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The use of WordPress is increasing every year, as is its use as a money-making blog. This can be done through affiliate marketing. It’s quite interesting to see how the WordPress affiliate platform works and how easy it can be to start making money off your blog with just the use of the right plugins. Specific WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers have been around for a while now, monetizing blogs all over the world in the easiest ways possible. These plugins, combined with a good user-friendly blog, can be just what you’re looking for to direct your users to your affiliated products

As 2021 gets underway, we’re taking a look at the top WordPress plugins for this year. There exists a plugin for almost any purpose on the WordPress platform, be it for security, analytics, backups, forms, affiliates, RSS feeds; anything you need. We’ve gone through those plugins that firstly, were of most help to us, and secondly, were of most help to the rest of the WordPress community – that’s you! So here’s our list of WordPress plugins that we feel will be of most value this year (in no particular order). WordPress SEO by Yoast WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress

Creation of several free and paid WordPress plugins helped us solve many specific and necessary needs. We’ve recently reviewed an interesting plugin that enable users to build up various styled sliders from their available posts and products – Responsive Category Slider developed by ThemeLead. If you are looking for a WordPress plugin to be able to spend less time on building and changing each slide of ordinary sliders this plugin is a great solution for your selection. The plugin has also passed the strict review of WordPress.org and now can be downloaded and updated through the WordPress.org directory. Responsive Category

The use of WordPress is increasing every year, as is its use as a money-making blog. This can be done through affiliate marketing. It’s quite interesting to see how the WordPress affiliate platform works and how easy it can be to start making money off your blog with just the use of the right plugins. Specific WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers have been around for a while now, monetizing blogs all over the world in the easiest ways possible. These plugins, combined with a good user-friendly blog, can be just what you’re looking for to direct your users to your affiliated products

As 2021 gets underway, we’re taking a look at the top WordPress plugins for this year. There exists a plugin for almost any purpose on the WordPress platform, be it for security, analytics, backups, forms, affiliates, RSS feeds; anything you need. We’ve gone through those plugins that firstly, were of most help to us, and secondly, were of most help to the rest of the WordPress community – that’s you! So here’s our list of WordPress plugins that we feel will be of most value this year (in no particular order). WordPress SEO by Yoast WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress

After blogging for a while you might want to start making money from all your efforts. Maybe you create a web series that you want to keep hidden only for exclusive guests, or maybe it’s time to see if your online magazine can start making money. This is where a paywall WordPress plugin comes in, helping you restrict a certain amount of content on your site unless people pay for it. I know a few bloggers who create membership sites with featured content, or they simply want to sell a couple videos or books they created. In short, developing content

What is content curation? The term “content curation” has often been misused or incorrectly defined. The idea of content curation is to gather content from an outside source and distribute it to your audience after some careful filtering, sorting and editing. Rather than creating all your content yourself, sometimes you might want to share some other great content you find on the web. This is what content curation is all about. All you have to do is pull in content from the sources of your choice then manually filter and sort it, making sure you only select the most valuable content for

Selling tickets for events online is becoming more and more popular, even more so for international events such as music festivals or even WordCamps. Note that when selling tickets online, it’s a must to have an SSL certificate. Luckily, there are hosting companies, like our preferred host SiteGround, who offer free SSLs as a part of their hosting plans. The SSL will protect your visitors’ sensitive data, ensuring all data goes through a secure connection. Selling tickets online can be easily done with a number of plugins, ranging in price as well as functionality, depending on the e-commerce platform you’re

Promoting an upcoming offer or event, highlighting a certain holiday period, selling a new product, promoting a new post – all of these are good reasons to add that extra personal touch to your WordPress site to grab your visitors’ attention. There already exist certain plugins to add a notification bar to your site or to add something like a fireworks effect during the 4th of July period, but you’d have to add them all separately and some of them might require manually monitoring them. The ideal solution would be to have one plugin with all these options (and more), along with the

Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. That’s annoyingly long to read, almost as annoying as some actual Captchas can be when trying to sign up to something or even just leave a comment. What a Captcha does is serve as a tool to prevent spambots from littering your comments and sign-up forms. This tool gives you, as the end-user, a simple test you must pass in order to proceed. They’re (usually) very easy and take you just a few seconds to complete, however a computer program will not able to get past it, hence

When you’re a developer handling a number of WordPress sites, or have a number of your own personal websites to attend to, you know how tedious it can get to maintain every single one individually. You have to keep every websites’ themes and plugins up to date, login to each site every time you’d like to publish a post, create back-ups for each one, and so on. All this takes up a lot of your time, time which can be used more productively. Hence the creation of CMS Commander – your WordPress command centre. An Overview of CMS Commander What is it?

Widgets for the back-bone of any WordPress website. While the trend nowadays is to sacrifice the sidebar in favor of a content-centric website layout, especially for personal blogs, the sidebar and footer widgets still play a big role in conveying useful information to your visitors, such as subscription and social media buttons, as well as additional information about yourself or your website or blog. At times, the default WordPress widgets just do not suffice. For that purpose, you can try a premium widgets plugin that lets you do more with your sidebar and footer areas than just boring default widgets.

Even though WordPress began primarily as a blogging platform, it can now be used to power virtually any genre of website, be it a simple blog, a magazine site or even an eCommerce store. In fact, a good number of WordPress websites that are built nowadays are eCommerce store, thanks especially to the super popular WooCommerce plugin, that can transform any WordPress installation into an eCommerce store within minutes! However, for running a WooCommerce store via WordPress, not every theme will suffice. You will need a theme that is meant primarily for eCommerce sites and stores. There are a good

It is no secret that website speed matters a lot when it comes to improving the performance of your website. Google has openly stated on numerous occasions that faster page load times equal better user experience and as such, websites that load fast have a better chance of getting a higher search engine rank. Now, since majority of the websites tend to rely on images, it is often noticed that uncompressed and large images play a big role in slowing down a website. Quite obviously, optimizing and compressing your images will improve your website’s performance manifolds. There are many such

As time passes, more and more users are relying on their mobile phones and tablets to browse the internet. This has led to a massive increase in mobile-responsive websites, and WordPress has not been left behind in this matter. To the contrary, WordPress sites are nowadays almost certainly created with a mobile-friendly version. In addition to mobile-friendliness websites also remain a great form of income, and one of the most common forms is advertisements. This is where dedicated mobile advertising come in, and one of the latest platforms to offer such a service is ModiAD. What is the MobiAD platform? MobiAD is a

User feedback plays a very important role in determining whether your website’s content, design or product meets the standards of today’s world. Obtaining this feedback can be done in a number of ways, however one of the simplest of these is introducing a rating system. WordPress has a number of plugins that provide similar rating and/or comment systems for you to obtain such feedback, however they’re all limited in some way or another, be it in the number of options available or the styling provided out of the box. There was therefore the need for a WordPress plugin that meets

Of late, videos have grown in popularity, and more and more websites are now offering video content to their users. You can credit it to the fact that we all have better internet speeds nowadays, or that videos in general are much easier to understand as compared to text content, but the fact remains the same: be it social media or publishing websites, videos have become a popular factor everywhere. So, is it possible to create video website via WordPress? Of course it is! But are there any special plugins for that? No, not just a plugin that lets you

Are you a website developer who manages multiple clients’ WordPress sites at once? Or do you have your own number of WordPress sites to keep track of and struggle to do so? If so, then you’re looking for a simple solution that allows you to monitor and maintain each of these sites from one location. That’s where website management tools come into play, and nowadays we can find a number of them being offered in the WordPress world. They offer a simplified solution to the problem of having to login to every single WordPress site you manage in order to update

You’ve all come across a situation where you needed some sort of help with WordPress, be it how to use the dashboard as a beginner, or how to achieve something with a particular plugin or theme. In most cases you’re advised to read a page from some documentation or watch a tutorial video, which, while possibly being adequate support, don’t offer the one-on-one feel that a walkthrough from another individual would give. Now having someone by your side 24/7 to help you out with any issues you come across isn’t possible. However, the team at SIDEKICK decided that they wanted to provide an alternative,

What is WP App Studio Designing, maintaining and updating a WordPress app can be hard work – especially if one has limited, or no programming experience. WP App Studio (WPAS) is a WordPress design and development platform (PaaS) that allows users to design and develop their own WordPress plugins without coding in PHP. WPAS is offered in two tiers, ProDev, the commercial tier, and FreeDev, the free development tier. We will be reviewing ProDev within this article. What does it offer? WPAS is targeted at all types and levels of WordPress users, from marketers, bloggers and start-ups to developers and

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that anyone can use to create a great e-commerce site to sell absolutely anything, all while functioning like all the great online stores around. As you can expect, there will be certain features, both on the back-end and the front-end, that will apply to certain types of e-commerce sites, and it’s impossible to include them all in one plugin. In reply to this you’ll find a large number of WooCommerce add-ons that will cater for most, if not all, situations you can imagine. In this review we’ll be taking a look at two in particular

One way to offer customer support on an e-commerce site is to offer a live chat option within the front-end of your website. This is known to help generate more sales and make the customer feel more appreciated right from the off. Most tools to do this within WordPress offer just the chat function, while other websites only offer an email contact form, however there are others that take it a step further. This extra step is what offers the customer a quick reply, in turn potentially convincing said customer to make the purchase right there and then. With mobile-browsing

An immense amount of data is generated every day across the web. In numbers, 571 new websites are created and 347 new WordPress blog posts are published every minute. Understandably, going through new content and pulling out what is relevant, can be a challenge. This is where RSS comes in. What is RSS? It has been said that RSS is a kind of glue that binds web content, social networks and media together. And it’s easy to see why. Also referred to as Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, RSS is a protocol that allows people to share and

Sliders are a great way to present various types of content to your website’s visitors while also ensuring that your site is aesthetically pleasing and attractive to the visitors’ eye. Many WordPress themes come bundled with sliders in order to facilitate this idea, however it’s a good idea to look at and work with a slider plugin that you choose. There are a couple of reasons to do this. Firstly, should you decide to change your theme at any time, your sliders will still work and you’ll be able to easily adapt them to the new design. Secondly, a separate plugin could offer more features that meet your particular

News aggregator websites, whatever niche they may be for, offer the best way to sift through the ridiculously large amount of news that is published every hour. Curating the news for a specific niche or market gives readers a single location where they can find all the information they need. There are plenty of great news aggregators out there, from the likes of Alltop to the Drudge Report. Sites like these are tremendously successful because they focus on 4 key areas: They use a simple design that is easy to navigate and read. Whether you’re on a desktop computer or

Everyone vies for a spot on Google’s first page in hopes that their website will be a standout amongst even the toughest competition. That’s why so many people look to website designers to create one-of-kind projects for their brand. If you have ever worked with a client designing any part of their WordPress website, you know that feedback is essential for client satisfaction and ultimately, client retention. You are probably also aware that receiving quality feedback is not always easy. That’s why the team at Themewich created ProjectHuddle. This premium WordPress plugin was designed to give you an easy way

With each update, the features and functionality behind WordPress continue to improve. But when it comes to the WordPress admin interface, it’s pretty much looked the same for years, even when WordPress 3.8 tried to bring us a fresher design. This stagnancy in the WordPress admin opened the door for WordPress plugin developers to create WordPress admin themes that allow for unique, custom-branded interfaces. One such offering is a premium plugin that’s available from CodeCanyon called Material WP, from the people at 732. 732 is the company behind several premium WordPress plugins, and Material WP brings elements from Google’s Material Design language to help freshen

Shopping online is quite common today, and why not? You can purchase anything now using your laptop or mobile device. Online marketplaces brings that much convenience to you and also maintain their quality, that’s how this business is done. In this article, we will show you how easy it is for you to have your own market and how quick you can build it. A Market of My Own? Have you ever thought of yourself as the vendor, or the site owner rather than the customer? You might reply “I didn’t because it’s probably too much”. You are right and wrong. It was once

Every year, it seems we hear more about security breaches and theft for online businesses and websites. As WordPress users, the front line of our security has always been user IDs and passwords. With the enormous popularity of WordPress, we face a growing number of hackers who use deviant methods like brute force attacks to gain illegal entry into our sites. Such attacks increase the need for more sophisticated security options for WordPress users. SnapID is one such option.   Launched in 2015, SnapID is a WordPress security plugin from TextPower, Inc., a company out of San Juan Capistrano, California. TextPower is a

Spam continues to be a time and resource consuming problem for WordPress website owners. The most popular solution is Automattic’s Akismet. Perhaps an even better solution is CleanTalk’s Anti-Spam. CleanTalk’s Anti-Spam is a cloud-based anti-spam protection service that protects websites from spambots. It was previously reviewed here at WP Mayor, so I won’t repeat the information that review covered. To see the original review, see the article Anti-Spam by CleanTalk: Separating Bots from Humans. CleanTalk has released some new features since WPMayor’s original review. One particularly interesting feature is the SpamFireWall. For this review I took SpamFireWall for a spin.

As a content creator, it’s important to share your articles and messages as far and wide as possible. The more your target audience is exposed to your content, the more possibilities you have for engaging them and bringing prospects and customers to your site. These days, social media can be a significant source of traffic for your blog or online business. And more than ever, social media influence is a critical component of how search engines like Google measure authority and rank your content. Today, we’re going to take a look at Microblog Poster, a WordPress plugin from Efficient Scripts, a

Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress is an all-in-one solution for your WordPress social sharing needs and includes features for increasing your sharing, driving traffic, tracking, and analysis. It’s been around for a while and has recently gotten a significant update that makes it one of, if not the most, unique social sharing plugins available. It also has several addons that give it even more power. In this review I’m taking a look at the plugin and three free addons: Amp support Facebook comments Post views The Recent Update Version 3.6 has added some interesting features. No other social sharing plugin

If you’ve ever wanted to explore the idea of making extra income from your content, you may have considered starting your own membership site. Historically, starting an online membership site was a challenging task, especially if you were technically challenged. But thankfully, these days, WordPress developers are making the process much simpler. Still, how do you wade through all the possible options? Where do you find the right mix of features with something that’s still easy to use and easy to set up? One option is Ultimate Membership Pro. Ultimate Membership Pro is membership software with an impressive list of

Moving content from one site to another can be a nightmare of a task. This is especially true for larger sites. Firstly, you would not want to lose the formatting you’ve set. Secondly, you also definitely don’t want to lose any data along the way. While WordPress does allow you to export and import blog posts and pages, there is one big problem: images will not be imported together with the text. To address this issue, we found an easy and effective way to move posts using something as simple as an RSS feed. WordPress comes with RSS integration right

Multisites allow you to share plugins and themes, and perform some administration tasks, but the multisite network doesn’t share content. For that you need a plugin such as Broadcast. Broadcast is a network content syndication and post sharing plugin that allows you to share content automatically between multisite blogs. Why would you want to share content? Let’s say you have a network for a school, hospital, or large corporation and division has their own instance of WordPress on the multisite. You might need to deliver a company-wide message, post to specific sites, share templates and media with admins, etc. You

Translating your WordPress website into multiple languages can be difficult. Many plugin solutions are complex and hard to configure. In fact, many require manual translations which can prove costly unless you are fluent in many languages. And if you are, this task of manually translating content can become time-consuming and frustrating. There are many multilingual plugins available today claiming to make your website translations a breeze. However, very few actually follow through on those claims. Nonetheless, today I am going to share with you a freemium WordPress plugin that is almost perfect when it comes to ease of use and

For online stores, discounts are a powerful way to strengthen buyer loyalty and express customer appreciation. And when it comes to WordPress and eCommerce, WooCommerce is the big boy on the block. But WooCommerce, in its basic installation, has very limited ways to set up discounts. Out of the box, WooCommerce lets you create coupon codes for discounting product or cart costs based on a given percentage or fixed amount. It also allows for free shipping. Beyond that, if you need other options for providing discounts to your customers, you’ll need to move on to third-party plugins. One such offering is

ACF-VC Integrator is a plugin that adds an element to the ultra-popular Visual Composer allowing it to display fields created with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Your first thought might be the Advanced Custom Fields plugin has its own integration with the Visual Composer plugin. So why then is ACF-VC Integrator needed? ACF provides limited functionality and doesn’t display many fields in the best manner. For example, it doesn’t show images, create links, display maps, etc. The ACF-VC Integrator utilizes these ACF fields and allows VC to display the fields in the best way possible. Installation Installing the plugin is

Have you ever felt too busy to try new tools (like marketing automation) that you know will grow your business? With the new, free SendinBlue plugin, you can enable marketing automation on your WordPress site in just 5 minutes. Most marketers admit that marketing automation is an important tool. In fact, 78% of marketers say that automation techniques are their leading source for improving revenue.1 The funny thing is: only 8% of business are currently using marketing automation to nurture their existing customer base.2 If you’ve waited to try marketing automation because you were worried it would be too expensive

If you’ve ever been in the market for a WordPress form builder, you know the challenge of trying to sift through so many options. But the reality is, there’s just a tiny fraction of WordPress form builders with the feature set, ease-of-use, and support to separate themselves from the pack. Such form builders go far beyond simple contact forms—they offer a variety of functionality and features that meet the needs of many different WordPress users—from solo freelancers to large corporate marketers.     CaptainForm, launched in 2015, is one of the more recent WordPress form builder entries. It’s the product of

An Introduction to WPForms There are multiple aspects within your WordPress website that contribute to the overall user experience. Forms are, most certainly, an integral part to this. A form presents one of the best opportunities to collect valuable data from visitors or customers, so taking the time to put together an easy to fill, logical and sensible form, can to wonders to your conversion rate. In this article we will be reviewing WPForms, a plugin that allows you to build powerful forms in an intuitive and easy to use manner – great news, especially if you are a beginner.

As an eCommerce store owner, chances are you are not maximizing your profits as much as you can. Sure, you design your website for easy navigation. You publish blog posts with valuable information. You even interact on social media. But when was the last time you reached out to a current customer, one-on-one, and encouraged them to buy again? People that have already purchased from you are most likely to purchase from you again in the future.  In fact, loyal customers are often worth up to ten times as much as their original purchase. And, capitalizing on this fact can

Nelio Content is an editorial calendar plugin for WordPress users with powerful content creation, marketing, and scheduling features. It’s a product from Nelio Software, a company focused on helping WordPress users reach their marketing goals through easier content management. With Nelio Content, individuals and teams using WordPress for content creation can more easily and efficiently manage the tasks around content writing and social promotion. Successful content marketing means producing relevant and interesting content on a consistent basis—content that can attract the right audience to your site. It also means consistent and effective content promotion. Nelio Content promises to automate or