Weglot started out as a simple snippet of code developed by Rémy Berda and Augustin Prot before it expanded into a fully-fledged multilingual plugin for WordPress. The company has also built integrations for platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and Jimdo, but we’re going to focus on the WordPress plugin in this article.

Without further ado, here is our review of the Weglot multilingual plugin.

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WeGlot Plugin Overview

Weglot was developed in late 2015 before its official launch on February 5, 2016. It brought something new to the table by providing a way for WordPress users to translate their sites into multiple languages automatically, and it quickly grew to a user base of a few thousand. It now powers over 20,000 websites and has become one of the most top-rated multilingual plugins available for WordPress.

Let’s go over the features this plugin offers before we take a deeper look at it.

• 100+ Languages – Translate your site into over 100 different languages.
• Automatic & Manual Translations – Translate your entire site automatically with one click, and clean it up by editing bits and pieces manually.
• Order Professional Translations with Ease – All of Weglot’s premium plans give you access to the services of professional translators at a starting rate of €0.08/word. These can be purchased directly within the Weglot dashboard.
• 100% Compatibility – Weglot is compatible with all WordPress themes and plugins, including WooCommerce.
• Optimized for SEO – Weglot follows Google’s guidelines for multilingual sites by giving translated content dedicated URLs. For example, the URL “example.com/about/” would be “example.com/fr/about” if we translated the content into French.
• Customizable Language Button – Visitors will use the change language button this plugin provides to switch to the language of their choosing. Fortunately, this plugin allows you to customize the way this plugin looks and functions.
• Automatic Language Redirections – Weglot offers automatic language redirections that redirects visitors to translated content based on the language preferences in their browsers.
• Multiple Domains – Certain premium plans allow you to use Weglot on multiple domains.
• Unlimited Team Members – Many of Weglot’s premium plans allow you to invite an unlimited number of team members to projects.
• Statistics for Translated Content – Track the popularity of translated content using Weglot’s built-in pageview statistics.
• Multi-Platform – Weglot is most successful as a WordPress plugin, but it’s also available for Shopify, BigCommerce and Jimdo. You can even integrate it with any website when you use the provided JavaScript code with your own personal API key.

Let’s get into the review.

Installation & Setup

Weglot offers a free plan, meaning you’ll find its WordPress plugin directly in the WordPress plugin repository. This means installing it is as simple as searching for it in the WordPress admin area, and clicking Install Now.

Weglot is an API, so you’ll need an API key before you can use it on your site. Fortunately, this is free and only requires you to create an account at Weglot.com and copy/paste the key on the plugin’s settings page in WordPress.

All you need to do after that is define an original language for your site, and if you want, choose the first language you want your site to be translated into. This will be done automatically, as stated before.

You can view your translated site right away if you choose to do the latter. Here’s an example of our test site translated into French from English using our own Anissa WordPress theme. Notice the language button in the bottom, right-hand corner.

Let’s go over the settings this plugin offers.

Configuring the Plugin’s Settings

Aside from the Main Configuration section, this plugin has three different sets of settings for you to configure:

• Language Button Appearance
• Language Button Position
• Translation Exclusion

Let’s start with the first section.

Language Button Appearance

You seen what the default language button looks like in the screenshot from earlier, right? Here’s what it looks like when you don’t open the menu inside, for reference:

Let’s go over the settings you can change to customize the appearance of this button. You can change the style of the menu from drop-down to inline, for starters. You can also omit the flags, if you wish, and change the appearance or shapes of them.

You can also control the way each language is represented. For instance, you can showcase full names of languages rather than their abbreviations or omit names altogether and simply keep the flags. You can also choose which countries represent which languages, such as choosing the Mexican flag over the Spanish one for the Spanish language.

Lastly, you can add your own custom styles using the provided class selectors in the Override CSS box.

Let’s move on.

Language Button Position

Aside from the button that appears in the bottom, right-hand corner of the screen, which uses a sticky style when the user scrolls, Weglot allows you to place the language button in the following locations:

• Navigation Menu
• Widget Areas
• Text Editors with a Shortcode
• Source Code

All you need to is select the navigation menu setting to place this button in your navigation menu, which makes it replace the original button.

The Weglot Translate widget allows you to use the button elegantly in widget areas, such as your sidebar:

The shortcode is elegant as well. This can be useful when you only want posts and pages translated and not necessarily entire web pages.

Let’s go over the last set of settings.

Translation Exclusion

When you use Weglot to translate your entire site automatically, you may discover it translates a few items you didn’t intend to be translated, such as your brand name or slogan. You can use the Translation Exclusion section to prevent entire pages or certain parts of pages from being translated by inserting their URLs or CSS selectors.

You’ll see a button labelled “Edit My Translations” at the bottom of the settings page.

Clicking this leads you to the Weglot dashboard, which brings us to the next section.

Managing Translations with the Weglot Dashboard

Since Weglot doesn’t actually create new pages you can edit inside of WordPress, you’ll use the dashboard to keep track of translated content and edit content that needs a bit of work manually.

The Home screen of the dashboard gives you an overview of translated content. Specifically, it tells you the following:

• Information about your plan.
• The number of words Weglot has translated for you.
• The number of manual translations that have been conducted on your site.
• How many languages your site has been translated into.
• Statistics in the form of a graph that tell you how many pageviews your translated content has received.

Let’s talk about a few of these sections.

Translations List

The Translations List contains every bit of text that’s been translated on your site. Many items feature one word or a phrase while pages and blog posts are typically broken down into paragraphs. Given the actions you can take with each item, this can make it easy for you to determine which content needs to be translated manually by a professional and which content translated just fine.

Here are the actions you can take with each item in this list:

• Edit – Improve or replace the provided translations. The changes will be automatically saved and displayed on your website.
• Mark as Reviewed – Archive the item if it’s translation is complete.
• Add to Professional Order – Send the item to your cart, where you can order professional translations with the click of a button.
• Delete – Delete the item from the Translations List. This does not delete the translation from your site. You’ll need to exclude it from translations if you want to do that. More on that in a bit.

Visual Editor

The Visual Editor is what you’ll use to make manual translations. It’s simple to use. All you need to do is open the Visual Editor, which uses a frontend UI, use it to navigate to the page you want to edit, and click individual sentences to edit.

Translation Tools

Weglot currently has two translation tools you can use to create exclusions in translations. You can also use it to force translations, if you wish. Let’s take a look at the first tool. You can use it to add rules to “Never Translate” certain phrases or to “Always Translate” certain phrases.

If you’ve already translated your site and found a few phrases that were translated incorrectly, you can use the Search and Replace tool to correct all instances of the phrase in one go.

Professional Translations

When you add items from the Translations List to a professional order, you can head on over to the Professional Translations section where a basic summary of your order will be present. There will also be a shopping cart icon you can click on to open the shopping cart. You’ll see a complete list of the items you’ve selected here, but most importantly, you’ll see the total cost for the translations you selected.

Please note that access to professional translators is only available for premium users.

Statistics

The Statistics section features simple analytical data for translated content. It’ll tell you the number of pageviews you’ve received over time as well as which translated pages are most popular on your site. This data is also useful in letting you know which plan you’ll need since each one allows a different number of pageviews.

WeGlot Pricing

Please note: this screenshot was taken in March 2018 and may not reflect current pricing.

Weglot offers one free plan and five premium plans, as you can see in the image above. Premium plans can be paid for on a month-to-month basis or annually, the latter of which comes with two months free of charge.

There are three major differences between these plans:

1. The number of words you’re able to translate.
2. The number of languages you’re allowed to translate your site into.
3. How many pageviews you’re allowed for translated content.

The free plan limits the amount of words you’re able to translate to 2,000, which is fine for small sites, but if you’re looking to expand your business, along with your blog, into new markets, you’re likely going to need a heftier plan. That’s why it’s a good idea to install the plugin, take advantage of the 10-day free trial Weglot offers, and go through the Translations List. You’ll be able to see how many words the plugin has translated for you, which will, in turn, let you know which plan you’ll need to go with.

As for the pageviews, only visits to your translated content are counted, so you likely won’t run into any issues with limits.

Plans & Support

Here’s a quick round-up of Weglot’s premium plans and monthly pricing:

• Starter – €9.90/Month
• Business – €19.00/Month
• Pro – €49.00/Month
• Enterprise – €199.00/Month
• Corporate – €799.00/Month

You’ll gain access to professional translations and the ability to redirect international visitors automatically with the Starter and Business plans. The latter plans include the ability to use your account with multiple domains, the ability to invite an unlimited number of team members as well as the privilege of keeping the statistics once your trial period ends.

Weglot offers three levels of support:

• Basic
• Premium
• Dedicated

Basic support gives you access to email support. The Starter, Business and Pro plans bump that email support to a priority level and throws live chat into the mix. Enterprise and Corporate customers have access to dedicated account managers.

Conclusion

Weglot is quickly becoming one of the best multilingual plugins available for WordPress, even giving powerhouses WPML and Polylang, both of which only offer manual translations, a run for their money. Setting up the plugin is a breeze, and you won’t have any trouble configuring its appearance or position.

The automatic translations aren’t always accurate, but they provide a great starting base. Plus, having the ability to use the Translations List and/or the Visual Editor to make edits manually or hiring a professional translator with a few simple clicks is a great compromise.

You may be disappointed to learn your language or a certain version of your language isn’t supported. You can always contact support and request a new language if this is the case.

All of these, however, are minor complaints that do not take away from the sheer amount of value this application brings to the table. It provides one of the simplest ways to translate your entire site without having to face too many roadblocks.

You can try Weglot now for free when you download the plugin from WordPress and connect your account.

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We’re going to go over what a content audit is in this post as well as what the purpose of performing one is as well as the data you’re able to collect from one. We’ll then go over how to perform a basic content on your site. Let’s get into it.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a full analysis of the content on your site. It allows you to rank and classify all indexable content so you can make strategic decisions that optimize the way your site performs in search engines and revenue.

You probably have a few specific reasons for producing content, but every business creates content for these specific reasons:

• Traffic – Your products can’t sell and your affiliate links can’t be used if no one’s visiting your site. You blog to encourage more people to stop by.
• SEO – Blogging aimlessly and posting on social media doesn’t do much to bring organic traffic, the most valuable form of traffic, to your site. This is why you optimize your content for search engines.
• Revenue – The more people who visit your site, the more revenue you’re likely to generate. This is why you produce content to increase the amount traffic your site receives. It ultimately leads to more revenue.

A content audit essentially allows you to see how each and every indexable piece of content (page or post) on your site is performing in terms of traffic, SEO and revenue. You’ll be able to take a specific action on each post and optimize it to help it perform better.

Let’s talk more about the actions you can take when you perform a content audit on your site.

What is the Purpose of a Content Audit?

The purpose of a content audit is to analyze each and every piece of indexable content on your site to see how it can be improved to increase its traffic, search engine ranking or potential to earn revenue. “Indexable content” refers to any piece of content, whether it’s a post or page, that can be indexed by search engines.

Content audits allow you to do the following:

• Determine which posts need to be updated.
• Determine which posts need to be improved.
• Determine if any posts should be combined.
• Determine if any posts can be repurposed.
• Determine which posts need to removed.

This allows you to take the following actions on posts:

• Update – Update the post with more recent and relevant content.
• Improve – Adjust the length, language, structure and information of the content.
• Combine – Combine shorter, underperforming posts into one large post.
• Repurpose – Repurpose high-performing posts elsewhere, such as a slideshow on SlideShare or a free ebook to promote on social media.
• Remove – Remove content that’s underperforming and not relevant enough to be improved.

The overall purpose of a content audit is to increase the amount of traffic your site receives, its search engine rankings and the amount of revenue it generates. However, one particular thing that triggers the need to perform a content audit for many bloggers is a penalty from Google. Fixing issues in your blog can help you recover from this.

Information You Can Collect During a Content Audit

There’s a lot of information you can collect during a content audit. We won’t mention all of them in this section, so we’ll just stick to the most important pieces of data you can collect. Again, the purpose of a content audit is to improve traffic, SEO and revenue. This means the most important data you can collect relates to these things.

One of the most important pieces of data you can discover are your top pages. What defines a top page? That depends on the overall goal you have for your site (earn more traffic, earn more revenue, etc.). A page may receive a lot of traffic but generate very little revenue. This would keep it off of the Top Pages list if your goal is to generate more revenue on your site.

You can also determine what keywords each page ranks for, which pages aren’t ranking for the keywords you want them to rank for and how pages are generating revenue. Collecting these details as well as the ones we’re about to mention will help you figure out which action to take for each individual post.

How to Perform a Content Audit

Start by creating a spreadsheet with the following headings in Row 1. You can delete any headings you don’t want and add extra headings for other data you want to collect.

Headings:

• Title*
• Publish Date
• Content Type*
• Meta Title
• Meta Description
• Organic Search Traffic
• SER (search engine ranking)*
• Ranking Keywords (keywords page ranks for)
• Targeted Keywords (keywords you want the page to rank for)
• Revenue Model*
• Lead Magnet
• Internal Links
• External Links
• Action*
• Solution*

* = Most important headings.

Here’s what it looks like in a spreadsheet using the most important headings:

Once you decide what headings you want to use, you can go ahead and start filling in your spreadsheet with data. We recommend using tools like Screaming Frog and Google Analytics.

Screaming Frog offers a tool called SEO Spider. You can use it to crawl your website and analyze key SEO elements of individual URLs.

It gives you a list of every URL on your site and includes pages’ meta titles, meta descriptions, titles, H1 and H2 headings, meta keywords, and more. The free version only allows you to crawl a maximum of 500 URLs. You’ll need to spend £149/year to crawl your entire website. We recommend using a tool like Google Analytics to look for things like traffic and revenue. Other great tools to use include SEMrush and SERPs.

You can start filling out your spreadsheet once you have the right tools:

You need to be careful about the actions and solutions you implement. If you remove or change too many URLs that were performing well enough to rank, you may see your entire site’s overall search engine ranking plummet.

If you’re not experienced in SEO, you may want to consider only implementing your solutions on posts that aren’t performing well at all. Consult an SEO expert to see what you should do with your highest-ranking pages. If you aren’t able to afford an SEO, consider leaving your highest-ranking pages alone and repurposing them elsewhere.

That’s it for performing a basic content audit on your site. Let’s wrap this post up.

Final Thoughts

Performing a content audit can be one of the smartest things you can do for your site’s search engine rankings, traffic and revenue. Content is king, and things can get pretty messy if you’ve been producing content and adding more and more pages to your site for years without checking up on things.

However, implementing solutions after you’ve conducted a content audit can be a little risky. Google’s algorithm is sensitive and everchanging. If you make too many changes to your site’s top URLs, you could wind up making fatal errors in their search engine rankings, which could have a negative impact on your site’s overall traffic.

Take your time, and only implement solutions you know will help. In the meantime, check out these other posts we’ve published on content and SEO:

• The Complete Guide to Cornerstone Content for Your Blog
• Guide to Generating Content Ideas & Repurposing Content for Your Blog
• 12 Steps to Boost Traffic to Your Brand New Blog

The WordPress team has improved the search function in WordPress core over the years, but there’s always room for further advancement. We’re going to go over how WordPress search has changed over the years as well as a few different methods you can use to improve it on your site.

A History of WordPress Search

The tendency for WordPress search to display unreliable search results mainly occurred before 2013. An update released in WordPress core in late 2013 improved WordPress search for the better. That update changed the way search results are prioritized in the following ways:

• Results that have a match for the full sentence of your search term in the title of a post are shown first.
• Results that have a match for your full search term are shown second.
• Results that have a match for some of your search terms are shown third.
• Results that have a match for the full sentence of your search terms in the content of a post are shown fourth.
• All remaining search results are shown in chronological order.

Most WordPress sites that blog a few times a week and don’t use WooCommerce will get by on this search function just fine. If you use WooCommerce, post a lot and have a complicated taxonomy system, you may find yourself needing a more advanced search function on your WordPress site. Let’s go over your options.

8 Best WordPress Search Plugins

There are a number of different WordPress search plugins out there, but we’re going to focus on what we feel are the best available.

SearchWP

SearchWP is a premium WordPress search plugin that adds content WordPress tends to ignore in search results. This includes product details, content from PDF files and similar file formats, custom field content, shortcode output, and taxonomy terms. It’s not a cosmetic plugin, meaning it only changes which content is displayed in search results rather than changing the way they appear altogether.

Pricing for SearchWP starts at $79/year.

Download

Relevanssi

Relevanssi is essentially WordPress search on steroids. It takes the basic features available in WordPress core and cranks them up a few notches. It starts by implementing basic features, such as doing a better job sorting results by relevancy rather than date and matching partial words if complete words don’t match. Advanced features include adding more pieces of content to search results, including content from PDF files, content in a multisite network, custom fields and more.

Relevanssi is free. Pricing for the premium version starts at $49.95/year.

Download

Search Everything

Search Everything is a basic WordPress search plugin that enhances the search functionality on your WordPress site by supporting results for excerpts, attachments, drafts, comments, tags and custom fields. It also includes search highlighting as well as the ability to exclude certain posts and categories from search results.

Search Everything is available for free.

Download

Ajax Search Pro

Ajax Search Pro is a live search plugin for WordPress. Do you like the way Google autofills the search box for you as you type? Have you ever wished you could implement this feature on your website for own your users to enjoy? This plugin allows you to do just that. It also gives you different layout and style options.

Ajax Search Pro is a premium plugin whose pricing starts at $29.

Download

WPSOLR

WPSOLR is an advanced WordPress search plugin, and a great option for WooCommerce. It comes with the same features as the previous plugins, including adding content for documents, taxonomies and custom fields in search results. However, it’s main purpose is to provide a filtered search for your users to enjoy. It does this by displaying WooCommerce product attributes in search results.

Pricing for this plugin starts at €20/month.

Download

Better Search

Better Search is another simple WordPress search plugin that adds content from pages and custom post types to search results. However, one feature it adds is the ability for you to “assign greater weight to either the title or the content.” It also collects data and outputs it in a “heatmap” for your site’s most popular searches.

Better Search is a free plugin.

Download

Dave’s WordPress Live Search

Dave’s WordPress Live Search is one of the simplest WordPress search plugins on this list. It simply adds a live search feature to your site’s search function.

This plugin is available free of charge.

Download

Search & Filter

Search & Filter is a powerful WordPress search plugin that allows you to add a filtered search function to your WordPress site. It allows users to filter results in a variety of different ways, including categories, tags, post types, post date, authors and more. It’s also compatible with such ecommerce plugins as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads and WP eCommerce.

The base version of this plugin is free. Pricing for the premium version starts at $20/year.

Download

Improving WordPress Search with Taxonomies & Menus

Improving WordPress search is a major step you can take to provide a better way for users to find content on your site. If you really want them to find the content they need, use better menus and taxonomies.

For starters, if you have a sports blog and post a lot of content about football, your users will have a much less difficult time finding all of the content you’ve published about football if you have a specific category for it.

Here are a few simple rules to follow before you make changes to your site’s taxonomy system:

• Parent Category – Use for the main topics of your blog. Example: football
• Child Category – Use for a main topic that acts as a subtopic for one of the main topics of your blog. Example: national team, premier league
• Tag – Use for specific topics. Example: wayne rooney

Let’s go over menus before we wrap this post up.

WordPress Menus

WordPress users will most likely view your Blog page if they want to find your site’s latest content. However, you can make it easier to find posts on a specific topic if you place a drop-down menu for your site’s parent and child categories in your main navigation menu.

If you have a few main pages on your site, such as cornerstone content, you should consider rounding them up underneath a main heading in your menu as well. If you want to make it easier for users to use your navigation menu when you add too many categories and pages to it, consider using a mega menu instead.

Here are a few plugins:

• Max Mega Menu
• WP Mega Menu
• AP Mega Menu
• UberMenu
• WP Mega Menu by MyThemeShop

Let’s wrap this post up.

Final Thoughts

Improving WordPress search doesn’t need to be difficult. Start by going through the plugins we mentioned and determining which one’s features suit your site’s content best. Consider installing it if you find a match.

Other than that, you can optimize your site’s taxonomy system and include every parent and child category you have in your main navigation menu to make it easier for users to find content on specific topics. You can even add a tag cloud widget to your sidebar or footer.

In the meantime, check out these two pieces of content if you want to create valuable content for users to find:

• How to Create a WordPress Knowledge Base
• The Complete Guide to Cornerstone Content

Lead magnets provide an easier way for you to grow your email list, and they can even affect the quality of the people who subscribe to your list (more on that later). We’re going to go over what lead magnets are and how they can help you grow your email list. We’ll also go over a few lead magnet ideas before going over how to implement them in your email marketing (and overall marketing) strategy. Let’s get started.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet, also known as an “opt-in incentive” or a “content upgrade,” is a tool that gives you a better chance at attracting subscribers to your email list. The most common opt-in incentive seen on email forms is a simple “subscribe for more updates” message, which gets ignored more often than not. Lead magnets are free “gifts” you offer a new subscriber in exchange for their email address.

You’ll use your email marketing service provider to distribute the lead magnet to a new subscriber. This automates the process, ensuring you don’t need to send lead magnets to new subscribers manually. Let’s talk more about how lead magnets help you grow your email list. We’ll get into lead magnet examples after that.

How Do Lead Magnets Help You Grow Your Email List?

Take a moment to look at your analytics. How many new visitors did you receive today? How about in the last month or even the last year? How many of those visitors returned to your site? You may not realize it, but that last number is much more important than the previous three, especially if content marketing is your main form of marketing.

We as consumers are drawn to deals and free offers, and that’s exactly what a lead magnet is. Offering one on your site as opt-in incentive in place of the generic “subscribe for updates” message is a surefire way to turn more of those casual visitors into returning readers and eventually customers. They’ll be more likely to subscribe to your email list as they’ll actually get something out of it.

The way you set this up on the backend of things, meaning your email marketing service provider’s dashboard, can also affect the quality of the “leads” you collect. If you’re planning on launching a product soon, you’re more likely to have a successful launch if you build a list full of subscribers who are interested in what that product is about. You can do this with lead magnets.

Let’s get to our list of examples.

Lead Magnet Ideas to Grow Your Email List

Here’s a quick list of the lead magnets we’ll be going over in this section:

• Ebook
• Email Course
• Free Course
• Checklist
• Cheat Sheet
• Challenge
• Discount
• Free Trial
• Free Consultation
• Case Study
• Expert Round-Up Content

Let’s start at the top.

Ebook

Expand on one of your posts by giving your subscriber an entire lesson on the subject in the form of a free ebook.

Email Course

Same thing as an ebook, except you’ll use your email marketing service provider’s autoresponder feature to distribute lessons in three to 10 emails.

Free Course

A step-up from an email course. You’ll use a learning management system plugin or a platform like Teachable to create a free course and offer it as an opt-in incentive.

Checklist

Do you publish a lot of tutorials? Consider adding a few checklists to a few of your posts and offer them as opt-in incentives for subscribing to your email list.

Cheat Sheet

Similar to a checklist, except a cheat sheet simply acts as a quick reference for your subscriber.

Challenge

This is a great way to grow your email list and increase user engagement. Create a challenge for your subscribers to take, and distribute information on the challenge through your email list.

Discount

Do you already offer products on your site? Offer a discount available only to email subscribers as an opt-in incentive.

Free Trial

Do you have a subscription-based product of some kind? Offer a free trial available exclusively to email subscribers.

Free Consultation

Do you have a service-based business that offers custom pricing and services to each individual case you work with? Offer a free consultation as an opt-in incentive.

Case Study

People want to know what works, no matter what you teach. They also want motivation so they can achieve their goals. A case study from a real-life success story in your niche provides both of these.

Expert Round-Up Content

Do you have a few popular “experts” in your niche? Why not build a little buzz for your blog and grow your email list at the same time by creating a lead magnet out of their opinions on a specific topic?

How to Use Lead Magnets

You’ll see an immediate increase in the number of conversions your site receives when you replace those “subscribe for updates” messages with opt-in incentives, but you should be more strategic with it. Only offer lead magnets on email forms that span your entire site if it’s really good, such as expert round-up content or something that could easily be a product.

Start by creating a lead magnet for every main topic on your site. If you have a fishing blog and write about ice fishing often, create a lead magnet that would interest ice fishermen of all skill levels. Offer the lead magnet as an opt-in incentive in email forms on every post that relates to ice fishing.

Once you have a few lead magnets that cover broad topics, you can “niche down” and start offering a few on more specific topics.

How Does It All Work?

You’ll rely on your email marketing service for most of this. They’ll automate the process and send the lead magnet to your subscriber automatically. A download/access button will appear on the Thank You page or Thank You email your subscriber receives after they subscribe. Use your service provider’s autoresponder if you’re offering a course as a lead magnet.

What you do with a subscriber after you acquire them from a lead magnet is important. Strongly consider segmenting them in one way or another. Assign or tag them to various lists/segments on your list based on:

• How they subscribed.
  • What lead magnet/email form they subscribed from.
• The type of content they subscribed to.
  • Did they subscribe to a form that promoted a lead magnet on ice fishing instead of river fishing?

Segmenting them in this way will help you keep these subscribers around as it allows you to keep content they’re not interested in out of their inboxes. It’ll also give you a better chance at achieving successful product launches as you’ll be able to send special promotional emails to subscribers you know are interested in the topic your product is about.

Final Thoughts

Lead magnets provide unique, interesting and highly-effective ways for you to grow your email list, but there’s no cut and dry way of using them. You’re going to need to do a lot of planning to determine which type of lead magnet your audience would respond best with and what topic to create a lead magnet for.

Since you’re working on building your email list, check out a few additional posts we’ve written on this subject:

• 9 Best Email Marketing Services for Your Business
• Best WordPress Plugins to Grow Your Email List

We’re going to focus on a few specific tips you can use to grow your membership website using WordPress. Because we’re focusing on WordPress in this article, we’ll be mentioning a handful of membership plugins you can use. Check out a similar article we published on this topic if you’d like a more complete list of some of the best membership plugins you can use for WordPress.

Choose a Membership Type That Suits Your Audience

There are a number of different types of membership sites you can design your business around. Here are a few popular ones:

• Online School/Courses
• Online Publication
• Video Site
• Product
• Service
• Online Community

When you build a membership site, you’re not building something that will make you money. Not entirely, at least. You’re building something that solves a problem for a particular niche. When you solve a problem and provide great service while doing so, you won’t have to worry about growing your membership website as much. That’s why we’re starting this article off by talking about types of memberships, models you can use, pricing structures and similar topics.

What you need to do is define a specific problem you want to solve in your niche, even if you’re membership site is already up and running. Once you determine what problem you want to tackle, you can start brainstorming various ways to solve it and decide which membership type is best suited for your solution(s).

Integrate Additional Membership Types

That being said, you don’t need to stick to one membership type forever. In fact, you shouldn’t. You’ll come across many different types of individuals who learn and use products in different ways as your business grows. If you begin seeing a trend in students wanting features that resemble other membership types, add them as needed.

An example of this would be a membership site that starts off as an online school but adds a forum students can use to discuss coursework later on. Both of these features are powerful enough to run their own separate membership sites, but they’ll enhance your business if you combine them.

Choose a Delivery Model That Helps Members Achieve Their Goals

There are three main delivery models you can use to distribute content to your members. They are:

• Drip
• All Access
• Pay Per Product

Different types of membership types require or work best with different types of delivery models. Furthermore, different types of customers prefer different types of delivery models. The one you choose will determine whether or not people subscribe as well as whether or not they stay subscribed. Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear-cut method that simply works. It all depends on your audience.

Here’s a simple explanation of all of these models using an online school as an example:

• Drip – Lessons are delivered to the student in set intervals. For example, if you want the student to read/watch a lesson and implement whatever that lesson taught before they move on, you can wait 7 days before you send the next one. This gives them 7 days to complete everything before moving on. It can also motivate student to get through the course as some may become overwhelmed when they’re faced with a big course load.
  • Membership plugins that offer a drip feature include MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, Memberium and MemberMouse.
• All Access – This is the exact opposite of a drip model. You give the student access to the entire course (or every course in the school) when you use this model. While it may seem overwhelming for some, it can make your subscription seem more valuable to others when they see how much you have to offer for a certain price.
• Pay Per Product – Most subscription sites offer a wide range of features for a fixed price, but what if your audience doesn’t want all of those features? This is where the pay-per-product model is useful. Instead of requiring them to pay multiple features, you can offer them a sense of freedom by allowing them to pay only for what they need.

Some membership sites use two or even all three of these delivery models. Netflix, for example, gives you access to everything in its library when you subscribe, but it also “drips out” content in the form of original programming every now and then. You’ll need to figure out which delivery type(s) would work best for your audience so you can encourage them to join and keep their subscriptions active.

Be Meticulous with Pricing

Pricing for membership sites is interesting as different pricing tiers and membership levels allow you to offer your product or service to a wide range of individuals and businesses. It’s best to start off with a single, flat-rate pricing structure that’s easy to manage. As your business grows, you’ll notice some customers requesting more or less features, allowing you to add more tiers to your pricing structure.

When you approach pricing, your figures and the features you add to each tier should suit whoever you want to target. If your business targets other businesses, place your prices higher and be prepared to offer premium features designed for professionals.

If your business targets individuals, you’ll likely need to lower your figures to a number that’s closer to what they’re willing to pay. Just make sure you don’t lower them too much as you won’t be able to sustain yourself, which can have a negative impact on the quality of your service.

Giving Your Customers Control Over Their Subscriptions

Some membership sites do better when they give their customers more control over how much they pay for their subscriptions. This doesn’t mean you should use a “pay what you want” structure as it likely won’t create a sustainable business model. It also prevents you from offering high commissions to affiliates.

This means you should allow customers to choose from monthly, periodical (every 3 months) or annual subscriptions. You should also offer discounts to customers who are willing to pay more upfront.

Bring in More Revenue with Tiers

Some businesses try to get away with raising prices by offering more features to their single-tier membership services. The result is a large number of customers cancelling their subscriptions out of anger and finding service elsewhere.

A wonderful compromise to this dilemma would be to add a new, higher-priced tier that includes the new features you want to add to your business. You can even encourage current subscribers to upgrade by offering exclusive locked-in rates at discounted prices.

Offer Premium Content & Restrict Access

Online publications, schools and similar businesses can encourage their audiences to subscribe to their sites by offering premium content and restricting access to members.

Maybe you already have a blog you publish to frequently as well as a podcast and a YouTube channel. You can create more premium content, such as interviews, longer podcasts and higher-quality videos, and use plugins like MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, Memberium and MemberMouse to restrict access to them.

Offer an Ad-Free Experience to Members

This is another way online publications can increase their subscription rates. If your site is powered by ads and sponsorships, offer an ad-free experience to paying members to encourage them to subscribe. Paid Memberships Pro has a feature that allows you to do this.

Add a Members-Only Forum

Rallying your audience and turning them into a community is a great way to grow any website let alone a membership site. An online community may be a specific type of membership site, but you can just as easily use a forum as an incentive to subscribe. Plugins like MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro and Memberium integrate with bbPress, and MemberPress also integrates with Simple:Press.

Reward Achievements to Engage Members

Membership sites like online schools and communities can reward achievements to members when they engage and interact with the site. You can use a plugin like BadgeOS to add achievements to your site. Memberium offers an integration for this plugin.

Offer Quality Support

This should be a given, but we’ll mention it, anyway. Poor support and communication with customers can have a negative effect on your business’ reputation. Combat this by prioritizing your current customers’ happiness over new ones.

Collect Feedback from Members

This is a great use of your forum, and a wonderful way to grow your membership site. You can’t always guess what your members need, and you can’t always tell them what they want, either. Collecting feedback on features they like, features they hate, features they want and problems they’re having can help guide you to your next move. You can also use surveys or your email list to collect feedback.

Offer an Affiliate Program

Once you have a fully-fledged suite of features to offer members and offer them killer support and service along the way, you can start encouraging them to recommend your site to their friends and followers with affiliate links. There are a few membership plugins that offer integrations with affiliate plugins, including:

• MemberPress: Affiliate Royale
• Paid Memberships Pro: AffiliateWP
• MemberMouse: iDevAffiliate, AffiliateWP, Post Affiliate Pro and WP Affiliate Plugin

Up Your Marketing Game

You can use marketing techniques you’d use for a regular site to market your membership website to acquire new leads or even members. These techniques include content marketing, such as blogging, search engine marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and advertising.

Speaking of search engine marketing, Paid Memberships Pro has a feature you can use to show excerpts from restricted content to non-members. This allows search engines to crawl parts of the content you’ve restricted access to.

Final Thoughts

All in all, growing a membership site isn’t necessarily about which image you use in your Facebook Ads or what you publish in your blog. It’s mainly about optimizing every little piece in the products, services, features and support you offer. When you do this, you’ll find more people who are willing to subscribe to your website and keep their subscriptions active.

Once you’ve optimized all of that, you can move onto affiliate programs and digital marketing.

Clearly, WordPress security is an issue, one far too many sites don’t take seriously enough. That’s why we’re going over our top WordPress security tips to ensure your site is safe from any type of attack hackers may throw at it. Let’s start with a few external resources you should consider using.

Create a Secure Foundation

We’ll go over specific tips and tricks you can use to secure WordPress in a moment. Let’s talk about a few things you can do to build a solid foundation first. The purpose of this foundation is to keep the majority of hackers at bay. Think of it like a moat around a castle. It’s not 100% foolproof, but it’s the first line of defense hackers need to get through.

Choose Quality Hosting

Your WordPress installation exists as a folder on a server, a server you likely pay someone else to manage, such as a web host. Server security is vital to your site’s overall security strategy because of this. Similar to that moat, your server is your first line of defense.

You should choose a quality a web host that uses the best and most up to date technology because of this. Check out our post comparing the best managed WordPress and shared hosts if you need help deciding.

Use a Dedicated Security Solution

Sometimes, it’s better to pass off the management of certain things to someone else. This is one of those times. There are several services out there that will help keep your site free of malware and intruders. The top security plugins for WordPress are definitely Wordfence and iThemes Security.

You can also consult or rely on a service that integrates with WordPress but not exclusively. This includes Sucuri, a popular service that offers similar features to the plugins suggested above.

Create Regular Backups

We’ll get to our top WordPress security tips right below this section, but let’s be real. No security solution or strategy can ever be 100% secure. Hackers seem to always find a way. Let’s talk about what you can do to get your site back on track when that happens.

Well, if it has to do with malware, those security solutions mentioned above, particularly Wordfence and Sucuri, offer cleanup services that remove malware from your site. Unfortunately, when malware does find its way into your installation, it can cause permanent damage the simple removal of it cannot fix. This is where backups are useful.

If you create regular backups of your site, you won’t need to worry too much about hackers altering things. All you’ll need to do is remove the malware, secure the hackers’ entry points, and restore anything that was lost or changed. Most decent hosts create daily backups for you, but you can also take matters into your own hands by using a dedicated backup plugin.

Check out these articles if you need help deciding:

• 10 Best WordPress Backups Plugins
• How to Backup WordPress to Dropbox

You can also use a plugin called WP Time Capsule alongside these solutions to create restore points for your site.

Let’s switch gears and get into our top security tips for WordPress.

Use Secure Login Information

This should be a given, but many users fail to take precautions when it comes to their login information. We’re going to go over basic and advanced login security tips because of this.

For starters, don’t use “admin” for any administrative username, and don’t use your author or display name, either. You should also use strong passwords for every admin account, and force users to create them as well. Many plugins allow you to do this, including Force Strong Passwords, Wordfence and iThemes Security. Consider using a password generator for this purpose.

Advanced Login Security Tips

Another thing you can do to keep hackers from accessing your administrative accounts is to enable two-step authentication. It’s similar to the one you can use for your Google account. All you need to do is connect your admin account to your phone. This requires you to provide your password as usual, but it adds an extra layer of security by requiring you to input a unique code it texts to your phone. You can do this with plugins like Duo, Rublon and Wordfence.

Another thing you can do is change the error message that appears when you enter an incorrect username or password. The default error messages tell you whether or not your username or password are invalid. You can change this message to any text you want by adding this code to your functions.php file:

function no_wordpress_errors(){
return ‘Sorry. Try again.’;
}
add_filter( ‘login_errors’, ‘no_wordpress_errors’ );

Change the “Sorry. Try again.” text to anything you want.

Lastly, you can deter bots by adding CAPTCHA tools to all login modules and forms on your site as well as by limiting login attempts with plugins like WP Limit Login Attempts, Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, Wordfence and iThemes Security.

Develop Safe Downloading Habits

WordPress is an open-source CMS that has thousands upon thousands of wonderful themes and plugins you can download to enhance the way your site looks and functions. However, it’s important to keep in mind that what you’re doing when you install a theme or plugin is adding someone else’s code to your site. This can lead to a number of different issues.

For starters, this code may contain malicious content that can infect your installation with malware and other malicious content. Some of this content may even target your site’s visitors. It can also contain outdated code, bugs and security flaws that can have negative impacts on your site.

Here are a few tips you can use to prevent bugs and security issues from occurring when you install new themes and plugins:

• Only download WordPress products from trusted sources and developers.
• Only download products that have been updated in the last 12 months.
• Only download products that are well supported.
• Read the reviews of the products you want to download to see if other users have issued warnings.

It should also be noted that you should limit your reliance on plugins. If you can accomplish something without one, do so.

Keep Everything Up to Date

Bug fixes and security patches, i.e. updates, developers release for their products only work if you actually install them. This is why it’s important for you to keep everything, especially WordPress core, up to date. It may even be worth it to have WordPress itself update automatically.

Set up an update schedule for themes and plugins, such as once a week, every two weeks or every month, to keep everything up to date.

Create a Maintenance Schedule

Performing regular maintenance on your site can help it run in tip-top shape, but it can also ensure it’s as secure as possible. Go through your collection of themes and plugins every six months or so. Outdated themes and plugins can create huge security holes in your WordPress installation, so we recommend performing “audits” on your collection every now and then.

Make sure every theme and plugin you have installed on your site receives regular updates and support. You should also delete themes and plugins you aren’t using anymore. Just be sure to keep the most up-to-date default theme in your collection.

If you need help with WordPress maintenance, be sure to check out our article 8 WordPress Maintenance Tips to Make Your Site Run Smoothly.

Use Secure File Permissions

This is a bit of an advanced security tip, but it’s an important one if you have access to your site’s file system and use it often. You need to use secure file permission values for the folders and individual files in your WordPress installation to prevent unauthorized access to them.

Use 755 for folders and 644 for files. Also, be certain to never use 777 as this grants unrestricted access to your site’s file system.

Use a Secure Database Prefix

Some hackers are able to wage war against your server by attacking it through your site’s database prefix. Other security protocols are important for blocking attacks, but similar to your username and password, this merely provides an extra layer of security for you to use.

All you need to do is avoid using the default “wp_” database prefix. Treat it like your username, and pick something that’s unique, short and easy for you to remember and hard for hackers to guess. Also, keep in mind that some hosts handle this for you when you install WordPress by adding a random number and/or letter to the default prefix.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, securing your WordPress site comes down to a few basic things. This includes building a strong foundation that blocks the majority of attacks, but it also includes things like using secure login information and maintaining your site properly.

You should also cut back on plugin use, keep tabs on all of your products and dispose of outdated ones. If you find all of this overwhelming and wish to have these things handled for you, host your site with a managed WordPress host or consider using a WordPress maintenance service.

It should be noted we are not referring to making your site multilingual. You can check out our post How to Create a Multilingual WordPress Site for that topic. We’re going to go over the various methods you can implement to use the back-end dashboard of WordPress in nearly any language you please.

In this post we will cover how to install WordPress in a different language, how to change the language of WordPress once it’s been installed, WordPress language plugins and how to get involved with the WordPress project by helping out with translations.

How to Use WordPress in Different Languages

We’re going to be going over four different methods that allow you to change the language you use in the WordPress admin. The first is when you install WordPress as one of the first steps is asks you to complete is selecting a language.

The second has to do with a setting added to WordPress core in WordPress 4.1, released in late 2014. It allows you to select and install language packs from the backend of WordPress. There aren’t many plugins that allow you to do this since this setting was released, but we’ll talk about a couple anyway after that.

The final method we’ll go over is how to install language packs manually.

Method 1: Installing WordPress for the First Time

This option won’t be available to you if your host installs WordPress on your server for you, meaning you didn’t download the latest version from WordPress.org and install it manually.

It’s simple when you do as one of the very first steps involves selecting a language:

All you need to do is choose from one of the dozens of languages WordPress comes pre-installed with, and click Continue.

Method 2: Change Your Language Settings

If you’ve already installed WordPress, you can still change the language it uses in the backend. Just go to Settings → General, and change the Site Language setting to the language you want to use.

Click Save Changes to see your site in the new language.

You can also choose a different language on a per user basis by visiting that user’s profile screen in the backend of WordPress.

Let’s move onto a few plugins you can use to accomplish this task.

Method 3: Use Language Plugins

The first plugin we’ll mention is a simple language switcher that changes the language displayed on the backend of WordPress. It’s called English WordPress Admin. It allows you to switch between two languages, one of which is always US English. The other one, labeled “native,” is the one you set as the Site Language setting in the General Settings section.

All you need to do is hover over the menu item the plugin adds to the top bar to switch languages. It’s that simple. It may not help you add new languages to WordPress, but it does make it easy to switch between English and another language.

The next plugin we’ll mention is Admin Language Per User. It’s a tad obsolete as WordPress added the Site Language setting to the User Profile screen in WordPress 4.7. However, the developer of this plugin states he’ll maintain support for those who have not yet updated to WordPress 4.7 as well as those who use outdated plugins incompatible with get_user_locale.

Method 4: Install Languages Manually

WordPress is an open-source platform thousands of developers support by releasing plugins and themes for it. Languages are no different. If you visit a section on WordPress.org called Translation Teams, you’ll find dozens of projects for different languages.

These projects are translations for WordPress core, themes and plugins built and developed by teams of volunteers. Currently, this page has 169 projects, and the colors used to label them represent how up to date they are with the latest version of WordPress. Here’s a simple breakdown of what each color means:

• Green: Up to date with the latest version of WordPress.
• Yellow: Behind minor versions of WordPress.
• Orange: Behind one major version of WordPress.
• Red: Behind more than one major version of WordPress.
• White: Not released, yet, but the translation is in the works.

Another thing to note here are the percentages. They indicate how far along the project is.

Downloading a Language

When you’re ready to download the language you want to add to your site, click on its name on the far left side of the table.

This opens the language’s official download page on WordPress.org. Click its Download button located on the right-hand side of the page.

This is a complete ZIP folder of WordPress core for the latest version available in that particular language. Since you likely already have an established WordPress site, you’ll want to extract the folder you download, and open the inner folder named “wordpress.”

Open the wp-content folder after that, and open the Languages folder. What you’re looking for are .mo and .po files, which are the file extensions WordPress uses for languages.

Let’s move on to the next step.

Installing the Language Files on Your Server

The next thing you need to do is install the language files by uploading them to your server. The Languages folder does not exist in the main version of WordPress core, so you’ll likely need to create one for your own site. If you’ve ever switched languages using the Site Language setting, one should have been created for you.

Open the file manager you use to access your site’s files, whether it’s the one you use from your host’s control panel or an FTP client, such as FileZilla.

Open the wp-content folder. Create a new folder and name it “languages” if one doesn’t exist already. Next, drag the language files (the .mo and .po files) from the translated version of WordPress core you downloaded over to your new Languages folder.

That’s it! Your new language should now be installed and activated on your site.

You used to have to add the WPLANG constant to your wp-config.php file to activate the language, but this is no longer needed. If you’re having trouble getting your new language to install on your server, try adding it to your wp-config.php file:

define(‘WPLANG’, ‘sl_SI’);

Just be sure to change the second part to the WP locale your language uses. Consult the third column on the Translation Teams page if you’re not sure.

Let’s talk about the translation teams and how you can get involved before wrapping up.

How to Get Involved with Translation Projects

If you read some of the text in the screenshot above, you’ll see you can help out in three ways:

1. Suggesting translations.
2. Validating translations.
3. Managing translations.

If you want to make suggestions or see how the translations are coming along, head to the translation platform on WordPress.org. You’ll see every project going on.

Click the Contribute Translation button associated with the project you want to contribute to add your suggestions (with a logged-in account) or see a breakdown of its progress.

This section is broken down into WordPress core versions, the themes the translation is compatible with…

…as well as the plugins, meta content and apps the translation is compatible with.

If you want to get more involved by validating and managing translations, visit the Translation Teams page, and click the View Team Page link associated with the project you want to get involved with.

You’ll get a breakdown of the team’s managers and contributors as well as how to contact project leaders.

If you need more information, go through the Translator’s Handbook, and see if they have what you need.

Final Thoughts

Using WordPress in different languages has never been easier since the release of the Site Language setting in WordPress 4.1. It comes pre-packaged with nearly every language it has a project for, and there are only a small handful you’ll need to install manually. You can even get involved with several translation projects and request an entirely new project for a language that has yet to be translated into WordPress.

This post was all about using the WordPress admin in different languages. Unfortunately, using WordPress on the frontend, meaning creating a multilingual WordPress site, is a lot more complicated. Be sure to check out the guide on creating multilingual sites we mentioned before if you need help translating your site on the frontend.

If you have a website which deals with a lot of images, it can make sense to use display them with a gallery. Our of the box, WordPress has gallery functionality built-in and will work well with most WordPress themes. If you need something a little more advanced, such as light boxes, thumbnails, scrolling and so on then there are a number of free and premium plugins you can make use of.

If you are a photographer, you might find our detailed guide to WordPress for Photographers useful and if you are looking for a theme which has been designed specially for photography, check our roundup of the best themes.

We’re going to go over what photo galleries are in this post as well as the various methods you can use to create photo galleries in WordPress and then look at the best plugins for Photo Galleries. Let’s get started.

What are Photo Galleries?

Photo galleries, or image galleries, are a collection of digital images showcased in a single location that make it easy to view every image without having to scroll. Photographers use online galleries to showcase images from particular shoots or to gather images that share specific styles. A well-designed gallery organizes these images in a way that’s more artistic than a simple vertical layer of images stacked on top of one another.

Online publications also use galleries to showcase a collection of images from a particular event. This can range from a news organization displaying on-the-ground images from a natural disaster to a fashion magazine showcasing images from the runway.

You’ve even seen galleries on ecommerce sites, particularly on product pages. These pages show collections of images that demonstrate the product in question in a visual way. If the product is a WordPress theme or plugin, its product page likely features a gallery of screenshots.

Types of Photo Galleries

There are many types of image galleries you can use for WordPress. The main type is a grid that showcases your images in symmetrical, masonry or mosaic styles. These types of galleries may also come with a “currently selected” feature that showcases a selected image in a larger version above the gallery. Some grid-based galleries also open larger versions of your images when you click on the thumbnails. These larger versions are typically emphasized with lightboxes.

Another type of gallery you’re bound to see is the slider or carousel gallery. This type of gallery, as you likely know, showcases your images in a slider your visitors can use to scroll through your images as they please. Be careful if you use this type of photo gallery as sliders are notorious for being resource-hungry.

Let’s move on to the methods and tools you can use to create photo galleries in WordPress.

Creating a Photo Gallery without a WordPress Plugin

Yes, there’s a native feature in WordPress that allows you to create photo galleries without having to rely on third-party plugins or your own code. All you need to do is create a post or page, place your cursor where you want to insert in the gallery in the WordPress editor, and click Add Media.

Click the Create Gallery tab.

From here, you can upload the images you want to use in your gallery as you normally would in WordPress. Give your gallery a title and alt text after that, and click Create a New Gallery.

The final step involves adding a few finishing touches, such as captions for each image, the number of rows you want your gallery to have and the image sizes you want to use.

Here’s the final result in the WordPress editor:

And here’s the final result on the frontend using the Twenty Seventeen theme:

You can also create a gallery with images you’ve already uploaded to your server:

If you need to make changes to your gallery, such as add or delete images or change image sizes, click it in the WordPress editor, and click the Edit icon.

This is a decent way to create a basic image gallery, but there are better ways. Let’s explore them.

Creating Photo Galleries with Plugins

Like most things in WordPress, your next best bet is to use a WordPress plugin if you find the default WordPress gallery to be too limiting for your needs. Let’s go over the top gallery plugins for WordPress.

Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a premium gallery plugin that comes with an intuitive, drag-and-drop gallery builder and pre-built templates for easy use. It also comes with more powerful features, including social media integration for social sharing, WooCommerce integration for online stores and watermarks, which photographers can use to protect their images.

It also comes with interesting ways to showcase galleries, such as a slideshow or a fullscreen lightbox. If you’d prefer to showcase a video, you can add YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia or custom embed code.

Pricing starts at $29/year.

Get Envira Gallery

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a free gallery plugin that has a premium version. The plugin receives 1.5 million downloads every year, and it currently has over 1 million active installs on WordPress. As far as management goes, the plugin allows you to upload photos in batches with metadata, edit thumbnails and group galleries into albums.

The free version comes with thumbnail and slideshow galleries as well as basic lightbox effects. You can also create compact or list-based albums. Pro features include a higher-quality lightbox as well as galleries in mosaic, masonry, filmstrip, film, and blog style formats.

Pricing for the premium version starts at $69/year.

Get NextGEN Gallery

FooGallery

FooGallery is a free gallery plugin that has a few premium extensions you can purchase for additional features. It comes with multiple ways to showcase your gallery, including thumbnails you can enlarge in lightboxes and slideshows.

There are a handful of premium extensions you can purchase to extend the default features the plugin comes with. This includes a FooVideo extension that adds support for video. There’s also the FooBox Pro Lightbox extension that adds higher-quality versions of a few default features.

Pricing for extensions start at $29/year.

Get FooGallery

Photo Gallery

Photo Gallery is a free gallery plugin that comes in a premium version that offers more features. It has a few basic gallery views, but a few interesting features the free version offers include watermarks, advertising and the ability for users to download images from your gallery.

The premium version comes with 10 additional gallery views, including a masonry view, mosaic view, a slideshow with premium effects and more. It even comes with premium lightbox effects.

Pricing for the premium version starts $30/6 months.

Get Photo Gallery

Photo Gallery by Supsystic

Photo Gallery by Supsystic is another free gallery plugin that has a premium version. It comes with a number of different gallery styles and layouts for you to pick from, including hover animations. This also includes a post feed gallery, a carousel gallery, a polaroid gallery, a mosaic gallery and more. The free version also comes with a “pop-up” image effect and the ability to import images from Instagram.

The premium version comes with support for video and adds a caption builder, watermarks, custom buttons, a load more button, pagination and more. You’ll also be able to import from Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Drive and FTP.

The premium version is available for $29.

Get Photo Gallery by Supsystic

Image Gallery

Image Gallery is yet another free plugin that has a premium version if you want more features. It comes with seven views, including a pop-up gallery, a content slider, a lightbox gallery, a slideshow gallery and more. These galleries can also use a slider.

The premium version allows you to highlight your gallery’s appearance with lightbox styles, titles and descriptions. Hundreds of design options are also added to the premium version. You can even create and hide expanded galleries with a load more button and a pagination feature.

Pricing for the premium version starts at $29/6 months.

Get Image Gallery

Final Thoughts

Creating photo galleries is an easy task to accomplish in WordPress, as you can see. The hard part is figuring out which method to use. Do you use the default gallery built into WordPress core, or do you use a plugin, and if so, which one? Consider what purpose the gallery serves to start out with. Do you need one for a single post or page, or will you use them on a regular basis? If you only need to create one gallery, for example, you’re better off using the default feature in WordPress.

Photographers who want to showcase their work on multiple posts and pages as well as bloggers and news organizations who want to publish multiple posts that feature galleries should consider looking into plugins. Many of the free versions of the plugins listed above contain style and display options the default gallery doesn’t come with. You can even upgrade to premium versions for more features and better support.

It all comes down to the types of images you need to display as well as the reason you need to display them. You can narrow down your list of options by deciding which gallery type would be best for displaying those images as well as choosing the plugin that suits your needs and offers additional features and support at a price that makes sense for your business.

There are many different ways you can market your plugin, but we’re going to focus on the most important steps you need to take and a few strategies you should implement to ensure your plugin becomes a success. Let’s get started with the first thing you should consider.

Is Your Plugin Marketable?

It doesn’t matter what type of copy you use on your sales page or what method you use to market your plugin if it’s not something WordPress users find useful. It needs to solve a problem within the community no matter how big or small. You may have a hard time getting people interested in your product if all it offers are solutions that are nothing more than “cool”, “unique” or “interesting.”

You should also familiarize yourself with similar plugins to see where yours differs, though this is something you should have done in development. You don’t need to run a smear campaign akin to Apple & Microsoft commercials, but you should mention how the differences between your plugin and others benefit the user.

That’s actually what you need to focus on when you market any product. Consider the workflow your plugin adds to the problem you’re solving. Does it make sense? Does it make things easier for the user? Does it solve the problem entirely? Most consumers want solutions, not features, so be sure to consider what end result you’re providing before you implementing any marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Landing Page

We’ve established that users want solutions, not features. You need to pay attention to the content and copy you use on your landing page as well as the way it’s structured because of this. A simple list of your plugin’s best features isn’t going to cut it.

Add your solution to the very top of the landing page in a visual manner. It’s best to use a video, but a single screenshot or a slider filled with screenshots is also effective. If you choose to use a video, avoid using one filled with animations and “marketing speak” voice-overs. Customers want to see what they’re going to get before they get it, so you need to actually show what the plugin adds to the backend of WordPress as well as a brief showcasing and overview of the solution it provides.

Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page:

Features

You should add your features after this, but again, don’t just list them. Provide copy for each feature in a “feature; benefit” format. This is something professional copywriters do. Instead of saying what feature your plugin has, give an explanation of how that feature benefits the user.

Here’s an example for a plugin that adds a quick-view feature to WooCommerce products:

• Feature Format: “This plugin adds a “View Details” button to products.”
• Features; Benefit Format: “A “View Details” button allows you to hide excess information on the sales page while giving customers a quick way to access it.”

Features tend to have multiple benefits attached them, so make sure you mention the most important ones.

Support

WordPress users, whether they’re general users or developers, purchase plugins because they want simple solutions they didn’t need to implement themselves. This simplicity diminishes when you aren’t there to fix bugs or answer questions. Define what type of support your company offers so customers can decide if it’s suitable for them.

Here’s what you should mention specifically:

• Support Hours
  • Days and Times
  • Dates/Holidays Support is Unavailable
• Support Types
  • Phone
  • Tickets
  • Live Chat
  • Community Forums
• Documentation
  • Provide a link to it on the sales page so customers can research the plugin further.
• Knowledge Base
• Blog
  • Mention your blog only if it cover topics related to the problem you’re solving regularly.

FAQs

Take the questions and inquiries visitors leave before they buy and turn them into a FAQ section on your sales page. You can even research plugins similar to yours to see what FAQs they have and what users are saying in their reviews. Some sites, such as CodeCanyon, have comment sections you can look through as well.

Testimonials

Remember this no matter what type of product you’re marketing: social proof sells. Take sentences from user reviews and add them to a Testimonials section on your sales page. You can also use a quote from a review or send emails to users asking them for short testimonials.

Pricing

Figures for your plugin’s pricing should be showcased near the top of the page, but you should also add a dedicated Pricing section toward the bottom of the page. Use this section to give a more detailed outline of your pricing structure. Add a table here if you have multiple plans.

Call to Action

Add a call to action to the top and bottom of your landing page. Your call to action should always have a buy button. If you’ve created a demo for your plugin, add it as well.

Create a Company Website

Some developers who sell through marketplaces or the WordPress plugin repository don’t go through the trouble of creating their own websites, apart from support sites. This puts you at a huge disadvantage when it comes to marketing as it makes it hard for you to implement content and email marketing strategies.

Content Marketing

If you create a website for your company and start blogging on it, you can take advantage of email marketing while you take advantage of content marketing. This will allow you to drive traffic to your website and capture casual visitors as email subscribers you can nurture and turn into leads or even customers.

A long-term content marketing strategy would be to publish several blog posts related to the problem your plugin solves. You can mention your plugin in these posts and even promote discounts for it.

A short-term strategy would be to create some sort of long-form content directly related to the problem your plugin solves. This could be an “epic” blog post, an ebook, a free course or even an email course. Similar to your blog content, whatever type of content you do create should mention your plugin as a way to solve the problem. You should also promote a discount exclusive to the people who read this content. You should then promote this content as a free offer wherever possible, especially your email list, Facebook ads and guest blog posts.

Affiliate Marketing, Press Releases & Reviews

You don’t always need to promote your plugin or content yourself in order to get people to buy. There are a few different ways you can persuade others to promote it for you. This includes getting press releases on various WordPress and web development publications as well as getting bloggers to review it.

A great way to entice publications as well as individual users to promote your plugin is to implement an affiliate program where you pay affiliates commissions whenever they attract new buyers for you. If you don’t want to offer an affiliate link, offer an exclusive coupon code their readers can use at the very least.

You can also offer bloggers and publications free review copies or full demos of the plugin in exchange for unbiased reviews. It’s okay to let the publication know if you feel they’ve misrepresented something in the review, but you should allow them to be as honest as possible to their readers. Some publications charge fees that can cost hundreds of dollars for reviews, so be weary of that before you start firing off emails.

Aside from asking publications like WP Tavern and WPLift to mention your plugin in their news sections, you can do interviews around the WordPress and web development communities and publish guest blog posts, as mentioned before.

Release a Free Plugin on WordPress.org

Many developers have built businesses by creating stripped-down versions of their themes and plugins and releasing them on WordPress.org. You can do the same. You’ll need to decide how much of the problem the free version should solve as well as which features should be exclusive to the premium version. You can also release premium features as individual add-ons.

Avoid over-advertising the premium version in the backend of WordPress. Add a subtle Premium or Upgrade sub-menu item to the plugin’s menu in the admin panel to promote the premium version. You can also grey out premium features in the free version and add “PRO” labels to them.

Freemius

Freemius is a service which has been created especially for plugin developers with the sole purpose of helping them market their plugins and increase their income. They offer a range of services such as payments, upgrades and licensing to convert users of free plugins into paying customers. They also offer code you can embed in your plugin which provides insights and analytics on your user’s behavior which can in turn help you develop a better product.

They also offer specific marketing features like email capture and automatic email sending on different events such as un-installation or cart abandonment.

If you are thinking of offering a freemium plugin or theme, you should really take a look at Freemius as they are specifically aimed at boosting your revenues.

Final Thoughts

Those are the main strategies you should implement to market your WordPress plugin. Here’s a quick recap:

• Determine why your plugin is marketable.
• Optimize your landing page.
• Create a website to implement content and email marketing strategies.
• Implement an affiliate program for your business.
• Go on a digital press tour.
• Request reviews from blogs and digital magazines.
• Release a free version of the plugin in the WordPress plugin repository.

There are other forms of marketing we didn’t go over. This includes social media marketing, which can include going on Q&A sites like Quora and Reddit and offering expert advice there.

You should also keep your reputation with current customers high by offering great support and keeping the plugin up to date and free of bugs. Too many bad reviews can ward off new customers. Be sure to fill your knowledge base with helpful articles and tutorials, and build your readme file properly to help customers get started.

All in all, plugin marketing comes down to offering simple plugins that solve real problems while offering quality customer support along the way.

We’re going to go over the many different methods you can use to translate your site’s content and create a multilingual version of it. We’ll also go over the individual tools you can use to implement each method. Let’s start with why you’d want to create a multilingual site in the first place.

Reasons to Create a Multilingual Site

A multilingual site, which is another version of a site in another language, can seem like a long and expensive project to undertake, and this is true in a sense. Professional translation services are really expensive, and your only other option is to use auto-translation tools, which carry poor reputations for being highly inaccurate. However, these hurdles can become necessary obstacles when you learn why businesses choose to create multilingual sites.

Expansion

Think of this in terms of brick-and-mortar businesses. What do most businesses do when they’ve reached a point where their current single location generates more profit than the business needs? They expand. They open new locations in new towns and may even move overseas.

This is what a multilingual site can do for you. You may reach a point in your business where things become so routine and your profits become so high that the days of putting in too much work with little return are over. You can always launch new products and make new sponsorship deals, but it would make much more sense to spend all of that time, money and energy re-creating your content for other regions to maximize your profits. Instead of reaching a few new customers in your current region, you’ll have the potential to reach an entire new region of customers.

User Experience & Customer Service

Multilingual sites don’t only benefit you, they also benefit your customers. Think of a customer who relies on auto-translation tools to read your content or even get through a course/ebook you published. How much do you think they’d appreciate being able to do these things in their native languages?

Multilingual features can greatly improve the user experience of your site and the way your customers perceive you by making it easier for foreign users, who may make up a decent portion of your audience, to use your content.

Discover Untapped Markets

This ties into the point we made earlier about expanding your business. When you do decide to expand your website into foreign regions, you may discover untapped markets before your competition has gotten a chance to dip their toes into it.

This gives you the ability to establish yourself in the region and obtain influence without having to face off with competitors. It can also help you establish a relationship with the region before competition eventually arrives.

Determining Which Languages to Target

If you want to maximize the amount of profit you see from creating a multilingual website, you need to be meticulous about the ones you choose to target. There are two basic methods you can use to determine which additional languages you should consider targeting. These methods are tools and your customers themselves.

Tools to Use to Find Your Site’s Top Languages

There are many tools you can use to find which regions the majority of your audience is from and the majority of the languages they use. The most accurate is Google Analytics or a similar analytics tool.

The main dashboard of Google Analytics, or the Overview tab, has a section that allows you to see the top languages, countries and cities that make up your audience. The Language section even divides certain languages by which region they’re coming from, such as US English and UK English.

You can also view the top countries that make up your audience using a free scan of your site on SimilarWeb.

You can do the same with SimilarWeb’s competitor Alexa.

You should be careful about using regions to determine which languages you should target, however. SimilarWeb and Alexa report that India makes up a decent amount of the traffic AlienWP.com receives, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Indians would prefer to use their native language to read content on this site. It would be difficult to determine how beneficial creating a Hindi version of this site would be because of this. We’ll talk more about this issue next.

Your Customers

This is the next best place to go if the tools mentioned above aren’t conclusive enough. It’s important for you to have a good relationship with your user base. It can help you make key business decisions, such as which languages you should target first.

You can start with your email list by sending a simple broadcast email asking your subscribers where they’re from and what language they’re most comfortable using. You can even set up an audience survey and send the link in a broadcast email as well as showcase it on your site so non-subscribers can take it.

Pay attention to your comment section as well as some users post comments in their native languages. You may start seeing a trend of the same language (other than the one you use on your site already) being used over and over again.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a nifty little tool you can use to see how popular a particular topic is over time. One other metric this tool shows is where topics are most popular. This allows you to discover untapped markets you can potentially reach by creating multilingual versions of your site.

Enter your niche as a keyword in Google Trends (you can enter specific topics that relate to your niche as well), and see what comes up.

Ways to Create a Multilingual WordPress Site

There are many different methods you can use to create a multilingual WordPress site, and there are even more methods you can use to translate languages. These methods can be broken down into two basic categories, which are manual and automatic.

Manual

If you want to create a multilingual site manually, there are two basic ways you can do this. The first is to use a plugin that allows you to create two versions of the same pieces of content. You’ll still need to translate that content manually, but it’s an easier way to accomplish the task once the translations have been made.

You can also use a WordPress multisite network to create sister sites that share the same design as your main site but feature content written in entirely different languages. The only problem with this method is the fact that it create a separate website for you to manage.

Automatic

This is an easier way to accomplish this task, but be warned, it will lead to a lower-quality site. You can still use content translated by a human when you create a WordPress multilingual site manually. However, when you use automatic tools to perform this task, you’re allowing a machine to interpret your words and output them in the most technically logical way. It’s an easier and more cost-effective way of getting things done, but it should be used as a last resort if you’re short on resources and have a significant portion of your audience that uses a particular foreign language.

Manual vs Automatic Translations

We can’t talk about how to create a multilingual WordPress site without discussing the differences between manual and automatic translations. When I say “manual translation,” I’m referring to text translated by a human. When I say “automatic translation,” I’m referring to text translated by a computer.

Manual translations create high-quality versions of your text in different languages. If you’ve ever used Google Translate to translate a piece of foreign text, you know how robotic this can make the language seem. This is because the computer does its best to interpret the words being used and outputs what it thinks is the most logical way of saying those words in the target language.

This can lead to a song lyric saying “her skin is the color of mocha” in one language but “her skin that resembles coffee” in another. You understand what the lyric means, but it’s not nearly as catchy or poetic. Manual translations, on the other hand, have humans that can interpret the language and fine tune things so the final outcome sounds good to those who speak the language natively. Plus, manual translations allow you to optimize content for a specific region as it would be considered culturally insensitive to mention eating an animal that’s sacred in particular regions, for example.

So, if automatic translations are so poor, why would anyone bother using them in the first place? Well, if you yourself don’t speak the language you want to target, you’ll need to spend an obscene amount of money having a professional translate it for you. Let’s say you publish five 1,500-word blog posts per week and want to translate an entire year’s worth of content. Here’s the quote you’ll receive from One Hour Translation using English as a starting language and Spanish as a target language.

That’s a hefty bill to pay, and the automatic translation tool we’re about to show you does the work for free and, well, automatically. Again, if you’re feeling anxious about relying on a computer to do this, consult your audience. Create a beta version of your multilingual site, and have them read the content to see if they like it and prefer it over your main site.

Creating a Multilingual WordPress Site Manually

Let’s talk about the various tools and methods you can use to create a multilingual site in WordPress.

WPML

WPML, or WordPress Multilanguage, is a premium multilanguage management plugin for WordPress. It comes with over 40 languages pre-installed, but you can add your own variations if you need to.

You can see how the screenshot above allows you to manage the translations your site needs. When you open a post or page, you’ll be able to translate each individual part and mark each piece as “completed” so you can see what percentage of the page is done. It’s compatible with WooCommerce, and you can even translate theme and plugin text.

You can even control how the plugin handles translated pages. This means you can add language switchers to your menu or sidebar and control the way a translated page redirects.

WPML costs $29 for the first year and $15/year after that at minimum, and you can even purchase a lifetime license.

Get WPML

Polylang

Polylang is a free WordPress plugin similar to WPML. It allows you to translate posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomies and product pages into as many languages as you want as the plugin uses WordPress’ own language packs. It even has another plugin you can install temporarily to migrate your translated content from WPML to Polylang.

There’s also a premium version that allows you to have translated pages share the same URLs with original pages, duplicate posts across languages and more. This version costs €99/year at minimum.

Get Polylang

WordPress Multisite

Multilingual sites are a great way to use a WordPress multisite installation. You can technically create each secondary site and translate everything without plugins. However, Multilingual Press is a popular solution used by many for multilingual WordPress multisite networks.

It allows you to do all of the things the other multilingual plugins allow you to do, only this particular plugin allows you to select main languages for each site and connect them to one another (or create relationships). Similar to Polylang, it also has a plugin you can use to migrate from WPML.

Get Multilingual Press

Creating a Multilingual WordPress Site Automatically

So, you now know how to create a multilingual WordPress site manually, but how do you use automatic translations on your site? You can use the plugins and methods mentioned above to add content you’ve translated from external tools, such as Google Translate or Bing Translator, but why do this when developers have made using these tools so simple?

Google Language Translator

This is the best tool to use if you want to translate your entire site or parts of your site automatically using the Google Translate tool. It allows you to translate your entire site into multiple languages, and it even comes with a translate widget.

Get Google Language Translator

Final Thoughts

Creating a multilingual site is a long and arduous task, but WordPress makes the entire process a heck of a lot simpler. Plus, you’ll see benefits in your profits and your reputation among your customers if a decent portion of your audience uses a particular foreign language.

Your first order of business should be to determine which language(s) you should target first. Remember, don’t be afraid to consult your audience to see if it’s something they would be interested in.

After that, it’s merely a matter of tallying up the amount of content (words, to be more specific) you need to translate and taking your budget into account. Once you do that, you can decide between manual or automatic translations and settle on a method/tool.