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Best Dark WordPress Themes in 2018

Human behaviour and perception can be profoundly influenced by colours. According to colour psychology, a black background in graphic design suggests sophistication, elegance, and value. It comes as no surprise that luxury brands deliberately choose black as a base colour to communicate glamour and exclusivity.

Although a vast majority of websites use mostly light colour schemes, sometimes dark themes are best suited. And there is no shortage of stunning examples of dark beauties in web design. Have a look at this impressive Apple Mac Pro one-pager: class and style at their finest.

Are you looking to showcase your bold and daring project? Do you need a dark theme website design with a sleek and modern look?

Choose from a hand-picked selection of some the best dark WordPress themes in 2018 to tap into the power of darkness.

Pathfinder

Awesome travel WP Theme stylish and elegant will conquer with its neat and rich design. It is a highly customizable travelling website template that can be used by any travel agency or tour operators. Being part of a massive multipurpose WP Theme, Pathfinder can be easily transformed in any niche you just need.

Prestige

Prestige has an impressive collection of 300 dark theme skins, as well as 100 light skins. This highly customizable theme offers a collection of ready-to-use dark designs ranging from classic and elegant to modern and stylish.

The Luxury

As the title suggests, The Luxury is one of the best black WordPress themes for featuring luxury products, such as high-end watches, bags, jewellery, or even cars and resorts. Its dark version is a great example of an elegant black and gold WordPress theme.

XStore

XStore is a WooCommerce theme with over 70 good-to-go shops, including a professionally-looking selection of dark responsive website templates for restaurants, computer games, high-end salons, clothes, corporate services, and more. Packed with 250+ premium plugins, XStore is an excellent premium dark WordPress theme for those who are serious about selling.

Lumos

Lumos is a multi-page responsive WordPress theme offering a variety of layouts with an almost-black or black background. The moody dark designs with a splash of pastel colours, such as dark khaki are perfect for photographers. If you need a black WordPress theme to showcase your work with a little bit more drama, check out the Lumos black web templates.

Music Pro

Music Pro is possibly the coolest of all black WordPress themes for musicians, record labels, bands, and even music magazines. Fully customizable and responsive, completed with a playlists manager, music store and discography pages, Music pro is a neat choice for musicians looking to impress their fans with a modern-feeling signature-style dark website.

Thecs

Are you looking for something fresh? Like 2018 fresh? Check out Thecs, one of the new WordPress themes with a black background. The golden yellow elements are contrasting the dark backdrop, producing a bold and dramatic effect.

Archi

Archi is a WordPress theme with both dark and light versions, intended for businesses and experts specializing in interior design. With multiple layouts to choose from, the dark responsive website templates included in the Archi theme are perfect for those who are not afraid to stand out. The orange highlights scattered on the deep dark background immediately capture the eye with a hint of luxury and style.

 

North

North is a clean and professionally-looking white, black and red WordPress theme designed for creative studios and agencies. If you are looking for a modern, bold and fully responsive parallax single-page website with crimson red accents, take a look at North One Page Parallax Theme.

Skrollex

The black colour website templates included with the Skrollex theme are intended for those who need a sophisticated dark platform with the occasional splash of neutral colours, to demonstrate their creative talent. If you want an impressive resume, portfolio or would like to present your services in style, check out the Skrollex dark website templates.

 

Invention

Invention offers great dark WordPress Demo template for businesses that need a clean and simple responsive corporate website. With both one-page and multiple page versions, the Invention dark templates combine dark grey hues with red elements to show off a serious, no-nonsense attitude.

 

Appsperia

Appsperia is a beautiful landing page designed to boost mobile app sales. The web template comes with 4 dark colour schemes with 4 different vibrant accent colours, enticing users to click: red, green, blue and orange. Appsperia is a splendid choice of a professionally designed landing page for a travel, food, gaming or creative app.

Coral Dark

Coral Dark is a responsive black and white WordPress theme that you can download for free. The theme includes two basic layouts and a built-in slideshow. Further customization of this minimalist black WordPress theme is available in the Pro version.

Pique

Pique is a one-page scrolling free dark WordPress theme. The template includes alternating almost-black and dark blue sections and is designed for lean small businesses that need a simple, but effective web presence.

Hitchcock

Hitchcock is a popular free dark WordPress theme, updated in 2018. It is a minimal portfolio template intended for photographers and designers who want to show off their creative work.

 

SKT BeFit

SKT BeFit is a simple and flexible black website template that can be downloaded for free. With its combination of a dramatic black background and highly contrasting energetic orange design elements, SKT BeFit is a solid free black WordPress theme for gyms, fitness experts, health clubs, and sports trainers.

Xone

Xone is an elegant and modern one-page website template that includes both a light and a dark colour scheme. The almost-black background of the retina-ready dark template is perfect for a colourful portfolio meant to stand out.

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HostGator vs. iPage: Business Hosting or Honestly Cheap?

If you’re bound between two hosting companies, not being able to decide which should become your website’s host, check out with us a comparative review between two top hosting that can make a difference for your website: HostGator and iPage.

HostGator, a business-oriented hosting company will amaze you with the best price versus offer options and 99% uptime guarantee. Meanwhile, iPage will debate to offer better domain and bandwidth options along with money back guarantee.

HostGator – Leading Business Hosting

HostGator offers diversity in hosting plan choice. You can consider plans like share or cloud hosting – where they are experts – VPS hosting, dedicated servers, etc. Shared hosting related to the situation where the account is bound to a single server, while cloud exploits multiple servers.

HostGator ADVANTAGES (+)

A Leading Business Hosting – this is what you will probably hear about HostGator first. Hostings are generally competitive, each offering a special solution, different from another. HostGator has its own offers that delimit it as a leader in the business industry. Let’s see how exactly.

COST vs. OFFER. HostGator is inexpensive. Even their Baby plan, usual medium package, has all needed unlimited features. And the Business plan they have designed comes with premium options at a really low cost. Plus, you got to see the deals they are negotiating every now and then:

Normally, their first-year package comes at reduced price anyway. So if you add both discounts, you might want to search no further, since the price becomes very appealing. But hold on and see more to come. HostGator’s policy regarding payment is to give as much freedom to their clients as possible. This means you only pay a monthly fee for your package, not yearly bonding.

UPTIME 99%. Best companies are struggling to this point. It’s like balancing with 3 balls; you know there might come that moment when you lose it. However, HostGator invests in checking every 24 h its technology for any potential break, as much as in technical assistance.  99% uptime means max 8 downtimes per year, and so far the clients report even fewer. Well, except for the notable fall in August 2013.

GREAT SUPPORT & USER-FRIENDLY. Whenever you find yourself setting up your website on a new platform, be sure: with HostGator you will do it right. Because there is no need to do it yourself. You just send the necessary credentials to the support team and they do it for you. But if you plan to do it manually, here is an easy to follow tutorial on how to do it right and fast.

As for the system it uses – meet the standard and most popular tool, called cPanel. This tool represents a software that helps you manage your website’s backend. The tool, besides being easy to use, it has lots of related tutorials regarding how to use it. HostGator also offers File Transfer Protocol to prepare the website transfer. Finally, lots of guides for any newcomer for this hosting is available upon signing up.

EDUCATIONAL INVESTMENT. There are many educational sources HostGator invests in so that the clients are happy. There are many pieces of training developed for the hosting company’s clients; know-how’s linked to using the platform; how to generate an e-commerce website; promoting enterprises online, etc.

The most pleasant surprise is that all these materials are for free. And while working as a great advertising for HostGator, they are useful for any user who holds a HostGator account.

GREEN WEB HOSTING. HostGator’s offer includes the line about environmental protection while hosting your website. Among its resources, they say the company sustains construction of natural power plants that can obtain renewable energy. This means some of the energy that runs in order to keep your website going is taken from wind farms instead of coal plants.

HostGator DISADVANTAGES (-)

COMPLEXITY. The process of getting the website on the server plus the details that follow after are not among the easiest. Note that this happens despite all the available resources.

SUPPORT. On the other side of supporting you with your hosting transfer and questions that appear along the way, support isn’t preventing problems. That leads to constant repetitive issues you come across that are only solved temporarily. Backups are done weekly but not to its greatest extent. Malware scan happens now and then, but not often enough to prevent all the viruses that might happen in between.

LIMITED FREE STUFF. You surely get something, but not as much as you would get with GoDaddy or BlueHost. Among few things are the credits of $100 value for AdWords. Also, a 45-day guarantee followed. However, no Yahoo or YouTube credits. Not that it matters while getting a cheap offer, but it’s a great addition to be spent usually.

iPAGE – Honestly Cheap and Secured

iPage is part of Endurance International Group (EIG), developed parallel to other huge names like BlueHost, HostMonsters, FatCow, only to mention a few. All of them have grown under the umbrella of the EIG. Six office locations, over a million websites hosted, is just the top of the iceberg called iPage Hosting. iPage has generous offers and no year based contracts. But let us describe you both side of the moon.

iPage ADVANTAGES (+)

HONESTLY CHEAP PRICE. Like really cheap, no doubts for the price of $1.99 per month. These do not only apply for a 36-month deal but can be also requested for shorter periods, spanning one year. And there is no trick that comes along after a while, making you pay more. However, pay attention to when the low-priced period ends – this is when higher prices come up.

It offers good deals of disk space, data transfer and of course a package of email addresses.

GOOD CUSTOMER SUPPORT is important. iPage provides well-trained customer service through any possible mean of communication. That means that via phone, email, live chat all the answers are offered. Helpful additional details make the process of solving problems easier, offering information or useful links.

SECURITY OPTIONS. iHost plans come with the incorporated SiteLock security option that works as a first guard to the hosted website. It prevents unsolicited security breaches by scanning the website often for any potential malware. Moreover, its firewall focuses on security leaks prevention by updates and history check. It also lets you use the .htaccess file to restrict your website’s sections. Oh, did we mention daily backups? That means you can always use yesterday’s version of the website keeping it online in harming situations. Yes, for free.

THIRD PARTY APPLICATIONS that can be easily linked to commercial websites to PayPal, Google Apps, etc. This means easier ways of making financial transactions or handle secured transfers. Add here some bonus credits like Google AdWords, Bing and Yahoo for your website advertisement, isn’t that a happy free deal yet?

Also, iPage supports WordPress blog transferring through a simple Import Button. The general WordPress interface couldn’t be easier to be used.

30-DAY MONEY GUARANTEE. In situations when you change your mind regarding the hosting for which you just paid you still have options to cancel the deal. 30 days deal might not be the lengthiest option to consider, however, it has nice options like no terms and conditions to apply regarding the guarantee.

99.97% UPTIME. Similar to HostGator, iPage has a serious engagement regarding uptime. In the industry, iPage doesn’t have any serious competitors in this matter. And what else is there to be said about this?

The company asserts they are monitoring their uptime results for 24/7 and thus can always prevent or restore back the server’s activity.

EPA’S GREEN POWER PARTNER. The Environmental Protection Agency has been established to protect both human and environmental health. For companies dealing with technology, being an EPA partner means using at least partially the natural resources in acquiring energy. Thus, certified as a green site, iPage claims to be using up to 200% of the power of the wind energy equal to the sudden disappearance of 200 cars from the street.

Thus, long story short – by using iPage hosting, you participate in saving the planet. How is that for an advantage?

iPage DISADVANTAGES (-)

LOADING TIMES are not among perfect features of iPage. It has a negative effect on the SEO, where it all creates a circle – low ranking and less visibility. Slow site speed affects the attention span of visitors, whose 50% are reported to leave if the site doesn’t load under 3 seconds.

COSTS. For example, if you go for server services renewal. In the advantages section, we have described the starting price offers that are cheap beyond belief. Users who passed the stage of first amazement and paid after the first 12-month-deal know the reality is no longer unicorns and rainbows. Renewal prices apply to all the plans and grow suddenly high.

Or if you suddenly decided to interrupt the services based on the 30-day guarantee, you discover the company will deduct the 15$ fee for the domain name. It hurts more because you know they are usually cheaper. And that guarantee is not much of a guarantee.

NO cPANEL. Yes, iPage is one of the few hosting companies, along with Dreamhost, not to use the officially recognized standard panel system.

That doesn’t only mean an alien platform that is less used and with less available forum answers. It also means, for example, not integrating other standard applications. Try to go on ShopSite and you discover that you completely leave iPage’s control panel. It becomes quite a nuisance when you want to use its e-commerce services.

UNLIMITED OPTIONS are not so unlimited if you go read the user agreement before accepting it. Though you get unlimited space for your website, iPage doesn’t let you store any files of your own. It says openly that any extra storage might affect server activity and you might lose it probably during updates.

CONCLUSION:

HostGator comes as a  reliable, reasonably priced, business-oriented hosting company for your website. Thus if you search no further details, this could be a great option. It’s a durable hosting and it has a positive review from most of the clients who ever used it. However, if you look for greater support, maybe it is time to focus on iPage?

One might have some hesitations when thinking of iPage’s belonging to a bigger company. However, it has lots of potentials, a good back up support team with strong evidence of uptime. What hosting shall be chosen in the end, you decide.

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The post HostGator vs. iPage: Business Hosting or Honestly Cheap? appeared first on ThemeFuse.

WordPress Image Gallery: How To Create One (4 Steps + Special Tips for Advanced Users)

You have tons of cool images that you want to share with your readers. But you don’t want to put them in one huge list because…well, it’s ugly, hard for readers to use, and it’s likely readers never make it to the bottom, which is a waste of your awesome images.

So what’s the solution?

An image gallery.

But how do you create an image gallery in WordPress?

That’s what we’re here to help with!

In this post, we’ll show you how easy it is to get up and running with a simple image gallery on your WordPress site. Then, we’ll share a plugin that can help you create even more beautiful galleries and give you more control over styling.

Creating An Image Gallery In WordPress is Easy

By default, every single WordPress site has the functionality to create a basic image gallery. It’s not always the most stylish gallery… but if you just want to display your photos in a simple grid, it gets the job done.

Here’s the thing about the gallery feature, though:

It’s not always super obvious where it is. Heck, we know tons of WordPress users who don’t even know that they can create a gallery without a plugin!

So, here’s how easy it is to do, step-by-step.

Step 1: Click Add Media In The WordPress Editor

To get started, head to the normal WordPress editor where you write your posts and pages.

Then, click the Add Media button like you’re going to upload/insert a single image. Only, instead of inserting a single image, click on the Create Gallery link in the sidebar:

Step 2: Choose Which Images To Use In Gallery

In the Create Gallery area, you can either upload new images or select multiple images from your Media Library by clicking on each image that you want to use in your gallery.

Once you’ve uploaded/selected all the images you want to include in your gallery, click the Create a new gallery button in the bottom-right corner:

Step 3: Configure Gallery Settings

At this point, you should be in the Edit Gallery interface. And you should only see the images that you’ve already chosen to add to your gallery.

Here’s where you configure your gallery. Under the GALLERY SETTINGS heading, you’ll want to configure four options:

Link To: this determines what happens if a visitor clicks on an individual image in your gallery. You can either remove the link or link to the image’s actual file location or attachment page.
Columns: this specifies how many columns to use in your gallery. For example, if you choose 3 columns, your gallery will display 3 images on each line.
Random Order: when checked, WordPress will randomize the order of how it displays gallery images. You can also manually set the order by dragging and dropping the image thumbnails.
Size: this determines the size of the images in your gallery. The sizes are ordered from smallest to largest.

Beyond the GALLERY SETTINGS, you can also add an optional caption to each individual image in your gallery by using the text box underneath each image.

When you’re happy with how everything is configured, click the Insert gallery button in the bottom-right corner:

Step 4: Enjoy Your New Gallery

And that’s it! You should see a live preview of your gallery in the WordPress editor:

And as soon as you publish your post, you’ll see the same type of gallery on the frontend of your site:

Some Potential Issues With The Native WordPress Gallery Functionality

While the native WordPress gallery functionality is fine for basic galleries, you may have noticed some issues in the example above.

First, the gallery will look fine if all of your images are the exact same dimensions. But if you have some images with different dimensions, you’re going to end up with odd spacing and gaps like this:

 

Second, the core gallery just plain doesn’t have a lot of advanced functionality. For example, you can’t add:

Lightbox popups that display the full-size image
Hover effects when visitors mouseover gallery items
Filter effects to add neat stylistic elements to your gallery
Niche elements like social share buttons

 

So if you want to create more stylish and/or functional galleries, you’re going to need a dedicated WordPress gallery plugin.

How To Create More Advanced WordPress Galleries With Modula

Modula is a free WordPress image gallery plugin that lets you quickly create more advanced types of WordPress galleries.

Because it’s a grid gallery, it’s also better at handling galleries with images of different dimensions.

For example, here’s how it can automatically put together different image sizes to create one cohesive gallery:

And because Modula uses responsive design, your gallery will also rearrange itself so that it looks great no matter what type of device a visitor is browsing from.

Creating a gallery is just as simple. You:

Set a width and height for your gallery
Choose whether or not to add titles and captions to gallery images
Upload your gallery images
Insert your gallery using a shortcode

If needed, you can then go dig into more advanced settings to configure filters, effects, social share buttons, and more.

Enjoy Your New WordPress Gallery Power

If you just want to create a basic gallery and your images are all the same dimensions, using the core WordPress gallery functionality can get the job done.

But if you want to create more feature-rich, aesthetic galleries, you’ll need a WordPress image gallery plugin.

No matter what route you end up going down, enjoy your newfound power to better display your images on WordPress!

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The post WordPress Image Gallery: How To Create One (4 Steps + Special Tips for Advanced Users) appeared first on ThemeFuse.

BLUEHOST VS INMOTION: Giant Corporation or Dedicated Company?

In this article, we thought of comparing Bluehost and InMotion, two of most respected hosting companies in the industry. Our focus will enhance company’s reliability, prices, user experiences regarding support and the free options offered. Thus, you might discover interesting facts, seeing Bluehost as a favourite for starting companies, while InMotion would be praised for its support services behind, among many other advantages and disadvantages.

 

BLUEHOST – HOSTING FOR STARTING BUSINESSES

Bluehost is owned by Endurance International, among the largest hosting corporations in the world. On the market for over 20 years, it has a reputation one cannot simply hide when talking about the industry. And when we talk about reputation, we talk about what you might gain and what you might lose having it as a hosting. Therefore, let’s see the strong and weak points before considering choosing the hosting for your business.

Bluehost ADVANTAGES (+)

BRAND REPUTATION. Established in 1996 and on market to present time, Bluehost has a visible advantage of having stood through history. Meanwhile building a reputation. Obviously, the famous hosting has also gathered resources over time and enough negative feedback. It has a heavy brand recognition other smaller companies would never have. It may employ best developers and engineers for company’s development; lead top customer support service, invest in professionalism – simply because they can afford it. Also, considering that big brands would not disappear overnight when choosing such companies, it simply means investing in security.

It is widely known that whenever people choose between products’ small price difference, they are sure to go with a known name brand. We believe, the practice of hosting wouldn’t differ in behaviour. And this is a considerable advantage.

QUALITATIVE SERVICES. Being in the industry for years, Bluehost has invested in qualitative servers and networks over time. Also, a big industry can afford focus on customer’s satisfaction first and financial revenues second. This means their interest in a happy customer would translate into referrals to a friend. The last is a lately popular approach since referrals make companies grow. Grow means investment but also more financial revenue. A successful business, in one word.

PRICE vs. OFFER. Unless prices are placed in the context, they always seem unreasonably high. But let’s see what price packages Bluehost can offer and what are the target groups that can benefit from them.

Bluehost is a good option for a small to mid-size website looking for good hosting. It has basic, plus and prime offer packages. The price is affordable for the starters and has a good offer even for bigger businesses.

You may find unmetered options included like bandwidth across all the packages and unlimited features like domains, email accounts and storage for advanced packages.

Moreover, Bluehost offers a 30-day money back guarantee if you don’t feel happy with the hosting. This guarantee may be longer for other companies, but it still gives you freedom of choice even after the payment.

Additional to these, Bluehost offers nice options ranging from packages of email & hosting to dedicated hosting, or even customized hosting for websites run on WordPress or WooCommerce.

USER-FRIENDLY. When speaking about practical usage of an internet-based platform, the options are just two: user-friendly and difficult. Managing the website through the hosting system is easy with Bluehost since they use the most popular tool, called cPanel. It means you can always find online solutions to any encountered problems. And company’s years of experience online mean many of the problems have either been already fixed. Or, have an easy solution described in the accessible forums. Besides that, there are many available tutorials about how to use the tool.

Also, once signed up, you can use the system before you transfer your website to it. There is available File Transfer Protocol to get prepared for the process of transfer; also, numerous guides to lead you as a newcomer in hosting and website matters.

VALUABLE FEATURES. Any hosting should have a set of features to attract its users who will spread the word further. Most important feature for any hosting is setting the website right. Having a website transferred to a hosting requires some know-how. The transfer itself, getting to know the new interface, the setup after – one has to be sure they will manage it. If the process becomes too complicated – spread the word doesn’t work in company’s favour anymore. Bluehost makes things simple in this way, offering an easy transfer of the website.

Also, free features are a valuable gift any company can offer to its clients. Before anything else, Bluehost offers unlimited features even for basic packages (space, file transfer and email accounts). Besides this, it also gives free domain combined with site builder and setup.

For the bonus, you can rely on Bluehost regarding advertisement credits for Google, Facebook and Twitter.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT. Customer support is nearly impossible to judge unless you actually use it. And by using it, you get to know the customer support team and the customer support team culture. Both indicate whether or not the company views customer service as a cost, a sales opportunity or an investment. Bluehost has an advantage here by offering additional to chat and social media support the possibility to call a phone number 24/7.

SPECIAL OFFERS. We’ve negotiated a nice deal for you with Bluehost. You can get a free Premium WordPress Theme if you buy DISCOUNTED hosting from Bluehost.

 

Bluehost DISADVANTAGES (-)

STRICT STORAGE RULES. Just like most of the hosting companies, the great packages of BlueHost lack an element. And in our case, it regards the storage. Bluehost doesn’t give unlimited storage. You can always upgrade your storage, but that would cost you extra money.

DOWNSIDE OF BIG COMPANIES. Besides a name, big companies have also reputation. Reputation, it is known is built for years, and can be destroyed in a minute. The business grows, and the problems multiply usually. History recalls a more than 24-hour downtime in summer 2013. Another network malfunction went into the press in winter 2016.

Of course, they have enough resources and expertise to solve these bugs easier than small companies. But this kind of problems mostly sticks to big companies. Especially when they start to cut expenses at a certain point, in order to produce larger revenues. Thus, Bluehost would overuse the server, adding more websites to it than necessary. This leads to the next point.

SLOW SPEED. You expect from your web host two main features: to store your web files first and second – deliver those files upon request. But it’s like a fast delivery company, there is no time to be lost. And whenever a company you trust fails to bring forward the two first important operations, you are allowed to be discontented at least to say.

Bluehost is operating averagely on this topic, and they are quite transparent about it, displaying the specifications of their servers. However, the slow speed stays a disadvantage whether they hide it or not.

BACKUP seems to be ok, however, for best practices clients who are paying for services buying a package would prefer a daily backup. While BlueHost doesn’t offer it, their competitors do.

MIGRATION. Try to change the website server from Bluehost to another one and you got to pay a fee. Most hosting companies do not display their discontent in such an obvious way and let their clients go for free.

INMOTION – HOSTING WITH STABILITY

InMotion might be called lucky: it’s not so often a company is praised the same by newcomers and senior users alike. But this is the case with the InMotion hosting company, started in 2001. It is known as a shared server model; thus, it keeps the balance of being known as free hosting and for its dedicated servers. Only free hosting would mean troubles you once in a while; dedicated servers would be too expensive for your traffic. Putting them together seemed to become a great solution for many users.

In the industry for more than a decade, it has created a reputation for its stability.  It also offers virtual private servers and dedicated servers for bigger businesses.

INMOTION ADVANTAGES (+)

MONEY. With InMotion, you pay for a product that gives you the option of 90-day money guarantee. Much different from what giver BlueHosting, for example. And among most of the hosting companies, this has the longest guarantee span.

PACKAGES. Let’s agree, every hosting company has something to offer unlimited and later will be charging for other options. It all depends on your preferences. InMotion’s big hit is unlimited features like disk space and data transfer from the very basic package. If these represent value for you, then it’s a huge advantage you should consider.

FREE OPTIONS. Among the company’s best options, the possibility of choosing a good domain to your theme and getting it for free during the transfer or registration are priceless. Add here free credits to Google AdWords, Bing and Yahoo for site promotion. If that didn’t convince you yet, think of free automated backups, that might save you maybe once, but from a big trouble.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT. In the tech world where things can just turn the wrong way, customer support is what you need. That someone, who on the other side of the line will back you up with professional advice. 24/7 is not just words nowadays. InMotion keeps the professionalism running through emails, live-chat, telephone line or website forms. As small as it is, compared to other bigger companies, InMotion is a giant professional in customer support.

Moreover, the Community Support section exists for those who want answers immediately from the others; there is a well-defined FAQ, existing guides, videos and how-to articles.

SERVERS QUALITY. The website’s performance is based most of all on the technology the company uses. The quality hardware is the base for a future transfer of information between servers and websites. And modern technology has communicated its best experiences with InMotion: its server’s loading pace is better than other shared web hosting companies, even though they have only 2 fully featured centre data servers, both in the US.

UPTIME is that keyword you come across whenever you search about servers and hosting peculiarities. Uptime is known as the uninterrupted running time of a server. Usually, the closest to ideal, uptime represents 99% of server’s work.

The technology behind InMotion’s servers are equipped with Dell; also, it has Linux operating system with Cisco components. These show huge investments from the company’s side regarding hardware. Add to this the human component: InMotion employs staff to take care of the performance and address the issues before it comes into view of the clients.

HOSTING SECURITY translates into spam filtering, offered for free and separating real emails from the fake ones. Also, it invests in its products, using lately Sucuri and Patchman, offering protection, detection and cleaning or patching from malware.

GREEN WEB HOSTING. Just imagine how much energy server databases consumes. Hosting a number of websites without damaging the planet is the purpose many companies got aligned in.  Thus, InMotion, among other green web hosting companies has the aim to save and generate energy from renewable sources.

SPECIAL OFFERS. We’ve negotiated a nice deal for you with InMotion as well. You can get a free Premium WordPress Theme if you buy a 50%+ DISCOUNTED hosting from InMotion.

 

INMOTION DISADVANTAGES (-)

PAYMENT. Fees paid for InMotion services vary from affordable to high. However, after a quick research, you can see that they are surely not the lowest ones in the industry. The plan is sold for a year or longer, without many options of using monthly payment instead of yearly. The commitment might be interrupted by the 90-day guarantee; however, clients read no further than the heavy payment they need to offer in the first instance.

LIMITATIONS. With InMotion for the hosting company, you can have two websites plus two active databases. Only by buying a more expensive package you’re allowed for more. These should not bother you in the beginning, but once your business grows, the upgrade might cost you significantly more than you can still afford. And that is not close the case with many other hostings, who offer a more significant number of websites to be hosted.

LONG SET UP. Should it be based on security issues or maybe that is the policy of the company, but long setups of the websites combined with verification become annoying. Hosting is needed to be activated manually.

NO BACKUP. Actually, InMotion backs you up quite often and in a good way, however, it has limitations you might not be away from. If your website exceeds 10GB, it won’t be backed up. And restoring the files has a time span, thus if you go over 4 months you lose a lot of stuff. Anything else is done at an additional cost.

CONCLUSION: BLUEHOST VS. INMOTION HOSTING

InMotion is a fast-growing company among other providers. Maybe it is because they approach the issue in a more complex way, offering lots of features for clients. They are attractive for their longer guarantee and independence from big businesses. However, if you want more steady and sure company that already showed their adaptability over time, Bluehost is still a power not to be disregarded.

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DiscoverBest Domain & Hosting Deals in 2017

The post BLUEHOST VS INMOTION: Giant Corporation or Dedicated Company? appeared first on ThemeFuse.

GoDaddy vs. SiteGround: Choosing your perfect hosting

One of the world’s biggest domain registrar and hosting, GoDaddy can’t pass unobserved in the industry. Moreover, it is recognized as the largest ICANN-accredited registrar. Thus, it is only normal that you come across its name when you decide to choose a hosting for your website.

However, the case could be that you’re oriented towards a less corporate hosting company to rely on. In this case, you might want to know more details about the SITEGROUND hosting company. Even though it is not an industry giant, it is praised for its reliability and known for more client-oriented solutions.

So let’s see the advantages and disadvantages of both companies before you cast your lot with any of the two.

 

GODADDY’S ADVANTAGES (+)

And here are many.

COST. GoDaddy Group Inc. also known shortly as GoDaddy, offers reasonably low pricing for most of its packages. The last is being tailored to various size clients’ needs. You might go for the economy package when you decide to start. You can always turn to a deluxe or ultimate package when your website starts to flourish. Growing your business might help you choose the extra options you would be already ready to pay for. Also, some packages with longer terms might bring up cheaper rates. Reports say, GoDaddy’s costs 70% lower than other companies’ offers.

COMBINED SOLUTIONS. Some companies focus on web hosting, some go for domain registration. Focusing on developing a more specific product usually associates with the high quality of the product. However, combining similar products and offering one solution for two problems is where the strength of GoDaddy lies. It offers both domain registrar and web hosting. Moreover, it has been known as emergent in both.

FREE STUFF. Let’s be frank, everyone likes free stuff once in a while. We are ready to pay, invest, or search for economic solutions, but we like the spontaneity of free offers too. GoDaddy features free themes, free plugins, free domains, free cloud storage, etc. It even guarantees money back to those who don’t stick to it. Not to mention the AdWords credits to Bing and Yahoo.

Also, the company is into its customers and has loyalty stance for programmers, offering them a variety of website creation tools and advanced design elements.

SECURITY. Safety is most probably our number two priority after the income our website is bringing. Or is it our number one? Go Daddy backs up its customers offering essential features like locking the purchased domain names, offering the nightly backups, securing clients’ personal data.

Free is good. But UNLIMITED FEATURES are way much better. GoDaddy offers unlimited bandwidth allocation, which means no matter how many visitors suddenly get on the website, it won’t get crushed. Moreover, you won’t have to pay for all those clicks. And if you want to know:  any hosting company will limit certain features (storage, database, emails), but having the bandwidth limited might turn into a very unpleasant situation, to say it mildly.

We left it for the end, however, for those who like to keep under control their business, EASY MANUAL INSTALL from GoDaddy is a gift. It doesn’t only make the process easy and pleasant, it goes smoothly. You just purchase the hosting for your WordPress and then easily install it in a few hours. Certainly, a huge plus.

GODADDY’S DISADVANTAGES (-)

If you’re all positive and ready to skip the rest to go buy a GoDaddy hosting, slow down and see the disadvantages you might want to be aware of.

LIMITATIONS of Your Databases, Email Addresses & Memory. We have been previously talking about the unlimited bandwidth GoDaddy offers, which is a huge benefit in our humble opinion. However, if you value more the storage for the database and email addresses, you will have to pay extra to get them unlimited. It is still greatly affordable; however, you get those unlimited options from other providers by default.

YOU DON’T LEAVE EASILY. Yes, GoDaddy makes it hard to leave. Both websites owners and providers are investing in the relationship. However, people are not trees, they move and they can decide to move their domain to a different provider too. And the history says that whatever bug might come up during that move – GoDaddy won’t come to help. Moreover – the process of domain’s migration will be interrupted for no reasons. And that must be awfully annoying when you’re already on the go.

DATA ACCESS RESTRICTED. Again, some features seem to work along for us, like the security. But there is always another side of the moon. Incorporating web forms, auto-generated content, accessing the emails might surprise you with its restrictiveness. It will report the contact form as a spam, thus you will have to follow a detailed tutorial to make it work.

Shall we have a pro here? Reports say, there is less spam because of the same data restrictiveness. Definitely a plus along its minus.

VERY SLOW CUSTOMER SUPPORT. Big corporation status plays along, but this is definitely not an excuse. In technology, EVERYTHING can go wrong at a certain point. Thus, having a professional support back up is always an investment you want to make in features like hosting. And professional customer support that can assist you 24/7 should be a well-functioning feature in every business.

 

SITEGROUND’S ADVANTAGES (+)

Hosting companies usually come up with certain solutions, deals and packages. It only makes sense that they are differently tailored in order to meet the needs of various clients. SiteGround got famous among most rigid hostings as delivering a product that works as described. However, let’s see first the advantages it is in possession of:

SPEED. In this age of the fast internet, a website’s most critical value is the speed. First, the user accesses the website; after that, he sees the content and then decides upon the product value. If the website speed is slow due to hosting underperformance, your business lost the game before it has even started. SiteGround is a reliable partner in offering good, reliable speed to your website.

Moreover, the company has international locations on different continents that play a high role in offering what they promise. Having offices and server locations in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Milan and Singapore it makes things easier, right?

SiteGround invests in its FREE FEATURES that come along with hosting. Among these, you can discover the unlimited database, unrestrained number of email accounts. It invests in performing daily backups. Also, it is important to mention the admin’s menu of options which has always been cPanel, an industry standard. Free transfers, a free domain name for the first year and free site builder makes it a worldwide recognized hosting brand.

If you are looking for more specific solutions, contact the company for more information, they might have sometimes in store.

SECURITY AND RELIABILITY. SiteGround makes it short when speaking about security: 24/7. Their security steadiness is also considered a reliable factor due to company’s 6 different physical server locations, providing high performance to its clients. All these are also physically protected locations. This precaution is an important long-term gain for any company who values their investments.

ALL TYPE QUALITY SUPPORT. Managing a website means being having a 24/7 business to manage. When things go wrong, be it day or night, you have to fix it fast. Thus, a supportive back up of your provider is a huge help. It translates into the ability to reach help and fix most of the technical issues. SiteGround offers intelligent and friendly staff that operates nonstop. Moreover, SiteGround is well known for its support of web communities like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. These speak absolutely in favour of the company.

GLOBALLY ORIENTED. SiteGround is located in Bulgaria, which is convenient in European terms.  Bulgaria is far from countries considered as technology hubs. Besides, it has offices in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Milan and Singapore easily covering the world’s geography. They also accept a variety of currencies for payment, to compete in economic terms. Very economically convenient for clients, right?

EASY WORDPRESS INSTALLATION. WordPress knowledge is a mandatory skill for many users, thus being able to install the website easily is a prerequisite that SiteGround can offer. There is no need to be technically savvy with the existent variety of ways SiteGround offers for installation. Moreover, it presents a normal pack of shared, cloud and dedicated servers, so that you always have options.

 

SITEGROUND’S DISADVANTAGES (-)

PRICING VS. UNLIMITED FEATURES. If comparing the domains – database – disk space formula, offered by SiteGround, and watch the packages of shared hosting plans they offer, you might find serious disadvantages. If first two Ds work fine (related to the number of websites hosted and the number of software you can install on your website) then the third D creates a hole in your hosting plan. You suddenly discover the Disk space where you upload files is limited to a number. Data plan offered by SiteGround is limited to 10, 20 or 30 GB, tailored to the type of the website you plan to install (non-CMS, WordPress or Joomla/Drupal run websites). And if you regard to disk space unlimited as a value for the website hosting, then the disadvantage is too serious.

FINANCIAL FEATURES. If you go for normal costs from the beginning of hosting plan, you know what to expect regarding payment. Much too often, SiteGround gives away hosting package offers that are budget friendly. However, upon the increase, after the first year of usage, you would suddenly find themselves paying much over normal budget. That is painful as experience. Users frequently are faced to change to other hosting after one year.

Moreover, you should be aware of the financial trick the company uses. It is also known to be operating through an easy month-to-month bill, opposed to other hosting companies. This means you can stop services in case your business doesn’t go well. However, for this, they will charge you ~$14.95 for the monthly billing cycle upon setting up of the website. And chances are that you will find it out after a while. When they’re already billed.

Advertised as offering a full-spectrum solution, user’s research shows up that SiteGround is more of a BUSINESS ORIENTED package hosting. Being a blogger, you might find it costly to maintain a personal website with the company, despite all the features provided. But for the users who are business oriented, with plans for growing their business, the prices are just well tailored to their needs.

GODADDY vs. SITEGROUND: Conclusion

So, after all the advantages and disadvantages you have read, you might have figured out that your choice should be based on the type of business you are running. Also, depending on features that are most keen to you. If you are looking for affordable pricing and known brand hosting, GoDaddy should be the choice. This should include your awareness about less available support as well as data and freedom-to-leave restrictions.

If you feel that you would count on as valuable the speed, free features and reliability, SiteGround is the answer. Great customer support and global orientation are sound like a great addition. However, be aware of hidden financial statements regarding the free features and costs in general.

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The post GoDaddy vs. SiteGround: Choosing your perfect hosting appeared first on ThemeFuse.

Discover NowHow to make your online presence profitable. Digital nomads

You may be a housewife or a mother on maternity leave; an unemployed graduate or a retired veteran in any field, but you’re not fully content with your current budget. Are you looking for a full-time job? Is a part-time opportunity appealing to you? Have you ever heard about freelancing? Is there any chance you’d like to combine a full-time work position with some additional income sources?

It doesn’t matter who you are and what are you looking for: in the tech era, you’re obliged to make money out of the Internet!

 

How can you make money online in 2018?

A few decades ago, people could only dream about working in the comfort of their homes and earning more than the most committed office slaves. Discipline is good, but why don’t you implement it in your own growth, not someone else’s company?

First and foremost, admit that working from home has such strong pros as no time is wasted away on the to and from workplace way. It’s important, especially for big city careerists that spend hours in traffic gem, or that cover huge distances daily. The things that you can do with that saved time are numerous, but in any case, it will contribute to your budget health.

Next thing, you don’t need to invest in restaurant lunches and business looks no more hundreds of dollars for suits you hate.

This stream of consciousness may never stop. Let’s proceed to the real topic: what can be done to become financially independent by working online only and what gates it will open for you? Digital nomads.

Does it sound familiar to you? This “fashionable” notion stands for people that work remotely, mostly by freelancing and travel all over the world. Wow.

You heard that right: you may watch a Bali sunset while holding the laptop on your knees and thinking what’s the next cocktail challenge… This utopia became a boring reality for many people already. Let’s find out how they achieved this state of Nirvana.

Digital nomads: why & why not?

 

Considering all the amounts of writing on this topic, it sounds trivial, but still true: get a site of your own and monetize its traffic. All you need is to create a site on WordPress and pull together its afferent components: best WordPress hosting and best theme. Since the goal is to get monetary paid off, go for a paid version hosting so that it won’t limit your influence regarding space on your page.

That only means, that some free providers, prevent you, through terms and conditions agreement, from advertising whatever you want on your site; some other free providers allow only the ads they approve. So, if a free server is used, be cautious and don’t neglect the part about conditions…

 

Next thing to take into consideration is the WordPress theme. Keep in mind that even if it’s  a free WP theme, you may want to upgrade it from basics to something more unique and that will cost. The same apply to plugins: many of them will help to shape your newbie site into a gorgeous masterpiece, but evolution on the Internet takes both inspiration and professional tools (that require minimal expenses).

Grow an audience that shares your interests and hobby by bringing something good to that community. Share your knowledge and discoveries, so that other people can make a good use of your experience.

There is nothing more valuable than a returned visitor. Your aim is to gain, one by one, thousands and even millions of subscribers to your site, but this requires high-quality content and genuinely useful information.

WordPress is a smart platform, so you’ll come across many utilities that will support your endeavours.

Nowadays, the Internet is overpopulated with sites that repeat well-known ideas and try to manipulate facts. Your task is to focus on honest contribution: aspire to help your content consumers. Update your web page with fresh pieces of writing on a recurring basis and don’t leave your success to chance.

In order to leverage an audience, you have to know it very well: consider setting a feedback page, or some other ways of interacting directly with all those people that preferred your web resource to others.

By preferring, not only the positive comments are referred to: even the not so bright messages can help you assess and improve your writing in terms of style and techniques. Besides, isn’t it a challenge: to turn an opponent into a fan?

If you nail this mission, your financial benefits from the Internet, in long terms, will exceed your expectations. Don’t go to extremes, spending each and every spare moment on crafting the site isn’t the best option either, you may burn out too soon.

As someone said, finances will sort themselves out if you keep doing what you like.

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The post Discover NowHow to make your online presence profitable. Digital nomads appeared first on ThemeFuse.

Discover7 Essential KPIs That Tell Everything About Your Blog’s Performance

When you are running a blog, there are many key performance indicators aka KPIs that you need to check on a regular basis to track the progress. Not only track and see how your blog is doing. These are highly important in regards to growing your compelling WordPress blog. You will have a better understanding of your overall site traffic, organic traffic, page views, newsletter subscribers and much more. All, of course, are measurable. That said, you can set a specific schedule when to check back to update the statistics with new results.

However, inspecting only one of the KPIs might not do you any good. You should know that all, in one way or another, relate to each other. If one is doing badly, your whole website might not be at the level it should be. For instance, even if you have a ton of traffic coming towards your blog but the bounce rate is extremely high, Google will know that there is something fishy about your page. Make sure you publish only quality content, your page loads fast and, needless to say is entirely mobile-ready. But if you are reading this article you know the basics and are in to scale things up.

Without further ado, let’s take a peek at some of the most important KPIs. They will provide the majority of information you need to know about your WordPress theme powered blog. Depending on what your long-term plans are for your blog, you might dig even deeper into the analytics and statistics.

 

Overall traffic increasement

The first thing everyone checks is how much visits their website generates in a specific time-space. Starting out, you will probably be glued to the screen every day in hopes today’s visits exceeded yesterday’s. As soon as you realize that checking daily traffic stats is not that important, you will save yourself plenty of time. Track it on a weekly, but better, on a monthly basis. Choosing the monthly approach will tell you which month is good and which bad. You can then execute your blogging strategy accordingly. Make poor months great and make those doing good, fantastic. Discover trends and find out what works and what would be better to avoid publishing.

 

Organic traffic

Since we began with traffic, we will continue with traffic. Organic traffic (yes, I used the “t” word for the fourth time) is the one that search engines, like Google and Bing, send to your page. Organic visitors are, by far, one of the most wanted ones for every blogger. After all, this is all free traffic and if done correctly, a very targeted one. Having your website search engine optimized will get your posts rank higher on SERPs. The higher you rank, the more traffic you will receive. Check the percentage of your overall traffic that comes from search engines and even which blog posts receive the most traffic. Also, find out which keyword drives in the most amount of visitors and which the least.

 

Bounce rate

After you get familiar with traffic statistics, the next thing you should look is the bounce rate. The number is in percentage and lets you know how many visitors left after viewing only one page. The lower the number the better. For a better understanding, if your site’s overall bounce rate is 80% and higher, you should immediately find out what the issue might be. Maybe it has to do with the design, with the navigation, slow loading speed or your website is undergoing other technical issues. Bear in mind, even if the bounce rate is at 40% or 50%, you can still make improvements. One thing is for sure, you should never stop making your website better by testing what works and what does not.

 

Time on site

Time on site correlates with bounce rate. If the latter is high most likely, the former is low. How long guests stay on your blog tells you how quality and relevant your content is. When users stay on your website for several minutes, it tells you that you must be doing something right. But that is not all that comes with high time on site. Google will also notice this, rank you higher and send even more search traffic towards your page. Meaning, time on site has a big impact on SEO. If it is low, investigate whether or not your blog is working properly. Does it open in an instant? Does it have an eye-friendly design? Is it going through technical issues?

 

Page views per session

Just as much as third and fourth paragraph go hand in hand, so do fourth and fifth. The more pages a reader visits, the longer he or she will stay on your page. This all comes down to one thing: comfortable navigation. If they are struggling with navigation, they will surely leave after visiting the first page (high bounce rate!). Another metric is the quality of your content. If there’s nothing useful in it, why would they even search other sections of your page? Since it is crucial to have articles and media to the highest standards, I won’t be talking much more about it. That is the golden rule.

What I will advise you to do is to add a sidebar to related blogs and intriguing images. You can also place similar widgets in the bottom of your articles. Moreover, your menu should be top-notch and search bar clearly visible.

Pro tip: Use Google Analytics’ Behavior Flow Report to see what guests are doing and how they are moving from one section of your page to the other.

Inbound links

To witness blog growth, inbound links aka backlinks are still important. It shows that your blog is of the finest grade, packed with first-class content. What else would other websites want to link to you, right? Another indicator that tells search engines that you are a serious deal, releasing only outstanding articles. But most importantly, useful to users. Find out how many inbound links each page and blog posts receive. If you already see one of the pages/posts doing good but there are few sites linking to them, find a way to increase the number. You will be surprised how many methods you can put into practice to boost the number of backlinks.

More Newsletter subscribers

Although there are many fancy ways available how to market your blog, products, and services, email is still going strong. And if you have the right subscribers, it will certainly be the most effective technique you can use. Furthermore, if your email list is growing on a daily basis, you have another proof that what you are releasing to your website others find advantageous. They subscribe to receive even more of what they see straight to their inboxes. That said, if you are not already, start sending out compelling newsletters. Still, testing out the right location for the subscription box plays the key part in the number of new subscribers you get. Things like exit pop can work, too.

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The post Discover7 Essential KPIs That Tell Everything About Your Blog’s Performance appeared first on ThemeFuse.

7 Best WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Email Conversions

Would you like to boost your website’s email conversion rates and generate more subscribers for your email list?

 

For most bloggers, growing an email list is a struggle of its own. Well, you can’t expect people to discover your blog and signup for your email list all on their own. You need to equip your blog with the right tools to promote your email list to get that job done.

In this post, we’ll show you some of the best WordPress plugins you can use to get more people to join your email list. These plugins are guaranteed to increase your email list conversions like never before.

#1 OptinMonster

Price: $9 per month
Main Features: Opt-in forms, welcome gate, embed forms, etc

 

OptinMonster is one of the best lead generation plugins available on WordPress. This plugin will help you install pop-up messages, embed email opt-in forms inside blog posts, add a welcome gate to capture leads, A/B split test your signup forms, and so much more to make the most of your website traffic.

Why Use It?

You can’t grow your email list without promoting it to your website visitors. OptinMonster is a plugin that does this perfectly.

This plugin comes with lots of useful tools like MonsterLinks, technologies such as exit intent, and plenty of professionally designed opt-in form templates for setting up an effective lead capturing system on your blog.

#2 Yoast SEO

Price: Free
Main Features: Optimize blog posts for search engines

 

This is a must-have plugin for every WordPress blog and website. Yoast SEO optimizes each page and blog post on your website for search engines to help your articles rank higher in search results.

Why Use It?

How do you expect to generate more subscribers if your website doesn’t generate traffic?

 

Yoast SEO will make sure your blog posts are properly formatted and optimized for the right keywords for the search engines to easily recognize your website. This will bring in lots of organic traffic to your website. Giving you the opportunity to convert more visitors into subscribers.

#3 WPForms

Price: $39 per year
Main Features: Build contact forms with lead capture

 

WPForms is a form building plugin that you can use to create various types of forms without even having to type any code. You can use it to create advanced contact forms, signup forms, registration forms, and much more.

Why Use It?

A cool feature in WPForms is that it allows you to add a lead capture option into your contact forms to let the people who use the contact form to subscribe to your email list with a simple checkbox.

 

WPForms comes with an easy to use form builder that you can use to build forms by dragging and dropping elements into your designs.

#4 Tidio Live Chat

Price: Free
Main Features: Capture leads from contacts

 

Live chat is an effective way of offering support to your website visitors and customers. This can also be used to generate more leads. Tidio is a free plugin you can use to set up a live chat system on your website.

Why Use It?

Tidio also supports integration with email marketing services such as MailChimp, GetResponse, and more. Which allows you to turn the people who contact you through live chat into leads.

The plugin also lets you keep track of who visits your website and engage with them in real-time. It also supports an offline messaging system so that you don’t have to stay online all the time.

#5 LeadQuizzes

Price: Free
Main Features: Capture leads with quizzes

 

LeadQuizzes is another lead generation plugin that helps you capture leads with entertaining quizzes. Using the plugin, you can create fun quizzes and embed them on your website to engage with your audience.

The plugin asks for the user’s email at the end of a quiz to send the results. This will help you add more subscribers to your email list without much effort.

Why Use It?

Quizzes are not only fun, but they also help people explore their identity, personality, and even a future career. With LeadQuizzes, you will be able to grow your email list with more engaging subscribers.

LeadQuizzes supports all major email marketing services and comes with a free forever version for test driving the service.

#6 Elementor

Price: Free
Main Features: Build landing pages

 

Elementor is a free page builder plugin that you can use to build landing pages on your website to promote your lead magnets.

Elementor is beginner-friendly and comes with a live page editor that allows you to design landing pages without any web design experience. It also includes a number of pre-designed templates.

Why Use It?

Landing pages help you drive more traffic to your lead magnets and effectively convert your traffic into subscribers. You can use Elementor to build beautiful landing pages to showcase your free eBooks, email courses, and other lead magnets on your blog.

#7 WP Rocket

Price: $39
Main Features: Caching, optimize website speed, etc

 

WP Rocket is a powerful caching plugin for WordPress. Unlike the free caching plugins, WP Rocket can easily be installed with a single click.

It also comes with plenty of other great tools for optimizing your website for speed. Such as cache preloading, lazy load, minification, support for CDN, and more.

Why Use It?

Caching your website pages can drastically improve your website performance. And, as you may know, Google considers website speed as a ranking factor.

 

Which means you will be able to rank higher on Google by optimizing your website for speed and generate more traffic to your website. Of course, that also means you will get more email subscribers as well.

Over To You

These plugins will definitely help increase your email conversion rates. However, growing an email list takes more than WordPress plugins. You also need to generate traffic, offer a valuable lead magnet, publish great blog posts, promote them on social media, and so much more.

Don’t expect your subscriber numbers to grow automatically. Now that you have the right tools, it’s time for you to get to work.

 

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The post 7 Best WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Email Conversions appeared first on ThemeFuse.

New Premium Slider Included Our The Core Theme Comes With Smart Slider Pro

I just wanted to let you know about this cool partnership we recently did with the guys behind Smart Slider 3. After extensive testing, we’ve come to the conclusion that Smart Slider 3 is one of the best WordPress sliders out there and decided that this is a must for our The Core premium WordPress theme.

Including the Smart Slider 3 in The Core will enable us to create some really creative sliders for our next premade websites that we’ll add to the theme.

Our designers played with the Smart Slider (currently version 3.2) and you can basically create any type of slider with it. Not only that but the huge number of options, features, animations and the ease of use are the ones that really impressed us.

An important thing to note is that the Smart Slider that will come with our The Core theme is a PRO version slider, not the free version that everyone can download from WordPress.org.

This PRO version doesn’t come with the premade sliders made by the Nextend team, you’ll need a separate license sold on their website if you want to use one of these premade sliders. You’ll have all the options from the PRO version of the slider already unlocked so that is a huge plus.

How to Add a Smart Slider to your page

We’ve created a new shortcode in our visual page builder in order to let you add a Smart Slider to any page you create.

1. Switch to the Media tab and add the Smart Slider shortcode to your page.

2. Open the Smart Slider shortcode and click on the Select Slider button.

3. Select the slider you want to insert from the Smart Slider pop up. The slider needs to be created beforehand in the Smart Slider plugin in order for you to see it in this popup.

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How toBoost Your Email Subscription Rate with these 5 Quick Content Fixes

Content is the key to a successful marketing strategy. You can’t build a marketing strategy without it. The content you create will play a major role when promoting your business, from generating traffic to growing an email list and increasing sales. Content marketing not only generates 3X as many leads, it also costs 62% less than traditional marketing, that’s why you should boost your email subscription at any price. However, not everyone is able to achieve such results. Because most businesses skip the most important part of creating content: Optimization.

Is your content optimized to achieve the best results? Are you following the right strategies to use your content to convert more of your visitors into subscribers? Keep reading to find out.

What Is Email Subscription Rate?

Email subscription rate is a metric which marketers use to determine how well the content performs when it comes to generating leads.

For example, if your blog receives 1,000 visitors per month and you’ve also received 100 email subscribers in the same month, then your subscription rate would be 10%.

While there’s no specific rate to measure the success of a subscription rate, if your blog generates around 10% subscribers, it can be considered a successful conversion rate. If it’s as low as 2-3%, then you have a problem.

You can learn more about your email subscription rates via the stats or analytics section in your email marketing service. From there, you will be able to see how many subscribers your blog generate each month.

There can be many reasons for a low subscription rate. Maybe you’re not using the right email opt-in forms or lead magnets. But, most of the time, it’s your content that fails to convert visitors into subscribers.

By optimizing your content, you can increase the chances of successfully converting an ordinary website visitor into a subscriber. Here’s how you can do it.

So, how to Boost Your Email Subscription?
#1 Create A Proper Content Strategy

Before you even begin creating content for your blog, you should have a proper conversion funnel in place for transforming your visitors into subscribers.

According to inbound methodology, the conversion process begins with the Attraction stage. Your blog content is the main platform that defines the success of the Attraction stage. You will be attracting new visitors, building their interest, awaking their desire, and influencing them through your blog posts.

This is why it’s extremely important to have a solid content strategy in place to make sure you’re creating the right content to attract your ideal customers.

Of course, attracting visitors is only the first stage of the conversion process. You also need to have landing pages, opt-in forms, and lead magnets in place to convert those visitors into subscribers. Then transform them into leads through workflows.

#2 Use The Color Psychology

Psychology plays a major role in persuading people to take action. And color also has a strong effect on persuasion as well. It’s hard-coded into human brains.

Traffic lights use the color Red to signal us to stop and take notice. Why do you think the retail stores use that same color on their “Discount” or “For Sale” signs? It signals us to stop and take notice of that sign.

Even though the term color psychology is fairly new to us, most big brands have been using it to influence customers for decades. You can also use it to your advantage.

According to an experiment by HubSpot, changing the color of a button from green to red can help you get 21% more clicks.

The color of your blog theme, the colors you use in your blog graphics, the colors of your CTAs, and the colors you use in your opt-in forms, can help boost your subscription rate.

#3 Optimize Your Call To Action (CTA)

The CTA in your blog posts is what give directions for the readers to take action. And your CTAs has to be just perfect to make them more effective. This includes the placement of the CTA, the copy of the CTA, and the use of color.

Install a heatmap on your website to figure out the places where your readers are most active and where they most engage with your blog. Use the results to optimize your CTA placement.

Carefully choose the best wording for your CTA copy. Insert power words, like Bonus, Exclusive, Now, and Hurry, into your call to actions to grab the user attention and persuade them to take action.

#4 A/B Test Headlines

When it comes to blogging, A/B split testing is not used enough. This is not just a process used only in testing ads and copy, you can also use it to improve your blog content.

You can use A/B tests to improve everything on your blog from ad placements to the theme of your opt-in forms. But, start with testing your blog post headlines.

The headline of a blog post is the first thing your visitors will see when they land on your website. The headline will help them decide whether to read the rest of the article or move on to the next.

#5 Integrate Storytelling

Everyone loves a good story. Integrating a great story into your blog posts is another way to connect with your readers and gain their trust to make them feel safe to join your email list.

But, we’re not talking about turning your blog posts into Disney fairy tales. The stories have to be real to make a true impact.

Share your real-life stories, the mistakes you’ve made, the risks you take as a company to serve customers, how you come across ideas, and stories related to your employees. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable. This shows the human side of your company through your content.

Wrapping Up

Also, remember to optimize your blog posts for SEO to make your articles rank well in Google search results. It’s the key to generating more organic traffic.

Keep track of conversion rates as well. See which blog posts get the most comments, shares, and downloads. And include similar topics into your content strategy to boost your email subscription rate even further.

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The post How toBoost Your Email Subscription Rate with these 5 Quick Content Fixes appeared first on ThemeFuse.