rd party photo tools.
The schedulable, white-label insight reports which are fully automated;
The free local SEO toolbox.
Final Verdict
The software is a perfect solution for businesses of all types and sizes. Whether you’re an SEO expert who manages multiple businesses or an entrepreneur who has their business listed on GMB and simply wants to increase sales and revenue.
Whitespark is one of the original providers of local SEO tools and services with a bunch of free tools and fantastic services too, which can quickly become indispensable for your business. The company has been around for more than 15 years, building its reputation as one of the best service and tool providers for citation building, citation audit and clean-up, and rank tracking tools.
One of the reasons why we love Whitespark is that it’s user-friendly and affordable. While companies like Yext charge around $500 for less than 50 listings, you can get the same deal for half that price on Whitespark, and you’ll even own your listings permanently. This makes Whitespark a great tool for small businesses, as well as large companies.
Key Features We Loved:
The GMB review link generator;
The review PDF/printout generator (this is really good for offline businesses);
The citation finder which has a free option;
Some of the paid services are great at cleaning up citation disasters and uncoupling from services like Yext.
Other Features Include:
The competitor tracking feature where you can add your top competitors to keep a close eye on how they’re performing for the same target keywords, as well as run comparison reports to better understand your position.
The ability to track your rankings on Youtube and other social media accounts.
The ability to make deep keyword comparisons, so you can be first in line when some keyword gains momentum.
The Reputation Builder through which you can capture more feedback and engage more customers.
The Review Checker, which is another amazing tool that can help you manage your reviews and clearly see where you’re doing good and where you need to improve.
The ability to find, fix, and enhance your listings on the most influential sites in the U.S.
Final Verdict
Whitespark is one of the best service providers for citation building, citation audit, and clean-up. Regardless of whether you’re a one-person professional, SEO agency, or a business looking to outsource their local SEO strategy, Whitespark will no doubt become a valuable service. It’s an excellent option for smaller companies and new-comers in the industry as it’s affordable and user-friendly.
Similar to WhiteSpark, BrightLocal has been around for a long time, and we’ve used them extensively in the past. The tagline “Local Marketing Made Simple” makes BrightLocal what it is – a user-friendly marketing platform that helps marketers deliver better results to clients, even if they’re not SEO experts.
BrightLocal offers both a software tool to manage and monitor GMB listings as well as a citation building service. In fact, they have three types of services: local SEO tools, aggregator submissions, and citation building services. Whether you need to boost local rankings, increase online visibility, build citations, or increase online reputation, Brightlocal might be just the right platform for you.
Key Feature We Loved:
One feature we love here is the ability to compare citations and local ranking factors against competitors, find the gaps, and fix them.
Other Features Include:
The Local Search Rank Checker, through which you can track Google and Bing rankings, organic rankings, Google Maps rankings, as well as keyword search volume.
The ability to easily track local citations, spot NAP issues, and find duplicate listings, and identify new citation sites.
Automated local search and GMB audit from which you’ll get a full report in a matter of minutes, saving you many hours of manual work.
The lead generation widget, which you can fully customize and easily implement on your site that will allow you to run free local search audits on potential clients (especially beneficial to marketers and SEO experts looking to attract new clients and expand their agency).
The Yext Replacement Service that gives you an opportunity to make an easy switch from Yext to BrightLocal and puts you in full control over your listings.
The ability to distribute business data to thousands of directories, apps, and mapping services, thanks to the data aggregators.
The 14-day free trial that doesn’t require you to subscribe in advance.
Another reason why BrightLocal is trusted by many businesses all around the world is that it offers four different package solutions tailored to fit the need of different business profiles. For example, you can choose from the Agency, Enterprise, Multi-location, and Small Business solutions.
Final Verdict
If you prefer to work with longstanding, reputable companies that have an amazing client history, BrightLocal would be a good match. It’s the perfect tool when you want to find out where you stand among your direct competitor and find which factor can help you beat them.
CallRail is a big company that specializes in delivering in-depth insights on quality inbound leads from places often overlooked by other platforms, like calls, forms, chat, and more. It’s an indispensable tool for call tracking and lead attribution, as well as form tracking, which is why we use it extensively.
Aside from being highly specialized and unique, one of the most appealing features of CallRail is that it integrates directly with Google Analytics. CallRail presents all of their findings and reports in Google Analytics together with the other KPIs crucial for your business. This way, the tool saves you time and gives you a clear view of your overall performance and goal reach.
Key Features We Loved:
The ability to get an automated, detailed analysis of your conversations with the Conversation Intelligence engine. You’ll get instant call categorization and scores which helps you determine who’s a real lead.
The Form Tracking tool that will help you identify which channels, campaigns, ads, and keywords are bringing in form submissions.
The ability to reveal which marketing campaigns generate phone calls, as well as gather useful data from your callers.
Specialized solutions tailored to various different industries: agencies, healthcare, legal, automotive, and home services.
Another great aspect of using CallRail is that it comes with a bundle of resources you can use to help you better understand your analyses and grow your business. The resources include a blog, e-books, guides, on-demand webinars, case studies, partner directories, and integrations.
Final Verdict
CallRail is a highly specialized service provider that offers some unique features. If you need a tool to track calls, forms, and chats, then CallRail is the right option for you. It’s a great way to see some additional insights that can show you where your money and time are best spent.
Previously known as “My SEO Tool”, AgencyAnalytics became a powerful tool for building great client relationships. The company focuses on automated reports, integrations with different platforms, white-labels, as well as SEO tools.
We use Agency Analytics for client reporting because it can create some amazing reports and integrates with dozens of popular tools. Our local SEO reports typically include GMB Insights Reports, Review Reports, and Callrail conversion data.
Key Features We Loved:
Automated Marketing Reports tool with the ability to schedule daily, weekly, and monthly marketing reports personalized with comments, so you can explain the meaning of your KPIs to your client.
The ability to view insights and make marketing reports from more than 40 channels. Whether it’s from social media, PPC, email, call tracking, SEO tools, and other reviews, you can easily integrate all the analytic data to a single, intuitive interface.
The ability to fully customize your reports by creating a custom marketing dashboard. You can choose from a variety of widgets like bar-charts, line graphs, pie charts, tables, or statistic widgets for every metric.
The ability to give your client login info without editing permissions, so they can monitor and keep track of everything they want or need to.
Make 100% white-labeled reports with your company’s colors, logos, and much more.
SEO tools like Rank Tracker and Website Auditor.
The ability to create various staff accounts with different permissions, so they can monitor specific tasks.
Final Verdict
Although Agency Analytics offers some great SEO tools, it stands out with its reporting tools. It’s the go-to service provider when you’re handling many aspects of the client’s SEO and marketing department. It will keep you from getting overwhelmed by the many different KPIs and present a clear picture of your efforts. Given that it’s one of the best local SEO tools on the market today, we highly recommend it.
Relatively new, the SEO Builder company began its journey as a Citations Builder tool and slowly emerged into a more comprehensive platform for essential SEO services. The main focus today is put on link building services. We use these guys for a lot of our citation work and they’re fantastic.
As a small company, their motto is that every business is unique and deserves a personalized approach, which is what the SEO Builder offers. We believe these guys are perfect for anyone who wants to make the switch from in-house citations work to something more professional and effective. Using SEO Builder, you should expect to get a lot more citations and an incredibly high indexation rate.
Key Features We Loved:
Manual Citation Building Service that will get you citations on relevant, generic, niche-specific, and geo-specific sites. No automated tools are used when building the citations, which means real experts will be working on achieving your needs.
Indexing service where all the citations are run though an indexing tool, making each citation unique.
100% free Citation Audit that goes along with the detailed report of your order and login details for each citation.
Cleanup Service for your citations, where the team manually resolves incorrect or duplicate citations
The ability to order up to 25 niche-specific citations, which will be run by a special in-house indexing tool.
Full control over the Guest Post Service, with you viewing and approving the website and the content with links before it gets published.
GMB Post Service that will allow you to get it and forget it, as the team will do the keyword research, topic selection, content writing, and post publishing.
Final Verdict:
SEO Builder is an amazing platform for citations work and perfect for people who are outsourcing it for the first time. It’s simple, affordable, yet professional and effective. The team behind SEO Builder works manually on your citations, and you’ll be getting high-quality, relevant mentions.
Loganix is yet another fantastic provider we use for citations work. The company has been around for a decade, and the team does an awesome job in delivering high-quality services that are basically a steal, considering its low prices.
What first started as a citation service tool, with time grew into an all-inclusive SEO platform with all the essential SEO services that will help your business grow into a success story.
The feature that stands out the most, is the awesome dirt cheap citations audit that’s well worth a look. In fact, for most marketers, the less than $10 audit, can be a great “foot in the door” strategy to start the conversation with potential clients and show them what you can do for them.
Key Features We Loved:
Fully managed Local SEO Ranking Solution that’s meant to put your mind at ease with its all-inclusive offer. The solution is a one-click option that can replace all other tools and services, as it covers all local ranking factors.
The ability to personalize the chosen service by picking only the tools that fit your current business needs. You can decide on a personalized strategy by choosing from citations (audit, cleanup, building), on-site optimization, link building, copywriting, and more.
Getting an account manager assigned to work specifically with you, which you can always reach by phone or email.
Local Citation Building service that offers quick results – five days or less.
Fully customizable reseller packages and an Agency Partner Program, which means you’ll get special discounts on Loganix services.
Affiliate program which allows you to get a commission on any new customers you refer to Loganix.
Final Verdict:
Because Loganix offers a wide range of services, depending on your business needs, you can always choose between going with their full range of services or simply choose the ones you currently need. As a company with a long history and well-known reputation, there’s no hesitation that regardless of what you choose, it will be handled professionally.
Web20ranker is a white label SEO company founded by SEO and local SEO aficionados who believe in leveraging processes, standard operating procedures, and automation to deliver the best results possible for your business. The company started by offering white label SEO and link building services, and not much later included a GMB Optimization line which became one of the most successful white label local maps services that built the company’s reputation.
Today, Web20ranker provides a bunch of different, advanced local SEO services such as GMB stacking. They also offer monthly management services as well as some great Google Data Studio report setup services.
Visiting their website can seem a little overwhelming as they have a lot of services, although everything is well organized and you can even shop for services by category: DFY SEO, GMB SEO, Citations, Links, Branding, and even Press Services.
Key Features We Loved:
Advanced level campaigns for GMB and local SEO that are hard to find with other providers.
Accelerated GMB bundles with a variety of add-ons, clean-up, and social optimization, that you can choose from and decide which services you like, so you can create your own package.
Authority Map Stack which includes MREID, CID linking, local press release, and GMB place embeds.
Building Co-Citation and Co-Occurrence strategies.
Complete citation clean up service with a free manual audit.
Data Aggregator Listings in the USA and Canada, so you can get your company’s info distributed in over 1000 online business directories.
The ability to get country-specific citations. You can choose from a variety of unique content topics, authority links, and brand mentions.
On top of all this, Web20ranker offers free training resources and client acquisition training, so you can be more involved and better understand GMB and local SEO needs.
Final Verdict:
Beginners and smaller businesses might be content with the more basic SEO services, but large companies and professional SEO agencies looking for advanced local SEO tools should turn to Web20ranker. The company offers a bunch of management services that are unique and hard to find at other service providers.
Unlike all the other services and platforms we’ve presented so far, NAP Hunter is a free tool that makes it easier to do citation research and cleanup work. Plus, it’s super easy to use.
The tool is developed by Local SEO Guide, which is a company that specializes in local SEO services. It works as an extension to Google Chrome and once you install it N.A.P Hunter will perform searches for various combinations of a business’ name, address, and phone number. It will open tabs with citation sites that you can browse.
N.A.P Hunter is perfect for SEO experts who are overwhelmed by the workload they have to do for their clients and are looking for something simple that can speed up the process of searching for wild N.A.P data. The fact that’s completely free of charge makes this tool a must-have.
Local SEO Guide has an amazing team that offers several local SEO tools for FREE. So, once you’re on the site, feel free to also check out:
The free Business Listing Scan
The Local Keyword Generator Tool
The Text-Only Google Cache Checker
The Automated Google Lighthouse Reporting
The RICE Model Forecasting for SEO
The Automate Knowledge Graph & GMB Image Change Alerts
Final Verdict:
Unlike the other platforms, N.A.P Hunter is a single tool that’s completely FREE. It does just one thing – hunts down citations, which saves a lot of time when doing manual work. It’s great when you’re doing your citations in-house and you’re looking for something simple to help you out.
Semrush is not strictly a local SEO tool but an all-inclusive platform that provides services for SEO, advertising, content, and SMM. Basically, Semrush is a go-to provider that allows you to outsource your whole marketing department. However, there are many reasons why we included Semrush in our best local SEO, Google Maps & GMB SEO tools list. The most notable being Semrush’s audit feature, which is probably the best on the market and is the feature we like the most.
The company is also recognized as the best SEO suite and has received numerous rewards in the industry, such as the US Search Awards 2019, MENA Search Awards 2019, and SEMY Awards 2019.
Key Services We Loved:
Organic Research
Organic Traffic Insights
Keyword Research
Backlink Building and Analytics
Rank Tracking
Site Audit
On-Page SEO Checker
Search Engine Sensor
Semrush can help you take control over your online presence with their Listing Management tool, developed in collaboration with Yext. Within the tool, you can also manage your GMB profile completely by uploading pictures, updating your address and opening hours, and even creating posts. You can also create social media content in SEMrush’s Social Media Poster in GMB so your site back while the tool automatically publishes each post at just the right time.
Our favorite, the Site Audit tool can help you track your website’s health and optimize it for mobile, and increase your indexing.
Final Verdict:
Semrush is a widely popular all-inclusive marketing platform that can handle everything you though at it. It’s a little bit more expensive, but it’s a good option for large companies and enterprises. We included in our list because of its amazing Site Audit tool, which we believe it’s indispensable for mobile optimizing.
Every tool has its particular strengths and Accuranker’s is probably the fact that it’s one of the best rank trackers for local SEO work as it has local tracking capabilities. Accuranker can track competitors, track SERP features, and do a bunch of other useful SEO things.
Accuranker has been around since 2013, founded as a Software as a Service (SaaS) company for fast keyword rank tracking. It quickly became an indispensable tool for many SEO agencies and businesses because it’s efficient, simple, and affordable.
Accuranker provides insightful, in-depth analytics of various key rank metrics. Here are some of the features of this rank tracker:
On-demand updates, meaning you can refresh and update the data anytime you need, so you can stay on top of any sudden changes. This can help you get a better understanding of your ranking fluctuations and make smarter local SEO strategy.
The ability to understand what exactly drives the most traffic to your site by examining SERP History.
The ability to organize, filter, and customize how you want to see your data, so you can be sure you never miss something important.
You can add an unlimited number of domains and users, which is especially beneficial for bigger businesses with larger marketing teams.
Tagging and Landing Pages feature through which you can organize large keyword data.
3rd party integration support, which means you can do everything in one dashboard and pull from multiple sources.
Free help guides and walkthroughs through all the features for new customers and beginners.
The ability to get discounts and 20% recurring commissions through AccuRanker’s Affiliate Program.
Final Verdict:
Accuranker effectively provides what the name suggests- accurate rank tracking. We love it and believe it’s a great choice for anyone that needs a rank tracking tool because it has one of the fastest, most precise, and affordable software that can track competitors, track SERP features, and other local SEO indicators.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this guide helped you find the best tools and solutions for all of your local SEO and GMB needs.
As you can see, different tools and service providers specialize in different aspects of SEO or local SEO. You should carefully examine what fits your current needs best and how you can combine some of the tools to get a full service that will guarantee results.
Do you need help with citation work, N.A.P clean up, or a more comprehensive GMB management platform? Each and every one of the tools we’ve reviewed does their work professionally and efficiently, but varies in functionality and price. Don’t be afraid to contact the teams behind each service and ask for a free consultation to be able to make a better decision.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
If you’re trying to promote your business online, you probably know that you can’t avoid using pay-per-click advertising. But managing PPC campaigns is not an easy task, as it requires a lot of time and hard work. This is where PPC and Google ads management software and tools come into play.
These tools will take out the burden of manual management and give you a helping hand in setting up, managing, and tracking the performance of your PPC campaigns.
To help you out, we went through the best PPC tools and Google ads management software so you can choose the one that works best for you. But before we go into the reviews, let’s briefly list the most important features that make a PPC tool worthy of being on this list.
Key Features the Best PPC tools & Google Ads Management Software Should Have
The following are the most essential features you should look for in the best PPC management software:
Protection against fraudulent clicks of bots, click farms, and competitors;
Options for customization and control over the software;
Great research and report features;
User-friendly interface;
Ability to manage several accounts at the same time;
24/7 customer support;
Value for price.
The quality of the services the PPC tool of your choice offers will determine the quality of your business and the amount of revenue that goes into your account. We’ve ensured that the ones on this list include the above-mentioned features, so let’s go over the reviews.
ClickCease tracks each and every click your ads get and collects valuable information to gain insight into how your audience interacts with them. Their state of the art algorithm detects and separates real potential customers from bots and fraudsters. Hence every time ClickCease detects a fraudulent click, your ad will hide and ClickCease will either block or quarantine the most fraudulent and dangerous IP addresses. This process can either be automated, or you can do it manually by reviewing the notifications yourself.
ClickCease does an excellent job in analyzing your traffic. Each click receives a score on a dozen parameters after which their click algorithm takes over, which also sends reports to Google asking for a refund for invalid activity. You can get ClickCease for $15 per month for the “Basic plan”, $50/mo for their “Standard Plan”, and $75/mo for the “Pro Plan”.
Pros
24/7 automated protection against fraudulent clicks;
Options to automate the blocking process or do it manually;
Insightful analytics;
Excellent customer support (phone, chat, and email).
Cons
You have to manually block IP addresses on Bing since this process isn’t automated when it comes to this search engine.
With the protection of ClickGuard, you can maximize your Google Ads ROI and focus on the quality and growth of your business. ClickGuard identifies and blocks all types of useless, abusive, disruptive, and fraudulent clicks on your Google ads, automatically eliminating harmful clicks. It fixes the leaks in your Google Ads campaigns and enables your business to reach full revenue potential.
ClickGuard monitors all clickstream information and with its forensic insight analyzes who, where, why, and what is behind every click on your ads. With its amazing reporting feature, you’ll be able to auction reports that allow full audit and accountability for every click on your account. Additionally, you can optimize your campaigns based on visitors’ behavior and eliminate low-quality traffic sources. The basec “ActiveGUARD” plan starts at $59 per month, the “Premium GUARD” plan is $79 per month, and the most advanced “EliteGUARD” plan is $99 per month.
Pros:
Excellent protection against fraudulent clicks;
Great options for customization and control;
Beginner-friendly;
Real-time monitoring.
Cons
It might be a bit difficult to set up this tool If you are using PPC tools as a beginner.
PPC Protect is a next-generation click fraud protection tool which stops click frauds at the source and protects your Google Ads campaigns from bots, click farms, competitors, and any other click fraud sources. With its advanced fraud analytics features, you can see your traffic’s insights in detail, check its quality, and analyze all fraudulent activity. This tool protects your ads across the entire Google Ads suite with native support for all campaign types and integrations.
In addition, PPC Protect has AI learning and neural network features, so the more data you process, the smarter the protection system becomes. To ensure your security, PPC Protect includes a secure API Access that’s approved by Google to use their Google Ads API connection. There are two plans you can choose from. The “Pro” plan is $70 per month. The “Unlimited” plan, that allows for an unlimited ad spend, doesn’t have a fixed price.
Pros:
Automated machine learning algorithm;
Easy to install and set up;
Option to add a tracking template;
Auto IP blocking, multiple detection rules, and many other functionality features.
Agency Analytics is an all-in-one reporting platform for agencies and one of the best PPC reporting tools that can be found nowadays. You can send automated marketing reports directly to your clients’ inbox by scheduling daily, weekly, or monthly reports. Keeping your clients up to date has never been easier, and you can even personalize the reports with comments to explain to your clients the significance of various KPIs and offer your personal insights.
Besides clicks, impressions, CTR, and other essential KPIs, this tool also focuses on important ROI metrics. Moreover, with the help of Agency Analytics, you’ll be able to gather your clients’ data across multiple PPC platforms including Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook ads, Adroll. You can create automated PPC report templates where you can include your own colors, logo, and other elements that best fit your brand. The “Freelancer” plan costs $49/mo, the “Agency” plan is $149/mo, while the “Enterprise” plan will cost you $399/mo.
Supermetrics has the ability to collect all your marketing data across your PPC platforms, including Google AdWords, Bing, and Facebook ads, among others, and bring it to your favorite reporting, analytics, or storage platform. After having the data in one place, you can start organizing and filtering by dividing the data into the optimized numbers and information. Moreover, with Supermetrics’ automated feature, you can eliminate hours of manual work by scheduling data transfer and automating your marketing reporting.
The Supermetrics dashboard allows you to visualize data, crunch your numbers, or move your marketing data into a data warehouse. All you have to do is choose your destination: Google Sheets, Data Studio, Excel, API, BigQuery, or Uploader. You can create cross-channel PPC reports, budget tracking reports for your PPC campaigns, conduct trend analysis, create insightful dashboards for your clients, as well as analyze your Facebook ads campaigns to improve their performance. Supermetrics has 6 different pricing plans, the cheapest one being $39/mo.
Semrush offers several outstanding features that’ll help you get an analytical insight into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building. You can analyze their ad budget and keywords, monitor ad copy and landing pages, and discover new competitors. Besides researching the competition, you can also spot new publishers, view display ads from different devices, and target the right audiences.
With the traffic analytics feature you can monitor your competitors’ marketing activities and strategies, discover new marketing niches, but also detect certain customer behavior, media consumption, qualified leads, prospects, partners, and opportunities for future investments. You can also cross analyze domains, visualize the data, and create charts. You can have the “Pro” plan for $99/mo, the “Guru” plan for $199/mo, and the “Business” plan for $399/mo.
Pros:
Competitive organic research;
Organic keyword research;
Link analysis to measure fraudulent levels;
Excellent tracking feature;
PPC planning;
Simple and easy to use.
Cons:
Might need some time to get used to navigating the UI.
Opteo is a smart Google Ads management tool that helps you manage your AdWords accounts in the easiest manner possible. It functions by continuously monitoring your AdWords account and detecting statistically significant patterns, based on which you get suggestions for improvements. It also helps you manage your accounts, monitor performance, browse segments, track budgets, and get alerts when some important changes happen.
The monitoring feature gives you all key performance metrics in one location, from where you can manage your accounts, view your ad groups, keywords, and other components. Additionally, the automated AdWords tasks Opteo provides are highly optimized to save you time and money. You can integrate this tool with your favorite Slack channel where your team can share information and improve your campaigns.
The “Basic” plan will cost you $97/mo, the “Professional” plan $197/mo, the “Agency” plan $397/mo, and the “Unlimited” plan is 797/mo.
Pros:
Data-driven improvement suggestions;
+40 optimizations;
Excellent graphics and data visualization;
Intuitive user interface;
Ability to process changes in bulk.
Cons:
Campaigns and ad groups lists do not show in alphabetical order.
This Google shopping feed management tool is a fast and easy way to drive more sales and increase the visibility of your online store, by distributing your products to over 100 comparison shopping platforms like Amazon, Shopzilla, and Google Shopping, among others!
GoDataFeed is a very useful tool to have, considering that 35% of all shopping-related searches begin on Google. Google Shopping is the gateway to the entire Google Retail ecosystem. GoDataFeed will help you navigate the complicated requirements and build PLAs that perform well in the online competitive environment. Consequently, you’ll be able to multichannel your marketing through the various features, intuitive design, and support. With its built-in Google Shopping templates, GoDataFeed will guide you through the process of building each feed for full compliance. It also optimizes thousands of feed attributes in seconds while maintaining informational accuracy with the automated product updates.
GoDataFeed offers 4 pricing plans: the “Lite” plan is $39/mo, the “Plus” plan is $99/mo, the “Pro” plan is $199/mo, while the “Ultimate” plan is $399/mo.
This PPC tool brings visibility to marketers who work with inbound leads to boost their company success. CallRail focuses on data generated by calls, forms, and chat, which is data often overlooked by its competitors. It prioritizes your customers’ needs and gives you a smart insight into your quality calls and other inbound leads.
The bid management this PPC tool uses is optimized to track offline call conversations so you can optimize search, social, mobile, and display advertising in a single interface. You can also connect to Google Data Studio and display data points from CallRail to create custom reports, as well as bring your calls into Business Ad Manager on Instagram, and view call data and click data side by side. Moreover, the marketing automation CallRails offers can discover which campaigns are driving phone calls and text messages, and see how those leads convert into sales.
The “Call Tracking” plan goes for $45/mo, the “Conversation Analytics” plan $95/mo, the “Marketing Analytics” plan is also $95/mo, and the “Analytics Suite” plan is $145/mo.
Pros:
Call tracking;
Form tracking;
Conversation intelligence;
Real-time reporting;
Excellent marketing functionalities;
Integration with third-party software.
Cons:
Stores old calls that might not be relevant for campaigns.
This easy to use online advertising tool is built for small and mid-sized businesses to help them drive big results from online advertising. WordStream claims that compared to their competitors, they turn 60% more leads to customers while spending 10% less, and customers seem to agree.
With WordStream, you will be able to manage AdWords, Bing and Facebook, manage bids, improve quality score, identify negative keywords, build out campaigns, research new keywords, track calls, and conversations, and much more. You’ll also get valuable features like time saving alerts and workflow tools, cross-platform reporting dashboard, and easy to use solutions for ad creation. The free Google ads performance feature will give you a final grade on your overall Google ads performance based on detailed reviews of wasted spend, quality score, click-through rates, account activity, text ads, long-tail keywords, impression shares, mobile advertising, and PPC best practices, neatly packaged in a comprehensive report.
WordStream offers 3 pricing plans: the first one offers the basic tools and costs $49/mo, the second plan includes one-on-one customer support and goes for $299/mo, while the third plan includes even more support when it comes to specific tasks and costs $649/mo.
With Unbounce, you can create beautiful landing pages optimized to prompt your visitors with one focused goal instead of leaving them to wander a site full of distractions. With the easy to use drag and drop builder, you can choose from over 100+ landing page templates and create specific campaigns for your customers. The templates are customizable with optional JavaScript and CSS to increase functionality for both desktop and mobile devices.
Unbounce is all about growing your ROI, which is why their Smart Traffic feature is so powerful. It’ll match your visitors with the page where they have the highest chances to convert, which will get you up to 20% more conversions than before. There’s also the ability to run A/B tests, launch custom pop-ups, and see how your pages are performing in real time. You can also choose how often visitors see pop-ups, schedule offers, target by URL, target by location, target by cookies, and more.
The “Launch” plan goes for $80/mo, the “Optimize” plan is $80/mo, the “Accelerate” plan is $200/mo, and the “Scale” plan is $300/mo.
Pros:
Over 100 landing page templates;
Built-in AI conversion feature;
Ability to publish to WordPress with 1 click;
A/B testing;
Suitable for beginners;
Integrates with Facebook, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Zapier, Hubspot, and other platforms.
Instapage is one of the most advanced landing page platforms currently on the market. Unlike other single product solutions, Instapages includes six tools and plenty of features built specifically for helping you increase your advertising conversion rates.
With Instapage, you need no developer skills to create relevant, on-brand, and mobile-responsive post-click landing pages. You can optimize these pages to receive even more visitors, and receive detailed heatmaps, run A/B tests, and have access to robust analytics. With the AMP and Thor Render Engine features, you can improve the loading speed of your landing pages and catch every visitor’s attention immediately.
There are two plans you can choose from – the “Business” plan is $199/mo, while their “Enterprise” plan’s cost depends on your unique needs.
Pros:
Mobile-friendly templates with nice colors and appealing design;
Google Data Studio is a part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, and unlocks the power of your data with interactive dashboards and reports that enable you to make smart business decisions. With Google Data Studio, you can access your data from 500+ data sets from over 240 connectors. You’ll get data visualization software and web-based reporting tools to quickly build interactive reports and dashboards, which you can share with your team at any time.
One of the best things about using Google Data Studio is that you can import any data that you collect in Google Sheets, like an unlimited number of tables and pages. You can also share reports directly with your team, and edit the reports in Google Docs. Everybody that has access to this document can share comments or directly edit the document, which results in easy and effective team collaboration.
Google Data Studio offers a free version of its reporting and data visualization software, but you can also get the paid version if you want to create more than five multi-page reports.
Pros:
Access your data from 500+ data sets;
Customized reports to match your brandl;
Ability to import unlimited data as long as you use Google services;
Google Ads Editor is a free, downloadable application that lets you work offline and make bulk changes quickly and easy. This tool will let you download your campaigns and work on them even when you are offline. You can search and replace text, move items around, and undo or redo changes across multiple campaigns.
Google Ads Editor will also give you the option to review the changes you have made before you post them. Your colleagues can see the drafts before you export your files. You’ll have access to the most important metrics when it comes to your campaigns like click-through rate, cost, position, and conversion information. Google Ads Editor is a great way to control your advertising costs and get excellent results.
Pros
Use bulk editing tools to make multiple changes quickly;
Export and import files to share with colleagues;
View statistics for all campaigns;
Manage, edit, and view multiple accounts at the same time;
Search and replace text across ad groups or campaigns;
Work even when you are offline.
Cons
Sometimes there are software errors and the editor might receive an unexpected response from API.
Over and Out
Promoting and marketing your business online can rarely be done successfully without using PPC and Google ads tools. And we know that you need only the best ones, which is why we included only the very best PPC management software that can be found today. You won’t make a mistake no matter what tools you end up choosing from this list. If you’re interested in reading more informative articles, check out our blog.
The Search Engine Shop helps business owners get more hits, get more new customers and make more money in their business by properly leveraging the internet.
Learning Management Systems (LMS) are software solutions that enable individuals or organizations to create and manage online courses and various training programs. The integrated virtual classroom is where students and trainees interact with each other and learn via multimedia teaching methods, including videos, text, PDFs, and audio files.
To help you find the right software for your needs, we’ll review the 7 best learning management systems currently on the market. But first, let’s see the most important features the LMS of your choice should have.
What to Look For in the Best Learning Management Systems (LMS) & Software?
Learning Management Systems should make your life easier by consolidating your content and bringing into play a variety of learning resources. They should not only meet your expectations but the expectations of thousands of potential students on a global scale.
Here are some of the key LMS features to consider when looking for the best platform.
Intuitive Page Builder
An easy-to-use, preferably drag-and-drop page builder is crucial for creating and customizing the course or training program just as you’ve imagined it. Avoid LMSs that don’t offer a flexible page builder with multiple options, as this is a crucial feature required for creating quality content, personalized to your specific needs.
Learner Progress Tracking
Your students need a feature that will show their progress transparently. Progress tracking is one of the best ways to keep students motivated to work continually throughout the course without giving up.
Content Drip
How you provide your participants with the necessary study materials might also play a role in the students’ engagement and productivity. With content dripping, you will be able to feed your participants with materials in a specific tempo that can be adjusted to fit with the course material.
Tests and Quizzes
The best way to gain insight into your participants’ progress is to give them tests and quizzes. This can be a fantastic motivational boost and reward after all the hard work. Choose a software learning platform that offers a variety of tests and quizzes to make your course more exciting and engaging.
Certificates and Badges
The best learning management systems also provide you with the feature of customizable certificates and badges that can be awarded to students after they finish a course. Besides serving as proof for completion (a deciding factor for many potential students), certificates and badges can also serve as an additional motivation.
Automated Emails
Automated emails are another essential feature that you can’t afford to go without. You can use it to notify students about completing an assignment, changes in the courses, various offers, reminders, etc.
The Best Learning Management Systems and Software
Let’s take a look at the best learning management systems and software currently available on the market.
Kajabi
Kajabi is an eCommerce platform that offers the “Kajabi University,” one of the most popular learning management systems nowadays.
This LMS, developed by online marketers, is an all-in-one marketing automation platform with added capabilities to sell and deliver digital products and online courses. You’ll get everything that a course creator needs because there are no plugins or integrations required, but if you want to use some of your favorite tools, you can integrate it with third-party apps via Zapier.
This solution is perfect for when you’re looking for a comprehensive resource to design and sell your courses in a creative and eye-catching way. Kajabi offers hosting and plenty of useful features and tools for creating high-quality content. Currently, it’s one of the most attractive platforms on the market, so let us go through the best features it offers and see what the fuss is all about.
Key Features:
Integrated Subscriptions, Course, and Digital Products. Kajabi has one-click templates that you can use, plenty of customizable templates that you can edit without any coding knowledge, and a create-your-own template option.
Large Course Capacity. This LMS has an enormous capacity for hosting courses and students. Depending on the price option you choose, with Kajabi, you can offer up to 100 courses and enroll up to 20.000 students.
Drip Content. Kajabi allows you to drip content according to the schedule you have created to keep your students/employees up to date with their materials.
Module Availability Customization. You can unlock all modules and make them available for your students from the moment they enroll in your program. You can also set the course in such a way so that the next module unlocks only after the students finish the previous one.
Grading Features. Kajabi is an LMS that offers various options for quizzes, tests, and assignments in all media formats. It also allows you to create forums where participants and instructors can share their thoughts and ideas.
Multimedia Support. Kajabi is a platform that supports text, audio, video, and live video conferences. You can also provide your participants with pre-recorded webinars and events.
Email Marketing. You’ll get integration with several email marketing services and the possibility to use email marketing to its fullest potential.
Kajabi Monetization Options
Kajabi offers integration with payment processors like PayPal and Stripe. Both payment processors are available worldwide and allow you to take payments directly from your site with Kajabi. You also get payment plans, subscriptions, and discount coupons.
Kajabi also offers excellent marketing options that will enable you to sell your courses more quickly and present them in front of the right audience. The sales page comes with several customizable templates and landing-pages with multiple themes, opt-in forms, email sequences, and more.
Pricing And Final Thoughts
Kajabi ranges from $119/mo for the “Basic” version, $159/mo for the “Growth” plan, and $319/mo for the “Pro” plan. But before you decide on a plan, you can try it out for free for up to 14 days.
All in all, Kajabi made this list because it is genuinely one of the best learning management systems available on the market today, which is why we highly recommend it.
Teachable
Teachable is a learning management system marketed towards entrepreneurs looking for a solution that’ll enable them to express their creativity when creating online courses.
It’s a cloud-based platform that allows you to create and sell online courses from your website. All essential tools this platform offers are everything you need to create and deliver engaging online courses.
Like most of its competitors, Teachable is easy-to-use and comes with a variety of features. However, it stands out from other LMSs with its course creator and delivery. We are truly impressed with the unlimited video hosting. But we also love the course builder and the course player that supports features essential for testing and delivering content.
Key Features:
Custom Root Domain. You can easily link your existing website to Teachable under a custom domain.
Visual Course Builder. You’ll get a customizable online school experience and an editor that allows you to create engaging lectures or coaching sessions supported by multimedia.
Integration with Third-party Apps. Teachable supports integration with third-party apps such as Google Analytics, SumoMe, Zapier, Mailchimp, Segment, ConvertKit, and many more.
Intuitive Dashboard. With the easy-to-use dashboard, you can organize your course and keep your students in a team by customizing their positions and roles.
One-on-one Coaching Sessions. This feature enables you to host one-on-one or group coaching sessions, as well as schedule Calendar and Zoom meetings.
Quizzes and Certificates. Besides creating quizzes to test the course participants’ knowledge, you can also create certificates or appoint your students’ badges after they finish the course.
Advanced Security. This LMS seamlessly hosts and protects your data. They offer constant upgrades, 24/7 monitoring, SSL certificates, and work only with payment providers that are PCI level 1 compliant.
Teachable Monetization Options
This software solution offers coupons and advanced pricing options, including subscriptions, one-time payments, bundles, and more. It accepts payment from more than 30 currencies and supports PayPal and mobile pay. When you sell through the Teachable getaways, they also take care of the EU VAT.
Pricing And Final Thoughts
The pricing with Teachable starts from $29 for the “Basic” plan, $99/mo for the “Pro” plan, and $249 for the “Business” plan.
Teachable is user-friendly, full of valuable features, and very reliable. You’ll receive a fantastic tutorial and onboarding course to help you go through setting up and teaching your courses. This is especially helpful to those who’ve never used an LMS before. However, if you want to have everything under one roof, we believe it’s better to search for other solutions. You won’t get advanced quizzes, assignments, and forum options because Teachable only provides you with the basic functionalities – perfect for those who prefer simplicity.
Adobe Captivate Prime
Adobe Captivate Prime is recognized as one of the leading tools in the industry because it brings an elevated learning experience to its users. It has been awarded multiple times and it’s the favorite tool of leading corporations around the world.
What’s interesting about this LMS is that it provides an AI-based Social Learning Platform for learners to share their experiences with colleges in a motivating and encouraging manner. The overall design of this LMS is more than satisfying and the platform’s ability to organize various multimedia content is something that you will surely appreciate. Moreover, their website is full of instructional videos. So if things get overly complicated, you can open the easy-to-use instructional videos or just rely on their excellent support.
Key Features:
Automated Content Curation. The system automatically keeps a check on content quality and approves only those courses that meet the quality score. This is super-effective thanks to the content scans based on AI & ML algorithms.
Manual Content Curation. With Adobe Captivate Prime, you can moderate your content manually. You can assign SMEs as moderators that can view all content published by students or instructors. Moderators then can approve or disapprove of the produced content. The approved content enters the social learning ecosystem.
Discussion Board. Post content to existing boards or create new boards and start discussions in groups or peer-to-peer.
Users Generated Content. Users can post their videos, audio, screenshots, and documents directly from their desktop or mobile devices.
Captive Prime Desktop App for UGC and Browser Plugin. This free app will enable you to capture, post, and edit multimedia content. Learners can also install the add-on on their browser and natively post any web content to Adobe Captivate Prime LMS.
Social Learning Feed. Everyone who’s enrolled in the courses has their social feed where peers can follow each other’s activities and discuss different topics.
Poll Option. Learners can turn text quotations to a poll question and invite their peers for responses. The instructor can see popular opinions among the responses, which is a valuable insight.
Access Control for Discussion Boards. You can mark your boards as public, private, or restricted, and allow access to those boards only to people who have the pass.
Activity Tracker. With this tracker, you can follow the engagement of the learners and the engagement levels of the groups.
Social Search. This feature will enable you to take advantage of a robust search algorithm that populates relevant results from both social learning posts and formal learning courses.
Adobe Captivate Prime Monetization Options
Adobe Captivate Prime has flexible and customer-friendly pricing models. You can use credit cards and buy a subscription for a maximum of 3500 learners. You can assign independent payment getaways to each country and you can implement both PayPal and another payment gateway for each country. Stripe is also supported by Captivate Prime as well as other payment gateways.
Pricing And Final Thoughts
Adobe Captivate Prime is licensed on a per-user basis and the price for one user is $4 per month. The minimum threshold on the number of users is 10.
Adobe Captivate Prime is a developer’s dream as it’s one of the most innovative, versatile, and intuitive LMS’s. Mainly trainees, LMS managers, corporate trainers, sales professionals, and serious couches use this LMS.
Adobe Captivate Prime is a great learning management system if you want to continuously reduce employees’ skill gaps and align their skills to the business objectives. After the courses are over, the manager can make decisions using the data from the skill and compliance reports. The same applies if an individual entrepreneur wants to offer specific knowledge to online learners. This sophisticated LMS can satisfy the needs even to the most complicated and demanding course giver.
Moodle
Moodle is an open-source LMS and the world’s most popular learning platform. It’s designed to provide educators, administrators, and learners with a robust, secure, and integrated learning system. We believe Moodle is a proven and trusted platform and an excellent tool for creating a personalized learning environment.
Moodle is 100% free, as it comes with no license fee, regardless of whether you use it for commercial or non-commercial projects. It provides the most flexible tool-set to configure, enable, disable, or integrate built-in features. Moodle has multilingual capabilities and possesses no linguistic limitation for learning online. You can use Moodle anytime and from any device.
What we love about Moodle is that a global community of developers support it. That means that the code of this software is constantly updated and the platform is getting better and more user-friendly with time. Besides the great support of the community, Moodle also offers forum support with lots of documentation on how to solve each problem. It’s no wonder that it’s the most used LMS in the world and translated into more than 126 languages.
Key Features:
Modern, Easy-To-Use Interface. Moodle is designed to be responsive and accessible. That is why the interface is easy to navigate and it’s optimized to function seamlessly on all devices.
Personalized Dashboard. The Dashboard on Moodle is customizable and provides the users with details of their progress and upcoming deadlines. Students can easily track their activities and courses on this dashboard.
Advanced Activity Section. These are a group of 14 basic functional features that will enable you to assign, grade, chat, give feedback, open forums, quizzes, survey, etc, to all participants on the Moodle platform. With these features students and teachers can properly contribute to the courses.
Calendar. The calendar on Moodle can display site, courses, group, users, and category events. It can also show the deadlines of the assignments, quizzes, and tests and show you the chat time for your online meetings.
Easy Share Feature. This drag-and-drop feature will enable you to easily provide and share materials with your students. The files can be in a text or presentation format.
HTML Editor. The text editor has many functions to assist the user in entering content. It includes Editing Section headings and descriptions of an activity.
Notification Options. With Moodle, every participant will be able to receive notifications about assignments, forum discussions, etc. Besides notifications, this feature will enable you to send private messages between teachers, administration, students, and other users.
Progress Tracker. There are several ways to track the progress activated on Moodle. This LMS allows you to follow the course grade book, the level of competence and proficiency of the user, activity completion, course completion, course reports, analytics, etc. Based on these activities Moodle will also enable you to award badges.
Moodle Monetization Options
Moodle can be integrated with PayPal, Stripe Payment, Authorized.net, 2Checkout, DPS Payment Gateways, Bitcoin. It also supports payment with SCA and Coupons. Moodle also supports a solid number of enrolment plugins.
Pricing And Final Thoughts
There are three ways you can get Moodle. The first option is to install it for free on your server. The second option is to set up your learning system with a Certified Moodle Partner, or third, to run Moodle on their cloud-based solution, where depending on the number of students, the prices range from $80 to $1,000 per year.
Moodle is very good for setting up and managing courses, and distributing teaching materials. The platform provides educators around the world with a solution for eLearning that is scalable, customizable, and filled with a large section of activities and features. If you are willing and able to put some effort into administrating this open-source platform, then Moodle might satisfy the needs of the most demanding customers. However, if you are not willing to spend time coding and adjusting, then we recommend looking elsewhere.
Blackboard Learn
This amazing LMS helps businesses and associations by providing flexible online learning and training experiences for the successful growth of the organization. Blackboard Learn is a product that has a modern, intuitive, and fully responsive interface that delivers simpler, more powerful teaching and learning experience by delivering tools and workflows that can help you stay organized, engaged, and productive.
This is a great platform for students to send and receive schoolwork, and for teachers who use mobile devices to connect with students. This LMS offers all the necessary features and allows teachers to upload assignments and participants to take quizzes and tests to check their progress.
Blackboard is also very suitable for facilitating and recording real-time lectures and discussions. It offers a secure online space for professors and students with good academic support such as mentoring and tutoring. It works well with big amounts of content and supports multimedia. This software is suitable for preserving institutional knowledge, educating employees, and driving positive business results.
Key Features:
Detailed Course List. After logging in to the course builder, the user can see all of the current courses, assigned instructors, and other custom roles. The course lists are easy to use and display all the details you need to effectively organize the courses.
Course Overview. When you open the course list, you will be able to see the option Needs Attention and quickly access assessments that are ready for you to grad. You can also see the Due Dates on assignments, review the grades, go through the announcements, course content, or discussions.
Tests and Assignments. Tests and assignments are included in Course Content, where you can preview, edit, and assign tests for students.
Grading. With Blackboard, you can easily identify courses where you need to grade student assignments. With this feature, instructors can also review the grades and give feedback to students.
Discussions. You can start new threads or follow and comment on the already existing forums. The discussions are the best way to stimulate your students and instructors to think and discuss different topics and questions.
Announcements. With this feature, you can create, edit, view, and delete announcements within individual courses. When creating the announcements, you can select options like date and time to set when you want these announcements to be delivered.
Organizations. Organizations behave like courses and contain tools that enable members to communicate. For every organization, you can access content, create announcements, and moderate discussions.
Languages. Blackboard is available in over 30 languages including English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, German, etc,
Designed for Mobile. The Blackboard app provides course access optimized for mobile devices. This feature takes advantage of all the capabilities of this LMS and helps you complete your tasks with great functionality and ease.
Blackboard LMS For Business Monetization Options
Blackboard offers great functionality and can be integrated with the most common payment system gateways.
Pricing And Final Thoughts
Detailed pricing information is not publicly available for Blackboard. That being said, you can easily contact the team through their website and get all the necessary information.
This LMS excels in course creation because the instructors can upload and manage all course necessary materials on their comprehensive and flexible platform. Blackboard is considered one of the best value-for-money LMSs, however, according to some users, their pricing might get expensive.
Thinkific
Thinkific is a powerful, all-in-one platform that makes it easy to share your knowledge, grow your audience, and your business. Regardless of whether you have 10 or 10.000 students, this technology has all the necessary tools to satisfy your online teaching needs. Thinkific enables entrepreneurs to create and sell courses and aims to revolutionize the way people think and earn online.
Thinkific is designed for creating sustainable, lasting, and effective courses that you and your audience can enjoy. It’s easy to set up and customize your course to match your brand and you’ll have full control over your data and content.
Because of its applicability, this platform is suitable for a huge number of users. Consultants, authors, public speakers, experts, trainers, associations, enterprises, and universities all use Thinkific. The platform is popular because it enables anyone who uses it to quickly create and deliver courses on their own branded site.
Key Features:
Course Builder. The course builder features drag & drop and quickly upload content options that are simple to use but powerful enough even for the most demanding online schools.
Option To Fully Customize Your Content. With the full customization power (drag-and-drop) that this feature offers, you can organize content, use your domain name, and go beyond with full access to HTML and CSS.
Multimedia Courses. Thinkific supports multimedia, hosts your video content for free, and lets your students enjoy dynamic content. It supports video, text, quizzes, discussion, surveys, Typeform, Google Docs, Captiva, and much more.
Customizable Course System. You can customize the way your course system runs with the click of a button. Create private and hidden courses, assign work to multiple instructors, drip schedule content to your students, and much more.
Advanced Marketing Tools. With this feature, you can also attract larger audiences by offering coupons, free trials, upsells, payment plans, and monthly payments. What’s more, you can easily connect with your favorite email provider, and based on the advanced analytics, form a strategy and start a campaign to reach more learners.
Progress Tracker. With Thinkific, you will be able to follow the progress of your course and the progress of your students. The robust data that is generated by this platform can be monitored and analyzed with the tools that will provide you with excellent segmentation and improved communication.
Safety Features. One of the priorities of this LMS is to keep your data and content safe. That is why their cloud is certified with the best and newest online safety protocols.
Thinkific Monetization Options
When it comes to monetizing, Thinkific offers a full suite of business tools that will help you market and sell your courses. With these tools, you can offer flexible pricing options that are adjusted to the size and style of the business that demands your courses. You can also offer membership and subscription packages or boost your course sales by offering coupons, free trials, upsells, tailor payment plans, and custom first-month payments. Thinkific supports integration with payment gateways such as Stripe, charges in 100+ currencies, accepts all credit cards, and offers secure payments.
Pricing And Final Thoughts
Thinkific offers a free test drive with its core features. But if you want to feel the benefits of the software, you will have to go for the paid option of $49/mo for the “Basic” plan, $99/mo for the “Pro” plan, and $499/mo for the “Premium” plan.
We love that this online course platform is user-friendly and less costly than the more traditional competitors. Thinkific is suitable for individual course givers and small companies that want to monetize their knowledge or educate customers about their products. That’s not to say that it isn’t a solid LMS for big companies, but their competitors might give big companies better conditions. If you’re interested in using Thinkific, you will be pleasantly surprised by the range of features that the more advanced plans offer.
Docebo
Docebo’s AI-powered learning platform is not just a single product but an enterprise learning system made out of a variety of features that can be specifically tailored for your learning needs. Unlike traditional LMS platforms that use the formal educational top-down approach, Docebo blends formal, social, and experiential learning modalities. By blending these modalities, it drives the growth of your business’ revenue.
This LMS is adopted by more than 1,900 organizations all over the world, and it’s capable of satisfying multiple use cases for external and internal enterprise learning. But what Docebo is best known for is the top-notch enterprise L&D ecosystem that uses learning-specific AI algorithms to produce an unforgettable learning experience. This automated learning management is very unique because the social learning powered by artificial intelligence can be a personalized experience that all your learners will remember.
The AI makes sure that user-generated content finds its way to learners who value knowledge. That is why when using Docebo, you will be able to create a nice experience that employees, customers, and partners will love and appreciate. The Docebo Learning Platform also facilitates informal learning applied in the flow of work. With these functionalities, Docebo can produce deeper learning outcomes tied to your high business objectives.
Key Features:
Automated Learning Management. You can centralize, manage, and organize activities while enjoying the beautiful experience that this platform provides.
Discover Coach and Share. With this feature, you will be able to reverse the forgetting curve by facilitating social learning as it happens.
Extend Learning Reach. Engage and align partners with your brand, products, and services. You can also boost customer adoption and product renewal and increase the value of membership programs.
Virtual Coach. Docebo’s AI Virtual Coach interacts with learners through a conversational UI and provides instant answers to any question. This powerful feature can also recommend content and remind both instructors and students about the progress they’ve made.
Optimization for Mobile Devices.
Docebo Content. The average e-learning course takes more than 250 hours to create. However, Docebo Content reduces the time for course development by supporting in-house content capabilities with engaging learning content that covers a variety of topics.
Enable Sales. Docebo enables sales at scale by preparing salespeople with the knowledge they need to have a valuable conversation with buyers. It will also allow you to update product training, establish brand message consistency, and gamify your sales training activities.
Docebo Monetization Options
The Docebo e-commerce app allows you to sell courses online by creating a marketplace available for registered and non-registered users. Activating the e-commerce app takes several steps. After you configure it, you will be able to choose a variety of payment gateways and currencies. You can also set up a wire transfer payment, offer course subscriptions, and coupons.
Pricing And Final Thoughts
The pricing of Docebo depends on the number of active users you have. The software gives you access to 300 users at a charge of $3.33 per user per month. It delivers great value and usability for the price. Thanks to its good reporting feature as well as the emphasis on social networks, gamification, and integration with third-party apps, Docebo offers great value.
This cloud-based enterprise learning service ranks among the world’s top 10 eLearning solutions, and it’s trusted by big corporations like Starbucks, Uber, and Reuters.
What Are Learning Management Systems Used For?
Both educational institutions and corporations use online teaching platforms. Educational institutions, especially colleges and universities, use learning management systems to give students more efficient access to information and provide an online learning environment that’s more practical and inclusive. On the other hand, organizations and businesses find these solutions ideal for creating training programs for their employees, including employee onboarding.
Learning Management Systems can also be used by individuals who want to create courses to share their skills and experiences. This is one of the best ways to share your knowledge with others and make some money while doing that.
In contrast to a physical classroom, learning management systems offer:
better organization,
more involvement of all participants,
greater accessibility to information,
maximum efficiency in learning,
lower costs.
However, different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses in various aspects that might be more or less suitable for you.
Conclusion
We hope that our best learning management systems list helped you find the right software for your needs.
If you’re an experienced coder, you should go with an open-source LMS like Moodle. On the other hand, if you don’t want to deal with code and want an LMS that will give you easily customizable themes, Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific are great platforms. Finally, if you are a large enterprise and money and resources are not an issue, go with a platform that will take care of all your needs, like Adobe Captivate Prime or Blackboard LMS For Business.
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Bluehost and Clowdways – these two hosting providers are some of the most popular and innovative ones on the market today, as they offer great value without breaking your bank.
No matter which of the two you choose, you’ll get excellent functionality, easy management, and exceptional customer support.
But which one is better for your personal needs?
In this article, you will find the information you need to make an informed decision regarding Bluehost vs Cloudways – which is the best choice and why.
Let’s get right into it and compare Cloudways vs Bluehost side by side.
Cloudways is one of the most popular and influential hosting services that can be found nowadays. Because of their reliability, excellent uptime, and valuable features, this hosting provider generates high client rates and is preferred among many users. This is an SSD web hosting, crafted for startups, bloggers, developers, and online businesses.
Besides their excellent hosting capabilities, Cloudways stands out from the competition due to their expert customer support that’s fast and helpful. Their proficient and friendly team is among the highest-rated support squads online, available 24/7. How about that for a good host?
Cloudways has excellent features, and its innovative platform is built to empower teams and help businesses in their quest for expansion. The products and solutions they offer are fast, secure, and able to scale your business to the next level.
Bluehost is a US-based company that’s part of a massive corporation and is one of the best and oldest web hosting providers out there. Bluehost is capable of hosting high-traffic websites and is best known for its shared hosting.
With their “Basic’’ plan, this hosting provider offers one of the cheapest hosting services on the market; however, if you want to enjoy their premium features, we recommend using their “Choice Plus” or their “Pro” plan.
To keep it short, Bluehost offers 24/7 live chat customer support, a free domain name for the 1st year, free SSL certification, and a 1-click WordPress installation package. This web hosting gives you access to many marketing services, tools, and paid ad credits to boost your website’s global reach. If you don’t like what Bluehost offers, you can get a quick and easy refund within 3 days of signing up.
Cloudways Features
Expert support.
Cloudways has excellent customer support with their 24/7 live chat, online ticketing for more complex queries, and a phone line.
Performance.
Cloudways is an SSD based hosting that offers excellent loading speeds.
Security.
The security provided by Cloudways keeps all your servers safe from security breaches. This hosting provider offers dedicated firewalls, encrypted SSL, IP whitelisting, bot protection, regular security patches, and two-factor authentication.
Choice.
Cloudways gives you a lot of choices and freedom to take your business to the next level. It provides you with renowned IaaS, several WordPress and Magento sites on a single server, multiple PHP versions, and global availability of your data with access to more than 60+ centers all over the world.
Integrations and add-ons.
Cloudways gives you the option for multiple integrations and add-ons; it provides you with a Cloudways bot, API, third-party add-ons, Rackspace email, and a premium DNS service.
Bluehost Features
WordPress hosting.
Bluehost offers fast, easy, and secure WordPress hosting. With Bluehost, you can build your website in minutes with an automatic WordPress installation; you can choose from the hundreds of themes and get verified on Google My Business.
Shared Web Hosting.
Bluehost’s shared hosting is built to provide reliable hosting intended for blogs and small business websites.
Domains.
Once you find a suitable web address and use their domain name lookup, you can dive into the services and manage all its aspects with the easy-to-use control panel. When you settle on a domain, Bluehost will allow you to lock it down and prevent unauthorized transfers.
Services.
Bluehost provides you with services that will help you with your design and marketing needs. With their help, you will be able to focus on what really matters, building strategies for your business. The services they offer range form design and marketing to SEO suggestions, pay-per-click to target customers, and a smooth website migration. Bluehost also offers an expert live chat, email, and phone guidance for building and growing your business.
Email.
Bluehost offers a custom email for your domain, with a Microsoft 365 application. The email is included in all plans, and it comes with Microsoft Outlook web access, automatic updates, security and disaster recovery, and expert support.
Setting up Cloudways
First, we have to mention that Cloudways offers a free migration service. They offer to transfer your website from any web host for free, so you don’t have to worry about the complexities and time needed to finish this procedure.
There are two steps in setting up your website on Cloudways. The first step requires logging into your Cloudways Platform, selecting your target server, and writing down the IP address of the server where your web application is installed. After this procedure, you appoint your primary domain or add additional domains. That way, Cloudways will know which website name it should respond to.
The second step entails setting up your DNS register. You need to access your DNS provider panel and create an A Record. On the Cloudways website, you can find more detailed instructions on how to do this. Once you have added DNS records, it will take a maximum of 24 hours for your website to go live on Cloudways.
Setting up Bluehost
Bluehost doesn’t offer a free migration service, so you will have to manually migrate your website. Nonetheless, it’s easy to set up a WordPress site on Bluehost. There are several steps you need to take.
First, you need to sign up for your web hosting, choose a hosting plan, and choose a domain name for your site. After you are finished and have completed your hosting registration, you need to install WordPress, log into your account, and start writing and organizing your site.
Cloudways Performance
Cloudways is an SSD based hosting, with auto-healing managed cloud servers that resolve issues with auto-healing restarts. You’ll get a free WordPress cache plugin and a free Magento full page cache.
Cloudways is a top performer when it comes to speed tests. When using this hosting service, you’ll notice that even tutorials with over 50 images and hundreds of comments that take more than 2 MB page size load very fast.
Bluehost Performance
Bluehost uses CPU protection and ensures that every user on a shared server gets fast access to their resources. They ensure that all their clients have equal access, and if they detect that some of the users are abusing the servers, there are several disciplinary measures they can take. Bluehost might not be the fastest hosting service, but it surely is one of the cheapest with a variety of functional features.
Cloudways Customer Support
Cloudways has excellent customer support with their 24/7 live chat, online ticketing for more complex queries, and enhanced SLAs for a faster response. With their premium support add-on, you can also get a phone line for direct calls to their senior support team, or open a private Slack channel and pose all your questions there.
Bluehost Customer Support
Customer support is where Bluehost really shines. Besides the rich knowledge-based archive full of articles, guides, instructions, and FAQs, you can also use the chat or call them 24/7 on their “contact us” phone numbers.
Cloudways Pricing Plans
Pricing for Cloudways depends on the RAM, processor, storage, and bandwidth. You can check the pricing on the picture below. All plans come with the same features.
Bluehost Pricing Plans
You can choose between the “Shared”, “VPS”, and “Dedicated” plans, based on your specific needs.
Cloudways Wrap Up
We really like the features that Clouways provides. Although the pricing might be confusing, we love what the less expensive versions offer, and we especially like the free trial.
When it comes to support, we appreciate the option to reach out to their expert team 24/7; however, getting to the right person to resolve your issue might get some time. So there is a bit of a lag there. But besides that, we believe that Cloudways is an excellent and modern cloud hosting platform.
Bluehost Wrap Up
Bluehost delivers excellent performance and a great value for the price. It’s ranked as one of the best hosting platforms because it offers robust security, plenty of user-friendly apps and tools, and great features; all of which comes with some of the lowest pay rates in the industry. The customer support is also something worth mentioning.
Contrary to Cloudways, Bluehost also offers phone support.
The only disappointing thing about Bluehost is that there’s no free option for site migration. Also, the renewal rates for the hosting increase after the introductory price ends. But the positives far overweigh the negatives.
Bluehost vs Cloudways – Who’s the Best Choice?
Both Bluehost and Cloudways are excellent and offer outstanding services for the price.
However, Cloudways gives you a free trial option with two additional coupons that you can use for a discount. So if you are a beginner, it’s much more comfortable and convenient to start with Cloudways. But then again, if you have experience and want something more reliable, user-friendly, with excellent support, and great features, then we believe Bluehost offers a bit more.
For instance, when it comes to cloud hosting plans, Bluehost offers more space with their starter package than Cloudways. Bluehost also provides unlimited bandwidth, while Cloudways limits your bandwidth to 1 TB. Another competitive advantage of Bluehost is that it can enable users to share web hosting.
But when it comes to storing data, Bluehost only has server locations in North America, while Cloudways has them all over the world. So, if you prefer your data to be closer to you, then Cloudways is the way to go.
In the end, you are the one who has to decide which is better according to your specific needs. We only hope this comparison guide equipped you with the knowledge you need to make the right decision.
With the wide variety of hosting services currently available on the market, most of which are going after the same group of customers, you need a solution that offers superior service. Bluehost and Siteground are such hosting services, both exceptional enough that they stand out as two of the best web hosting options that you can currently find.
Both of these solutions are a great choice for just about every company, since neither of them have any glaring issues. Which is why this article isn’t going to be a comparison between a superior product to an inferior one, but rather a comparison between the nuances of two great web hosting options and the differences that make both of them ideal for specific companies. This is how you’ll find the best one for your specific needs.
In essence, you can think of this article as a comparison between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini, in the sense that both are absolute beasts, but everyone is going to have a preference.
So between Bluehost vs Siteground, who’s better?
Bluehost vs Siteground – a little bit of history
SiteGround was founded back in 2004 from the collective efforts and ideas of three college students. The site began operations in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria and has gone on to become one of the most recognizable names in the web hosting industry throughout the entire world. The company has grown massively since it’s founding and is now a holding of companies registered in the USA, UK, Bulgaria, and Spain, that manages four offices and several datacenter locations around the world
Bluehost was started one year earlier, in 2003, by Danny Ashworth and Matt Heaton in Provo, Utah. The two founders wanted to give people an affordable web hosting option that can provide everything that they might need in order to get their site up and running. Bluehost powers over 2 million websites throughout the world and that number grows by the thousands each day. The company has a strong partnership with WordPress and has an in-house team of experts that can provide 24/7 customer support on the uses of the website creator.
Speaking of building your website, both Bluehost and SiteGround are on the list of the three officially recommended WordPress partners, the third one being Dreamhost. As you can imagine, having the official seal of approval from the top website creation tool on the planet, which powers more than a third of all websites, means that both companies are top tier.
What kind of features do they offer?
Features are an important part of any web hosting service, and these two have a few very useful tools that could prove beneficial for any customer.
Bluehost
Hosting options
The large variety of hosting options that Bluehost offers make their plans flexible enough for just about any company, regardless if they have any specific requirements that they’re looking for. Bluehost offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting, colocation hosting and VPS hosting.
Security tools
The plans that are on offer also come with some extra protection that’s meant to put the user’s mind at ease from some more common threats to their sites. These security tools come with spam detection, malware detection, reliable firewalls and site backups that can be delivered at the request of the client.
Database support
Bluehost offers support for MySQL, PostsgreSQL, SQL Server, and more. The hosting service also offers the installation of CMS tools, as well as support for a variety of server-side coding languages.
SiteGround
WordPress options
All of the web hosting plans that the company offers include WordPress installation, automated migrations, automatic updates, advanced caching, and expert WordPress support. This is great news for anyone that’s struggling when it comes to creating a website, since all of these options are bound to make the whole process a lot easier.
Priority support
This feature allows premium customers to be directly assigned to more experienced support agents in order to sort out any problems that they might be having in mere moments. This feature is available for all of the hosting packages aside from the most basic one, and it’s definitely worth spending a few extra dollars to gain access to it.
Performance boosters
The boosters that SiteGround provides can really help improve your site traffic and overall efficiency. These boosters include SSD storage, a customized server setup, free CDN with each account, HTTP/2 enabled servers, SuperCache and servers located in four continents.
How do their speeds compare?
Both companies have fantastic uptime, which is to be expected from two giants in the field. Thankfully this means that either one could be a great choice for anyone that’s looking to engage their services. However, if we were to pick between the two and say which one has the edge when it comes to speed, we’d have to give the prize to SiteGround.
Bluehost is by no means lacking in this field and was in fact considered to be the fastest web hosting service in 2019, but this only shows how rapid the page load times are at SiteGround since they can manage to stay ahead even against competition this fierce.
Both sites provide stable connections and very rarely experience any sort of outages or downtimes that might restrict visitors from visiting a site that they are hosting. However, SiteGround has been shown to have better speeds and faster page load times than Bluehost in every location that was tested throughout the entire world.
What’s the customer feedback like?
This section is going to focus on the quality of the customer support that both companies provide, as well as the forethought that they put into ensuring that they’re customers are safe and taken care of through the use of data backups that can provide a sort of safety net in case something goes wrong.
Customer Support
Both SiteGround and Bluehost provide 24/7 customer support via phone, chat or email. Both companies also hire the best of the best when it comes to IT experts and support staff that can fix any issues that you might be having, or provide you with instructions when it comes to using certain WordPress options.
The consensus is that both companies provide great customer support in every regard, but according to a survey that was conducted, it seems that a lot of WordPress users actually favour SiteGround slightly more than Bluehost.
According to the survey, while most customers were satisfied with Bluehost, there were a lot of customers that found their overall support, as well as their WordPress specific support to be lacking. SiteGround on the other hand received favourable scores in both categories as well as positive reviews from most of the participants of the survey.
In terms of customer support:
Bluehost scored a 7.98 among non-us voters and a 8.16 among US voters in the survey
SiteGround scored a 8.68 among non-US voters and a 8.59 among US voters in the survey
Backups
You can spend months at work without having anything go wrong, but then you can have one single day that can ruin all of those months of work and flawless execution. In order to prevent such days from happening, or at least minimize the damage that they could cause to your company, it’s important to have a backup option available.
SiteGround and Bluehost both have a daily copy of your site data for the last 30 days of work. This will allow any company to work without having to worry about data loss. Both of their approaches towards the backup are slightly different though.
SiteGround provides this service as a feature in their GrowBig and GoGeek plans
Bluehost only offers this service for free on their most expensive plan and it costs an extra $3 a month if you want to get it as a part of their other plans.
While SiteGround has no backup option available for their low-tier plan, Bluehost has a much more serious issue in that the additional backup fee actually doubles the monthly price of the service, unless you spend the extra money to get the most expensive plan available.
Conclusion
Bluehost falls behind SiteGround in both backup and customer support, and while it’s still a great web hosting service, it has a few flaws that it needs to work out when it comes to prioritizing the needs of their customers.
What are their prices like?
Both companies have pretty similar prices when it comes to their most expensive hosting plans, but the differences in the pricing of the other plans and what you get from each company for a certain payment will play a very large part in deciding which company will give you more bang for your buck.
Before we go on, we should point out that Bluehost actually has two mid-tier options that are called Plus and Choice Plus. We will only go over Choice Plus in this article due to the fact that they’re both the same price and Choice Plus has a lot more options.
Low-tier
The Basic plan that Bluehost offers is priced at $2.95 a month. For this price you get 1 website, 50 GB of SSD storage, standard performance, 1 included domain, 5 parked domains and 25 subdomains.
The StartUp plan from SiteGround comes in at €5.99 a month. The package provides you with 1 website, 10 GB of web space and around 10,000 monthly visits.
Mid-Tier
Choice Plus is the upgraded version of the Plus package from Bluehost and it’ll cost you $5.45 a month. This option comes with standard performance, but unlimited websites, SSD storage and bandwidth, as well as unlimited domains, parked domains and subdomains. Choice Plus also comes with access to spam experts, domain privacy and protection, site backup and CodeGuard basic, as well as a Microsoft 365 mailbox which is free for 30 days.
The GrowBig option that SiteGround provides will set you back €9.99 a month. For this price you get unlimited websites, 20 GB of web space and around 25,000 monthly visits. Included in this price are also the options to request on-demand backup copies, speed boosting caching, staging, as well as the option to add collaborators.
Top-tier
The last Bluehost option is called Pro and it costs $13.95 a month. The three differences between this and the previous package from Bluehost is that instead of standard it offers high performance, it provides you with a dedicated IP, and access to two spam experts as opposed to just one.
The most expensive hosting option that SiteGround has is the GoGeek plan, which costs €13.99 a month. For this price you get unlimited websites, 40 GB of web space and around 100,000 monthly visits. You also get access to all of the options form the previous plan, as well as white label clients, the highest tier of resources and priority support for any issues that you might have.
What you get in every package
Blue host offers unmetered bandwidth and a free SSL certificate across the board, regardless of which plan you go for, as well as resource protection, marketing credits, scalability and access to domain managers which can make it easier to track, update and transfer your domains.
Siteground provides its customers with unmetered traffic, free SSL, daily backups, free CDN, free email, an unlimited database, and a 100% renewable energy match with all of it’s plans. As an added bonus, all of the hosting packages that SiteGround offers also come with a 30 day money back option, as well as free WordPress installation.
Drawbacks
Bluehost has proven to be the cheaper option all across the board when it comes to the prices of the services themselves. However, they do charge a one-time migration fee of $149, whereas SiteGround offers the migrations option free of charge.
SiteGround offers a lot of impressive perks for buying any one of their packages, but they do have limited storage options even for their most expensive plan, while Bluehost offers unlimited storage even in it’s mid-range hosting plan.
Summary
Bluehost vs Siteground – who’s better? As we said in the beginning, either of these web hosting services are a great choice for just about any company, but there are a few things that you need to keep in mind before you decide which one you’ll want to ultimately go with.
Bluehost provides more than enough features for any small to medium sized company, especially when you consider the reasonable prices that they charge, as well as their unlimited storage options that come as a part of their mid and high-tier packages.
SiteGrounds provides excellent customer support, backup options and some of the fastest speeds of any hosting service provider that’s currently in business. They are especially well suited for medium to large sized companies, or anyone that’s willing to spend a bit more money on the quality that the company can offer.
If you want to increase your conversion rates and engage with visitors based on an in-depth analysis of their actual behavior, then having a heatmap software is a must.
Heatmap software is different from your typical analytics software (Google Analytics, for example) because it shows you how consumers behave on your site in a visual way.
It collects data on clicks, keypress, scrolls, and looks, and allows you to visualize this activity by showing you the areas of your pages with more activity as hotter as opposed to the areas where there’s not much user activity.
Given that choosing the right heatmap software and tools can be a time-consuming task, we jumped right into this challenge and created a list of the seven best heatmap software and tools.
They all share standard functionalities; however, some are equipped with extra features and are more suitable for your business than others. To better understand which heatmap software is the most suitable for you, go through the list, compare features, and choose your winner.
Lucky Orange is one of the best heatmap software solutions that can be found nowadays, which is why it’s the first choice on this list.
This software can help you make sense of your traffic, analyze the behavior of each visitor, and, based on those indicators, increase your leads, conversion, and sales.
Lucky Orange gives you tools to instantly notice where and why your visitors become unsatisfied, confused, and leave your site. You’ll be able to see how many people are on your website right now, how they found your site, and find out the purpose behind their visit.
With Lucky Orange, you can detect for yourself why people stay, or leave and don’t convert. Installing and setting up Lucky Orange takes less than five minutes, and it won’t slow down your site either. Let’s go over the most important features.
Features
Real-time dashboard
With the easy to use Dashboard, you can see exactly how many people are currently on your site and how they found you. The dashboard will also enable you to compare historical data and statistics on keywords, referrers, locations, tweets, driving traffic, and other user behavior on your site.
Recordings.
Lucky Orange records every visitor on your website, and it provides you with a segmented recording that can be easily filtered into analytical data to answer the question of why visitors don’t convert. This software records dynamic and members-only pages, as well as other advanced sites and single-page apps.
Dynamic heatmaps.
Lucky Orange will showcase all your visitor’s actions in bright and beautiful heatmaps. It will show you how people read and interact with your site while segmenting that data by location, browser, dates, mobile users, and more.
Chat.
The Lucky Orange chat, which integrates with your website, is rich with features that will enable you to send auto invites for chat, assign multiple operators, give canned responses, etc. The chat feature is fully responsive for desktops and mobile devices.
Conversion funnels.
The conversion funnel feature will enable you to quickly identify the drop-offs in your conversion process. When you click on this option, you will instantly get filtered recordings with data about the abandonment of the visitors in particular steps.
Form analytics.
When using this feature, you will be able to discover which fields of your forms are causing abandonment. The software will provide you with five distinct and valuable reports that will give you a detailed insight into the problems you have with your forms.
Polls.
The polls feature will enable you to ask your visitors about their preferences. Polls are highly customizable and can be made in multiple questions, redirection to URLs, and can be triggered at the best moment for your visitor.
With Hotjar, you can understand how users are experiencing your site, and you can do that without the typical abundance of data and numbers that don’t tell you much about users’ experience, or make it hard to understand.
Hotjar works with most of the popular ecommerce platforms, and it’s easy to set up and even more comfortable to use. This tool is one of the best heatmap software programs because it keeps end-user privacy at the center of what it does.
This software is used by over 500.000 organizations, in more than 184 countries. Hotjar intends to satisfy the needs of marketers, product managers, and UX designers. Marketers track customer satisfaction, product managers eliminate guesswork by recording sessions to detect how people use their products, and UX designers look at users’ behaviors and ask the right questions.
Features
Heatmaps.
If you want a visualized behavior map on every click, tap, and scroll behavior, then Hotjar has you covered. This feature eliminates guesswork by recording and analyzing all your visitors’ behavior, so you can have a better understanding of what’s at play and build better strategies.
Conversion funnels.
With this feature, you can find the most significant opportunities for improvement, because you can identify the page or step where your visitors drop off.
Form analysis.
With Hotjar, you can improve your online forms completion rates by merely detecting at what point your visitors decide to leave or continue filling out the form on your website.
Incoming feedback.
With the easy-to-use feedback feature, you can see what people prefer and don’t like; you can identify issues and create strategies for future growth.
Feedback pools.
If you want to understand the reasons behind your website visitors’ behavior, you can use this feature to target questions to specific visitors and get helpful answers that will help you improve.
Surveys.
With this feature, you can create surveys for your website visitors and customers and place them on any page of your website.
Heatmap gives you instant access to data and immediately informs you of the issues you need to fix in order to take action. This software enables you to discover how users interact with your pages and provide you with real-time analytics for your website visitors and customers’ behavior. Understanding your customers is key to the further development of your business, and that’s exactly the purpose behind Heatmap.
Features
Heatmaps.
This software allows you to access real-time analytics and check what’s happening on your website right now. The heatmaps are updated continuously and appear on your screen in seconds. Based on the information from your heatmaps, you can change your content, change pictures, and change every other element that impacts behavior on your website.
Interactive interface.
With the interactive interface, you can browse your pages even when the heatmap overlay is displayed—this allows you to investigate further or replay the navigation of your visitors.
Easy to install, small footprint.
All you need to do to install Heatmap is to add a JavaScript tag. The tag is very small, and it won’t slow down your pages. The tag works with all browsers; it’s configurable and handles rendering differences.
Privacy for users.
Heatmap collects only the data that’s necessary to produce the heatmaps, so there is no additional key-logging, cookie sniffing, and even the IP addresses are not logged. Heatmap does not collect, nor does it sell your data to third-party apps.
This is a software that can produce visualized heatmaps with complex data that will help you understand the behavior of your customers much better. This software can also run marketing and product experiments by conducting A/B tests. The VWO tool takes you a step further when compared to conventional tools because it helps you gain a complete and personalized picture of your users’ behavior.
The DIY interface of the VWO editor makes it easy for you to navigate, create marketing experiments, and experience the growth of your business. You don’t need coding experience to use this tool, because a team of experienced developers is continuously working on the HTML/CSS/JS.
Features
A/B Testing.
It’s easy to create and run tests with VWO. This software is capable of combating cart abandonment, building an excellent digital experience, and increasing your revenue. You can create A/B tests and different versions of your site so you can choose the best-performing version.
Multiple tests.
VWO allows you to run multiple tests on your page at the same time while ensuring that the tests don’t interfere with each other.
Laser target your tests
You can run tests based on visitors’ on-site behavior, click, time spent, page scroll, etc.
Funnels.
With VWO, you can map out your visitors’ actual behavior and check what progress they’ve made during different stages of their digital experience.
Record and playback visitors’ sessions.
You can use session recordings to follow your visitor’s behavior and how they interact with your website.
Heatmaps.
With the help of the VWO heatmaps, you will be able to see your visitors’ browsing history while on your website. You can detect what catches their attention, where they spend most of their time, or where they drop off.
One-Page surveys.
The one-page surveys will help you discover the insights of your visitors’ behavior by giving them simple surveys they can answer on the spot.
Form analytics.
You can also analyze the form reports and detect how visitors interact with the form on your website.
Mouse Flow is one of the best heatmap software solutions on the market right now – it records the behavior of frustrated users, detects JavaScript errors, finds friction on your website, and much more.
It’s built to increase conversion rates by recording track clicks, mouse movements, scrolls, form, etc. This software also filters sessions and finds the ones that the users don’t enjoy, and enables you to eliminate guesswork so you can take proactive measures sooner rather than later.
Mouse Flow is secure and mobile-friendly and packed with features that support dynamic content, checkout, member-only page, etc.
Features
Heatmaps.
This feature provides the user with indicators to detect essential behavior in an easy to read format. The software gives you a summary of where people click, move the mouse, pay attention, and are located on your website. With the data provided by this feature, it will be easier to uncover what works and what has to go.
Funnels.
Mouseflow tracks activity from every page analyzes the key journeys of visitors, and builds reports on where people drop out.
Forms.
With the forms provided by Mouseflow, you can identify what hurts your conversions, and improve your user experience accordingly. The forms will help you identify issues and enhance the visibility of your website.
Feedback.
This feature will enable you to understand your visitors much better, because you can create custom surveys and deliver them to a specific audience to get valuable feedback.
Third-party integration.
Mouseflow works seamlessly with third-party apps such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Shopify, Squarespace, and many others.
Because of its ability to understand user behavior, Inspectlet is one of the best heatmap software solutions on the market. The heatmaps that this software produces can visualize and help you understand data in a glance.
With Inspectlet, you can stop guessing what your visitors want, and playback and detect everything they want from your site. Setting up this tool is very easy. All you need to do is write a couple of lines of javascript into your website and see how data gets to your dashboard in a matter of seconds.
Inspectlet can be integrated with Google Analytics, and while this analytics tool will tell you what kind of behavior is happening on your site, Inspectlet will tell you why.
Features
Session recording.
Inspectlet can record videos of your visitors as they use your website. It offers you the possibility to see every mouse movement, clicks, keypress, and scrolls. By recording all these actions, you can learn priceless information, and based on that data, you can improve your user experience significantly.
Powerful filtering.
With this option, you can detect exactly what your visitors are interested in watching, or you can discover when they abandon the checkout process.
Conversion funnels.
With the funneling option, you can detect where you lose potential leads. The software enables you to define a series of pages that lead toward a goal, and then watch the recordings of the visitors to better understand what went wrong.
Tag your session and users.
With this feature, you can identify individual users and mark exciting events. The javascript tagging API lets you send any metadata to associate with the user or a session so that you can filter against it.
AJAX, HTTPS, Single-page apps.
This well-developed software plays very well with all the latest technologies like single page web apps, AJXm dynamic DOM manipulation, Cookies, and login authentication and HTTPS/SSL.
Heatmap visualization.
With Inspectlet, you get an eye-tracking option, and you can see what your customers are reading. You can combine this data with the data of mouse movement to find correlations. This feature also provides you with data from clicks and scrolls.
A/B testing.
With the A/B testing, you can test two versions of a page to see which is the best performing version based on data about their effectiveness.
Form analytics.
The form analytics provides varieties of metrics and with critical information on the performance of your site.
Error logging.
With Inspectlet, you can track and monitor all javascript errors, view network requests during a page view, and see how exactly an error occurred.
Due to it being a complete marketing and analytics platform, PTEngine is one of the best heatmap software solutions you can find nowadays, one that uses smart marketing and archives excellent results. PTEngine helps you deliver the right information to the right customer by implementing the high-performance UX. This software allows you to focus on the end-to-end user experience and optimize every level of the performance of your site.
This tool also will enable you to see where your customers come from, how they interact with your content, and where they drop off. The data you collect with PTEngine can be merged with your other data, and based on this information, you can create custom experiences for each visitor.
Features
A/B testing.
This easy-to-use and highly functional feature is the best way to test the performance of your web pages. After several clicks, the user data for optimization of your platform will be right in front of you. You can also segment your audiences and make tailored reports for targeting.
Heatmaps.
PTEngine enables you to create heatmaps like clicks maps, attention maps, and analysis maps. With these maps, you will be able to detect which is the top-performing content on your site, how in-depth do your users consume your content, whether there any unexpected misleading things for users, and much more.
Digital experience platform.
The DXP is a feature that collects all your data from your customers’ touchpoints.
Faster, smarter conversions.
With PTEngine, you can reduce CAC with data-driven optimization, foster loyalty with customers by unifying the view of the individual visitor, and empower your team to analyze the data quickly so it can run tests and improve the functionality of your website.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you identify the best heatmap software for your needs. There is no clear conclusion which one is the best because they all have excellent features that will satisfy the needs of even the most demanding entrepreneur, so we encourage you to test your favorites from this list.
Having a heatmap software that will measure your performance will increase your market competitiveness; however, if you want your business to grow even faster, we recommend combining this heatmap software with other digital marketing tools. That is the best way to improve your conversion, engagement, and the growth of your customer base, and with that, the growth of your revenue.
If you want to take your Shopify store to the next level, having an excellent email marketing solution is a must! After all, email marketing is one of the best ways to convert website visitors into customers, which is why in this article, we’ll review the best email marketing apps and tools for Shopify that are currently on the market.
But Why Is Email Such a Powerful Marketing Method for Converting?
First of all, email is the perfect marketing tactic for targeting inactive customers. Sending reactivation emails to those who haven’t opened your newsletter or purchased a product in the past 6 months might remind them why they liked your brand in the first place. This is a great way to bring back past customers but also remove inactive customers from your list.
Secondly, email marketing allows for segmentation. As we already mentioned, emails are a great method for converting website visitors into customers. By segmenting your audience, you can boost engagement and personalize your emails whenever a customer or a potential customer has a birthday, abandons their shopping cart, purchases a product, etc.
Then we have automation, which is perfect for promoting your products, various announcements, birthday emails, setting up reminder emails about abandoned shopping carts, but also thanking your customers after they’ve completed a purchase.
And lastly, email marketing is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your customers. You can send them tracking numbers for their purchases, ask them if they’re satisfied with the product/service, and of course, ask them for product reviews and feedback.
The Best Email Marketing Apps and Tools for Shopify in 2020
As one of the best email marketing solutions specifically designed for ecommerce, Klaviyo’s popularity started rising after Mailchimp put an end to their Shopify integration. It offers integration with WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and, of course, Klaviyo works seamlessly with Shopify.
Klaviyo’s popularity is not only because of its flexibility when it comes to integration with ecommerce platforms, but due to the various valuable features it offers as well.
As an advanced marketing automation solution, Klaviyo is all about increasing your ROI and helping you make more sales, so let’s go over some of those features.
Features
Segmentation.
Segment your audience based on their behavior on your site, geographical location, engagement with previous campaigns, and other factors, to make your emails more personalized and more effective.
Targeting.
It’s very easy to start a targeted campaign with Klaviyo because this email marketing app allows you to track what your customers are doing on your website, so you can get in touch with people who are frequent visitors, those who have abandoned their carts, etc.
Personalization.
You can pull dynamic blocks for order details, cart contents, custom web feeds, and product recommendations, as well as hide dynamic data blocks based on recipient characteristics or use template tags to personalize specific elements.
Automations.
This email marketing app allows you limitless options for email automation. You can combine what your customers do with the already collected data and customize automated email flows to your heart’s content.
Reporting.
With the analytical features Klaviyo offers, you don’t have to settle only on clicks, opens, and sales, but you can also rely on how much revenue you’ve generated from specific marketing promotions. You can also add, edit, and remove metrics to customize your dashboard to your liking.
A/B testing.
With this feature, you can test your email campaigns and your triggered flows to measure results and grow your business faster.
Verdict
Klaviyo is the best email marketing tool if you want to create more complex email marketing campaigns and use its ample functionalities to achieve your business goals.
We recommend Klaviyo to ambitious entrepreneurs who have email marketing experience and are ready for the next step in their business adventure.
Shopify online store owners can take advantage of ActiveCampaign due to its excellent deep data integration with this ecommerce platform. With this email marketing and sales automation tool, you can offer your customers a great shopping experience and put the right emails in front of the right people to boost your sales.
ActiveCampaign is one of the best email marketing apps for Shopify because it provides a series of useful features that are best suited for marketers who have previous experience with email marketing.
Features
Powerful Marketing Automation.
With this powerful feature, you can set email welcoming messages, segment your contacts based on various parameters, and use simple workflows to automate your marketing campaigns.
Smart CRM.
By making it possible to keep all your customer data organized in one place, you can manage pipelines, update deals, and always be ready for the next big moment in sales.
Email Segmentation.
How about a powerful email segmentation feature that can make it possible for you to send the right emails to the right people? With this feature, you will have the opportunity to segment your audience based on various factors and provide them with tailored information for a more personalized experience.
Website Messaging.
Keep meaningful connections with your customers and message them when it matters the most. What’s more, you can engage them by recommending products, offer sale deals, ask for feedback, or ask them questions about their experience with your products and store.
Advanced Reports.
Analytical capabilities are some of the most crucial functionalities that an email marketing app can have. With ActiveCampaign’s advanced analytical tool, you will be able to better understand the behavior of your customers and create strategies to gain leverage on the market.
Integrated Forms.
The moment your customers give you their contact info, you can start engaging them by triggering actions as follow-up campaigns. Besides capturing the contact information, the sign-up forms will enable you to tag people based on their interest and start automation campaigns that will boost your sales fast.
Gmail Chrome Extension for CRM
ActiveCampaign gives you the option to manage all your sales communication without leaving your Gmail account. You will be able to see exactly when your contacts have opened your email, track their behavior, and collect valuable information for your next marketing campaign.
Verdict
ActiveCampaign is considered one of the best email marketing tools currently on the market, and now you know why. Similarly to its competitor Klaviyo, this is also a tool that’s recommended for those who are already familiar with how email marketing works.
If you are an online entrepreneur that wants to shake things up and introduce an extra flair to their online business, then ActiveCampaign is the best email marketing tool for you.
If you have a growing base of subscribers but you don’t want to spend a lot of money on email marketing apps, Sendy is the right choice for you. Also considered one of the best email marketing tools for Shopify, Sendy uses Amazon’s Simple Email Service to send trackable emails that will help you engage with your customers and boost sales.
With its newsletter application functionalities, Sendy will provide you with the possibility to send authenticated bulk emails for a low price and superb deliverability. Sendy also offers integration with third-party apps and bumps functionality and value to this cheap email marketing solution.
Features
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
Sendy uses Amazon’s high-scale cloud email service due to it being cost-effective and flexible and providing users with excellent inbound and outbound email service. With SES’s flexible IP deployment, you will be able to deliver carefully analyzed emails at high rates, personalize messages, and protect your email sender reputation.
Analytical Features.
With Sendy, you can create beautiful reports and visualize the opens, clicks, bounces, and complaints in nicely designed charts and data. Based on the results, you can segment customers and target them in various campaigns.
White Label Client Accounts.
If you are managing multiple products and services, this feature will allow you to organize them into groups called “brands”. This option will give clients access to their own brand and let them send their own newsletter for a price set by you. It’s not only the price that you can adjust, but you can also put monthly sending limits and adjust their privileges to this service.
Autoresponders.
The autoresponders feature will provide you with the option to automate your marketing campaigns and send tailored emails at specific date and time intervals set by you.
List Segmentation and Subscriber Management.
You can segment your audience and create different lists based on the parameters you choose. Managing the lists is easy because you will have the options to import/delete, subscribe/unsubscribe contacts, tailor thank you/goodbye messages, etc.
Blacklist.
With this feature, you can block email addresses from certain domains, or put emails into the suppression list to ensure you never accidentally re-send another email campaign to the same person again.
Third-party Integration & Zapier.
Sendy offers simple integration with third-party apps. Zapier, an app that’s also on the list, will provide you with 1000+ apps from Zapier’s directory that can further boost the functionalities of your automated email service.
Verdict
Sendy gives you excellent deliverability of emails for a very low price. As one of the best email marketing tools, Sendy offers integration with third-party apps and offers features that will boost your business in no time. If you are new to email marketing or what to change your email marketing solution because you find it expensive, Sendy is definitely for you!
Another great email marketing tool for Shopify is Bento. This all-in-one marketing platform with email, chat, SMS, ad analytics, and data visualization is capable of providing enterprises with effective features for less than the price of its competitors. With Bento, you will be able to synchronize your data effortlessly and create prices and productive messaging strategies that will make a big difference in your sales.
Because it’s an all-in-one marketing platform, Bento saves you time on installing unnecessary apps and gives you fast page loading times, leaving your visitors satisfied with their shopping experience. Let’s go over some of Bento’s best features.
Features
Customer Support.
User-friendly chat, phone and email support, and video tutorials, Bento offers all this support for a fair price.
Plug-in Installation.
Bento can be installed by copy-pasting the script on your preferred platform, and if that platform is Shopify, you’ll have a 1-click option on the menu.
Email Deliverability.
Bento gives you access to every channel on the platform (chat, email, SMS) and provides improved deliverability and accuracy leaving no space for mistakes.
Lossless Tracking.
With Bento, you can track your customers’ behavior from the moment they click on your site. This email marketing tool tracks and stores all behavioral data your customers create and will give you detailed reports on which you can base your future marketing campaigns.
Automation.
You will be able to automate your SMS, chat, and email messaging, because Bento automatically assigns additional information to all your contacts.
A/B Testing.
Bento also provides you with an A/B testing feature, giving you the option to see which content works better with your specific audience.
All-in-one-App.
As you can see, Bento is an all-in-one solution that offers tracking, live chat, analytics, automation, segmentation, welcome banners, surveys, etc. With Bento, there is no need for installing several additional apps.
Verdict
Bento is one of the best email marketing tools for Shopify simply because it’s an all-in-one marketing solution. You also get a state of the art CRM, which might be essential if you want to boost sales and improve your business strategy. We recommend Bento for more experienced email marketers who want to go a step further.
How about a smart email marketing tool for Shopify that can keep your audience engaged by delivering tailored messages to the right people at the right time? Sendinblue is excellent for building unique connections with your customers and can serve as the driving force behind the growth of your business.
With the help of Sendinblue, besides growing your business, you can also start your entrepreneurial adventure and look for new opportunities to invest in and expand, which is why this tool is used by big and small companies alike. The intuitive design and highly functional features make Sendinblue great for both newbies and more experienced marketers.
Features
Drag-and-drop Editor.
When you create a message, Sendinblue will give you the options to choose a starting template, build a new design, add blocks and styles, and adjust the template to match your brand, all this in their intuitive drag-and-drop editor
SMS Marketing.
Sendinblue also offers marketing via SMS. With SMS communication you can reach your customers directly and create urgency on time-sensitive offers. This feature is excellent for spreading the word about your offers and creating a competitive edge on your competitors.
Chat.
With the chat feature, you will be able to set a chatbox and start a conversation with visitors on your website to answer all their questions right from the start. The chat will allow you to assign team members to different conversations and organize your team so you can have a more productive workflow.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
With Sendinblue, the moment you upload your contacts you immediately have access to this feature. The CRM will give you control over your contacts from one centralized place where all the data from previous calls, meetings, and relevant documents can be reached with a few clicks.
Automation.
With this software solution, you will have access to marketing automation that will enable you to automate marketing tasks and improve the workflow of your organization. You have full control over the automation feature, and will have the power to set rules and conditions to trigger different actions.
Segmentation.
The segmentation feature will enable you to target smaller groups with messages that are tailored just for them. There are several segmentation options to choose from like declared interests, previous engagement or purchase history, socio-economic or geographical characteristics, etc.
Landing Pages and Signup Forms.
With Sendinblue, you get pristine pre-built landing pages all easily reachable in just a few clicks. You also have a beautifully designed signup form, which will enable you to collect and store information from your customers.
Statistics.
Gain detailed insight into the behavior of your customers and optimize your marketing campaigns to boost sales and conversation rates.
A/B Testing.
The A/B testing is an essential feature to optimize your email campaigns by testing and choosing the right version that you believe best represents your business.
Verdict
Sendinblue might be the last email marketing tool on this list, but that doesn’t make it the least good. On the contrary, Sendinblue offers all essential features for your business and does that for a cheaper price. That is why, if you want to lead an email campaign that does not take too much of your resources then Sendinblue is the one for you.
Final Words
Choosing the best email marketing apps and tools for Shopify depends on your needs and your priorities. If you need an email marketing tool that is capable of complex automated campaigns then we would recommend Klaviyo and Activecampaigne.
If you don’t want to purchase yearly licenses and want a solution for occasional purposes then we recommend Sendy, furthermore, if you are on the market for a cheaper software solution capable of robust campaigns then we recommend that you go with Sendinblue.
There is also Bento, the all-in-one solution, capable of doing various operations and substituting a whole bunch of other apps and tools.
All these email marketing solutions are the best in the business and for that reason alone, they are on the list for Best Email Marketing Apps & Tools for Shopify in 2020.
How fast is fast enough when it comes to loading websites? According to Google, 3 seconds is all you have to load your website before mobile visitors get annoyed and leave. Sounds like a difficult demand? That’s because it is. For example, the average load time for sites on mobile is 19 seconds and 14 seconds, depending on whether one is using a 3G or 4G network. So, how can you be better than average?
In this article, we’ll take a look at the best email WordPress caching plugins that can significantly increase your site speed. Websites that load within five seconds perform much better in terms of viewability, average session time, and bounce rate.
Can a caching plugin help you achieve that? There are many things that can affect the speed of your WordPress website and we wrote about the subject in great detail in our comprehensive guide on How To Fix A Slow WordPress Website. While hosting-related problems come first, having no caching plugins in place is the second most common reason why your WordPress site is slow to load.
Caching is a must-do for WordPress and you can think of it as a data storing unit that memorizes a static version of your website and is ready to display it as soon as your page is requested.
How You Can Benefit From a Caching Plugin?
The first and main benefit of installing a caching plugin is the increased speed and performance of your website, but there are also a few other benefits that come as a result of the increased speed.
Installing a caching plugin can also reduce the load on your hosting server. This can be especially beneficial for anyone who uses a limited hosting plan. Caching will save you a lot of memory and transferring operations.
Furthermore, faster websites get more visibility because they provide a more positive user experience. Being on Google’s good side will get you new visitors while being on the users’ good side is key to retaining those visitors as loyal customers. The fact that Google confirmed that site speed is one of the main ranking factors speaks a lot about how important this is.
When you combine that information with the astonishing statistics that say 92% of traffic goes to the results on the first page of Google, you can’t afford to be without a caching plugin. And we are here to tell you which ones will get you the best results.
The Best Caching Plugins for WordPress
Since site speed is so important, there are many caching plugins available on the market today, making it nearly impossible to tell which is the fastest.
So, how can you be sure you’re making the right decision for your website?
Will you benefit by installing any caching plugin? Certainly, not, which is why we’ll take a look at the best caching plugins for WordPress, and show you exactly how you can benefit from each one.
Just a quick note before we begin: Although we have our favorites and we’ll discuss why in great detail, we can’t and should not label any plugin as the fastest on the market. Some of them are more feature-packed and user-friendly than others, but it’s up to you to test them and see which one performs better on your website. This is because your server, configuration, resources, and even physical location affects the performance of the caching plugin.
On top of that, caching plugins are incredibly complicated and there are dozens of settings that affect the speed positively or negatively. What works best for you, might not be the best option for someone else. We recommend trying out and testing a few different caching plugins first, to see which one delivers the best results for you.
WP Rocket was founded in 2013 by Jonathan Buttigieg and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier, two web developers who got frustrated by the existing plugins because of their complexity. According to them, plugins weren’t optimized for user experience, as they had way too many features, and set up was time-consuming even for experts. So, it was upon these two problems that they based their own plugin, WP Rocket – a simple solution for everyone.
WP Rocket was developed by rigorously following WordPress’s philosophy. Simplicity was their top priority, making it easy for beginners and non-tech-savvy users to install and use the plugin.
And, it seems like their idea was a winning combo. Since 2014, WP Rocket has optimized more than 1,212,000 websites and made more than 144,000 customers happy. The plugin gained popularity quickly, as it was recommended by leading WordPress Experts soon after its release, and positive customer reviews have been piling up ever since.
WP Rocket is our favorite caching plugin for a number of reasons, but we really love the simple user interface and quick setup. Although we do believe beginners should spend some time learning about the settings and how they can optimize the plugin, WP Rocket has the power to make your website blazing fast without you having to spend hours on it or be an expert on the subject.
Why We Chose WP Rocket As One Of The Best Caching Plugins for WordPress?
Developer friendly. Optimized to fit both worlds, WP Rocket delivers a great experience to developers by being clean and easy-to-use, as well as flexible and fully customizable.
Cloudflare compatibility. WP Rocket integrates with Cloudflare so you can manage everything from the WordPress dashboard.
Cache preloading. The indexing of your website by search engines is improved as the WP Rocket crawler simulates a visit to preload the cache.
Database optimization. The plugin will clean your WordPress database and reduce the number of resources used.
Static file compression. WP Rocket reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files, and you know that lighter means faster.
Images on request. Lazyload is a technique used by major websites like YouTube and Facebook, where the images on your websites are loaded only when the visitor scrolls down the page. This furthermore improves the load time of your website.
Google Fonts optimization. The ability to optimize Google Fonts is one of the most advanced and unique features that are very hard, if not impossible to find in other caching plugins.
Browser caching. The ability to store static components of the website in the browser, so when the visitor goes on another page of your website, the static components do not need to be loaded again.
Final Thoughts
WP Rocket is one of the best email WordPress caching plugins currently on the market that’s especially appealing to the less tech-savvy users, beginners, or DIY-ers. However, we believe professionals and bigger businesses would also be satisfied with it.
Being a premium caching plugin, unfortunately, there’s no free option for anyone who wants to try WP Rocket for a limited time. However, the team behind WP Rocket guarantees that you can get a refund if you request it within 14 days of purchase. That being said, there are three payment plans you can choose from, based on the number of websites you want to optimize. At this time, the one website plan costs $49 for one year of support and updates, the three website plan costs $99, while the infinite website plan costs $249.
Wondering why you would spend money on a premium caching plugin, with so many great, free options available? WP Rockets stands out from its competitors because it’s incredibly feature-packed and provides a lot of options that many free caching plugins lack, like browser caching, lazyload, and so on.
Anyone with a WordPress website can use WP Rocket, although a minimum of PHP 5.6 is required. Whether your website is a simple blog or an online store, WP Rocket will speed up the loading time remarkably. If you’re an expert or a long-time professional, you’ll be glad to know that WP Rocket is very flexible and you can customize it to your liking.
If you’ve been looking for a WordPress speed optimization plugin, chances are you’ve come across W3TC (W3 Total Cache), as it’s one of the oldest caching plugins for WordPress and presumably the most well-known.
W3 Total Cache was first launched back in 2009 and through the years it has gone from being the most popular caching plugin to being in the hotspot because of a problem in developer support. Fortunately, BoldGrid bought the plugin in 2019, and from there on, we’ve witnessed the efforts to restore W3TC to its former glory.
Today, W3TC has more than 11 million downloads, with over 1 million active installs. The vast majority of the reviews gave the plugin five stars, although there is a significant portion of one-star reviews due to the rough patch this plugin went through before it was bought by BoldGrid. This needn’t worry you, as it’s all in the past and we’ll show you why W3TC deserves your attention.
We love that W3TC has the ability to integrate with CDNs, and its focus on delivering the best results for mobile and websites that use SSL certificates (eCommerce), where fast loading pages are crucial for making sales. In fact, there’s a lot that W3TC offers, and we’re going to take a look at the best features in more detail. Just, keep in mind that some of these features require the PRO version.
Why We Chose W3 Total Cache As One Of The Best Caching Plugins for WordPress?
Transparent integration with most CDNs. CDNs included are Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, Rackspace, and many more, which improve SEO rankings, the time visitors spend on your site, and conversions.
Compatibility with most hosting options. W3CT is compatible with shared hosting, virtual private/dedicated servers, and dedicated servers/clusters.
W3TC offers mobile support and AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support.
Fragment Caching(PRO version). The ability to control the caching times for comments, eCommerce, and other interactive elements.
Caching Statistics(PRO version). The ability to use advanced metrics that can help you diagnose and identify previously unknown performance issues that might be key to fixing your slow WordPress website.
Minification and compression. W3TC makes JS & CBS files a lot lighter and with that, it increases loading speed.
Lazy Load for Google Maps(PRO version). W3TC optimizes Google Maps so it can speed up loading times.
Support for Object Caching.
Purge Log feature. You’ll get information when your cache is being cleared and why.
Final Thoughts
We believe W3 Total Cache is the best email WordPress caching plugins for SEO experts, developers, and other professionals, as it’s very technical to configure and might be overwhelming for beginners in this field. You might easily break your page, so be careful.
Another advantage of W3TC is that it comes as a free tool that you can upgrade to a PRO version. The free version is available directly from WordPress, while the PRO version is only available in-app within the free plugin interface. Unfortunately, there’s no multi-site discount, so regardless of how many sites you have, you still need to pay $8.25 a month (billed annually – $99) for the PRO version. This is very expensive when compared to WP Rocket, for example.
It’s not our favorite caching plugin, but it’s here because we do recognize its potential to make your website load at a dazzling speed. BoldGrid claims at least a 10x improvement in overall site performance once the plugin is fully configured. Plus, at the end of the day, it all boils down to personal preference and W3CT might just be the right tool for your website. If you’re an experienced developer, we encourage you to try the free version and test it for yourself.
Swift Performance is relatively new on the market but many developers and professionals are already convinced that it leaves the competition lagging with its powerful performance and lightning-fast loading times. Is it really the best value-for-money plugin you can find today?
Considering the fierce competition, we wouldn’t say it’s the fastest or the best value, but it’s definitely one of the best. Keep reading to find out our favorite features and what makes this plugin truly valuable, so you can make an informed decision on whether it might be the best for your specific needs.
The first benefit of Swift Performance comes from the fact that it’s much more than a caching plugin, as it offers a lot more features that classify it as a full WordPress speed optimization tool.
With this tool, you’ll be able to improve perceived load time, reduce server response time (TTFB), improve loading times for returning visitors, improve site efficiency, and offer advanced granular control.
Why We Chose Swift Performance As One Of The Best Caching Plugins for WordPress?
Compatibility with other plugins. Swift Performance is compatible with WooCommerce, WPML, bbPress, Cloudflare, Varnish, and more.
Lazyloading Feature. The ability to only load images and other elements when the visitor scrolls down the page.
Smart Caching System. The intelligent caching system allows users to cache AJAX requests and dynamic pages. It also means that users can create rules about which files they want to be cached.
CSS and Javascript Optimization. The ability to minify the CSS files and Javascript, as well as generate CSS for every page automatically.
Image Optimizer. Optimizing the images can make them lighter without sacrificing image quality.
Google Analytics Bypass. The ability to host Google Analytics locally, which eliminates the external call (HTTP request) to Google servers.
Database Optimizer. This feature deletes unneeded revisions, expired transients, trashed posts, orphan, post meta, and other elements that might be slowing your performance.
Plugin Organizer. Once you install a plugin, it becomes active on all of your pages automatically, so Swift Performance allows you to create rules on how you want your plugins to work and where.
Final Thoughts
This powerful all-in-one WordPress speed tool is designed to fit the needs of both beginners and experienced professionals. However, we believe that to fully optimize the plugin, you still need some “expert” touch as it’s somewhat difficult to set it up. That being said, Swift Performance offers a guided setup wizard and autoconfiguration, so even if you doubt your skills, we encourage you to give it a chance.
Swift Performance is a premium caching tool that offers three pricing plans and a 14-day money-back guarantee, just like WP Rocket. The pricing plans are dirt cheap considering you can choose a plan depending on how many websites you need to optimize. If you have one website, you can purchase the “single” plan that costs only $39 a year. The “multi” plan costs $99 a year and allows you to optimize up to four websites, while with the “developer” plan you can optimize an unlimited number of sites for $199 a year.
On top of this, Swift Performance comes in two variations:
Swift Performance Lite
Swift Performance PRO
The Lite version is free and you can find it in the WordPress repository.
Swift Performance goes beyond your caching needs, which is why it’s perfect when you need much more than caching to fix your slow WordPress site, so you don’t have to pay or look for a variety of different tools. It’s the ultimate multi-use tool that offers the functionalities of five different plugins.
Comet Cache is the second cache plugin from the developers that first created ZenCache, a cache plugin that also enjoyed a large following. In 2016 they launched Comet Cache, which received many positive reviews from developers. And, even now, after almost 2 million downloads and over 60,000+ active installs, this caching plugin manages to hold on to its five-star rating.
We love Comet Cache because of its easy installation process and user-friendly dashboard that will appeal to many users who aren’t professionals in the field but still want to optimize their page by themselves. On the other hand, if you’re a developer, you can configure the plugin with its advanced features and the PRO version functionalities even more.
Nonetheless, the documentation department is what truly sets Comet Cache apart from its competition. Installing or buying this plugin means you’ll get incredible support and a massive library of learning resources that will help you understand caching in-depth.
Why We Chose Comet Cache As One Of The Best Caching Plugins for WordPress?
Two-Minute Setup. Comet Cache is really famous for its easy and well-documented set-up that doesn’t take more than two minutes.
Post/Page/Category/Tag Caching. The ability to speed up load times by optimizing the caching settings for all WordPress components.
Automatic & Intelligent Cache Clearing(PRO version). The ability to set the caching preferences upon installation and then forget about it as the feature will automatically detect any changes and clear the cache.
Client-Side Browser Caching. The ability to allow the browser to cache the cache for extra speed (double-caching), which is not the same as “Leverage Browser Caching”.
WP-CLI Compatibility. It means you can install, activate, deactivate, and delete all from the WP-CLI.
GZIP Compression. The ability to improve compression rates (up to 70-90%).
Debugging Mode. The ability to see what exactly Comet Cache is doing by enabling debug notes in HTML “View Source” mode.
Mobile-Adaptive Mode. The ability to create multiple variations of your cache based on OS, device type, browser name, and browser version. This is perfect if you’re using different themes for your desktop and mobile site.
Final Thoughts
Comet Cache is one of the most efficient and user-friendly caching plugins you can find on the market. It’s the perfect option for most beginners and amateurs who want to see lightning fast results without putting way too much effort into the configuration process. Although, if you’re a developer, Comet Cache is flexible and offers some advanced features, so it’s still a good option for you.
When it comes to the pricing options, you can choose between a Lite (free of charge) and two PRO (paid) versions. The good thing is that the pricing is just a one-time fee that will get you a lifetime of software updates and three years of support. The first paid version costs $39 for a single site and $99 for three sites. The second paid version offers unlimited sites for $139.
Comet Cache also offers the possibility of buying a developer license with some added benefits and a 14-day money-back guarantee.
The main reason why you might want to upgrade from the free to its paid version is the reduced workload. Having the paid version means that all the features will be automated and you can basically “set it and forget it”, while on the free version you’ll have to do a lot of things manually.
Simple and highly effective, WP Fastest Cache is yet another popular and loved caching plugin that you can find in the WordPress repository. It’s very similar to our previously mentioned plugins, as it also claims to be the fastest and simplest. However, WP Fastest Cache also offers some unique features which give it a spot among the best caching plugins for WordPress.
WP Fastest Cache has more than 1 million downloads and over 100,000 active installs, with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5, which is pretty impressive. One reason for its popularity is that WP Fastest Cache’s free version comes packed with a lot of great features and functionalities which are more than enough for the average user. For example, the free version features desktop caching, minification of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
We love it because the developers are fully committed to this plugin and they update it regularly. Plus, customer support is top-notch, so you won’t need to worry if something is not clear.
Why We Chose WP Fastest Cache As One Of The Best Caching Plugins for WordPress?
Several minification features. The ability to combine and minify CSS and JavaScript.
Leverage Browser Caching. The ability to store static components in the user’s browser, so the page doesn’t need to be reloaded when the user moves from one page to another.
Image Optimization. The ability to optimize images and make them lighter, which speeds up the load time of your page.
Cache Statistics. The ability to diagnose and identify performance problems by looking at advanced metrics that show how your page is performing.
Database Cleanup. The ability to clean your WordPress database in order to save resources and make your page lighter.
Lazy Load. The technique of loading images only if and when the visitors scroll further down the page.
Final Thoughts
WP Fastest Cache is one of the best email WordPress caching plugins for the average user as it doesn’t allow for too much customization, and it’s very easy to navigate. The plugin can speed your site and do it for free as long as you don’t need any advanced functionalities.
You can find the free version in the WordPress repository, while you can only buy the paid versions directly from the WP Fastest Cache website. There are three premium plans offered: bronze, silver, and gold. The bronze plan costs $49 and includes one license, the silver plan costs $125 and includes three licenses, while the gold plan costs $175 and includes 5 licenses. WP Fastest Cache promises a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with the results. There are also some other possibilities when it comes to the payment options but you have to sign up and contact the team to get specific information.
How Do Caching Plugins Work?
The first thing you need to know is that WordPress generates content dynamically. In other words, every time someone requests to access your website, WordPress processes all the information (files, elements) to provide an up-to-date version of your website to the user’s browsers. However, this process takes some time, especially if your page is larger and contains a lot of elements. This is where caching plugins come into play.
Caching plugins were created as a solution for the slow process of loading the page dynamically. Caching plugins create a static HTML version of your page by memorizing all the information and then simply show the visitor a cached version, as opposed to the heavy PHP scripts.
It works because once you update your website and publish posts, you won’t make day-to-day changes in the content. But, even then, the best caching plugins are developed to “refresh” if you make a change to your page.
And the visitor won’t even be able to tell the difference between a dynamically processed and a cached version of your page. Users will only notice how fast your website loads, which contributes to a more positive browsing experience.
How Loading Times Impact Your Website
Does a time variation of one second really make a difference? You might think not, but according to Amazon, one second costs $1,6 billion in sales yearly. Google, on the other hand, has calculated that they’ll lose 8 million searches per day if their search results were only four-tenths of a second slower. These shocking findings speak a lot about the lack of tolerance for slow loading websites among web users and give reason to why so much effort is invested in finding faster ways of displaying websites and search results.
These findings also explain why Google will punish you by not showing your website high in their search results if it loads slow – they want to make sure the user is satisfied with its search.
So, by having a slow loading page, you’re losing traffic in two ways. First, Google will rank you much lower, which will decrease your visibility. Second, half of the users that found your page will leave before your page loads, thus lowering your viewability.
Fortunately, an easy solution is to install a caching plugin that will help you increase conversion rates and search engine rankings.
Summary
Since site speed and performance is crucial for website traffic, installing a caching plugin becomes an indispensable task. Hopefully, our article will help you decide on the best caching plugin for your WordPress site.
After going through dozens of potential options available on the market today, we made a final selection of what we believe are the best five caching plugins – and, the fastest, too. Our list includes WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, Swift Performance, Comet Cache, and WP Fastest Cache.
Every website is different as it uses different themes and elements, so try to think about your site, and which of our recommendations can serve you best. However, don’t forget that caching plugins are just one piece of the whole puzzle. To find out what more you can do, check out our article on the best WordPress speed optimization plugins, tools & resources.
Before leaving, the final thing we want to mention is that you should be particularly careful whether you already have a caching plugin. Some WordPress hosts have built-in caching or their own caching plugin. Make sure you do your research before installing a new plugin. The reason for this is because having two plugins is worse for site speed than having no caching at all.
With so many web hosting services to choose from, it’s no wonder that you might be having a hard time choosing the best option for you. Depending on the exact requirements of your company, certain services are going to be much more convenient for you than others.
The most common requirement that most companies have, especially small startups and medium-sized companies, is the price of the web hosting service. For this exact reason, we’ve gathered 10 of the most reasonably priced and cheapest WordPress hosting providers that are currently on the market.
Spoilers
Hostinger wins the main prize when it comes to affordable web hosting services. This result was, honestly, pretty obvious considering that the company offers a staggeringly low price on its initial hosting plan.
However, the rest of the services that are on this list also have some pretty reasonable prices, especially when you consider the caliber of the options they offer with their plans.
So, if you simply wanted to know which was the best cheapest WordPress hosting that you can find – it’s without a doubt Hostinger. If you wanted to know some other options that you can get for some criminally low prices, read on.
SiteGround offers daily backups for up to 30 days with all of its plans, as well as an accompanying 30-day money-back guarantee policy. All of their customers also receive free SSL certificates and 24/7 support, on top of the free CDN and the dev tools that give access to tools like WP-CLI, SSH, PHP version control, and more.
Plans
StartUp – $7.10 a month
The first plan that SiteGround offers will get you 1 website, 10 GB of webspace, and around 10,000 visits per month. The plan also comes with the “essential WordPress features”, which consist of the free WP installation, migration, and 24/7 WP support options, as well as a free email, and HTTPS. You’ll also receive WordPress CLI and SSH, in addition to the auto-updates and daily backup options.
GrowBig – $11.85 a month
The second plan that SiteGround offers will get you unlimited websites, 20 GB of webspace, and around 25,000 visits per month. You also get the previously mentioned essential features, as well as the premium ones. This means that you’ll gain access to the WordPress SuperCacher, advanced on-demand backups, 1-click WP staging, and the option to add collaborators.
GoGeek – $16.59 a month
The final plan that SiteGround offers will get you unlimited websites, 40 GB of webspace, and around 100,000 visits per month. Aside from the essential and premium features, you’ll also get the final “geeky WordPress features”. These features come with a pre-installed Git for WP, white-label site management, the highest tier of server resources, and advanced priority WP support, meaning that WP experts will always be on standby to fix any issues that you might be having before you can so much as blink.
Pros:
Recommended by WordPress
One of the fastest services when it comes to site loading speeds and upload time
Provides performance boosters that can increase site traffic
Cons:
Limited CPU due to the shared host
Not recommended for high traffic sites due to the monthly visitor limit
While SiteGround is the priciest option on our list, the plethora of useful features that you get with each plan more than compensate for having to pay a few more dollars a month. This particular web host is known for the speeds of its service and customer satisfaction, making it a great choice for companies that are large enough to afford the plans, but not so large as to have problems with the limited site visitor restrictions.
GoDaddy provides unmetered bandwidth and free 1-click WordPress install as standard features in all of the plans that are on offer. All of the customers will also be given access to an easy-to-use control panel, 1 GB of database storage, and 24/7 network security. In addition, GoDaddy also has the 1-click domain name setup and 1-click install of over 150 free apps.
Plans
Economy – $7.75 a month
This plan will provide you with 1 website, 100 GB of storage, and standard performance for your site. You’ll also get 10 databases, a free office 365 email for the first year, as well as a free domain.
Deluxe – $10.35 a month
This plan will provide you with an unlimited number of websites, unlimited storage, and standard performance for your websites. You’ll also get 25 databases, as well as the same free email and domain that the previous plan also offered.
Ultimate – $16.80 a month
This plan will provide you with an unlimited number of websites, unlimited storage, and twice the processing power than the previous plans offered. You’ll also get an unlimited number of databases, free premium DNS, and a free SSL certificate for one year, in addition to the free email and domain.
Maximum – $25.85 a month
This plan will provide you with an unlimited number of websites, unlimited storage, and twice the processing power and speed of the Economy and Deluxe plans. You’ll also get all of the previously mentioned additional features, the difference being that the free SSL certificate will be valid for the full term of your hosting plan, and not just for one year.
Pros:
Easy to use website creation tools
Famously reliable servers
Cheap prices for a free domain name and automatic backups
Cons:
Has a higher starting price than a lot of its competitors
Most of the best options are only available in the most expensive plans
Much like SiteGround, GoDaddy is considered to be on the more expensive side of web hosting services. However, GoDaddy is actually a great choice for bigger companies that are predicting a higher number of visitors to their site, since they can probably afford the plans that open up unlimited visitor options.
Pricing starts at – $4.99 ($7.99 at renewal) a month
Disk space starts at – 50 GB
InMotion offers a WP optimized stack in every plan, as well as free SSL and premium malware and hack protection. All of the plans also come with 24/7 customer support, WordPress as a pre-installed feature, and a money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with the service that was provided.
Plans
WP – 1000S – $4.99 ($7.99 at renewal) a month for the 3 year plan
Purchasing this plan will gain you a free domain and 1 website that’s suitable for around 20,000 monthly visitors. You’ll also get 50 GB of SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, and a WordPress web builder that can really be helpful for anyone who’s new to website design.
WP – 1000S – $7.99 ($10.99 at renewal) a month for the 3 year plan
Purchasing this plan will gain you a free domain and 2 websites, both of which are suitable for around 50,000 monthly visitors. You’ll also get 100 GB of SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, and access to the same WordPress web builder as the previous plan.
WP – 1000S – $10.99 ($13.99 at renewal) a month for the 3 year plan
Purchasing this plan will gain you a free domain and 3 websites, all of which are suitable for around 125,000 monthly visitors. You’ll also get 150 GB of SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, access to the WordPress web builder, and a dedicated Opcode cache pool.
Pros:
SSD storage with all of the plans
Advanced WordPress features
Free website transfer
Cons:
The enormous price spike upon renewal
Slow loading speeds
The biggest drawback to the plans that InMotion offers is undeniably the difference in the initial price when it’s compared to the renewal price. This hosting service is a great option for companies that can afford to pay the monthly premium and can make good use out of the SSD storage that InMotion provides with every plan.
iPage provides its users with access to sites that are very search engine friendly, which is a great help for drawing in potential visitors to their customer’s sites. You’ll also get a dedicated staff of WordPress experts that are always on standby, as well as a platform that’s designed to increase load speeds by up to 2.5 times.
Plans
WP Starter – $3.75 a month
The starter plan comes with a free domain registration that lasts for one year, unlimited storage and bandwidth, a customizable control panel, and a ton of pre-installed themes and plugins.
WP Essential – $6.95 a month
The essential plan offers all of the same options that were mentioned in the previous package, in addition to automatic malware removal, SiteLock professional security, and WordPress expert support.
Pros:
The customized control panel
Contains a lot of popular pre-installed plugins
WordPress support
Cons:
There are only 2 plans and both of them offer very few features
Heavy user loads are a concern
The only problem with iPage is its small selection of plans and features. However, the web hosting service is still a great affordable option for any company that’s looking to utilize the unlimited storage and bandwidth that are offered even in the cheaper plan.
A2 Hosting provides WP auto-setup as an essential feature in all of its plans. You can also look forward to receiving access to unlimited email accounts and unlimited transfer options, as well as 24/7 phone, email, and live chat support. Additionally, you’ll also get a free SSL certificate, Cloudflare CDN, and website builder.
Plans
Startup – $2.99 a month
The cheapest plan will grant you access to a single website, 100 GB of SSD storage, free site migration, and a money-back guarantee. You’ll also gain access to the “key features”, which include website staging, an easy cPanel control panel, a 99.9% uptime commitment, and a choice of data center location.
Drive – $4.99 a month
The second plan will grant you access to an unlimited number of websites and unlimited storage, on top of the previously mentioned free site migration and money-back guarantee options. You’ll also get free automatic backups, all of the “key features”, as well as the “growth features”, which contain twice the number of available resources, unlimited databases, as well as data backup and traffic spike protection options.
Turbo Boost – $9.99 a month
The third plan will grant you access to an unlimited number of websites, unlimited NVMe storage, as well as all of the previously mentioned features from the other two plans. You’ll also get the “turbo features”, which contain up to 20 times faster page loads, higher SEO rankings, lower bounce rates, improved conversion rates, and much more.
Turbo Max – $14.99 a month
The final plan will grant you access to all of the features that were mentioned in the previous plan, including the ability to handle 9 times more site traffic, the 3 times faster read/write speed, and the 40% faster AMD EPYC CPU performance, which all come as part of the “turbo features”. The difference is that you’ll receive 5 times more resources than the previous plan had to offer.
Pros:
Good balance of performance and affordability
Monthly payment system
Easy site transfer
Cons:
Servers are prone to crashes
Takes a while before the servers are up and running after a crash
A2 Hosting has a lot of good features and a reputation for good customer support. The biggest difference between A2 Hosting and most of the other providers that appear on this list is the fact that it provides a monthly payment option as opposed to the standard yearly option. This means that it’s a great choice for any company that either isn’t sure what they want from their web hosting service yet, or for companies that don’t want to take advantage of this service for a full year.
Bluehost gives out a $200 marketing credit with all of its plans. Potential customers will also be happy to know that each plan comes with automatic WordPress installation and updates, a free domain name for 1 year, and hundreds of available themes that you can use to customize your website. You also get verified on Google My Business, a free SSL certificate, and 24/7 WP support.
Plans
Basic – $2.95 a month
The basic package offers you 1 website, 50 GB of SSD storage, 5 parked domains, and 25 subdomains.
Choice – $5.45 a month
The choice package offers you unlimited websites, unmetered SSD storage, unlimited parked domains and subdomains, as well as a free 30 access to a Microsoft 365 mailbox.
Choice Plus – $5.45 a month
The choice plus package offers you all of the same features that the previous plan did, as well as access to a CodeGuard basic backup option.
Pros:
Recommended by WordPress
A free domain name is included in every plan
A free site builder
Cons:
Long waiting times on support calls
Semi-frequent site outages
Bluehost has a reputation that speaks for itself. All of the plans come with remarkably similar features, all of which are incredibly useful. This means that any company that gets anything aside from the cheapest plan will also get access to certain unlimited resources, making Bluehost an incredible deal for a company of any size.
All of the plans that HostGator offers come with unlimited pages and email addresses, as well as unmetered bandwidth and storage. HostGator also offers 1-click WordPress installations and free WP/cPanel website transfer options. You might also be interested in the website builder that comes with an assortment of templates, the 24/7 customer support via phone and live chat, and the automatic weekly off-site data backups.
Plans
Hatchling – $2.75 a month
In the hatchling plan, you’ll get access to a single domain, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain that’s included in the plan.
Baby – $3.95 a month
In the baby plan, you’ll get access to unlimited domains, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain that’s included in the plan.
Business – $5.95 a month
In the business plan, you’ll get access to unlimited domains, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain that’s included in the plan. You’ll get an option for a free upgrade to a positive SSL, a dedicated IP, and even access to a few very useful SEO tools.
Pros:
Good speeds for such low prices
Free auto-backups
Decent WP cloud hosting plans
Cons:
Intermittent Website and Email Problems
Random server crashes
HostGator offers a great balance of reasonable prices, great up speeds, and useful features. This means that the service is a great option for pretty much any company, regardless of their size. All of the plans come with unlimited pages, bandwidth and storage, so the price isn’t an issue and everyone that can pay the nominal fee can use the fantastic resources that HostGator has to offer.
All of the plans that DreamHost offers come with WordPress pre-installed, a free automated WP migration option, and a WP website builder. All of the plans also come with unlimited bandwidth and storage, automated backups, and free privacy protection. You might also be interested in the free SSL security, the advanced but easy to use panel, and the in-house 24/7 WordPress support.
Plans
WordPress starter – $2.59 a month for the 3-year plan
In the starter plan, you’ll get 1 website, a free domain, fast SSD storage, a free SSL certificate, and the option to add an email for as low as $1.67 a month.
WordPress unlimited – $4.95 a month for the 3-year plan
In the unlimited plan, you’ll get an unlimited number of websites, a free domain, fast SSD storage, a free SSL certificate, and an unlimited number of emails for your domain.
Pros:
Recommended by WordPress
Unlimited bandwidth
Consistent performance
Cons:
A very pricey email option on the first plan
The more affordable plans require a 3-year commitment
DreamHost has been a staple in the web hosting business for a long time now. The customers trust the service and rely on it to provide them with good stability and site speeds. While it might not be outstanding in any particular aspect, DreamHost has been a recommended partner of WP for a long time now, and that should tell a lot about the quality of the service you’ll get.
Namecheap includes unmetered bandwidth, a free website builder, and domain name and privacy protection in all of its plans. All of the users will also get a free supersonic CDN, an automatic SSL installation, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Additionally, the service also provides 24/7 live support and a personalized email option.
Plans
Stellar – $1.44 a month
The stellar plan comes with 20 GB of SSD storage, 3 websites, and free CDN.
Stellar plus – $2.44 a month
The stellar plus plan comes with unmetered SSD storage, unlimited websites, a free CDN and domain name, and an AutoBackup.
Stellar business – $4.44 a month
The stellar business plan comes with 50 GB of SSD storage, unlimited websites, a free CDN and domain name, AutoBlock, and cloud storage.
Pros:
A monthly payment plan
Incredibly affordable
The initial plan offers 3 websites
Cons:
Limited WordPress support
Random server crashes
Namecheap is another web hosting service that doesn’t have mandatory yearly plans, but rather allows the customers the flexibility of paying month to month and cutting off their subscription any time they want. Add that to the incredibly low prices, and you get a service that’s a great first choice for any fledgling company.
Pricing starts at – $0.99 ($2.15 at renewal) a month
Disk space starts at – 100 GB
Hostinger offers 1-click WordPress installation, 24/7 chat support, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The service is WP optimized, has a wide variety of website creation tools, and the Hostinger panel is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.
Plans
Single shared hosting – $0.99 ($2.15 at renewal) a month
This package will grant you access to 1 website, 1 email address, 100 GB of bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain.
Premium shared hosting – $2.89 ($3.49 at renewal) a month
This package will grant you access to an unlimited number of websites, an unlimited number of email accounts, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, a free domain, 2 times the amount of allocated resources as the previous plan, and WordPress acceleration.
Business shared hosting – $3.99 ($7.95 at renewal) a month
This package will grant you access to all of the features from the premium shared hosting plan, as well as daily backups and 4 times the amount of allocated resources as the first plan.
Cloud hosting – $7.45 ($17.90 at renewal) a month
This package will grant you access to all of the features from the premium shared hosting plan, as well as daily backups and 48 times the amount of allocated resources as the first plan.
Pros:
Free templates
Intuitive website builder
High-speed performance
Cons:
A spike in prices after upon the renewal of the plan
Limited features
The merits of Hostinger are pretty self-explanatory – use it if you’re a new company that wants to make use of the most economical available web hosting option. In fact, even bigger and more established companies can make good use of the unlimited websites, emails, and bandwidth that Hostinger has to offer.
Our recommendations
Now that we’ve gone over some of the more attractively priced web hosting options, we would like to take a bit more of your time to note a few items of interest that you might find useful when it comes to choosing your first web hosting service.
Support
As you might have noticed, most of the web hosting services that we mentioned consider their 24/7 customer support to be one of their most important features, and rightfully so. However, keep in mind that pretty much every service will have this option. The more important thing that you should watch out for is that the service actually has WP support.
A dedicated WP support team makes the world of difference when it comes to how fast they can solve any issues that you might be having. While this may not be an absolutely crucial feature, in the long run, it can really turn out to be a life-saver, especially for new companies that aren’t that knowledgeable on the workings of WordPress and the issues that might arise.
Simply put, bandwidth is going to be a lot more important in the beginning when your company is still relatively unknown and you don’t have that much need for site storage space. As you expand you might want to look into getting a bit more storage space, if you need it, that is.
Keep in mind that while your current storage space might be adequate even if your site grows exponentially, your bandwidth should always be able to keep up with the transfer rate that you need to hit for your visitors. Meaning that you should almost always prioritize better bandwidth rather than more storage space.
Site traffic
Having your site traffic be limited to a certain number per month initially seems like it would be quite limiting for any company. The truth is that if you’ve just started out, you’ll struggle to reach even some of the more restrictive monthly visitor limitations.
As you grow and expand your customer base, you’ll naturally start getting a lot more hits on your site, but it really isn’t worth it to consider switching to a more pricey web hosting service plan in order to get rid of restrictions that you aren’t even reaching.
Additionally, any plan that has an unlimited visitor option at a reasonable price is worth considering. However, speed and storage space are a lot more important and should always take priority.
In conclusion
SiteGround is a great choice if you’re looking for speed, BlueHost is a great all-rounder that can provide you with everything you might need, HostGator offers unlimited bandwidth and storage at affordable prices, and Hostinger has a price tag that’s so low that it’s almost comical.
Any of these web hosting services are a great choice for pretty much any company. However, the rest of the services we mentioned also have something for everybody. Meaning that ultimately it’ll depend on what you’re looking to get out of your web host.
Auditing your website is just one of those crucial elements for a successful online business, but reviewing a website is not an easy task. To accomplish such a complicated procedure, you need to have experience, a keen eye for detail, or ideally both. What’s more, auditing is very time-consuming since you need to go through hundreds of pages to accomplish your goal. That’s why competent SEO auditors turn to some of the best SEO and website audit tools to attain their online entrepreneurial goals.
Given the sheer volume of available software, choosing the best SEO auditing tools can be rather tricky. But, we did the leg work for you by conducting all the necessary research to help you find a solution that’s most suitable for your needs. Should you opt to include some of the software on this list, hiring an SEO consultant would be no more than an afterthought. The expert teams that created these audit tools will provide all the help you’d ever need.
So, without further ado, let’s dive into the list.
Semrush
Semrush is one of the best SEO audit tools because it’s capable of accumulating and processing large volumes of data to provide the user with products that are essential for a successful online marketing specialist. As one of the leading companies in the business, over 6 million users all over the world use this software. This all-in-one marketing platform is capable of auditing your site using all the relevant information and making your content recognizable and unique.
Semrush is capable of providing backlink ideas, research keywords used by competitors, daily position tracking, PLA copies, along with the keywords that trigger them, and much more. Semrush also enables you to take care of your brand reputation by monitoring and responding to customer suggestions which will improve your site in no time. This software will make your business more accessible and will provide you with a variety of features that are essential for every successful online business story.
Features
Analytical Reports
With Semrush, you’ll be able to get insights into your competitors’ strategies, discover their best keywords, detect new organic competitors, and observe position changes of domains. With this feature, you’ll be able to gain a competitive edge by adopting marketing strategies you might not have thought of.
Advertising Research
Semrush provides research that enables you to uncover competitors’ search ads, dive into your competitor’s search strategies, and based on that information, create your PPC campaign. The research also provides you with information on the competitor’s ad budget, best keywords, your competitor’s ad copy, and landing pages, etc.
Organic Research
This feature will allow you to find out which keyword drives the most traffic for your rivals and find the most relevant keyword in your industry. With organic research, you can also analyze websites ranking Google’s top 100 and get your webpage to a search engine results page.
Backlink Analytics
The backlink analytics tool is useful for collecting and analyzing any website backlinks. This activity can be time-consuming; however, Semrush provides you with a feature that checks the backlink in a few clicks, thus providing you with options to stay up to date with every inbound link.
Keywords Research
Semrush is one of the best audit tools because it provides you with PLA research that explores the competitive landscape by analyzing your rivals’ e-commerce strategies in detail. With this feature, you can see whose ads are pushing you out of online sales, see how many PLA keywords your competitors have in common with you, discover the words that trigger ads, and define Google shopping rivals.
Traffic Analytics
Traffic analytics in Semrush is a powerful tool that will reveal your competitors’ prospects and uncover your potential partners by analyzing website performance, setting benchmarks, and providing you with smart insights. This feature will also provide you with detailed traffic metrics on variables like website performance, traffic volume, leaders and upcoming players, trends, desktop vs. mobile traffic rations, etc.
Raven
Raven also ranks as one of the best SEO audit tools. This software is an all-in-one platform that connects all of your SEO, marketing, and advertising data in fantastic marketing reports. By combining all of the data in your marketing reports, you’ll be getting your paid social and organic data all in one place.
With Raven, you can grow your business by boosting your SEO results and improving your client reporting. What’s more, the features that this platform offers will satisfy the needs of every agency, freelance entrepreneur, and in-house marketer. Because of its high functionality, thousands of small, middle-sized, and large companies trust and use Raven.
Features
Website Audits
This feature quickly analyzes your website in order to find and fix all issues that affect your website’s traffic. By fixing these issues, you’ll be able to improve your ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Backlink Tools
Backlink Explorer allows you to enter a domain or URL and get an advanced overview of the backlinks. By having this option, you’ll be able to take a look at your competitors’ functioning and better understand their strategy. When you identify the backlinks, you’ll also be able to add those links to the Management tools and inspect their quality.
Rank Tracking
This feature will provide you with daily, weekly, or monthly rank tracking on each SERP, be it Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu. The variables that you can track include device type, zip code, language, single keyword, keyword lists, etc. You can also access historical ranking data and export the data in nicely visualized reports.
Marketing Reports
With Raven, you can build reports in seconds by using the straightforward drag-and-drop reporting wizard. While creating reports, you’ll have access to 30+ data modules and summary pages. The reports in Raven can be scheduled or created on-demand, and every account includes unlimited reports.
Competitor Research
These features combine domain and keyword research in a single research resource, saving you plenty of time. With competitor research, you can easily access and analyze an URL’s page authority, domain authority, backlinks, social signals, etc.
Link Building Manager
The link building Manager will allow you to store, organize, and find thousands of link opportunities as well as monitor link activity. With this feature, you can also categorize the links, integrate link manager with the CRM, store relevant information for a connection such as URL destination, link type, link status, anchor text, and much more.
Keyword Rank Checker
The keyword rank checker gives you the ability to research competitors and get instant access to a domain’s keyword ranking. With this insight, you’ll be able to better understand your rival’s website and give a massive boost to your website by implementing keywords that your competitors don’t have.
Agency Analytics
Agency Analytics also ranks as one of the best SEO audit tools. With this software, you’ll save precious hours of work thanks to the easy-to-use drag-and-drop dashboard. With Agency Analytics, you have options such as powerful reporting features, beautiful PDFs, and web-based reports that will be automatically sent to your clients.
As one of the best SEO audit tools, this software also offers rank tracking, website audits, backlink monitoring, and much more. Agency Analytics supports integration with more than 45 third-party apps. It allows you to connect to the most popular marketing channels like Google Analytics Adwords, Facebook Ads, Search Console, social media, and much more.
Features
Automated Marketing Reports
The automated marketing report feature will enable you to schedule daily, weekly, and monthly reports and keep your clients up to date with all of the relevant developments. When you send the news to your clients, you can also send them comments and suggestions, explaining the significance of key performance indicators regarding their marketing campaigns.
40+ Marketing Integrations
With Agency Analytics, you’re able to review insights from your clients’ marketing channels using only one app. You can streamline the marketing campaigns and monitor them in a single interface, saving you hours better spent elsewhere.
Custom Marketing Dashboard
Agency Analytics offers drag-and-drop custom widgets on a mobile-friendly dashboard. There’s a variety of widgets that you can choose from, such as bar charts, statistics, pie charts, line graphs, etc. By using this feature, you can also give your clients access to a customizable dashboard that you control.
Fully Branded for your Agency
Agency Analytics allows you to add your branding across the interface, reports, and mobile apps. Branding is an easy process and all you need to do is upload your logo, choose your color scheme, and access it from your domain.
SEO Tools
SEO Tools give you the ability to accurately track keyword ranking for any language and any location. You can also optimize or boost the client’s ranking by identifying and fixing all of the SEO issues on the spot.
Manage Your Entire Agency
Agency Analytics allows you to create staff accounts and assign staff members to each client so they can easily monitor progress.
Woorank
Woorank is a simple and easy-to-use website analysis tool that can track and connect your marketing data with an instant SEO checker and an SEO audit tool. The features that this SEO audit tool provides will give you relevant insight and help you optimize your marketing strategies quickly and efficiently.
Woorank can also help businesses gain more usability by increasing your website’s online visibility and give you a better understanding of the criteria you need to improve to get better SEO results. Woorank, as one of the best SEO audit tools, will keep track of your websites without the need for an expert. Because of its intuitive interface, small and big companies alike prefer Woorank.
Features
Simple Digital Marketing
With Woorank, you can streamline your marketing efforts, increase your visibility, and track & analyze your website’s data. The functionalities of this feature will improve the usability of your website’s data for SEO and social media.
Report
Woorank provides you with well-designed reports that can be fully customizable with your brand. With the detailed descriptions that Woorank delivers, you’ll be able to keep your existing customers up to date and build strategies to entice new prospects.
Keywords research
Woorank offers a powerful tool for keyword analysis. Using this feature, you will dominate the search results, by revealing and outranking your competitors’ keywords. Based on this analysis, you’ll be able to build strategies so you can stay ahead.
Marketing Tips and Tricks
Woorank offers plenty in the way of actionable marketing tips to improve your website’s performance and reach your online customers.
Keyword Tool
This feature enables you to find new keywords, track ranking, positions, competitors, competitors’ keywords and strategies, and much more.
Site Crawl
With this feature, you can understand your site’s overall technical and SEO health by analyzing the data and detecting hidden errors that affect your traffic.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is one of the best SEO auditing tools that you can currently find. By being a website crawler, it helps to improve onsite SEO by extracting data and auditing for all SEO issues. Screaming Frog is easy to download and free to activate for up to 500 URLs. You can also buy the license which removes the limitations of the free version and enjoy all of the premium features.
Screaming Frog, as one of the best SEO audit tools, offers a powerful and flexible site crawler that can be effective for both small and big websites, and also includes analytical tools that are capable of analyzing all data in real-time. With Screaming Frog, you will always make informed decisions and watch your business grow.
Features
Search Engine Marketing
This feature encompasses a wide range of activities, all revolving around making your website more visible for people using a search engine. With search engine marketing, Screaming Frog will give you a better understanding of the unique business challenges and objectives, leading you to a better strategy for growth.
Search Engine Optimization
By using this feature, you’re sure to get a return for your investment because you’d only be paying for qualified traffic. Due to the PPC strategy that this software provides, you’ll get tailored PPC campaigns that are right for you and your business.
Social Media Marketing
Screaming Frog will help you develop a social media marketing strategy built by an in-house marketing team. They will help you find the right tone, voice, and style that will suit your brand.
Content Marketing
Screaming Frog offers an experienced team that can produce creative content or create content strategies to boost the SEO of your website.
Link Building
With Screaming Frog, you’ll be able to define your link building objectives and identify key audiences or influencers from the industries you consider to be relevant for the growth of your business.
Conversation Rates Optimizer
With this feature, you can improve your site’s conversion processes and increase traffic. You’ll also enhance the user’s onsite experience and identify any potential barriers within your funnels.
Analytics Consultancy
You can also improve your digital offerings and enhance the experience of your customers because you would be able to analyze and understand their behavior. The analytics will help you determine your ultimate business objectives and measure them with relevant and carefully harvested data.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best SEO audit tools and competitive research tools that will boost your traffic and rank your website higher in no time. Ahrefs has one of the most prominent backlink indexes and allows you to look at your competitors’ strategies, keywords, backlinks, etc. This is an all-in-one SEO toolkit that offers free learning materials and tutorials that can be used by junior marketers and SEO experts alike. Both bloggers and multinational brands use Ahrefs due to the excellent tools it provides for the growth of your search traffic.
It’s no wonder that Ahrefs is the first software option for many experienced marketers all over the world. By using Ahrefs, you get excellent community support and you can participate in the private Facebook community where you can pose questions or bounce ideas. They also offer excellent customer support via chat and Twitter – 24 hours a day throughout the workweek.
Features
Site Explorer
The site explorer combines three powerful SEO tools in one interface, allowing you to do organic traffic research and see what keywords your competitors are ranking for. Backlink checker gives you an overview of which websites link to your competitor’s sites, along with paid traffic research that lets you know whether your competitors are doing paid search advertising.
Keyword Explorer
With this feature, you’ll be able to discover thousands of great keyword ideas, analyze their ranking difficulties, and calculate a keyword’s potential of bringing you traffic. The keyword explorer supports data for 171 countries and supports ten different search engines.
Site Audit
With the site audit, you can check under the hood of your website and find what’s holding you back, allowing you to create a strategy to overcome the challenges. The website analysis you get is visualized with key data charts on different parameters.
Rank Tracker
By using the rank tracker, you’ll be able to monitor ranking over time and measure your performance against your competitors. This feature will enable you to track your Google rankings across 170 countries.
Content Explorer
The content explorer will provide you with the most popular articles on any topic. You’ll be able to discover and analyze the best performing content in your industry, estimate monthly traffic from search engines, test the popularity of backlinks, check the number of unique websites linking to a page, and much more.
Deepcrawl
Deepcrawl is a software that automates the SEO QA process and minimizes risk, disruption to site performance, and loss of revenue. Deepcrawl is a cloud-based web crawling solution that can fix your technical and performance issues and accelerate the growth and profitability of your online business. Due to its immense crawling abilities, Deepcrawl can audit a site no matter its size. Its ability to scale effectively is particularly preferred by large enterprises.
The Deepcrawl Automator is their most recognizable product. This product helps you avoid traffic and revenue loss by mitigating the risk of introducing harmful code changes with new releases. With this in mind, they always try to improve their solutions so the customer can have an amicable user experience.
Features
Multi-domain Monitoring
This feature will allow you to monitor site health of domains, automatically push relevant data, fix issues, and alert stakeholders. The monitoring of sites is also available for international websites because Deepcrawl enables you to effectively manage large networks of websites that resonate with regional audiences.
Custom Dashboard
Due to their enhanced API, customizing your dashboard is relatively easy. They also offer a variety of dashboard providers, including Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Klipfolio, and Data Studio.
Professional Service
The professional service team accessible for Deepcrawl users provides the benefit of having an expert working to utilize your success by creating effective strategies.
Mitigate Risk
In the event of a new code release, you will get a notification for any potential SEO problems. With these notifications, you will be able to avoid a drop in search engine visibility and mitigate the risk of loss of revenue.
Protect Revenue
Deepcrawl will enable you to bring SEOs and developers together to minimize risk, avoid disruption to site performance, and leave the revenue stream uninterrupted.
Save Time With Automation
Instead of focusing on tactical and labor-intensive manual tasks, Deepcrawl will allow you to increase your efficiency by concentrating on strategic revenue opportunities.
Segmentation
This feature allows you to conduct analysis on different page types and identify your next opportunities or occurring issues.
Sitespeedbot
Sitespeedbot is a tool that tests the speed of your website, gives you detailed analytical insight, and informs you on issues that slow your site down, giving you solutions to speed it up. This website gives you all this information in no less than 60 seconds. All you have to do is enter your URL, location, and press the button to test your site’s speed. This website is handy if you intend to do fundamental analysis on your site’s SEO aspects and if you want to improve your site performance. Furthermore, the website provides guides on how to improve your online business.
Guides
Guide for WooCommerce speed up and optimization of your slow WooCommerce site
The best hosting for WooCommerce
How to fix slow WordPress hosting on GoDaddy
Four reasons why your WordPress admin panel is slow and how to fix it
How to fix your WordPress hosting on Bluehost
Shopify speed optimization and fixing slow Shopify sites
How to serve images in next-gen formats in WordPress
How to fix WordPress hosting on HostGator
Fastest WooCommerce and Shopify themes
WP Speed Fix – WordPress speed optimization service
MySiteAuditor
MySiteAuditor is one of the best SEO audit tools, further evidenced by being a lead generation and sales tool for SEO service providers all over the world. With the embedded SEO audit tool on your website, you can get up to 10x more leads and sales. Using its enormous capacity with over million leads, MySiteAuditor has helped countless SEO firms, digital marketers, and marketing agencies to improve their business.
Features
Audit Forms
You can personalize and embed all audit forms through your agency website. MySiteAuditor offers three types of forms. You can use the Large Form on your landing pages and increase the conversion rates on your website. You also have the option to use the members’ favorite responsive and gorgeous Slim Form, or just add the Small Form that’s perfect for sidebars or other smaller areas on your site.
Audit Reports
Using the dashboard on MySiteAuditor, you can generate unlimited reports. It takes only several seconds to make these reports, and they always provide you with a detailed review of the SEO alerts and how to optimize your site’s performance.
API
MySiteAuditor offers access to its auditor via an API. All API packages are purchased on a month-to-month basis.
Languages.
MySiteAuditor is available in 19 languages, and it’s used all over the world.
Pick Your Best SEO Audit Tools
Our list of best SEO audit tools isn’t based on objective ranking variables, but rather on our personal experience and the feedback from our clients. But, no worries – all of the auditing tools we’ve reviewed bring extra functionality to your website and will certainly help your business grow.
No matter which tools you choose from the list, they all intend to enable you to be a step ahead of your competitors. However, none of these tools are do-it-all. That’s why we believe that combining these audit tools with other software, such as advanced analytics for marketing, will yield the best results. Making these software combos will surely make your website a winner.
Email empowers you to connect with people from all over the world, and it is the quickest and most cost-effective means to communicate for business. Online banks, online business platforms, online stores – they all require a valid email for a verifiable connection. A good email hosting provider has become one of the most valuable tools that an entrepreneur can integrate. Considering these facts, it’s no surprise that email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your products.
When running a business in a competitive environment, having good email communication can be crucial for having an edge over your competitors, given that email gives you the ability to engage with customers on a group and individual level. But in order to be able to provide impeccable email service, you need to have good email hosting.
In this article, we will address the best email hosting providers for small businesses in 2020 by giving you a short summary of the types of email hosting services, the features that the hosting provides, the pricing, and the pros & cons of every provider.
Types of Email Hosting Service
When you’re shopping for email hosting, the first decision you will need to make is what kind of hosting you need for your email. There are three main options to choose from.
Shared Web Hosting and Email Services
Email hosting is included for free with most of the web hosting subscriptions. If you don’t need a powerful email service and you have a modest budget, getting an email service from your web host is the way to go. But keep in mind that there are limitations in sending, receiving, and storing that come with this option.
Self-hosted Email Servers
This is a complex, but robust option that requires owning servers, technical expertise, and a team that operates the servers. Self-hosting is a reliable option and you can send and receive emails with ease, however, smaller businesses don’t have the resources nor time to fully implement this option. Especially if you consider that there are third-party email providers that specialize in hosting emails for small businesses.
Third-party Email Hosting
Finally, there’s third-party email hosting. Although you will have to pay additionally for the cost of the email hosting, the email services that these third-party providers offer are easy-to-use and full of useful features that will make your business more functional. That is why most small, digital businesses choose this option.
G Suite/Gmail
G Suite is Google’s hosted email service that provides smart cloud search functionalities, top-of-the-line security layers, and administrative control. Getting started with Google email hosting is easy. All you need to do is input some information, such as administrator contact and size of the company, after which you will need to associate a domain to your account. When you get access to your email, Google will ask for some additional information: add a text (TXT), Mail eXchange (MX), or Canonical NAME (CNAME), so they can verify that you are the rightful owner.
Google is one of the most popular email services used and has over a billion active users. It’s cloud-based, advanced, familiar, and full of features, making it one of the best email hosting providers for small businesses.
Features
Secure, private, ad-free email. Gmail keeps you updated with real-time notifications and stores your emails and data in a secure way. Gmail allows you to entrust everybody in the company with a personalized and professional address (e.g. kevin@yourcompany) or create a group mailing list (IT@yourcompany). You can access your email from any device, and if you don’t have access to the internet, you can read or compose your mail so they will be ready to send when you’re back online.
Docs is a word processing platform for individuals and teams. With this feature, you can create and edit text documents in your browser. Multiple people can work on the same document and every change is saved automatically. Your co-workers can also comment, chat, and edit the document. In the feature DOCS, you can find Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Google Slides. This feature supports add-ons and plug-ins.
Gmail also provides users with an integrated online calendar. With this calendar, you can schedule events quickly and share them with your colleges. The calendar can be integrated with Sites, which will enable you to create impactful team sites effortlessly.
Currents. With this feature, you can share ideas with your team and get instant feedback from your colleagues. Currents allows you to work more efficiently and create a productive community that works on a common goal. This feature is a reborn version of Google+, and it is adopted for your business needs.
Besides these useful features, Gmail will also give you their Apps Script, which is a low code platform for quick and easy business solutions. Cloud Search provides powerful options to search through your company’s content while Google chat makes for an easy to use messaging and video platform.
Pricing
G Suite offers three plans. The Basic plan is $6 per user per month, the Business plan will cost you $12/mo, and the Enterprise option is $25/mo.
Pros:
Great familiarity with the features;
Sharing documents creates a permanent business platform on which everybody can participate and contribute;
Integrated communication features;
Incredible cloud file storage capacity;
Customer support 24/7 via phone, email, and online support.
Cons:
The free trial lasts 14 days;
The communication tools are aimed for communication with your co-workers and not your clients.
Office 365
Office 365 is a Microsoft hosting service on which you can run your organization in the cloud and let Microsoft take care of the information technology. When you subscribe to the email hosting of Microsoft, you will get a custom email domain extension that allows you to assign email addresses (in the following format: You@YourBusinessName.com). By purchasing their service, you also get enterprise-level of security with multi-layered authentication, state of the art calendars and contact lists, secure cloud storage accessible from anywhere, and professional customer support.
When you subscribe to Microsoft 365 Business, you will also get various productivity apps that will provide your business with tools for productivity, communication, cloud storage, and business apps that help you reach your customers. In addition to the features, Microsoft offers an upgrade to Windows 10 Pro from Windows 7 Professional or later. With this update, you get better security and access to your business devices.
There are 4 deployment steps to set up an account on Microsoft 365 Business. The initial step is acquiring a subscription and assigning Microsoft 365 Business licenses to the user. Then you use the set-up wizard to configure the account. Once you install the Office apps on your devices, the final step is to prepare your PCs by using the Windows AutoPilot.
Features
Email and scheduling. The email offered by Microsoft 365 Business is a business-class email that can be reached through your phone, tablet, desktop, and the web via MS Exchange. The mailbox has up to 50 GB of space and it allows you to use your own custom domain name for all assigned individual emails. With the Microsoft email, you can manage your calendar, create meetings and events, share time schedules, and set up reminders.
Web and mobile versions of Office apps. With this feature, Microsoft 365 for Business offers its well-known web version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. You also get the web version of Outlook. All these tools are regularly updated and will allow your team to collaborate using real-time co-authoring, which means that multiple users can share and work on the same document.
File storage and sharing is another essential feature offered by Microsoft 365 Business. With it, you can store and share files with 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. You can also access and work on the files directly from the cloud. The changes in the document will be updated and synced with all devices. This feature offers security and accessibility from all devices no matter whether they are run on a PC or Mac.
Teamwork and communication features. Microsoft Teams allows you to host online meetings and video calls with up to 250 users, chat with your team, create team sites to share information, content, and files.
Microsoft 365 Business offers excellent security and helps you protect your email against spam, malware, and other threats. They offer more than 1,000 security and privacy protocols and offer the user control over who has access to your business information.
Pricing
Microsoft 365 Business offers three pricing plans. The cheapest plan is “Basic” – $5 per user per month. The second one is “Standard”, which is $12.50/mo, and the last one is the “Premium” which costs $20/mo.
Pros:
Integration with Outlook and preview of documents, spreadsheets, etc;
Memory management. Microsoft 365 Business manages the CPU and RAM of the machines better than its competitors;
Access to your documents from a different mobile device;
Lots of storage room and offline functionality;
Security is constantly updated and improved.
Cons:
Licensing can be difficult to understand because there are many apps and features that are provided under different pricing plans;
Updates are frequent and can be annoying;
Lack of compatibility with other operating systems.
Zoho
Zoho Mail provides users with secure, encrypted, privacy-guaranteed, and ad-free email hosting for your business. Zoho business email is best suited for organizations and teams that run business communication. The business email is set up via the user’s custom domain and adds features that will add credibility and extra professionalism to your company. The business mail that this hosting provides comes with multiple mailboxes, group aliases, higher storage, dedicated migration support, and levels of management that will give you additional control over your email.
If you decide to migrate to this hosting, Zoho provides a simple solution for the migration of data. Before you start your migration, user accounts need to be created, and the domain has to be verified, after which the process of migration can start. Before the actual migration process, Zoho allows you to run a simple migration for around 2 to 10 users. Zoho mail offers a free plan for up to 5 people, however, when a 6th person joins the group, a paid license has to be purchased.
Pricing
Zoho offers three paid plans. “Mail Lite” which is $1.01 per user per month, “Mail Premium” $4.05/mo, and “Workplace” $3.4/mo. Zoho Mail Premium also offers a 15-day free trial.
Features
Secure email for secure communication. Zoho mail stores encrypted email in an infrastructure that is safeguarded 24/7, keeping your mail safe from physical break-ins and malware attacks. The data servers are located in undisclosed locations distributed across the US, Europe, China, and India. Furthermore, Zoho provides users with data security through tools such as systematic protocols, policies, and mechanisms in the service that will prevent email spoofing, phishing, spam, and data leakage.
Custom domains. If you don’t already have a custom domain, Zoho will allow you to purchase one from them and set up custom email addresses.
Zoho Mail has a powerful Control Panel that enables you to add users, manage group aliases, set up policies to moderate business content, and do other customizations and configurations. The Dashboard is multifunctional and enables you to take control of all domain-related settings.
Stream. With this feature, you can add a social media flavor to your mailboxes. Stream will change the way you communicate across teams without the familiar email cluttering of unproductive email exchanges. All you need to do is just mention “@” the person from the group you want to address and involve them in the conversation.
Email retention and e-Discovery. This feature allows you to track, search, and discover the data from a specific period of time, and see whether they comply with the company’s standards. This feature can protect you from potential lawsuits, evidence tampering, and intellectual property theft.
Mail on Mobile. With the native mobile app for Mail, Mail Admin, and Stream, you can stay in touch with your co-workers even on your mobile devices. The mobile app provided by Zoho offers Calendar, Contacts, Files, and Reminders. The interface is light, fast, powerful and optimized for quick swipe actions.
Zoho Mail has 24/7 support by email.
Pros:
Excellent application for mobile devices, allowing you to manage users and configurations;
Huge variety of settings, preferences, and view options;
Responsive customer support;
Free version with up to 5 users;
Competitive prices;
Calendars, Contact management, Files, and Reminders.
Cons:
No customer support for the free version;
Lack of integration with third-party plug-ins, connectors, and other providers of services.
Fastmail
Fastmail is a simple, fast, and secure email provider that has no unwanted advertisement and provides the user with privacy features. The company operates on four core values. They will treat you as a customer, not as a product, and will spare you from the unnecessary advertisement. They believe that your data belongs to you and that you should be allowed to have complete ownership and control over it. They also pride themselves in being good stewards of your data and take privacy seriously. The last one is that they’re good internet citizens, therefore, they do not burden you with additional apps that will slow the customer down, but rather contribute to open source projects that move email forward.
By choosing FastMail, the host will allow you to email from an address that matches your business website. You can create up to 100 your own domains (you@YourWebsite.com) and 600 aliases (sales@YourBusiness.com). FastMail will also allow you to use one inbox to send and read mail from every alias and if you encounter some problems, FastMail will deliver great assistance from their expert team. With FastMail, you can have administrative control that allows you to manage access levels and protect your sensitive data by giving insight into your emails only to trusted business partners.
If you don’t have your domain, you will need to choose a FastMail domain and select an email address. If you have your own domain, however, FastMail will provide you with the option to migrate. When opening a FastMail account you can choose from a variety of domains and create an alias as an alternative to fastmail.com. After you open the account you will be able to transfer your existing mailbox content, transfer your contacts, and your calendars.
Pricing
The three pricing plans of FastMail hosting are the following. The first one is “Basic” and costs $3 per user per month, while “Standard” is $5/mo, and “Professional” is $9/us/mo.
Features
Accessibility. With FastMail, you will always be able to access your account by using FastMail in your browser, downloading the mobile app for iOS and Android, or by using the desktop app.
FastMail provides the user with a full-featured email inbox that will help you work fast and easy. The inbox gives you the option to: pin important emails, search through the search bar, and follow the conversations with ease. What’s more, it has powerful automated sorting and offers a lot of keyboard shortcuts.
Increase your productivity. With the three apps (mail, calendars, and contacts) in one place, you will be able to work fast. FastMail will also give you the tools to work uninterruptedly by giving priority to the people you’ve assigned VIP status to, and block the alerts from unwanted contacts.
Calendar and contacts. This email host will allow you to bring all your calendars in one place. With this centralization, it will be easier for you to filter information and give priority to the things you deem most important. The calendar will provide you with the option to create and share events or share the whole calendar with other users.
Privacy. The business account of FastMail goes the extra mile when it comes to protecting sensitive business data. That is why they offer 24/7 customer support. Besides the support, they also provide the user with the option to share your professional identity with a brand, create an alias so your contacts can reach the right co-worker (sale@yourbiz.com or help@yourbiz.com), share calendars, and create archives.
Security. FastMail offers security options for every level. Your data will not be shared with advertisers and third parties. They also provide a two-step verification protection, unique access tokens to your mobile devices, etc.
Pros:
Privacy and storage of data;
Accessibility on every device through a web browser or app.;
Variety of domains and aliases;
Bring all your calendars into one place;
Good security level.
Cons:
Does not offer labels to organize mails;
May need some time to get used to;
Lacks integration with thor-party services;
Lacks a task manager.
ProtonMail
ProtonMail is an easy-to-use, secure email service with built-in end-to-end encryption and state-of-the-art security features. ProtonMail put an emphasis on internet security and its goal is to build an internet that respects privacy and is secure against cyberattacks. They are a company committed to developing and distributing tools that are essential to the protection of our online data. They are constantly working on their practical interface that will guarantee encrypted communication.
ProtonMail for Businesses secures your data on the cloud and offers administrative functionality to manage email across an organization, including passwords, priority support, unlimited messages, and catch-all email. ProtonMail assigns 5GB of email storage for every user in the Business plan. However, if you have several users, then the combined capacity can be divided as the admin pleases.
Migration from your existing email over to ProtonMail is easy. After purchasing a ProtonMail account, you will need to update your DNS settings in order for your email to be redirected to their servers in Switzerland. Then their experts will assist you with setting up your inboxes and migrating the data.
Pricing
With ProtonMail Business you get two price options. The first one is the “ProtonMail Professional” plan where you pay €8 per user per month. The second option is the “ProtonMail Enterprise” plan. For the pricing of this plan, you will have to contact their sales team.
Features
iOS and Android app. The iOS app is a secure email app that brings easy-to-use email encryption to iPhone and iPad. The apps provide a modern user interface and have a full set of features such as customizable swipe gestures and the ability to send expiring emails. The same applies to the Android app.
ProtonMail Bridge. This feature is an application for paid users that runs on your computer with a purpose to encrypt and decrypt your emails as they enter and leave your computer. This program is supported by Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and other programs that support IMAP and SMTP. The ProtonMail Bridge is easy to install and configure.
Proton VPN. This high-speed Swiss VPN will safeguard your privacy by sending your traffic through an encrypted VPN tunnel. Your password and confidential data will stay safe even over a public or untrusted internet connection. Besides the email, this VPN will keep your browsing private with the freedom to access any website or content. ProtonMail also integrates with the Tor anonymity network.
Security. Data breach is a significant problem, so ProtonMail offers a hosted email solution to ensure that your information remains secure even in the event that your business does suffer a data breach. To ensure the security of your correspondence, ProtonMail offers data control through end-to-end encryption, high security, and high reliability at a low cost.
Encrypted contacts. ProtonMail has the ability to encrypt and open the information within contacts. This information is crucial for advanced features, such as auto-complete in the composer, whitelisting, blacklisting, filtering, and conversation view. The user also has the ability to store phone numbers and home addresses in contacts.
Pros:
Easy and secure email encryption;
Excellent apps for mobile devices;
Whitelist, blacklist and other filters;
Password protection;
Message expiration.
Cons:
Sometimes the interface can be sluggish;
No integration with third-party;
Limited capacity of the search bar;
ProtonCalendar only beta version.
Migadu
Migadu offers email hosting for your own domains. This email hosting provider allows the user to host multiple email domains in a simple manner and at a reasonable price. Their services are not intended for large enterprises and they do not offer Service Level Agreements. This email hosting provider based in Switzerland, is a non-profit organization that’s always prepared to sponsor interesting projects that serve as educational, non-profit, and pro-open-source activities. This email hosting provider constantly works on making the experience of the user better and that’s why they’re in constant innovation of features, changes, upgrades, and optimizations.
All Migadu accounts are limited with a daily outgoing message quota that depends on the plan you’ve chosen. If you go over your quota, Migadu will politely ask you to upgrade or it won’t be possible to send any more emails until the end of the calendar date. Migadu uses Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), which means that there are no supporting folders (no junk folder). Migadu is also not mobile-friendly, meaning that the email management is not optimized for usage of portable devices.
To register an account, you need to go to their website and enter the necessary information. Migadu does not offer a number of features and apps in the form of bells and whistles, which makes for a simple but functional service. Because this webmail is very simple, Migadu allows the user to use their hosted email address with GMail’s powerful interface.
Pricing
Migadu offers one free plan and 4 premium plans that differ only in the allowed message quota. The “Mini” plan is $5/mo with up to 100 outgoing emails per day, the “Standard” plan costs $17/mo and allows for 500 outgoing messages, while the “MAXI” plan goes up to 2000 messages per day.
Features
Have as many addresses as you want. Migadu is not interested in the number of addresses but in the number of emails you send.
Automatically forward messages with aliases. With the aliases, you can create virtual addresses and automatically forward messages.
Unlimited storage. Migadu gives you unlimited space to store your messages.
Their biggest feature is deliverability. But, if your intention is to send a bulk of emails, newsletters, or spam, their deliverability is really bad. If you want to send personal or business emails, on the other hand, this email hosting provider is for you.
Blacklist monitoring. Migadu offers a blacklist option that is simple and protects you from spammers. This email hosting provider checks the sender’s IP addresses and compares them in the blacklist.
Feedback loops. Migadu checks every report for spam that comes from their large email providers. When the reports are valid, the users of the spammy domains get permanently blocked and denied all services.
Manual verification and monitoring. Migadu has a limitation on their outgoing messages because they believe that accounts that breach these limits are spammy. Until the reputation of the account is verified, Migadu keeps its users to a low number of outgoing messages, no matter the price plan. Suspicious domains and accounts are kept under observation until proven valid.
Email authentication with DKIM and SPF. This method is one of the best for email authentication because PSF allows an email sender to define which IP addresses are allowed to send emails to the domain, while DKIM provides an encryption key and digital signature that verifies that the email messages were not forged.
Abuse prevention. Migadu implements several checks before the email is sent and does not allow misrepresentation in the outgoing emails.
Pros:
Have as many addresses as you want;
Unlimited storage;
Good deliverability;
Protects you from spam, newsletters, and phishing emails with multilayered security;
Gives you the option to blacklist contacts;
Cheap price plans.
Cons:
You need your own domain;
There are daily sending limits;
No calendar;
No option for bulk email sending;
They do not offer Service Level Agreements;
Occasional bugs;
The administration is still not mobile-friendly.
IRedMail
IRedMail is a free, open-source, self-hosted mail server with many features. With IRedMail, you have all the personal data on your own hard disk, which enables you to control your own emails and increases your security. All software used by iRedMail is open-source and the bug fixes and updates are serviced by Linux/BSD. This email hosting provider uses secure connections (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) and the emails are encrypted via TLS.
With IRedMail you manage emails, folders, and filters directly in the easy-to-use web interface. This email hosting also enables you to manage your calendars and address book not just on your desktop, but on your mobile devices as well. With IRedMail you can create as many mail accounts (domains, users, mailing lists, admins) as you want. This service also provides you with antispam and antivirus filters and will keep your emails safe and sound all the time.
There are three products offered by iRedmail. The first one is the iRedMail downloadable installer. To start with iRedMail you need to download the installer package, and after installation, you need to set up DNS records for your iRedMail server. After you have done these two steps, you will need to upgrade with additional installations. The second one is iRedMail Easy. This is an easily deployable web interface that will save you time and worries. The third one is the paid iRedAdmin-Pro – a product that provides you with many more options than the previous two.
Pricing
The iRedAdmin-Pro Licence can be ordered for $499 for 1 year, $699 for 2 years, and $899 for 3 years.
Features:
Privacy and security. iRedMail saves personal data on your own hard disk. This way you have full control over your email and logs, and nobody can see the content of your messages. What’s more, this email service forces the user to use the security protocols for delivering and receiving messages and the emails are encrypted in transit using Transport Layer Security. This email service also provides the user with secure password storage.
Open-source. iRedMail is an open-source email hosting provider that depends on Linux/BSD and the enormous supporting community to fix bugs and provide you with updates.
Reproducible deployment. With iRedMail you get a reproducible, easy-to-use, stable mail server. With this feature it is easy to migrate an old server or restore a crashed server to a new iRedMail server.
Webmail management. iRedMail is a web-based deployment platform that offers an easy-to-use web interface to deploy an iRedMail server. The webmail features enable the user to manage emails, folders, and sieve filters directly on the interface. It provides the user with calendar synchronization, address book, and other task managers. These features are also available for mobile devices.
Unlimited accounts. With iRedMail you can create an unlimited number of accounts, domains, users, mailing lists, and admins. You can store mail accounts in your Backend offered by Linux.
Web admin panel. There is a difference in the option that the paid and the free version that this web admin panel offers. Nonetheless, the free version offers a free and easy to use web admin panel which is suitable for the users that want to manipulate the privileges of the email service.
Professional tech support. With iRedMail, you get good support with the online support forum by posting a technical question on their Github.
Pros:
Open-source and Main Stream Linux/BSD;
Unlimited number of accounts;
Good storage capacity;
Privacy and security;
Professional support via GitHub and email.
Cons:
Expensive iRedMail-Pro Licence;
Experience in coding is strongly advised.
Mailcow
Mailcow is a Dockerized, open-source, self-hosted email server that stands out from the other email hosting providers with their dedication and passion. The team of Mailcow offers friendly support and help for every project, no matter whether the project has private, educational or independent purpose. This email hosting provider meets all the requirements for careful data protection and insurance against hacker attacks, third-party property damage, data misuse, data loss, etc. Mailcow is easy to set up and supports all of the latest releases of Ubuntu and Debian.
Mailcow also provides the necessary communication standards, integration with anti-virus software, anti-spam, firewall, etc. Furthermore, Mailcow stores the data on a hidden server somewhere in Germany and they have a growing base of users. The data center of their servers is operated on 100% green electricity. Installing this easy-to-use email service takes several steps. First you need to create a new Cloud server, then you need to set up DNS, continue with the installation of Docker Compose, create the configuration, and start your Mailcow account. Mailcow is suitable for growing organizations that have 50 to 100 self-hosted inboxes.
Pricing
Infrastructure costs with Mailcow are €12.00/month = €202.80/year.
Features
DKIM and ARC support. DomainKeys Identification Mail (DKIM) allows an organization to take responsibility for a message that is in transit. That means that the organization has full control over the messages, i.e. DKIM provides the user with a method of validation, and you will be able to decide whether to trust the message or not. Arc Specification for Email (ARC), on the other hand, modifies the message so your message will not be mistaken for a fraudulent one.
Black and whitelistings per domain and per user. This feature helps the user identify and manage wanted and unwanted messages, thus giving you even more control over your inbox.
Spam Score management per-user. With Mailcow, you will have a spam score and you will be able to use this method to detect the probabilities of spam messages.
Temporary email aliases. These temporary email aliases are most often used in instances when the user needs to provide an email address but doesn’t want to further receive messages from that party.
Tagging. With this feature, users of Mailcow can tag their email address and they can control the tag handling in the users UI panel.
Force TLS for outgoing and incoming emails. This feature allows the mailbox users to toggle incoming and outgoing emails with extra security by enforcing Transport Layer Security.
Add domains, mailboxes, aliases, domain aliases and SOGo resources.
Antivirus scanning, micro scanning of office documents, quarantine system and integrated basic monitoring are also some of the features provided by Mailcow.
Pros:
Open-source
Self-hosting
Supportive user base
Security
Temporary aliases
Blacklisting and whitelisting
Third-party integration
Cons:
A bit complicated to understand
Needs some experience with coding
Difficult to find relevant and helpful information
Final Words
As we said, the email empowers you to connect with people from all over the world and it is the quickest and most cost-effective business communication solution. There are varieties of good options for email hosting providers, so when it comes to choosing the best email hosting provider for small business in 2020, it is not an easy job. They all offer features to ease your communication and security to protect your data from potential misusers.
Some of these hosting providers are big corporations with a lot of resources and some are the opposite. The corporations will give you the benefits of multifunctional features, third-party implementation, and very good support, however, they do not offer what the smaller providers will – privacy of your email correspondence.
In the end, it all comes to what kind of services you prefer and how you plan to expand your small business. If you care about privacy, then definitely go with the likes of ProtonMail and Mailcow. However, if you just want to be productive and don’t care too much about the privacy of your data, then G Suite and Microsoft 356 are the right email hosting providers for you.
Hypertext transfer protocol secure, or HTTPS, is rapidly becoming the norm on every website that you visit. The simplest way to find out if a site that you’re on is using HTTP or HTTPS is by checking the address line at the top of your browser.
If there is a padlock in front of the URL, then you’re currently on an HTTPS site. But what exactly is the difference between the two aside from the icon in the address bar? And what’s the best way to speed up HTTP to HTTPS redirects? Read on to find out.
Why are more and more sites using HTTPS?
The main reason that so many sites are switching over to HTTPS is because of security – the S in HTTPS actually stands for secure.
Due to the fact that a site requires a TLS handshake for authentication before it can be set to run over HTTPS, this adds an extra layer of encryption to the visitor data to each site. This means that the login information that the visitor uses is a lot better protected.
Many companies have taken notice that this added level of security has increased customer trust which has, as a result, increased the number of their monthly site visitors.
Since the number of sites that use HTTPS continues to grow by the second, this has resulted in better SEO rankings for those sites, as well as more accurate referral data from Google Analytics.
Why is redirecting HTTP to HTTPS so slow?
HTTPS is not a separate protocol from HTTP. Actually, the only difference between the two is the fact that HTTPS uses either SSL or the aforementioned TLS encryption in order to keep visitors’ data better secured.
Most sites will either have a plugin that handles this sort of encryption or will have some sort of built-in feature. Either way, if the features or plugins are set to run on HTTP (plaintext), there might be a slow-down when they receive a request to go to an HTTPS site that uses TLS/SSL.
Naturally, the biggest factors in how fast the visitor will be transferred will be the site servers and their own internet speed and stability. In reality, the transition from an HTTP to an HTTPS site only takes 1-2 seconds in the worst of times.
However, when it comes to site speeds and page load times, you don’t want any delays, even those that can be counted in microseconds.
Configure Web Server for HTTPS redirection
Depending on which web server you use, the redirection instructions are going to be slightly different each time. However, before we get into the procedure of actually configuring the redirect settings, there are two important things that need to be done.
Firstly, backup your site. Going into the source code and making any sort of trivial modification can sometimes cause problems or mistakes for even the more experienced programmers. Meaning that covering yourself by making a backup beforehand is always recommended.
Secondly, activate your certificate. Most web hosting providers will have an SSL certificate as one of the main selling points of their packages, so you might already have one. However, if that’s not the case before you can configure your redirection settings, you’re going to need to either upgrade to a package that has that option, or simply buy one separately.
And lastly, after both of these are done, you can go into your settings.
Apache/LiteSpeed
You’re going to need to gain access to the .htaccess files of your site by connecting to your Apache server and opening the files that are placed in the domain root directory. In order to change the redirect settings through the mod-rewrite module, you’ll need to enter the following code:
The “Rewrite engine on” section enables the rewrite capabilities, the “Rewrite cont %{HTTPS} off” checks for an HTTP connection, and the final line redirects any HTTP to HTTPS with stats code 301, which signifies that it’s been moved permanently.
The site doesn’t need to be restarted as Apache does that automatically.
Nginx
In order to change the Nginx redirection settings, you’re going to need to log in to the Nginx web server and go into the configuration settings. Once there, you’re going to enter this code:
server {
listen 80;
server_name examplesite.com www.examplesite.com;
return 301 https://examplesite.com$request_uri;
}
The “listen 80” portion allows the server block to listen for incoming connections on port 80, the “return 301…” redirects the traffic to the HTTPS version of the site, and the “server_name…” portion will specify the server block’s domain name. Keep in mind that any instance of “examplesite.com” should be replaced with your own domain name.
Restart Nginx and test out the site.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is by far the simplest process as it requires no coding knowledge or execution what-so-ever.
In order to set your redirect preferences, log in to your Cloudflare account.
Next, go to your SSL/TLS settings, find the “Always Use HTTPS” command, and switch it to ON.
Then find the “Automatic HTTPS Rewrites” command and turn that ON as well.
Finally, save your changes and test your site.
Conclusion
If you don’t have at least a certain level of IT knowledge or education that was centered around computer sciences, this might all seem a bit daunting at first.
However, all you really need to do is follow the instructions that we’ve laid out, maybe do a bit of Google research, and you should be all set to tackle this configuration head-on.
As long as you back up your site beforehand, you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain from the HTTPS-enabled functionality.
As your website grows and you start getting more and more visitors, you’re likely going to see a lot more lag and even a few crashes here and there. The reason behind this is that your website is optimized for a certain number of visitors, and it can’t efficiently accommodate the expanding numbers.
In order to allow WordPress to more efficiently recompile a page every time a visitor tries to access a site, a lot of people have started downloading WP Rocket.
In the simplest terms, WP Rocket is a plugin that gives you the ability to enable certain options in WordPress that’ll allow it to run a lot more smoothly.
However, the exact configuration is crucial, and certain functions might actually slow down WP if they aren’t compatible with certain other functions that you’ve enabled. That’s exactly why we’re here – to show you which configuration is the best option when it comes to speeding up WordPress.
How to install WP Rocket
The first thing that you’re going to want to do is log in to your WordPress site and make sure that you’re registered as the administrator.
On the left-hand side of the screen, you’re going to see a menu that says “Plugins” and you’re going to click it. There is going to be a pop-up that appears immediately next to the menu, and you’re going to want to select and click the “Add new” option.
The Add Plugins screen is going to open up, and you’re going to want to click on the search bar in the top right corner of the screen and type in the name of the plugin. All you need to do is find the plugin on the list and click the “Activate” button.
Alternatively, you can go to the official WP Rocket site and sign up for a license by selecting one of the three payment plans (or simply use the link that we provided). If you download the plugin this way, then you’ll need to go to the Add plugins screen and click on the “Upload plugin” button that’s located at the top left-hand corner of the screen. Click the “Choose file” button, locate the .zip file of the plugin on your PC, and click the “Activate plugin” button.
Once the plugin is finished installing, you can find it by going into the Settings menu that’s located on the left side of your WordPress account screen. After you open it up you’ll see a “Save changes” button, that’s going to save all of the changes that we’re going to go over next.
Dashboard
When you open the WP Rocket plugin, the top-most menu that you’ll see on the left side of your screen is going to be the Dashboard. This menu is going to display your license status, the expiration date of the plugin, and other information that you can look through by pressing the “View my account” button that’s located near the center of the top of the screen.
You’ll also be able to see the Frequently asked questions section, which is where you can go in order to ask about any aspect of the plugin that you aren’t clear on. Additionally, you might choose to press the “Rocket tester” button, which will mark you as an active participant in the beta testing program, and the “Rocket analytics” button, which will allow WP Rocket to collect data anonymously.
Remove all cache files
This feature does exactly what it says – it removes all of the cached files. This is usually a recommended procedure for after you’re done with configuring all of your WP Rocket settings.
Start cache preloading
This function generates a cache for your homepage and all internal links on the homepage.
Purge OPCache content
This function purges the OPCache. This will help prevent any issues that might arise when you update the WP Rocket plugin.
Cache
The second menu is the Cache menu, and it’s divided into 3 sections:
Mobile cache
Enable cache for mobile
This option will make your website more mobile-friendly and it will allow visitors that try to gain access through their phones to be able to open the page with as little issues as possible. In addition, the “Separate cache files for mobile devices” should also be enabled since WP Rocket will run better if both options are working in tandem.
User cache
Enable caching for logged in WP users
This is only a useful feature if you have a website that has an implemented membership system. Enabling this on such a site will provide your members with a better experience while they’re logged in to your site. However, this function is useless if you don’t have such a system, so whether you turn in on or off will depend on the nature of your site.
Cache Lifespan
This section allows you to decide how many hours the cached files will remain on the server before they get removed automatically. The lower the value, the busier the site. It’s recommended that sites with more visitors set the number of hours in the single digits, while sites with less visitors have a bit more flexibility when it comes to how long they can keep the files on the server without any issues.
File optimization
The third menu is the File optimization menu.
Minify HTML/CSS/JavaScript
This function removes the white space between the code and reduces the size of the files. This isn’t all that vital since the difference that this makes in terms of affecting the performance of your site is pretty negligible. Keep in mind that some minified files might actually cause issues in your site code, so you might need to go into the source code to check if it’s the HTML, CSS or JavaScript files that are doing that and disable their minification.
Combine Google fonts files/CSS files/JavaScript files
The “Combine” option on all of these functions merges all your files into just one file, which will reduce the number of HTTP requests and speed up your site performance. Keep in mind that combining CSS and JS files is a good option if your site runs on HTTP/1, but it isn’t recommended if it runs on HTTP/2 and you should only combine the Google fonts in those circumstances.
Remove Query migrate
This function removes the version query string, and then encodes the version number directly into the URL. This allows the browser to more quickly locate the necessary files and enables a faster connection between the browser and the server that the site is using. In simple terms, it allows the user to connect to your site faster.
Optimize CSS delivery
When your site loads, the CSS files that are interspersed within the HTML code sometimes are processed more slowly and this causes the page to be rendered more slowly due to an effect that’s called render blocking. This function speeds up the page rendering times by only processing the critical CSS files and allowing the HTML files to be processed and the page to load before the rest of the files need to be finished.
Load JavaScript deferred?
This function essentially accomplishes the same thing for the JS files as it did for the CSS files that we mentioned in the point above.
Safe Mode for JQuery?
This feature loads jQuery at the top of the document as a render-blocking script in order to ensure support for inline jQuery references from themes and plugins.
Delay JavaScript execution
Improves performance by delaying the loading of JS files until a specific user interaction.
Media
The fourth menu is the Media menu, which is divided into 3 sections:
LazyLoad
Enable for images/iframes and videos
Both of these features essentially do the same. If you enable them, the images or thumbnails will only load when they are in view and the visitor has scrolled down far enough on the page to where they are located. This significantly reduces initial load times and HTTP requests.
Replace YouTube iframe with preview image
Having a background video or gif run on your page can significantly impair performance. This function allows you to replace that background video with a simple thumbnail that’s placed in the YouTube window.
Emoji
Disable Emoji
Emojis slow down your site and this function takes care of that problem by disabling their use entirely. This still allows the default emojis on the users browser to remain, while also getting rid of the additional HTTP requests.
Embeds
Disable WordPress embeds
This function prevents any users from embedding content from your site, and simultaneously also prevents you from embedding content from other sites. Additionally, this function also removes JavaScript requests related to WordPress Embeds.
WebP compatibility
This function will allow WP Rocket to serve WebP images to browsers that are compatible.
Preload
The fifth menu is the Preload menu, which is divided into 4 sections:
Preload cache
Activate preloading
Enabling Preloading triggers cache warming when content is added or updated, which essentially means that the visitors are immediately met with cached pages. Enabling this option is also necessary if you want to enable the other two preloading functions from this section.
Activate sitemap-based cache preloading
This function must be enabled in order to allow WP Rocket to cache all of the necessary URLs that are found in the sitemap files
Rank Math XML Sitemap
This function enables WP Rocket to automatically detect XML sitemaps generated by the Yoast SEO plugin
Preload links
Enable link preloading
This function allows the user to manually enter any links that he would like WP Rocket to automatically preload.
Prefetch DNS Requests
Any URLs that are entered into the field that’s available in this section will load faster. By having the administrator enter the URL’s of the sites that they would like their site to link to, the DNS will be obtained in advance and the connection will happen much quicker.
Preload fonts
This function allows the user to manually enter any fonts that he would like WP Rocket to automatically preload.
Advanced rules
The sixth menu is the Advanced rules menu, which is divided into 5 sections:
Never cache URL(s)
This function allows you to block specific pages from getting cached by manually entering their URL into the text field from this section.
Never cache cookies
This function allows you to block specific cookies from getting cached by manually entering their ID into the text field from this section.
Never cache user agents
This function allows you to block specific user agents from getting cached by manually entering their device into the text field from this section.
Always purge URL(s)
This function allows you to purge any specific URL from cache whenever you update anything on your site.
Cache Query string(s)
This function mainly works in tandem with product pages or e-commerce sites and it caches the information from these sites.
Database
The seventh menu is the Database menu, which is divided into 5 sections:
Post cleanup
Revisions
This function deletes the old versions of your posts that are saved when you hit the “Publish” button.
Auto drafts
This function deletes the versions of your post that were automatically saved if you don’t hit the “Publish” button.
Trashed posts
This function deletes any posts that were marked as trash.
Comments cleanup
Spam comments
This function deletes any comments that were marked as spam.
Trashed comments
This function deletes any comments that were marked as trash.
Transients cleanup
Expired transients
This function deletes any transients that have expired but are still in your database.
All transients
This function deletes any stored data that takes a long time to retrieve.
Database cleanup
Optimized tables
This function optimizes the tables in your WordPress database.
Automatic cleanup
Schedule automatic cleanup
This function allows you to set the time and frequency of each cleanup.
Recommended frequency:
CDN
The eighth menu is the SDN menu, which is divided into 2 sections:
CDN
Enable content delivery network
Turning this function on will allow you to reduce the number of requests that are made to your server by essentially allowing the CDN’s servers to take on the load of these requests instead.
Exclude files from CDN
This section allows you to choose which files shouldn’t be re-written to the CDN by manually entering them into the text field that’s provided in this section.
Heartbeat
The ninth menu is the Heartbeat menu. The Heartbeat API provides a connection for real-time data transfer and syncing between the server and the browser. The API is present in the real-time data displayed on the dashboard, the autosave and revision functions in the post editor, and even in the notifications on the WordPress admin dashboard.
The Heartbeat menu is divided into 2 sections:
Heartbeat
Selecting the “Control Heartbeat” option in this section will open up the options in the following section and it will allow you to reduce or disable the Heartbeat API’s activity however you see fit.
Reduce or disable heartbeat activity
Selecting the “Reduce activity”, “Do not limit” or “Disable” options will apply the selected function to the Heartbeat API. Keep in mind that selecting the “Reduce activity” option might limit the efficiency of the functions that the Heartbeat API is involved in, and selecting the “Disable” option will limit them even further.
Recommended setting:
Add-ons
The tenth menu is the Add-ons menu, which is divided into 2 sections:
One-click Rocket Add-ons
Google Tracking
The number of external requests is reduced by allowing WP Rocket to locally host the analytics script on your servers. This will in turn increase your site speed.
Facebook pixel
This function works pretty much identically to the before-mentioned Google tracking function.
Varnish
This function will remove the Varnish cache whenever WP Rocket does a routing cache purge in order to ensure that the content is always up to date.
Rocket Add-ons
Cloudflare
This function will enable Cloudflare to run on your site, and it will automatically remove Cloudflare’s cache whenever there’s a routing cache purge.
Cloudflare credentials
This sub-menu can be found by clicking the “Modify options” button on the Cloudflare add-on. In this section, you’ll have to enter the email that you use for your Cloudflare account, your domain name and your global API key, which can be found in the top right corner of your Cloudflare account.
Cloudflare settings
Development mode
Turning this function on will allow you to make changes to your site without worrying if you’re actually modifying the cached version. This function automatically turns off after 3 hours, so it’s always recommended that you turn it onwhenever you’re making changes to your code.
Optimal settings
This function configures your Cloudflare settings for speed and performance. This boosts Cloudflare’s compatibility with your site and automatically minifies certain files in order to reduce their size.
Relative protocol
This will convert the URL of static files so that they’re written as // instead of http(s)//. This feature should only be used in tandem with Cloudflare’s flexible SSL feature.
Cloudflare cache
This function will manually remove Cloudflares’s cache whenever you update your site in any way in order to make sure that everything is up to date.
Sucuri
This function enables the Securi feature to be made active on your site. The feature is designed to defend your website from hacks and DDoS attacks, while also removing any malware that it identifies and even providing a bit of a performance boost. This function will also automatically remove Securi’s cache whenever there is a routing cache purge.
Image optimization
The eleventh menu is the Image optimization menu. This menu is where you go in order to install the iMAGIFY tool. iMAGIFYis used by WordPress in order to help reduce the size of the images that you post on the site, while also reducing the size of said images as much as possible. The image optimizer is an all-round great tool and every WP Rocket user should really consider installing it.
Tools
The twelfth menu is the Tools menu, which is divided into 3 functions:
Export settings
This function will allow you to download a backup file of your settings by clicking on the “Download settings” drop-down menu that’s present in this section.
Import settings
This function will allow you to browse your PC for any settings that you might have previously saved. You can do this by clicking the “Choose file” button, or the “Upload and import settings” drop-down menu and locating the necessary files on your PC.
Rollback
This function allows you to re-install a previous version of the WP Rocket plugin. This is an incredibly useful option if the version that you’re currently working with is giving you problems or isn’t compatible with the software that you’re using.
Enable Google Font optimization
Combine multiple font requests into a single file in order to reduce the size of the files and slightly improve the performance of your site.
Tutorials
The thirteenth menu is the Tutorials menu. This particular menu doesn’t have any configurations that can be switched on or off in order to improve the functionality of your site. It is however the hub that contains all of the video guides and instructions that can help show you what each option in WP Rocket does and how to use them all in order to get the most out of all of the functions of the plugin.
Conclusion
With the right settings, WP Rocket can really speed up your site’s efficiency and load speeds. However, the reverse is also true, and simply enabling all of the features can actually do more harm than good.
However, as long as you stick to the settings that we’ve outlined in this article, all of your functions should work well together and should help optimize your site so that your visitors experience as little lag as possible.
Many companies consider WooCommerce to be an integral part of their site, so it stands to reason that they would want to tailor their site to be better optimized by choosing the right theme.
In order to accomplish this, the easiest way is to simply get a theme that can provide all of the necessary features you might need in order to make the interactions between WooCommerce and your site as seamless as possible.
This article is going to focus precisely on that, and by the end you’ll hopefully have a better idea of the main strengths the themes on our list provide so you can choose the one that would be the most ideal fit for you.
What Makes a Good WooCommerce Theme?
Speed definitely plays a key factor when considering WooCommerce themes. If your site doesn’t load and perform quickly enough, your visitors will most likely just find another online store. There are many qualities that make a good theme, like ease of use, beautiful design, integrations, mobile-friendliness, and so on, but the one quality you should be looking out for before all the rest is speed.
If, however, there are multiple themes that you like and all of them offer great speed, you should then take the other features into consideration before making your final decision.
That being said, when it comes to whether or not you prioritize faster page render time over customization options, we’ll leave that up to you. All the themes we’ve listed below provide great loading times, so choose the one which provides the features you need the most.
The first theme on our list is definitely a speed-oriented one. Shoptimizer prioritizes performance and quick load times over everything else. This allows your site to render data at a staggering rate, and perform the actions and requests the visitors send in before they can so much as blink.
On the other hand, due to the heavy focus on site performance, this theme is quite limited when it comes to site customization options. You are provided with quite a few features and layout choices, however, they are all pretty minimalistic in nature.
Features:
More than 5,000 available extensions;
Provides icons that can mark the quality of the products on sale;
Megamenu support is included;
SEO-friendly;
Automatically minifies superfluous CSS code;
Optimized to work well with Elementor;
Options for placing additional product information text;
Designed to work well in tandem with WooCommerce sites;
Inbuilt conversion optimization;
Allows you to include single product FOMOs.
Summary: If you’re looking for one of the best performance-optimized themes for your eCommerce site, then this is the choice for you. If you’re looking to create a memorable site with a lot of features, then you might want to give this one a pass.
The second theme on our list is very different from the first. Neve is an all-rounder when it comes to WooCommerce themes and can provide you with excellent page loading times, as well as an assortment of different and varied layouts you can choose for your site.
We should also mention that while the theme itself isn’t overly focused on speed, it does provide a few useful conversion optimization options and boosters that can really make a difference when it comes to the number of regular visitors you get per day.
Features:
Mobile and AMP-compatible;
SEO-friendly;
WooCommerce support;
In-built WooCommerce boosters;
Not jQuery reliant;
Translation & RTL ready;
Custom Header and Footer options;
A rollback option is available for older versions;
More than 80 premade starter sites to choose from;
Incredibly lightweight.
Summary: Neve comes with a free version that you can try out before you decide to purchase it. Combine that with the well-balanced performance and customization features and you’ll get a theme that’s perfect for just about anyone, but especially for newcomers who haven’t created an eCommerce site before.
While Astra wasn’t specifically designed to be used exclusively for WooCommerce focused sites, it still has quite a few useful features that can improve WooCommerce stores in various ways. Among these features are the numerous pre-made WooCommerce demo sites that you can choose from, and a large number of options when it comes to search engine product filtering.
Astra comes with a variety of customization options and can really provide you with all the necessary tools that you might need in order to craft a unique-looking site that can help you stand out among your competitors.
Features:
Offers a large variety of pre-built starter templates;
Mobile and tablet-friendly;
Not jQuery reliant;
Provides optimization features that take care of trash-code;
Two-step checkout options;
Product quick-view options available;
Allows you to create your own display for your product catalog;
Infinite scroll feature;
Optimized for a wide variety of different widgets;
Great customer support.
Summary: Similarly to our previous entry, Astra is very beginner-friendly and a great choice if this is your first time creating an eCommerce-focused site. This theme can provide you with both a large number of interesting features and fun customization options, meaning that you’ll be able to make your tenth site just as unique as your first.
This is one of the more well-known WooCommerce and WordPress themes. The malleability and sheer creation diversity of this theme really help it stand out. It can be used to create virtually any type of site, the only limitation being the requirements of the site administrator.
The theme also provides good page load times due to CSS optimization options. However, while it does provide both customization options and speed, there are themes that are a much better choice for those looking to focus more on one aspect or the other, rather than choose an all-rounder type theme.
Features:
Provides a variety of different color and font options for WooCommerce sites;
Has a large number of available demo sites;
Not jQuery reliant;
SEO-friendly;
Can display a large variety of different Google fonts;
Customizable Header and Footer options;
Customizable button and icon options;
Constant upgrades for a year after purchase;
Allows you to control the sizes, padding, & margin of your site elements;
30-day money-back guarantee.
Summary: Generate Press is a great choice for pretty much anyone which can really help you design an eCommerce site with any feature you might need. Additionally, the great WooCommerce support that comes with it also helps explain why it’s such a popular theme.
Speaking of WooCommerce specific support, OceanWP is another theme that can really provide you with everything from a helpline that can answer any questions you might have, to a variety of helpful features that can be integrated into your site.
These features include the large deposit of pre-made WooCommerce demo sites, the numerous quick-view and search filtering options for easier product archiving, and even the different icon options that you can use for everything from item selection notifiers to customizable pointers.
Features:
Translation & RTL ready;
SEO-friendly;
Compatible with the most popular page builders;
Compatible with a variety of different extensions;
Sticky and bubble text options are available for product information displays;
Available quick-view and search filtering options;
Allows you to selectively disable certain features;
Provides you with a shopping cart icon with a drop-down option;
Large layout library;
Great WooCommerce and site support.
Summary: Customization wise, OceanWP is one of the better themes that you can choose to use on your site. But it does lose some spring in its step when it comes to loading too many images. This is a common issue for a lot of themes, so as long as you don’t overload your site with images, you should be just fine.
If there is a word that can describe this theme, it would be “minimalistic”. Just to make it clear, we don’t consider this to be a bad point about the theme, but rather its most distinguishable characteristic and the reason why it’s a great choice for first-time site designers and everyone who appreciates minimalism.
The customization options that this theme comes with allow you to very easily create your layout by simply dragging each feature and placing it on the area where you’d like it to appear.
The theme is also minimalistic when it comes to enabling faster load times. This is mostly due to the fact that while it doesn’t have any trash-data conversion tools, it still affects your loading speeds simply by taking up so little space and not requiring much CPU power.
Features:
Streamlined checkout process;
Allows you to choose from a variety of colorful banners that draw the eye;
Mobile-friendly;
Has a variety of available layouts for different categories;
Geo-location support;
Create your own product grids;
Easy inventory management;
Allows you to customize your mega menu;
Clean interface;
Translation ready.
Summary: The speeds that this theme makes possible, as well as the simple but varied customization options, make it a great two-in-one deal for anyone who isn’t specifically looking to focus on the layout or the site speeds. However, if you are intending to focus on one or the other, there are more adequate choices on this list that you can pick from.
This theme can provide most sites with pretty good rendering and loading speeds, much like most of the other themes on this list. However, the real strength of this theme is the compatibility that it has with the Divi builder.
Thanks to this compatibility, the theme is a gateway into a world of many different creation features. Those of you who are skilled when it comes to coding can use this theme to design every aspect of your site from the ground up. Those of you who aren’t experienced programmers can still use the drag-and-drop features to make a layout that’s entirely and uniquely your own.
Features:
Over 800 premade site designs;
Provides you with a large variety of fonts & text styles;
Allows you to apply simple animations;
Multi-select & bulk editing;
There are multiple video and image integration options;
Responsive editing options;
A lot of different border options for your displays;
A fully-featured code editor;
Inline text editing;
Customizable box and text shadows.
Summary: The theme does boast decent site speeds and CPU usage, but the real star of the show is undeniably the customization options. If your main priority is the design of your site, then there really is no better choice than Divi.
This theme essentially has all of the same good and bad points as Shoptimizer. Namely, the small size of the theme and the code optimization features make it very quick and responsive, but it lacks the large number of customization options that a lot of other themes can provide.
Since this is the default theme that comes with the WooCommerce plugin, it has good support for eCommerce sites, as well as all of the fundamental tools and features that any such site might need.
Features:
Simple but interesting layouts;
Provides a variety of font and text styles;
SEO-friendly;
Flawless WooCommerce integration;
Effective site navigation tools;
Has a number of product filtering options;
eCommerce-focused homepage;
Mobile-friendly;
Intuitive and flexible designs;
Excellent WooCommerce support.
Summary: Don’t be fooled by the fact that this is the basic theme that you receive from WooCommerce. While it doesn’t have any breathtaking layouts or standout features, this is still a very well-optimized theme that can provide your site with some very impressive page loading times, while keeping the CPU usage mercifully low.
Conclusion
While WooCommerce isn’t a mandatory plugin that every eCommerce site needs to have, it makes things so much easier that there’s simply no reason not to use it.
In a similar vein, your site will come out and run great if you use any of the themes that we covered on this list. However, depending on the main goal that you have for your site, some themes will help you out a lot more than others, so simply choose the one that seems most likely to improve your site with the least amount of effort.
There’s a level of skepticism that comes with receiving something for free. In order to put a few speculations to rest right from the start – yes, the paid versions of these themes usually offer a lot more features.
That being said, there are definitely some very interesting options that the base versions can provide as well.
Think of it this way – you get to try some of the best WordPress themes out there, without spending so much as a dime.
If you aren’t satisfied with the service you end up with and would like to upgrade, that’s completely up to you. However, we guarantee that the themes we included in the list below have something for everyone, and a few of them are even better than some premium-priced alternatives that are currently on the market.
How Many Free Themes Are There?
Short answer – we really can’t say. There are hundreds of WordPress themes that we know about, and you can probably double or triple that number for the themes we haven’t heard of before.
We’ve done our best to limit the number of the most well-known and most popular themes that are currently available, and then reduced that number even further by specifically looking for themes that can offer the most without any sort of commitment or payment on your part.
The list below consists of what we consider to be the best free WordPress themes in 2020, chosen out of dozens of impressive candidates.
What to Pay Attention To When Choosing a Free WordPress Theme
When looking for Shopify or WooCommerce focused themes, you’re looking for those that offer the best features for selling your products. WordPress, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated.
You’re obviously going to want to ensure that the theme integrates well with WordPress powered websites, but you should also pay attention to site speed and performance optimization.
Before you choose your theme, you should know exactly what you’re looking to get out of it. This way, you’ll easily be able to find one that can really increase your page loading speeds, allow you to create a better all-around site, and give you whatever else you might need.
The first theme on our list is one that’s a bit more presentation focused that some other themes that you might find. It has a large number of customization options for seemingly simple things like the font type size and positioning, the letter spacing, and so on.
While this doesn’t sound like much, the seemingly simple style that this particular theme can provide can really help you make a good first impression on your site visitors, and help you ensure that they’ll come back to your site again and again.
Features:
Works well with Elementor;
Very responsive design;
3 different page templates to choose from;
Custom menu;
Responsive editor.
Short Review:
The minimalistic design and abundance of white space that the theme comes with are definitely part of its charm. It isn’t the most customizable theme, but it cuts out all of the clutter that you see in a lot of other more busy themes and allows the eyes to focus on each element naturally.
Cali offers up a large variety in the number of different Google text fonts and colors that it allows you to display on your site. The customization options are both minimalistic and striking, allowing you to very easily create interesting and eye-catching layouts.
This theme also contains some pretty solid code. Most of the excess trash-code that you see in a lot of other themes has been trimmed off, and the result is a tighter, more responsive interface that can really improve your loading times.
Features:
Takes up very little disc space;
Offers a sleek home page carousel;
Allows you to add social media widgets;
Translation ready;
WooCommerce support.
Short Review:
Cali is one of the best free WordPress themes in 2020 for both fashion-oriented and blog sites. In essence, it can really help you display the items or products that you have on your site by drawing attention towards them through good text and menu placement.
The theme website states that Writee can be used to create personal, food, travel, fashion, corporate, photography, technical, and other types of blogs. The theme is also compatible with most of the popular browsers as well.
This is without a doubt one of the more flexible themes that you’ll come across, and you can use all of the features that you’re provided to give it a touch of your own style and make it a better fit for the type of blog that you’re running.
Features:
Built-in social media sharing icons;
Translation ready;
WooCommerce compatible;
Very lightweight;
One-click installation.
Short Review:
Writee is a great choice for blogs or sites that can really make good use of uncluttered layouts with a lot of free space. It allows you to create pages that have a minimalistic design but are very well organized and have good menu placements.
Unlike its name, this is actually a very lightweight and very simple theme. The reason why Reykjavik takes up so little disc space is thanks to the advanced level of coding that it has at its base.
The theme itself has some of the more useful customization components that you might expect, namely the different font sizes, color choices, and even a few different Header and Footer options. However, the theme is mostly focused on speed and it can really make a difference in render speeds because of that.
Features:
Allows you to import a number of pre-made demo-sites;
Supports Jetpack portfolios and testimonials;
Custom backgrounds;
Mobile-optimized;
Good support.
Short Review:
This theme is compatible with Beaver Builder, Beaver Themer, Elementor, Elementor Pro Theme Builder, Visual Composer, and a few other page builders as well. This flexibility is a testament to how easy and malleable the theme is, and how easily it can be used to create a pretty decent site for just about any sort of business.
This theme is probably one of the most widely used customization-focused WordPress themes that are currently on the market. This does mean that it can’t boost your site to have staggeringly quick page load times, but the render speeds that it does make possible are still more than enough for most small and medium-sized sites.
While the theme can be used for WordPress sites, it’s flexible enough in terms of the options that it has on offer that it can be a great fit for everything from eCommerce sites to pages that have a lot more of a blog-type feel.
Features:
Offers pre-built demo sites;
WooCommerce compatible;
Has a number of free extensions;
Translation & RTL ready;
Good support.
Short Review:
This theme can provide you with a lot of diversity when it comes to the different color pallets that you have access to, the number of Google fonts that you can use, and even the different spacing options that you can use for your Header and Footer. It’s a great creation tool and in the right hands it can create sites that you’d normally have to pay top dollar for.
On the surface, Neve isn’t really all that impressive. It has decent render speeds and customization options, but very little else, which leads to a lot of people writing it off as a very basic theme that’s not worth their time.
If you’re interested enough to look a little closer, you’ll find that the theme really doesn’t have any especially impressive traits, but the ones that it does have are top-notch. This puts it in the “better than average” range for both speed and style, which is pretty impressive.
Features:
Works well with AMP;
Comes with pre-built demo sites;
Very lightweight;
Responsive design;
Compatible with the Gutenberg editor.
Short Review:
Neve is known as an “install and use” theme. In essence, this means that you can choose to make any sort of alterations to the theme that you want, but it isn’t really necessary. The default look of the theme is already professional-grade, and while it can always be adjusted to your personal tastes, major alterations could lead to it losing some of its original simplistic charms.
Astra is mostly a performance-focused type of theme, but that doesn’t mean that it’s lacking in terms of customization options.
There are definitely more flashy themes that can provide you with more variation when it comes to color pallets or font choices, however, there’s almost always a trade-off in the speed that they can make possible for your site.
Astra allows you to add a lot of different elements to your site while making sure that these new additions don’t affect the render speeds all too much. This makes Astra a speed-boosting theme with an impressive amount of customization options, and those are very rare.
Features:
Takes up less than 50kb of disc space;
SEO-friendly;
Provides an assortment of starter templates;
Native AMP ready;
Compatible with a number of plugins.
Short Review:
Astra is a great choice for those that are new to site creation, and this is largely due to it’s easy to use layout editor and the multitude of different customization options. Additionally, the theme does provide tools that can help you edit and code that you might need, making it a good choice for more experienced programmers as well.
GeneratePress is probably the most well-known theme that we’ve mentioned, which is saying something since this list is full of some of the best free WordPress themes in 2020. The popularity of this theme comes from the developer support and constant updates that it receives, ensuring that it runs as smoothly as possible at all times.
This level of support has resulted in a well-coded theme that can be used to make pretty much any type of site that you might need. While the final result will always vary depending on the level of skill and experience that the user has, if you know how to use the tools at your disposal, you can make a first-rate site.
Features:
Works well with most page builders;
Very lightweight;
Mobile-friendly;
Isn’t dependant on jQuery;
WooCommerce compatible.
Short Review:
An impressive all-rounder that isn’t lacking in any particular area. While the theme isn’t specifically focused on speed or customizations, and some people might have an issue with that, it can still outperform most other run-of-the-mill themes in both areas.
Conclusion
As we mentioned before, there are going to be differences between the free and paid versions of these themes. If you’re looking for something a bit more than the features that we outlined in our article, then we encourage you to visit the sites yourselves and look through the available packages that they offer.
If you find that you aren’t impressed with the list of services that are provided by what we deemed to be the best free WordPress themes in 2020, then there’s nothing stopping you from upgrading to another package or switching themes entirely. However, we do believe that all of these free themes are definitely worth looking into, so we encourage you to give them a try for yourselves and make up your mind afterward.
Regardless of what kind of site you run, loading speeds are a key factor in how many return visitors you’re likely to see.
If you run a Shopify focused site, then you’re likely going to have a lot of product details and images that are notoriously slow to render and can really affect the performance of your site.
There are quite a few things that you can do in order to improve these loading speeds, but by far the easiest is to get a theme that can work well in tandem with Shopify and make good use of all of the available features you have at your disposal.
What Can Affect Site Speed?
While there are quite a few different elements that can be a hindrance to your loading speeds, there are essentially 2 major contributors to your render times – disc space and unnecessary code.
Disc Space
Sites are composed of many different elements. Most of the time, the bulk of the disc space that a site uses is dedicated to saving and rendering a large amount of text and a large number of images that most product-focused sites contain.
The larger the product image or description, the more disc space will need to be dedicated in order to store and retrieve that data at the request of the site visitors.
Unnecessary Code
You can make a strong argument that this point can also be included in the “disc space” category, however, while the size of the code does influence site speeds, there are also other problems.
Cleaner code has fewer lines, meaning it can download and render faster.
The issue is that certain processes require more complex code, so while a lot of themes have a built-in CSS code specific cleaner or don’t require the use of jQuery, there will be exceptions that will need to be made if you want to use more complex features on your site.
How Do Themes Fix These Issues?
Each contender on our best Shopify themes in 2020 list is different from the others in a number of ways, but most of them have quite a few features in common. Lazy loading and disabling selective apps are two such features.
Lazy loading allows the image to load only after the visitor has scrolled far enough down the page, and disabling background or certain apps can help reduce CPU usage drastically. Both of these features essentially reduce the processing power that most pages require and focus it instead on the more essential site functions.
Both of these features are common enough that most themes have them in one form or another, as well as a few other data-saving focused features that are too varied to name. However, most quality Shopify themes contain at least some minimization and data compression options, on top of the other features they offer.
Other Useful Features
While speed is key, it isn’t the be-all and end-all of site management.
A good theme should also have at least a few good site creation and customization options that you can use in order to make your homepage look like something you’d be proud to show to your site visitors.
Additionally, you might also want to have a few boosters or maybe even some choice when it comes to your font and headers. The themes we’ve listed below all have a number of useful tools and can be helpful to you in many different ways.
Flex offers an incredibly large array of different customization options. While you do get advanced CSS coding options built into the theme itself, you also have more easy to use drag-and-drop creation options that are super-helpful if you’re less experienced in terms of programming knowledge.
The theme also contains a few of the aforementioned data space-saving tools that really help boost the speed performance of any site that uses Flex.
Key Features:
A selection of colorful homepage layouts;
Allows you to create CSS classes or target specific code and elements;
Product stickers;
Different border and width settings;
An expensive icon library;
Megamenu and drop-down menus are available for integration;
Dependable support staff;
Multiple different Header and Footer styles;
Year-round automatic updates after purchase;
14-day money-back guarantee.
Final Verdict:
The most surprising element of this particular theme isn’t the multitude of design tools that you have on display, but rather the ease with which all of them can be used. The simple placement oriented site design style is so intuitive and easy to use that it alone is a big factor as to why Flex appears on our best Shopify themes in 2020 list.
This theme comes from the same developers as the previous one on the list. However, unlike Flex, Turbo is a theme that’s much more focused on speed rather than customization or page creation options.
Turbo is designed to provide visitors with the quickest possible interval between the moment that a request is sent in and the moment when the request is actually fulfilled.
Key Features:
Advanced mega menu;
Simple but creative page layouts;
Product sale display boxes;
Multiple colorful banners with a number of messages;
Multi tag filter;
Customizable product galleries;
Product quick-view options;
Thumbnail positioning;
A calculator for shipping rates;
Infinite scroll.
Final Verdict:
While the processing speeds and loading times that it makes possible are worth noting, the design tools it has leave a lot to be desired. This simply means that you shouldn’t go for this particular theme unless you’re fully committed to improve your page load times.
The optimized code that reduces render times, the few but interesting layouts, and the incredibly low price of the theme itself are all key factors as to why we rank Shoptimizer as one of the best Shopify themes in 2020.
Shoptimizer can be purchased by making a one-time fee of $167 for the Basic plan, $197 for the Pro plan, and $597 for the Ultimate plan. The more expensive plans will naturally have more options, but even the basic package can offer a large number of useful features.
Key Features:
Product search filter options;
Currency switcher;
Mobile and tablet optimization options;
Custom Header and Footer fonts;
Lifetime upgrades & support;
Various designs of product badges;
Allows video embedding;
A customizable call-to-action button;
Sale duration timers;
Display for the number of products still in stock.
Final Verdict:
This is another theme that prioritizes performance over appearance. Despite this, Shoptimizer still has quite a bit more diversity in its creation tools than a lot of the other themes on this list that focus solely on loading speed. In essence, this makes it an all-rounder type theme, with a bit more emphasis on site speeds.
Booster is a theme that’s focused on providing you with all of the necessary tools you might need to start selling your products as soon as your site visitors hit your homepage.
The theme contains a number of social proof sales notifications that can really help you spread awareness for your products among a large group of potential customers in a very short amount of time.
Key Features:
SEO optimized;
Allows you to offer gifts with specific product purchases;
Smart mega menu;
Sales countdown timers;
Mobile-friendly;
An option that allows the customer to go directly to checkout;
Displays “related product” and “frequently bought together” recommendations;
Integrates with Facebook Messenger;
Currency converter;
GDPR bar.
Final Verdict:
The main strength of this theme is the large array of tools that it has at its disposal that are specifically focused on selling products to any and all site visitors. While most of these methods have proven to work very well, you should be careful when choosing which ones or how many to enable at once or otherwise the constant reappearing notifications might actually drive customers away.
Shella is a jack-of-all-trades that can really provide you with just about everything you might need from a Shopify theme. Similar to other all-rounder themes, it doesn’t have any particularly note-worthy features, but the large number of smaller tools that it boasts are more than enough to make a great site with.
Regardless if you’ve already created a site or two, or if it’s your first time and you don’t exactly know what you’re doing, Shella can help you make your site as simple or as complex as you’d like.
Key Features:
SEO optimized;
Mobile-friendly;
Large color pallet;
Advanced swatches;
A large number of different Header and Footer fonts;
Option to selectively disable certain features and apps;
Lazy load effect;
Advanced admin panel;
RTL support;
Wishlist.
Final Verdict:
Shella is both fast and SEO-friendly, макинг it easier for people to find your site in the Google search results, but much harder to leave because of the responsive display and the intuitive and eye-catching product layouts.
Plak doesn’t have a free version, and the payment plans are divided into three one-time payments of $295 for the Small business plan, $395 for the medium business plan, and $595 for the Large business plan.
All of these plans come with 24/7 support, lifetime free updates, and all of the Plak theme features included.
Key Features:
Messenger and Whatsapp widgets;
Lazy Loading effects;
Inventory quantity on the product page;
Predictive search;
Size Chart;
Delivery estimator;
Megamenu;
Product labels with animations;
Currency converter;
Product upsell.
Final Verdict:
The theme boasts some pretty quick loading speeds and useful conversion features. Aside from that, the theme is also a pretty good all-rounder with a lot of variety in its tools. The single drawback would be the lack of any interesting layout options, but that can be overlooked because of all of the other positives that the theme has.
Fastor can be used for a large variety of different sites. It has a large number of different layouts that you can choose from, and while most of them are pretty simplistic, they still manage to catch the eye and give each site its own style and feel.
The theme also has good code compression, significantly reducing the CPU usage and allowing you to host a lot more images and item descriptions on your site.
Key Features:
SEO-optimized;
Contains video tutorials;
Allows product grouping and bundle purchasing;
3D product display;
Age verification features;
Allows you to set your own discounts;
Mobile web booster;
Product timers that signify sale durations;
87 pre-made demo sites;
Over 600 Google fonts.
Final Verdict:
The theme has a great selection of tools that can really help you get some products off of the shelves, and comes with good site speed and customization options.
Debutify has the rare distinction of having as many good features in the free version as it has in the paid version. It stands to reason that the paid version is going to have a lot more tools, however, the free version still comes with options that can really provide a major boost to the conversions and overall performance of your website.
The prices for the theme start out at $19 a month for the Starter plan, go up to $47 a month for the Hustler plan, and top off at $97 a month for the Master plan. Both the free and the paid versions receive regular updates, conversion-boosting apps, and product research tools.
Key Features:
Easy to use editing tools;
1-click installation;
Customizable message text and icons;
Allows you to place trust badges;
Smart search and product filtering options;
Wish list;
Add-to-cart animation;
Mobile optimized;
Product sale timers;
24/7 support.
Final Verdict:
The theme is average in both site performance and customization options. Luckily, the plethora of useful features it offers when it comes to things like dropshipping optimization and brand stores more than make up for it.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, these all deserve to be considered for the title of the best Shopify themes in 2020, however, since you’re going to need to make a decision, let us give you a final word of advice.
If you’re still unsure about which theme would best suit your site, then one last thing that you can do is check the public updates for every theme we mentioned.
GeneratePress is considered one of the best WordPress themes that you can find nowadays. But why exactly do a lot of people seem to favor this particular theme over all other WordPress themes, and why has it received such high praise?
The easiest way to explain this would be to simply say that it’s a reliable all-rounder that can provide pretty much any sort of company with the necessary features to make a high-end website.
Given that this is a bit of an oversimplification, let’s get into our GeneratePress review.
GeneratePress Review: General Info
When it comes to reliable site themes, GeneratePress is one of the most well-known and loved examples you can find. The theme has been on the market for about 5 years now, and during that time it has only kept improving and gaining speed.
The theme is versatile enough to be used in tandem with a large number of different types of sites, including WooCommerce focused and general WordPress sites alike.
GeneratePress can also be used with most of the other more popular page builders, but it works especially well with Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Divi.
Overall Rating
GeneratePress has received mostly positive reviews so far. Most of the review websites that have rating systems have found that their polls usually result in the theme receiving 5/5 stars, or a score of 10/10, with the lowest scores not dropping more than 1 or 2 points from the more positive ones.
That being said, like every other theme on the market, GeneratePress has some weaknesses as well. Well, when we say weaknesses we mean that certain speed-focused or feature-focused themes will outclass it in certain areas, but that comes with a price.
These themes will either need to focus solely on features and neglect site speeds, do the exact opposite, or be very proficient at both, but charge obscene amounts for their services.
GeneratePress, on the other hand, is both quick and feature-heavy while being reasonably priced. This will all depend on the exact package you choose, of course, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
Site Speeds
The way that most themes handle the burden of increasing the site render times and page load times is by either using specific boosters or by minimizing the amount of extra code that appears in the theme itself.
While GeneratePress also has WooCommerce boosted modules, the main reason why it can help make your site a bit faster is that the code itself is so air-tight that very little CPU power needs to be expanded on processes that aren’t necessary or can be removed entirely.
The theme itself only takes up slightly more than 60 kb of disc space, and even using all of the built-in modules simultaneously doesn’t affect the loading speeds all that much. There will naturally be a slow-down of about 0.2 seconds on the page rendering speeds, but that can easily be fixed by turning off specific modules or unnecessary background features.
Basic Customization Options
Pretty much every theme has the following three customization options. That being said, GeneratePress still provides a lot in terms of the versatility of the font, color, and layout options.
With these options, GeneratePress will help you create an eye-catching website, if that’s what you want. On the other hand, if you’d like a more simple design, there are a few more simplistic pre-built designs that provide a bit more empty space and aren’t so cluttered and busy.
What you decide to go with will naturally fall down to your personal preference as well as your audience.
Font and Topography
GeneratePress allows you to customize any text you have on your site. This means that you’ll be able to change both the style and the letter spacing of all of the elements on your site. These elements include the header and footer, the basic text, image titles, menu and section names, and so on.
You’re also able to change the size of the letters to make things like the widgets and sidebars easier to locate or read, and even apply text transformations and change the font-weight. Additionally, you’re given the option to use any of the available Google fonts that you have on display.
Color Selection
The theme has a selection of over 60 different colors you can use to give your site a bit more character. The colors can be used on everything from the links that appear on your page, to the borders of your menus.
The large selection of colors can also help you to accent certain areas of your layout by creating a more striking contrast between two different tones to draw more attention to specific elements.
This method is usually used to great effects when it comes to making the header and footer more noticeable by making them a more saturated or a brighter shade of the opposing color that you decided to add to your background.
General Layout
You can choose to apply any layout changes by simply going and editing any posts or elements in the actual pages where they’re located, or you can choose to use the general site customizer that’ll allow you to change any element from one menu. The choice is obviously yours, but for our money, it’s much simpler to use the customizer.
You can change everything from the dimensions of the menus, the visibility or transparency levels of certain sidebars, the amount of the screen space the page content should take up, and so on.
The customizer also allows you to disable certain elements at a time. This is mostly used if you have widgets that take up a lot of processing power, or if you have any background features that aren’t very useful but they’re slowing down your site by remaining active.
Pricing
The theme has a free version and a premium version. The free version comes with the perks that we’ve just mentioned, however, if you want access to the premium modules and the site library, then you’re going to need to be prepared to pay the yearly fee of $49.95.
If you do decide to make the purchase, you’ll be allowed to use the theme on an unlimited number of websites, receive a full year of updates, and you’ll even get 40% off on the renewal fee, on top of the 30-day money-back guarantee.
This is quite frankly a steal of a deal considering that for a little over $4 a month you’re getting access to a fantastic library of pre-made site designs, as well as a large number of very useful modules.
Modules
These are some of the most useful features of any theme. In essence, they are sort of control centers that allow you to make a large number of small or drastic modifications to certain features on your site.
The convenience that these modules provide is that they allow you to make all of these changes from one menu, whereas it would usually require you to seek out and modify the individual elements by hand, which is a lot more time consuming and tedious.
Blog
The blog module is essentially there to help you add a few things to the post that you put on your site. It will allow you to add the post date, the author of the post, the category, and also certain tags.
You’ll also be able to show the comment count and enable the use of infinite scroll on your page.
Finally, you’ll also be able to include any images in your posts and even place a set requirement for the number of characters that the excerpt should have.
Background
This module will allow you to place background images on most of the elements of your site. The menu in the module will display options for body, header, primary navigation, primary sub-navigation, secondary navigation, and so on.
Disable elements
The title of this section is pretty self-explanatory – this module allows you to disable certain elements on the theme.
This is one of the most useful features that you can have if you’re trying to make your page load times as fast as possible. This module will allow you to look through all of the background apps, widgets, and other elements that are currently active on your site and turn a certain number of them off.
Rather than the number of different elements, the exact element that you disable will have a lot more impact on render times. Simply put, this means that disabling the header, footer, and content title can sometimes be less effective than simply disabling the primary navigation.
If used correctly, this can really boost your site speed, just be wary of turning off any vital elements or even going overboard on the number of elements you disable.
Elements
This module takes the form of a drop-down menu that allows you to select between the header, hook and layout elements in order to modify them.
The header elements allow you to add your custom header by using HTML and CSS.
The hook elements allow you to place hooks in order to insert content into your site without having to worry about messing up the code.
The layout elements allow you to essentially do everything that we mentioned in the “general layout” section of our article, and this is essentially the third way that you can apply changes to the layout of your site.
WooCommerce
This module will naturally require you to already have the WooCommerce plugin installed, in order to make changes to your WooCommerce store. This means that you’ll be able to modify everything from the font and spacing between the letters, to the specific color that you want to use for your menus or text.
If you don’t run an eCommerce site, then this module will be practically useless for you. If you do run a product-focused site, then this is without a doubt one of the modules you need the most.
Site Library
The site library on GeneratePress offers a large number of pre-built sites that you can use as a template for your own. You can later choose to modify these sample sites in small or more drastic ways in order to fit your personal preferences better, or simply keep them the way they are.
Considering just how many pre-designed sites there are for you to choose from, you might want to either pick one that you really like the look of, or simply get one that’s close to what you’re looking for and simply modify it a bit.
Alternatively, you can go for a simpler site design to use as a template and build your own layout from there.
Whatever your preference, we’d like to recommend the following 10 templates that you have at your disposal once you get GeneratePress. These aren’t the undisputed best-of-the-best or anything like that, but they are all unique enough that they can be very useful for specific types of sites.
Mentor
Mentor has a sleek black look to it and it can give your site a very professional feel. Everything from the header color, to the bold font of the letters and the white text color, is used to make the elements of the site pop-out from the dark background and really help draw the eye of your visitors to the most important elements on display.
The theme was built with the use of Elementor and any modifications that need to be made should be done using the same page builder.
Read
As you might be able to tell by the name, this is the perfect choice for blogs and column style sites. These sorts of sites are naturally going to contain a lot of articles and text posts, so the white background is a required element, at least if you want your visitors to be able to read the text on-screen with as little eye-strain as possible.
The design is very reminiscent of a lot of magazines and news sites, selecting to keep the layout of the page to the most important menus and elements without cluttering it up with unnecessary sidebars and widgets.
Seller
Seller is a site that was designed specifically to display a large number of products on each page. Much like the design of “Read”, the page background is white so that the product images and information can be easier to see and read.
The font choice is usually a bit more fancy looking and it serves to add a little touch of design to the otherwise very small amount of decorations that this site design has.
Seller can be modified by using any page builder or the GeneratePress customizer options.
Studio
As their landing site says, Studio is a very minimalistic GeneratePress site. Everything from the background to the menus and the header font is made so that it can interact well with the Beaver Builder.
As long as you have at least a semi-decent understanding of how this particular page builder works, then you can really have some fun with this design and add some interesting elements to it.
More inexperienced users can also simply use the customizer to make any necessary changes or disable any elements that aren’t working for them.
Pixel
Pixel is a site that was designed with photography in mind. The layout of each page is centered around fitting as many high-quality pictures on the screen as possible at any one time.
This site takes up a bit more CPU power than the others purely because of the lazy-loading options that need to always be on, as well as the sheer amount of pictures that it usually contains.
Although it uses a lot of disc space, the site design is still well optimized, and it handles the extra rendering slow-downs surprisingly efficiently.
Prime
This is another product-focused site that’s intentionally made to look similar to Amazon, down to the menu colors, product picture placements on the screen, and the way that the text is displayed as soon as a visitor clicks on it.
You can easily modify the design, so if you don’t think that the current layout is good enough, you can simply use the editor and move a few elements around to get a more unique look.
Prime can be edited either by using the GeneratePress customizer or by using almost any page builder.
Liberte
This is a WordPress site designed for freelancers. Regardless if you’re a writer, photographer, blogger, or so on, this site design will likely have something to offer you.
The Elementor base makes it very easy to manage and modify the page layouts in order to better fit your own personal preference.
The site comes with your basic “About me” section, a few different menus at the top of the screen, a “Sign up” option for anyone looking to create a membership for your site so that they can keep up with your work, and a few other useful elements as well.
Coach
Similarly to the previous entry, this design is much more focused on marketing the abilities of the individual rather than any sort of company or product.
Coach allows you to essentially write out your entire resume and create a list of all of your qualifications so that any future employer or collaborator will have easy access to the list of skills that you possess and can bring to the table.
The site design also allows you to also add recommendations and referrals from people as well. This means that you can provide quotes and phone numbers of previous employers or co-workers that can vouch for you.
Agency
The colorful but minimalistic icons and the non-cluttered page layout are two of the biggest strengths that this site has. Both of these features are made possible thanks to the drag-and-drop creation function that allows you to create the layout one block at a time.
This is a great choice for everything from small to large-scale companies. The simple nature of the design makes it versatile enough to be used for pretty much any venture. This sort of design may seem sparse, but the final product is really striking when all of the elements come together.
Rumour
Rumour is another great blog and article type of site design. This is actually almost the exact opposite of the previous blog site that we covered because it used black backgrounds and white text, whereas “Read” used white backgrounds and black text.
Your preference will be the deciding factor as to which one you choose, but we included it because dark themes with white text are actually very popular since people feel like their eyes aren’t under so much strain while reading due to the black colors.
The design also features some minimalistic icons that really add a touch of style.
Support
Compared to other themes, GeneratePress has some of the best support options. This is in large part due to the fact that there are 2 ways in which you can get solutions to the problems you might be having.
The simplest way is to simply use Google. The staff at GeneratePress are very active on a lot of different review sites and forums, meaning that as long as you search for the exact problem that you’re having, you’re very likely to come across an answer from one of the members of staff very quickly.
The more direct approach is to visit the GeneratePress support forum directly. This is where all of the users and creators post their solutions to the problems that you might be experiencing with the theme. It’s well organized, each answer is time-stamped, and it’s very easy to find specific problems by using the search bar at the top.
Additionally, you can also visit the WordPress forums as well. GeneratePress is a very popular theme, so there are likely going to be at least a few posts about it a day.
Conclusion
As to the question if this is the best theme in 2020 – the answer is always going to come down to personal preference.
There is never going to be a consensus as to which theme is without a shadow of a doubt the best-of-the-best.
However, this GeneratePress review wasn’t made to change anyone’s mind. This article was made in order to point out some of the incredible features that this particular theme has, how it excels in nearly every area, and why it’s our personal choice for the best WordPress theme of 2020.
You might agree with us or you might not, but we do hope that we’ve at least given you a few reasons as to why you might want to give the free version a try.
CloudWays is a great hosting service that can provide you with very reliable connections, quick upload speeds, and a number of useful perks at very reasonable prices. This was probably the shortest CloudWays review that you can find online, but it’s concise, it gets to the point, and you don’t have to waste your time reading the entire article.
That being said, if you’re interested in hearing about some more specific features it offers and why it’s considered one of the better hosting services currently on the market, read on.
General Info
CloudWays is based in Europe, more specifically the island of Malta, and it was founded all the way back in 2009. While that doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, when it comes to hosting services, it might as well be centuries.
CloudWays has managed to stay relevant in a very competitive market for over a decade and it scarcely could have done that without picking up some good business practices and learning exactly what their customer base is looking to get out of their service.
The company states that they don’t have any specific focus but are rather trying to be a jack-of-all-trades that can provide their customers with a functional and fast service that comes at affordable prices.
In our CloudWays review, we’re going to go over all 3 points we just mentioned, and more, so let’s get started.
Pricing
CloudWays provides 4 different plans (5 if you include the free trial) and while a lot of them offer different speeds and disk space depending on the price bracket, most of the available features are included in each package.
These features include a free migration option, free SSL certificate, and the ability to host an unlimited number of applications. Additionally, you’ll also gain access to 24/7/365 support, as well as the pay-as-you-go billing feature, which allows you to pay only for the resources you consume.
We’d also like to note that CloudWays has unfortunately not named their plans, so we’re simply going to number them based on their prices. Cloudways has also priced their plans depending on the data centers you’ll use, so we’re going to list all of the prices in order from the lowest to the highest.
Free Trial
If you aren’t sure you want to commit straight out of the gate, CloudWays has you covered. You can choose to get the 3-day free trial that will allow you to try out the first plan before having to even spend a cent.
This is a great way for you to try out the service and find out if it can provide you with the sort of reliability and speed that you’re expecting. Keep in mind that sites for large companies aren’t likely to do well on any free service or even on the cheaper options. Meaning that you’re going to have to splurge for one of the more advanced plans that are more appropriate for a site with a lot more monthly visitors.
The First Plan
This plan will set you back $10 on DigitalOcean, $11 on VULTR, $12 on Linode, $33.63 on Google Cloud, and $36.51 on Amazon. These are all monthly payments. There are also hourly payment rates, but since we won’t be covering them, you’re free to check them out by clicking on this link.
The plan provides you with 1 GB of RAM, 25 GB of storage, and 1 TB of bandwidth on DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultur. On Amazon and Google Cloud, the storage goes down to 20 GB and the bandwidth goes down to 2 GB, while the RAM goes up to 1.70 GB on Google Cloud and 1.75 GB on Amazon.
This package also gives you a CDN add-on and unlimited application installation, access to automated backups and HTTP/2 enabled servers, regular security patching, SSH and SFTP access, and much more.
The Second Plan
This plan will cost you a single monthly payment of $22 on DigitalOcean, $23 on VULTR, $24 on Linode, $75.29 on Google Cloud, and $86.77 on Amazon.
The plan provides you with 2 GB of RAM, 50 GB of storage(55 for VULTR), and 2 TB of bandwidth on DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultur. On Amazon and Google Cloud, the storage goes down to 20 GB and the bandwidth goes down to 2 GB, while the RAM goes up to 3.75 GB.
This package comes with all of the options that the previous one had, including a few that we didn’t mention. These include the auto-healing function, the team management options, the staging environments, the 24/7 real-time monitoring, the dedicated firewalls, and the advanced caching optimization.
The Third Plan
The third plan that CloudWays provides will cost you $42 on DIgitalOcean, $44 on VULTR, $50 on Linode, $142.48 on Google Cloud, and $176.26 on Amazon.
The plan provides you with 4 GB of RAM, 80 GB of storage, and 4 TB(3 on VULTR) of bandwidth on DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultur. On Amazon and Google Cloud, the storage goes down to 20 GB and the bandwidth goes down to 2 GB, while the RAM goes up to 7.5 GB on Google Cloud and 8 GB on Amazon.
This package comes with all of the features that we mentioned before.
The Forth Plan
The final plan will require a monthly payment of $80 on DigitalOcean, $90 on Linode, $100 on VULTR, $232.80 on Google Cloud, and $274.33 on Amazon.
The plan provides you with 8 GB of RAM, 160 GB of storage, and 5 TB(4 on VULTR) of bandwidth on DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultur. On Amazon and Google Cloud, the storage goes down to 20 GB and the bandwidth goes down to 2 GB, while the RAM goes up to 15 GB on Google Cloud and 16 GB on Amazon.
This plan also provides all of the same features that come with the other packages.
Is it a Good Deal?
As you could tell by the packages we listed, CloudWays is incredibly generous when it comes to the features it offers. A lot of hosting services will either hide most of their more useful features behind paywalls or simply charge extra even for very necessary features.
The service is known for having better CPU and rendering speeds than a lot of other services that charge quite a lot more, like SiteGround. The CPU and data center will vary depending on your location and the package that you chose, but ultimately they all provide some incredible speeds.
Due to the various data centers and payment plans, CloudWays provides a reliable service to companies of varying sizes. Regardless of the number of site visitors you get in a month, the service provides upgrades that can accommodate your growing business.
In our opinion, you’re getting more than a good deal with any of the plans you pick.
Convenience
In the beginning of our CloudWays hosting review, we mentioned that one of the 3 biggest draws this service has is the convenience it provides for the users. We’re going to go over a few simple things that CloudWays does that really make a difference to their customer base.
1-Click Functionality
Most of the apps and additional features that the service offers can all be used with a few clicks. This can really save you a lot of time when you’re trying to run a website as efficiently as possible.
This might not sound like much, but trust us when we say that a lot of mistakes have been made due to people not making proper backups because the procedure was too much of a pain. CloudWays allows you to backup and even clone your site by simply going into the staging or backup menus and clicking a single button.
The 1-click functionality is also incredibly useful when it comes to setting up new sites and all of the applications that you mean to use on them. It can really make the process as quick and painless as possible even for less experienced site creators who don’t really know what they’re doing yet.
Managed Hosting
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, managed hosting, in essence, is when you transfer most of the administrative duties to your service provider. This means that they will do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to maintenance and updates, while you’ll be consulted for any big change and warned ahead of time about any updates to the server.
You need to wear a lot of hats when you run a website. You need to know how to design it, how to maintain it, how to solve any problems that pop-up, and so on. What managed hosting does is it takes some of those burdens off of your shoulders so that you can focus all of your energy on other more important ventures.
While you may not feel too sure about this at first, the chance of having your site and server in the hands of real professionals is something you shouldn’t miss. In all honesty, while you may be apprehensive about the whole situation, the truth is that this particular service that CloudWays provides ensurese that your site is always up and running with as few interruptions or issues as possible.
Flexible
The combination of the multi-core CPUs, the CloudWays CDN, and the globally distributed data centers make this particular service a great choice for pretty much any type of site. As long as you get a plan that fits your site size, then you can create and host as many sites as you might like and see little to no performance depreciation.
When it comes to small and medium-sized companies, pretty much any plan that you choose can provide you and your site visitors with the best loading times imaginable.
Larger companies will have to splurge a bit more when picking out a plan. This is mostly due to the high CPU usage that comes from having too many people on your site at once.
eCommerce focused sites can take full advantage of the shopping focused features that the service is compatible with, as well as the upscaling options that are available as soon as you start to pick up steam and need a larger item library for your site and more CPU power for your visitors.
Individuals can take full advantage of the cheapest plans available. As we mentioned before, all of the plans come with all of the same features, and since freelancer sites don’t usually have high requirements, that means that you’ll be getting all of the speed and functionality that CloudWays has to offer at a bargain.
Speed
Not only does CloudWays have access to over 25 data centers all around the world, but it has recently also added a “High Frequency” option to their VULTR data center plans, which increase the server speeds, CPU, RAM, and bandwidth for a moderate increase in price.
We mentioned the importance of your location and the plan that you pick, and while we did go over all of the prices, we didn’t mention the relevance of the data center that you pick for your hosting. Let’s change that.
DigitalOcean
This provider is undeniably the most affordable choice that you can currently use with the CloudWays service. The cheap bandwidth is really useful if you have a lot of applications that require a lot of it. However, while the infrastructure is reliable, the other providers generally have faster and more reliable upload times.
Linode
Is very cost-effective when you consider the quick speeds and reliable upload times. A great choice for small and mid-sized companies alike. While the scaling-up process is slower than some other providers on this list, it makes up for it with the cheap bandwidth.
VULTR
While this provider is relatively new, it can still provide quick and reliable speeds, a decent number of locations throughout the world, and cheap bandwidth. The backup process is slower than some of the other providers, but all-in-all, both the standard and the high-frequency packages are great all-rounders.
Amazon
This provider is known for having the highest number of locations on a global basis, as well as an extremely reliable infrastructure. This makes it a great choice for stable connections, reliable uploads, and quick speeds. Unfortunately, these are also the reasons why it’s the most expensive option.
Google Cloud
In terms of the number of locations and the average speeds, Cloud is only second to Amazon. However, this is still a great deal for load times that are ridiculously fast. Just keep in mind that it has the most expensive bandwidth, meaning that you need to make sure that you aren’t using apps that drain it too quickly.
Conclusion
Maybe the most important feature that we saved for last is the lack of any year-long binding contract. This allows you to only pay for the service for as long as you need it and simply switch or cancel it at your earliest convenience, which is an option that criminally few web-hosting services provide.
At the end of our CloudWays hosting review, we’d just like to remind you again that there is a free trial available, and if all of the positive traits we listed so far have done nothing to convince you that this is a great hosting service, then feel free to try it out for yourselves and make up your minds afterwards.
GeneratePress is one of the more popular WordPress themes that are currently available. The theme can provide both high-performance speeds and a variety of customization options that would be perfect for just about any sort of business site or personal blog.
While the sheer number of satisfied customers can speak to the quality of the theme itself, a lot of free users have a few doubts as to whether or not they’re missing out on some very useful features, and a lot of premium users are wondering if they’re paying for nothing.
If you’re a paying user, a free user, or simply interested in the theme and would like to know which version you’d prefer, then we might be able to help. We’ll go over and outline the most important key points in the GeneratePress free vs. premium debate, and let you decide which suits your needs better.
If you’re a paying user, a free user, or simply interested in the theme and would like to know which version you’d prefer, then we might be able to help. We’ll go over and outline the most important key points in the GeneratePress free vs. premium debate, and let you decide which suits your needs better.
Pricing
Obviously, the most important factor in the GeneratePress free vs. premium argument is going to be the price of the premium features and whether or not they’re worth it. Before we get to the features themselves, we should mention a few things about the pricing system itself.
The first thing that you’ll notice if you open the pricing page on the GeneratePress website is that they only have two available plans. This stands as a sharp contrast to similar themes like Astra or OceanWp, both of which have several available plans for both their annual and their lifetime payment options.
While the initial reaction of many people that have seen this payment plan may have been to condemn it as limiting, the truth is that it’s anything but that.
Even though their competitors may have a lot more plans at their disposal, unlike them, GeneratePress provides you with all of the tools straight out of the gate. This makes the cheaper plans that the other themes provide a bit meaningless because most of the more useful features are hidden behind paywalls. Meaning that you’ll need to get the more costly plans just to gain access to the tools that you’d have liked to have had access to from the start.
You have a choice between the yearly and the lifelong plan. Both of these will provide you with all of the same premium tools, but while one will provide you with free updates, support options for a whole year, the other will give you both of those features for good, for a single payment of $249.
GeneratePress Free
The free version of GeneratePress is a great basis for any WordPress site. Pretty much anyone can use the tools that the free version provides them in order to create a fast and responsive site.
Unfortunately, the major part of the customization options is in the premium version of the theme. You’ll still be able to create a site that can give your visitors a good first impression of your private business or your company, but you’ll need a bit more skill to achieve this.
The Code
The theme itself is very lightweight and has some impressive code at its foundation. As long as you have at least a rudimentary understanding of CSS and have some degree of coding experience, you can easily design a page layout that you’d be happy with.
If you aren’t good at site design, you are provided with a reset button that simply returns the layout to its default settings and undoes any mistakes that you’ve made. Additionally, even if you can’t make any significant modifications to the layout of your pages, you’ll still be able to use the theme to boost your loading speeds.
As we mentioned before, the theme is very compact and has very little excess code. Because of this, simply installing the theme on your site has been proven to decrease render intervals, increase request response times, and minimize the amount of disc space you use.
Google Ranking
A major point of interest for any company is going to be how well your site does in rankings since that will significantly affect the number of visitors you get each day. Because of this, you’re likely interested in finding out which of the GeneratePress free or premium theme options have more to provide you in this field.
Anticlimactically, the answer is that you’ll get all of the result boosting features even in the free version. This means that you’ll get all of the same advantages as any other site without having to pay a single cent.
The theme is optimized to run Schema, which is an algorithm that helps the search engines go through your content a bit more quickly and isolate points of interest. Both the free and premium versions of Generatepress are also designed to work well on any mobile device.
Other Features
The free version of GeneratePress isn’t as barren of customization options as we might have made you believe. It’s undeniable that the premium version has a lot more features at its disposal, however, the Greneratepress free version is still impressive in its own right.
This version comes with a selection of over 14 pro modules that you can use on your site, as well as more than 100 different types and styles of font that you can use for your site articles or product details.
It should also be said that while it is limited the free version also allows you a certain level of control over the layout of each page, as well as access to any and all upcoming updates for the theme itself.
GeneratePress Premium
The Premium version of GeneratePress will cost you an annual amount of $49.95. The plan comes with access to all of the GeneratePress premium modules, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and a 40% discount if you choose to renew.
The premium version also comes with full support options, as well as the option to use the theme on an unlimited number of websites. After the year is up and you choose not to renew your contract, you can still keep your site, however, you won’t receive the support options anymore and you won’t be able to access the full site library and the various customization options.
It Makes Things a Lot Easier
Probably the biggest reason why a lot of people fall squarely on the paid side of the GeneratePress free vs. premium discussion is because of how flexible the customization options are.
Even if you’re a complete novice when it comes to site design, you can still use the intuitive GeneratePress premium page builder in order to create something that has a good flow in the layout and can provide many useful features for your customers.
The premium version comes with over 60 color options, a number of backgrounds that can really give your site an eye-catching look, and access to a site library that has over 33 pre-designed demo sites.
Additionally, you’ll also be able to design your headers and footers, modify the spacing of the letters and text, and even control the layout of the page to the most minute detail.
WooCommerce
If you’re running a product-focused site, or are aiming to run one at least, then you’re going to need a good eCommerce plugin to help you out. WooCommerce is widely considered to be one of the better eCommerce plugins that are available on the market, so it’s advised that you have a site that’s well-optimized for it.
The WooCommerce options that GeneratePress premium provides can help you integrate the plugin seamlessly into your site layout. This helps improve the shopping experience for your customers as it simplifies the process and allows them to more easily find and purchase their products without any difficulties.
You’ll also get a selection of different customization options for the plugin which include menu settings, header fonts, color selection, and so on. Additionally, you’ll also be able to customize certain payment methods, regional information for delivery options, and even provide more detailed item information by way of sticky product bars.
More Intuitive Design
The multitude of different customization options may seem overwhelming at first, and while it is true that forcefully cramming as many different assets as you can into a single page will result in a cluttered mess, there are better alternatives available.
The premium version of GeneratePress comes with the option to disable any unnecessary background apps, widgets, or features in order to reduce disc space and bandwidth usage. You also get a mega menu and secondary navigation, both of which will make going through your site a lot more intuitive. And finally, you also have the 1-click import and export theme settings feature.
If used correctly, the premium page builder can be used to create a site that flows naturally from menu to menu. This will ensure that the people that open and browse your site will immediately be hooked, and you’ll stand a better chance of getting some more return visitors.
Conclusion
The free version of GeneratePress can provide any small business owner with everything that they might need in order to compete with the bigger sites at absolutely no cost. It’s also a great economical option for a lot of medium and even large businesses, as long as they have the know-how to switch a few lines of code around and give their site a bit more of a professional feel.
The premium version of GeneratePress comes with a page builder that makes the design process of your page creation an absolute breeze. The single $49.94 yearly payment is a comically low price for the number of tools that you get at your disposal. This version is a great option for any company or individual that’s looking to create a wholly unique site layout that can really draw potential customers in and leave a good first impression of your business.
We’d like to end this GeneratePress free vs. premium discussion by saying that everyone has their preferences, and one version will work better than the other for you. However, we firmly believe that you won’t regret getting either version of this theme.
It would be a lot easier to come to a definitive conclusion on the WP Astra vs. GeneratePress debate if either of these WordPress themes had any definitive drawbacks.
As it stands, both WP Astra and Generatepress are great all-rounder themes that can provide your site with some pretty impressive loading speeds, as well as quite a few different customization options that can make your page layout as intuitive as possible.
Undeniably, both themes have their strengths and their weaknesses. We’ll do our best to outline all of those good and bad points for you, and by the end of the article, you’ll hopefully have come to a conclusion as to which side of the WP Astra vs. GeneratePress divide you fall on.
Pricing
In order to be fair when tackling this WP Astra vs. GeneratePress debate, we’re going to need to make an important distinction in the aspects of the themes that we’re going to be covering.
Simply put, Astra has three annual plans that it provides for its users, while GeneratePress is limited to only one. The initial Astra plan – the Astra Pro – will cost you an annual sum of $59, while the GeneratePress plan will set you back $49.95.
We felt we should make this distinction clear because if you have the available funds to afford the more high-end Astra plans, like the $169 mini agency bundle, or the $249 agency bundle, then you’ll predictably gain access to a lot more impressive tools that you can use.
However, the difference between paying $59 and $169 is quite steep, and while larger companies won’t have much trouble when it comes to covering that price, the smaller businesses will likely find the price difference a bit too jarring to consider upgrading to the mini agency bundle.
Therefore, in order to have as much of a fair comparison on the subject of WP Astra vs. GeneratePress as we can, we’ve limited the number of elements that are under consideration to the ones that come from the two plans that are the most similar in price to one another.
Similarities
Seeing as how both of these themes are acclaimed to be two of the best WordPress themes that you can use on your site, you can imagine that they would have a lot of elements in common when it comes to their general infrastructure and list of available options.
Renewal: Upon renewal of your yearly plans, GeneratePress will provide you with a 40% discount, while Astra will provide you with a smaller but still welcome 20% discount.
Size: Astra comes in at under 50KB, which is still staggeringly lightweight, but GeneratePress beats it out once again with it’s under 30KBs of disc space usage.
Speed: The aforementioned slight difference in size, as well as the general better compatibility with the plugins that it has at its disposal, gives GeneratePress the slight edge when it comes to loading and site speeds.
Modules: While GeneratePress has a good number of modules – 15 to be exact, Astra beats it out by one with its 16 modules. However, a slight note should be made that two of the modules are yet to be released, switching the lead over to GeneratePress, at least for the time being.
Templates: GeneratePress Premium comes with 33 pre-built page templates to choose from, while the Astra Pro plan only comes with slightly more than 20.
WooCommerce: Both themes have a lot of customization options available that can be used with the WooCommerce plugin.
Page builders: Both themes are compatible with most of the more popular page builders. However, while GeneratePress can be used in tandem with each builder equally, it has been noted that Astra runs well with other builders, but it’s better with Elementor and Beaver Builder.
Megamenu and filters: Both themes come with good navigation and secondary navigation options, as well as mega menus that can make the feature placements on your site a lot more intuitive.
Mobile-friendly: Both themes are flexible enough to be adaptable to any platform.
SEO-friendly: Both themes are compatible with the Schema algorithm, improving their Google rankings. The more costly plans for Astra are also compatible with Schema pro.
The code: Both templates are well optimized and have very little in the way of needless code that could create unnecessary strain on the CPU or problems with any of the plugins and features. This also means that as long as you have some level of skill, you can easily use the code editors in order to easily change quite a few things on both themes.
GeneratePress Features
The annual GeneratePress Premium plan comes with a full year of updates and support and a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re unsatisfied with the service that was provided. You’ll also gain access to the full site library and all of the available templates, fonts, colors, header, and footer options.
The theme also comes with a free version that anyone can use. If you’re interested in hearing a bit more about the differences between the premium and free versions of GeneratePress, then you might be interested in this article.
In short, while the premium version has the most customization options, the free version still has the same blistering speeds, low CPU usages, availability to be used on an unlimited number of sites, and a decent amount of pre-made demo sites.
WP Astra Features
The WP Astra template also comes with the option to be used on an unlimited number of sites, one-to-one support, a large number of different headers, colors and widget options, and even a spacing control feature that allows you to create a better design for your layout.
The agency bundles come with access to more than double the number of starter templates of the Pro plan, a selection of addons for both Beaver Builder and Elementor, which will make site modifications much easier, and even Pro versions of both the Convert and the Schema plugins.
It should also be pointed out that even without getting the more expensive plans, the Astra pro plan has more than enough available functions. Among these are a number of blog and custom layouts, a scroll to the top link, options to implement clearly defined header sections, LifterLMS Integration, hooks for easier coding sessions, and so on.
Conclusion
It should be clear by now that both Astra and GeneratePress have very different strengths and weaknesses. This contrast in their strong points comes due to them not being targeted towards the same types of users.
GeneratePress beats Astra in terms of speed and price, and it can more than match up to it in terms of customization options and third-party support features, as well as plugins. These qualities make GeneratePress an ideal option for smaller companies and private businesses that are looking for incredible site speeds and decent layout options at affordable prices.
WP Astra is definitely a more costly alternative. This isn’t just in regard to GeneratePress, but also to a lot of other similar themes currently available on the market as well. This definitely limits the availability of the better features it has to offer.
However, any company that’s willing to spend a few more dollars will find that the agency bundles can really give your site a significant boost in terms of available site visitor features, layout designs, plugin options, portfolios, and more.
Caching is the process of storing a certain type of data outside of the storage location where your site information is usually placed. This transient data is then more quickly accessible to any repeat site visitor that makes a specific site request. Caching specific types of data allows you to be able to serve up certain parts of your site more efficiently, thereby improving site speeds and reducing CPU usage.
While this is a bit of a simplified definition given that there’s a bit more to caching, most people are familiar enough with the concept that they can at least understand the basic workings of the process.
However, what most people don’t know is that WooCommerce caching is actually a different beast altogether. Let’s see why this is before we go into the best caching plugins for WooCommerce.
WooCommerce Caching
WooCommerce caching falls under the umbrella of web browser caching. The same basic concept applies – data is stored on the hard disc of the computer where the browser is running. The reason why caching a WooCommerce site is so different from, let’s say WordPress sites, is because the content of most product-oriented sites is dynamic in nature. This is why WooCommerce sites have much higher performance requirements than standard WordPress content sites.
The sort of data that is cached on most WordPress sites most often counts as HTML code caching. This allows specific lines of code to be saved in a location on the site visitor’s PC in order to be pre-loaded ahead of time as a way of improving page load times.
The issue with WooCommerce site caching is that it brings Checkout, Cart, and Account pages into the mix. These types of pages require visitors to input their personal information into the required boxes.
Cached data works because the same information is served to each site visitor. When the cached data varies from one visitor to the other, then in the best-case scenario the visitor may see random products that they didn’t select in their cart, and in the worst case, they might have their personal information revealed to other site visitors.
What this all means is that the best caching plugins for WooCommerce are able to meet much higher performance requirements than any plugins for a standard WordPress site, which is how the worst case scenarios can be avoided.
How Cloudways Hosting Can Help
Speaking of higher performance, maintaining your WooCommerce site and the necessary plugins will be much more difficult if you intend to do it on a cheaper or a lack-luster web hosting service.
The hosting service you go for should at least be able to support object caching. Object caching is a type of database caching that speeds up areas such as WordPress backend, the cart, checkout, order management, and various customer functions.
We aren’t new to the site optimization game, and after working on more than 3000 websites, we’re confident that we have a firm grasp on which hosting services can really provide the biggest advantages to their users.
This is why we recommend Cloudways as a hosting option. The service provides you with a WooCommerce hosting option that enables you to manage your site much more easily by using the intuitive platforms, performance-oriented tools, and site boosters.
Depending on the data centers that you use, as well as the amount of RAM, processing power, storage space, and bandwidth you need, the service can cost you as little as $10, and as much as $745. Most average-sized sites usually prefer the plans that range around $50 a month, since you get all of the best perks, without having to burn as much money as the more large corporation-focused, high-end hosting plans.
All of the plans can provide you with SSD hosting options, the 7.3 version of PHP, optimized stacks, and even a CloudwaysCDN that can help reduce the server load.
Most importantly – Cloudways is compatible with all of our choices for the best caching plugins for WooCommerce, and, in fact, comes with Redis already installed.
Important Features That The Best Caching Plugins for WooCommerce Include
Before we jump into our pick for the best WooCommerce plugins, we’d like to go over a few of the more notable features that they have. Keep in mind that even with these plugins equipped, you’re still going to need to manually adjust certain settings.
Since all 3 plugins have these features, outlining them in this section will keep repetition down to a minimum, while also allowing us to draw your attention to what we consider to be the most important elements that any plugin needs to have in order to be counted among the best caching plugins for WooCommerce.
Cookies
Cookies essentially keep track of the requests that site visitors send in on specific pages. This allows the sites to personalize their ads and send the site visitors offers for products they might like based on their internet search history.
WooCommerce cookies do the same thing, but they are used in order to store data about when cart contents are updated. They also allow the site to register which customers added which items to their carts.
Caching these cookies can lead to the shopping cart not updating properly and the customers either not being able to see the items that they selected in their cart, or having completely random items in their place.
This means that you’ll need to set a rule that ensures that the plugin you’re using will exclude these items from the caching process.
WooCommerce pages
WooCommerce has 3 basic pages that it adds to your site. These are the Cart, My Account, and the Checkout pages.
As we mentioned before, all 3 of these pages are dynamic in nature due to the fact that each customer needs to enter their unique personal details into the boxes. This leads to a large amount of data that can’t be cached in order to prevent security leaks of confidential data.
As such, any WooCommerce plugin is also required to be able to skip the information on these pages when it comes to caching site data.
JavaScript
JavaScript code is a key factor when it comes to the performance of a site. The optimization of the code and the overall quantity of unnecessary or junk code can really affect the speed at which certain routines run on your site.
In order to ensure that the JavaScript code runs at optimal capacity, most sites minify it. However, the obvious problem that product-focused sites are faced with is that there is no easy way to distinguish WooCommerce specific code from general site data.
In order to circumvent this issue, you’ll need to go into your base files and manually locate and copy the WooCommerce data. Afterward, you’re going to need to go into your plugin and paste your items into the list of URL’s of Javascript files that need to be excluded from minification.
The Plugins
Our list of the best caching plugins for WooCommerce is likely going to be very different from others that you might see. We’re not saying that there aren’t any other choices that can give these 3 a run for their money. What we are saying is simply that we consider these 3 to be the absolute top of the line in our opinion and based on our experience.
WP Rocket is one of the best WooCommerce caching plugins that are currently available. The plugin comes with general optimization options like lazy loading that can really make an impact on your site performance and improve both the speed and processing power.
Since it’s WooCommerce focused, the plugin also comes with page caching. This will allow you to set up exclusion to the dynamic WooCommerce pages without needing to go into your site files and locating the URL files manually.
Redis is one of the best WooCommerce plugins simply because of the efficiency and speed with which it handles object caching. The plugin comes with a variety of different configuration options, serialization and compression options, as well as cache analytics and preloading features.
One of the hiccups of this plugin is that not every web hosting service supports it. The more efficient ones, like Cloudways, are an exception, but before picking up this plugin, we suggest that you make sure that everything is ok with the hosting service that you’re using, or simply change providers.
This plugin will only cost you $5 per month, and for that price, you’ll be able to gain access to all of the WooCommerce specific features that we previously mentioned which were present in the other plugins, as well as a variety of general WordPress performance-boosting options.
This plugin works well with CDN’s and has a lot of features that go well with high-end sites that are expecting to see a large visitor turnout on a regular basis.
Conclusion
If you’re interested in any of these plugins, remember to run a full analysis on your site after you’ve installed any of them. The chances that there would be a problem that could arise from using these caching plugins is low, but there are certain web host servers and site features that don’t play well together.
If your site and server are compatible with any of these plugins, then you’re going to see quite a difference in overall performance.
Site speed is considered to be the most crucial component that determines how well your site performs and how many visitors you receive on a daily basis.
While you might get the gist of the importance of this element simply by the name, you might not be completely aware of how site speed actually impacts SEO.
We’re here to change that, and by the end of this article, you’ll hopefully be aware of the exact meaning behind the term “site speed”, as well as how it can help your site, and what you can do to solve any problems that it might cause.
Defining Site Speed
Site speed is exactly what it sounds like – the speed at which your site can fully load a page. More specifically, the actual site speed refers to the time that passes from when a site visitor sends in a request, which is then processed by the server, and the time it takes for the site itself to load and present all of the necessary page elements.
The page loading times that your site achieves is going to play a major role in both visitor satisfaction and rankings. The reasoning is simple – slow loading times cause visitors to leave your site, so Google registers the low amount of active time that a user interacts with your site and defines your ranking based on those statistics.
There is obviously a lot more to it as this was the simplest explanation that we could give. In the upcoming sections, we are going to provide a more in-depth view of how site speed actually impacts SEO and how you can improve the performance of your site. Before we get there, we just need to specify that low site speeds aren’t a symptom of a bad site, but rather the result of bad site management. That being said, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed.
We’ll go over the elements of bad site management and how you can avoid them, but the first thing you’ll need to do is get a speed reading.
Speed Test
In order to properly evaluate your actual site speed without having to rely on Google ranking data, you can use measuring tools like Sitespeedbot. We’ve optimized thousands of websites over at WPSpeedFix, and without question, this is our tool of choice when we want to easily and quickly produce the most accurate findings possible.
The main reason why we recommend this tool is because it actually makes a measurement of the most vital site components. Other speed measurement tools usually do nothing more than compare your speeds with certain predetermined vectors, which gives you no data that you can actually work with and simply waste your time with meaningless averages and unnecessary statistics.
Sitespeedbot outlines all of the most important elements that you need to pay attention to, like the TTFB (time to first byte), page size, number of requests, and so on. All of the terms are pretty self-explanatory simply by the name, and even the more generally unknown phrases like the FCP timing have small descriptions in brackets so that you know exactly what the metric is measuring.
We can point you to some articles that can explain the importance of certain elements and what sort of figures you should be aiming to reach. However, for this article, we’ll be sticking to explaining how they collectively make up the page loading times and how site speed actually impacts SEO.
If you already went to Sitespeedbot and got your baseline numbers, then you know where your starting point is and where you’re gonna go from there.
How Do I Improve Site Speed
Each of the elements that we mentioned earlier, such as the TTFB, FCP timing, and the page size(as well as the ones we neglected to mention, like the cumulative layout shift, the total blocking time, and the fully loaded time) are all influenced by different factors and can all be reduced or increased in a number of ways.
Going over all of them would be a waste of time since they’re all interconnected. This is good news since it means that all you need to do in order to boost a handful of your site stats is to make a few changes in your site management here and there.
In particular, there are 3 major elements that you’re going to need to look out for when it comes to site speed, and we’ll go over all of them, plus include a few solutions to each.
Improving these 3 elements can really help you get a better SEO ranking and improve the performance of your site.
Page Size
The size of a website is directly proportional to the speeds it can achieve. In essence, this is due to the fact that the larger amount of data that a page needs to load at any one time will drastically affect the CPU power that’s required in order to fully render all of the elements.
One of the more troublesome elements that can affect CPU usage is the code. We’ll go over some of the reasons as to why this is and how you can prevent it later on, but suffice it to say that poorly optimized code can cause strain by adding too many unnecessary lines that do nothing more than clutter the site and cause processing power to be expanded by going over junk data.
Luckily, even if you have poorly optimized code, that isn’t the major issue when it comes to site sizes and there are still a few things that you can do in order to more effectively reduce the megabytes.
The majority of your hard disk is going to be taken up by image files, given that the difference between the memory usage of pictures and the memory usage of text is astronomical.
Solutions:
Compression
The .webp image format is one of the better choices when it comes to both reducing the size of your images and keeping them in mostly the same resolution.
The .webp format doesn’t compress the images as much as the JPEG format, nor does it maintain as much of the resolution as the PNG format (both of which we’ll cover in the next point).
However, while the other two formats are better in their respective functions, the .webp format is a great middle-ground.
The easiest way to implement this format is to either use the Shortpixel plugin or the Cloudflare option (if you’re using that particular service). Shortpixel might just be the more popular option between the two, but it doesn’t really work well on sites that aren’t WordPress powered, which is where the Cloudflare polish to compress images feature comes into play.
File Types
A much simpler method that you can use to reduce the size of your images is to simply save them as JPEG files instead of PNG. This can be done manually, or by using this particular WordPress plugin. The difference between the two lies in the compression algorithm that they use.
PNG files use a lossless compression system, while JPEG files use a lossy system. The lossless system keeps all of the image data intact while the image is compressed, while the lossy does not.
This means that the PNG files are going to stay the same quality if you compress and then uncompress them, whereas the JPEG files will have their resolution reduced after to restore them to their original size.
On the other hand, the lossy system allows the JPEG files to be compressed into much smaller items, allowing you to use a larger number of compressed images on your site than would be possible otherwise.
In essence, you’re trading quantity for quality, but we believe that the trade is worth it since site visitors aren’t likely going to even notice if the images are a slightly lower resolution, while they will notice the speed droops that come with having too many large files on the page at one time.
Lazy Loading
Speaking of having too many images displayed at once, the lazy loading function can help you reduce the amount of stress that your CPU comes under as a result of having to keep track and render a large number of images.
The function of lazy loading is to only load the images after the site visitors have scrolled far enough down the page to actually be able to trigger the display rule, as well as to de-load the images that the visitors have scrolled past.
In order to accomplish this, helpful tools like the Lazy Load plugin set a certain border over the edges of the image. As soon as a certain predetermined part near the top of the point is visible on the screen, the image will load, and the reverse will happen as soon as the image is too far up on the screen.
Naturally, the way in which these plugins help your site is by giving it less work by reducing the number of items that need to be rendered at any one time, ensuring that the resources are better spent somewhere else.
Reliability
Constant crashes, unreliable uploads, and difficulty in request processing are the surest signs of a bad web hosting server. Using a service that can’t provide you with the speeds, bandwidth, and CPU power that you need to run your site properly will result in a lot of frustration for both you and the site visitors that have stable internet connections but still have a hard time loading pages from your site.
Without question, the easiest way that you can increase your overall site reliability is to simply move to a different web hosting provider. Some of the most famous and trusted hosting services that are currently available come with a lot of useful perks for site management, while also lots of valuable features at some pretty reasonable prices.
Our recommendation for one such service is Cloudways. The main reason is the fact that the service can provide some of the most impressive loading speeds, stable servers, and uptime reliability. They also have a flexible pricing scheme that can allow you to pay anything betweeen $10 and $745 a month, depending on your requirements.
If you do move to a different hosting service, you’re still going to need to keep an eye on your site performance to make sure that your speeds and ranking aren’t dropping. There are a few common issues that you might run into, but there are also a few easy solutions.
Solutions:
Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network allows you to host your site data on multiple servers around the world in order to be able to stream to visitors in different countries without them having to suffer drastic speed drops.
Without a CDN, if the visitor is farther away from the server base that your web host is using, it will take much longer for them to send out a request, have that request processed, and receive the required data. This results in faster speeds for visitors that happen to be in the same general location as the server, while the other visitors have to put up with much longer delays.
A CDN circumvents this issue by allowing you to host your site on multiple locations that services like Cloudflare maintain, thereby ensuring that the data is both delivered more quickly, and has less of a chance of being corrupted or having information lost in the transit.
Set up a Monitor System
You can find a lot of useful monitoring tools online. We personally prefer to use Uptimerobot. We have a lot of history with this tool and it’s one of the more reliable monitoring tools that we’ve worked with.
The main reason why we prefer to use this tool is the lightning-fast, 1-minute intervals at which it checks the site pages for any notable flaw or problematic features. We are using the paid version, but the free version that everyone can get will still check your site at 5-minute intervals, which still isn’t all that shabby.
You might also look into investing in the LittleWarden and DomainComet tools as well. Both of these are useful for monitoring things that also impact uptime, like SSL certificates and domain expiries.
Backup Your Site
You’re likely going to frequently experience some data loss. This can come as a result of bad coding, unreliable plugins, botched maintenance attempts, or even hacking. The simplest way that you can minimize the damage that you take from any of these is to frequently create backups of your site data, and even then make sure that you have multiple copies of these saves.
Realistically, the most likely problem that you’re going to face is going to be one that you might create yourself.
Most WordPress plugins are sponsored by some big names in the field, meaning that a faulty plugin is going to be very unlikely unless you intentionally choose to use some shady software.
Bad coding shouldn’t be an issue as long as you use WordPress themes like Divi, Astra, or BeaverBuilder, all of which have site builders that can help design a perfectly functional site from scratch.
As for hacking, most web hosting services like Cloudways provide you with a pretty reliable firewall that can thwart most such attempts.
None of these factors are 100% safe and you might have issues with any and all of them at some point. However, without question, the most likely cause of data loss on your site is going to happen when the maintenance that you attempted didn’t quite work out so well.
So just make sure to create multiple backups and you should be just fine and dandy.
Site Data
The Google rankings are decided based on collected data from a few different sources.
Most prominently, they use CRUX or “Chrome User Experience Report”. This data is collected from millions of Google chrome users and it compiles together your site speeds and metrics along with the user engagement algorithms.
They use both of these results in order to determine how long a visitor stays and engages with your site while it runs under different loads and provides them with different site speeds.
They also use Google Pagespeed Insights and Pagespeed score, in addition to Core web vitals, in order to run a 28-30 day information processing cycle.
What all of this means is that there is no set time that you need to worry about your site being reviewed by Google since it’s already happening on a regular basis.
This is both good news and bad news.
The bad news is that you’re constantly going to need to be on top of your game in order to keep a good ranking and keep up with your competition.
The good news is that as long as you managed to do everything that we mentioned up until this point, you’re very likely going to receive a favorable Google ranking, so you really don’t have anything to worry about.
However, one area that you should pay attention to is the performance of all of your pages. Most sites focus on optimizing their homepages and largely neglect the rest. This is easily uncovered when the surveys are carried out, and if this is the case, the site will be considered as having nothing more than fancy window dressing and no actual substance.
Luckily, there are a few things that you can do in order to ensure that all of your pages are properly optimized.
Solutions:
Caching
Caching is a method of storing data after a user comes to your site for the first time. The general method of caching data involves embedding certain lines of code in the user’s PC so that they can be accessed much more easily the next time they send a request to your site.
There are actually many different types of caching. WooCommerce caching, for instance, is a lot more dynamic in nature and involves excluding certain pages from the caching process in order to prevent leaks of confidential information. We won’t go into all of that, but you can check out this article if you want any more information on the subject.
There is also object caching, which involves storing database queries. One of the most well-known plugins that can do this, which is very beneficial for both WordPress and WooCommerce sites, is Rebis.
While you don’t have to use the specific caching plugin that we recommend, getting a general-purpose caching plugin for your WordPress site and a dynamic caching plugin for your WooCommerce site can really boost your loading times.
HTTPS
Updating from HTTP to HTTPS will allow you to gain some additional security to your site, which goes a long way when it comes to both visitor loyalty and improving your ranking.
The added encryptions that HTTPS sites are equipped with is a real help when it comes to eCommerce sites in particular. Seeing that lock in front of the address bar can really put you at ease when you’re considering entering your personal information into a site that you’ve never visited before.
HTTPS sites are also able to use the new HTTP2 protocol which allows them to receive the files that can be downloaded from a site at a quicker rate, hence boosting the site speed.
Before switching over, simply make sure that you run it by your web hosting provider. If they are one of the services that can’t support this transition, then maybe it’s time for an upgrade.
Plugins
If you’re running a blog or general content sort or WordPress site, then you might like to look into some plugins that are tailor-made to provide you with a few useful tools, regardless of the exact nature of the site. The same applies to WooCommerce sites as well.
All you’ll need are 5 minutes and you’ll probably find a plethora of useful features and add-ons for fashion sites, travel sites, business-focused sites, private venture sites, and so on. The WooCommerce plugins are also particularly useful since they include a lot of product marketing-oriented features.
Regardless of what you choose to add to your site, any boost in page performance will result in an all-round improvement of your site functionality.
Just make sure that the plugins and new features play well with all of the options that you already have added. If they don’t, then no matter how useful they are, they’ll likely do more harm than good and you’re far better off removing them right away.
Summary
When it comes to the question of how site speed actually impacts SEO, the answer is a bit more complicated than many people think. However, there are quite a few ways that you can ensure that both your site performance and speed are good enough so that your SEO ranking improves, or at least doesn’t drop significantly for a long time.
Let’s briefly summarize what was said so far:
Use image compression plugins in order to save on disc space;
Prioritize the JPEG format rather than PNG for your images;
Install a lazy loading plugin to help reduce unnecessary CPU usage;
Use a CDN in order to be able to stream data closer to your site visitor locations;
Set up a monitoring system so that you can keep an eye on your site performance at all times;
Make sure you have multiple backups of your site data, especially before attempting any maintenance work;
Caching site data helps repeat users load the pages faster;
Upgrading to HTTPS has multiple benefits, the best of which is the boost in speed;
Add tools to your site that can boost it in specific ways, depending on the exact nature of the site.
There are many different aspects of hosting a website. There are the hosting service providers themselves, the plugins that you’re using, how well the theme interacts with your site, and many other different elements that you always need to pay attention to.
One of these elements is the TTFB. As with almost everything, there has been a lot of debate on the subject of the importance of this element to the site itself.
Table of Contents
For our money, every element of a website, regardless of how seemingly unimportant, should always be improved and made to run as quickly and efficiently as it can.
The TTFB is initially one of the more confusing elements of hosting a website, but hopefully, this article can help you understand what TTFB is and how to reduce it as much as you can.
TTFB – Time To First Byte
Right off the bat, we should emphasize that the TTFB is not your actual page loading time. While the TTFB plays a part in your overall site speed, there are many moving parts that are responsible for the overall performance.
As the name implies, the TTFB is the interval between when the first segment of site data is sent from the web host servers and when it’s received by the site visitor. There are a few different factors that actually come into play from when the data is sent to when it’s received, and all 3 can significantly impact the total TTFB.
The first thing that happens as soon as a visitor tries to access your site is that a request is sent out to the server of the web host provider that you’re using;
Next, the server will process the request and generate a response;
The response, in the form of bytes of information, will then be sent back to the site visitor.
The time between the start of this process till the end of it is how the TTFB is calculated.
What Causes a Slowdown in The TTFB?
There are quite a few reasons as to why the request and the response steps of the TTFB process can be marred with incredibly bad slowdown. One of the major ones is a bad internet connection on the side of either the web host provider or the site visitor. While there are measures that can be taken in order to improve the speed of the web host and the site itself, naturally, there’s nothing that can be done if the problem lies with the visitor’s slow internet.
There is also the possibility that geographic location is causing your site to have a slower TTFB speed for certain visitors. A response to a request from a different continent will arrive a lot slower than a response to a request that was sent from the same country. This will depend on the location of the web host servers, as well as whether or not you’re using a DNS.
As for the second step, the speed at which the request is processed is mostly going to be influenced by the CPU capabilities of the host server. However, the compatibility of the site theme with the type of website that you have, the number of background applications that you have running at any one time, and badly optimized site code can all have a negative impact on the request processing.
TTFB Speeds
Knowing the reasons as to why your page loads slow is all fine and good, but we really haven’t explained what good request and response times are supposed to look like. Before we go on to the next section where we provide you with examples of how to reduce your TTFB speed, we’d like to explain what sort of benchmarks you’re going to be looking to reach first.
Measuring Your TTFB
Before making any modifications, you’re going to need to get a measurement of what your current site speeds are like. This can be done by going to any site testing speed website that is available online.
One such reliable site that you can consult for this sort of information is SiteSpeedBot. The main reason why you might want to use SiteSpeedBot over certain other similar tools is that it actually measures and provides you with a detailed list of your site statistics.
This may sound like the most basic requirement for a speed testing tool, but you’d be surprised how many similar tools actually don’t run any sort of tests but rather simply tell you that your site is lacking in certain areas without providing any more detailed or useful information on the actual issues.
SiteSpeedBot on the other hand can give you surprisingly accurate readings on elements like your page size, your FCP timing, your fully loaded time, your total blocking time, your time to download on different internet speeds, and much more.
What You Should Be Looking For
After you’ve got a decently accurate measurement of your site statistics, you’re going to go item by item and compare your readings with the numbers that we’re going to outline below.
TTFB
Ideally, you’re going to want your TTFB to be somewhere between 100 – 200 milliseconds. Keep in mind that this is for requests made from within the country where the web host server is located. International requests are generally going to take around 200 – 500 milliseconds.
FCP and LCP Timing
The FCP (First Contentful Paint) is the first visual segment of a page that will load, while the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is the largest segment. Simply put, when you open a page, you’ll often see that the text will load in before an image will appear on the screen. This happens because the FCP is a smaller segment of information, and it has different timing than the LCP, which are the more robust clusters of data.
You’ll want your FCP to stay close to or under 1 second, while your LCP should come in at under 4 seconds. Ideally, your LCP should be as close to your FCP as possible. While the times are never going to be identical, an LCP that comes in at just a second slower than the FCP is considered to be very quick.
Load Time
This one is nice and simple. You’ll want to keep your site load times between 1.5 and 2.5 seconds.
Fully Loaded Time
The fully loaded time will vary depending on the third-party code being used, however, as a basic rule of thumb, you should always measure it against the load time of your site. For example, if we set your load time at 2 seconds flat, the fully loaded time should generally come in at somewhere between 3 to 4 seconds.
Keep in mind that this isn’t always the case. While the fully loaded times of most general WordPress sites will usually come at 1 or 2 seconds slower than the load times, eCommerce-focused sites can be 3 to 5 seconds slower due to the large amount of additional information that needs to be fully processed.
The Importance of TTFB
As you can see, the TTFB is only one part of your overall site performance numbers. This shouldn’t however understate the importance that it has when it comes to providing your visitors with more efficient site speeds.
The TTFB is the first domino that falls, and the rest of the chain is entirely dependent on that first piece doing its job properly.
How to Reduce Your TTFB
This isn’t a complete list, and there are dozens of other methods that you can use in order to improve your TTFB speed. However, the items that we’ve listed below are what we believe to be the best examples of how to reduce your TTFB in a few simple steps and in a few more advanced ones.
Simple Steps
While we say “simple”, what we mean is that these include the least amount of coding or modification knowledge from the user and they can simply be implemented by either subscribing to a certain service or changing a few things in how you manage your site.
CDN
A Content Delivery Network is meant to allow you to place your site on multiple servers in different locations throughout the globe. As we mentioned before, the request and response speeds are largely based on geographical location, so certain site visitors will receive their responses much slower proportionally to how far away they are from the web host server.
A CDN like Cloudflare circumvents this issue by allowing you to host and stream your site data from multiple locations. This way the visitor that sends a request will get a more immediate response because the data was processed in a server that’s close to their location.
Web Host
The most drastic way that you can improve your TTFB speed is to switch out your web hosting service provider. This is usually done as a last resort and shouldn’t be the first thing that you try if you want to slightly improve your page loading times.
However, if the web host can’t provide you with good speeds and is negatively affecting your site numbers by being unable to accommodate a larger amount of requests without having the CPU catch fire, then it might just be time to start looking into alternatives.
Caching Plugins
Caching is essentially the site pre-building portions of the website by compiling the data ahead of time so that the page loads faster for the visitors after they send in a request.
Adding a caching plugin like WP Rocket is one of the easiest ways that you can ensure that your visitors get a better response time and that your site seems as quick as possible to them.
You can also use it in order to ensure that your site runs the highest version of PHP that it can support, since the optimization of this scripting language can also affect the TTFB.
HTTPS
The difference between an HTTP and an HTTPS connection is the S at the end that stands for secure. We won’t go into the difference between the two here, but we will mention that the way that your site interacts with both is very important.
In our opinion, there is no reason why your site shouldn’t use HTTPS. The transfer requests from both HTTP and HTTPS sites are processed more efficiently, your visitors will appreciate the extra layer of security that you provide, especially if you run an eCommerce site, and any HTTPS site will use the HTTP2 protocol, which provides a boost in speed.
Just make sure to check that your web host can support HTTPS since a lot of the more inexpensive services usually don’t.
Advanced Steps
You don’t need to be a qualified programmer in order to implement the changes that we’ve outlined in this section, but familiarity with the core concepts of coding and the inner working of your site is still required.
Caching
We covered caching plugins and their general use just a little while ago, but there are also a few more specialized caching options that you can enable in order to give your site a bit more of a boost in performance.
HTML caching – The HTML code is the first bundle of data that is processed by the browser after you open a page online. Setting up a rule that prioritizes HTML code caching can dramatically increase the TTFB speed by reducing the interval between when a response to a visitor request is sent and when it’s completed.
Object caching – This process involves the storage of database query results. This allows the site to more rapidly gain access to information that was repeatedly requested from several visitors without having to repeatedly query the database.
Cloudflare APO Edge Caching – Simply put, this is less a type of caching and more a method of enabling or disabling all of the previously mentioned caching methods on your site with nothing more than a press of a button in order to increase your TTFB.
Automatic Site Managers
Opting to use the Query monitor plugin and Cloudflare Argo service can help reduce your TTFB by simplifying some of the site management tasks and streamlyning some of the more essential performance optimization options.
Query monitor can handle debugging of database queries, PHP errors, hooks and actions, while Cloudflare Argo is simply a more hands-on CDN that can allow you to use a lot more convenient content delivery options in order to stream your data more efficiently.
Background Processes
Lastly, we have probably the simplest tip that we can give you on how to reduce your TTFB speed – deal with any and all unnecessary background plugins or applications.
Go into your settings and mark any processes that aren’t essential. You don’t have to remove them, but it’s advised that you turn off all of the features that don’t play any major role in improving your site performance.
You’re also going to want to check your htaccess file for duplicate rules and old rules and remove them. These aren’t usually significant, but they can sometimes lead to unexpected issues.
Smaller items that don’t use much CPU or bandwidth should be fine to keep active, even if they’re largely for cosmetic value, but the more costly plugins that can really cause your times to drop off drastically should be dealt with as soon as possible.
Conclusion
There is a definite connection between site responsiveness and user interest. They go up and down in response to one another. While this isn’t an exact science, it’s undeniable that there aren’t many people who are patient enough to wait through slow loading times. People make their minds up quickly about frustratingly slow speeds, and they tend to steer clear from repeat visits to those sites.
Improving your TTFB speeds is a reliable way to ensure that even if your site doesn’t load that quickly, enough data is still being displayed immediately that the visitor remains engaged and they will hold on a bit longer and give the data a chance to catch up.
One of the most important aspects of properly maintaining a website is making sure that it’s always updated so you can be at ease, knowing that you’re working with the most optimized tools you have at your disposal.
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A lot of site administrators frown on any sort of changes to their site for one of two reasons.
They prefer their site the way it is and don’t want to have to adapt to any changes that come with the updates;
They don’t see any benefit to fixing something that isn’t broken.
While we do understand why a lot of people feel this way, there are actually a few very valid reasons as to why regularly updating your website can prove beneficial.
Why Should I Update My WordPress Site?
Compatibility With New Tools
As we just mentioned, people usually prefer to stick to the tools that they’ve grown accustomed to. This is usually out of convenience since once you’ve learned to use a tool at an optimal level, you’re not really looking to start using a new tool from scratch.
The thing is, any changes made to the functionality of the features that you’re accustomed to are likely going to be beneficial for everyone (both you and your site visitors) and may even help optimize the way that you interact with these same features (as long as you at least give them a chance, that is).
As for new tools or features, they’re usually included in any new update and often add a certain tool that wasn’t already present on your site. If you’re not willing to try them out, then you can simply ignore them. However, you might actually find that a lot of them were features that you didn’t even know you needed, but now can’t live without.
Staying Current
We all know how often the update requests come in on our PCs, laptops, and smartphones. Most of the time they’re optional, but the software usually goes through a few major changes at least once a month.
These updates and changes are a result of new optimization methods and code retooling that can really help make the system run a lot better.
While you don’t have to update your website at quite such a high frequency, there are usually certain changes that come with these updates that may affect how your site runs on the newer versions of the software. WordPress anticipates these changes and takes measures to prevent compatibility issues.
This means that updating your site is a good way to ensure that there isn’t any significant drop in speed due to incompatibility between the newest updates to any operating software and your site.
Increased Protection
And we finally arrive at the main reason as to why people need to learn how to update WordPress safely.
Firewalls become obsolete much quicker than people can even imagine.
At any given moment, someone out there is looking for a way to breach the security measures of an operating system and create a back-door entry point that they can use to gain access to all of your site data.
These hacker attacks aren’t specifically focused on your site. However, the methods that are developed in order to breach specific systems can usually be used in order to breach your site defenses as well.
WordPress updates ensure that any present vulnerabilities are eliminated one by one. Each new update provides a patch to a fault that was brought to light and fills a hole in the system that was removed or fixed.
Each security breach brings new problems and new solutions. Updating your website ensures that you aren’t susceptible to any already established methods, meaning that anyone trying to forcefully get into your site is at the very least going to have to try a lot harder.
How to Update WordPress Safely
Now that we’ve gone over the “why”, it’s about time we move on to the “how”, as in how to update your WordPress safely.
This is always going to seem a lot more difficult than it is the first time around, but you should get the hang of it pretty quickly, and we’ll be here to take you through all of the steps one-by-one.
Backups
It’s always a good idea to make copies of your data before making any significant changes to your site. Regardless if we’re talking about site design or updates, storing your content somewhere safe is advised. We personally prefer to use Blogvault for these purposes.
For those of you not in the know, Blogvault is sort of like an online data bank. It’s designed to store your backups safely so you can easily gain access to them whenever you need to. The plugin comes with WooCommerce backup options, integrated free staging, uptime monitoring, and even the ability to manage multiple websites.
This plugin will appear on your dashboard as soon as you install it and sign up for the service. This will cost you between $7 and $20 a month. The more costly plans will provide a lot more services, such as the ability to archive 365 days worth of backups, instead of the 90 that the other plans offer, and the real-time backup sync frequency.
The costlier plans can really be useful for a variety of reasons, but we recommend simply starting off with the basic $7.4 a month plan. This will allow you access to an inbuilt staging site, WooCommerce backups, one-click staging, flawless migration, and a lot more.
Most importantly, this plugin will allow you to keep your data safe while you make the necessary adjustments to your site.
Turn Off Caching
The caching functionality affects certain internal processes on your website. Without going into too much unnecessary detail, suffice it to say that turning it off before updating your site can really reduce the chance of any unforeseen issues cropping up.
Simply go into your plugins menu and make sure that all of your caching plugins are turned off for the duration of the update process.
Updating Your Site
If you’re logged in to your site and there’s an update available, there should be a box near the top of the screen that displays an option to install the newest version immediately that says “Please update now”.
If the box doesn’t show up for you, or if you accidentally minimized it, then you can simply go to the Dashboard that’s located on the left side of your screen and click on the “Updates” menu that’s located near the top, just under the “Home” option.
While in the “Updates” menu, all you need to do is click on the “Update Now” option that you can see on the screen and the process will start automatically.
During this process, the site will be in maintenance mode, meaning that you won’t be able to make any edits or changes to it while the update is being downloaded.
You’ll receive a notification once the process is finished. The runtime of these updates will vary from site to site, but generally it shouldn’t take more than a few hours tops.
Updating Themes
In order to update your themes, all you need to do is go into your “Appearance” menu and click on the “Update Now” option in the Themes section.
Keep in mind that this will remove the custom code that you might have and reset any customizations. If you’re looking to update a modified theme, then you’re going to need to use a child theme first.
Make a backup, then create a child theme copy of your existing theme in a staging area;
Locate any changes that you might have made to the functions, stylesheet, and files of the parent theme;
Copy these changes to the blank child theme;
Activate the child theme;
Update the parent theme;
Copy the customized data from the child theme onto the updated parent theme;
Make sure that your site is running as it should;
Make any additional modifications if there are issues after the update;
Double check your site data;
Go live.
Turn On Caching
Pretty straight-forward. Turn the caching features back on again.
Visual Regression Testing
After you finish with the updates and turn all of your systems back on, it’s time to run a check on your site.
This involves checking all of the features, menus, even all of the font choices to your site text in order to make sure that there are no major changes that you didn’t approve of. This check also makes sure that all of the systems are as well optimized as before you started the update process.
You can do this manually, or you can use visual regression testing. We would recommend that you opt for the latter choice for a few reasons.
Those reasons are:
Visual regression tools like WPboom and Diffy are much more likely to catch any small issues that might have come about as a result of the update, and they can provide immediate possible solutions to any such issues;
Checking every nook and cranny of your site is time-consuming work while delegating it to the appropriate software can make it almost instantaneous;
These tools provide excellent statistics on your site before and after the updates so that you can get an accurate picture of what’s exactly been changed.
Visual regression testing is essentially a before and after shot of your site. It’s an incredibly useful process, and it can really save you a lot of time.
We recommend WPboom and Diffy as our tools of choice simply because they both provide an excellent service, and while Diffy comes with a 14-day free trial period, WPboom has an entire plan that’s free.
If you aren’t interested in the free plan, WPboom has 4 other plans that range from $9 to $89 a month, all of which will provide you with an option to set specific pages for scanning, weekly alerts, and it allows you to use it on anything between 10 and 150 sites (depending on the package you chose).
Diffy also has some interesting features. These include the production, development, and stage environments, the team management options, the ability to remove certain elements from the screenshot, and even the ability to add custom CSS and JS code.
Make Another Backup
You can never be too careful when updating WordPress, plus, if you already have the Blogvault plugin installed, you might as well get your money’s worth.
Making another site backup also has another more practical reason behind it than just using Blogvault as much as possible. That reason is that you’ll be able to put the most up-to-date version of your site somewhere safe.
This will allow you to use the backup if there are any unforeseen problems on the site itself, or even on the web hosting servers that might have caused certain issues to emerge. Plus, keeping an updated version of your site allows you to skip having to install the same new functionalities again if you ever do need to do a hard reset and reboot your site.
Conclusion
The safety of your site is a major contributing factor to the number of loyal visitors you get on a regular basis.
Standard blog or article based WordPress sites aren’t so bad. Site visitors won’t exactly be thrilled about going to an unsafe site, but as long as the content that you have to offer is in their interest, you’re likely to see a lot of repeat visitors regardless.
However, product-focused sites are another story altogether. This is where data safety is paramount and your security can’t afford to be lack-luster.
Luckily, as long as you make sure that everything is properly up to date, the chances of something like that happening go down significantly.
As a WordPress user, you must have seen the “Error establishing a database connection at least once. Along with the notorious white screen of death (or Error 500), this is one of the most common errors you could encounter on the internet.
In this post we break down some simple troubleshooting steps to help you fix this error.
“Error Establishing a Database Connection” – What Does it Actually Mean?
The MySQL database contains all of the information from your WordPress site. This includes meta-information, as well as plugin settings, post and page data, and the likes. The only type of data that’s not being stored in MySQL is media content (images), and also your site’s theme/plugin/core files (for example, index.php, wp-login.php).
Once your site is being hit by a visitor, the code your page (and hence your entire site) has been written in, will be executed by PHP. PHP will also do a database query, meaning it will request data information from your site’s database table, and that, in the end, will show up as your website in the visitor’s browser.
But, some sort of setback can always occur. Sometimes things go wrong and all this process explained above simply won’t work as it should. In these cases, what you or your visitors end up seeing is the “Error establishing a database connection” message.
This error is annoying both because it shows up in the visitor’s browser, but also because it won’t let you get to your dashboard in WordPress. The good news is, though, that not all visitors can see the “Error establishing a database connection” message immediately.
If your site is still serving cache then your site might linger online for a little bit more. Which is a good thing, since it can buy you time to fix it! And don’t worry, it won’t take you as much time as you think – it’s totally doable under 15-20 minutes!
So, How Does it Actually Happen?
How does the “Error establishing a database connection” error actually occur?
Well, there are a few common reasons. After we go over them, we’ll proceed with what you can do in these scenarios to fix it.
Incorrect Database Login Credentials
This is arguably the most common reason behind the “Error establishing a database connection” message. If this is the reason behind the error message you’re seeing, then you will have to use different login information for your site so it can connect to the MySQL database.
Corrupted Database
Your WordPress site is a place of constant movement: it welcomes and sends off numerous plugins and themes, sometimes in a very short period of time, it constantly receives updates and so on, which is part of the reason why databases sometimes become corrupted. Sometimes a file can be missing or only one file can be corrupted. Data or information can also sometimes be deleted by accident. Another reason behind corrupted data can be hackers, and, of course, data corruption can also be present in your WordPress installation from the very start.
Database Server Issues
Sometimes it’s the host’s fault when it comes to error messages such as the “Error establishing a database connection” one. Again, there are numerous reasons why this is happening on the servers of your host. Often the database can become overloaded with traffic and go through a traffic spike; it can also become unresponsive if it’s being subjected to too many connections. If you’re on a shared host, then this is considered a very common issue, for the simple reason that shared hosts use identical resources on the same servers, for a bunch of different users.
Okay, so now that you know the main reasons behind the “Error establishing a database connection” message, we can start getting our hands dirty with ways to fix it.
But, before we tell you how to do it, one small, but very important reminder: do a backup.
Why Should You Do a Backup?
The nature of the “Error establishing a database connection” along with its tips on how to fix it requires a large amount of tinkering with the database information of your site. And, as you may have guessed by now, this is not something to fool around with or take lightly.
Your database is your site, and if fixing a particular error requires you to do something with the database, then you definitely don’t want to make it worse. Hence the backup. Always, always do a backup when you set out to fix whatever it is you want to fix on your WordPress site. And this goes for experienced developers and IT guys and gals as well!
A great backup tool you can use for these instances is BlogVault, which is the plugin we use and one that we heartily recommend! It has really important features for backing up your site, such as:
Realtime backup capability (changes on your site are being backed up as they happen);
Superb system for informing you of its actions and telling you what it’s not backing up.
Overall, it’s an extremely reliable plugin that will tell you immediately when it’s not able to do a backup or has some sort of issues.
Another option is to do a manual backup of your own MySQL database if you opt to use phpMyAdmin. A third option is to do a backup restore to staging or production.
So don’t hesitate, always do a backup! And now, once we’ve got this covered, we can start with the actual steps and tips on how to fix the “Error Establishing a Database Connection”.
How to Fix the “Error Establishing a Database Connection”
1. Check Your Database Login Credentials
First thing’s first: check whether the database login credentials of your site are indeed correct. If you remember, we mentioned above that this is the most common reason behind this error (oftentimes it has to do with people migrating to another hosting provider).
Your site’s connection details are placed in the wp-config.php file that’s usually found at the very root of your WordPress site. This file has four chunks of information which must be correct because otherwise, it’d be impossible to set a proper connection.
The files are the following:
Database Name
// ** MySQL settings ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘xxxxxx’);
MySQL database username
/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘xxxxxx’);
MySQL database password
/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘xxxxxxxxx’);
MySQL hostname (server)
/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);
The way to this wp-config.php file is through SFTP – you can connect through SFTP and reach your site’s root. Another option is cPanel (for those who prefer it) – where you have to find “File Manager” and then from there reach the root of your site. Once you’re there, simply do a right-click and edit the file.
Next, you should check the current values of your site and compare them with the ones on your server, to see if they match up.
Check Database Credentials in cPanel
First, check the name of the database. You can do this by logging in to phpMyAdmin in cPanel – section Databases.
The left bottom side gives you the database name. If you see the “information_schema”, pass it by, since it’s info necessary for the host, and not for you in this instance.
What you need to do next is to compare the database name you’ve located with the DB_NAME value in your wp-config.php file. If they’re the same, then the problem lies somewhere else. If, however, they’re not identical, then it means that you’ll have to do an update of your wp-config.php file.
Another way to make sure that you’ve found the right database is to look for the URL of your site contained within it.
This can be done by:
Opening the database file and then clicking on the wp_options table (you also might encounter something like wpxx_options, since sometimes the table can be named differently because of extra protection).
You should then be able to see name and URL values for your site at the top of the table. If they’re the same with your site, then it means you’ve hit the spot.
But, what if you still see the database connection error even if you’ve found the database name to be correct?
Well, then you have to move on to check the password and username of your site. What you need to do is to go to the root directory of your site and make a new PHP file. You’re free to name the file anyhow, you just have to keep the .php extension (for example, let’s say you name it dbtest.php). After that, you’ll have to put this code:
NOTE: What you see here as ‘db_user’ and ‘db_password’ is only for displaying purposes. When you go to your own root directory and your own file, you’ll need to put the values that are present in your wp-config.php file.
Then browse to the file on your WordPress site: https://____.com/dbtest.php. If you get the following: “MySQL Error: Access denied”, then it’s certain that there’s a problem with your password and/or username, which means you’ll have to reset them.
NOTE: Don’t forget to remove the file once you’re done with the test.
Change the Database Credentials in cPanel
In cPanel, go to the Databases section and click on the MySQL Databases.
Then you will need to create a new MySQL user.
Choose your new password and username and then click on the “Create User” option.
What you can also do is change the password on the particular screen for the current database user.
After that you can add the new user to your database. When you see the question that will ask you which privileges you want to assign, you will need to press the option “All Privileges.”
After this you should update your wp-config.php file with the new password and username. Update the DB_PASSWORD and DB_USER values. This should resolve the database connection error, if the problem was with the credentials. But, if you still see it, then it might have something to do with the hostname (for example, the hostname might be wrong, since certain hosts tend to use different values). Here is a list of common values hosts use, you can check it out to see if something matches. Reach out to your hosting provider for more details, and also if you’re not sure about the hostname.
If you still see the database error after all this, then make sure to check out the next section on corrupt files and see if that might help.
Fixing Corrupt Files
Corrupt files is another fairly common reason why you might see the database connection error. Files can get corrupted for various reasons: it might have to do with hosting issues, a hacker attack, or something that has gone wrong during the FTP file transfers.
Even though this is something that’s totally fixable, it’s still highly recommended that you do a site backup before you set out to do it.
The themes, plugins, as well as the media, won’t be affected; what’s going to be replaced on your site will be the core WordPress version (aka the installation). This is quite easy to do since it only requires you to go to WordPress.org and download the newest WordPress version.
After the download, you’ll have to unzip the file. Once you locate the ‘wp-content’ folder, delete it, along with the ‘wp-config-sample.php’ file.
You can upload the rest of the files on your site through SFTP. This will overwrite the ones already in existence. The overwriting is going to bring new files to the core of your WordPress version, files that are not corrupted and that won’t cause trouble.
NOTE: After you do this replacement, we recommend to clear the browser cache.
After all these steps, you can go to your browser and check whether the “Error establishing a database connection” message is still present. If it’s still there, cross over to the other sections of this article. Go step by step and see which solution might work for your particular database connection error issue.
Repairing Corrupt Database
Sometimes databases get corrupted. WordPress is a busy site and as a user you or your collaborators must constantly install and uninstall a bunch of themes and plugins your site needs. If you happen to see this sentence while trying to login to the dashboard of your WordPress site, then it means there’s something going on with corrupt databases: “One or more database tables are unavailable. The database may need to be repaired.” The fronted piece of this puzzle you already know: “Error Establishing a Database Connection”.
Luckily, WordPress contains a mode for database repair which you can use in situations like these. To do this, you have to add the following code to the bottom of your wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);
Afterward, you will need to go to this place on your WordPress site: https://_____.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php. Here you can see two options: you can either repair and optimize the database or only repair it. The faster solution would be the second one, so if you’re in a hurry to fix your site (aren’t we all, always?!), make sure to choose that one.
After you go through with the database repair, you have to make sure that you’ve taken out the code mentioned above that you placed in your wp-config.php file (if you don’t do this, everybody will be able to initiate the repair).
If you’re using cPanel, the repair option can be run from the inside of the database screen of MySQL.
You could also initiate a repair from the insides of phpMyAdmin. If you want to do this, you’ll have to log in to phpMyAdmin, then click on your database, and make sure you select all the tables. After that find the “Repair table” option and click on it.
A fourth option to run the repair is by using WP-CLI. You’ll have to put in this command:
Backups! Another reason why are they so important is that you can turn to them in troubled times such as this one. If nothing else works from the suggestions mentioned above, or you simply don’t have as much time to deal with it and you want a quicker solution, then this is the way to go. If you think that there won’t be much (or at all) data lost from the latest backup, then you can do it without any issues. If you’re on a good hosting provider, chances are they have their own backup tools/plugins and can help you restore both your files and your database.
Database Server Issues
Another last-minute solution (or cry for help) can be your hosting provider. If you don’t see any results with the other steps we’ve compiled here, then you can definitely turn to your host. The database connection error might also have to do with the database server of your host. A big number of hosts have constraints when it comes to their servers and the number of allowed connections to your site’s database at the same time. This means that too many simultaneous concurrent connections to your database can definitely cause an error such as this one. What can help in situations like these is a good caching plugin, one that can contribute to the minimization of your site’s interactions with the database.
Now you see the reason why it’s so important to have a good quality hosting provider and why it pays off so much in the end. If you’re on a shared host, it means that the resources your site needs from the host’s servers are being used by others as well, which will affect your site one way or another.
Conclusion
The “Error Establishing a Database Connection”, like any error, is an annoying one. Nobody wants to see their site go offline, and nobody wants to lose time tinkering in its backend. Sometimes, though, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Here we tried to give you detailed descriptions of what to do when you set out to fix the database connection error in WordPress. We gave you the most common reasons why this might happen and what to do about it. We also reminded you about the importance of backup, both if everything else fails from the solutions above, but also even before setting out to tinker with anything in the database or files.
We hope we helped you get your site back on track and we also hope that in the future you won’t have to experience any errors such as this one or the like!
Elementor is one of the more popular page builders out there, which is why it has quite a lot of third-party add-ons and integrations available, as well as a number of themes that are specifically designed to work well in tandem with its functionalities. And when it comes to choosing the best themes for Elementor, the only problem seems to be the large number of possible options you’re faced with.
There is a bounty of riches to choose from, and there are quite a lot of great options to consider, but there are also some themes that really aren’t compatible with this specific page builder and might cause you a lot of problems if you try to combine the two.
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To avoid such problems, we recommend using one of the two best themes for Elementor, which are Astra and GeneratePress. These two are the gold standard for WordPress and WooCommerce themes, and they provide an assortment of features that work well in tandem with Elementor.
If you’re looking for some other alternatives as well, we’ve created a list of the 5 best themes for Elementor, so you can find your most suitable match.
Theme
Free Version
Active Installations
Price Starts From
Astra
Yes
1,000,000+
$59/year
GeneratePress
Yes
300,000+
$59/year
Neve
Yes
200,000+
$59/year
Ocean WP
Yes
700,000+
$39/year
Shoptimizer
No
N.A.
$99/year
What are Themes and Why Do You Need One?
A WordPress site can’t work without a theme. The relationship between a website and a theme is similar to the relationship between an operating system and a PC – one is useless without the other.
A theme allows you to set the base for your site by either importing pre-built site designs from a dedicated site library, or using the interactive page creation tools in order to set up the framework and organize your page and site layout, one menu at a time.
In the simplest possible terms, a theme allows you to design your website in such a way that it fits both the image of your brand as well as the products or services that you’re promoting. This customization can range from the arrangement of the widgets and drop-downs, to the exact font type, size, and color.
Moreover, the easy to use drag-and-drop functionality that most themes come with can really help you streamline the site building process and make up for the shortcomings of the page builders.
Using a theme to lay the groundwork and then coming in and making any needed small alterations or adjustments to the site settings is without a doubt the easier and quicker way of doing things, as opposed to creating one from scratch.
Our Choices for the Best Themes for Elementor
While the most important factor on this list is naturally going to be the compatibility with the page builder itself, in this case Elementor, the themes we’ve selected are also considered to be some of the best WordPress and WooCommerce themes currently available.
This means that all of them have a few distinct features and qualities that really help them stand out and mark them as the best themes for Elementor, as well as some of the best themes out there period.
Astra is one of the most widely recognized WordPress and WooCommerce themes out there. It’s flexible and perfectly optimized for speed and performance due to its lightweight foundation upon which you can create any type of website.
And that’s exactly what Astra is most notable for – its remarkably small size on disc (just under 50 KB), as well as its independence from jQuery. Both of these factors allow the code of the theme itself to be incredibly lightweight and capable of fast page loading times as a result.
Key Features:
Site Library. Astra comes with a large selection of demo sites that you can look through and use as the basis for your own site;
Customization options. On top of the multiple site layouts that the theme provides, you also get a remarkable level of customization options for everything from the spacing between the menus, to the typography, text placement, and colors;
Hooks and Filters. This feature allows you to easily make changes to your site code, allowing for better synergy between the theme and the page builder.
Page Builder integrations. Aside from Elementor, the theme is compatible with other page builders, such as Divi and BeaverBuilder;
Price:
Astra comes with 3 pricing plans – the “Astra Pro” at $59, the “Mini Agency Bundle” at $135, and the “Agency Bundle” at $249. All of these plans come with more than a hundred free starter templates, unlimited website usage, extensive training, and one-on-one support.
The more expensive plans come with a few additional features as well. For example, the Mini Agency Bundle plan includes the WP Portfolio plugin and unlimited add-ons for Elementor, whereas the Agency Bundle plan comes with Scheme Pro and Convert pro plugins.
GeneratePress is another pretty well-established name when it comes to WordPress and WooCommerce themes. It’s associated with lightning-fast loading times and some pretty impressive SEO optimization tools and features.
The reason why GeneratePress is considered one of the best themes for Elementor is the “per page layout controls” feature. This one feature, in particular, allows for easier code modification to single pages on the site, significantly reducing the time it would take to make any alterations to the layout.
Key Features:
Easy Customization. You can change any parameters that you might want with two clicks of a button.
Hooks and Filters. This feature allows you to make any sort of needed alterations to the code, without having to worry about causing issues on the site.
Disable Elements. There are going to be specific features or plugins that don’t work particularly well together. This simple function allows you to turn off any unnecessary elements on your site that might be doing more harm than good.
Secondary Nav. This feature, along with the primary navigation, can really help your visitors make their way through your site much more easily. This is especially useful for eCommerce sites with a lot of products and product categories.
Site Library. You are provided with a large number of pre-made demo sites that you can import and modify at your leisure.
Price:
The theme technically only comes with a single pricing plan. We say “technically” because there is an annual and a lifelong price, but they are both for the same plan and features. If you’d like to secure the GeneratePress theme for a whole year, you’re going to need to pay $59, whereas the lifetime plan will set you back $249.
Both of the plans come with all of the premium modules and features, full access to the site library, the option to use the theme on as many as 500 websites, and even a 30-day money-back guarantee. The difference between the plans is that the annual plan will grant you a year of updates and premium support, while the lifetime plan will grant you both for an unlimited time.
Neve provides you with an assortment of different minification and caching plugins, thereby ensuring that it’s as lightweight as it can possibly be. Additionally, the lack of jQuery dependency improves the loading times and ensures that Neve can keep up with the rest of the themes on our list.
Neve also comes with a few WooCommerce and blog boosters, thereby making it a great choice for both product-oriented sites and personal sites alike. On top of that, it also has header boosters, which allow you to use multiple HTML header components, as well as sticky and transparent menus.
Key Features:
Demo Sites. The theme comes with almost a dozen great importable sites that you can choose from.
Translation Ready. Making your site accessible in other languages can really go a long way in increasing the number of potential visitors that you receive each month.
1-Click Rollback. Your site might not be very compatible with the newest version of a theme, or you might personally prefer the older version for a number of reasons. Regardless of the reason, the option to rollback to your preferred version is always a welcome addition.
Elementor Boosters – This booster enables you to use seven new premium widgets, allows for content protection, animations, and more.
Page Builder Compatibility. The compatibility with Elementor is a given, but Neve is also flexible enough to be compatible with page builders like Divi and BeaverBuilder as well.
Price:
The theme comes with 3 plans – the “Personal” plan, which costs $59, the “Business” plan, which costs $99, and the “Agency” plan, which costs $159.
The “Personal” plan comes with the header and blog booster we mentioned earlier, an Elementor booster, custom layouts, as well as support and update options for the duration of your contract.
The ”Business” plan comes with all of the items from the “Personal” plan, as well as premium starter sites, priority support for the duration of your contract, and the WooCommerce booster.
The “Agency” plan comes with all of the features from the previous plans, as well as template cloud access, live chat support, and white label functionality.
OceanWP is compatible with most of the more popular page builders, but it works particularly well when paired up with Elementor. The pairing works well when it comes to the loading times thanks to the good synchronicity between the page builder and theme’s features.
This compatibility can also be used to great effect when creating both WordPress and WooCommerce sites. The theme is actually so versatile that it can pretty much be suitable for any type of website.
Key Features:
Easy Customization. The theme allows you to alter the layout of your pages to an extraordinary level.
Premium Demo Sites.The site library provides access to a selection of pre-built sites that can be used for a number of different businesses.
SEO Optimized. The theme has a built-in SEO base that can really help improve your rankings.
Add to Cart Button. This floating menu ensures that the cart option is always visible so that the site visitors have an easier time selecting their desired products.
Quick View. A pop-up that allows the visitors to view the product details without having to open a new page and slog through unnecessary loading times as a result.
Price:
The prices for the OceanWP theme start off at $39 for the “Personal” plan, go up to $79 for the “Business” plan, and top off at $129 for the “Agency” plan. All of these plans come with updates and support for the duration of your contract, 8 free extensions, 12 premium extensions, 13 free demos, and 60 pro demos.
While all of the plans have the same features, the difference is the number of sites they can be used on. The “Personal” plan can be used on 1 site, “Business” on 3, and “Agency” on 25. This is actually a great thing because you get access to all the features regardless of the plan you choose, and pay extra only if you’ll use the theme on multiple sites.
While the Shoptimizer theme doesn’t come with a free package, it does provide you with a demo theme. This will allow you to get a sense of the exact sort of product that you’ll be provided with upon purchase.
Shoptimizer is considered to be one of the best WooCommerce oriented themes on the market. Additionally, the theme also sports some pretty impressive loading times and bandwidth, which are both welcome features of any theme, especially for larger websites.
Key Features:
Optimized for Conversions.The fact that this theme is optimized for conversions can be really helpful for just about any e Commerce-focused site.
Page Builder Support.The single page customization feature can be really useful when used in tandem with your page builder in order to make any necessary modifications to the site.
Minified CSS. Selecting the automatic minification option for certain files in the settings can help drastically reduce your site loading times.
Better Product Menus. Shoptimizer comes with both a “sticky product details” menu and an “additional product information” option.
Product Category SEO. The theme comes with inbuilt SEO enhancements for individual products. This results in the product receiving better rankings, which can increase the rankings of the entire site.
Price:
Shoptimizer has one plan that’s priced at $99. While initially, this may seem quite limiting, the biggest benefit that comes from this singular pricing strategy is the benefit of receiving all of the tools that the theme has to offer right from the get-go.
While other themes have cheaper starting plans, a lot of them will hide their more important features behind the paywall of their more expensive plans, meaning that the customer will be forced to pay more for services that they should have received upfront.
Conclusion
All of the entries on our list are considered the best themes for Elementor, so no matter which one you end up choosing, you’ll be making the right decision.
If we have to highlight 2 themes, those would be Astra and GeneratePress, due to their speed, valuable features, and fair price. And, of course, their compatibility with Elementor.
This is a guest post from Tom Libelt from Smart Brand Marketing, an agency that specializes in marketing and promoting online courses. In this post, Tom details a common problem with the sales pages of online courses specifically relating to their site speed AND what to do about it. Over to Tom….
The speed of your sales page is important.
I run a course marketing agency. Before we do any marketing or SEO for online courses, the first thing we do is move the sales page over to the client’s WordPress site. Part of it is due to control. I want each client to own their entire sales process. The other factor is speed.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that web page speed matters, but if not, here’s a short summary on why it’s so important:
It directly correlates with conversion rates;
It’s a factor in how Google ranks your page;
Improves user experience;
Google and Facebook both favor it with lower ad prices;
Decreases bounce rates.
How Speed Affects Conversions of Sales Pages
Studies by other companies show similar results.
Walmart
For every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%;
Cook
Reducing loading time by 0.85 seconds raised conversion rates by 7%;
Mobify
Each 100 ms reduction in speed resulted in a 1.11% increase in conversions.
There are a few reasons for this.
If someone lands on your site and bounces, that conversion is lost.
When people search for services or products on Google, they often open a few tabs of the first few positions. If your site loads slower than the competition, it won’t be ranked among the first few and you will lose that sale.
Many sales pages are built around a certain process. You might want to have the prospect watch a video and then scroll down the page to view the price. If your video hasn’t loaded on time, they will see the price first and might lose interest.
The browser they are using is also a factor.
Here’s a study that compared a few browsers’ page load times.
Poor reflection of your brand. Customers expect speed. It’s the one thing you can control.
When we don’t like what we see.
We leave.
The Online Course Platforms
I decided to run an experiment and see how the speed performance of sales pages hosted on the most popular platforms that host online courses.
To create a fair test I’ve done the following:
Randomly chose 10 sites out of all of my clients;
Only tested sales pages;
Used the same speed tool;
Chose the same server – US West Coast;
Ensured that all pages have less than 5 MB of content.
The chosen platforms are some of the most popular ones and they’re where my clients usually host their courses. This means I’m fairly comfortable with them and know whether any have settings where it’s possible to tweak their performance.
Here are the results:
As you can see, the WordPress sites outperform the other platforms. None of these have had any speed fixes done to them.
When it comes to the elearning platforms, reducing the speed is virtually impossible since you do not have access to their hosting, code, or server.
WordPress sites are much more flexible. You are able to pick your hosting company, your own theme, plugins, and tweak the performance.
My rule of thumb is that you want your sales page or any other main page on your site with a load speed of 1 second or less.
You can also run benchmark tests via Page speed Insights or GTMetrix. All of these tools are free and allow you to run an unlimited number of reports.
Move the page to WordPress (if on a platform)
None of the teaching platforms are meant to host sales pages. They usually have a very limited web editor. This translates into a poor design. You are not able to control the sales environment. Prospects are able to see links for other courses and get distracted without spending time going over your sales copy.
They are fairly ok at hosting courses. Although, if you look at my list of top course learning platforms, you’ll see that most can’t even do this properly. There are many instances of them going down or having problems with payment processors. This always happens at the most unfortunate times. Also, do not host your blog on any of these. That should be done on WordPress as well.
My team usually recreates each sales page as the platforms do not have any way of downloading the html code. You can hire almost any freelance coder to help out with this. The task is not complicated. The result is what matters.
Have a professional optimize the speed
You can always DIY but when it comes to technical stuff like site speed, the results are going to be sub-par as you’re not an expert.
I strongly recommend that once your WordPress site is up and running, you have the team at WPSpeedFix optimize it for you.
Monitor the uptime of your sales pages
The following is not specifically site speed related but it’s important anyway, as technology breaks and things go wrong. Sales pages are one of the most important parts of your funnel, so it’s worth tracking their uptime. Uptimerobot.com has a free plan that will monitor uptime on 5 minute intervals and will alert you if something is wrong. Their paid plan checks on 1 minute intervals and is worth every penny, even if you only have a handful of sales each day.
Want more help with marketing your online course? Visit our website and apply for a free consultation to see how we can help you do better with your online course.
Time moves fast in the world of technology – a smartphone can become obsolete in a year, and our computers update their software along with third-party programs on an almost daily basis. But advancements in technology make things that were once only accessible to the “select few” available to the broader public. That includes you.
While in the early 90s no one without coding knowledge could build a website, today, just about anyone can thanks to the countless WordPress page builders you can find online. WordPress page builders allow users to create anything from an ecommerce store to a landing page without ever encountering HTML or CSS. The trick is that rather than using coding, these drag and drop page builders allow the creator – you – to build a website solely by manipulating visual elements, i.e. selecting them, dragging them, and dropping them where you want them to be.
In other words, WordPress page builders allow you to create a professional-looking website with less time, money, and effort.
So, if you’re looking to build and customize your very own website, you’ll be needing one of the best page builders for WordPress to get the job done. And to help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite WordPress drag and drop page builders. Our top picks are versatile, easy to use, and often come in both free and paid versions – meaning, there’s something here for every budget.
Why You Should Use a WordPress Page Builder
Before we go over the best WordPress page builders, where you’ll find one that’s just right for your needs, let’s take a look at why these builders are worth looking into.
Page builders are cost-effective. For startups, blogs, and small businesses, hiring a professional developer and web designer can cost a small fortune. Although this may be something you’d consider investing in once your company picks up speed, creating a website yourself with a page builder is a great way to get started.
Page builders are easy to use. The whole thing about drag and drop page builders is that they’re as easy to use as dragging and dropping elements to where you want them to be. After initially familiarizing yourself with the builder’s interface, you’ll be able to create contact forms, online shops, forums, and much more for your website without any technical know-how. You can choose a template and work off it, or start from scratch and project your own vision onto a blank canvas.
Page builders show you exactlywhat your website will look like. When developers code pages, they have to check what the website looks like once they’ve completed a portion of code. Drag and drop page builders allow you to see what your website would look like to the end user as you’re building it. In other words, you can see your edits in real time. You won’t have to stop and click preview every few minutes to check if things are working.
Page builders offer plenty of versatile features. Creating galleries, moving blocks, adding blogs, widgets, videos, products pages, navigation menus, checkout carts, social sharing buttons, add to cart buttons and sliders are only some of the features you can include in your website with a page builder. You won’t need to prepare anything on your own – these features come right out-of-the-box. All you’ll need to worry about is repositioning, resizing, and playing with color to make sure each element complements the layout and theme of your website.
Great for beginners, great for professionals. Yes, page builders are super easy to use – but that doesn’t mean they’re only suitable for beginners. Lots of professional web developers use page builders to get more done in less time. If you’re a web designer, you may find that choosing a web builder that’s to your taste can help you take on more clients without extra stress.
Your website will be automatically optimized for mobile. In 2020, smartphones accounted for half of all web traffic. Needless to say, your website will have to be optimized for mobile in order to draw in visitors and keep them around. Drag and drop builders do this automatically – so it’s one less thing to worry about :).
Overview of The Best Page Builders for WordPress
Before we delve into the details of each page builder, here’s a quick overview of our favorites:
We did the diligent nitpicking to come up with this definitive list of the five best page builders for WordPress in 2021, because something good should come out of this year, right? Make sure to read what each builder has to offer, so you can decide which one is the right choice for you. If you’re short on time, you can read the feature overview at the end of each builder review, where we also tell you who we recommend that particular tool for.
Although we love all the builders on this list, we had to start off with Elementor, a WordPress page builder that is versatile, user-friendly, and incredibly powerful. The core version of Elementor is free and open-source. You can get it as a plugin for your WordPress website. If you want more features, we highly recommend Elementor Pro, which costs between $49/year (for one site) and $199/year (for unlimited sites). Keep in mind that the free version has a lot to offer, so if you’re on a limited budget, it’s an excellent place to start.
The free version of Elementor is a straightforward, intuitive, and powerful drag and drop page builder which is compatible with most WordPress themes. You get to view your edits live, create a site from scratch by playing with hundreds of available blocks, or choose from over 100 stylish templates and customize them using tools such as box shadows, overlays, hover effects, animations, gradients, and so on. The blocks come predesigned for various purposes – calls-to-action, testimonials, services offered, etc.
The free version also offers more than 40 free widgets, including custom buttons (social media sharing, shopping), image and video, galleries, headings, text editor, testimonials, icons, advanced tabbing options to choose from like accordions, sliders, and carousels, and much more. If you feel like the builder is missing something you need, you can also add a shortcode to any other plugin you want to include and view in the page builder. The Elementor plugin will automatically optimize your site for mobile.
Elementor Pro
The pro version of Elementor offers even more in the way of tools, so it’s well worth the additional cost for those in need of advanced features. With Pro, you can get access to over 90 (global) widgets and more than 300 beautiful templates. It also offers advanced theme builder and customization options for your header, footer, blog, fonts, and icons. It’s also quite resourceful if you want to create a dynamic website with lots of fast-loading motion effects.
We especially recommend the Pro version for ecommerce websites, as it features marketing automation with CRM (customer relationship management) integration, a WooCommerce builder, a popup builder, and a form builder. It’s also translated into 56 languages, so it’s ready for your global audience out of the box.
Note: Comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Feature overview:
Free and paid versions are available;
Intuitive user interface;
Lots of featured widgets (over 40 in free, over 90 in premium);
Hundreds of beautiful, customizable templates;
Hundreds of blocks for building a website from scratch;
Insertable third-party plugin shortcode;
Custom buttons;
Form, popup, WooCommerce builders (Pro);
30-day money-back guarantee;
Mobile optimization.
Best for: startups (free), ecommerce stores (pro), freelancers.
Beaver Builder is a highly customizable drag and drop page builder that can be fun for both beginners and professional creatives, as it combines ease of use with flexible design. Beginners will be able to build pretty websites without much effort, and professionals will be able to have enough creative control to bring their vision to the screen.
Similar to Elementor, you can also get Beaver Builder as a free, lite WordPress plugin, or choose from several premium versions with more advanced features. There are three paid plans that cost $99, $199, and $399. All plans are available for an unlimited number of websites, and the most expensive plan, intended for agencies, enables white labeling, which means you’ll be able to modify all the core templates and replace the words Page Builder or Beaver Builder on your WordPress admin page.
Beaver Builder Lite (WordPress plugin)
Beaver Builder lite, the free WordPress plugin, is an intuitive, user-friendly page builder that comes with several modules such as HTML, sidebar, text editor, photo, video, and audio (a lot more modules are available with the pro version, and we’ll go over them in a bit). The layouts are full-width and column based, and all sites are optimized for mobile and fast page loading speed. You can also play around with the backgrounds of photos, video rows, and color patterns. Like Elementor, Beaver Builder allows you to add shortcodes for other plugins, and integrate other widgets to this builder.
Beaver Builder
However, the free version of Beaver Builder is quite a bit more limited than the free version of Elementor. Luckily, the premium versions come with a lot of advanced features and many more modules, including modules for tabs, sliders, pricing tables, contact and subscribe forms, maps, blog posts, social icons, etc.
These paid versions also come with lots of stylish templates, fully-customizable modules, multisite network settings, and support from the Beaver Builder team. We especially recommend Beaver Builder if you’re a creative professional or if you are the owner of multiple related websites. The multisite network settings allow you to enable changes across all your sites at once.
SeedProd is another popular favorite drag and drop page builder, and not for nothing – it’s super easy to use, full of versatile, customizable templates for different types of pages, optimized for mobile, and – something we quite appreciate – features bloat-free code that will make your website fast, which is great because visitors do not like waiting for a site to load. Unlike Elementor and Beaver Builder, you can only get a paid version of SeedProd. They offer four plans that range from about $40 to about $240 per year, depending on how many websites you’ll be using the builder for (one, three, five, or unlimited). The pricier plans also come with 2 million free stock photos, domain mapping, and priority support.
SeedProd allows you to choose from over a hundred beautiful templates or create your own layouts from scratch. It features templates for different types of landing pages (sales, maintenance, webinar, login, thank you, optin page, etc.) as well as specific blocks you can use to build these different types of landing pages. There’s also built-in coming soon, 404 error, and under maintenance pages. Sections for things like calls to action and headers are also bre-built and ready to go, so you can easily put together something that looks professional and stylish.
We especially recommend SeedProd to bigger, more dynamic sites with customers and subscribers, as it features resourceful subscriber management tools and integrations for email marketing services such as MailChimp, ConvertKit, and ActiveCampaign.
SeedProd, like our previous two builders, automatically optimizes your website for mobile. It also comes with spam protection via reCaptcha. If you’re considering SeedProd, make sure to take a look at their full list of features.
Note: comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Feature overview:
Beautiful templates for different types of landing pages;
Easy-to-use, intuitive drag and drop page builder;
No bloated code – fast page load;
Subscriber management tools;
Integrations for email marketing services;
reCaptcha spam protection;
Customizable design;
Mobile optimization.
Best for: ecommerce stores, email marketing, subscriber-heavy sites.
Divi is both a WordPress theme and a visual drag and drop page builder that comes to us from the folks at Elegant Themes. There’s no free version of Divi, and if you want access to this real-time visual page builder you’ll need to purchase access to all Elegant Themes products, which is not a bad idea at all. They offer lots of useful WordPress themes and plugins, including Bloom, an email marketing and lead generation plugin, and Monarch, a social media marketing plugin.
All in all, purchasing access to all the Elegant Themes products can be a well-rounded solution for the various needs of your business website. Plus, you can use Divi on an unlimited number of websites! You can either buy a yearly subscription of $89, or pay $249 for a lifetime access to all Elegant Themes products.
As with the other builders we’ve talked about, Divi is also a largely visual builder that allows you to see what your site would look like as you create it in real time. The websites built with Divi are automatically mobile responsive, but you get control over how your website should look on mobile devices. The builder also allows you to implement global elements and styles across your entire website, which is quite useful if you’re managing a site with lots of pages.
Divi is a great choice for beginners and pros. It offers over a hundred well-designed full-website layout packs that are suitable for different types of sites. They also offer over 800 premade page designs. So, if you want to jump-start your website, Divi can make it easy for you – you’ll just need to make some small tweaks in the builder to make the premade layouts suit your brand. Professionals will enjoy the custom CSS control that Divi provides, which allows users to combine their own custom CSS with the existing visual design builder.
You can build literally any type of website you want, as Divi features over 40 website modules including sliders, blogs, calls to action, buttons, galleries, forms (subscribe, contact), pricing tables, audio players, and testimonials. It also comes with all the cosmetics options you’d want from a professional (yet easy to use) page builder – like background images, color gradients, shadows, animations, videos… You can also copy-paste elements from one place to another as easily as you would in Microsoft Word.
We especially recommend Divi for websites that have ecommerce stores because of Divi’s powerful WooCommerce modules. As you’d also be getting access to all Elegant Themes premade templates, you’ll be able to take advantage of some beautiful, product-specific online shop layouts. Plus, the interactive page features and buttons you can add to your site with Divi will make for an engaging user experience.
All in all, Divi combines the right amount of premade anything with flexible customization controls, so you can make any design your own.
Note: Divi offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on both plans.
Feature overview:
Clear, visual, intuitive builder;
Hundreds of beautiful full-website layout packs and page templates;
Over 40 website modules of useful website elements;
Customizable design;
Custom CSS for pros;
Copy-paste elements feature;
Access to all Elegant Themes themes and plugins;
Optimized for mobile, & you get to pick the mobile layout;
Themify Builder is another drag and drop builder that is free in its core WordPress plugin version. The core plugin offers plenty of basic features that can help you get you started with a website. If you want more advanced options, you may wish to consider Themefy’s Builder Pro, which includes more customization options and modules. Builder Pro combined with over 25 addons by Themify, including advanced modules for WooCommerce, maps, sliders, custom buttons, etc., costs $69. You can also just get the free plugin with the same addon bundle for $39.
The core Themify Builder is a straightforward and intuitive drag and drop builder, so it’s an excellent choice for newbies to site making. It offers over 40 stylish pre-designed layouts for an entire website. This means that you can import a layout you like, edit the images and text content, and have your landing page ready (and looking good) in no time. The live preview features will allow you to view your design changes while you’re making the edits.
Themify offers some traditional and much-needed features that will speed up your work in an intuitive way. For instance, you can duplicate elements, modules, and rows if you want to work off the prototypes in different parts of your website. You can also copy/paste, import/export, and, for the trigger-happy, undo/redo changes with the click of a button.
Even though it’s free, Themify Builder brings a lot to the table in terms of style, customization, and modules. You can make any arrangement of rows and columns you like, and still expect a mobile-responsive design. You can also play around with over 60 types of animation effects that come right out of the box, in order to engage your site visitors.
Customization options abound. Even if you’ve picked a premade template, you can change the background type (image, video, slider), color, overlay, position… You can also change and import custom fonts to make the site seem like a clear extension of your brand. You can use Themify Builder on as many websites as you like, and even take advantage of its multi-site network support.
Last but certainly not least, Themify Builder has some features that will help your website rank higher in the SERPs. It arrives with its own cache system, which is meant to take pressure off the server and speed up your page loading speed. If you don’t already know, page loading speed is a ranking factor for Google. Plus, sites built using this builder are fully indexable by search engines, which is always good for SEO.
Comes with copy/paste, import/export, undo/redo shortcuts;
Live preview;
Over 40 beautiful premade layouts available for different types of websites;
Lots of useful modules (sliders, rows and columns, animations, photo, video);
Responsive for mobile;
Flexible customization tools;
Multi-site network support;
Available for unlimited number of websites;
Fast page loading speed thanks to caching system.
Best for: beginners, multiple website owners, small businesses, bloggers.
Conclusion
Our favorite WordPress page builders may offer different specifics, but they do have one thing in common: intuitive, visual interface. Having a live preview of your website as you build it and user-friendly tools at your disposal can really help beginners and professionals alike to realize their vision. Whichever builder you end up choosing, you won’t go wrong.
In the end, which WordPress page builder is best depends on what’s right for you. Personal preference, skill level, the number of sites you’re managing, needs of your website, and budget are only a few of the factors that will play a role in your decision making process. If you’re on a tight budget, opt for one of the options that offer free core WordPress plugin builders, like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Themify Builder.
If you do have some cash to spare, however, you should really look into the premium versions of these page builders. At least in time, as your site, agency, or freelance business grows, you’ll find that the advanced tools are well-worth the investment. And, if you’re not completely sure about your choice, take advantage of the grace periods these builders offer. Elementor and Divi give you an entire 30-day window in which you can decide whether you like the builder. Most other options offer 14-day money-back guarantees.
One last piece of advice we can give you is to revise our recommendations for each builder. Some are best suited for creatives, while others are perfect for building powerful ecommerce stores. Or for instance, you may need to create and launch a website as soon as possible, in which case you could take advantage of Divi’s library of premade, full website layouts. Of course, nothing is set in stone, so consider our recommendations more as general guidelines and less as strict rules.
Deferring Javascript is a powerful way to improve your site speed.
Most articles around the web give you super long explanations of how to defer Javascript in WordPress, which you probably don’t want to read. Plus, most of it is just rewritten nonsense and filler content authored by writers who’ve never optimized a site in their life.
We’ve optimized 4000+ sites over at WPSpeedFix.com, so we have a good deal of experience doing this.
The two simplest ways to defer Javascript in WordPress are:
Use the WP Rocket plugin which is the most popular site speed optimization plugin for WordPress. Using WP Rocket is probably the easiest and safest way to do it if you’re DIY-ing. Keep in mind that it’s a paid plugin, although still dirt cheap.
Use the Async Javascript plugin which is free, but a bit more complicated to use and more buggy. In other words, it’s more likely things will break.
We’ve detailed how to configure both plugins below, as well as how to make sure you haven’t broken anything in the process, which is common when messing with optimizations like this.
Note that there are other plugins we use in edge cases like PerfMatters and Asset Cleanup Pro, but these are even more complex and we typically only use them for more advanced optimizations.
Deferring Javascript is only one way of optimizing your site for speed. When you defer it, Javascript executes and does its processing AFTER most of the site rendering is complete. For the most part, it makes Javascript non-render blocking – you may come here after seeing an error or warning like “remove render blocking javascript” or something similar.
Executing the Javascript later allows the web browser to use CPU power for displaying the site instead of doing things like executing Google Analytics scripts or Facebook marketing code which can be done later in the load process. The end result is faster page load or faster perceived page load.
We’ll explain the difference between the Javascript attributes async and defer further down in this article. If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you probably care more about site speed, so we’ve provided 6 other methods for optimizing Javascript that go well beyond simply deferring it.
Table of Contents
How to Defer Javascript in WordPress Using WP Rocket (easiest + safest, paid plugin)
WP Rocket is our favorite plugin for deferring Javascript. It allows you to delay the loading of JS files until the user actually interacts with them, which significantly reduces the load time of your page when a visitor first opens it.
WP Rocket is very easy to use, and you won’t need to mess around with any code to get it done. Although it’s a paid plugin, it’s dirt cheap and well worth the tools it delivers. In addition to deferring Javascript, this plugin offers other site optimization features, as well.
Once you’ve installed the plugin to your WordPress dashboard, here’s how to defer Javascript using WP Rocket on your WordPress website:
Open the WP Rocket dashboard.
Go to the File Optimization tab.
Find the JavaScript files section.
Click on the check box where it says Load JavaScript deferred.
It’s also a good idea to make sure that Safe Mode for jQuery is enabled, too. On newer version of the plugin, Jquery is excluded using a URL string instead of a checkbox.
Click on Save Changes. You’re done!
How to Defer Javascript in WordPress Using Async Javascript (more technical + risky, free plugin)
Async Javascript is a free WordPress plugin. However, it is a bit more technical and more prone to bugs – as free plugins often are.
With Async Javascript, you have the option to either async or defer the parsing of Javascript, a difference that we’ll explain in greater detail at the end of the article. In most cases, however, you’ll probably need to use async rather than defer. Defer is recommended if the script is reliant upon another script file on the page.
Regardless of which parsing method you decide upon, the process of activating it is the same. Once you’ve installed the Async Javascript plugin:
Go to the Async Javascript settings page from your WordPress dashboard.
Click the check box at the top next to Enable Async Javascript? to enable the plugin.
Choose from the table of Quick Settings if you want to apply JS async, JS defer, or if you want to apply either method while excluding jQuery.
In the third section, you can choose whether you want to enable the async or defer JS parsing method.
Click on Save Changes.
Make Sure You Don’t Break Things!
When you’re deferring javascript you’re messing with the load order of files, so there’s a moderate chance something powered by Javascript could break.
We want to avoid deferring jQuery, a Javascript library used heavily on the web, as deferring jQuery files will most likely break them. You’ll see in WP Rocket and other defer plugins options for “exclude jQuery” (as we saw in Async Javascript) or “safe mode for jQuery” (available on WP Rocket). You’ll want to use these options in 99% of cases.
A simple way to see if you’ve broken Javascript is to:
Open your page in Google Chrome.
Right-click anywhere on the website (not on links) and select Inspect from the drop-down menu.
Click on the Console tab.
If you have a look at the screenshot below there’s two Javascript errors (in red), one relating to Jquery.min.js and the other to frontend.min.js.
Usually, the fix when things like this happen would be to exclude those files from being “deferred” which can be easily done in WP Rocket.
You can exclude files in WP Rocket by adding to this text box:
How To Optimize Javascript in Other Ways
Optimizing Javascript is not limited to adding WordPress plugins. Here are a couple of other ways you can do it.
Remove it!
This sounds like an obvious solution, but it’s still usually overlooked. Often, we see sites that have installed plugins and third-party Javascript code that hasn’t been used in a long time. Most commonly, this is due to tools like Hotjar or old email marketing tools.
Doing an audit of all the WordPress plugins you’re using, the code in Google Tag Manager and any manual code embeds, and then removing anything not in use can make a huge difference, especially for older sites!
Move Code Further Down the Page or to the Footer
Here’s something neat: the further down the page the Javascript code is inserted, the later in the loading process it runs, and therefore- the less of an effect it’ll have on site speed.
Moving the code for third-party marketing tools like Hotjar, Luckyorange, Callrail, Clickcease, and so forth, from the header of a site to its footer can make a big difference on the site render.
Often we see Javascript inserted right at the absolute start of the code after the opening <head> tag which is not great for speed in most cases. A common offender here is Google Tag Manager code. Even though this code needs to sit in the <head> section of the site, it’s better placed at the bottom of this section right before the closing </head> tag as this means it fires later in the load and render process.
Delay or Pause Javascript Until the User Interacts With the Page
One recently added feature to WP Rocket is the ability to pause or delay Javascript until the user interacts with the site.
This is a fantastic way to squeeze more speed out of the page and it’s perfect for tools like Livechat, Facebook Messenger widgets, or marketing tools like Hotjar – essentially, any code or tools that don’t need to fire until the user interacts with the page are a prime candidate for this optimization.
Move the Code to Google Tag Manager and Use the Window Loaded Trigger
Some third-party code breaks or doesn’t work as expected when you defer it. In that case, we would typically move that embed code to Google Tag Manager and then use the trigger Window Loaded which loads that code only after the page itself has loaded.
There’s three page view trigger types. Typically, “page view” is used, which fires the code immediately. However for most code, using the DOM Ready or Window Loaded trigger is better for site speed.
The image below is from an article (https://pavelbrecik.cz/the-easiest-cro-you-can-do-is-via-google-tag-manager.html ) detailing GTM triggers and their image on site speed and is a great visual representation of when the different triggers fire:
Use Cloudflare Rocket Loader
Cloudflare Rocket Loader is an even more advanced way to defer Javascript and it can squeeze even more speed out of a page in addition to using WP Rocket for deferring Javascript. The combination of the two usually works better than either of them as standalone optimizations.
Rocket Loader is simple to enable. All you need to do is turn it on under the Speed tab in Cloudflare.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The Cloudflare Rocket Loader is much more aggressive than WP Rocket, so it’s also more likely to break things, especially for JS-heavy sites like WooCommerce. Make sure you check the Console tab for errors as we discussed earlier.
For sites where we can’t enable the Rocket Loader sitewide (due to it breaking things like the checkout), we’ll often add a page rule to enable it just on the homepage or on the top 5-10 pages, where it’s reasonable to check them all manually.
Use Browser Hints To Speed Up The Code – Preconnect & Preload
“Browser hints” are HTML code that tells the browser to do certain things. In this case, the preload directive tells the browser to load particular files earlier in the load process. The preconnect directive tells the browser to do a DNS lookup and connect to a server address.
We can use both directives to speed up Javascript and site speed, as they get the browser started on tasks like DNS lookups that can often be slow.
On the other hand, a more effective way would be to use a speed test tool (e.g. Site Speed Bot) and review the waterfall for slower third-party code. Here’s a good example:
Typically, we’ll add preconnect code manually or use a plugin like Perfmatters to do it for us.
If we were going the manual route, we’d insert this code into the header of the site
Combining and Minifying Javascript Can Sometimes Help, but Not Always
Wherever you see Javascript and CSS optimizations mentioned, you’ll see recommendations to minify and combine these files.
On the modern web, most text files like JS and CSS are either minified already or are in the process of being minified by a CDN service. Typically, when we’re using Cloudflare, for instance, we’ll have it do the minification. In any case where the server is using Gzip and Brotli (most do) minify does next nothing for site speed.
So, combining Javascript files *can* help sometimes, but not always. If you’re optimizing right to the edge, it’d be worth testing combined vs uncombined JS to see which is faster.
Defer vs Async Attributes
The Javascript async and defer attributes are really poorly understood across the web. So often we see companies claim their embed code is optimized because the code has async tags, but oftentimes, that’s not really the case.
The graphic below from this excellent article explains the difference between async and defer.
In simple terms:
No JS attribute means the processing, or parsing of the page stops to download and execute the Javascript, making it heavily render blocking
Async tags partially optimize the Javascript by blocking the rendering when the Javascript has downloads
Defer tags fully optimize the Javascript waiting until the HTML has been fully processed, and then execute the Javascript. You’ll note that the JS still downloads during the HTML processing phase even when it’s deferred. This means that it’s still for the best to put the JS as far down the page as you can, so that it will have the least impact on the site render speed.
