WordPress Plugins Archives - AlienWP Clean & Minimal WordPress Themes Sat, 11 Sep 2021 06:11:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2 https://alienwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/alienwp-50x50.png WordPress Plugins Archives - AlienWP 32 32 133423484 Monarch Social Sharing Plugin Review: Get More Shares & Follows https://alienwp.com/monarch-plugin-review/ Mon, 10 Feb 2020 06:06:04 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=16400 In recent times, having a well-designed WordPress site is not good enough. Given the stiff competition in the market, you need to go the extra mile if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. One way you can do this is by incorporating social media share buttons on your site. A social media plugin will make this smooth and seamless.

Among the highly rated plugins is the Monarch social media plugin. Developed by Elegant Themes, this plugin is designed to make incorporating social media sharing and following into WordPress sites super easy.

It has a range of display options so you can display icons for your users to share your content, which should help drive more social traffic to your site. It also has options for display links to your social media profiles so you can increase your follower counts.

Are you considering using this plugin? Below is a detailed Monarch social media plugin review, in which we discuss the Monarch plugin, its uses, and some of the features that make it stand out as one of the best.

Visit The Monarch Plugin

Introducing Monarch

This is a WordPress social sharing plugin. The plugin is designed to help WordPress users to incorporate social share and follow buttons in their WordPress sites. It offers a variety of button locations and an impressive variety of button styles, colors, and sizes.

This is a standalone plugin, and you do not need to install additional software to run in. The plugin is a product of Elegant Theme, a leading developer of WordPress themes. Elegant Themes is dedicated to producing innovative WordPress plugins, and the Monarch plugin is not any different.

Monarch Installation

The installation process is just like that of any other plugins. When installing this plugin, you are advised to disable any similar plugin on your site.

Go to Plugin →Add New →Upload Plugin→ Browse File→ Monarch Zip File →Install Now→ Activate plugin

Monarch Configuration

Once installed, the plugin needs to be activated to ensure optimal performance.

To configure the plugin, start from the Dashboard. You will find it in the sidebar to the left. It is tucked under the tools tab of the WordPress Admin. Click on Tools and then select the Monarch settings.

You will then be presented with a nice modern looking dashboard where you can begin configuring the plugin to your requirements.

Monarch Plugin Settings

Monarch Settings

To begin setting up the monarch plugin, you should look at the Networks part first.

Networks

Under this category, you get to select the combination of social networks to use. You can add or rearrange the networks to your liking. You can even go a step further and add your name to the networks you selected.

The Monarch plugin has an impressive number of supported networks. With over 20 supported networks currently, it is highly unlikely that you will not find your preferred network among them. Most WordPress users only utilize 3-5 networks.

Network Setup

Enabling networks is as simple as clicking on the Add Networks icon. After this, just click on the tick symbol you see next to your preferred network and Apply.

The other five sub-categories are the 5 locations discussed above. Each sub-category provides a platform when you can choose the icon shape, style, and color. From here, you can also configure the display settings and determine whether you want to enable the share button on pages, posts, or both posts and pages.

Now, a detailed look into the page locations

Location

In this sub-category, you get to select where to place your social settings.  The category offers 5 locations. You can opt to choose one location or use them all at once. The locations are:

  • Sidebar – Social button placed on the sidebar
  • Pop-Up – Social buttons pop at the end of the page just when a visitor leaves or is about to leave the page
  • Inline – Social buttons placed below, above, or at both ends of the article
  • Media – Social buttons triggered when one hovers over an image
  • Fly In – Social buttons triggered at the bottom- either to the right or to the left

To select any of these locations, all you need to do is click on the tick symbol corresponding with each option.

Manage Locations

The location sub-category comes complete with its own settings panel. From here, you can fine-tune characteristics such as icon style. There is a variety of predesigned icons provided for every location. The setting panel is different for every location, but the layout is similar.

Other parameters that are adjustable from each location include orientation and share counts. You can also choose whether to show or hide the share buttons on certain devices such as mobile phones.

Side Bar

This tab represents the floating sidebar location. As highlighted above, the tab offers a chance to choose the shape and style of the icon.

More options can be found on the display settings. Some of the options found here are spacing, sidebar animation, and visibility. The display settings section also allows you to choose the color that you want. Thanks to this feature, it is easy to choose a color scheme that matches your theme.

Sidebar Settings

Popup & Flyin

These two function in a similar way. The only difference is that in the case of popup, the social sharing buttons pop up in an overlay while these buttons are shown at the bottom of the screen in the flyin location.

In the two locations, you can customize the color, size, and icon style. Setting the locations is easy.  You start by adding the title and message you want to display above the buttons. Once this is done, you can then go ahead to align the share icons in your desired columns.

Popup Settings

The last step is choosing the buttons’ delay appearance. Appearance is delayed with the help of triggers. The triggers available for these two locations are:

  • Timed Delay Triggers – Here, you have a choice to delay time for fly-ins and pop-ups until a reader has been to the page for a given duration.
  • Page Leave Triggers – With these triggers, the share buttons pop-up and fly-in just when a reader is about to leave the page.
  • After Commenting Trigger – Here, the share buttons appear after a visitor to your site leaves a comment. In most cases, a reader will only leave a comment after staying engaged on your site. The chance of such a reader sharing that content is relatively high especially if the reader found the content helpful. Presenting a share button after the user comment increases the chances of getting the content to a wider audience.
  • Bottom Post Triggers – For these triggers, the share buttons pop-up or fly-in when the reader gets to the bottom of the page Most WordPress users prefer to place the social sharing buttons at the bottom of the page. The button look better in this position, and it gives a reader a chance to interact with the content first.
  • X Sec Delay Triggers – Here, the share buttons appear when the opened page has been inactive for a certain duration. These triggers work to re-capture a reader’s attention.
  • After-Purchase Triggers – These are particularly helpful if yours is an online store. This feature allows you to place the share popup and fly-in right after the customer checks out. Your customers will then have an easy time sharing your site to their friends and family.

Inline Location

This is among the most utilized position and for a good reason too. It is strategic. Given the fact that the social share buttons appear at the top and bottom of the article, sharing becomes easy. A visitor can also read the article uninterrupted to the end.

Aside from just incorporating the social sharing buttons at the top and the bottom of the page, this tab also allows you to drift these buttons from the right or left. It helps that the plugin is responsive and the size of the buttons will adjust depending on the width of the site.

Media Location

This allows you to incorporate social media buttons on top of videos and images. Given the fact that images and videos drive a lot of traffic to a site nowadays, including sharing buttons on them is a smart move.

The Social Follow Buttons

These buttons are for the people who want to follow you from your site.

The follow section of the Monarch plugin comes with even more networks than those available from the share category. With over 35 networks, there are more than adequate network integrations for the average WordPress user.

To enable a new network, just click the big button to select your preferred network. The network integration process depends on the network you choose. For some networks, integration is easy and seamless. Other networks present quite a challenge when it comes to integration. All in all, this plugin strives to make integration easy. A user guide is provided to guide you on the integration process of different social networks.

The follow buttons section has three sub-categories. These are:

Network

On this tab, you get to configure the networks to your liking just like in the sharing category but here you will enter the URLs to your own social network profile pages.

Social Follow

Widgets

From the widgets sub-category, you can configure any social follow widgets.  You can select the icon style that you want and even adjust the widget behavior and appearance. You can also view the available widget options on the sidebar.

Social Follow Widget

Shortcode

This tab allows you to configure any social follow shortcode. The customization options are just like the ones in the widgets subcategory.  Once you have customized the shortcode to your liking, you only need to click on Generate Shortcode, and you will have yourself a unique shortcode.

The shortcode you generate can be used on pages and posts among other areas. The good thing about the shortcodes you generate here is that they are not global. Therefore, you can use shortcodes that are slightly different throughout your website.

Social Follow Shortcodes

General Settings

This category comes with two main settings. The first setting enables you to adjust your count updates frequency. For example, you can set the times you want the plugin to cache and grab social network counts for the networks that support APIs.

You can also disable this feature by setting the frequency to zero. Setting the frequency at zero will also work for the times you want to check counts immediately.

General Settings

The default frequency for this plugin is 3 hours. You can make the duration shorter, but it is advisable that the frequency should at least be an hour.

The second setting in this category allows you to incorporate custom CSS. This feature will come in handy when you want to change the style of your share buttons or follow widgets.

Monarch Sharing Stats

Aside from making it easy for you to customize share and follow buttons, this plugin also allows you access to data surrounding the social shares on your site.

To go to the analytics view, click on the icon that resembles a bar chart. This will lead you to your site analytic view. The icon is located at the top right corner of the dashboard.

On the analytics view, you will be able to see your data. The data is presented in separate charts and cover the last 7 days. You can also see information for the past 30 days and even for the past year.

Monarch Stats

The analytic view is important because it allows you to see how people on different social platforms have been interacting with your content. In a single page, you get to see how people are responding to your posts and how many times the posts are shared. Here you will also be able to identify the social platforms that are working for you.

If utilized well, this information can help you increase traffic to your site and increase your following on social media. Just see which social platforms are working for you and pay more attention to them so you can bring even more traffic to your site.

Import/Export Settings

The Monarch plugin also comes with an import and export function. Using this feature, you can export your settings on one site and import them on other websites. This feature can save you a lot of time if you are working on more than one site. You can simply customize one site and use most if not all the details on other sites.

Import Export

Performance

During our review we found the overall performance of the Monarch plugin impressive.  The plugin comes with all the necessary features to make incorporating of social media into WordPress seamless. Even better, the plugin is quite light-weight to ensure that it does not affect the site’s load time which is an important factor with these types of plugins.

Performance may differ depending on the WordPress theme. While the slight lag may be negligible on one website, the story may be different for another website. This is not to say that this plugin is poor where performance is concerned, far from it.  Most people who have used the plugin have nothing but good things to say about its performance.

We recommend you test out the loading time difference on your site, as long as you are using a cache plugin we don’t think you will find much difference. The extra shares on your content and follows on your social profiles should make the trade-off worth it.

User- Experience

The user interface is easy to understand. The dashboard is very clean, and the details are well arranged into categories for easy accessibility.

The buttons are designed to be highly customizable. They are also extremely appealing. Overall, the Monarch plugin provides 3 button shapes, 4 inline buttons hover effects, and 5 sidebar button hover effects. To configure most of these functions, all you need to do is click on the option that you want.

The plugin is responsive and the icons will respond to suit any screen. You can incorporate the share functions without having to worry about messing up your site’s appearance.

In simple terms, the dashboard is designed with the user in mind. The plugin features allow users to easily incorporate social networks to their WordPress sites and see how well their sites are performing on these networks.

Monarch Documentation

Documentation for the Monarch Plugin is extensive. On the documentation page, you will find detailed information on how the plugin works and enough tips on how you can utilize this product on your site. Everything from the installation process to the rundown on every feature is included. The explanations are easy to follow and understand. Even if you have not interacted with a social share plugin before, understanding all the steps will be easy.

Given that this is an Elegant Theme product, the Elegant Themes support forum provides a wealth of information on the functioning of the Monarch plugin. You can either search for topics relating to your problems or simply submit your ticket. Your question will be answered in the shortest duration possible. Joining the community will also ensure that you stay updated and help you understand the Monarch plugin better.

Sometimes there might be a queue on the support forum. This means that it may take a while to get your answer. That said the forum works as the best source of because people who are actually using the Monarch plugin among other Elegant Themes products provide the answers.

For a quick answer to your question, you can also go to YouTube. There are numerous tutorials and videos readily available online. These are perfect if you are more of a visual learner or simply want clear illustrations of how everything works. Just do a random search on the topic you are concerned about, and you will have more than enough resources to get your answers from.

Effect on Load Time

With all the above features, it is expected that the plugin will have a negative effect on performance. Is this the case with the Monarch Plugin?

Well, in our experience the effect of the Monarch plugin on load time is negligible. The difference for a basic site is just a millisecond.  If this sounds like a deal breaker for you, then this plugin is not for you. However, we would like to point out that this is as good as it gets when it comes to social sharing plugins. Similar plugins are known to have a significant effect on load time and some end up doing more harm than good.

Monarch Pricing – Get Money off With Our Deal

The membership for this plugin is set at $89 per year. For this price, you get full access to all Elegant Themes plugins and themes. You also get technical support and Photoshop updates and files for the duration your subscription is active. While this amount may seem steep, the truth is that it is quite reasonable. Just consider the close to 90 premium themes and more than 5 plugins you get. All these additions come with technical support and updates.

The lifetime membership fee is set at $249. For this price, you get lifetime access to Elegant Themes plugins and themes among other features. Even if you do not plan to use the other plugins offered in this platform, less than $250 for a lifetime membership sounds like a good deal.

It is important to note that Monarch is only available on Elegant Theme Developer and the Lifetime Membership. In the case of personal pricing, you will not get access to Elegant Themes plugins hence you cannot access the Monarch plugin.

There is a 30-day refund policy for the developer pack. In case you do not like the way the plugin works, you will be fully refunded. Try this and other Elegant Themes plugins and get your money back if you think the product is not the right match for your site.

Luckily, AlienWP also has access to a special deal which will save you 20% off the purchase price of a membership, simply follow this link or visit our Elegant Themes Coupon code page to access the deal.

With our deal discount you can get the yearly access for $70.

Elegant Themes Deal

Monarch Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Deliver great-looking social share buttons
  • Great sharing feature with five sharing location options
  • Responsive plugin meaning that the share buttons will look great on different devices
  • A wide selection of social networks with over 20 social share networks and close to 40 social follow networks. All the networks that matter are included.
  • User-friendly interface and straightforward self-explanatory features. Easy to set up and configure
  • Provide stats for website performance on different social networks making it easy for you to measure overall site performance.
  • Allows you to hide the share numbers until they get to a certain number. This works to prevent negative social proof.

Cons

  • Share counts are sometimes inaccurate
  • Buttons design is not consistent for all themes
  • The floating sidebar location is limiting as it can only be displayed on the left
  • Media sharing is restricted to posts

Should you get the Monarch Plugin?

You can’t deny that this plugin can make all the difference when it comes to social sharing. Yes, it comes with all the right features but is it a worthy investment?

Well, if you are on any Elegant Themes membership, this is a no-brainer. Even if you are on personal pricing, the upgrade will cost you slightly over $20 for a full month of unrestricted use. For the theme Developer and Lifetime Membership plan, you get this plugin at no extra cost at all. The Monarch plugin is part of the plugins that this Company offers in these two plans.

If you are a member of Elegant Themes, getting the subscription just to use the social sharing plugin does not make economic sense. The $89 price is quite expensive for one plugin.

If you really like what this social sharing plugin has to offer, just become an Elegant Themes customer. This way, for one price, you can get a versatile solution that will also allow you to design your pages and even create your website from scratch. The Elegant Themes page builder Divi and other plugins by this team are highly rated and are among the best in the market.

Who is Best Suited for the Monarch Plugin?

Given the fact that this is a user-friendly plugin, even a novice WordPress user can use it with relative ease. There is adequate information, both in text and video, that is readily available online. The dedicated Elegant Theme community is also a great help as far as enhancing the user experience is concerned.

When you consider the features, this plugin is designed to work great for both novice and seasoned WordPress users. Numerous social networks are available and just as many options are available for those who want to customize the different features to their liking.

The plugin is responsive thus ensures that site appearance is not affected even when viewed from different devices. This is in addition to the fact that the plugin also comes with triggers that can be set to respond to users’ interactions on the site.

If you are an elegant theme customer, the monarch plugin is perfect for you. You will need to pay a little more if you are on the personal pricing plan as the plugin is only available in the Theme Developer and Lifetime Membership plans.

Conclusion

This is another high quality plugin created by Elegant Themes, we love their products here at AlienWP as they are always well-designed and maintained and updated as needed. The customer support is also top notch, you can be assured of a good experience when purchasing a product from ElegantThemes.

That said, it is important to remember that the plugin is offered as part of a package membership. While grouping the Monarch social media plugin with others that works for Elegant Themes customers, it locks out a good number of other WordPress users who do not with to use the Divi theme, Bloom Plugin or other plugins which come with the package. So you have to think to yourself, does this plugin represent $89 ( $70 with our coupon) worth of value to me ? On it’s own, possibly not, combined with a theme or another plugin, probably yes.

If you are looking for a solid social media plugin, and most websites these days will need one, then we can highly recommend the Monarch plugin – it does a great job for what it is.

Visit The Monarch Plugin

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10 Best WordPress Membership Plugins 2020: In-Depth Guide to Free & Paid Options https://alienwp.com/wordpress-membership-plugins/ Mon, 10 Feb 2020 05:47:41 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=13541 Creating a membership site is one of the most effective sources of monetizing websites and earning a reliable amount of money each month without having to work for those extra hours, by putting a membership system in place you can create a product once and then earn recurring income from it.

A membership site is one in which your visitors have to subscribe to your site by paying a small amount of money to unlock your content. When you have a membership site, you (as the admin) can have full control over what part of your content can be accessed by your visitors. For example, you have set up a site with various online courses. Each of these courses will have distinctly different materials for your visitors, depending upon their needs or interests. But these materials will not be accessible for all. Anyone who wants to read them will have to pay you a specific amount.

You obviously can always keep it exciting for your members, by providing incentives and other added benefits as well. There are different kinds of membership sites. Some sites charge a one-time payment, while others may charge a monthly, quarterly or yearly payment to unlock their content, products or services.

WordPress Membership Plugins

You will find various plugins available in the market, which can help you monetize your site or blog by paid membership programs. These plugins make it absolutely easy for you to build an effective member based website, with no shortage of options, for your users.

However, membership sites are known to be resource hungry. This makes it extremely important for you to choose the right provider that enhances performance and reliability. There are tons of affordable WordPress hosting providers that will definitely make your life much easier.

The WordPress market is flooded with tons of Membership Plugins. But only a few are good enough to be considered for your website. Keeping that in mind, we have brought to you a list of 10 Best WordPress Membership Plugins that you might like to know about before making a purchase. Each of these plugins comes loaded with amazing features and are extremely user-friendly. The best thing is that besides being highly advanced and super flexible all the products listed here comes with a very affordable pricing. So, let’s get started.

S2 Member

S2 Member is one of the oldest and most well respected member plugins around, the plugin now has over a million downloads since it was created. If you are looking for a plugin which has lots of features this is the one – It integrates with many different payment processors and has a huge feature list. It’s available in a few different version – a Free framework which contains the basics you need to create a very simple site with PayPal buttons, a Pro version which costs $89 one-time for lots more features and Pro unlimited version which costs $189 and allows you to use it on as many websites as you like.

More Info & Demo

Amember

Amember Pro is another member system which has been around and continuously developed for many years now. It’s available as a standalone system which you can install on your hosting or you can integrate it with a number of platforms including WordPress via the use of their own plugin. It has all the main features would expect from a membership plugin and has a very nice and easy to use dashboard. Amember is very popular among WordPress vendors and a lot of the top WordPress plugin and theme shops use it to run their own sites.

More Info & Demo

WP-Emember

WP eMember is a very well regarded plugin which has been in development for many years again, it costs just $59 for the full plugin and is one of the easiest ways to create a membership site with WordPress – either with a brand new site or by adding a new section to your existing website. It’s packed full of features that you will need to easily build your members area with no bloated features you will never need. You can use it to protect posts or pages on your site and mark them as members only, display partial content as a teaser, you can create unlimited membership levels and so on.

More Info & Demo

MemberPress

MemberPress is a highly advanced and professionally designed membership plugin, that comes with the latest web trending features. With this plugin, you have the ability to control access to the content on your site, opening it up only to your team members.

The plugin automatically grants and revokes access when a member joins or unsubscribes to your website. It also adds to the powerful features of online marketing by selling and accepting payments with PayPal express checkout and Stripe. You can easily install this plugin on your website and start charging instantly for access.

Using this robust plugin also ensures that your digital products are sold off securely. So now you have a plugin that is not only versatile but immensely powerful too. The users of this plugin have highly acclaimed it for its functions and simple user interface. Another good thing about it is the support team. You can reach out to them at all times and they will help you sort out all your problems within minutes.

This plugin is an amazing one if you want to create, manage and track membership subscriptions with confidence and ease. This fantastic plugin beautifully integrates with your already existing WordPress site. The plugin works wonderfully and its features are truly the cherries on the top.

It comes under different pricing plans, so you can choose the one that best fits your requirements. If yours is a new membership site, then its best that you select the Business Edition. It is available at just $119 per year. If you are an advanced membership site builder than the Developer Edition which is available at $239 per year can be your best choice.

More Info & Demo

Magic Members

This plugin is exceptionally useful for educational membership websites. The Magic Member plugin is known for its exceptional content dripping abilities. It also includes multiple payment gateways and amazing integration with e-mail newsletters such as Aweber and Mail Chimp.

The plugin has got a download manager included to manage all the digital downloads. A great feature is also the pay per view access to specific video contents. If you are selling a course, the feature of sequential course delivery will be right up your alley. The single licenses version of this product is available at just $97. This includes a quick support guide, free updates for a year and of course instant access.

More Info & Demo

Wishlist Member

If you want to have your membership site withing minutes, without any programing then WishList is the plugin you need to have. This is a premium membership plugin that is renowned for giving you immense control over your content and methods of delivery of the same to your members. A number of Standard functions are included in the plugin that works flawlessly, with unlimited membership levels and control.

There is also a great feature of sequential content delivery which allows you to release your content according to order or time. Membership levels are also auto upgraded according to your specifications. Being the admin you are powered to view your members, their registration status, membership level and more.

The plugin can be directly integrated with your WordPress site that you have been using. This makes it easyy for you to manage it as you are not forced to enter into a new realm that needs a new understanding. You can create a free, trial or paid membership level or combine all the three together for your users.

The plugin also has the option to create a multi-level access for your members. Another brilliant feature is Subscription Length Control option.With this feature, you can control the length of the duration through which your members can access the content. You can also make the subscription auto-expire within the time that you may want to specify.

The Custom Error option will automatically direct your visitors to the error page if they try to access content or products that they are denied access. With the Partial Content Display option you can display a part of your content to non-members. If they want to gain full access to the entire content they will obviously have to be a member of your site. Displaying some gripping content is a great way to tempt visitors to be a paid member.

The plugin also integrates very easily with PayPal and ClickBank. You can also allow secure RSS feeds to be displayed. Another feature is the free preview with protection to entice more subscribers to become members.

On top of all this, you will get great technical support as well as detailed documentation on how to use the plugin and get the best out of it.

This plugin is available at $197 for a single site and at $297 for multiple sites.

More Info & Demo

Restrict Content Pro

Restrict Content Pro is a fully featured powerful membership solution for WordPress users. The plugin is very intricately designed and it seamlessly integrates itself with the backend of your site. There are limitless possibilities with this plugin. It gives you complete control over how your content can be accessed.

You can create unlimited subscription package levels and provide level specific access to your content. It also gives you the option to sell digital products and accept payments through some of the major payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal Standard, and Express etc.

With Restrict Content Pro you can generate a CSV to all your active members. The settings can be changed to members of a particular subscription as well. You can even create an unlimited number of discount codes and offer percentages for your visitors. The Reports feature will show you how well your site is performing. And this does not need any extra work. The developers have taken care of it.

The Email Members help you send an automated email to your new member welcoming them to your site. It will also remind them about the date of expiry and the send them a payment receipt. This feature will make you appear more professional.

The plugin even offers a Premium support and regular updates to all its users. Moreover, they have lucrative deals for almost any budget with some great pricing options available vis-a-vis: Personal, Plus, Professional and Ultimate. The plugin also comes extensively documented so even if you have a problem setting it up, you surely can go through the walk-through that is available on the web.

The plugin is available under different pricing plans ranging from  $99 to $499. So depending on the requirement of your site you can pick the one that you think will suit you best.

More Info & Demo

MemberMouse

Membermouse is another powerful and scalable membership plugin in the market. It is known for being very user-friendly in spite of having some of the most advanced features. The basic working is the same as it allows you to restrict access to any content like posts, pages etc controlled via a grant access button.

You will even be able to specify which membership level can access what content, in a very simplified manner that can be mastered within minutes. The drip-feed feature allows you to release your content automatically upon a specified time. The reporting suites of Member Mouse are some of the most accurate and detailed information.

The key metrics can help you target important areas through which you can increase profits etc. The key feature is the split test pricing which lets you optimize your pricing strategy to maximize subscribers and revenue. It is one plugin that will help you maximize your revenue without any programming.

With its Customer Management feature, you can not only grow your email list but also easily register new members and accept orders with your flexible checkout pages. You can also have an overview of the engagement statistic from your dashboard.

The plugin offers excellent support automation allowing your customers to serve themselves in easy steps. So they can update their profile, cancel subscriptions, and do a lot more. You can set it up like installing any other WordPress plugin, directly on your site. It is easy, fast and reliable.

You can try out this plugin for 14 days free of cost before you finally hit the purchase button. See if you like the way it works and if you are satisfied with its features and services this beautiful product is definitely worth buying.

More Info & Demo

Rainmaker Platform

Rainmaker, Membership Plugin

This platform has gone a step further and turned itself into a membership site-in-a-box. All your hosting, e-mail, site builders etc are included in one neat package providing an all-in-one solution. The Platform is immensely powerful with some of the most practical and useful features bundled in together.

It can also integrate affiliate programs to your site and add or restrict access to forums for your members to interact. It lets you create an unlimited number and level of memberships too.

There are also options through which you can sell any number of digital items and accept payments from a large number of vendors. Rainmaker is incredibly powerful with amazing functions for your business.

Select from the number of subscription packages available for this plugin. The prices for this range from $145 to $165.

More Info & Demo

WP-Members

This is an amazing free plugin for memberships on WordPress sites. Again, the basic working is the same. It has an auto-generated excerpt feature which is very useful for generating excerpts for restricted content with SEO optimized excerpts.

Though there are limitations of this plugin, it is free and the features included are more than enough for basic functionality. It has already bagged a 4.9-star rating and has more than 70,ooo active installs. The plugin is fully customizable and you can use over all the 100 action and filter hooks to do that. In case you want more features in your plugin, you can easily extend them by using the premium add-on modules from its support site rocketgeek.com

The biggest limitation, however, is that you can’t charge for memberships, for which, however, you can upgrade to the premium version which comes at a decent cost.

You can block your posts and contents individually or both as well if you want. You ( as the admin) also need to approve a member before he/she joins the others in the group. The admin is automatically notified about each new registration.

More Info & Demo

WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce is an excellent e-commerce solution which is very popular in the digital world. WooCommerce Membership is an add-on which allows you to create awesome, scalable membership websites. Restricting your content with this plugin is going to get easier than ever.

You can not only restrict your content to your members but can also drip specific content and schedule a time for members to have access.

The functionalities are immense. They have lots of payment gateways integrated as such increasing your versatility as well. It is dedicated to membership requirements with standard functionalities and tons of add-on features.

You can create member only discount codes and also offer physical products exclusively to members by combining your website to that of any e-commerce store. The plugin will also hide your content or products from non-members. If you want, you can make the product view public. But make it purchase-able only by the site members.

Not only this. You can even include a membership with product purchase or manually assign memberships too.  You can also export members to a CSV file to make member data out of WooCommerce available for them.

The plugin has also simplified the process of communicating with your members by adding the Membership Note option that you can share with your members via email. The Basic Reporting feature of the plugin will help you find out your stats. With this system, you can find out how your site is doing and what revenue it is earning.

The plugin also has the option to let you add a membership discount per plan or per subscription. You can also send an auto-generated single or multiple reminders to your members before a specific event. Add another coat of security to your already secured site, by adding a re-captcha verification for your paid member subscription.

This amazing plugin is available from $149 through $249 per year. So try out this plugin now and enjoy its brilliant features and services.

More Info & Demo

Conclusion

We have very carefully selected the Best Membership plugins out there, specifically to help you out in your search. It should, however, be noted that your requirements could be different from others. And as such you are advised to look into the products and use their trial versions to see whether or not they work for you.

The products listed here are popular and immensely successful in the digital world. They are very effective and are also used by some of the giants of the industry. You too definitely deserve to know about them before you make your purchase.

I hope you have liked our collection. Do let us know through your comments, which plugin did you like the best. Do you also know about any better plugin that we missed? We are eager to hear from you.

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Elementor Plugin Review: How Does it Compare to Other Page Builders? https://alienwp.com/elementor-plugin-review/ Mon, 10 Feb 2020 05:46:01 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=16292 Among WordPress page builders, Elementor was the newest kid on the block. This should not fool you however. With over 1 million installs since its release in mid-2016 and an impressive 5 star rating on WordPress.org, it is safe to say that this page builder is literally taking the industry by storm.

They say that numbers do not lie and as per current numbers, this sure is an impressive product. So what makes the Elementor plugin tick? Why does it stand out in a highly competitive market? Below is a detailed Elementor plugin review that answers the above questions and so much more.

In this review, we discuss how the Elementor plugin works, its key benefits, and some of the areas we think have room for improvement. We will also go over the features that set it apart from other page builders. In short, we want to make you understand what the rave is all about and explain why everyone who has used Elementor cannot stop talking about it.

Visit Elementor

What is Elementor?

Elementor is a drag-and-drop visual page builder for WordPress. Drag and drop here means that can drag and move design elements such as images, buttons and so on. The visual bit means that you can see exactly what your visitors will see as you design.

Elementor comes with a handy interface that allows you to create pages and posts. Once you enable Elementor on your WordPress editing screen, the page builder entirely takes over the process of page editing.

Elementor Plugin

Elementor just like any other page builder allows you to create attractive page layouts and designs from scratch. Regardless of your WordPress theme, you can create impressive page and content layout and the good thing is that you do not need to be a designer or possess any page building skills.

Elementor comes in two main versions. There is the basic version that comes at no cost at all. You do not need to pay to access it and neither do you need to pay anything to use any of the features available.

There is the pro version that comes with additional features. This version comes at a cost of $49 per year for a single site and is aimed at people who need more functionality, elements and the ability to construct complete WordPress themes.

Just like any other page builder, the Elementor page builder is designed to make page layout easy. It is created to be user friendly and ensure that those who have no design skills at all can use it with ease.

Elementor Plugin Notable Features

Elementor is packed full of features, so let’s take a look at what’s on offer…

Page Creation

This is the core function of this plugin.  It enables you to build, adjust, and tweak your pages as needed. Even better, the plugin allows you to see your updates in real-time. This way, you know exactly how your page is going to look before you can publish it.  If you have a limited budget but still want a great-looking website, this plugin will be of great help.

All designs that you create using Elementor are mobile responsive. This is to mean that they not only look good on PC but also adjust to look just as great on mobile devices. In a world where mobile device users come close to a billion, it is logical to create sites that are also mobile friendly.

Now this is where things get interesting; Let us say you have large images that you would rather not display on certain devices. The responsive design controls in the Elementor plugin allows you to hide the image. At the end of the day, you content and site in general will be more user friendly regardless of the device that your target audience use.

Elementor Page Creation

Friendly User Interface

Majority of the tools are found on the side panel. The rest of the page is left for the user. This is definitely a plus as space is important when you are designing. This being a visual builder, you can get a clear picture of how your pages will look like while actively making changes on your page content and layout.

If you still need more space, you can contract the tools panel even further. Just drag the panel to reduce the panel size.  The good thing is that contracting this panel does not affect usability in any way. It just gives you more space to create and refine your pages.

Expanding the panel is also possible. This is particularly helpful when editing a text block

You can also completely slot away the tools panel by clicking the arrow on the panel. This allows you to preview your page and see exactly what your audience will see when that particular page or content is published. The fact that you do not have to hit preview is perfect and simply makes this platform user friendly.

Elementor User Interface

Elementor is an open source plugin. This means that the software used to make the original source code is readily available. If you are a developer, you can access this software and improve the features, fix bugs and even introduce new additions.

Aside from the open source resource making Elementor super versatile, it also open doors for third party plugins. This mean that users get more options and have an easy time building pages and themes on this platform.

Drop and Drag Functionality

Thanks to this functionality, you can drag any element of the content on your page and move it elsewhere. The full drag-and-drop feature works for all content types represented by Elementor content widgets. The widgets include images, videos, spacers, testimonials, social media icons, headlines and many others.

The drag and drop functionality takes the stress out of designing. All you need to do is to identify the widgets you need to add and simply drag it to the area you want to place it. Once you have done this, you can then go ahead and make changes on the individual widgets.

Drag & Drop

Template Library

The pro version of Elementor comes complete with a template library. This means that even though the platform allows you to create designs from scratch, it also gives you templates that you can incorporate in your WordPress. You can also simply use the templates for inspiration but with over 100 free and paid templates, you are sure to get a template or two that will suit your style.

The templates come in two formats.

  • Pages – the page templates are full-page designs. You can import these pages or tweak them to suit your needs.
  • Blocks – these are specific sections designs. These templates work where you just need to incorporate a certain section into an existing layout.

For example, you can use the blocks template to incorporate a contacts section rather that redesign the entire page.

After tweaking or creating your own designs, the platform allows you to save them for future use. You get access to the basic display settings where you can change the default fonts, colors, background and other features to suit your style.

Templates

Custom Page Template

This is simply a blank page template that allows you to build a page without headers, footers, and sidebars from your WordPress theme. Otherwise known as Elementor Canvas, this template makes creation of custom pages much easier.  The good thing is that you can drag and drop the blocks and sections available on Elementor and custom make these to your liking.

The custom page template is ideal for those times you want to create a page that is entirely different from your current theme. Instead of struggling to edit and remove all the details in your theme, simply open a blank page and customize it to your liking.

Easy Redo with Entire Revision History

If you make any mistake while you are designing you page, you rectify those mistakes in 2 ways. One you can revert to correct the mistake as every action you take is logged. Since every save comes with a new revision, you can revert whenever necessary.

Elementor Revision History

It is important to note that only actions you make during a certain design session are logged. Once you exit the interface, the actions are cleared. On the bright side, saved revisions can be accessed with relative ease.

While the redo feature works fine, it is a little disappointing that this plugin does not come with an undo option. If you have done a lot of editing, going back to the version that you want can be quite a task given the fact that you will need to preview different versions to find the one that you want.

To ensure that you do not have numerous revisions that can also slow down your system, be sure to clean up your history every now and then. There is a cleaner plugin available. To be on the safe side though, ensure that you have saved all the important updates before you can run the cleaner plugin.

Pricing

This is where the Elementor Plugin beat other page builders hands down. The main plugin is available through the official WordPress repository and the good thing is that it comes at no cost at all. There are no hidden charges either and you do not need to register to use the plugin.

If Elementor plugin reviews are anything to go by, you do not need to pay for this page builder even though it comes with a premium version. Close to 90% of the best Elementor features are found on the free version. When compared to other page builders in the market, the free Elementor version performs just as good if not better.

For the Pro Version, the price starts at $49 per year for one site, $99 for 3 sites or $199 for unlimited sites.

For this price, you get to use slides, customize your WooCommerce content, and deploy elements from Elementor in widgets and sidebars. With the pro version, you can also edit and work on web forms in Elementor and also display portfolios and post listings in Elementor layouts. In addition, the Pro Version comes with more content blocks and page templates.

Elementor Pricing

Support

This is another area where the Elementor plugin really stands out. It comes complete with a community of users who are always willing to help. Despite the fact that Elementor does not have a live chat option, the Elementor community has been proven to be quite resourceful in answering questions and guiding new users.

Have any question about Elementor? Visit the Trello Board on the Plugin. Here, you will find a well-organized layout of all the questions you may have about Elementor. If your questions have not already been answered, all you need to do is post your questions to the community. The over 4000 members are quite active. Your question will be answered in no time at all.

In addition to the community, Elementor has provided more than enough information about how the platform works. You can also just use the contacts provided to get more details and all your questions answered really fast.

How Elementor Interface Works

Elementor is a WordPress plugin. However, it is more advanced that the other plugins you find on this platform.

If you want to use Elementor, you have to install it and then activate it. After activation, you can choose to either go to the settings panel or open your WordPress pages. Once you open your pages, you will immediately see the ‘Edit with Elementor’ option.

Getting Started

When you launch Elementor on WordPress, this is what you see.

Elementor Editor

On one side is the content area where you can see your regular theme. You can build the design that you want on the area where you see the grey dotted lines by simply dragging elements from the left over.

On the side, there is the widgets area. Here, you get all the blocks you can use to design and build your page. Then there is the settings part where you can preview your work on different devices and undo changes to your designs whenever necessary.

Building a page with Elementor

With Elementor, you are free to choose the number of sections to incorporate in your page. For every section, you can either have one or more columns. A column can also contain more than one content element. To top it all, you can individually style each content element to suit your style.

To build a page, Elementor give you two structural elements. These are position elements and style elements. The position elements are the sections and columns.

You can start with a blank section and add columns and content by dragging and dropping the content blocks available on the side bar. The sections can also be rearranged as needed.

Here you can see we added two columns to a section and placed an image in one and a video in the other.

Columns

You can also choose to use one of the many templates available. If you find a template that you like, just use it and tweak it to match your needs.

Once you have added the content block you want, simply click on it to adjust the details. By clicking inside the content block, you will see the Advanced, Content, and Style tab. You can choose either of these tabs and work on every content block until you are satisfied.

Edit an Element

Generally, Elementor is a user-friendly platform. If you have not used the platform before, you may need to familiarize yourself with it and all its sections. That said, everything is quite straightforward and you can learn all there is to learn about this plugin in no time at all.

A Brief on Elementor Pro

Initially, Elementor only worked for page layouts. The launch of the New Elementor Pro changed all that. This new Elementor version works to ensure that aside from just designing the content layout, you also get to choose how your overall theme looks like and edit it in the same drag and drop manner.

Thanks to the Elementor Pro 2.0 version, you can now build your theme. Just like with the page content, all you have to do to build your theme is drag and drop the themes that are available on the Elementor interface. Theme in this case includes post templates, headers and footers.

Theme Builder

When you want to build your theme, you have to first select the part you want to build. For example if you want to build your blog post template, select this and you will get to choose whether you want to post content, post the title and so on.

Elementor Pro comes with more templates and features and this can only translate to increased flexibility when designing. The extra widgets available can also allow you to replace other plugins. Some of the most useful widgets on the pro version are social share buttons, pricing tables, and login forms.

Below is the full list of Elementor Pro Widgets.

Pro Elements

Of all the widgets you get with the Elementor Pro version, the Global elements are the most outstanding ones.

Global widgets are perfect for those times you want to use the same element on different pages.

For example, you may want to put your contact information on different pages. Thanks to the Global widgets, you can save the contact widget and reuse on different pages as required. Even better, editing any saved up widget is just as easy. The global widget automatically updates when you make any changes so you do not have to edit all your pages to capture the updated information. This will make your work easier even when you have to build an entire theme from scratch.

Global Elements

There are many third party Elementor templates and themes available. If you are a developer, these additions make it possible for you to extend the plugin functionality. Extensions that are beyond the add-ons you find in the pro version are in plenty and this can only means that developers have limitless options. If you are a developer and you find that Elementor is lacking in any area, you can simply use the third party add on to update it to your standard.

Do you need the Pro Version?

Well, this will depend on a number of factors. What exactly do you want? If all you want are well styled pages then the basic function is ideal. The basic Elementor version still stands as the best free page builder. It helps that it comes with most if not all the features you find in other page builders. The fact that it is free also means it is perfect if you are just starting out, or simply do not have a budget for page building.

The Elementor Pro is ideal if you are looking to build your entire website and theme. Aside from allowing you to build your pages, the Pro version also comes with theme building features. This version also comes with more features that give you some extra control over how your overall website looks like at the end of the day.

It is up to you to decide which version will work best for your website.  You can always start by experimenting with the free version. After you have familiarized yourself with the plugin, you can then upgrade to the Pro version if you find that you need the additional features. The Pro version comes at a price but the amount is reasonable. The fact that the plugin is user-friendly is a plus. If Elementor Plugin reviews are anything to go by, this page builder is way ahead of its competitors as far as overall performance is concerned.

Pros

  • Wide range of impressive features
  • It is free. Also comes with no hidden charges
  • Give you a chance to build custom designs and page layouts that are not in your current theme.
  • Allows you to separately adjust desktop, mobile, and tablet views. Even better, with Elementor 1.5, you can tweak column layouts depending on the screen size or type of device
  • Generally user friendly. Even if you do not have any HTML, PHP, and CSS skills, you can use this builder to create impressive designs with relative ease. Everything from the features to the interface is designed with the end-user in mind.
  • Comes with a real-time preview. This allows you to preview your work and see how your pages will look like from different devices.
  • The blank canvas page allows you to disregard you current theme and make use of Elementor sections and blocks. This feature comes in handy whenever you want to avoid those pesky headers and footers you find in most themes.
  • Elementor comes with a rollback option. This feature allows you to revert to the earlier version.  This works great in case something goes wrong when you are designing.

Cons

  • Elementor does not properly inherit link styles from the current theme. It also does not allow you to style your link.
  • Applying text and font styles can sometimes be frustrating, as it does not work all the time.
  • Does not come with a white label options. This is particularly a concern for developers.

Elementor vs Div & Beaver Builder

The top Elementor competitors are Divi and Beaver Builder. These two page builders also have a great reputation and come with great page building abilities. Both novice and seasoned WordPress users can use the above platforms to create quality looking pages and all this can be done with no design skills at all. That said it is important to note that Elementor plugin also comes with great page building abilities.

With the free Elementor version, you can create beautiful pages using the templates provided. The variety is quite wide and it is almost impossible not to find a template or two that will match your style. The pro version also allows you to create your website’s theme and offer the same features you find in the page builders mentioned above. Sure, there are areas where the plugin can be improved but generally, it is a great platform. It helps that the Elementor interface is extremely well designed, making it easy to learn and use.

The one thing that sets the Elementor plugin apart is the price. Both Divi and Beaver come at a price and for hobbyists or startups that can be restrictive. With Elementor you can try it out for free and see if it’s the right plugin for you.

If you are on a tight budget, the Elementor plugin is a perfect choice. You do not even need to get the Pro version. The free version is very goodand will allow you to start creating custom page layouts with ease.

The platform is also perfect if you are just getting started with WordPress as some people will find the default WordPress editor restrictive as it stands or not want to get to grips learning about blocks.

Learn Elementor in 3 Simple Steps

Want to learn how you can use this page builder to upgrade your WordPress site? Why not start by checking out a few YouTube video tutorials.

There are enough tutorials available online and these contain a wealth of information that you may find helpful. The Elementor YouTube channel is particularly helpful and covers all the basics as far as using this plugin is concerned.

There are also enough guides on how to make use of Elementor. Just be sure to do adequate research and where possible, read the guides as you try the plugin.

The third and last option is using the available templates. Simply import one of the templates and deconstruct it. By doing this, you will see the steps the designer used when making the template in question.

Learning Elementor just like learning anything else in life and needs some time. Even though the platform is quite easy, there sure is going to be a learning curve. However, at the end of the day, you can be sure that you will be creating beautiful pages if you take the time to learn and understand it.

Conclusion

All things considered, Elementor emerges at the top of the list of best page builders in the market. It comes with numerous friendly features that make it particularly suitable for beginners. Even seasoned users will find the page builder will save them time building layouts. Unlike other page builders that come with free trials but with numerous limitations, Elementor is nothing like that. It is safe to say it is a budget blogger’s dream as it comes at no cost and with no limitations.

Elementor has introduced a Pro Version that gives additional features to the user who wants more than WordPress page layouts. This version allows users to build entire site themes from scratch. Just like the free version, the Pro version is user friendly and one does not need to be an expert in design to start creating nice layouts.

It is important to note that just like any other page builder, the Elementor plugin comes with a few shortfalls. For example, it lacks some basic features that people use when designing their pages.  Some users have also encountered difficulties when trying to change column widths and adjusting the pages to their requirements. That said the good by far outweigh the bad.

Elementor overall performance is on par with the best page builders. Yes, there are a few areas that need to be fixed, but the plugin is backed by a strong team and is constantly being updated.

Elementor is continually improving this page builder and going by this trend, the possibilities here are a promising for the future. Given the fact that the Elementor page builder is open source, you can upgrade and tweak the plugin to your liking with the use of numerous add-ons which are now available.

This plugin comes with a lot of moving parts and this can be confusing if you have never used a page builder before. Fortunately, Elementor provides adequate guidelines and resources that you may find helpful. Everything from detailed videos to detailed tutorials are available and all you need to bring to the table is some attention and a willingness to learn.

Have we covered everything you need to know about Elementor? Let us know Your thoughts?

Visit Elementor

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WPForms Review: A Complete WordPress Form Plugin? https://alienwp.com/wpforms-review/ Sun, 09 Feb 2020 14:13:28 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=16199 The WordPress market is flooded with so many Contact Form and Form Builder plugins. The only problem is knowing which one to choose which will suit your requirements.

In our opinion, the best option you can have is WPForms a popular plugin that has been used by millions of users. It’s available as a free plugin with the option to upgrade to a paid plan for even more features.

In today’s post, we are going to review the WP Form plugin. This article, is going to take you through everything you need to know about the plugin. So keep reading because, by the end of it, this plugin might just be the form builder you are looking for, for your business.

WPForms Complete Review

Visit WPForms

WPForms Plugin Introduction

WPForms has been in the market for a quite some time now and this plugin has garnered a lot of praise over time. With a brilliant 4.9 out of 5-star ratings and 3248 reviews (and counting) for the Free Version, WP forms has a lot to offer to its users.

The WP Forms is a drag and drop form builder plugin and working with it is really very easy. The power punch that this plug is allows you to create multiple, creative forms for contact, subscription, payment etc in a matter of minutes. And its super fast, light-weight, highly advanced and compatible with tons of other plugins as well.

At the time of creating the plugin, the team always considered user-experience as its foremost priority. Therefore to make it beginner-friendly, the team added dozens of pre-built form templates to help you easily get up and running.

The plugin is responsive for devices and screen sizes of all types. It has been very well optimized for performance and receives regular updates too. Overall, it’s a great option for anyone who wants to integrate a Contact Form in their website.

But before we reach any conclusions, let’s explore it a little more, starting with the features.

WPForms Features

As already mentioned, this form builder plugin is extremely flexible and user-friendly. Compatible to screen sizes ranging from phones to computer screens. Most of the themes with their drag and drop features have become the talk of the WordPress community.

Thus, WordPress form builder offers the same level of flexibility and smoothness which allows you to build a form in a matter of minutes. The fields can be arranged for a better visual appeal and functionality with just one click.

WPforms Features

The most important thing here is, no coding knowledge needed! You can just install the plugin and get on your way to build the most illustrative user interaction form for your business.

The plugin has been extensively documented so it’s easy to set your hands on it, if you ever face a problem handling it.

Pre-built Templates

Keeping the vastness of the industry category in mind, WordPress has designed this plugin to cater to multiple industries. Some the form option which are frequently used are:

  • Contact Form
  • Newsletter subscription Form
  • Email opt-in Form
  • Survey and poll Form
  • Donation Form
  • Billing and Order Form
  • Suggestion Forms
  • Feedback Form
  • Request a Quote Form

While a few of these templates are available in the basic package, you will have to shell out $49 to $199 to get a host of addons and endless benefits.

If you are from a unique industry and you are wondering if this plugin is the right one for you. Yes, it is. Install the Form Templates Pack addon, and then a tailored form for your business or industry is just a few clicks away.

Easy to Use

Payment Collection via Form

Now if you are in the ecommerce business, or exploring the idea of establishing one, then there is a definite need for online payment option for your customers. Or if yours is a non-profit for which you accept online donations, then the good news is, WP form plugin comes integrated with PayPal and Stripe. It has made payments so much easier.

Field Categorization

The fields are categorized primarily into 3 separate sections –

  • Standard – Includes name, email, single line and paragraph text, dropdown, multiple choice, etc.
  • Fancy – Includes phone, file upload, website / URL, page break, captcha, etc.
  • Payment – Includes credit card payment, single / multiple item payment, etc.

Apart from the above, the form is optimized for web and server performance ensuring maximum speed.

The fields are the most important thing to be used in a form. So let me share a brief on how to make your own form in the WP Form builder.

First, select the kind of form that you want to build based on your business needs. Then, Click on the ‘Fields’ option on the left corner of the screen. It will open a pop-up with the most commonly used field options such as name, contact number, email id, address, date and time, etc.

However, intricate fields such as website URL, file upload, payments, etc. are also available when it comes collection of extensive data. Now to create a form of your own, all you have to do is select the required field, drag and drop it in the form on a place of your choosing. Voila, you are done making your form for you website.

Easy to Add a Form

With the arrival for WP forms, embedding your form into the website is just few clicks away. Now, no coding or copy-pasting the short code manually. All you have to do is,

Click on ‘Add Form’ button located above the text editor.

Chose the relevant form from the pop-up.

Select the right form and click on the ‘Add Form’ button.

Smart Conditional Logic

Despite the world slowly going digital, filling an online form is tedious at best. For that matter, filling any form is a pain. For a new user, this is a task he/she will definitely not look up to.

But if you are giving a form to an existing user, then why not give them the fields based on their last form? Wondering if this is possible. Well, let’s just swipe the clouds of doubt from your head right away.

With the WP form builder and its smart conditional logic, you can show only the required fields of the form based on the user’s last form submission.

This way, your user does not have to see the fields which he does not want to fill thus making a form submission less time consuming for him and this whole process also ensures high completion and submission rates.

P.S. – If you wish to recover abandoned forms, WP Form has an addon for that.

Workflow

Zapier and Email Marketing Addon + Gutenberg Support

Now with all that subscriptions, registrations, requests, quotes, etc. you would not want your mailbox to be choked. For subscription requests, manually collating the email ids and then copy-pasting the data is the last thing you would want to do.

Wp Forms have got a solution for you. It’s auto- integration capabilities to Email Marketing Platforms such as Mailchimp, Drip, GetResponse, Aweber and Campaign Monitor.

Zapier is the most intelligent way to automate inter-app data movement. So if you want to connect your WPForm to your favorite app, which you can choose from the 1300 plus web apps which are already supported.

Zapier allows you to move data from your WP Form to Salesforce, Freshbooks, Hubspot, Twilio for creating lead, invoices, contacts or send text messages respectively. This is just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities that Zapier offers you.

Despite getting some flak since inception, Gutenberg has built a name and carved a niche for itself and is here to stay. WP Forms has added support for the Gutenberg WordPress Editor as well. It’s very own Gutenberg block makes adding WP Forms to Gutenberg managed content a cakewalk.

What typs of Form Can you Create?

Here are some of the forms that you can create with the plugin.

Survey/Poll Form

This form template allows you to conduct surveys and polls on your website. Now, when this form is combined with conditional logic, the survey questions can be personalized based on user responses.

Another feature of WPForms arms you with a feature to share the poll results on your website or your followers in social media. That’s a really nice way to create awareness and reach the masses with just one form.

Login and Registration Form

Now if you are into the ecommerce business, social media platform, video/audio uploading, community centric platforms, or a website that intends to cater specially to its members, you will definitely need your customers to sign in and register.

WPForms answers your call again. Create a form with just dragging and dropping the required fields and yes, such a contact form can be embedded anywhere in the website. Thus not forcing your users to go to the sign in page every time and portraying professionalism by caring about their time.

Payment Collection through the Form

Online shopping platform or a non-profit organization, the option to accept online payments via cards and virtual wallets is always a boon for the user and the service provider.

WPForms is integrated with PayPal and Stripe to facilitate payment. In case of selling merchandise, products or services online, the order page can be designed to make the customer see the their purchases and a classic way to gain their trust and loyalty to your brand.

Post/Comment Submission Form

If your website caters to like-minded people using the internet to speak about common concerns, events, places, activities, etc., then the ‘Post Submission Addon’ fills the shoes for this specific purpose. With this addon, you can accept articles, contents, reviews, testimonials, feedback from your user.

All of the above without having to provide backend access to each and every user. The content will be kept as pending in your post editor and after reviewing the post, you can publish the same.

Form Types

More Features Available In the Upgraded Version

With the best WP Form plugin, comes the best of features.

  • Custom captcha – This option is a good way to fight spam. You can put random math questions or your own questions. That way you can rest assured that your website if a complete spam-free zone.
  • Geolocation– It helps you to store location data of your users and visitors along with their form entry.
  • Signature – This is yet another brilliant feature that you the plugin offers. It allows you facilitate your users to sign their initiates via the mouse or touchpad. Now that’s a lovely way to personalize user experience.
  • Instant notifications – You also get to trace and respond to all the leads that come your way. This sets the impression that you are actively engaged and involved with your business.
  • Smart Form Confirmation – With this one you can display a custom message or take your users to a custom thank you page of your website. That is really sweet because these little gestures means a lot when you are doing business.
  • Form Locker – This helps you manage form access rules, permissions and controls via password protection, date/time limit to form expiry, limit access to specific users and more. In other words it is kind of a protection layer for your form to avoid spammers and hackers.
  • Form Abandonment – It is a sleek feature to capture the data from all the incomplete forms.
  • Offline Forms – This feature comes in handy in cases when the internet connectivity is intermittent as it allows the users to submit their forms when the internet is restored.
  • SEO – This is now a part and parcel for every website that comes up in the web. I mean, who would create a website and not want it to be found? So even the WPForms is SEO Optimized to gradually reach the masses in a healthy way.

How to Install WPForms In WordPress

Now that I have taken you through the exciting features that this plugin has to offer, let me give you a tutorial on how to install this plugin and get started building your forms.

If you have been using WordPress for a while I am assuming that you are already familiar with the process of installing a plugin. The process is exactly the same in this case too. Here’s how you do it.

Go to the Admin Panel of your website and click on plugins>Add New and type “wpforms” in the search box.

Click on Install and then activate button for the plugin to start working.

wpforms review

Once the installation is done, with the installation you will see a screen with an introductory greeting.

There is a path to a very extensive guide which you can use to know the plugin inside out.

Creating your First Form With WPForms

To the left of your admin panel, you will see different options that lets you create your first form. Click on the Add New option as in the image below.

wpforms review

The basic plugin (WPForms Lite) is free which gives you 3 inbuilt templates ie. Simple Contact From, Newsletter Signup Form, Suggestion Form and the option to create a blank form.

To start with, click on the ‘Simple Contact Form’ template. Adding and removing fields from the form is just drag and drop till you find the look of the form that matches your taste.

You can follow the Gif below to understand how you can build your form.

wpforms review

When you are done creating the form click on the ‘Save’ option to save your first creation. Now on your left hand side, you will see several options like Setup, Fields, Marketing etc. go back to your admin panel and click on Settings>Notifications.

wpforms review

Add your website or brand email in the ‘From Email’ section and ensure that the website is configured to an authorized service provider to send email from the mentioned email address.

wpforms review

The concluding step is to embed the form in the website or WordPress Pages. Click on the ‘’Embed” button and copy the shortcode and paste the shortcode in your desired page’s text editor.

That was not at all difficult, was it?

Displaying Your First Form On your Website

Now that you are all ready with your first form created with the WPForms, its time you display it on your website. So let’s get started.

To be truthful, there are several ways to show your form on your website. So the method you want to choose depends on where on your site do you want your form to reflect. Let’s check out the different ways of doing it.

Displaying your Form On A WordPress Page

To make your form appear on one of your page, start by creating a New Page. Now click on the Add Form button above the page editor to add a form onto your page.

wpforms review

A new popup will now show up under the name Insert Form. Click on the drop down menu and select the form that you have already created.

wpforms review

As soon as you select the form, you will notice a shortcode appear on your editor. If you publish the page, your Form will automatically go live on your website. Here is an example of the live form.

wpforms review

Displaying Your Form In The Widget Of your WordPress Site

If you ever think of adding the form to your widget for example to the footer or the sidebar of your website, then you will have to follow this process.

Start by going to your admin panel. Now on the left side of your panel click on Appearance>Widget. Now scroll down to find the WPForms widget.

wpforms review

In the next step, you will have to drag and drop the WPForms widget to a widget location of your choice. This can be any place where you want your form to show up. When that is done, you are ready to click on the WPForms widget to select your form. Finally, click on the Save option not to loose your settings.

Here’s an exampe of the live form in your widget.

wpforms review

Yay! Your first form has been successfully created and displayed in your website. That was easy right!

Customizing the Submit Button Text

WPForms also offers you with the choice to style your submit button.Here’s exactly how you can do it.

To change the text in your submit button, you will first have to go to the Form Builder>Settings>General.

wpforms review

Here you will see two different fields.

Submit Button Text: This is the text displayed on the button when it hasn’t been clicked yet

Submit Button Processing Text: It is the text shown after the user clicks this button, but before the confirmation is shown to the user

Just go ahead and make the necessary changes that you want in your buttons. Do not forget to save your changes.

Importing Forms from Other Plugins

Sometimes you might not want to redesign a new Contact Form because you are too fond of the one you were using before installing this plugin. So what do you do if you want the exact same one on your website.

Well, the answer is simple. If you are using a different form such as Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms,WP Forms has a feature using which you can import your forms from the above mentioned plugins to WPForms.

And this step is not a complicated one. You can easily do it within a few minutes. Let see how to do it. To import your pre-built form you will have to first start by visiting your admin panel.

Now under WPForms click on the Tools option. The following page will show up on your screen.

wpforms review

Now click on the drop down arrow under the Import From Other Form Plugins option. Now select the form plugin that you have used previously to design your favourite contact Form. Once done Click on the Import button.

And that’s it. Your form is ready to be used.

Securing Your Form With A Captcha

WPForms lets you protect your form and save them from all sorts of spammers and hackers. To use this facility you will first have to install and activate the  install and activate the Custom Captcha addon.

Once that is done, go to the form builder. Here you will find the Captcha option added to the builder.

wpforms review

Now to create this field in your form you will have to drag and drop it in the preview panel of your form builder. This field will pop up everytime your user shows up, just so that the site receives the maximum protection.

You can click on the field in the form preview panel to open up its Field Options, if you want to edit the field. Under this you will have the options to change your fields.

wpforms review

Under the Type field, you will have two different options. One is the Math captcha and the other is the Question and Answer captcha. You can choose either one that you want to show up to your users or visitors.

The Math captcha will generate random math questions for your users. This can be anything – addition, subtraction, and multiplication questions for your user to answer. These are not any complicated questions just simple ones to ensure its a human and not any spam bots.

wpforms review

The Question and Answer type on the other hand will pose a question for the user to answer. These are simple questions and generally every normal and literate human being can answer them.

wpforms review

Once you choose Question and Answer under the Type field, add your question in the first field and the preferred answer below that. Something simple like this.

If you’d like, you can add additional pairs of question and answers. The Custom Captcha field will display a random question from these sets of question and answer pairs every time your page is loaded or refreshed.

This is to doubly ensure that your site is safe from all unwanted threats.

WPForms Pricing

WPforms have a range of pricing options if you decide to upgrade from the free “Lite” version, take a look below and select the version which contains the features you need.

WPForms Pricing

  • Basic Package – At $39 a year, you get license to a single site, spam protection, advanced fields, unlimited forms and entries, multipage forms, conditional logic and one year each for downloads, support and updates. The features here are impressive and specifically designed for those venturing into the website making business or making their own website for the first time.
  • Plus Package – At $99 per year, you get everything that basic has to offer such as unlimited forms and entries, spam protection, conditional logic, one year each for updates, support and downloads. Now let’s look at the additional offerings. This package integrates the plugin to MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse and Campaign Monitor. Along with this you get license to 3 sites. It does look like an amazing deal for people looking for specific data and thus need a purely business driven user interaction form.
  • Pro Package – The best package claimed by a vast majority of users worldwide. Looking at what it has to offer, I barely doubt them. So you shell you $199 for one year and you get the entire combination of Basic and Plus. Added to that, you also get PayPal and Stripe integration, user registration, survey and poll templates, zapier integration, license to 20 sites. 20 sites! Wow! Oh I have more to mention here. Exclusive features such as Form locker, form abandonment, offline forms, priority support and bonus form templates, signature, post submission and geolocation. For the money asked, I really don’t find it to be a bad deal. This is the big brother of WP forms packages and you wish to dedicate yourself towards the constant growth of your website and generate fantastic user feedback, reviews, testimonials, support and queries, your search stops here.
  • Elite Package – This is designed primarily for thorough professional developers and agencies. Priced at $299 for one year, it has everything that Pro has to offer. But since this package is for a different category of WordPress theme users, it comes with Client management, Premium WordPress Multisite support and unlimited site license. You heard that right, unlimited sites. I am not shocked to hear this because this package is not for one website guy like me. This is for the big players and it is the big daddy of all the packages.

Conclusion

WPForms has been created by one of the best teams in the WordPress space so you can rest assured that it has been coded well and will have amazing support behind it should you run into any problems. WPForms is powerful and but also very easy to use, even for complete beginners.

It’s good that there is a range of different payment plans so you can choose the one you need without overpaying for the features that you would never use. The lite version is also great if you just need a simple contact form solution for your personal site.

WPForms hasn’t been around as long as other contact form plugins like Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms but it certainly holds up against them and should be able to accomplish most of your needs out of the box,

I hope this review has been insightful to the readers and everyone out there searching for a form builder that is as smooth as butter.

Visit WPForms

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Bloom Plugin Review: A Great Optin Plugin by ElegantThemes https://alienwp.com/bloom-plugin-review/ Sat, 08 Feb 2020 05:18:18 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=16298 Do you want to build a successful WordPress-Based website, online store, or a personal blog? If yes, then growing your email list should be top on your list of priorities. It’s something that is often overlooked or “put on the back-burner” in pursuit of other activities but it really shouldn’t be. Growing a mailing list from day one allows you to start building relationships with your website visitors and customers and allows you to reach them any time you choose. Social media messages and other forms of communication are easily overlooked or will not even be shown to your customers unless you pay, with email you can put your message in front of the customer in a more personal way.

To get started, an email optin form plugin presents the best way to start building your list. If you are a WordPress user, you will are spoilt for choice when picking your email optin form plugin. The market has a plethora of products ranging from basic free products to premium options. As a result, it can be a daunting task to identify the most suitable. But here’s the kicker: Elegant Themes has a ground-breaking email optin form plugin called the Bloom plugin.

We have rigorously scrutinized the Bloom plugin, and have compiled this extensive review to help you make an informed decision. We’ll discuss its features and help you find out whether this plugin is worth your investment.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Visit the Bloom Plugin

What is the Bloom Plugin?

Bloom is an innovative email optin and lead generation plugin designed by Elegant Themes for WordPress users. If you have any familiarity with the WordPress theme and plugin space, you need no introduction to who Elegant Themes are.

Elegant Themes is a renowned developer of fantastic WordPress plugins and themes. Every time they create a product, it turns out to be high quality and well designed. Just look at how they disrupted the page builder space with Divi Builder Plugin and the social sharing space with the outstanding Monarch plugin.

Elegant Themes has remained true to the game with the Bloom plugin, it’s a testament to the developer’s unique identity and unmatched reputation for quality in the WordPress Themes and plugin world.

Having been in the space for over 10 years, Elegant Themes has developed 87 premium themes and 5 highly innovative plugins. And with over half a million customers, this company is one of the largest in WordPress.

The Bloom plugin is designed with the goal of helping WordPress website owners gain more email subscribers. It helps you turn your visitors into loyal customers and enables you to send highly targeted content.

To put it simply: Bloom Plugin is built to help encourage your website’s visitors to join your mailing list, which then allows you to keep in contact with them more easily and convert them to paying customers or just broadcast your updates and news.

Why Use Bloom Plugin?

Email remains of the oldest and best methods of digital communication. The channel grew out of the early internet wave, and today is still one of the most effective ways to keep in touch with people.

Email marketers are building incredible business cases using this medium thanks to its ease of use and high ROI. Email marketing is considered one of the most effective marketing techniques by approximately 64% of companies. It’s reported that email marketing has an average Return on Investment (ROI) of $38 for every dollar spent. This translates to return on investment (ROI) of 3800% which is extraordinary.

To tap into the full potential of email marketing, you will need to grow your mailing list. Collecting the emails of your target audience or potential customers is important as it enables you to directly reach out to your audience any time you choose. The simplest way to collect emails is displaying an email optin box on your website, online store, or personal blog.

About Bloom

The purpose of the Bloom plugin is to offer targeted display settings, great design options, and other important functionality. The plugin enables you to create and display nice looking email optin forms on your website. When website visitors enter their email address & relevant contact information, the details are sent to your marketing service or email newsletter.

Once the visitor joins the list you can quickly send them personalized messages at will to promote new products, motivate them to visit your website regularly or notify them about exclusive deals and sales. This streamlines email marketing and makes it easy to turn first-time visitors into loyal customers to boost your website’s conversions.

Bloom Plugin Features

The power of having a big email list cannot be underestimated. However, the entire process of building the list is easier said than done. The trick to its success lies in how your email optin form works.

In the modern world, implementing annoying popups on your website can be precarious and can cause more harm then good. This is because visitors these days are tired of being bombarded with marketing material, optins, GDPR notifications and so on. Bloom offers a range of different options so you can pick the one that will suit your audience the best.

This plugin comes with an impressive suite of features that give you complete control over the placement and behaviour of your optin form.

Bloom Plugin Features

Optin Form Display Types

Different websites, blogs, posts, and pages may require different types of optin form display and location. Bloom plugin offers six form display types which are designed to fit your choice of targeting for your audience.

Once you activate the plugin, and visit it’s “Settings” page you will see the choices so you can get started building your first optin.

Create an Optin

The display types not only enhance the visitor’s exposure but also increase chances of the visitor signing up. The display types include:

  • PopUp – This display option allows you to create optin popups that are activated by time delays, after purchase or customer comment, or when a visitor reaches the end of a post or a page.
  • Fly-In – This option is similar to the automatic optin popups. It offers 10 fly-in animations, 6 automatic triggers, and can be located on the lower right or left of the screen.
  • Inline – Inline optin forms is an excellent option for well-versed WordPress users. This display type allows for shortcodes placement anywhere within the content. It can also be customized to display an optin form below every page and post. The best thing is that there is no limitation to the number of optin forms you can create using this option.
  • Below Content  – This optin form presents the best way to attract the attention of the most engaged readers. As its name suggests, the optin form is displayed below the page content. This makes it an ideal option for blog posts and content-rich pages.
  • Widget Area – This option allows you to display an optin box in the footers and sidebars. You can create as many optin forms as you want and add them to all the widget areas on your site.
  • Locked Content – This display option offers the best way to confine premium content. It allows you to create shortcodes to lock content and ensures it’s only accessible to loyal customers. Better still, it enables content to conform to SEO best practices, making it visible to search engines.

Once you choose your optin type, you will then have to give it a name and choose a Form Integration which is your mailing list provider, such as Mailchimp, SendinBlue etc.

Optin Setup

Multiple Form Templates

Bloom offers 115 pre-made optin form templates. The plugin offers a wide selection of form templates that allow you to create great looking optin forms in seconds. The comprehensive suite of templates delivers options with numerous designs and styles, ensuring that there is a design of choice for everyone. If you don’t find a design of your liking, also have the option of using custom CSS to tailor an existing design to suit your style.

At this point, you should choose a suitable template as a starting point for your optin.

Choose a Template

Design Your Optin Form

Once you have chosen a template as a starting point, you can begin editing the settings to suit your needs. On this page you can set the title, message, upload an image, choose fonts and colors and other design choices.

Optin Design

Customization Options

The plugin offers endless possibilities for modifying built-in settings to create unique optin forms. Elements such as background color, text color, op-tin form title, animation effects, fonts, image & form description, border style, and more can be manipulated with ease.

Let’s look at some of the customization options:

Optin Styles

In addition, Bloom gives you complete control over the colors of the most critical elements of your form. It provides unlimited color options allowing you to choose any color to compliments your design and theme color. Every aspect of the form such as form filed, edge, border, and text content options can be defined using a color of choice.

Optin Colors

Bloom plugin allows you to add an image to your subscription form. The image can be set to appear to the right, left, above or below the content in your optin form.

Bloom Display Settings

Once you have made your design choices, the next stage is to set the “Display Options” which governs the behavior of your optin form. For this demo we created a popup optin so you will see options for when it should load. You can control whether it is animated, a loading delay and other options such as should it display after scrolling, commenting, on click and so on.

Display Settings

You can also select the optin form to display on homepage, archives, blog page, post, page, tags, and/or specific categories:

Display On

Better still, the optin form can be set to display or not to show on individual pages and posts:

That’s not all: Bloom allows you to create optin forms and modify them to display on specific pages and posts to suit your target audience. By targeting specific visitors, it becomes easy to send personalized messages that are geared toward increasing the conversion rates.

Automatic Triggers

This arguably the most critical feature of any email optin plugin. Triggers determine when the optin form will popup or fly-in. No single trigger is a one-size-fits-all, simply because different websites, pages, and even posts serve different purposes. Bloom is designed with this in mind, and it delivers a number of triggers that are activated by a specific visitor’s action. Bloom triggers include:

  • Time Delay – The optin form is displayed after a visitor spends a stipulated number of seconds or minutes on a page or post. This option helps you desist from displaying the optin form immediately after the visitor lands on your website. The trigger time should be long enough such that only the customers who find your content useful will get the opportunity to subscribe.
  • Bottom of the post – This option is popular with well-versed bloggers. As the name suggests, the optin form is displayed when the visitor reaches the end of the post.
  • After scrolling – Nowadays, it’s easy to determine the percentage of a page scrolled by a visitor. This enables you to identify if the visitor finds your content useful and interesting. The After scrolling trigger, allows you to display the optin form to a visitor who deems your content helpful.
  • After commenting – A visitor can only comment on a post only if he/she is engaged. That means, if you set the optin form to display every time a visitors comments on the post, you will get customers who can easily convert.
  • After purchase – This an ideal option for e-commerce entrepreneurs. If you own an online shop, this trigger can be tremendously useful. The trigger allows you to set the optin form to display immediately after the customer checks out. This offers you an excellent opportunity to market other relevant products to increase your revenue.

The Bloom Dashboard

Once you have created your first optin, you can make it “Active” and it will appear in your settings dashboard where you can view statistics such as Impressions, Conversion & Conversion rate.

Active Optins

With a click of a button you can:

  • Access all Bloom settings
  • Enable automatic updates
  • View optin statistics (such as conversion rates)
  • Manage your accounts
  • Import/export Bloom settings
  • View active and inactive optins

If you visit your website now, you will see your optin is in place.

Optin Live

A/B testing

It’s nice to remember that you are installing Bloom plugin to increase your conversion rate. The best way to enhance your conversion rate is to test, fine-tune, and refine your optin campaigns persistently. Implementing a test system is a great way of keeping track of the progress of your optin forms’ performance. Luckily, Bloom plugin comes with built-in A/B split testing which is very easy to setup.

A/B testing enables you to perform a side-by-side comparison of different variations of optin form to pinpoint the most effective version. Starting an A/B test is easy. Navigate to your WP dashboard, click Plugins and select Bloom> Options > optin Forms, then click A/B testing. This creates a new version of the current optin form that you can easily tweak. Make one change at a time to avoid complicating things.

A/B Testing

Once you have made the necessary changes, click Start test. Bloom will automatically display the two variations of the optin form to your visitors. Once the set time has elapsed and you feel the information gathered is enough to make a decision, click End & Pick Winner. This will give you an analysis that will help you determine which of the optin form is effective. The whole process is very intuitive and easy and is something you can do quite often to improve performance.

Detailed Statistics

You cannot improve what you don’t measure! But it turns out measuring is not a walk in the park, especially if the right data is unavailable.

Bloom plugin offers useful performance statistics for all the active optin forms. It consolidates the data on a robust stats dashboard, providing real-time updates to keep you informed. The statistics dashboard presents data in an easy to read and understand manner. It displays the impression data, conversion data, and conversion rate for all the active email optin forms.

Optin Stats

In addition, you can view the overall growth statistics, best-performing pages, and a graph for new signup in the last 12 months. These statistics enable you to derive soft, intuitive insights that aid your decision-making.

What is even more interesting is that you can import and export Bloom data. The plugin permits you to export or import critical data from a site to the other. This feature aids site migration and presents an effective way to backup Bloom data frequently.

Email Marketing Integrations

Integration with different mailing list platforms is essential as that is where you will be storing your list and sending out different campaigns. We won’t be going into detail here about the different platforms as that’s outside the scope of this article.

Bloom has integrations with most of the top providers, 16 in total :

  • AWeber
  • MailChimp
  • Campaign Monitor
  • Constant Contact
  • Mad Mimi
  • Infusionsoft
  • iContact
  • Get Response
  • Mail Poet
  • Feedblitz
  • Sendinblue
  • Ontraport
  • Emma
  • Salesforce
  • HubSpot
  • Active campaign

Email Integrations

Another bonus is being able to use different mailing list providers within the same site, so you can use different ones for different optins, popups and so on. All you need to do to add a provider is enter their API details when creating a new optin. You can then view your providers under the “Mail Accounts” link the Bloom menu where you can see the different lists at that provider and view number of subscribers and your growth rate for each list.

Mailing List Providers

What Makes Bloom Plugin Unique?

Bloom is an awesome email optin plugin. It’s an essential tool that can help you entice more visitors to sign up to your newsletter or email list. Bloom is unique, and this attribute is amplified by the following aspects:

  • Prebuilt templates design – Compared to other superb optin plugins such as OptinMonster, Bloom’s prebuilt templates design is excellent. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and our position is influenced by the designs we prefer. That said, Bloom templates’ designs are clean and colorful and look more professional than those of OptinMonster. Let’s be specific: the prebuilt templates for OptinMonster are not terrible. However, they are a bit dated compared to those for Bloom. For that reason, you have to give the award to Elegant Themes for providing elegant templates.
  • Intuitive Dashboard – If you are an admirer of Elegant Themes’ products, you may have noticed they feature well designed dashboards. The Bloom plugin is no exception. This optin plugin features a unified dashboard that offers easy access to vital statistics, email provider accounts, and optin forms. Unlike OptinMonster, Bloom dashboard provides detailed statistics that include data obtained from your email marketing service. You don’t have to separately check details such as subscriber’s data, conversion rate, and subscriber growth.
  • Straightforward Pricing – Moreover, Bloom plugin offers an all-inclusive pricing plan. It allows you to get all the features in one-off price plan. This is a significant benefit since, with other Plugins like OptinMonster, you will have to incur extra cost to access certain features.
  • Highly targeted display setting – Another good attribute of Bloom is its highly targeted display settings. The plugin allows you to select or exclude individual pages and post for form display. It also provides options to display personalized optin forms with unique offers based on visitor interaction and location.

Factors to consider before installing Bloom Plugin

Although Bloom offers a near perfect suite of features, it falls short in some areas. Therefore, if you have decided to install Bloom plugin, consider how these drawbacks will impact its performance on your website. Some of the factors to consider include:

Bloom Has No WYSIWYG Editor

Bloom offers a host of form customization options. It provides numerous ways to edit the font, font color, Background color, corners, align content, borders, and more. Even though these options are sufficient for most of the editing tasks, the lack of a WYSIWYG editor something we feel is missing.

It’s competitors such as OptinMonster provides an intuitive WYSIWYG editor that delivers more formatting options. Besides, with the editor, you don’t have to press the preview button to see the changes made. Every modification made, happens in real-time, which makes it easy to know when the desired results are achieved. Unfortunately, this cannot be accomplished with Bloom, and we hope they will introduce this powerful features in the near future.

No Exit Intent Trigger

Also, unlike other popular optin plugins like OptinMonster, Bloom doesn’t implement exit intent technology. For this reason, you cannot set your email optin forms to popup or fly-in based upon visitor’s exit intent. This is a drawback, but Bloom offers a trigger option that can be customized to imitate exit intent. However, the option cannot deliver the same effect as the exit intent technology used in OptinMonster.

Bloom Plugin Pricing ( With Our Deal )

Elegant Themes offers an interesting pricing structure. None of their products, including Bloom Plugin, are sold individually. To access the optin plugin, you must subscribe to Elegant Themes’ membership plan. There are two membership plans:

  1. Yearly Access @ $89/year
  2. Lifetime Access @ $249/one time

This seems to be fair pricing for what you get with an Elegant Themes membership, access to top quality themes including their flagship Divi theme plus their plugins, Bloom, Monarch and the Divi builder.

Luckily, AlienWP also has access to a special deal which will save you 20% off the purchase price of a membership, simply follow this link or visit our Elegant Themes Coupon code page to access the deal.

With our deal discount you can get the yearly access for $70.

Elegant Themes Deal

Conclusion

Bloom plugin is an excellent plugin which we have come to expect from ElegantThemes, it’s super easy to setup and you should be able to create your first optin in no time at all. The plugin is in competition with other systems like OptinMonster and Thrive Leads and holds up very well. It doesn’t have quite as many options as those two, but we feel it represents better value for money.

Its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use dashboard should be familar to most users, even complete beginners who haven’t used an optin plugin before.

The amount of premade templates is impressive, beating that of their competitors and they are all nicely designed so you should be able to tweak them to suit your website’s theme and color scheme quite easily.

The A/B Testing option is also simple to setup and you should start seeing results right away. We recommend this is an area you spend some time on and study the results as even simple things like a color change or different font choice can affect your signup rates.

It’s let down slightly by lack of a WYSIWYG editor that is present in other plugins like this, but with a little trial and error you should be able to get great results anyway.

If you are in the market for an easy to use and effective optin plugin for your site, then we highly recommend you check out Bloom.

Visit the Bloom Plugin

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Weglot Review: Manual & Automatic Translations for your WordPress Site https://alienwp.com/weglot-review/ Fri, 01 Feb 2019 09:10:35 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=15020 Creating a multilingual website is a great way to reach a wider audience and expand your business into new markets. Once your business reaches a certain point in your original language, you may find yourself wanting to branch out and reach a wider range of customers. You can always tackle new niches or become more aggressive in the way you approach advertising and marketing. A simpler approach, however, may be to translate your entire site into another language and target customers in a new region. Weglot is an application that helps you do just that.

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

Weglot

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

Visit WeGlot

WeGlot Plugin Overview

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

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

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

Let’s get into the review.

Installation & Setup

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

Install Weglot

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

Weglot - API Key

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

Weglot - Main Configuration

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

Anissa - Weglot - French

Let’s go over the settings this plugin offers.

Configuring the Plugin’s Settings

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

  • Language Button Appearance
  • Language Button Position
  • Translation Exclusion

Let’s start with the first section.

Language Button Appearance

Weglot - Language Button Appearance

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

Weglot - Default Language Button

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

Weglot - Language Button Appearance

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

Weglot - Language Button Appearance

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

Weglot - Language Button Appearance

Let’s move on.

Language Button Position

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

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

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

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

Weglot Translate Widget

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

Weglot Shortcode

Let’s go over the last set of settings.

Translation Exclusion

Weglot - Translation Exclusion

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

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

Weglot - Edit My Translations

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

Managing Translations with the Weglot Dashboard

Weglot Dashboard

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

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

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

Let’s talk about a few of these sections.

Translations List

Weglot - Translations List

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

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

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

Visual Editor

Weglot - Visual Editor

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

Translation Tools

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

Weglot - Translation Exceptions

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

Professional Translations

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

Weglot - Shopping Cart

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

Statistics

Weglot - Statistics

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

WeGlot Pricing

Weglot - Pricing

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

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

There are three major differences between these plans:

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

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

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

Plans & Support

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

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

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

Weglot offers three levels of support:

  • Basic
  • Premium
  • Dedicated

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Visit WeGlot

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Best Free WordPress Invoice Plugins 2019 https://alienwp.com/best-wordpress-invoice-plugins/ Wed, 17 Jan 2018 05:36:11 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=8319 If you work as a freelancer online, one of the most important aspects for managing your finances is keeping your invoices and customer payments in order. There are a number of commercial apps and systems you can use to do this, however they will charge you a monthly fee or take a cut of your payments. Chances are you already work with WordPress or know how it works, there are a number of free plugins you can use to turn WordPress into a customer invoicing system.

A good invoicing system should include features like client management, PDF invoices, reporting, recurring billing, discounts, estimates and so on. It should be easy to use for you so you can setup it once and then integrate it easily into your working life. It also needs to be easy for the client with clear information on what they are being billed for and above all, it should display their payment options nice and clearly so you can get paid as soon as possible.

In this post we have gathered together the best Free WordPress invoice plugins, these will help you keep your clients in order and make sure you get paid on time.

Sliced Invoices

A flexible, well-supported, and easy-to-use WordPress invoicing plugin to create professional quotes and invoices that clients can pay for online. Sliced Invoices is an invoicing system that is easy to use but at the same time comes packed with features to help make your quoting and invoicing a breeze.

The basic plugin is free to download and they also sell a number of paid extensions for adding more functionality. Extensions include things like Tax, Client Area, Discounts and Partial Payments, PDF Invoices, Different payment processors and so on. Free plugins with add-on modules like this tend to work well as you are only paying for the exact extra functionality that you need. They also offer bundle deals which include a number of the extensions and will save you money from purchasing them separately.

  • Free Plugin with Paid Extensions

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More Info WordPress Hosting

Sprout Invoices

Premium WordPress Invoicing Plugin. Take control of your invoicing! Fully customizable, no limits, and features you can’t get anywhere else. Reduce the time spent getting paid. Improve your business workflow with automated tasks for fielding project requests, estimating projects & getting paid.

Sprout Invoices has a free version, a pro version and also offers a number of paid extensions.

  • Free Plugin with Pro version and Paid Extensions

3

More Info WordPress Hosting

WP Invoice

WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients. Ideal for web developers, SEO consultants, general contractors, or anyone with a WordPress blog and clients to bill. The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information.

  • Free Plugin with Paid Extensions

2

More Info WordPress Hosting

Invoice King

Invoice King Pro makes creating and sending your invoices simple. The invoice creation interface gives you full control over every word on your invoice. Choose a different theme to give your invoices the look, style and layout that you want.

  • Free Plugin with Paid Extensions

4

More Info WordPress Hosting

Invoiced WP

The Most effective way to Get Paid by your clients. Rather that using a spreadsheet or word processor sent through to get your invoices to your customers Invoiced WP makes the creation of invoices faster and easier. Send it directly from your webiste and get paid.

  • Free Plugin

5

More Info WordPress Hosting

Sumo Invoices

SUMO Invoices is a Complete WooCommerce Invoicing System. It supports the PDF Invoice and PDF Proforma Invoice. SUMO Invoices is highly customizable and is a Must Have WooCommerce Plugin.

  • Paid Plugin $22

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Quip Invoices

Quip Invoices is a complete invoicing solution built directly into your WordPress website. Create and send invoices, accept credit card payments using Stripe or Paypal, store client information and track your sales with Quip Invoices.

  • Paid Plugin $26

7

More Info & WordPress Hosting

WP Pro Invoicing System

The “WP PRO Invoicing System” WordPress Plugin is a standalone plugin that allows you to create invoices on your WordPress site. It has many powerful features to handle invoices on your website. You can easily Create/ Edit/ Manage/ Export/ Send/ Track/ Report/ … your invoices in just a few clicks.

  • Paid Plugin $29

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More Info & WordPress Hosting

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How to Improve the WordPress Search Function on Your Site https://alienwp.com/improve-wordpress-search/ Thu, 21 Dec 2017 11:30:24 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=14584 WordPress search, in past and present, is notorious for being unreliable. It’s meant to make it easy for users to find what they need on your site, but it’s not always accurate. Sometimes it lists posts and pages it thinks are related to your search term but lists them in chronological order, so you aren’t sure which post is most relevant. Other times it doesn’t seem to understand what you’re searching for at all.

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

A History of WordPress Search

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

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

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

8 Best WordPress Search Plugins

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

SearchWP

SearchWP WordPress Plugin

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

Pricing for SearchWP starts at $79/year.

Download

Relevanssi

Relevanassi WordPress Plugin

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

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

Download

Search Everything

Search Everything WordPress Plugin

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

Search Everything is available for free.

Download

Ajax Search Pro

Ajax Search Pro WordPress Plugin

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

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

Download

WPSOLR

WPSOLR WordPress Plugin

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

Pricing for this plugin starts at €20/month.

Download

Better Search

Better Search WordPress Plugin

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

Better Search is a free plugin.

Download

Dave’s WordPress Live Search

Dave's WordPress Live Search WordPress Plugin

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

This plugin is available free of charge.

Download

Search & Filter

Search & Filter WordPress Plugin

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

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

Download

Improving WordPress Search with Taxonomies & Menus

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

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

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

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

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

WordPress Menus

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

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

Here are a few plugins:

Let’s wrap this post up.

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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Best WordPress Email List Building Plugins 2019 https://alienwp.com/email-list-building-plugins/ Thu, 28 Sep 2017 05:51:25 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=12870 Building an email list is an important part of conducting business online, every business or blogger who wants to engage with their readers or customers should start to build a mailing list at the earliest opportunity they can. By building a large, engaged email list you can enable your business to grow faster, acquire more sales, drive traffic to your latest content or special offers and also hedge against downturns in traffic due to search engine changes or seasonal downturns.

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.

Features:

  • Exit Intent detection feature allows you to trigger popups when the user is about to exit your website. Helps a lot with cart abandonment.
  • A/B Split Testing allows you to split test your forms and constantly improve your conversion rate.
  • Popup, Slide-in, After Post, Canvas and many more types of opt-in forms available.
  • Supports most of the popular Email Marketing platforms including MailChimp, GetResponse, Aweber and Constant Contact.
  • Advanced Display Rules to help you create highly targeted opt-in forms. You can choose to display your forms only when someone clicks a link, is about to leave the page or has spent a specific number of seconds on the page.

Price: Starts at $19/month for one site.

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Over a hundred beautiful templates to choose from.
  • Multiple opt-in form types available including fly-in, popup, in-line forms, after content, sidebar widget, and content locker.
  • Multiple display triggers including Timed Delay, Bottom of Post, After Scrolling, After Commenting, After Purchasing, and After Inactivity.
  • Integration support for major email marketing software including MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Aweber, GetResponse, iContact, OntraPort, SendInBlue, and ActiveCampaign.
  • Content Locker opt-in form allows you to lock premium content only for subscribers. Locked content can only be viewed once the user subscribes to your email list.

Price: $89/year for access to all plugins and themes with unlimited website usage.

We have written a full indepth review of Bloom here.

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Lightbox Popup
  • Notification Bar
  • Slide-in
  • Sidebar Widget
  • Before / After Post
  • Premium Themes & Templates
  • Unlimited Optins
  • Page-Level Targetting
  • User-Base Targetting
  • New Post Notifications
  • Email Digests

Price: $99 Per year for unlimited websites

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Over 50 beautiful templates to choose from.
  • An easy-to-use drag and drop editor to help you create high-converting opt-in forms within seconds.
  • A/B Split Testing to help you constantly improve your conversion rate. Unlike most other plugins on this list, Thrive Leads allows you to split test not only different form variations but also different form types.
  • Integration support for all major Email Marketing Services including MailChimp, Active Campaign, Constant Contact, GetResponse, ConvertKit, and Drip.

Price: For just $67 you will get 1 Year of Support and Lifetime free updates for one site.

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Offers integration for most of the popular Email Marketing Services including Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp, and ConvertKit.
  • Multiple opt-in form types available including Popup, Welcome Bar and Welcome Mat.
  • A/B Split Testing.
  • Advanced Display Triggers to help you create highly targeted opt-in forms.

Price: A Limited Free plan available. Premium starts at $29/month for one site up to 5000 visitors when paid annually.

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Offers an easy drag and drop builder to help you build Landing Pages and Popups within seconds that match the branding of your website.
  • Over 160 field-tested high-converting Landing Page templates that you can sort by conversion rate.
  • Digital Asset Delivery helps you send your lead magnets (free Books, Reports, etc.) directly to the subscriber from LeadPages.
  • All plans allow Unlimited Pageviews, Leads, and Landing Pages.
  • Integration support for major Email Marketing Services including ActiveCampaign, Aweber, Constant Contact, Drip, ConvertKit, Emma, GetResponse, and MailChimp.
  • An easy-to-use drag and drop builder to help you create high-converting Landing Pages and Opt-in forms within seconds.

Price: Unlimited Leads, Traffic and Landing Pages for just $37/month.

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Integration support for major Email Marketing Services including MailChimp, Feedburner, GetResponse, Aweber, Drip, SendGrid and SendInBlue.
  • Allows you to create popups and in-line opt-in forms.
  • Offers page level targeting, popup animations and popup triggers like Exit Intent.

Price: Basic version available for free. The premium version is available for just $29, can be used on unlimited websites, and comes with one year of support and updates.

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Integration support for major email marketing service providers including Aweber, iContact, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, GetResponse, and Infusionsoft.
  • Multiple Popup types including Countdown Popups, Redirect Popups, and Exit-Intent Popups.
  • Comes with A/B Split Testing built-in to help you constantly improve the conversion rate of your popups.
  • Dozens of beautiful mobile-responsive templates available.

Price: Starts at $9/month for up to 30000 popup views, unlimited domains, and unlimited popups.

View Details

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.

Features:

  • Over 150 templates to choose from.
  • Easy-to-use drag and drop landing page builder allows you to create high-converting landing pages within seconds.
  • In-built A/B Testing support to help you constantly improve the conversion rate of your landing pages.
  • Integration support for most of the popular Email Marketing Service providers including MailChimp and Aweber. You can use custom HTML forms for services that don’t integrate directly with the plugin.

Price: Starts at $67 for one website and one year of support.

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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?

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Top 5 Drag & Drop WordPress Page Builder Plugins 2019 https://alienwp.com/drag-drop-page-builders/ Thu, 28 Sep 2017 05:32:45 +0000 https://alienwp.com/?p=12265 Here’s the deal: If you want to build a beautiful-looking page in WordPress, you either need to know how to code or know someone who does. Even if you know how to code, you will not want to waste hours building a page – This is where Drag and Drop page builders come to rescue.

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.

Pros:

  • A simple, user-friendly interface.
  • Access to more than 87 themes and 3+ other plugins that come with an Elegant Themes membership.
  • A relatively short learning curve.

Cons:

  • Not sold separately. You have to subscribe to the Elegant Themes membership to get this plugin.
  • Lacks some content modules available in other page builders.
  • No way to remove data from the database after removing the plugin.

Price: Included in the $89/year Elegant Themes Membership ( Use our ElegantThemes Coupon for Money off this )

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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.

Pros:

  • Beaver builder offers a built-in deep integration with WooCommerce allowing you to easily design storefront pages.
  • Developers can extend/customize the functionality by creating their own widgets or custom modules.

Cons:

  • Other page builders in this list offer more templates.
  • The page builder only works with pages and cannot be used to design posts.

Price: Starting from $99

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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.

Pros:

  • Comes with over 42 customizable widgets and support for widgets from other plugins on your site.
  • Offers over 20 pre-designed templates.
  • Free and open sources.

Cons:

  • Offers a lot of customization options and can be overwhelming for beginners.
  • Form widget only supports integration with MailChimp and MailPoet.

Price: Basic version available for Free. Pro version starts at $49/site

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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.

Pros:

  • A clean, beginner-friendly user interface.
  • Comes with over 20 useful modules.
  • Works with any post type and supports shortcodes from 3rd party plugins.

Cons:

  • To get the content modules that come built-in with all the other plugins in this list, you will have to buy a premium add-on bundle.
  • Unlike other page builders, Themify Builder displays content modules at the bottom of the screen.

Price: Comes free with all Themify themes, but can also be purchased separately for $39.

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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.

Pros:

  • Comes with support for 3rd Party WordPress Widgets.
  • Totally free and will always remain free.
  • Offers a history browser that allows you to easily undo your changes.

Cons:

  • Relatively basic when compared to the other plugins on this list.
  • A really small amount of widgest offered with the core plugin. You have to download a widget bundle to get the much needed functionality.

Price: Free

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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.

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