Jupiter v1.21: Introducing the New Jupiter X Control Panel

Jupiter v1.21 featured

We heard you! You told us what would make Jupiter X even more interesting – and listened. Now, we’re thrilled to unveil a whole new phenomenal change to Jupiter’s control panel in the new Jupiter v1.21. That’s where you can control the theme’s basic functionality, install templates and plugins, install updates, and much more. 

Now let’s dig into the exciting stuff.

The fast and stunning new UI 

Jupiter has always been the pioneer of the greatest user experience and user interface among the most popular WordPress themes. It was high time to give the Jupiter X control panel a facelift. The new look of the control panel in the Jupiter v1.21 is designed to deliver a more clear and straightforward experience while taking advantage of the entire screen to be more responsive and spacious. 

The new horizontal navigation helps to accommodate the new additions and features in a more accessible way. We have also made massive changes to the code to get rid of unnecessary components and reduced its weight to perform faster.

More accessible navigation and more spacious workplace are the key characteristics of new control panel user interface

Performance tips 

Jupiter X is designed to be fast. However, a WordPress theme can never guarantee your website performance to run at its peak because WordPress is an open platform that allows users to install plugins or modify pretty much everything. So there are other measures that you have to take to ensure your website is fast and performant.

The new Jupiter v1.21 control panel provides you with helpful recommendations to get your website running even faster. These tips include suggestions to install a cache plugin if you have not already or fix the faulty thing that is causing your website to run slow.  But that’s not the end of the story. From time to time, we’ll add new tips to enrich this feature even further. 

Site health

The new control panel is missioned to help beginner and intermediate WordPress users to run their website like a pro. That is why we introduced the all-new site health feature in the control panel dashboard. This is where you can get important information about your website issues. 

For example,  this website has run into trouble because there is a problem with the PHP modules. Normally it takes an advanced user to put in some time and figure this out but thanks to these new smart reports, everyone can immediately become informed about what exactly needs attention. 

These helpful reports usually provide links to the related documentation to teach you how to fix the issue step by step.

Jupiter v1.21

All new plugin section

Jupiter X is offered with tons of premium plugins bundled with it. This is amazing news for you to save hundreds of bucks and use the best plugins in the WordPress market for free. 
In the Jupiter v1.21’s new control panel, it is now much easier to review the bundled plugins and choose one with the new functionality driven approach. For example, we have presented the plugins with a description of what they do and how they can be helpful instead of writing just their names.

Jupiter v1.21 - plugin

Furthermore, once you click on any plugin thumbnail, you’ll be able to watch a short video about the plugin to make sure it’s what you’re looking for. 

Once you’ve decided to install the plugin all you need to do is to press the install and activate the button. This will install the plugin and activate it automatically to save you one extra step to activate it manually.   

Version control

Every WordPress update can be surprising and perhaps chaotic. So what if in case your website crashed after you updated Jupiter or a plugin, you could just roll back to the previous versions. Well, that’s now possible with the new control panel. 

We’re introducing a new section in the settings panel called “version control.” Just like the name suggests, it gives you full control to reinstall the previous versions of Jupiter X theme and all of its bundled plugins. All you need to do is select the version and press the reinstall button.

Jupiter v1.21 - version control

New ways to update Jupiter X

It’s important to keep your WordPress theme and plugins up to date. Add WordPress updates to the list and you’ll find yourself having to update quite a lot and regularly. Unfortunately, this process is not always that smooth and factionless. But this is now different with the new Jupiter X control panel.

You can now update everything about Jupiter in just one place. Previously you had to go through each plugin that needed to be updated but now even those plugin updates are being processed in the new updates section. With just the press of a button, you can update Jupiter X and all of its bundled plugins at once. 

Auto-update 

If you’re a freelancer or running a design agency using Jupiter X to power up your clients’ websites, you know how tedious it is to update each and every website when an update is released. 

With the new control panel, that changed too. Now you can automate the update process and save tons of time by enabling the new Auto-update feature. When this option is enabled, the Jupiter X theme and its plugins will be updated automatically, keeping everything fresh and updated at all times. 

License management is easy now

Licenses are important because Jupiter won’t work until you get a proper license, which can be purchased through the Envato marketplace. In the previous version of Jupiter, you weren’t able to view much info about your licenses in the control panel. You had to visit your dashboard in the Artbees portal if you wanted more information. Yes! That was a hefty process.

In the new control panel though, there’s a whole lot more you can do. You can see which email the current license is assigned to and how many days are remaining until your customer support expiration. In addition, you can click on the shortcut links to revoke, extend and manage your license from the Artbees portal.

Jupiter v1.21 - license

Other improvements

The more you dig into the new control panel, the more interesting you’ll find it. It’s filled with numerous small improvements and additions to deliver a pleasant experience. Here are some of the more notable ones:

  • A properly categorized section that includes links to Jupiter documentation
  • Major code improvements to make it lighter and function better 
  • Clearer ways to contact Jupiter X support      
  • Extended the native WordPress site health feature to check for theme’s issues and report them 
  • Reordered plugins based on the usage and requirements to reduce the time users spend finding the plugin they need
  • A better, clearer way to signal inactive plugins  
  • Extended white label feature to cover more sections of the theme 
  • Implemented more related helper links so users can learn about every setting in the control panel
  • A link to the customizer to change the global styling of the theme 

And the journey continues 

The Jupiter X control panel has gone under a major change so that you feel better working with it and save a lot of your precious time. That was a big mission for us at Artbees but that is far from the end. Apart from adding even more improvements to the control panel, we are working on some exciting additions to other areas of the theme to bring to you the most pleasant experience you can ever have working with a WordPress theme. 

Let us know what you think about Jupiter v1.21 and the recent control panel overhaul and stay tuned 🙂

How to Personalize Landing Pages in WordPress

personalize your WordPress website featured

It might surprise you to think about your website visitors like this: they’re not paying close attention to your landing page – or any of the components that make up the page. They’re probably not even paying much attention to your brand. What they want is something that will fulfil what they need and want at that particular moment in time. When they get to your landing page, they will only be focused on what they’re looking for. It’s likely these couple seconds are the most crucial point in the customer’s journey throughout your site. If you’re able to convey the right message, then your site’s visitors are more likely to stay on your page a bit longer. The goal here is to get them to explore your site more and click on your call-to-action button.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how you can personalize your landing page to boost both engagement and conversion. Then we’ll go on to discuss the essential elements to personalize landing pages in WordPress and how to automate the entire process.

What’s the point of personalizing your WordPress website?

Let’s face it: your site’s visitors are sophisticated. They have at least 10 years of experience on the internet being bombarded with ads and clickbait. Most of them at 81% assume that business will understand what they want and offer up solutions and services at the appropriate place and time. Your sophisticated visitors are likely to open up several search results in one go, look over them in just a couple of seconds and pick 1 or 2 results that they like the most.

If you have a cookie cutter landing page, then your visitor will be welcomed with an overly used message automated by general WordPress templates. And the visitors will exit the site as quickly as they arrived. 

Google places a lot of importance about the content of your landing page. In other words, the more relevant the content, the better the landing page ranks in search results. Providing customized products and services is the best way to convey to potential customers that you know what it is they’re looking for and their particular attributes and characteristics. Giving visitors what they want when they want it is likely to have a positive psychological effect on them, increasing the chances that they will engage and convert.

Good segmentation is the first step in personalizing your landing page

Personalization only works when it’s done right. And to do it properly, you’ll need to do the research and get your hands on the right marketing technology. If not, your personalization efforts might fall through, and you’ll end up with a landing page that’s worse than it simply being generic!

Before starting on the process of personalizing your WordPress website, you should first do your research. Part of this means finding various customer segments that are relevant for your business dependent upon what your aims are and what you expect from customers. It’s important to create a customer profile for crucial visitor types on your website. You can figure this out through market research and competition analysis, as well as your website funnels. The next step is to narrow your focus into customizing and tailoring your landing page for this segment. We’ve gone ahead and provided some samples to give you a better idea:

  • User phases: Is this a user visiting for the first time? A lead who has returned? Or a regular customer?  
  • Location-specific visitors:

Do visitors from a specific location carry more weight?

  • Source-specific visitors:

Or are visitors from a particular source (certain social media platform, website, etc) more important to you?

  • Particular campaigns:

Would you like to personalize the experience for users coming to your site from a particular marketing campaign (for example, using UTM parameters)?

  • Certain in-site activity:

Would you like to target users who have gone to certain pages on your website?

  • Visitors who display a particular behavior on your landing page:

Does it matter if they spend a certain amount of time on your page or if they are trying to leave your page?

  • Previous shopping history:

Would you like to target customers who already made a purchase of certain items on your website?  

  • Certain device:

Would you like to personalize the experience for users from a certain device such as a mobile phone or tablet?

Things to personalize on a landing page

Hot tip: not everything! When you’re looking to personalize your WordPress website, you should only look to customize the elements that will resonate with what your customers want. This is particularly important when considering that you have a short window of time in which to attract their attention. Here are some of the most vital elements to keep in mind:

Immediate content (images, texts, videos, among more)

Anything that a visitor could possibly see in the first couple of seconds after landing on your page could be personalized. This might include a greeting message, an image in the hero section or even an intro video.

Products

This is the most crucial! If you insert a list of products onto your landing page, then you can list the items that are most relevant to your targeted customer segment. This could be a particular product or it could be a category of products that aligns with exactly what your visitors are looking for. Let’s say that you’re aiming at getting business from existing customers, then you might want to include items they’ve abandoned in their cart.

Blog posts

There’s no doubt that blog posts are part and parcel in nurturing new visitors. Because of this, it’s vital that you display a relevant list of posts on your landing page that aligns with what your visitors want. This could be a particular post or a category of blog posts.

Any other important info

Although it might be easy to lay out the guidelines to follow for a landing page, a brand might have particular needs for its own custom content type and layout. The best thing to do is to understand which info on your landing page is important for your visitor and customize it based on that.

Actionable tips to personalize landing pages in WordPress

In order to better understand the practices that we’ve just mentioned, let’s go ahead and personalize a fictional landing page. For this, we’ll go ahead and use Growmatik for both segmentation and personalization. We can do this as Growmatik offers a wide array of criteria options for personalization. You can also make use of its visual editor – which means there’s no coding needed – to carry out these personalization rules you’ve set in the tool.

Let’s get to work!

Display tailored greetings by using personal dynamic keywords

In personalizing content through dynamic keywords, you can greet your leads or existing customers with their name. This can be done on your home/landing page or in a popup. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the customers column and click the + button.
  • Assign All customers as the condition.
  • Assign the action to Personalize Page and choose your landing page.
  • After the page loads, click on existing text or add a new text element. (learn more)
  • Edit the text and add the First Name dynamic keyword.
  • Click on Save and then Create Rule.

Another way to go about this is by inserting the greeting inside a popup in the corner. Follow the same steps as above and simply choose Show Popup as the action and add dynamic keywords exactly as written above.

Use UTM dynamic keywords to customize homepage and popup content

This is useful when you want to personalize the journey for visitors coming from a particular marketing campaign. For instance, let’s say they’re searching for ‘buy snickers’ and click on your ad in the results and visit your landing page. Using a UTM parameter in your ad, you can show their search intent in the hero section of your landing page as a way to convey relevancy to your visitors. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Guests column and click the + button.
  • Assign the condition as Source > UTM Parameter > UTM Source
  • Assign the action as Personalize Page and choose your landing page.
  • Insert the dynamic keyword of the UTM source in the appropriate place.
  • Click on Save and then Create Rule.

Another way to go about this is by inserting the greeting inside a popup in the corner. Follow the same steps as above and simply choose Show Popup as the action and add dynamic keywords exactly as written above. 

Insert a related video or image for each campaign

A promo video relevant to the visitor’s reason for being on your page can greatly speed up the amount of time it takes for a visitor to find out more about the product they want. And this makes the path to conversion shorter. This is in contrast to generic promo videos, which everyone tends to ignore. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Guests column and click on + button.
  • Assign the condition as Source > UTM.
  • Assign the action as Personalize and choose your landing page from the menu.
  • After getting to the Webpage Personalizer environment, insert a video element onto your hero section.
  • Click on Save and then Create Rule.

Display a tailored list of products on your landing page

Display certain products or a category of products to your visitor related to their previous shopping behavior. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Customers column and click on the + button.
  • Assign the condition as All Customers.
  • Assign the action as Personalize and choose your landing page from the menu.
  • After arriving in the Webpage Personalizer environment, insert a product element to the right section of your page, and select content > related
  • Click on Save and then Create Rule.

Or you can remind them about their abandoned items in their cart from their previous visit by:

personalize your WordPress website - product list
  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Leads column and click on the + button.
  • Assign the condition as All leads.
  • Assign the action as Personalize and choose your landing page from the menu.
  • After arriving in the Webpage Personalizer environment, insert a product element to the right section of your page, and select content > abandoned cart products.
  • Click Save and then Create Rule.

Insert customized blog posts onto your landing pages

As we’ve made mention to before, blog posts are an integral part of the customer journey when they are being made aware of and are considering your product. If you have blog posts that offer valuable insight into your industry or niche, then it’s a good idea to share them on your landing page. It would be even better if you could display certain blog posts or a category of blog posts to potential leads and customers based on their attributes – or even on their previous reading history if they are already a customer. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Leads column and click on the + button.
  • Assign the condition as All Leads.
  • Assign the action as Personalize and choose your landing page from the menu.
  • After arriving in the Webpage Personalizer environment, insert a blog element into the right section of your page, and select content > related.
  • Click on Save & Exit and then Create Rule.
personalize landing pages in wordpress - blog list

You can also set more specific sources for your visitor like the UTM_source and in Personalizer, set Content > Category or ID to place more specific blog posts based on which campaign your visitor was referred from.

Show geolocational popups for customers

When it comes to retaining repeat customers, it’s always a good idea to offer them limited-time offers and discounts. For instance, let’s say a visitor who comes from a particular location lands on your page, they would be impressed if they had a personalized message and an exclusive discount on a product. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Customers column and click on the + button.
  • Assign the condition as All Customers.
  • Assign the action as Show Popup.
  • After arriving in the popup builder tool, choose a premade popup template or create one. 
  • Insert a text element and include dynamic tags > first name and location inside it.
  • Click on Save & Exit and then Create Rule.
personalize landing pages in wordpress - geolocational popup

Display chronological dynamic keywords in popups

You can welcome your existing leads or customers with a weekday greeting, for example “Happy Friday!” or “Happy Monday!”. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Customers column and click on + button.
  • Assign the condition as All Leads.
  • Assign the action as Show Popup as the action and choose your landing page from the menu.
  • Edit the relevant text element and choose the Weekday dynamic keyword.
  • Click on Save & Exit and then Create Rule.
personalize landing pages in wordpress - chronological popup

Utilize daytime dynamic keywords on the landing page

One other way to make use of dynamic keys in your quest for personalization is through greeting visitors with their local time zones. This means that a site visitor from Moscow will see a “Good evening!” message while someone from Virinia will see a “Good morning” message. To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the leads column and click on the + button.
  • Assign the condition as All Leads.
  • Edit text on the homepage or add a text element.
  • Add a new dynamic tag for Daytime.
  • Click on Save & Exit and then Create Rule.
personalize landing pages in wordpress - daytime greeting

Use geolocation to personalize your calls-to-action  

One great way to personalize landing pages in WordPress is to tweak your calls-to-actions to make them relevant to your visitors’ location. Let’s say that your main target customer segments reside in three cities or countries – then you can customize your calls-to-action based on each location: 

Find a store in Beijing

Find a store in Berlin

Find a store in Delhi

To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Guests column and click on the + button.
  • Assign the condition as All guests.
  • Assign the action as Personalize and select your landing page.
  • In the Webpage Personalizer tool, click on the call-to-action button and insert the location name by double-clicking on it and then selecting dynamic tags > location inside it.
  • Click on Save & Exit and then Create Rule.
personalize landing pages in wordpress - geoclocational call to action

Insert mobile-specific calls-to-action for mobile users

Before indexing your desktop site, Google first looks at your mobile site to decide on ranking. In other words, digital mobile channels are of utmost importance. To leverage this knowledge, place mobile-exclusive products onto your landing page to increase the changes of converting your visitor into a paying customer. For instance, this could be a “call now” or “message on WhatsApp” button.

personalize landing pages in wordpress - calls to action mobile users

To do this in Growmatik:

  • Navigate to the automation dashboard, locate the Guests column and click on the + button.
  • Assign the condition as Device and select Mobile.
  • Assign the action as Personalize and select your landing page.
  • In the Webpage Personalizer tool, insert a related Button to your top menu. 
  • Click on Save & Exit and then Create Rule.

Wrapping up

Personalization is a magic wand that can be implemented on any marketing channel or campaign. Visitors will feel privileged and important if they are treated specially through seeing content that is relevant to what they are looking for. In turn, this increases the likelihood that they will be converted into paying customers – or that you can retain them as loyal customers.

To do this, it’s important to pinpoint the most crucial target segments and then to research how best to personalize the experience of visitors in this segment. Before making permanent changes to all your channels, you can first test your ideas out via A/B testing in some ads and/or landing pages and make notes of how well they do.

How to Use HubSpot with a Jupiter X Website

Use HubSpot with Jupiter X featured

It’s inevitable that you’ll day you’ll need to dive into the world of marketing to promote your product or service. At this point, the search for the necessary tools begins. You’ve probably heard of HubSpot, which is one of the most widely-used marketing platforms. HubSpot is an all-in-one software for marketing, sales and services. By using it, you can create and optimize your content, nurture leads and monitor your marketing progress. In this article, we’ll review the most important HubSpot tools and how to use HubSpot with Jupiter X.

Understanding HubSpot and what the HubSpot platform includes

HubSpot is a company founded in 2006 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It provides software products for inbound marketing, sales and customer service with the same name – HubSpot. All the HubSpot tools are divided into hubs: 

  • HubSpot CRM – A free customer relationship management (CRM) software, which helps you to organize and track your leads and customers.
  • Marketing Hub – Set of tools that help to grow traffic and convert more visitors on your site.
  • Sales Hub – Allows your sales team to manage and communicate with your leads and customers.
  • Service Hub – Customer service tools that help your customer service team to identify and resolve customer’s issues in a way that leaves them happy.
  • CMS Hub – Website builder and blogging platform that provides the ability to build and host a website without the help of a designer.

The HubSpot CRM

The HubSpot CRM is a free platform in the HubSpot core that includes access to all HubSpot marketing, sales, customer service and contact management tools for unlimited users. It helps companies to track leads and analyze business metrics.

The HubSpot CRM offers a visual dashboard with a view of the entire sales funnel. By using the CRM system, you can track customer interactions through email, live chat or phone calls, social media, and every interaction is stored in a timeline organized by lead. The platform integrates with other HubSpot tools such as Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub.

Despite the HubSpot CRM being a free platform, it offers a long list of tools you can use to get new leads and do better business with the existing customers. The full list of CRM free tools can be found on this page.

The HubSpot Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub consists of a set of tools developed to make life easier for your marketing team. By using them you can run a successful marketing campaign from start to finish. Here are the most features of this hub: blog and content creating tools, landing pages, social media, emails, SEO, marketing automation and analytics. These tools will help you to attract visitors, convert them into leads and delight potentials and current customers. The Marketing Hub connects with your HubSpot CRM to increase the website traffic and track your lead’s progress.

The HubSpot Sales Hub

The Sales Hub has tools your sales team needs to close better deals in less time. This hub lets your sales department see what pages and how often they are visited by your leads, so that helps to focus attention on what matters most and close deals with qualified clients. The Sales Hub syncs with the HubSpot CRM and you can monitor which deals are won, lost, or still in progress. The main features included in the hub are: email templates and sequences, free calling, meeting scheduling and pipeline tracking.

The HubSpot Service Hub

An important component of a successful business is great customer support service, and the HubSpot Service Hub can help you with that. It has all the necessary tools such as live chat and conversational bots, knowledge base, support tickets, phone support, customer feedback, canned snippets.

Integrate and use Hubspot with Jupiter X site

HubSpot has its own content management system (CMS) where you can build and host your site and manage marketing progress. However, you can integrate WordPress-based website with HubSpot using the plugin, so it gives you an ability to continue using WordPress as your CMS and use HubSpot’s marketing features.

The WordPress plugin called HubSpot All-In-One Marketing – Forms, Popups, Live Chat allows you to use HubSpot with Jupiter X site by connecting your account with the site. Thus you’ll get access to many of HubSpot’s tools directly from your WordPress dashboard.
To install the plugin, log in to your site’s dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New and find the plugin by typing the word “Hubspot” in the keyword field.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll need to connect your HubSpot account with the plugin. To do this, go to the HubSpot section and log in to your HubSpot account. If you don’t have it yet then you’ll be prompted to create one.

When it’s done, you’ll be able to create forms, lists, monitor new contacts and more from your WordPress dashboard.

Let’s check the example of creating the popup form using Hubspot. Open the Hubspot > Forms section and click the Create a free form button.

Select the Pop-up box form type and click Next.

In the next step, we need to configure the Callout view: add featured image, edit the text and color.

In the Form tab, we can edit the form view which will be displayed to our visitors after the subscribe button is pressed in the Callout window.

Also, we can set up the thank you message once the visitor subscribed in the Thank you tab.

In the Targeting tab, configure when the popup will appear, and if needed, add filters based on information about your visitors.

When all the settings are set, you can preview the newly created popup and then publish it.

Aside from that, the Hubspot plugin allows you to use chat and chatbots to engage visitors, build beautiful email newsletters inside the WP dashboard and nurture your leads with marketing automation campaigns. Also, you can manage your contacts and group them with the built-in list builder, as well as measure your business growth in real-time with analytics dashboards.

Set the HubSpot action in the Raven Form widget

In Jupiter X, using the Raven Form widget, we can submit our form data to the HubSpot form. To do that, we need to create a new form in HubSpot at first via the HubSpot account in Marketing > Forms.

Or if you have installed the Hubspot integration plugin, then you can do it directly in WordPress Dashboard > HubSpot > Forms.

Use HubSpot with Jupiter X - create form wp

However, the Hubspot plugin isn’t required for the functioning of the Raven form feature we are going to review. Once the form is ready, you can get the Portal ID and Form ID which are required for the action settings in the Raven form. You can find those IDs in the Embed section when editing the form.

Use HubSpot with Jupiter X - form edit
Use HubSpot with Jupiter X - embed forms
Use HubSpot with Jupiter X - form ids

The next step is to configure the Raven form action. In the Elementor editor, open the form settings and select Hubspot in the Add Action field.

Use HubSpot with Jupiter X - raven form settings

Then we need to add the Portal ID and Form ID in the Hubspot tab settings and set the Field Mapping fields to connect Hubspot form fields with our Raven form.

Use HubSpot with Jupiter X - action settings

Now when the form is submitted the data from our Raven form will be collected on the HubSpot side for further analysis, creating contact lists and more.

Wrapping Up

HubSpot offers great software as a free CRM along with specific free and paid software for marketing, sales and customer service teams, which integrate together to help your company grow. Besides that, HubSpot has its own CMS for creating and hosting websites, and it also easily integrates with the WordPress platform that gives a powerful tool for your inbound marketing on existing WordPress sites. Also, what is great in HubSpot is that it provides an opportunity to level up your professional skills with free online courses at the HubSpot Academy.

How to Create a Gaming Website in Jupiter X Using Dynamic Shortcode

create a gaming website in Jupiter X Featured

At some point, you’ve probably heard of dynamic elements in Jupiter X. They allow you to turn your raw data into fascinating page templates without coding. However, sometimes, using custom coding is inevitable, especially when you want to use your dynamic data with a piece of Javascript code. In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can create a gaming website in Jupiter X  by using dynamic data, transforming it into custom made shortcode and using it in a wheel of fortune game.

What we’ll need: 

Creating a new post type: Wheels

In creating a gaming website in Jupiter X, I’m going to start by creating a new post type named Wheels. The reason is that I want to create different wheels with different colors, conditions and prizes. Imagine that you own a website where users are able to select different wheels of fortune and start the game as they wish. Also, creating a new post type using the Jet Engine plugin allows me to create the wheels upon user submission in the future. We can aim to build a gaming website with a combination of aforementioned features and a membership plugin. However, it’s just a simple example of how you can integrate your dynamic data with custom features developed on your own in Jupiter X. 
Let’s get back to work. I assume you already enabled the Jet Engine in the Jupiter X -> Control Panel -> Plugins. So, let’s create the post type “wheels.” I want to be able to create multiple wheels with different prizes.

Adding a new post type in Jet Engine

Now, try to add as many prize options as you wish and also set a meta field for the number of prizes. This field should indicate how many prizes a wheel should have.

Now update the post type and then navigate to WordPress Dashboard -> Wheels and add a new wheel.

As you can see, the post looks empty in the front end, but don’t worry, we are going to add the wheel of fortune using the dynamic shortcode capabilities there.

Empty front end in wheels single pages

Activating the Jupiter X child theme

Since we need to create a shortcode to use in our single templates, it’s better to use a child theme, define the shortcode there and only call it in the posts. To do that, download and install the Jupiter X child theme package provided here and then activate it.

The Jupiter X child theme is active

Add the shortcode in the child theme

The next step in creating a gaming website with Jupiter X is to add the shortcode to show the wheel of fortune. To do that, first download the winwheel.js library from here. Then extract the files and copy the winwheel.min.js to the jupiterx-child/assets/js/ folder. You also need to add the TweenMax.js library to preserve the smooth animation while the wheel is spinning. After downloading and adding both JS files into your child theme, add this line to your jupiterx-child/functions.php to include the js file in your website.

wp_enqueue_script('jupiterx-child-wheel', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . 'https://d3pa45a5f8vwb1.cloudfront.net/assets/js/winwheel.min.js', [ 'jquery' ], '', false );
wp_enqueue_script('jupiterx-child-tween', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . 'https://d3pa45a5f8vwb1.cloudfront.net/assets/js/TweenMax.min.js', [ 'jquery' ], '', false );
wp_enqueue_style( 'wheel_of_fortune', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . 'https://d3pa45a5f8vwb1.cloudfront.net/assets/css/wheel.css' );

The last line will add the necessary CSS snippets to style the wheel. You need to also add some image files into the assets folder.

The structure of the child theme having the wheel of fortune shortcode.

Now, to only test the static version of the wheel, I will add the codes from one of the samples in the wheel.js package and then change the image file paths and actually integrate it with my child theme. Using the below code, we are creating the [wheel_of_fortune] shortcode, but it’s just showing a static wheel. It’s not using our post meta fields to load the dynamically created wheel.

add_shortcode( 'wheel_of_fortune', 'jupiterx_wheel_of_fortune' );
function jupiterx_wheel_of_fortune( $atts ) {
	?>
		<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
            <tr>
                <td>
                    <div class="power_controls">
                        <br />
                        <br />
                        <table class="power" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0">
                            <tr>
                                <th align="center">Power</th>
                            </tr>
                            <tr>
                                <td width="78" align="center" id="pw3" onClick="powerSelected(3);">High</td>
                            </tr>
                            <tr>
                                <td align="center" id="pw2" onClick="powerSelected(2);">Med</td>
                            </tr>
                            <tr>
                                <td align="center" id="pw1" onClick="powerSelected(1);">Low</td>
                            </tr>
                        </table>
                        <br />
                        <img id="spin_button" src="<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . 'https://d3pa45a5f8vwb1.cloudfront.net/assets/img/spin_off.png' ?>" alt="Spin" onClick="startSpin();" />
                        <br /><br />
                        &nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#" onClick="resetWheel(); return false;">Play Again</a><br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;(reset)
                    </div>
                </td>
                <td width="438" height="582" class="the_wheel" align="center" valign="center">
                    <canvas id="canvas" width="434" height="434">
                        <p style="{color: white}" align="center">Sorry, your browser doesn't support canvas. Please try another.</p>
                    </canvas>
                </td>
            </tr>
        </table>
		<script type="text/javascript">

			
			 // Create new wheel object specifying the parameters at creation time.
            let theWheel = new Winwheel({
                'numSegments'  : 8,     // Specify number of segments.
                'outerRadius'  : 212,   // Set outer radius so wheel fits inside the background.
                'textFontSize' : 28,    // Set font size as desired.
                'segments'     :        // Define segments including colour and text.
                [
                   {'fillStyle' : '#eae56f', 'text' : 'Prize 1'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#89f26e', 'text' : 'Prize 2'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#7de6ef', 'text' : 'Prize 3'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#e7706f', 'text' : 'Prize 4'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#eae56f', 'text' : 'Prize 5'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#89f26e', 'text' : 'Prize 6'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#7de6ef', 'text' : 'Prize 7'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#e7706f', 'text' : 'Prize 8'}
                ],
                'animation' :           // Specify the animation to use.
                {
                    'type'     : 'spinToStop',
                    'duration' : 5,     // Duration in seconds.
                    'spins'    : 8,     // Number of complete spins.
                    'callbackFinished' : alertPrize
                }
            });

            // Vars used by the code in this page to do power controls.
            let wheelPower    = 0;
            let wheelSpinning = false;

            // -------------------------------------------------------
            // Function to handle the onClick on the power buttons.
            // -------------------------------------------------------
            function powerSelected(powerLevel)
            {
                // Ensure that power can't be changed while wheel is spinning.
                if (wheelSpinning == false) {
                    // Reset all to grey incase this is not the first time the user has selected the power.
                    document.getElementById('pw1').className = "";
                    document.getElementById('pw2').className = "";
                    document.getElementById('pw3').className = "";

                    // Now light up all cells below-and-including the one selected by changing the class.
                    if (powerLevel >= 1) {
                        document.getElementById('pw1').className = "pw1";
                    }

                    if (powerLevel >= 2) {
                        document.getElementById('pw2').className = "pw2";
                    }

                    if (powerLevel >= 3) {
                        document.getElementById('pw3').className = "pw3";
                    }

                    // Set wheelPower var used when spin button is clicked.
                    wheelPower = powerLevel;

                    // Light up the spin button by changing it's source image and adding a clickable class to it.
                    document.getElementById('spin_button').src = "<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . 'https://d3pa45a5f8vwb1.cloudfront.net/assets/img/spin_on.png' ?>";
                    document.getElementById('spin_button').className = "clickable";
                }
            }

            // -------------------------------------------------------
            // Click handler for spin button.
            // -------------------------------------------------------
            function startSpin()
            {
                // Ensure that spinning can't be clicked again while already running.
                if (wheelSpinning == false) {
                    // Based on the power level selected adjust the number of spins for the wheel, the more times is has
                    // to rotate with the duration of the animation the quicker the wheel spins.
                    if (wheelPower == 1) {
                        theWheel.animation.spins = 3;
                    } else if (wheelPower == 2) {
                        theWheel.animation.spins = 8;
                    } else if (wheelPower == 3) {
                        theWheel.animation.spins = 15;
                    }

                    // Disable the spin button so can't click again while wheel is spinning.
                    document.getElementById('spin_button').src       = "<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . 'https://d3pa45a5f8vwb1.cloudfront.net/assets/img/spin_off.png' ?>";
                    document.getElementById('spin_button').className = "";

                    // Begin the spin animation by calling startAnimation on the wheel object.
                    theWheel.startAnimation();

                    // Set to true so that power can't be changed and spin button re-enabled during
                    // the current animation. The user will have to reset before spinning again.
                    wheelSpinning = true;
                }
            }

            // -------------------------------------------------------
            // Function for reset button.
            // -------------------------------------------------------
            function resetWheel()
            {
                theWheel.stopAnimation(false);  // Stop the animation, false as param so does not call callback function.
                theWheel.rotationAngle = 0;     // Re-set the wheel angle to 0 degrees.
                theWheel.draw();                // Call draw to render changes to the wheel.

                document.getElementById('pw1').className = "";  // Remove all colours from the power level indicators.
                document.getElementById('pw2').className = "";
                document.getElementById('pw3').className = "";

                wheelSpinning = false;          // Reset to false to power buttons and spin can be clicked again.
            }

            // -------------------------------------------------------
            // Called when the spin animation has finished by the callback feature of the wheel because I specified callback in the parameters
            // note the indicated segment is passed in as a parmeter as 99% of the time you will want to know this to inform the user of their prize.
            // -------------------------------------------------------
            function alertPrize(indicatedSegment)
            {
                // Do basic alert of the segment text. You would probably want to do something more interesting with this information.
                alert("You have won " + indicatedSegment.text);
            }

			//});
		
		</script>
		 

<?php
    
}

And finally, by calling the shortcode on a page, we can see that the wheel of fortune is successfully functioning:

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - wheel of fortune
Calling the wheel of fortune shortcode on a page.

The result would look like this:

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - wheel
The static version of the wheel integrated with a WordPress website

Now, let’s make it dynamic and use our post to create different wheels! 

Use the shortcode in the single wheel’s post templates

The exciting part here is that we can make the wheels as dynamic as we want or even allow our users to create their own wheels. To do that, we need to first make the wheel dynamic by modifying some part of the shortcode we created. The dynamic settings that we have right now are these:

  • The number of prizes
  • The prize names

We can add more and more dynamic fields, but for now, we just want these. So, I’m going to find the place that I would need to change. Here it is:

let theWheel = new Winwheel({
                'numSegments'  : 8,     // Specify number of segments.
                'outerRadius'  : 212,   // Set outer radius so wheel fits inside the background.
                'textFontSize' : 28,    // Set font size as desired.
                'segments'     :        // Define segments including colour and text.
                [
                   {'fillStyle' : '#eae56f', 'text' : 'Prize 1'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#89f26e', 'text' : 'Prize 2'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#7de6ef', 'text' : 'Prize 3'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#e7706f', 'text' : 'Prize 4'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#eae56f', 'text' : 'Prize 5'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#89f26e', 'text' : 'Prize 6'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#7de6ef', 'text' : 'Prize 7'},
                   {'fillStyle' : '#e7706f', 'text' : 'Prize 8'}
                ],
                'animation' :           // Specify the animation to use.
                {
                    'type'     : 'spinToStop',
                    'duration' : 5,     // Duration in seconds.
                    'spins'    : 8,     // Number of complete spins.
                    'callbackFinished' : alertPrize
                }
            });

All the settings are stored here, so it’ll be an easy move. I would just need to set the number of prizes dynamically and add the “segments” to in a for statement and add a random color for each prize.

<?php  $number_of_prizes = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'number-of-prizes', true ); ?>
	 // Create new wheel object specifying the parameters at creation time.
            let theWheel = new Winwheel({
                'numSegments'  : <?php echo $number_of_prizes ?>,     // Specify number of segments.
                'outerRadius'  : 212,   // Set outer radius so wheel fits inside the background.
                'textFontSize' : 16,    // Set font size as desired.
                'segments'     :        // Define segments including colour and text.
                [
                	<?php 
					for ($i = 1; $i <= $number_of_prizes; $i++) {
					    ?>
						{'fillStyle' : '<?php echo sprintf('#%06X', mt_rand(0xF00000, 0xFFFFFF)); ?>', 'text' : '<?php echo get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'prize-' . $i, true ); ?>'},
					    <?php
					}
					?>

                ],
                'animation' :           // Specify the animation to use.
                {
                    'type'     : 'spinToStop',
                    'duration' : 5,     // Duration in seconds.
                    'spins'    : 8,     // Number of complete spins.
                    'callbackFinished' : alertPrize
                }
            });

The result looks like the following:

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - results

Now if I add 3 more prizes to this post, we can see the effect in the front end:

Adding 3 new prizes to the post

Remember to change the number-of-prizes meta field to 9 as well.

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - prizes
Result of adding 3 new prizes to the

Now it’s time to use this shortcode in a post template. First I need to enable the post type option in the Jupiter X -> Control Panel -> Settings like:

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - enable wheel
Enabling the wheel post type in Jupiter X -> Control Panel -> Settings.

Then I can add a template in the Customizer for the wheel single posts. To do that, I’ll open Customizer and navigate to Post Types -> Wheels -> Single and add a custom template.

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - add template
Adding a new template for the wheel post type.

Here I will add a Shortcode element and add my shortcode inside it.

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - add shortcode
Adding the shortcode into the template.

Now I’ll go ahead and save the template and refresh my page. Here’s the result:

create a gaming website in Jupiter X - final result

The source code of the child theme that is being used here can be found here.

Wrapping up

Dynamic data can bring life to your website. In this article, we showed you how to easily create a gaming website with Jupiter X. Imagine using a simple game like above, and you’ll actually be able to monetize your website. You can integrate the wheels with a membership plugin, make some levels and assign people to those levels, keep their scores etc. It would be an easy way of creating a gaming and entertainment website. The features of the dynamic fields do not stop there. And we’ve already provided ways in our Artbees blog about making your own polling website using Jupiter X, building hotel and booking websites, dynamic sliders and more. If you have any suggestions or comments, please write them in the comments section below!

How to Create a Multilingual Jupiter X Site with the WPML Plugin

create a multilingual Jupiter X site featured

If you want to attract visitors from around the world or are already attracting international readers, translating your site can improve communication, make visitors feel more welcomed, and attract more clients, increasing profits effectively. 

In this article, we’ll cover how you can create a multilingual Jupiter X website using the popular WPML plugin.

What is WPML?

WPML (WordPress Multilingual) is the most popular plugin for building multilingual WordPress websites, with over 1 million installations. Using WPML, you can easily translate your Jupiter X website into multiple languages, and build a multilingual site in just a few minutes. 

WPML is a premium plugin with 3 different pricing plans:

  • Multilingual Blog – €39 / year
  • Multilingual CMS – €99 / year
  • Multilingual Agency – €199 / year

If you’re planning to translate your website into 2-3 languages, the Multilingual CMS plan should be sufficient. It includes all WPML features and addons, as well as 90,000 translation credits – WPML’s currency for automatic translation.

In general, you need around 2 credits to automatically translate 1 word. So, if your site has a total of 45,000 words, you can automatically translate your entire website into one language without having to make any additional purchases. 

To learn more about credits, see WPML’s Pricing for Automatic Translation

Installing WPML and its components

To install WPML on your website, go to the Downloads area in your WPML Account and download the OTGS Installer – a setup plugin for configuring WPML on your site. Then, in your WordPress admin, go to Plugins Add new and upload the OTGS Installer file.

Once installed, go to WPML Setup Wizard to begin configuring WPML on your website.

Configuring WPML on your website

To prepare your site for translation, WPML includes a short setup wizard for configuring some basic settings: 

  1. Languages – choose your website’s default language, and the languages you want to translate into.
  1. URL Format – organize your URLs using subdirectories, different domains per language, or language parameters. 
  1. Register WPML – enter your WPML site key. If you don’t yet have one, click the Get a key for this site link to generate a new one. 
  1. Who Will Translate – decide whether you want to translate your site by yourself, with your team of translators, or translation services
  1. Support – choose whether to share theme and plugin information to get faster support. 
  1. Plugins – install any necessary addons, like WooCommerce Multilingual, to translate specific plugins. WPML will automatically detect which ones you need. 
  1. Finished – once you complete the setup wizard, you can continue to the Translation Dashboard to start translating your content or set up a language switcher in WPML Settings. 

Translating content with WPML

To translate any type of content with WPML, start by going to WPML Translation Management. From here, you can view all your website content, like pages, posts, and custom posts, as well as select what content to translate. 

To select content for translation, simply check all the items you want to translate. Then, scroll down to choose which languages to translate into, and your preferred translation method. 

In addition to translating by yourself, your translators, or translation services, you can also use automatic translation. 

Unlike human translators, automatic translation takes just a few minutes and costs a fraction of the price a human charges. And thanks to WPML’s new translating engine – WPML AI, you can achieve translation quality that matches, or exceeds human translators. 

To translate with WPML AI, simply set your translation method to Translate automatically and click Translate.

Reviewing translations

Reviewing translations is optional, but recommended when you automatically translate important content, like your homepage. For other pages, you won’t need to review translations, since WPML AI will likely translate your content as well as a human translator would. 

To review translations, go to WPML Translations, and click your translation job. This will open the front-end editor, where you can preview translations before they’re published on your website. 

If you’re satisfied with your translations, click Publish translation to add them to your website. If you want to make changes, click Edit translation. This will open the Advanced Translation Editor, where you can make any necessary changes to your translations. 

Once you publish translations, you can view them on your website by going to the page you just translated and switching languages. 

Translating Menus and Taxonomies

By default, WPML translates menus and taxonomies along with the content they relate to. For example, a post category will translate along with the rest of the post contents, and a menu linking to a page will translate along with the page contents. 

To translate these elements individually, see WPML’s taxonomy translation and menu translation guides for more information.

Wrapping up

If you’re thinking of creating a multilingual website, WPML can easily help you translate your entire site into multiple languages. Compared to other options, WPML is budget-friendly, packed with powerful features, and powered by the best AI available today. 
To get started with WPML, visit the official WPML website.

How to Run a Speed Test for a WordPress Website

Speed Test for a WordPress Website featured

It’s a fact that fast loading times are extremely crucial for a WordPress website as it affects search engine rankings and attracts more visitors. If it takes your website longer than three seconds to load, a visitor is likely to leave your page. So then you might be wondering: how can I find out how well my website is performing? The great news is that there are easy-to-use tools available that allow you to perform a speed test for a WordPress website.   

In this article, we discussed how to improve a site’s loading speed, but now we’ll list some tools that will help you to test website performance.

Reasons for a slow website 

If you’d like to know the reasons for a slow website, you should know what a page lifecycle is. 

As you enter a URL into your browser and hit Enter, it’ll go through the following process:

  1. The browser passes the URL to your network default DNS servers or gateways. It will try to resolve the URL with an equivalent IP address in order to find the web server. The web server is the place where your website files exist. A slow DNS server can cause a slow website. 
  2. After locating the IP address, the request will be sent to your web server. The web server will then receive your request and will route you to the path requested. If the path exists, it will return the page with a HTML 200 code. If it does not exist, it will return a 404 error code along with a 404 page (if it exists).
  3. If your website is not static, it means that the page you requested must be generated. Depending on your web server, you might have different compilers or interpreters in use. You might also use a CMS like WordPress. Each web server, software, CMS or script you are using is involved in the page generation lifecycle and might cause performance glitches. Even a non-optimized database can cause performance issues. 

In other words, there might be several reasons at any stage of a page generation lifecycle for a slow website.  Here, we’ll provide an overview of some of the most common problems on a WordPress website. 

Poor hosting

Simply put, more server resources provide better performance. Using cheap hosting is like creating a long queue for each visitor. Long queues can cause a long TTFB (time to first byte). If you’re using a cheap hosting that you know doesn’t have the proper resources for your site, it’s time to think about new, faster hosting. Some shared hosting providers that are suitable for your WordPress site include:

Also, check out this article to learn what other hosts are recommended for WordPress.

Poorly coded themes

When looking for a WordPress theme, it’s important to pay attention to speed optimization. If you find a theme that is visually appealing, it might be poorly coded, which can drastically slow down your website. The themes that are free or offered for cheap are usually not optimized. In other words, it’s better to switch to another theme (note that a good theme will cost $60-$120). Before purchasing a theme, make sure developer support is available so that you can contact them anytime you experience an issue.

Third-party plugins

When installing a new plugin, it’s good form to ensure that it’s also not poorly coded as this will slow down the site. Pay attention to the plugin rating, how many times it was downloaded and how long it’s been since the last time it was updated. You can disable/enable each plugin while running a speed test, but it’ll be time consuming, so it’s better to use the Query Monitor plugin. This plugin reports the database queries on your site and can be filtered by a plugin to see which one is causing high CPU usage.

Large Images

Everyone knows that images are extremely vital to any website as they provide much more info than simply text. The downside is that images also increase the size of the page. That said, you can optimize the images and still retain the quality.

Online image compression tools can help you with this. The top ones are TinyPNG and Kraken. First compress your images using one of these tools, then upload the optimized ones to your site. 

Before running a WordPress website speed test

When running a WordPress website speed test, you need to take into account the following:

  • Check different geographic locations

You may not know where your visitors are coming from. In this case, you can use Google Analytics. If most of your visitors are from the USA, then you need to choose a test server from Chicago, for example. If your visitors are from all over the world, then you’ll need to run several tests with multiple locations.

  • Enable the website cache

To run a website speed test correctly, you need to enable the caching on your site. When it’s on, you’ll test website caching as well and see how effective it is and if the performance has improved. 

  • Enable the website firewall/CDN

It’s recommended to switch on a CDN service and the firewall to improve the performance. We have a separate article about CDN and why it’s so important for website loading speed. To find out more info about this, feel free to read How To Set Up CDN For Your WordPress Website.

Best tools to test website speed 

Below, we’ve listed the top tools that you can use to check how fast your site is loading for your visitors.

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is a very popular tool and easy to use. If you’re a novice, chances are that it’ll be your favorite tool for testing. Besides the full report of the website’s loading speed, GTMetrix also provides suggestions on how you can improve the performance of your website. It’s really useful as you’ll get advice on what you need to fix to make the site load faster. Here you’ll see your site’s score from A (excellent) to F (fail). The score is based on load time, page size and the total number of requests.

Speed Test for a WordPress Website - gtmetrix

WebPageTest

One upside offered by WebPagetest is the ability to select a country from which you want to test, so you can see how well your site is performing in different parts of the world. Like GTMetrix, the WebPagetest tool will provide you with recommendations on how to resolve your site performance issues.

Speed Test for a WordPress Website - webpage test

Chrome DevTools

The Chrome DevTools panel is related to the Chrome browser and is quite popular among developers for performing a speed test for a WordPress website. You can activate the Network panel in Chrome by pressing Command+Option+I (Mac) or Control+Shift+I (Windows, Linux). Then you can generate a waterfall analysis of your site. Note that Chrome will show Network requests while the Network panel is open. If you want to inspect a request that happens on page load but you don’t see anything, all you need to do is refresh the page while you have the Network panel open.

Speed Test for a WordPress Website - devtools

Wrapping Up

There’s no doubt that website speed is crucial to running and maintaining a WordPress site. If the site loads quickly, your visitors will be able to view your content without delay. Quick loading times could further work to convert new visitors into subscribers or paying customers.
In this post, we reviewed some of the best and easy-to-use tools to test speed for WordPress websites. Once you’ve identified how well your site is performing, then make sure to head over to this article to learn more about how to speed up loading times.

5 of the Best WordPress Development Environments

WordPress development environments featured

Developers spend most of their time in test environments. Having a good development environment can save tons of time and energy. This begs the question: what’s the best test environment for WordPress? In this article, I’ll share some of my personal thoughts about five of the best WordPress development environments. I’ll dive deeper and talk about their features, so you can make an informed decision when choosing the right environment for your particular workflow.  

The best WordPress development environments in a nutshell

I chose 6 of the most necessary features and will do a quick comparison among the Valet, Vagrant, Local, DesktopServer and XAMPP development environments, so you can quickly wrap your head around these environments.

ValetVagrantLocalDesktopServerXAMPP
Cross-platformMacMac, Windows, LinuxMac, Windows, LinuxMac, WindowsMac, Windows, Linux
Easy installationYesYesYesYesYes
DashboardNoNoYesYesYes
Easy configurationTo some extentTo some extentYesTo some extentYes
Multiple websitesYesYesYesUp to 3 in free versionYes
PriceFreeFreeFree & ProFree & PremiumFree

Valet

Simply put, Valet is awesome. I can’t help but use this development environment since I found out about it some years ago. I’ve been amazed by the simplicity of this environment. The Laravel team has done a fantastic job in developing so many great features. I won’t list all the features but will quickly share a few key points with you.

Pros

  • It’s open-source and free.
  • It’s blazing fast.
  • It has a wide range of support for different platforms (WordPress, Laraval, Lumen, Drupal, …)
  • It’s easy to install via Homebrew (The Mac package manager).
  • With the help of Homebrew, you can switch between different PHP versions. In my job, I am sometimes in great need of this feature.
  • It offers two ways to share your local project online via Ngrok or Expose. It’s very practical for quickly getting feedback from your clients.
  • It has well-written documentation.
  • It has a long list of commands to control different aspects of the development environment.
  • No usage of virtual machines. This might be a con also but to me, the simplicity that it provides in comparison to virtual machines is worthy.
  • You can secure your site with TLS easily using a single command.

Cons

  • Multisite WordPress installation requires installing a separate driver. It’s easy to install, but I feel that it should have native support.
  • It’s not cross-platform. It only has official support for Mac users. There’s a fork called Valet Windows for Windows users, but it’s not official.
  • It configures your Mac to use some specific server type, and it can get messy if you want to use other servers and packages.
  • It’s not possible to turn on/off individual sites.

Vagrant

Vagrant is an all-in-one software for having full-featured environments. The main selling points of this software is that it’s portable and distributable, which allows it to provide lots of flexibility regardless of your operating system. It’s able to handle any type of environment that you need. The initial feeling that you may get is that it’s a software for pro developers but once you get your head around it, you’ll like it.

Pros 

  • It’s open-source and free.
  • It’s a cross-platform software that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
  • It’s portable and distributable via Vagrantfile. This is a killer feature.
  • It has the necessary commands to control the software via the command line.
  • Isolated packages and configurations for each environment.
  • Ability to turn off/on individual sites.

Cons

  • It has good documentation, but it could be improved to help newbie developers learn faster.
  • It seems that it’s intended for pro developers, not all developers.

Local

best WordPress development environments Local

Local is a modern WordPress development environment that offers many features. It provides a dashboard in which you can control your sites easily. If you are the type of developer who likes to have a dashboard instead of working from the command line, Local is one of the best available tools.

Pros 

  • It’s free. There’s a premium plan, but the free version is rich with features.
  • It’s a cross-platform software that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
  • If you want to serve your site in Flywheel and WP Engine, you can simply push your site to those servers from the dashboard.
  • To quickly share your local site online, you can create a live link with one click.
  • After creating the site, you can easily reconfigure the settings via the dashboard. Like changing the PHP version, server confirmation and more.
  • Ability to turn off/on individual sites.
  • It has built-in support for Mailcacher which makes email testing easy.
  • You can export/import your sites. It’s very handy to recreate your site in another operating system.

Cons

  • It seems that it’s slower than Valet in some cases.
  • It’s not possible to use the command line to control the environment.

XAMPP

best WordPress development environments XAMPP

XAMPP is an old player in providing WordPress development environments. It’s completely free and easy to install. I have used XAMPP before, and it has all the necessary features for having a good WordPress environment but I moved to Local some time ago.

XAMPP has a unique feature that almost none of the other environments has, which is a community that can quickly offer help. 

Pros 

  • It’s completely free.
  • It’s a cross-platform software that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
  • It’s getting frequent updates to support the latest versions of PHP.
  • It provides a way for you to easily configure the PHP and the server.
  • It comes with all the necessary modules to run a smooth WordPress environment.
  • It has a wide range of add-ons to support different platforms not only WordPress.

Cons

  • It’s slower than Valet based on my testing in some cases.

DesktopServer

best WordPress development environments desktopserver

DesktopServer is similar to Local and offers a dashboard to manage your sites. It’s not intended only for developers, other people like designers can also use it easily. It has free and premium versions. The free version is very limited in comparison with Local and XAMPP. I’ll mention the pros and cons of the free version below.

Pros 

  • It’s free with basic features.
  • It’s quick and easy to create a WordPress site from the dashboard.
  • It has built-in support for Xdebug which is a handy tool for debugging.
  • Ability to duplicate a site. This feature comes very helpful for me since I need to create my main sites with different versions of WordPress themes for testing purposes.
  • It includes the latest versions of PHP.

Cons

  • It’s not possible to create multisite. 
  • It’s limited to creating only 3 sites.

It’s worth mentioning that the premium version of DesktopServer has tons of features. Some of their features like importing/exporting, having code editor integrations, and blueprints for automated WordPress configurations are indeed time saver and worth the try.

Wrapping up

Selecting the right development environment is a personal choice, and I shared a few pros and cons of each of them. It’s recommended that you play with different environments and use the one that fits your needs.

In my opinion, what I’ve mentioned above are the best WordPress development environments at the moment. Personally, I use Valet and Local based on my needs. I’d love it if you would share your development environment in the comment section below and share their key pros and cons!

5 Key Maintenance Tasks for Your WordPress Website

maintenance Tasks for your WordPress website featured

Nowadays, as the digital world is evolving like never before, creating a website and leaving it is simply not enough. When it comes to content management systems like WordPress, keeping up with routine tasks is vital. If you are running outdated software on your site, don’t have an optimized database or if you simply don’t care about security questions, sooner or later these maintenance tasks for your WordPress website will catch up to you. Fixing them down the line will be much harder and may even cost extra money.

A better approach is to use the simple tactic of running routine tasks or even automating them in order to streamline this process.

In this post, we’ll discuss the significance of maintenance tasks for your WordPress website and the most important runs to keep your site functioning optimally.

Updates – themes, WordPress, plugins

Plugins and themes are barebones of your site. Basically, your project mainly runs on themes and plugins. However, if you don’t update them, you might encounter serious issues with security or performance. Some users are hesitant about updating their themes and plugins as they think that the update will break the site and lead to some unwanted results. But this is the absolute wrong mindset to have. In this case, staging sites are the best option for those who want to test every update before running.WordPress has a system to manage automatic updates for themes and plugin, however, there are some cases when you might miss an update. Luckily, WordPress addressed this problem in its recent 5.5 update, which allows you to set automatic future updates for plugins and themes. To do this, all you have to do is go to the WordPress dashboard > Plugins and on the right side of the plugin list, set it to Automatic update:

The same thing can be said about the WordPress update – which is the most popular content management system as it backups more than one-third of the world’s websites – which always offers the most important performance and security updates. 

The automatic WordPress update can be easily done by using the Easy Update Manager WordPress plugin, or you can manually set it in the wp-config.php file by adding this line of code:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true );

Now your WordPress core will update automatically without your input.

Maintaining your database 

Maintaining your database is one of the most important maintenance tasks for your WordPress website. The more content you add to your site, the bigger your database becomes. Changes made to your site, post revisions, your site’s content, user settings, comments, and pretty much everything else is stored in the database. 

As the database becomes bigger and heavier over time, it will slow down your site’s loading speed. Furthermore, the larger your backup, the more it might affect the uploading and downloading speed of your backups.

There are many methods to optimize a WordPress database. The WordPress plugin repository offers many plugins that you can use for a particular job. If you want to save time and use tools that have been tested by many users, you might want to consider using Wp-optimize. This plugin contains pretty much everything you need to optimize your database.

This plugin has more than 900,000 installs and was created from the same group as Updraftplus. Once you install and activate the plugin, visit the plugin’s main page and select how you want to optimize your database as seen below.

Please note that when working with a database, it’s always a must to create a backup before doing anything. Wp-optimize has this option on the right side of the Run all selected optimization button. Don’t forget that important step before proceeding.

The plugin also has image, cache and minification settings that you can use for different purposes. 

Regular backups

Backing up your website is another important thing to consider to protect your site against any unexpected surprises. Whether you update your theme or WordPress, instal a new plugin or just optimize your database, you’ll need to create a database.

For this, you’ll also have some great options to choose from for backup plugins in WordPress. We went ahead with UpdraftPlus, which is one of the most popular and universal tools for this task:

Maintenance Tasks for your WordPress Website - updraftplus

Once you install and activate the plugin, go to the setup tab and setup the plugin to meet your goals.This plugin offers some amazing features like backing up and restoring the site from the Cloud or migrating from one server to another and etc.

Security scan and logs

Security in WordPress is one of the most important aspects of site management. Keeping your WordPress, themes, and plugins up-to-date or having a good hosting is a must. But sometimes, event updated software is not enough to protect you from newly written malicious code.Hiding your security gaps is a massive question – so big in fact that it might require a different post entirely. Aside from the basic things such as changing the admin password, setting up two-factor authentication, disabling file editing, among others, it’s also vital to run a general security audit on your site.  You might want to consider Wordfence, which is one of the most popular tools out here for this purpose:

Maintenance Tasks for your WordPress Website - wordfence

Wordfence can run an audit and security scan of your site. If it detects any malicious code in your files, it’ll provide recommendations to further protect your site. Along with its security functions, Wordfence also can be used as a firewall.After installing and activating the plugin, the next thing you need to do is to run a scan of your site. You can do this by going to Wordfence menu > Scan:

Maintenance Tasks for your WordPress Website - wordfence scan

Once the scan of your site is complete, you can then follow the instructions provided by Wordfence.

As you add more content to your site, you are also adding more articles. You might notice that links in your older articles no longer work. The reasons for this vary such as the link or the URL was changed – or perhaps the website was taken down. The same thing might happen if you’ve added images from other sources.  A scheduled inspection of broken links on your site is important, since they may affect user experience and it could hurt SEO ranking in general. But checking these links manually is time consuming, so it’s better to use a plugin for this. For this, we recommend using the Broken Link Checker plugin.

Maintenance Tasks for your WordPress Website - broken link checker

This plugin will monitor all broken and dead links on your site and inform you either by mail or in the dashboard.

Conclusion 

This post is by no means a comprehensive list of tasks that you’ll need to maintain your online business. There are other important things you’ll need to keep track of such as image optimization, spam comments, abandoned themes or plugins, performance tests, SEO audits, among much more. 

If you have any questions related to WordPress maintenance, let us know in the comments section below!

Automate Marketing for WordPress: How to Choose a Tool in 2020

automate marketing for WordPress featured

Due to the extensive breadth covered by marketing in today’s world, the field is inundated when it comes to touchpoints, channels and ins and outs. Throughout the years, marketing has become increasingly comprehensive to cover more and more aspects of a business – from increasing conversions to ensuring customers are happy, from fostering a loyal customer base to encouraging advocacy for a brand.

In its most traditional form, marketing aimed to appeal to people and sell something to them while you had their attention. However, marketing has transformed since its early days to engage with the customer throughout their entire journey.

The factors already mentioned mean that the marketing world is filled with tools. Today, you can find a number of tools that help with every aspect of the customer journey. This includes tools for advertising and SEO, automating email campaigns, personalizing websites, moderating affiliates and referrals, among much more.

Needless to say, a marketer’s job has become much more complicated over the years. In order to carry out comprehensive marketing campaigns and to eliminate legwork, redundancy and dependency, a typical marketer has to work with at least 5 tools. Eliminating excessive repetition and legwork is reason enough to allow for a new vertical function in the digital marketing realm called marketing automation. However, this is not the biggest hurdle that automation should overcome.  

Within the scope of this blog post, we’ll cover what marketing automation in WordPress looks like today, discover what effective and efficient marketing automation is and take a look at some helpful products that allow you to automate marketing for WordPress.

Personalized marketing is in 

To quote Seth Godin, “Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.” However, this is no longer the name of the marketing game as everyone is constantly hit with marketing ads. In a day and age of millions upon millions of ads, you need something to stand apart from the competition. What you need is relevancy.

automate marketing for WordPress set godin

So what exactly does this mean? The message you convey should be relevant throughout all marketing channels, including your website content, email and marketing campaigns, ads, and so on. Moreover, the aim of marketing automation shouldn’t be simply cutting down on legwork or automating repetition, but to incorporate attributes that personalize automated content.

Tools that personalize automation for WordPress need to be able to send out content customized for each and every visitor based on particular preferences, purchase histories and attributes.

Factors to consider when selecting an automation tool 

With this new type of marketing in mind, it’s crucial to choose a tool that provides the features listed below in order to automate marketing for WordPress.

Omni-channel structure

As we already mentioned, your campaigns should include personalized content on every main marketing channel, including websites, popups and emails. And all these channels should be in tune with one another. Failing to align these campaigns with each other will cause a rupture in the customer journey.

Most of the marketing automation tools – both for WordPress and other platforms – do not have this feature and only deal with one or two aspects such as website content or email campaigns. A tool like Growmatik combines all the tools and channels needed to automate marketing for WordPress.

Segmentation capability

The first step in automate marketing for WordPress is identifying segments that break down a customer base depending on specific characteristics or behavior. Site visitors or potential leads could be segmentations that you use to expand your customer base. To do this, the automation tool we select should have a broad selection of segmentation filters, including behavior, personal and contextual. A vaster range of segmentation criteria will make more capable automations.

Rule creation workflow

The type of automation tool we’re after needs to be able to trigger automation whenever particular conditions are met. The easiest and best way to do this is with the “IF this THEN that” rule. These rules should be implemented without the need to write code.

UX of builder and personalizer tool

Another thing to take into account is the type of tool you’d like to work with. Would you rather work within a custom user interface and tuned user experience (such as Growmatik) or would you rather create and maintain automations in the native WordPress backend with a customizer, meta options and custom fields at your disposal? (such as If-So and Groundhogg).

Performance consequences

Automation is related to your website speed and performance. Automation rules are set to be triggered when specific events occur. It’s the responsibility of your automation tool to frequently and repetitively (sometimes every hour) check to see if any of these events are triggered for a user so it fires the relevant action. This whole operating and execution requires server resources, and it can become a serious matter when your user base grows. 

If the tool you choose to automate marketing for WordPress is not a service but just a WordPress plugin (such as AutomateWoo, If-So, Groundhogg and Logichop), the server resources required for this operation will be on your server’s shoulders. You should make sure that you have enough server resources to cover these operations, otherwise your website speed and performance will be compromised. However, if your automation tool is a service such as Growmatik and Jilt, your server resources won’t be used to operate and execute the automations, and it will be included in the service you pay for.

Email sending service

When researching different tools, you’ll want to check to see if they include sending emails as part of the plan. Several of the tools on the market  such as AutomateWoo and Groundhogg will require you to link them with a third-party email sender, which incurs an additional fee. Or they might ask you to use your own email server, which also necessitates additional resources and technical know-how. While tools such as Growmatik and Jilt include the email delivery in their service.

Pricing

You’ll want to make sure that the licenses or membership subscription in your paid plan has all the features you need. Some tools such as Jilt might allow you to access their features but limit the extent to which you can use them. Other tools such as Groundhogg and If-So might limit both features and usage. We recommend that your preferred tool allows you to test out the product for free or through a trial plan (ideally with unlimited features such as Growmatik), so you can make an informed decision before purchasing.

Let’s now dig into a handful of the automation tools out there for WordPress and WooCommerce.

automate marketing for WordPress - Growmatik

Growmatik is a unified tool to automate marketing for WordPress and WooCommerce that takes information about user types and behavior and breaks them down into segments. It then further uses this info to tailor a harmonized customer experience across multiple channels: emails, popups and webpage content.

You can create automations in the form of the “IF this THEN that” rule with premade segments, or you can build custom segments with 50 attributes. Growmatik offers both premade templates and powerful native builders for your emails, popups and web page personalizations. With Growmatik, you won’t need a third-party email service to send your emails and your server resources will not be used for automation operations.

Automation ChannelsSegmentation CriteriaAutomation BuildingBuilders/Personalizers
✅ Email
✅ Webpage Content
✅ Popups
50 Attributes in:
✅ Personal details
✅ Referral activity
✅ In-site activity
✅ Email activity
✅ Shopping activity
– IF this THEN that
– Independent interface
– Native email builder
– Native popup builder
– Front-end web page personalizer
Email Delivery ServiceRequired Server resourcesPricingFree Plan
✅ Included✅ Included✅ All features available in all tiers
– Starting from $20/month when annual
✅ All features available
– 2000 subscribers
– 10,000 visits / month
– 15,000 emails / month
Growmatik Features
automate marketing for WordPress - Groundhogg

Groundhogg is an email funnel builder for WordPress and with a wide integration list. It connects the funnels that you build with a third-party email service of your choice and doesn’t send it itself. Although you will need more tools to automate your popups and personalize web page content, Groundhogg offers a decent integration support to connect it to different tools. It uses the native WordPress backend (Customizer, post types, meta options, etc) that makes it a decent email automator for anyone used to the WordPress classic backend experience.

Automation ChannelsSegmentation CriteriaAutomation BuildingBuilders/Personalizers
✅ Email
❌ Webpage Content
❌ Popups
❌ Personal details
❌ Referral activity
✅ In-site activity (very limited: Signup, form entry, link click, tags)
❌ Email activity
❌ Shopping activity
– Building funnels
– WP native interface
– Basic text-based email builder within free plan
– Third-party integration within paid plan
Email Delivery ServiceRequired Server resourcesPricingFree Plan
❌ Not Included❌ Not Included❌ Some features locked in lower tiers
– Starting from $20/month when annual
❌ Some features locked
– Send emails (no integration), create funnels, CRM, Reporting, Rest API.
Groundhogg Features
automate marketing for WordPress - If-So

If-So is a personalization plugin with dynamic content for WordPress, allowing you to add or replace content on your website based on visitors’ profiles or interactions with the site. It uses WordPress backend meta boxes and custom fields. Like Groundhogg, If-So uses the native WordPress backend and is useful for an average WordPress user to personalize the appearance of their WordPress website.

Automation ChannelsSegmentation CriteriaAutomation BuildingBuilders/Personalizers
❌ Email
✅ Webpage Content
❌ Popups
✅ Personal details (Limited)
✅ Referral activity
✅ In-site activity (Very limited)
❌ Email activity
❌ Shopping activity
– Condition & actions
– WP native interface
Personalizing via WordPress backend
Email Delivery ServiceRequired Server resourcesPricingFree Plan
❌ Not Included❌ Not Included❌ Some features locked in lower tiers
– Starting from $139 lifetime for 1 domain and up to 1000 geolocation sessions
❌ Some features locked
– Targeting based on device, logged-in users, date, IP and geolocation (up to 250 session/mo)
If-So Features
automate marketing for WordPress - Logic Hop

Logichop is also a page content personalization for WordPress where you define Logics (which are the conditions) and blocks or bars which are the content to show if the condition is met. To create recipes (rules), you should use backend custom fields in one step and assign those rules to triggers inside your page builder as another step. LogicHop supports a variety of page builders and lead generators, but you need to install a separate plugin for each of them.

Automation ChannelsSegmentation CriteriaAutomation BuildingBuilders/Personalizers
❌ Email
✅ Webpage Content
❌ Popups
40 attributes in:
✅ Personal details (limited)
✅ Referral activity
✅ In-site activity
❌ Email activity
❌ Shopping activity
– Condition & actions
– WP native interface
Personalizing via WordPress backend
Email Delivery ServiceRequired Server resourcesPricingFree Plan
❌ Not Included❌ Not Included❌ Some features locked in lower tiers
– Starting from $199/year
❌ Some features locked
Logic Hop Features
Jilt

Jilt is an email marketing automation tuned for WooCommerce. It offers segmentation, personalization, broadcast and transactional emails. It enjoys wide segmentation criteria, deep integration with many e-commerce platforms including WooCommerce and a powerful native email builder. With Jilt, you won’t need a third-party email service to send your emails.

Automation ChannelsSegmentation CriteriaAutomation BuildingBuilders/Personalizers
✅ Email
❌ Webpage Content
✅ Popups
✅ Personal details
❌ Referral activity
❌ In-site activity
✅ Email activity (limited)
✅ Shopping activity
– Rules for user types
– Independent interface
– Native email editor
– Native Popup Builder
Email Delivery ServiceRequired Server resourcesPricingFree Plan
✅ Included✅ Included✅ All features in all tiers
– Starting from $29/month
❌ Some features locked
– Up to 300 subscribers
– Up to 600 emails/mo
Jilt Features
AutomateWoo

AutomateWoo is an email marketing automation for WooCommerce where you can create workflows for different segments, and emails are rolled out according to the workflow conditions. In order to make sure your emails don’t end up in the spam folder, you will need to connect a third-party email sender service and pay for it separately, but AutomateWoo offers built-in reports and analytics of all your campaigns.

Automation ChannelsSegmentation CriteriaAutomation BuildingBuilders/Personalizers
✅ Email
❌ Webpage
❌ Popups
✅ Personal details
❌ Referral activity
❌ In-site activity
❌ Email activity (limited)
✅ Shopping activity
– Rules for user types
– WP native interface
WordPress-based email editor
Email Delivery ServiceRequired Server resourcesPricingFree Plan
❌ Not Included❌ Not Included– $99/year❌ Not Available
AutomateWoo Features

Epilogue

In this post, we provided an overview of marketing automation in WordPress, discussed how personalization is the best way to automate marketing for WordPress and what to take into consideration when selecting a marketing automation tool for WordPress and WooCommerce. In today’s ever-evolving world, marketing will continue to reinvent itself to retain its relevancy. Undoubtedly, personalization is the first step in this process. To hop on today’s marketing bandwagon, we need to understand how we can personalize our message and offerings to make it relevant for each user type.

5 Things You Can Do with Jupiter X Lite Version

Jupiter X Lite version featured

Earlier in June, we finally released the Jupiter X Lite version in the repository. Jupiter X Lite is totally free and many of the amazing features of Jupiter X theme are available in it. The Jupiter X lite version offers a decent experience of Jupiter X with a group of essential features that are enough to create a powerful WordPress website. In fact more features than what can be found in many free and even paid themes in the WordPress themes repository! Let’s dig deeper!

Why Jupiter X Lite version?

The WordPress community has always asked Artbees to release Jupiter X on the official WordPress theme repository along its lifetime. At every WordCamp we joined, we received more and more requests on releasing Jupiter X on the repository. We have been hard at work on it since late 2018, and we submitted it for review and approval in May 2019. But, shockingly, it took a whole year for the theme to get reviewed and approved by the review theme at the WordPress repository. 

That was definitely because of the complexity of a large theme like Jupiter X that was supposed to be not only in accordance with strict rules of WordPress themes repository but that also aimed to deliver read and useful features of Jupiter X in the Lite version, not just a shallow version of a premium theme that cannot be actually used to create a website unless you pay for the premium features. 

We are so happy we were able to work closely with the folks on the WordPress theme review team to preserve some amazing features (which we’ll cover in this article) to allow the community to create great websites without even needing the locked features. We hope this is a leap forward for the WordPress community who want to use a free but capable theme to create real websites. At the same time, anyone considering a premium theme to create a website can simply get an idea about the product and see if it suits their needs before paying for it.

Let’s have a look at the five amazing things you can do with the totally free version of Jupiter X Lite! 
Before anything, download and install the Jupiter X Lite theme from the WordPress themes repository. Simply search for Jupiter X Lite in WordPress -> Appearance -> Themes -> Add New, then install and activate it.

Installing Jupiter X Lite from the WordPress themes repository

1 – Build a blog with decent customization

I remember the first days of WordPress when you had almost no option to globally change the blog page stylings unless you got your hands dirty with code. Each theme added one or multiple styles but for further customizations, you had to code again. In Jupiter X Lite, you can customize and style every single element on the blog pages without a single line of code. Every option is provided in the customizer in front of your eyes, and you’ll see the result of whatever changes you make live.

Setting the featured image full width in blog single page using Jupiter X Lite theme

So, if you wish to have an amazing blog and a set of customization options, add your blog posts, choose the default blog page from WordPress -> Settings -> Reading and enjoy customizing the single and archive blog pages using Jupiter X Lite!

2 – Build a shop and customize the single page

A lot of WordPress users are using it because of WooCommerce. WooCommerce allows you to build your e-commerce website for free. While it offers only a little customization and styling settings, Jupiter X Lite provides a full set of options allowing you to style and customize your shop pages. The Shop Customizer contains a vast variety of options including quick cart view, product page elements customization, load more and pagination behavior for product lists, number of rows and columns on product list pages and much more.

Customizing the shop single page in Jupiter X Lite

The point here is that you can still customize your WooCommerce template files inside a child theme, so from the other point of view, except for the different single page premade templates, every other option is still available to build a great WooCommerce website. 

3 – Build and customize online portfolios

The portfolio post type is bundled with the Jupiter X Lite theme. So, in addition to blog posts, you can also showcase your portfolios. The portfolio section in the customizer allows you to customize and style the portfolio single and archive pages.

Portfolio single page customization and styling

Although the free version of Elementor provides a lot of good features to build portfolios, you can still use free Elementor add-ons. You can search through the WordPress plugins repository for tons of add-on pack plugins that have more or less free elements for portfolio pages. Take a look here

4 – Build stunning headers

Jupiter X Lite is capable of providing regular header, sticky header and fixed header options. It further provides several options to customize and style your headers. The sheer combination of settings and different layout options allow you to build dozens of header looks. You can find more information about it here in this article.

Header customizer

One of the coolest features in the Jupiter X Lite version is the Fixed Bottom headers. Your header can be sticky at the bottom of the browser all the time. Depending on the type of site you run, this could greatly enhance user experience.

Jupiter X Lite version
Fixed bottom header in Jupiter X Lite

5 – Build amazing sidebars

One of the most useful features of the Jupiter X Lite version is the ability to change the page and post layouts and style the widgets inside them. Using the sidebar feature along with the side width options will allow you to make unique web designs even with a free WordPress theme.

Jupiter X Lite version
Layout options in the Customizer in Jupiter X Lite

Better to mention that all the layout and sidebar options are possible to override inside the single pages. If you wish to do that, just install and activate the Advanced Custom Fields (free) plugin and change the post options as you wish.

Jupiter X Lite version
Overriding layout and sidebar options on individual pages using the Jupiter X Lite theme.

Conclusion

Although premium themes are highly recommended by pros in the WordPress industry, sometimes some free themes can be great competitors. The Jupiter X Lite version provides not only all the features and ease of access you need from a theme, it also provides you with the experience that you’re using a tool used by professionals.. As it lowers the overall final project cost, Jupiter X Lite is a great tool to use for projects on a tight budget. If you get your hands on the new Jupiter X Lite, please let us know what you think about it and what would be the next step for it to take.