When you build an email list, you not only get to drive targeted traffic to your blog and offers whenever your want, but you also get to build trust with your readers. Also, by building an email list, you are never in the danger of losing all your traffic and sales even if one or all of your marketing channels like Google, Pinterest or Facebook stop performing as well as they have done in the past.

Building an email list helps you deepen your relationship and build trust with your readers. That is the reason why Ramit Sethi, a very popular Entrepreneur, and Personal Finance blogger, only sells his products through his email list. If you want to buy any course he sells online, you will have to first sign up for his email list, go through his series of highly targeted emails and then get a chance to buy at the end.

The tools you use to grow your email list are as important as the tactics you use. The tools you use must offer you all the functionality you will need to make sure you don’t leave any subscribers on the table.

So, to save you hours research and money trying out different products, we have compiled a list of the best Email List Building Tools for WordPress available on the internet.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is one of the most popular and the oldest player in the game. It is a product by Syed Balkhi, the same guy behind WPBeginner. OptinMonster was first released as a WordPress plugin but now is offered as a SaaS application.

OptinMonster is used by a lot of popular brands and professional bloggers. It offers all the features you will need as a blogger like Split Testing, Content Locking, Advanced Display Rules, Exit-Intent Popups, and tons of beautiful, customizable templates.

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Bloom

Bloom is a WordPress list building plugin by Elegant Themes which is extremely popular and comes with dozens of features and offers tons of value.

You can use it to create multiple types of opt-in forms like Popups, Inline opt-in forms, sidebar widgets and below post opt-in forms.

Bloom offers multiple display triggers to allow you to create highly targeted opt-in forms. It offers triggers to help you display your opt-in forms when someone leaves a comment, scrolls to a specific % of the page, or spends a specific number of seconds on the page.

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Mail Optin

Mail Optin is a new plugin which has been built to help you grow your email list and send out event-triggered email newsletters. It uses a variety of methods such as popups, notification bars, slide-in boxes, widgets and so on to help capture your website visitor’s email addresses. As well as adding visitors to your mailing list, it can also send out a notification when you create new posts and also daily/weekly or monthly digests of your new posts. It integrates with the main mailing list senders and has some nice themes and templates for you to use.

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Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a popular list building plugin by Thrive Themes. It offers multiple types of opt-in forms including In-Line Forms, Welcome Bars, Popups, Scroll Mats and Opt-in Widgets. It comes with over 50 beautiful templates that you customize with their drag and drop editor within seconds.

Thrive Leads comes with in-built A/B Split Testing functionality which allows you to not only split test different form variations but also different form type variations.

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Sumo

Sumo is not a WordPress plugin but a web application (SaaS) that offers a suite of tools. It not only helps you get more email subscribers but also helps you get more traffic. Unlike other tools on this list, It offers different types of opt-in forms as individual apps. Think of SumoMe as the App Store for your website. You can enable and disable each app with just a click.

While SumoMe does offer dozens of tools and tons of value, it might not be the most affordable solution if you are just starting out as a blogger. You can try their free plan but it comes with a lot of limitations.

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Leadpages

LeadPages is not a WordPress plugin but a web application that allows you to grow your email list with more than just opt-in forms. It allows you to

One thing you should know is that LeadPages only offers Popups (called LeadBoxes), so if you are looking for a solution that helps you create multiple types of opt-in forms, LeadPages is probably not the best choice.

But if you are looking for a tool that helps you create both Landing Pages and Popups, LeadPages is the way to go.

They offer dozens of free Landing Pages and Popup templates that you can sort by Conversion Rate. All of these templates are field-tested by the experts behind LeadPages. And if you ever run out of free templates, you can buy more from the LeadPages Marketplace that offers hundreds of premium Landing Page templates.

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WP Subscribe

WP Subscribe is a free plugin by MyThemeShop that helps you create basic opt-in forms for your website. It doesn’t come with tons of features but gets the job done.

If you are just getting started and looking for a free plugin, WP Subscribe is the way to go. Its free version offers dozens of features to help you get started building your first email list.

While the plugin doesn’t offer as much functionality as the other plugins on this list, it does offer basic customization options and page level targeting.

If you want more features, you can get the premium version of this plugin for just $29.

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PopUp Domination

Popup Domination is one of the oldest and the most popular opt-in form plugins available for WordPress. As the name suggests, Popup Domination focuses on Popups and only allows you to create one type of opt-in form – Popups.

While it doesn’t offer multiple opt-in form types, it does get the job done pretty well. It is used by a lot of popular blogs like Income Diary.

Popup Domination offers multiple types of Popups and dozens of customizable templates. It offers multiple popup triggers to help you display highly targeted popups based on time spent, pages viewed, exit-intent and more.

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Thrive Landing Pages

Thrive Landing Pages is a landing page builder by Thrive Themes, but unlike LeadPages, it’s a WordPress plugin allowing you to handle everything directly from your website.

It offers over 150 templates that are designed in sets to help you maintain branding across your landing pages and comes with dozens of conversion-focused elements including buttons, forms, testimonials, feature grids, star ratings and much more.

While it does come with integration support for major email marketing services, if yours is not yet supported, you can send subscribers to your Email Marketing service using custom HTML forms.

When you purchase Thrive Landing Pages, you also get access to Thrive Content Builder. It’s a drag and drop content builder tool that helps you easily within seconds create beautiful looking Content Pages for the best content of your website.

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Can’t Decide?

If you still can’t decide, let me make it easier for you.

If you are just starting out and don’t want to spend a thousand bucks just to test the waters, you should go with the free version of either Sumo or WP Subscribe. Both of these offer tons of features for free and will help you get started.

If you are looking for powerful list building plugins with lots of options, stats and great customer support we recommend you use OptinMonster or Bloom.

If you are just starting out and haven’t started building an email list, the plugin (or tool) you choose from the above list doesn’t matter as much as it matters that you get started.

So, if you don’t have an email list, just choose any one of the above plugins and start building your email list as soon as possible.

Most of the successful bloggers online believe they made a mistake by not starting to build their email list as soon as they started their blogs. Don’t be a part of that group and start building your email list today.

Which of these plugins is your favorite?

Did we miss your favorite tool or plugin?

They allow anyone to build beautiful looking websites and landing pages within minutes without writing a single line of code, Whether you are a WordPress newbie or an expert coder, you can always benefit from the ease and simplicity these page builders offer.

So, in this article, I will share with you the best page builder plugins available for WordPress.

Divi Builder

Divi Builder is a powerful page builder plugin by Elegant Themes. It is one of the most popular page builder plugins available in the market.

It comes with a front-end as well as a back-end editor.

While the front-end editor helps you make live changes to your pages, the back-end editor allows you to get the perfect layout.

With the Divi Builder, you get can either start building your page from scratch or use one of the 20+ pre-made layout designs.

It ships with over 40 content modules including sliders, counters, pricing tables and testimonials. And all of these content modules offer tons of customization options including the option to use custom CSS.

One of the best features of this plugin is the ability to save your layouts or a part of them in your Divi Library and reuse them later.

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Beaver Builder

Beaver is a front-end editor that allows you to make live changes to your pages.

It comes with over 27 well-designed templates. These templates can be used to easily create both content and landing pages.

Beaver Builder comes with 19 advanced modules and also allows the use of shortcodes from other plugins on your site.

It also offers control over when these modules are displayed. For example, you can choose to display a module only for certain devices or user roles. While all beaver pages are fully responsive, this feature allows you to fine tune your pages and better optimize them for mobile devices.

While Beaver Builder works best with the Beaver Theme offered on the Pro and Agency plans, it will play well with whatever theme you are using.

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Elementor

Elementor is a powerful page builder plugin that is available for free. It works well with any theme and allows you to design not only pages but also posts and even custom post type posts.

It offers total control over the layout and delivers a pixel-perfect design.

It also comes with a visual form builder allowing you to easily create subscription forms that integrate with most email marketing service providers including MailChimp and MailPoet.

It comes with support for 800+ Google Fonts allowing you complete control over the typography of your pages. It also offers over 400 icons that you can use in your designs.

While the free version offers tons of functionality and features, the Pro version of Elementor comes with a lot of awesome features and support for WooCommerce.

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Themify Builder

Themify Builder is an affordable Page builder that offers both front-end and back-end editing functionality. While the plugin comes free with all Themify themes, it can also be purchased separately.

Its front-end builder allows you to preview the design live and its back-end editor helps you quickly move elements around the page.

While you can always start designing your pages from scratch, Themify Builder comes with over 40 beautiful-looking templates.

It offers more than 60 animations you can apply to your elements. These animations trigger only when the element is in the view.

Themify builder is compatible with most of the popular plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and disqus. It also offers full control over the typography and background styles of the design.

If you want to extend the functionality of the plugin, you can do that by installing the add-ons offered by Themify. While you can buy individual add-ons for $10 each, you can also buy the bundle for $39 which comes with over 21 add-ons.

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Page Builder by Site Origin

Page Builder by Site Origin is one of the most popular free page builder plugins. It is theme independent and can be used with any WordPress theme. It offers a back-end editor as well as a front-end editor allowing you to easily create responsive page layouts. While the front-end editor allows you to make live changes to your pages, the back-end editor allows you to quickly make changes to the layout.

Unlike other plugins on this list, you don’t get any custom elements to build your pages. This plugin only offers functionality to use WordPress widgets. And while there’s a free widget bundle by SiteOrigin you can download, you will only get 20 basic widgets to use.

Unlike other plugins on this list, Page Builder by SiteOrigin doesn’t have much diversity to offer when it comes to the elements available in this page builder.

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Can’t decide which one to choose?

Let me make it easy for you. If you want value for money, you should go with the Divi Page builder by Elegant Themes as it comes with over 20 pre-made layout designs and 40+ content modules. When you buy an Elegant Themes membership, you also get access to premium support, 87+ premium WordPress themes and 3 other plugins.

Another great option is Themify builder which comes with 40+ beautiful pre-made templates for just $39.

If you are looking for a free option, your best option is Elementor. The free version of this plugin can easily compete with most of the paid plugins on this list. You can also try Page Builder by SiteOrigin which offers fewer features than Elementor but still gets the job done. It’s a pretty basic page builder when compared to all the other plugins on this list.

If you want to create high converting landing pages, Divi Builder is the best choice. It comes with a lot of high-converting landing page templates and offers A/B Split Testing functionality allowing you to run split tests on your pages. But if for some reason you don’t want to use the Divi Builder, but also want A/B testing functionality, you can always use the free Google Optimize Tool to split test your pages. It will work with all the plugins on this list and is really easy to set up.

Now, it’s your time to unleash your creativity and get started building beautiful looking pages without the need to hire a developer or learn how to code. With these page builder plugins, creating a stunning pag on your WordPress site is as easy as choosing a template, adding text and hitting the publish button.

Why you need a knowledge base

When your customers want a question answered, they will start looking for a contact button or create a support ticket. And when this happens, if you first ask your customers to search your knowledge base, your number of support requests will significantly go down.

Most of your customer support requests will revolve around the same questions. And if you answer these questions in a Knowledge Base, not only will you be able to direct the customer to a more detailed answer but will also reduce the time you spend managing support tickets.

Benefits of Creating a Knowledge Base

If you are still not convinced, here are a few more benefits:

• Lowers the costs of customer support: You can only hire a few customer support representatives until you run out of cash. A Knowledge Base will help you reduce the number of support requests and will help bring down the costs of customer support.  As the number of requests reduces, your cost for customer support will also go down. What without a Knowledge Base would need a whole team of customer support agents will be easy to manage yourself with a Knowledge Base in place.
• Happy Customers: It is not possible for you to instantly reply to each and every customer support request. When a customer doesn’t hear back from you in a few hours, they might get frustrated and even stop doing business with you. With a Knowledge Base, all the customers have to do is type a search query and they can get answers to their questions about your product instantly.
• Fewer support requests: A knowledge base can significantly reduce the number of support requests you receive. This will not only reduce your costs for support but will also reduce the amount of time you need to spend fulfilling customer support requests.
• Good for SEO: Your knowledge base answers the most frequently asked questions in your industry. It will help you get some free search traffic from Google. Not only that, it will also bring all the search queries with a question about your products directly to your site.
• Make your product easy to learn: When you have a knowledge base, all your customers have to do is search your knowledge base for whatever they want to learn about your product. It is considered a good practice to link to the pages in your knowledge base directly from inside of your products. For example, instead of hoping your customers find your knowledge base and searches for a question about your product’s settings, link to the knowledge base page that answers the questions about your product’s settings directly from the settings page of your product.

10 Easy Solutions For Creating an Awesome WordPress Knowledge Base

Now that you know the benefits of a Knowledge Base, I will guide you through some of the easiest to implement solutions available. Some of these solutions are premium and offer an all-in-one solution. Others are free and offer limited functionality but get the job done.

WP KnowledgeBase

WP KnowledgeBase is a free plugin for WordPress that allows you to create a beautiful Knowledge Base directly on your WordPress site. It offers a clean, minimal design that is fully responsive. It comes with support for predictive text and live search results.

Features:

• Fully responsive design that looks great on all devices.
• Easily customize all aspects of the design within seconds.
• Support for live search and predictive text.
• Allows you to display a comments section below the Knowledge Base article. You can disable it if you want.

Price: Free

Details & Download

Ultimate FAQ

As the name suggests, Ultimate FAQ is a free FAQ creator plugin for WordPress. It allows you to create a FAQ page on your website. Unlike other plugins and themes on this list, this plugin only offers a simple FAQ Page.

Features:

• Support for unlimited questions and unlimited FAQ Categories.
• Ajax-based Search Form that displays results without reloading the page.
• Allows you to easily export all the frequently asked questions to a PDF file to create a user manual.
• Allows you to easily customize the CSS of your FAQ Pages.

Price: Free

Details & Download

Yada Wiki

Yada Wiki is a free Wiki plugin you can use to create a Knowledge Base on your WordPress site. This plugin is not a Knowledge Base plugin itself but can be used as one. It comes with dozens of customization options, so you can easily customize the design to suit your branding needs.

Features:

• Responsive design that looks great on all devices.
• A simple interface for managing your wiki pages.
• Dozens of customization options to help you customize the design. You can easily customize the design within seconds to suit your branding needs.
• Comes with support for Categories and Tags, so you can better categorize your wiki pages.

Price: Free

Details & Download

KnowAll

KnowAll offers a beautiful design. It offers a responsive design that easily adapts to all screen sizes. This theme comes with dozens of customization features and allows you to customize all aspects of the design.

Features:

• This theme is translation-ready. You can easily translate it into multiple languages and create a multilingual Knowledge Base.
• Support for user-restriction allows you to lock the Knowledge Base and make it available only to your logged-in users.
• Comes with support for videos, so you can upload explainer videos, webinars, and screencasts.
• Responsive design that works on all devices.

Price: $149

Details & Download

Flat Base

Flat Base is a Knowledge Base theme that offers a minimal flat design. This theme is fully responsive and looks great on all devices.  It comes with all the features you will need to create the perfect Knowledge Base for your product. It comes with a bbPress integration to help you easily create a forum for free. This theme is fully customizable, so you can customize the design to suit your branding needs.

Features:

• Easily add an accordion-style FAQ section.
• Live Search that displays results as soon as the user starts typing.
• Offers a boxed as well as a full-width layout to choose from.
• Fully responsive design that looks great on all devices.
• Optimized for SEO, so you can get some search traffic to your Knowledge Base.

Price: $49

Details & Download

Helper

Helper offers a clean, minimal layout that is fully responsive. This theme is fully customizable, so you can customize the design to suit your branding needs. It allows you to fully customize the color scheme, the layout, the typography and every other design element. This theme is translation-ready, so you can easily translate it into multiple languages and create a multilingual Knowledge Base for your customers.

Features:

• Comes with Visual Composer to help you build pages with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
• Offers a responsive design. This theme works on all devices no matter the screen size.
• Allows you to customize all aspects of the design. Customize everything from the color scheme to the typography styles and even the layout.
• Support for bbPress, so you can easily set up a forum on your website.

Price: $32

Details & Download

HelpGuru

HelpGuru is one of the most popular Knowledge Base Themes for WordPress. It is used by popular brands like CrazyEgg, OptimizePress, and Procurify.

Features:

• Support for Live Search. Displays results as soon as the user starts typing.
• Allows you to collect feedback on the Knowledge Base articles from your users using like and dislike buttons.
• Reorder your articles and categories with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
• Comes with 3 sidebar widgets you can use to display Knowledge Base articles anywhere on your website not just on the Knowledge Base pages.
• Support for Article Attachments, so you can attach files like templates to your Knowledge Base articles.
• Responsive design that looks great on all screen sizes.
• Translation-ready, so you can easily translate the theme into multiple languages.

Price: $59

Details & Download

KnowledgePress

KnowledgePress offers a beautiful design that is mobile-ready and works on all devices. This theme offers a distraction-free clean, minimal layout. It is fully customizable. So, you can customize all aspects of the design to suit your branding needs.

Features:

• Easily create a multilingual Knowledge Base and reach your customers in their native language. This theme is fully translation-ready.
• Reorder articles and categories with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
• Support for article voting allows customers to give you feedback based on likes and dislikes.
• Built-in Search and View analytics. No need to integrate Google Analytics.
• Fully responsive design that looks great on all devices.

Price: $59

Details & Download

KnowHow

KnowHow is a SEO-optimized Knowledge Base WordPress theme. It comes with a clean, minimal layout and offers a beautiful design. It is fully responsive and easily adapts to all screen sizes. This theme is fully customizable. You can easily customize the design with just a few clicks to suit your branding needs.

Features:

• Support for Live Search to provide instant answers to your customers as soon as they type in their search query.
• This theme is SEO Optimized, so you will receive free traffic from search engines.
• Comes with a FAQ page you can customize and add all your frequently asked questions to.
• Translation-ready, so you can easily translate it into multiple languages and create a multilingual experience for your customers.
• Fully responsive design that looks great on all devices.

Price: $49

Details & Download

Altera

Altera is a fully customizable Knowledge Base theme for WordPress. It offers a clean, minimal layout and looks great on all devices. This theme is fully customizable. You can customize all aspects of the design to suit your branding needs.

Features:

• Minimal responsive design that looks great on all devices.
• Fully customizable. You can customize all aspects of this theme within minutes.
• Comes with support for Schema Microdata.
• This theme is SEO-ready, so you can benefit from free organic Search Engine traffic.
• Comes with Visual Composer, so you can easily build beautiful pages with a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Price: $47

Details & Download

Conclusion

Having a Knowledge Base on your website can significantly reduce the number of support requests you receive from your customers. Not only that, it will also bring down your customer service costs. With a low number of support tickets, you won’t need to hire many (if any) customer support agents.

If this article helped you find the perfect solution, please share it with your friends.

And let us know what you think in the comments section below.

If you are not a web developer, maintaining a WordPress site can sound like a daunting task. But believe me, it only takes a few minutes every week to maintain your site and keep it running. In fact, there are easy set and forget solutions for most of these tips.

If you are ready to get your hands dirty, let’s dive in:

Update WordPress Regularly

According Succuri, 56% of WordPress sites that get hacked were running on an outdated version of WordPress.

If you want your site to be secure from hackers, you need to keep WordPress updated. When the WordPress community discovers a new security issue, they fix it and release a Security update as soon as possible.

If you don’t keep your WordPress site updated, it will soon become vulnerable to hackers. Security issues are only fixed when you update your WordPress software.

Moreover, when you install new updates, you also get access to awesome new features. It also fixes issues (bugs) other than the ones related to security.

Updating your WordPress site is really easy. All you have to Dashboard -> Updates and click the Update button.

While updating the core WordPress software is important, you should also keep your site’s themes and plugins updated.

Even if your WordPress software version is not vulnerable, outdated themes and plugins can make your site vulnerable.

Just like the WordPress community, plugin and theme authors like ourselves release new updates as soon as we find problems with our plugins and themes.

Optimize Your Database

The database is where WordPress store everything from your site’s posts and pages to settings and options. When you install WordPress, your database is clean and minimal. To run well, WordPress needs to store new data every day. Most of this data becomes redundant with time.

This data not only takes up space but also makes your site slow. The more data your database holds, the slower your site will work. If you don’t clean up and optimize your database, your site will load up slow and might even crash at times.

Optimizing your WordPress database is easy. Just install the free WP Optimize plugin and you can optimize your database with just a few clicks. It allows allows you to schedule automatic optimization.

Make Sure Your Site Is Regularly Backed Up

Backing up your site regularly is really important. If something happens to your site, you might lose all the content and countless hours you have put into building your site. But if your site is regularly backed up, all you have to do is click a button to revert your site back to a backup where everything was working.

Now, you could go about manually backing up your website. But it is time consuming and at times you will forget to backup your site. And if you forget to manually backup your site, you might lose all your data if something happens to your site.

We recommend setting up regular backs with either your web host or WordPress plugin.

Most web hosts offer free daily backups but you have to manually enable it in most cases. Once you enable daily backups from your Web Host, your web hosting service provider will automatically create a new backup every day at the same time. With automatic daily backups, you can revert back to a previous working version of your website with just a click.

One thing you need to know about manual and automatic backups offered by web hosts is that they backup all your website data including the database. This also includes the state in which your website is. So, in rare cases, your web host might create a backup when your WordPress software or plugins are being updated. When this happens, you will suffer loss in data.

For this reason, you should always use a backup service that is built for WordPress. These services are cheap and offer dozens of features like Site Migration and one-click restore.

Monitor Broken Links

Broken links on your website result in a bad user experience. Not only that, if your site has a lot of broken links, Search Engines will consider your website content to be low quality and outdated. If you want your user experience to be top notch, you need to fix broken links as soon as possible.

Now, going through all your content manually just to find broken links is not only time consuming but is not possible on scale. Finding and fixing broken links on a site with 10 or even 20 pages is not that big of a deal. But what if you have over a hundred or just 40 pages? It will take you days to go through all of the pages, find broken links and fix them.

The solution?

Use the free Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin to monitor all the links in your content. As soon as this link monitoring plugin finds a broken link, it will notify you in your WordPress dashboard as well as by email. It continuously checks your content for broken links and makes it super easy to fix broken links. With this plugin, you can fix all broken links in your content from just one page in minutes.

Monitor Your Site’s Speed

The speed of your website not only affects your user experience but also your search engine performance. If you want your site’s content to get on the first page of Google and stay there, you need to make sure your site loads up within three seconds. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, most visitors will leave your site and never come back.

There are a lot of free tools you can use to monitor your site’s speed. One such free tool is Pingdom. Use it monitor and keep track of your site’s speed from time to time.

Now, optimizing your site’s speed manually can be a daunting task. And if you are not a web developer and aren’t interested in learning how to code, use plugins to optimize your site’s speed.

Here are two speed optimization plugins we use and recommend:

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache caches (makes a copy) of all the pages on your website, so WordPress doesn’t have to generate a new dynamic version of the page each time it is requested. This not only saves dozens of server resources like memory, but it also cuts the time required to serve a page by more than half. It’s a free plugin by Automattic, the guys behind WordPress itself.

WP Smush It

WP Smush It is a free plugin that compresses the images on your website and reduces their size. This helps your pages load up faster. This plugin is totally free and you can just set it and forget it. It automatically compresses both the new images that you upload and the old ones that you already have on your site.

If you want more details on optimizing your site’s speed, have a look at our article on WordPress Speed Optimization.

Deactivate Unused Plugins

Every plugin you install on your WordPress site affects the performance of your site. When WordPress generates a page, your server has to run literally thousands of lines of code. And when you install and activate a plugin, it adds up to the amount of code that is executed.

The more plugins you install on your website, the slower it will get.

Most bloggers don’t actually know how WordPress works. Instead of deactivating unused plugins, they leave them active thinking they might need these plugins in the future.

And yes, you might need the plugins you are not using right now in the future. But if you are not using all the plugins installed on your WordPress site, you are simply slowing down your website’s performance. Your website will not only consume more server resources but will also load up very slow.

So, if you want your website to load up fast and avoid server crashes due to high memory usage, deactivate all the plugins you are not using anymore.

Now, it might be a bit tricky to find out which plugins are important for your website.

The easiest way to do it is by deactivating plugins and checking if it breaks your site. If the plugin you deactivate breaks your site, you need it. If it doesn’t, you most probably don’t need it.

Now, use common sense when deactivating plugins this way. If you are running an eCommerce site with WordPress, then WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads is a plugin that you need.

Note: Before you try this, make a backup of your site’s current state. This will help you go back to a state where everything was working if you break something by mistake.

Monitor 404 Pages

In addition to monitoring the broken links in your content, you also need to monitor 404 pages. When you delete a page on your site or move it to a new URL, all the old URLs by default will result in a 404 page. Now, 404 pages are not only bad for SEO but also for User Experience. Most people who land on your website’s 404 page will bounce back to where they came from.

If you aren’t monitoring the traffic that lands on your 404 pages, you are losing dozens of visitors on the table that you could redirect to a different page. Monitoring 404 pages helps you redirect the old broken page to a new updated page.

To monitor the traffic that lands on your site’s 404 pages, all you need is the free Google Analytics tool. While you can use Google Analytics to keep track of all the broken links to your website, you will need redirection manager to create redirects.

It’s a simple tool that helps you redirect old URLs to new URls with just a few clicks. It is totally free and also keeps a log of 404 pages errors. This plugin allows you to create 301, 302 and 307 redirects for your posts and pages. It works without access to your .htaccess file.

Deal With Spam Comments

If you are a WordPress user, you probably have to deal with Spam Comments every day. And most probably, you are using a plugin like Akisment to protect your blog from spam comments.

Most of the comments you receive on your blog will be spam posted by marketers trying to get a quick link from your website’s comment system.

And these spam comments take up space in your database and slow down your website. The bigger the size of your database, the more it will affect the performance of your website.

Deleting spam comments from your database from time to time is a good idea. It will clean up your database and very slightly improve the performance of your website.

Conclusion

All the tips in this article will help you keep your WordPress site running like a well-oiled machine. Bookmark this page and come back every week or two to make sure your website is well-maintained.

Before you try any of these tips, make sure your WordPress site software is up-to-date. If your WordPress site isn’t using the latest version of WordPress, none of these tips will help.

Remember, prevention is better than cure. If you are not maintaining your WordPress site every week or month, start today. Because if something happens to your site, you will lose not only all your content but also the countless hours you have put into building and growing your website.

If you have any feedback, suggestions or tips of your own, feel free to speak your mind in the comments section below.

If you search for Event Calendars for WordPress on Google, you will find lots of free and premium plugins. Some of these are totally free and don’t offer basic functionality, others are full-featured event booking and calendar management plugins. Finding the perfect event calendar plugin can be a challenge so we have compiled a list of the best free and premium Event Calendar Plugins for WordPress. Whether you want to notify your users of a webinar or want to be able to charge them for tickets to an offline gathering, I am sure you will find a plugin in this list that is perfect for your use case.

Simple Calendar –  Google Calendar Plugin

Simple Calendar is a basic free plugin that fetches your Google Calendar feed, parses it and then displays it as a calendar on your website. It allows you to display events from any public Google Calendar. With this plugin, you get to manage your events using the beautiful Google Calendar interface.

This plugin offers multiple designs for the calendars to help you match it with your Theme’s design. All the calendars you create with this plugin are fully responsive and work on all smartphones.

While the basic version of the plugin is available for free and offers dozens of useful features, you can buy additional add-ons for this plugin to get more features. You can buy the Google Calendar Pro add-on for this plugin if you want to be able to use it with Private Google Calendars.

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The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is the most popular Event Calendar plugin for WordPress. It offers a free as well as a premium version.

The free version of this plugin offers dozens of useful features. It not only allows you to quickly create event calendars, it also offers you dozens of customization features. It allows you to choose between Month view, List View, and Day View.

This plugin also allows users to search for events in your calendars.

The Events Calendar plugin is really flexible and has been scaled to be used on websites with over 25 million unique visitors a month.

This plugin is made for developers. This means it offers out-of-the box extensibility and customization. You can not only extend the functionality but also make changes to the existing functionality like the Stylesheets.

While the free version of this plugin offers a lot of functionality, you can also buy the pro version or the add-ons for this plugin to add more functionality.

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Stachethemes Event Calendar

Stachethemes Event Calendar is a premium plugin sold on Envato. It is one of the most popular Event Calendar plugins on the Envato Marketplace.

Being premium, this plugin comes with dozens of features and customization options. It comes with support for Visual Composer to help you easily customize your event calendars.

This plugin also comes with support for WooCommerce. It offers multiple views to choose from including a default, month view, week view and a day view. It also comes with support for iCalendar.

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EventOn

EventOn is the best selling Event Calendar plugin on the Envato Marketplace. It has sold over 28000 copies. It offers a minimal design that is fully responsive and works on all devices.

This plugin offers over 200 features and allows you to customize almost all aspect of your Event Calendars. You can choose from multiple design options including an Event List, Tiled Event Layout, and Event Card. It comes with support for single and multiple day events. You can create events all day events and events with no end date or time. It also allows you to import and export your Event Calendars in ICS format.

If you want more control over the design, you can also add your own CSS styles.

This plugin also comes with support for PayPal payments. This means you can easily sell tickets for your event on your website. This plugin is available for purchase at just $24 but it comes with all the features you will ever need.

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My Calendar

My Calendar is a free Event Calendar plugin for WordPress. It offers a grid as well as a list view for your event calendars.

It allows you to edit not only the CSS but also the JavaScript behaviors of the plugin.

If you want to sell tickets on your own site, you can use the My Tickets plugin by the same author. It allows you to sell your Event Tickets with PayPal using a My Calendar Event Calendar.

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WordPress Pro Event Calendar

WordPress Pro Event Calendar is a premium event calendar plugin sold on Envato Marketplace. With this plugin, you can import events from ICS feeds. And unlike most plugins on our list, this plugin also allows you to import Event feeds from Facebook.

This plugin offers a clean, minimal layout that looks great and works on all screen sizes. The Event Calendars created with this plugin come with support for both Drag and Touch.

It allows you to setup recurring events and offers dozens of customization options. It also allows users to subscribe to a Calendar Newsletter using its integration support for MailChimp.

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Event List

Event List is a totally free WordPress plugin. It offers basic functionality of displaying a basic list of events with date, time. Location and other details. You can display this list of events using the Shortcode in your posts or the Widget.

It comes with support for multi-day events. It allows you to edit the event details using WordPress’s default Post Editor.

This plugin also allows you to import and export multiple events via a CSV file.

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Event Espresso

Event Espresso has everything you will ever need. It not only allows you to add Event Calendars to your website, it also allows you to sell tickets on your website.

This plugin comes with dozens of customization options and allows you to customize everything from the Color Scheme and Typography to the CSS.

It comes with an Attendee Manager to help you manage the attendees. It allows you to create event registration forms within seconds.

This plugin comes with support for Event Schema Markup which is great for SEO.

If you are just starting out, this plugin might not be the best choice for you. The pricing starts at $79 for just one site. While the price is a little high, it is an all in one solution.

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WordPress Events Manager

WordPress Events Manager is a free WordPress plugin. It allows you to create single-day and multi-day events for your Event Calendars. You can also setup Recurring Events.

It allows you to create your own custom event attributes. It comes with a widget that you can use for Events, Locations, and Calendars.

This plugin comes with support for WordPress Multisite, BuddyPress and Google Maps.

While the free version comes with dozens of useful features, you can get the pro version if you want to be able to sell tickets to your events on your website.

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All-In-One Events Calendar

All-In-One Events Calendar is a free WordPress plugin by Time.ly. It offers a beautiful, minimal design for the Event Calendars.

The plugin offers a Monthly, Weekly, Daily, Posterboard and Agenda view for your event calendars. It allows you to filter events by Categories and Tags. It also allows you to create Recurring events with dozens of configuration options.

All events that you create with this plugin link back to the original calendar and are optimized for SEO. And if you want, you can also add a featured image to both Events and Categories with this plugin.

While the free version does come with some amazing functionality, you can always add more features by purchasing the premium add-ons available.

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Can’t Decide?

If you still can’t decide which plugin is the best for you, let me make it easy:

If you are just looking for a free plugin that offers the basic functionality, then look no further than simple calendar. It is free and allows you to easily manage your calendar events using Google Calendars. The free Events Calendar is also a good choice if you need some more functionality with the option to upgrade to a paid version later on if you need even more features.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a premium plugin that allows you to customize everything and offers tons of functionality, The Events Calendar Pro or Stachethemes Event Calendar is the best choice. Both offer dozens of features and allow you to customize almost everything. If you want to be able to sell tickets online, you can get the Plus version of The Events Calendar. It is a complete solution for Online Ticketing.

Whether you are about to host a webinar or a conference for thousands of people, I hope you were able to find the perfect plugin for your use case.

If you have any questions or suggestions, let us know in the comments section below.

When people leave your website, it increases your bounce rate. And a higher bounce rate means lower search engine rankings. Google wants to display the best possible results for every search query. And if your site doesn’t offer a great user experience, Google will drop your site like a stone. Next thing you know, your homepage is sitting on the 2nd page of search results. Moreover, after the recent algorithm updates, Google seems to prefer websites that are fast and mobile-optimized.

So, whether you want to keep the free search traffic ball rolling or want to start getting some search engine traffic, you need to improve your website’s speed. If you don’t know how much time it takes your website to load, try this free tool by Pingdom which will give you an initial reading so you can see how much it has improved.

Speeding up a WordPress website might sound like a daunting task that would take dozens of hours and a lot of technical know-how, but believe me, WordPress plugins and some simple tweaks will soon get your site loading a lot faster in no time at all – simply follow through our complete beginners guide below.

Choosing a Good Web Host

Most web hosts advertise themselves as the fastest. But in reality, many of them don’t offer any speed advantage over the other hosts. The web hosting service you host your website with can make a huge impact on the speed of your website – A shared host which places many websites together on the same server can suffer from poor performance and one slow site can have an impact on everyone else’s websites.

However, if you are just starting out with a small personal or hobby website, a shared hosting company can be fine if you know which one to pick. Our guide to shared hosting covers some different options for hosting so be sure to check it out.

But as your audience starts to grow, consider moving your site to a Managed WordPress Hosting or a VPS server. A Managed host will generally be of a better quality than shared hosting, they will also take care of things like updating WordPress and any plugins you use, will offer backups, caching to help with site speed, they may include a CDN for speeding up your static items like images and scripts and so on.

In the end, which host you choose will come down to your budget so choose wisely and make sure you monitor the speed and uptime of your site, you can always migrate your website to another host if you are receiving a poor quality service.

Start Using a Cache Plugin

Caching can have an enormous impact on the speed of your website.

When someone visits a page on your website, WordPress runs thousands of lines of codes, connects to your database and then generates the requested web page. And as you might have guessed, this requires a lot of resources and time – This is where caching comes to rescue.

Caching is a simple technique. Instead of generating a page over again and again, the application, WordPress in our case, generates the page as HTML, makes a copy and then serves that static HTML copy when the page is requested. When Caching is enabled on your website, it will cut the time and server resources required to generate a page in half. While WordPress doesn’t come with built-in caching functionality, there are dozens of free caching plugins available for WordPress.

Which Cache Plugin?

WP Super Cache is the best free Caching plugin and the one we would recommend, its easy to setup and makes a huge difference to your website loading times. try it out and test your site with Pingdom before and after you activate it, you will be surprised as the difference it makes.

Another option, is WP Rocket, which is a premium plugin that costs $39 per year for one website. You might wonder why you would pay for a caching plugin when you can get one for free, the reason is in tests WP Rocket out-performs other caching plugins so if you are trying to get that extra last bit of speed out of your website it can make a difference.

Due to the cost, we would recommend WP Rocket for commercial websites – otherwise WP Super Cache is fine for personal projects.

Start Using a CDN

The distance between your user and the server affects the speed of your website. While this might only make a small impact on the overall speed, it does add up. The further the user from your website’s server, the slower your website will load.

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) solves this problem. It is simply a network of servers spread across the globe. When you connect your website with a CDN, the CDN service will start caching all your website content on its wide-spread network of servers. It will cache everything from files to your blog content. When someone visits your website, the CDN serves the content through a server nearest to the user. This not only reduces the load on your servers, but it also decreases the time it takes for the user to connect to the server and get the file.

There are a lot of CDN services available but most of them can be very expensive. If you are just starting out, you should try CloudFlare. It’s free and the premium plans are relatively cheaper than other CDN service providers. You can download the free WordPress plugin to get started.

Leverage Browser Caching For Static Resources

Browsers load every single element of a page before they can start displaying it. Instead of caching the resources by default, they re-fetch all of them every time you load a different page on the same website. This not only increases the load on your servers but also increases the load time of your website. When you leverage browser caching, the browsers cache the static resources and then use a cached copy instead of requesting it again from the server.

To start leveraging browser caching, add the following code to your .htaccess file:

Optimize Your Images For The Web

Images make up most of the size of your web pages. Most images don’t need to be viewed in high-resolution. These images can be optimized (compressed) for the web. When you optimize an image, the size of the image is reduced by almost more than half without any noticeable loss in quality. Now, you could just fire up Photoshop or any other image edit program to do it yourself. But that would require a steep learning curve and a lot of manual labor. Instead, you can use a WordPress a free plugin like WP-SmushIt to automatically do it for you. This plugin optimizes all the images on your website automatically. All you have to do is install it and it will take care of everything itself.

Optimize Your Database

WordPress needs to store a lot of data to make all its internal process work efficiently. And the more plugins you have, the more of this data WordPress will store in your Database. With time, a lot of this data becomes redundant. This data includes additional data for posts, pages, comments, and plugins.

In the short-term, this redundant data doesn’t cost much of a problem but in the long-term, it will increase your website hosting costs and make your site slower. If you remove this data, it will make your database smaller resulting in small speed gains. Not to mention, all the web space usage and costs it will cut for you.

Now, you don’t have to be a scientist to be able to optimize your database. You don’t have to be a programmer either. All you need is install a free plugin like WP-Optimize. Once you install this plugin, it will optimize your database by removing redundant data and optimizing your database tables.

Enable GZIP

GZIP is a compression technology that can help you reduce the size of your web pages by more than half.

When you enable GZIP on your server, all your files are compressed with GZIP before they are served to the browser. And when the browser received the GZIPped file, it knows how to decompress and display it.

Most modern browsers support GZIP and for the ones that don’t your server will serve the content directly.

GZIP can help you cut your website’s load time by more than half.

To enable GZIP on your server, add the following code to the end of your .htaccess file:

Lazyload Your Images

Images make up as much as 80% of the load time for most web sites.

And when browsers load a website, they don’t start displaying the page until they have downloaded all the resources including images.

This is where LazyLoading comes to rescue.

LazyLoading is a simple technique of loading the images only when they are visible to the user.

So, if an image is at the bottom of the page, it will not be loaded until the user has reached the bottom of the page.

This not only improves your site’s load times but also reduces the load on the server and bandwidth usage.

To start using this technique, install, and setup the free BJ LazyLoad plugin.

Invest in a Faster Theme

While all WordPress themes advertise that they are optimized for speed, the truth is most of them aren’t. The theme you are using on your blog plays a big role in determining your site’s speed. If you are using a theme that is badly coded and doesn’t follow any coding standards, you will end up with a slow loading site.

Not only are a lot of themes not optimized for speed, they are often bloated with additional scripts and resources generated by using plugins like Page Builders, Sliders and other items you may not even be using.

Investing in a good theme from the start of your blogging journey is really important. Because if you try to fix the speed issues caused by the code, you will end up paying thousands of dollars to a developer. And even if you decide to switch to a different theme, it can be hard to switch without breaking some of the functionality of your website.

When looking for a WordPress theme, always use themes from trusted authors like ourselves. At AlienWP, we test and optimize all our themes for SEO and Speed. All our themes load up within just a few seconds.

Split Comments Into Pages

If you are getting a lot of comments on your blog, then it’s time to celebrate. It means you have an engaged audience that loves your content.

But here’s the problem: Too many comments increase the size of your web pages.

That means, the more comments you display on a page, the slower that page will load.

Now, to solve this problem all you have to do is split the comments into multiple pages.

To do this, navigate to Settings > Discussion and then check the Break Comments check box:

What this will do is instead of displaying all the comments at the end of the post, WordPress will display pagination links at the end of the comments just like it does at the end of your blog roll.

Conclusion

If your website is slow, act now. You are losing thousands of potential free website visitors and customers. Use the techniques in this article to speed up your WordPress website. Most of them don’t require you to touch a single line of code and don’t take much time to implement.

If you don’t have much time to invest right now, at least make sure you are using a Caching plugin, your images are optimized and that GZIP is enabled on your server, this will help speed up your site significantly over a regular WordPress installation.

If you have any suggestions, stories or feedback to share, feel free to speak your mind in the comments.

Google’s goal is to display the highest quality web pages that offer the best solution to the user’s query. And if your website has a high bounce rate, Google will drop your site like a stone. So, if you want to get on the first page and stay there, you need to make sure people spend more time on your site and bounce less.

Now, there are a lot of ways to increase the number of pages people visit on your website. But the easiest of all is to display related posts at the end of every post. This will not only reduce your bounce rate as people might click through to read another post or two but will also increase the time people spend on your website. Both of which are a quality signal for Google. And of course, it will increase your page views.

If you want to display related posts on your blog, you can either manually add the code to your theme or use a WordPress plugin.

Let’s explore both options:

Option #1: Manually Add Related Posts Functionality

If you are not interested in installing a related posts plugin on your website, you can manually add related posts functionality to your theme.

To add the functionality manually, you will have to add the following code to your theme:

You can use this code anywhere in the single.php file of your theme. But we recommend adding it right after your content. Most themes wrap the main content of the post in a <article> tag. To display related posts after the contents of your posts, paste the above code after </article> tag of your single.php file.

Now, add the following code to your style.css file:

The above code will handle the design part of the related posts displayed below your posts.

The end result will vary depending on the theme you are using. Here’s what it might look like:

The above code will pull posts related to the same tags as used by the current post. When using this code, you will have to make sure that you tag all the related posts using the same tag.

Option #2: Use a Related Posts Plugin

This is the easiest option of all. All you have to do is install a related posts plugin to your website.

Using a WordPress plugin to do the job is far better than hard coding the functionality into the theme you are using. When you manually add code to a theme, the related posts will stop showing up as soon as you change the theme or install a new theme update. Moreover, a plugin will also handle the design part, unlike the manual option.

While this is the easiest option, one thing you should know is that most related post plugins are resource intensive. This means you might have trouble running them on your website if you are on a shared web host.

If you are on a shared web host, you can easily get around this problem using the Manual Related Posts plugin. It’s a simple tool that allows you to select posts related to a post.

Jetpack

If you use the Jetpack plugin on your site, you already have the functionality for related posts – you just need to enable the module by visiting “Jetpack” > “Settings” > “Traffic” and turning on the related posts section. You can then choose whether to include the header text and images. You can then customize the “related posts” text by visiting “Appearance” > “Customizer.

The good thing about using the Jetpack plugin to handle your related posts is this processing happens off-site on the WordPress.com servers so this plugin is safe to use on shared hosting and you can be sure it won’t slow your site down.

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Related Posts

Related Posts is a free plugin that adds related posts right after your content. It displays related posts arranged in columns along with their thumbnails. You can customize the background color, border color, text size, text color and excerpt length. It also allows you to customize the thumbnail size and the type of relation.

You can choose from multiple types of relations including tags, categories and tags, categories, and custom taxonomies. This plugin also allows you to randomize the relation of the related posts.

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Related Posts By AddThis

Related Posts By AddThis is a free tool by AddThis. AddThis is a free suite of tools that help you increase your website traffic. When you sign up for AddThis, you get access to multiple tools including Content Recommendation.

The Content Recommendation tool helps you display recommended (related) content from your website on every post.

This plugin helps you display two different types of recommendations. One is called What’s Next which is displayed on the bottom right or left side of your website. It shows up when the user starts scrolling through your content. The other is called Recommended Content Footer. As the name suggests, it displays related content at the end of your posts.

The best part about this plugin is that the resource intensive login doesn’t run on your website servers. Instead, it runs on AddThis’ servers.

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Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) is a free WordPress plugin. It offers a unique algorithm to help improve the accuracy of the related posts displayed. Unlike other plugins, YARPP uses its own algorithm that takes into account more than just tags, categories and custom taxonomies.

YARPP also allows you to display sponsored content which is a great option if you are looking to increase the revenue of your blog.

While YARPP is one of the best related post plugins, it is also one of the most resource consuming related post plugins. Because this plugin consumes a lot of resources, it’s blocked by most Managed WordPress Hosting providers including WP Engine and Media Temple.

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Related Posts by Taxonomy

Related Posts by Taxonomy, as the name suggests displays related posts by taxonomy. It’s a lightweight plugin. It comes with dozens of customization options. You can display posts with thumbnails or as plain old links.

This plugin doesn’t offer much customization options and the design is a bit outdated. But it still gets the job done. If you don’t like the default design, you can create your own HTML templates for the plugin.

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Yuzo

Yuzo is a totally free WordPress plugin. It is one of the most popular related post plugins for WordPress. It offers a lot of customizations options. You can customize the thumbnail size, background color, height, width and many more other details.

Yuzo offers a beginner-friendly interface that is both easy-to-use and powerful at the same time. It is one of the fastest related post plugins available. It caches all the data to save resources and speed up the process.

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Contextual Related Posts

Contextual Related Posts is a resource intensive plugin. And just like YARPP, it is blocked by most Managed WordPress Hosting providers including WP Engine and Media Temple.

This plugin won’t cause much of a problem on a small site. But as the number of posts increases, this plugin might slow down your website and consume more resources.

This plugin comes with dozens of customization options and uses a custom algorithm to improve the accuracy of the suggestions. You can customize the design by creating your own HTML templates.

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Related Posts Pro

Related Posts Pro is a popular premium plugin that displays related posts after your content. It offers dozens of customization options and comes with three beautiful layouts. It comes with 65 pre-designed templates for each layout.

With this plugin, you can also choose to display related posts from custom taxonomies created by different plugins like WooCommerce and bbPress.

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Better Related Posts Widget

Better Related Posts Widget is a premium WordPress plugin. It allows you to customize the thumbnail size, text color, number of items, and widget titles. It also allows you to display multiple instances of the same widget on the page.

You can choose to display Author Name, Publication Date, Number of Comments, Post Thumbnails, and Excerpts. It allows you to choose the taxonomies to display posts from and caches the suggestions to speed up the process and save server resources.

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Inline Related Posts

Inline Related Posts allows you to display related posts in between your content. You might have seen this kind of suggestions on popular news websites such as Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

It’s a totally free plugin. While this plugin will help you improve your bounce rate and get more traffic, you will need to install an additional plugin if you want to display related posts in your sidebar or after your content.

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Related Posts for WordPress

Related Posts for WordPress is a free WordPress plugin. It offers dozens of customization features. You can customize almost all aspects of the design. It not only adds related post suggestions after your content but also allows you to add them to your sidebar. You can also use the shortcode to display suggestions anywhere in your posts.

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Conclusion

Displaying related posts in your content is a great way to reduce bounce rate and increase page views. Moreover, it also helps you automatically interlink the posts on your website. While using a plugin will give you a lot more functionality, it will also consume more resources so you should watch how your site responds if you are on shared hosting or choose a plugin such as Jetpack which does the processing on their own servers so won’t affect your site speed.

This is where Landing Page Builders come to rescue. They offer an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface to create high-converting pages in minutes. The best part is that they come with pre-made landing page templates that are already field-tested and proven to have a high conversion rate so you can put them to work building your email list, adding people to your sales funnel, selling products and any other action you wish people to complete on your website.

So, even if you don’t know how to code or aren’t good with design or don’t have a clue how A/B Testing works, you can still create high-converting landing pages without breaking the bank. Landing Page Builders can save you a ton of time as you aren’t starting from scratch and are using pre-made templates that are proven to have a high conversion rate.

Now, there are a lot of Landing Page Builders available on the internet and it might get really confusing when trying to find one that’s affordable and fits the bill. So, to save you hours of research, we have compiled a list of the best landing page builders available for WordPress.

OptimizePress 2.0

OptimizePress is one of the most popular and the oldest Landing Page builders available for WordPress. Unlike other tools on this list, OptimizePress is more than just a landing page builder. It also allows you create membership portals for your website. The membership portal is based on a custom version of S2Member.

It comes with over 30 landing page templates to choose from. The templates include Webinar Registration Pages, Thank You Pages, Confirmation Pages, and Free Training Pages. You can use their LaunchSuite (that comes along with the tool) to create highly customized product launch sales funnels within minutes. The editor offered by OptimizePress allows you to edit almost every aspect of your landing pages and comes with over 40 different conversion focused elements to choose from.

While the software comes with over 30 customizable landing page templates, it also comes with access to the OptimizePress marketplace which offers over 350 free and premium landing page templates you can download. The premium templates on the marketplace are available for purchase starting at $8.

All the landing pages you create with OptimizePress will be mobile-ready and will look great on all screen sizes.

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Thrive Landing Pages

Thrive Landing Pages is a Landing Page Builder plugin for WordPress by Thrive Themes. It comes with over 150 of templates to choose from. It offers a simple, easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that helps you build landing pages within seconds without writing a single line of code.

Most of the templates are offered in sets to help you keep the branding consistent over multiple landing pages. These sets include templates for Webinar Pages, Squeeze Pages, Thank You Pages and Sales Landing Pages.

The editor offers dozens of conversion focused elements like Video, Images, Testimonial, Price Comparison Tables, etc. It allows you to customize almost everything there is on your landing page including Call-To-Actions, Testimonials, Background Color, and much more. It loads up fast and comes with undo/redo functionality.

When you buy Thrive Landing Pages, you also get access to Thrive Content Builder which is another great plugin by Thrive Themes. It helps you create stunning content that improves user-experience, gets more shares and increases your brand’s credibility.

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LeadPages

While LeadPages does come with a WordPress plugin, it is not just a WordPress plugin but a web application.

It offers a very easy-to-use drag and drop builder to help you build high-converting landing pages within minutes.

With LeadPages, you get the choice of either publishing the landing pages on your own website server or directly on a customized LeadPages subdomain. Another great thing about LeadPages is that with this tool, you are not stuck with just WordPress. You can download the HTML code of the pages you create and upload it on any platform you want.

They offer over 160 high-converting, field-tested landing page templates. These templates are the ones that the creators of LeadPages have used and perfected over time. The templates are available in a lot of different categories you can be sort by industries or average conversion rate across their platform.

If you run out of templates that come with the tool, you can always get more from the LeadPages marketplace.

LeadPages not only allows you to create Landing Pages, but it also allows you to create popups (called LeadBoxes) that you can display on your landing pages and website. These popups can be triggered on a click of a button or when the user is about to leave the page. You can edit these LeadBoxes with a drag-and-drop editor that is similar to that for landing pages.

If you are just starting out, LeadPages might not be a very affordable option. It’s pricing starts at $37/month and doesn’t include a lot of features like A/B Split Testing.

But if cost is not a problem for you, then LeadPages has tons of value to offer. On the other hand, if you are looking for a more affordable option, Thrive Landing Pages might be a better choice. It starts at just $67 per site for one year of support and unlimited updates.

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Instabuilder 2.0

Instabuilder is a drag-and-drop landing page builder that comes with over a hundred highly customizable landing page templates. The drag-and-drop interface is easy to use and helps you customize the templates within minutes.

While the software is a WordPress plugin, you don’t need WordPress to actually publish the pages. It allows you to export the landing pages you create as HTML so you can publish them on websites that don’t use WordPress.

You can also integrate Instabuilder with Facebook if you are interested in publishing your landing pages as Tabs on your Facebook page.

Over 100 templates to choose from including Landing Page templates for Squeeze Pages, Sales Pages, Video Sales Pages, Webinar Pages, Upsell Pages, Launch Pages, Thank You Pages, Coming Soon Pages and much more.

It comes with in-built A/B Split Testing functionality to help you split test your landing pages against multiple variations to improve conversion rate.

Instabuilder also offers an Auto-Generator for Terms of Service, Disclaimer and Privacy Policy pages allowing you to create these pages literally within seconds.

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Instapage

Instapage is not a WordPress plugin but web-based landing page builder. It comes with over 200 high-converting landing page templates that you can sort by industry. The templates include landing page templates for Squeeze Pages, Launch Pages, Thank You Pages, Confirmation Pages, Video Sales Pages, Sales Pages, Webinar Pages and much more.

All landing pages you create with Instapage are fully mobile-responsive and work on all mobile devices.

You can use Instapage to publish landing pages on your website or directly under your username on the Instapage domain. It also allows you to export your landing pages as HTML so you can publish them directly on your own servers.

Instapage comes with integration support for major Email Marketing Services including MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse, InfusionSoft, Constant Contact, Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor. It comes with in-built A/B Split Testing to help you achieve the highest conversion rate possible by split testing multiple variations of your landing pages.

The drag-and-drop builder offered by Instapage is easy-to-use but comes with a bit of a learning curve if you have never used a design software like Photoshop before.

Unlike other drag-and-drop tools on this list, Instapage is built to increase the amount of customization possible. If you are simply interested in adding a few text blocks, images and videos to quickly create landing pages within seconds, Instapage might not be the best option. Not to say that Instapage can’t accomplish it, but other tools on this list are a better option if that’s what you are looking for.

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Unbounce

Unbounce is a landing page building platform that is created with Web Designers in mind. While it can help you create high-converting landing pages quickly and easily, it’s a tool made to help web designers easily re-create (or directly) create their landing page designs inside of this tool just like they would in Photoshop.

While the tool does come with almost everything you will need to create high-converting landing pages, we would not recommend you to go with Unbounce if you just want to quickly build landing pages and don’t care much about the design aspects.

If you are just starting out, Unbounce is not the most affordable option and should be avoided as the pricing starts at $99/month for up to 75 landing pages. That’s a lot of money if you are just starting out.

Unbounce also allows you to create pop-ups for your website and landing pages that they like to call Overlays.

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Can’t Decide?

If you still can’t decide, let me make it easy for you.

If you are looking for an easy tool to quickly create landing pages, OptimizePress is the best choice. It offersover 30 landing page templates to choose from. The templates include Webinar Registration Pages, Thank You Pages, Confirmation Pages, and Free Training Pages and allows you to build high-converting landing pages within minutes.

On the other hand, If you are looking for a web-based application, LeadPages is the way to go. It allows you to quickly create and publish high-converting landing pages. And it offers dozens of landing page templates that have a high conversion rate. It comes with an easy drag-and-drop builder that allows you to build landing pages within minutes.

Or are you a designer? Someone looking to turn mockup designs into real landing pages. If that is the case, you should go with either Unbounce or Instapage. They both offer a workflow and interface similar to that of tools used to design websites such as Photoshop. While Instapage is suitable for everyone, Unbounce is more suitable for designers looking to turn mock-ups into real landing pages.

Whatever tool you choose, the important thing is that you start building your email list. And start generating leads for your business. Because at the end of the day, the number of leads you generate is all that matters.

All WordPress plugins and themes are also licensed under the same license. That means you are free to modify, reuse and even redistribute all the free and premium WordPress plugins you buy. The only limitation is that you will have to release your derivative work under the same license.

While modifying and redistributing a plugin/theme developed by someone else is not illegal, but it can be considered unethical by some people (especially developers) in the WordPress community. And because the license allows you to modify and redistribute other developer’s work under your own name, there are a lot of people who are taking advantage of this license.

These stores are also known as GPL Clubs in the WordPress community. The reason why these stores exist is that people can’t always afford some of the more expensive WordPress themes and plugins fees, especially if they don’t know that the product will be exactly what they need. These stores don’t develop or update any plugins they sell themselves which allow them to sell the products at a greatly reduced cost than if you purchased from the original developer.

While it is totally legal to obtain a copy of plugins and themes from these stores, it is is up to you to decide whether or not it is ethical: Something to bare in mind though:

The owners of these businesses are mainly anonymous because a lot of people in the WordPress community consider it unethical to sell the work of other developers under your own name and there have been many controversies in the past over this issue and it should also be noted here that some products are trademarked which is a different matter entirely.

In this article, I will guide you through some of the more reputable GPL Clubs where you can access popular themes and plugins at greatly reduced prices.

GPL Plugins

GPL Plugins offers over 2500 WordPress themes and plugins. You can either buy the plugins/themes individually for less than half the original price or you can get a premium subscription for just $21 a month.

Their website says they update the plugins and themes every day. That means, they update the plugin files on their site as soon as a new update for the plugin is released by the original author.

They offer many popular WordPress plugins for a great discounted price. For example, Backup Buddy is available for just $10 and Gravity Forms is available for just $7.

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GPL Vault

GPL Vault has been online since the year 2016. They offer over 1400 Premium GPL WordPress Themes and Plugins. Their membership starts at just $10 a month which you can, as mentioned on their website, cancel anytime you want. They also offer a 5-year plan for a one-time payment of $199.

While they offer 1400 premium plugins, you cannot download more than 20 a day due to their fair usage policy. They offer a lot of popular WordPress plugins like Beaver Builder, Backup Buddy, Gravity Forms and Easy Digital Downloads.

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GPL Guru

Online since 2016, GPL Guru offers over 2000 premium WordPress themes and plugins for a monthly subscription of just $9.99. If you don’t want to get a subscription, you can buy individual plugins and themes starting at just $5.

For every plugin and theme you buy individually, you will get free updates for 365 days as soon as they are released by the original developer.

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GPLDL

GPLDL is a bit different from the others on this list. They offer all the premium WordPress plugins and themes on their website for free. While they don’t charge anything for downloading plugins and their updates, they do ask their users for donations if they like the service.

GPLDL offers over 1100 WordPress and WooCommerce themes and plugins. Their repository includes a lot of popular plugins and themes for WordPress and WooCommerce like Divi Builder, iThemes Backup Buddy, iThemes Security and Gravity Forms.

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Andy Sozot

Andy Sozot is one of the only people in this business who publicly displays his name on the website. He sells premium plugins and themes individually for just $10. He also offers a $15 a month subscription which offers full access to all the themes and plugins.

His offerings include popular premium plugins like Backup Buddy, iThemes Security, WooThemes Sensei and Gravity Forms.

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Woo Society

Woo Society offers over 190 WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. As the name suggests, they mostly offer WooCommerce plugins and unlike other providers on this list, they don’t offer WordPress themes. You can either buy individual plugins starting at just $9 a plugin or you can get their premium subscription for just $15 a month.

They offer popular WooCommerce extensions for integration like Constant Contact, Twilio SMS Notifications, and Authorize.net.

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GPL Chimp

GPL Chimp (formerly known as WooGang) offers over 300 WordPress plugins, themes and WooCommerce extensions for a recurring monthly subscription of $15. You can also buy plugins individually starting at $10 a year. Their website advertises that they have over 2000 paying members.

Their collection of WordPress plugins mostly consists of WooCommerce extensions. GPL Chimp’s collection includes popular plugins like WooCommerce Subscriptions, WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro, Gravity Forms and Backup Buddy.

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WP Null

WP Null is a Russian site that only sounds and looks like a ripware torrent site but is a GPL plugin and theme provider just like the others on this list. Unlike other providers, they don’t offer a subscription and don’t allow buying plugins individually. To download themes and plugins, you have to buy points starting at $4 for 10 download points.

They offer over 1500 Premium WordPress Themes and Plugins including Gravity Forms, Beaver Builder, S2 Member Pro and iThemes Backup Buddy.

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GPL Kit

GPL Kit (formerly known as WooGPL) offers over 550 WooCommerce and WordPress plugins for just $7.5 for the first month and then $15 a month after that. Unlike other theme providers, GPL Kit offers a WordPress plugin under the same name that you install on your WordPress website.

This plugin then allows you to install plugins from the GPL Kit collection with just one click and automatically updates them as soon as new updates are released. For just $15 a month, you can use GPL Kit for 25 sites. Popular WordPress and WooCommerce plugins like Monarch by Elegant Themes, Divi Builder and AffiliateWP are available.

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Ultimate Woo

Ultimate Woo is a WordPress plugin that is a suite of WooCommerce extensions. The company markets it as “Jetpack For WooCommerce”. As the name suggests, unlike most of the other providers on this list, this subscription based plugin only offers WooCommerce extensions.

The plugin comes with popular WooCommerce extensions such as Chained Products, 2Checkout Integration, Amazon S3 Integration, and Drip Integration. Unlike other providers on this list, once you install Ultimate Woo, you can enable any of the 78 WooCommerce extensions available with just one click. Ultimate Woo also installs plugin updates automatically as they are released.

Their personal license starts at $99 a year for a single WordPress site. You can also get a Business License for up to 5 WordPress sites and developer license for unlimited WordPress sites, for $199 and $399 a year respectively.

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WP Spring

Started in 2015, WP Spring offers hundreds of premium WordPress plugins, WooCommerce extensions, and WordPress themes. You can buy plugins individually starting at $10. They also offer an all-access subscription for $15 a month which gives you access to all the plugins and themes. If you are only interested in the themes, you can get their theme-only subscription for $10 a month.

As mentioned on their website, they offer access to WordPress plugin, theme and WooCommerce extension updates as soon as they are released. Some popular WordPress plugins and WooCommerce extensions include Gravity Forms, Restrict Content, 2Checkout Integration, Authorize.net Integration and AffiliateWP.

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Owlego

Owlego is online since 2015 and offers over 1500 Premium WordPress Themes and Plugins with new ones added almost every month. This site is a bit different than the others. They offer a free one-day account which allows you to download as many plugins as you can in a day.

Owlego’s subscription starts at $10 a month and offers lifetime updates to up to 50 downloaded items. They also offer a $50 a year subscription which offers lifetime updates for up to 500 downloaded items. Both of these plans allow you to download plugins and themes as many times as you want as long as you are a paying member and offer lifetime updates even after the subscription ends for the plugins you download.

Some of the popular premium plugins offered by this provider include Yoast SEO Local, Gravity Forms and its add-ons, Autoblog, and Social Locker for WordPress. They also offer hundreds of popular CodeCanyon and ThemeForest items.

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Theme Canal

Theme Canal sells premium plugins and themes individually starting at $8. Their premium subscription starts at $15 a month with an additional one-time registration fee of $5.

Their offerings include popular WordPress plugins such as Gravity Forms, AffiliateWP, Beaver Builder, Coming Soon Pro, and Advanced Custom Fields Pro. Theme Canal’s offerings also include premium WooCommerce extensions such as WooChimp, 2Checkout Integration plugin, and WooCommerce 360 Images.

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96Down

96Down offers over 1600 premium WordPress themes and plugins for just $18 a month that you can use on unlimited WordPress websites. Their website advertises that they have over 3700 members.

This provider has been online since 2012 and is one of the oldest. Their offerings include popular premium plugins such as Elementor Pro, Yoast SEO Premium, and Gravity Forms. They upload newly released updates of themes and plugins to their site every 12 hours.

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GPL Life

GPL Life offers hundreds of premium WordPress themes, plugins and WooCommerce extensions that you can buy individually starting at just $5. If you buy a single item, you will receive updates for the item for the next 365 days. You can also buy a 30, 90 or 365-day subscription for $19, $44 and $99 respectively. Their subscription isn’t recurring meaning you will have to manually pay every month if you want to continue using the service.

Their collection of premium WordPress plugins includes popular plugins such as Gravity Forms, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, Divi Builder by Elegant Themes and Backup Buddy by iThemes. GPLLife’s collection also includes hundreds of themes from popular providers such as Elegant Themes, App Themes and StudioPress.

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Conclusion

If you are just starting out as a blogger and don’t want to spend a thousand bucks just to test the waters, buying plugins from one of these providers might help save you a lot of money. Most of these providers do not offer any kind of support for automatic updates. That means you will have to manually install plugin updates by first downloading them from these providers and then installing them on your own.

There are some providers on this list like GPL Kit and Ultimate Woo who provide a plugin that offers a suite of plugins that can be enabled with just a click. These one-click install plugins also offer automatic plugin updates just like you would get when you buy from the original author of the plugin.

If you have ever bought a plugin from one of these providers or are thinking of buying one from these providers, we would recommend you to buy the plugin from the original author after trying it out to support the original developer or to gain access to customer support if you need it.

Whether or not it is unethical to sell plugins developed by a 3rd party under your own name is up to you to decide, but by the letter of the law it is not – theme and plugin developer choose to offer their products under the GPL license which specifically gives people permission to resell or giveaway their products if they want to.

We would love to hear your opinions on the matter. Feel free to join the conversation in the comments.

Getting traffic to your website is important. But if the traffic doesn’t convert, it doesn’t matter whether you get a hundred thousand visitors a month or just a hundred. This is where Google Analytics comes to rescue. It helps you identify what is working and what is not.

If you are serious about the growth of your business and blog, you need to start using Google Analytics today.

Before we dive into the ‘How’ of using Google Analytics on your website, I would like to answer the ‘Why’:

Why do You Need Google Analytics?

When someone lands on your website or landing page, they either convert or they don’t. When they convert, your revenue goes up. And when they don’t, you lose hard earned cash.

If you want to get the most out of the money you are spending on marketing, you need to start using Google Analytics.

It is a free Analytics Tool offered by Google that helps you analyze your traffic and answer dozens of important questions like the following:

• Where is the majority of your traffic coming from?
• Which landing page variation is performing the best?
• What type of content performs the best?
• Which post out of the last five or ten of yours performed the best?
• Which marketing channels are helping you grow the most?
• What should you write more about?

Answers to the above questions can not only make you thousands of dollars but can (and will) save you tons of hard earned money.

Answers to these questions will help you better understand your target audience, where they hang out and what content they like.

You can use the data you collect to create better content and offer your audience what they really want. It will also help you identify which marketing channels you should be investing your money in.

If you want to grow your business, you will need to know as much as you can about your customers. And Google Analytics helps you do just that.

So, if you are ready to get started with Google Analytics, let’s install it on your website.

The steps to installing Google Analytics on your website are really easy and are detailed in the sections below.

Add Your Site To Your Google Analytics Account

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, don’t worry. There’s no additional sign up process. All you need is a Google Account.

If you have a Google Account (Who Doesn’t?), you can start using Google Analytics by logging into your Google Account at the Google Analytics website here.

Once you are logged in, Click the Sign Up button on the signup page:

Now, you will see a form with the title ‘New Account’:

Note: In Google Analytics, accounts are a way to group your websites together for easy access. You can create multiple accounts to group your websites (properties). This helps a lot when working with clients or a team. For now, you can use the same name for your account as the name of your website.

Filling this form will help you create a new account and add your website (property) to that new account.

Now, fill the following details in the form and click the Get Tracking Id button at the bottom of the page:

• Account Name: A name for the new account. Allows you to group your websites. You can enter the name of your company or your website.
• Website Name: The name of your website. This will be shown in all your Google Analytics reports.
• Website URL: The URL of your website.

Now, you will be redirected to the administration page of the site you added:

On this page, you will see the Tracking ID and the tracking code for your website. You will need this Tracking ID later when you install Google Analytics on your website.

Installing Google Analytics To Your Website

Now that you have a Google Analytics account and your website added to the account, we can get started installing Google Analytics on your website.

There are four options when it comes to installing Google Analytics on your website. The easiest way is to install a plugin to handle everything.

If you don’t want to install any additional plugins on your website, you will have to manually add the code to your WordPress theme which can be difficult for beginners.

Option 1: Use a Google Analytics Plugin

This is the easiest option of all. All you have to do is install a WordPress plugin to handle Google Analytics setup for you.

When you install a Google Analytics plugin, you will be taken to a guided Wizard to help you set up Google Analytics on your website.

If you are looking for a premium all-in-one solution, you can use MonsterInsights.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a free solution, you can try Google Analytics Dashboard for WP. It’s a free plugin that is really easy to set up.

With either of these two plugins, all you have to do is enter your Google Analytics Tracking ID after installing the plugin.

There are a lot of advantages of using a Google Analytics plugin for your WordPress website. They add an easy to use widget to your WordPress dashboard allowing you to view your analytics without leaving your website. They also make the process of installing the code on your website much easier.

Option 2: Use Insert Headers and Footers Plugin

This is a free plugin by WP Beginner that you can use to add code to the header and the footer of your website’s HTML.

Once you install the plugin, navigate to Settings -> Insert Headers and Footers.

Now, paste your website’s Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code in the “Scripts In Header” input box and click Save Changes.

Option 3: Edit The Functions.php File

Editing the functions.php file of your WordPress theme is probably the best way to install code on all the pages of your website. The reason is simple, a theme might be using more than one header templates. And if that is the case, you will have to paste the code in every header template and if you forget to paste the code to even one header template, it will result in a broken analytics setup.

Adding the following code to your functions.php file will automatically add your Google Analytics code to all the pages on your website.

In the above code snippet, paste your Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code you received right below the comment.

Option 4: Edit The Header.php File

If you would like to manually add the Google Analytics code to all the Header Templates of your WordPress theme, all you have to do is paste the Google Analytics code right before the closing </head> tag of your header.php file.

One thing you need to know is that a theme might have multiple Header Templates. And if that is the case, you will have to find all the Header Template files and paste the Google Analytics code to them. If you forget even a single Header Template, it will result in a broken Analytics Installation.

Viewing Reports In Google Analytics

Now that you have installed Google Analytics on your website, you can start viewing reports in your account.

If you have just installed the tracking code on your website, you might have to wait for the data to start showing up.

When you visit Google Analytics after installing the code on your website, you will see the Dashboard for your website:

The dashboard allows you to view your important data at a glance. If you want, you can create your own custom dashboards with just a few clicks. Creating a custom dashboard allows you to easily keep track of the metrics that are important to your business.

As you can see in the above screenshot, there are four types of reports in the Sidebar. I will now guide you through each of these reports and what they are for:

Real-Time

The real-time report area helps you identify what is happening on your website right now. It shows you the number of visitors on your website Right Now:

As you can see in the above screenshot, it not only shows you how many people are on your website right now but also where they came from and what pages are they viewing.

There are 6 Sub-sections of this report:

• Overview: The main page of this report. Allows you to view an overview of the real-time data from your website.
• Locations: Find out the Geographic details about the people who are right now on your website.
• Traffic Sources: Helps you identify the top sources the traffic is coming from.
• Content: Helps you identify the top performing content on your website that is being viewed right now.
• Events: If you are tracking custom events on your website, you can see the events as they happen.
• Conversions: If you are tracking conversions using Google Analytics, you can see them live as they happen.

Audience

The audience reports give you more insight on your audience and users. These reports help you find out their Demographics, Interests, Language, Location, and Devices and Technologies they use.

The User Explorer report available under the Audience report helps you individually look at the behaviour of your users. You can see their bounce rate, sessions, average session duration and the revenue they have generated.

The Users flow report helps you identify where your users go from the homepage and the other pages of your website. This helps improve conversion rate and improving the flow of traffic on your website.

Acquisition

As the name suggests, this report helps you find out where your website visitors are coming from. This helps you identify your top performing marketing channels.

This report not only displays where your traffic is coming from but also tells you what campaign the traffic is a result of. You can use this data to identify your best performing AD Keywords and your best performing social network.

Behaviour

The behaviour report helps you dive deep into the behaviour of your website visitors. This report helps you identify your top performing content and what your visitors are doing once they land on your website.

Conversions

This report helps you track the conversions on your website. If you have setup conversion tracking with Google Analytics on your website, you should be able to see all your conversion data in this report.

This report is helpful when you are trying to improve your conversion rate as it allows you to identify the best performing landing page variations and the best performing offers.

You can use this report to track your email subscriptions, your product sales, etc. You can also set and monitor your own conversion goals.

Conclusion

If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, you are missing out on a lot of growth opportunities.

Even if your online business is growing fast, I am sure there is still some room for improvement and Google Analytics is the best way to find out where you can improve.

While Google Analytics is not the only Analytics Tool out there, it is probably one of the easiest, offers dozens of features and is totally free. Most of the Analytics Tools available are really costly which is why Google Analytics is the best choice if you are just starting out. If you are just starting out, you don’t need any kind of a fancy Analytics Tool. Google Analytics has more features than you will probably need.

If you have never used Google Analytics before, the interface might seem a bit overwhelming and complex, but trust me, you will love the way Google Analytics works once you spend a bit time with it.