5 Best Data Collection and Survey Plugins

data collection and survey plugins featured

There are plenty of reasons why you’d want to use a plugin to conduct surveys on your website. Let’s say you want feedback on your newly launched website or you want to hear more about how your customer service is doing. In general, collecting surveys and feedback from your customers gives you a chance to listen to your audience, and by collecting their complaints and and concerns, at the end of the day you have more opportunities to improve the weak points of your business.

Setting a poll on your website may sound like a simple task. However, in order to choose the right tool you need to choose one from many alternatives. There are many good survey plugins out there that offer different features and services, as well as different pricing and support plans. However, choosing the right tool is up to you. In this article we will review the 5 best data collection and survey plugins on the market to help you find the best fit for you without wasting a lot of time searching.

Formidable

Formidable Forms is a powerful WordPress form plugin with rich survey and poll capabilities. For those who prefer minimalist designs, the Formidable Form Builder plugin features a clean user interface and easy to understand building process. Their form builder allows you to construct any sort of form without coding and includes all of the common field types that you’d expect from a popular survey plugins.

In Formidable, you can create everything from polls to surveys and quizzes. Additionally, the plugin offers a few more choices, such as conventional forms and widget surveys. But the main reason why this plugin is so popular is its email marketing form and calculator, which can be used as survey-type forms for everything from online stores to real estate brokers and finance businesses. You may also create complex forms with advanced logic such as those used for customer service feedback or bug reporting. 

Forms created by the plugin are fully responsive and they look great on a range of devices, from tiny screen mobile devices to large screen monitors.

Formidable is the favorite form creation solution for over 300,000 website owners.

Pricing

You can start using the plugin for free since the core plugin is completely free to use. But to access all the plugin’s business capabilities, you’ll have to purchase the premium version, which starts at $149 per year and goes up to $599 per year.

Crowdsignal

CrowdSignal (formerly Polldaddy) is a well-known WordPress polls and survey plugins maintained by the famous Automatic.com. This is a free plugin, but in order to activate it you need an account on WordPress.com to obtain an API key. Please note that the plugin has a premium version as well. The free version of the plugin has fewer features and also will include branding on survey forms.

The main philosophy behind CrowdSignal is to offer a quick and easy method of survey creation and maintenance. The plugin has a drag and drop interface for creating surveys and polls and allows you to customize the survey and result sharing settings and choose from many styling options. It also has captcha to prevent spam and IP filtering to prevent duplicate answers.

One of the great features in the plugin is that it allows you to send interactive surveys via email. This allows consumers to complete the form in their email without having to navigate to another website.

The forms created in CrowdSignal are fully responsive on a wide range of screen sizes.  

The plugin also offers predefined color schemes, meaning that you can personalize without having to learn any coding.

Pricing

The free version allows you to create unlimited questions, surveys, ratings and polls. This plan’s features are restricted, yet it is suitable for small businesses. Its features include 2,500 answers, data exports and survey embedding. Each survey, however, has CrowdSignal branding.

Premium options start at $15 per month billed annually or $25 per month billed monthly. When you subscribe to one of the premium plans, the feature list grows significantly.

Quiz and Survey Master

data collection and survey plugins - quiz and survey master

Quiz and Survey Master, as the name implies, is intended to assist you in adding quizzes and surveys to your WordPress site. I can’t say this plugin has the most intuitive design and user interface, but it’s a very well documented plugin with many helpful features and that’s why it’s so popular.

The Quiz And Survey Master WordPress plugin is mainly designed for creating surveys and polls for posts and pages. This plugin promotes a full list of goods and services to achieve this goal, featuring a visual block builder and basic design that make it easy to use even for novice users. This is a great option for people who just want to focus on creating surveys.

One of the great features of this plugin is the option to send emails to thank users for filling surveys and then redirect them to any page on your WordPress website. 

Pricing

The core of the plugin is free to use but the premium plugin costs $79 per year and includes additional features such as landing pages, result exporting and conditional logic.

Also, there are several extra add-ons to the plugin available, which may be purchased separately or as part of the $129 per year Premium Bundle.

YOP Poll

data collection and survey plugins yop poll

The YOP Poll plugin is my favorite collection and survey plugin, as it is especially useful for individuals who don’t want to pay for a Premium plugin. This is an open source plugin, backed by great developers, and is completely free to use.

The main purpose of this plugin is to simplify the data collection process. It has a very simple interface. I can’t say it has the most visually appealing design interface, but it’s simple to use and does the job. It offers basic templates for getting started quickly and does not require any coding. The plugin can run multiple surveys at the same time and features survey scheduling, which lets you create polls for the future— just set it and forget it. The free version of the plugin gives you access to these options and many other features.

The results of the surveys you conduct can be viewed in the same section of the dashboard. The best part is that you can customize each of these pages to suit your personal dashboard preferences. Plus, the dashboard has options to customize the view and sort the results automatically.

Pricing

YOP is an open source plugin and is completely free.

Gravity Forms

data collection and survey plugins - gravity forms

Gravity Forms is one of the most popular and best-known survey building plugins that allows you to create both simple and advanced forms. This plugin has been around for a while and has a great reputation. One major benefit of this plugin is its powerful drag and drop form builder, where you can easily create forms for contact pages or advanced forms to collect detailed data from consumers.

The page builder has over 30 form fields, which is enough to create forms at any level of complexity. Please note that the regular Gravity Forms plugin can create surveys, but if you want to create advanced surveys and collect results or utilize user interaction and marketing research tools you’ll need to download the Survey add-on.

Pricing 

The annual cost is $259. There are less expensive Gravity Forms plans, but the Survey add-on requires the Elite License.

Fluent Forms

Fluent Forms is the fastest WordPress form builder plugin that combines ease of use with powerful capabilities. With its drag-and-drop form builder, creating everything from lead generation forms to product order forms or surveys becomes a seamless process. Whether you’re a beginner or an advanced user, Fluent Forms offers a range of features to meet your needs without the need for coding. 

The free version of the plugin includes 30 ready-to-use input fields. It also offers Conversational Forms to enhance user engagement, Conditional Logic to show or hide fields based on user responses, email notifications to keep you informed in real time, spam protection through reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha.

For users seeking more advanced functionalities, the Pro version of Fluent Forms takes your form-building experience to the next level. It includes over 60 input fields, including specialized fields for payments, quizzes, and advanced post creation. With the Pro version, you also get double opt-in confirmation, rules-based form restriction, conditional confirmation and more. 

Pricing 

Fluent Forms offers both annual and lifetime plans. The annual plans start at $79 for a single-site license and go up to $299 per year for the unlimited-sites license. If you prefer a lifetime license, you can opt for a one-time payment of $349 for the single-site license or $899 for the unlimited license, which covers an unlimited number of domains. 

Bonus tool: Jupiter X forms

If you are using the Jupiter X theme you may already know about the form widget it features. If you are looking for data collection or survey plugins I recommend you first review the Jupiter X Form widget before looking anywhere else.

This widget already offers various field options to collect different data from users, but what I most like about this widget are the variety of actions you can perform with the form data. The widget allows you to send them via mail, Mailchimp, Hubspot or Slack. You can even trigger a webhook for extra capabilities.

This form widget has great options for styling as well, from custom feedback to caption text. You are also able to change the view of any element, color, font weight and custom messages at every step. Beside this there is a captcha option integrated in the form to prevent spammers. 

Another great thing about the Jupiter X form builder is that you can integrate it with Growmatik, a versatile marketing tool for any e-commerce store. For more information, check out this article.

Notice how powerful it is? If you have not tried it before, go ahead and check it out before installing another plugin.

You can find more information about the form plugin here.

Conclusion

That’s all, folks! Hopefully, this post has helped you locate the finest of all WordPress data collection and survey plugins to fit the demands of your website and assist you in successfully developing your business online. It’s important to recognize that listening to your customers and getting feedback from them is very important for any business. Achieving this is possible with many different tools, each with their own advantages, so I hope this article will help you decide which plugin to use for your situation.

How to Customize WooCommerce Subscription Email Templates

WooCommerce subscription email templates featured

This is a guest post contributed to Artbees Themes blog by Thuy Nguyen from Ninja Team.

By offering subscription products such as news, summaries, courses, or even food, you can generate recurring stable revenue with WooCommerce subscription email templates.

Subscription-based products have a special business model that requires a strong digital presence. Brand print via email communications is a must.

Therefore, visual continuity is essential at all subscriber touchpoints, including your website, social media channels, and transactional emails. In today’s article, we’ll be showing you how to do that by customizing WooCommerce subscription email templates without coding using YayMail.

Install required plugins

In this tutorial, I’m using these plugins:

  • WooCommerce Subscriptions: to create subscriptions via WooCommerce and sell subscription-based products or services
  • WooCommerce Stripe Gateway: to handle recurring payments with Stripe 
  • YayMail: the free email template builder that support 50+ third-party extensions in its addons
  • YayMail Addon for WooCommerce Subscriptions: integration of email customizer for subscription emails
  • YayMail Addon for WooCommerce Stripe Gateway: integration of email customizer for Stripe’s payment reminder email templates

If you haven’t decided on which Woo subscription plugin to use, please check out our blog post on how to Create a Subscription Store with WooCommerce. In  this article, you will learn the pros and cons of each plugin in order to make an informed purchase. No matter which one you choose, the customization workflow will be the same as presented in this walk-through.

Let’s get started!

Design the general template layout

By default, the WooCommerce plugin alone comes with 11 transactional email templates. The WooCommerce Subscriptions extension comes with another 10 email templates and WooCommerce Stripe Gateway adds even more templates for payment status reminders. 
That’s quite a lot, right? But don’t fret, all of these subscription email templates are located in one place under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails.

Alternatively, you can also find the email templates by navigating to WooCommerce > Email Customizer.

In the email builder interface, please go to Settings > Enable/Disable Templates to find all the available email templates. There, you can choose to activate all the templates you want to put in use.

For each enabled template, you will see a green light indicating that it is now being used in the automation workflow of WooCommerce.

Also in the same Settings tab, you’ll be able to design the general layout of email templates. These options include universal display components like:

  • Language direction: it is left to right by default.
  • Container width: the width of the whole email body. It is 900px by default but 700px in the sample image.
  • Product image: automatically insert any product image with a custom position and image size.
  • Custom CSS: add your own creative adjustments.
  • Export and import email templates: keep a full template backup or use your customized email templates on different sites.

In the sample image I’ve changed the email background color to light mint and the text link color to dodger blue. Feel free to play around with colors before we move on to the next steps.

Customizing welcome email template for new subscribers

After finishing the general options, you can now move along to  a specific subscription email template such as New customer welcome email template for onboarding subscribers.

In the WooCommerce subscription flow, the first email your subscriber receives after signing up is called Processing order. Choose it from the dropdown list and then we can start to transform it into a more appealing welcome email template.

Logo and email header

Similar to Gutenberg blocks, you can upload and insert your logo very quickly. For this logo block, I set its background color with the same light mint color as the email background.

Alternatively, you can use a full width banner or an animated GIF in your email to emphasize your brand and its personality.

Then, with the email heading block, I pick a darker mint color for its background. After that, I just add some custom text and tweak it:

  • Change text color: use the built-in color picker or paste your own HEX color
  • Change font family: choose one of the email-safe fonts listed under “Font Family” option
  • Align and format the text further if necessary

After I am satisfied with my email header, I can continue with the main email content using text blocks such as:

  • Welcome greetings
  • Announcement of the subscription registration, and a bit more of what you have to offer
  • WooCommerce subscription detail table

Multiple column email section

Now it’s time to add some fancy media sections to the onboarding subscription email template. Here you can unleash your designer vision with an advanced multiple column block.

Here are some ideas to help you out with what to put in new subscriber email templates:

  • Setup instructions
  • Upcoming events and webinars
  • Merchandise and badges
  • Other useful links and resources

It’s easy to implement this media section by following these steps:

  • Add a three column block: set portion width, padding, background color or add an image
  • Drag and drop content blocks into each column
  • Insert buttons into columns: edit button color and text font/text color
WooCommerce subscription email templates - multiple column email

Feel free to add more images or videos to build excitement for your products with new subscribers and include gentle CTAs for further actions.

Email footer and signature

As for the email footer, this is where you can include post-purchase details such as customer service number, return or refund policy, company signature, QR code, etc.

Here I want to minimize those details so I only include social media profiles and the website tagline/company slogan.

WooCommerce subscription email templates - customize email heading

Within YayMail’s email builder, you can find a dedicated Social Icon block for showcasing your online presence. This enhancement provides customizable options including:

  • Social icon row paddings
  • Icon width and spacing
  • Various pre-set styles 
  • Links to social media networks and home page
  • Optionally add or remove social media icons

After all of the customization work, our email template looks  like this:

Customizing payment reminder email templates

When it comes to processing renewal payments, there are many scenarios that cause failed authentication. When this happens, Stripe Payment Gateway automatically sends payment reminder emails to the subscribers.

The WooCommerce email template Failed Subscription Renewal SCA Authentication gives a heads up to your customers:

  • To inform that an attempt to automatically process a subscription renewal payment has failed, 
  • To explain that the transaction requires an SCA verification, 
  • To request the customer to authenticate the payment, and a retry rule has been applied to notify the customer again within a certain time period.

That said, please prepare a reminder copy that helps clarify the issue and what actions you want your  subscriber to take.

Here’s what my copy looks like: 

“The automatic payment to renew your subscription with [yaymail_site_name] has failed. To reactivate your subscription, please login and authorize the renewal from your account page: Authorize the payment »”

After that, you can go to the email builder and reuse the newly customized email template to develop a consistent brand experience.

To save valuable time, it’s wise to duplicate an email template so that you don’t have to design it over again. To do this, simply follow these steps:

  • Select the current email template, eg: Payment Authentication Failed
  • Click on the button “Copy template” from the upper toolbar
  • Choose a particular template from which you want to copy all designed blocks, eg: Processing order
  • Click Copy template to have the new draft right on your current email template
WooCommerce subscription email templates - copy full template

Then you’ll have a full template cloned from the Processing order’s template. Now go ahead and omit the blocks that you find unsuitable or unnecessary.

WooCommerce subscription email templates

For situational guides, you can even add an extra text box to the email body with additional information. 

It is as easy as pie! When the email templates look just as you wish, click Save to finish.

Subscription email best practices

So we have guided you through the very basic steps of customizing subscription welcome and reminder emails. 

While it is intuitive to design with this drag and drop email builder, here are the best practices to save you more time:

  • When you add external links to the email templates, they could appear as insecure links and the template won’t be able to be saved. You can troubleshoot this problem by trying to reset the template.
  • There are many shortcodes and variables to insert personalized information into the subscription email templates. You can find them in any textbox element or from the (i) Shortcode button.
  • At any point in time, you can save and preview the current template on desktop or mobile interface.
  • Before enabling the email templates, you can send a test email anytime to make sure it looks good on different email clients and devices.
  • You can try sending different email templates in real life to find out which layout brings the highest WooCommerce conversion rate.

Wrapping Up

WooCommerce subscription email templates are expected and contain important information. These emails have a high open-rate. While you don’t want to promote hard via these emails, you do have the chance to give incentives for sharing your products, or simply ask for a review.

With the help of YayMail – WooCommerce Email Customizer, you have a simple way to build a successful relationship with your subscribers.

Have any templates that you want to share? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comment section below.

How to Find Your Referrals Using the New Dynamic Parameters in Jupiter X Forms

Dynamic Parameters in Jupiter X featured

Once I had a client who needed a landing page where visitors could submit a form asking for a medical appointment. The landing page was about to receive traffic via different marketing campaigns from different advertisers. The challenge was to detect which marketing campaign had the most conversions. In order to find it out, I needed to find a way to detect referrals by ad publishers. The next challenge was that the final product had to be delivered within 24 hours. Fortunately, Jupiter X is extremely helpful in a situation like this. In this article, I’m going to let you know how Dynamic Parameters in Jupiter X Forms can come in handy in these situations and allow you to detect your referrals quickly and easily. 

What is a dynamic parameter?

URL parameters (or Query Strings) are part of the URL that add extra information to it. The structure is similar to a valid URL but separated with a “?” symbol. Whatever comes after this character will be considered a parameter and may or may not have a key value pair. 

https://example.com/page1/index.php?parameter1=value1

In the above example, parameter1 is the query parameter and value1 is the value of that parameter. 

In fact, back in the day, web pages were simply HTML documents stored in different folders and they had  no way to communicate with each other except via hyperlinks. You could just use hyperlinks to navigate between HTML docs in different folders. Implementing Web Forms and additionals to HTML and HTTP protocol allowed simple data transfer between the pages using GET and POST methods. Imagine that you had this web form implemented on your HTML doc:

<form action="/page1/" method="get">
  <input type="text" name="parameter1" />
  <input type="text" name="parameter2" />
  <input type="submit" />
</form>

The result of such a form would be the following:

Now if a user inputs  value1 and value2 in the form fields and hits submit, it will redirect the user to /page1/ with the given URL:

/page1/?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2

In page1, it’s up to you if you want to collect the value parameters and do something with them. You can use a server to get the query strings and render them on your page or send an email to someone if the parameter is a certain value, or perform much more complex scenarios. The thing is, this is one fundamental method of passing variables between HTML documents and, although it’s simple, it can be used in much more complex cases. 

Sidenote: The GET method has a limitation of 2048 characters. This means that if your URL is bigger than 2048 characters, you will need to pass the variable using other methods such as POST. 

Now that we know the fundamentals, we can come up with a strategy for our task. I need to pass the traffic from different sources to my landing page and, once on the landing page, detect each source and dynamically add those sources to my form. This ensures that, whenever the user submits the form, the source parameter will also be submitted.

Different traffic sources for marketing campaign summer2021

Implementing the landing page: the quick way

Since I was not a designer, I was not worried about the design of the landing page. I could easily use one of Jupiter X’s landing page templates or select an elegant page template and easily add my form. Regardless, I had a design file ready from a designer and needed to implement it using my tool of choice, and I chose Jupiter X. I’m going to quickly use one of the contact page templates on this page (using the WunderWP plugin) to be able to explain the process. 

After setting up a WordPress website on my client web host, I installed Jupiter X, registered and created the first page using it. (+)

After that, I installed the WunderWP plugin and made sure it was connected to my website.

Make sure WunderWP is connected to the website

Now I need to create my landing page. From Pages -> Add New I choose to add a new page, then set the template to “Full Width” and edited with Elementor.

Creating the landing page with the appropriate page template.

When the Elementor editor loads, I can see the WunderWP icon. Simply clicking on it will open a popup where I can choose the proper contact template.

Opening up the WunderWP template modal.

After finding the proper template, I just click on the “Insert” button below it.

Click on the Insert (green) button below each template.

And here we go! I have my landing page ready.

Jupiter X Forms widget on the landing page.

Now I can configure my form to send the data to whichever email I want, or submit a copy to my MailChimp, Growmatik or any other conversion tracking system. 

Let’s get back to where we were before. I have my landing page now and still need to collect information from different viewers of my landing page, see which ones are coming from which marketing campaign and submit all the data together once the user submits the form. 

But let’s have a quick overview of the URLs that are open on my visitors’ browsers. This is an example of an actual marketing campaign link that one of my advertisers used to link to my landing page:

http://mylandingpage.com/?UTM_SOURCE=publisher1&UTM_CAMPAIGN=summer2021

Let’s have a quick look at the parameters first. 

UTM parameters 

Based on this wikipedia page, Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are five variants of URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. 

As I mentioned earlier, you can edit parameters however you wish, but marketers have standardized a few specific parameters for continuity between different marketing campaigns. It’s up to you whether you choose to follow their example or not. It’s up to you. 

There are five standardized UTM parameters, which may be used in any order:

ParameterPurposeExample
utm_sourceIdentifies which site sent the traffic. A required parameter.utm_source=publisher1
utm_mediumIdentifies what type of link was used, such as cost per click or email.utm_medium=cpc
utm_campaignIdentifies a specific product promotion or strategic campaign.utm_campaign=summer2021
utm_termIdentifies search terms.utm_term=running+shoes
utm_contentIdentifies what specifically was clicked to bring the user to the site, such as a banner ad or a text link. It is often used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads.utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink

I know that the links that redirect to my website have two of these parameters: utm_source and utm_campaign. So, I need to get the value from them and store it somewhere until the user submits the form. 

Now let’s see how we can attach these parameters to the form. 

Dynamic Parameters in Jupiter X Forms

Jupiter X Forms has a unique and interesting feature that allows you to add a hidden field to your form and populate it with a dynamic parameter. Pretty much exactly what we need, right? Then it’s as easy as adding the hidden form fields and configuring them to the value from the URL.

The first thing I’m going to add to the form is two hidden fields.

dynamic parameters in Jupiter X
Adding a hidden field to the Jupiter X Forms

After that, I need to name my field exactly like the UTM parameters that I’m going to use.

dynamic parameters in Jupiter X
Adding Request Parameter as the dynamic field value. 

After naming the field and setting the value to be a dynamic request parameter, I need to provide the name of the parameter in the box.

dynamic parameters in Jupiter X - add UTM
Adding UTM_SOURCE as the parameter name to the hidden field.

I will do the same process for the UTM_CAMPAIGN parameter. I also added a test text field and then populated it with the same request parameter to show how it will populate the field value dynamically. Here is the result:

dynamic parameters in Jupiter X - populating dynamic parameters
Populating the dynamic parameters inside the form fields.

I don’t need the TEST UTM_SOURCE and TEST UTM_CAMPAIGN fields, so I will remove them. The parameters are already attached inside the form as hidden fields.

dynamic parameters in Jupiter X - hidden field
Populated hidden field showing up in the browser inspector.

One thing to consider is that the name of the generated hidden fields are random here, so you may need to map them before sending them to MailChimp or Growmatik

After submitting the form, I can now see dynamic parameters that are added among the filled fields. 

If there are no dynamic parameters available, no issues will occur. The fields will have no value and won’t cause any trouble for your submission.

dynamic parameters in Jupiter X - form sample
Sample of the form submitted to the email containing the dynamic parameters.

And we are done. Finding your referrals using dynamic parameters in Jupiter X Forms requires no additional plugins or extra work. This example demonstrates how you can get the values from the URLs. There is also one other feature that I would like to mention and that is the POST parameter types. Sometimes you need to get the values using the POST method instead of the GET (url), which is also possible via Jupiter X Forms. 

That’s all, folks! Feel free to ask questions or share your ideas about this article and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter to get the latest updates from Artbees!

How to Create Popups in Elementor Websites

popups in elementor featured

A popup is a small window that appears from different sides or with different effects as a customer browses a website. It can have different shapes, forms, locations and functioning behavior, it can be used to show important information, make an agreement with the user, collect leads or gather other information from the end user.

Let’s be honest, you probably hate to see popups when you’re browsing a website. It’s usually unwanted and distracts from whatever process you were engaged in. However, as a site owner, you can’t afford to ignore making popups because they have the potential to greatly increase lead generation. In this article we will discuss the function of popups and present several methods on how to create popups in Elementor websites. 

Popups in Elementor Pro 

Elementor has a built-in feature for popups, but in order to utilize this feature you need to upgrade your account to the Pro version. 

If you are familiar with Elementor, then you probably know how to create and manage templates. Building popups in Elementor is very similar to working with templates; you create them, define rules and set where they will appear. Let’s shortly review how this works in Elementor Pro:First you need to create a new popup via Elementor > Popups > Add new popup. Once you add the name you will have the chance to choose from a pre-designed template or start from scratch.

No matter which way you use it, working with page elements is absolutely the same. Besides, this post is not about how to use the Elementor page builder. Rather, the most interesting part of the popup is in the template setting (marked by the gear icon at the bottom left). Here in the settings tab you can define width and height, animations for entry and exit, the horizontal and vertical position of the popup window and close button style and appearance.

On the style tab (on the right side), you can define the style of the elements used in the popup, close button style and some other style-related settings. 

If you finished setting up the popup window it’s time to define how and when to show your popup. To do this you need to define the Publish Settings of this popup.

The Conditions tab defines the location of the popup. You can choose different locations like pages, posts, only frontpage, only Shop page or anything else you can imagine. You can also combine rules together.

The Trigger tab defines exactly when you want a popup to appear. There are several triggers and they are enough to setup advanced processes including:

  1. On-Page Load
  2. On Scroll
  3. On Scroll to Element
  4. On Click
  5. After Inactivity
  6. On-Page Exit Intent

The Advanced Rules tab allows you to define the advanced conditions of your popup such as  where or to whom you want to display the popup. These include different user roles as well. There are many different rules available and they can also be combined with each other.

Once you set all your rules and click Save & Close, your popup will be ready and will show up for end users according to the rules you set.

Popups in Jupiter X

Popups in Jupiter X can be used even if you don’t have Elementor Pro! They are organized by famous JetPopup plugins, which is a premium plugin and included for free in Jupiter X.

In JetPopup, as in Elementor pro, you also have pre-built templates, but here you have a better selection of templates and they can be filtered by different categories.

The process is almost the same as in Elementor Pro: you start with a blank template or with a premade template. Designing the page with the Elementor widget is the same, you just need to add and configure the Elementor widget. The difference is in the settings of the popup. In this case you don’t have a Publish Settings tab, but instead you can configure all the settings from the same window.

Here in the settings tab you can define animation, popup events, amount of popups and many other settings. The most important part here is Display Condition, which defines rules of where exactly you want to show your popup. Here you can choose to include or exclude pages, posts, categories or many other post types. They can also be combined with each other.

The Style tab in the settings is responsible for the style of the popup. Here you can define width and height, position, background type and many other settings such as close button style and overlay of the popup, which can be defined as a color or image.

The good thing about the JetPopup plugin combination with Jupiter X is that when you install one of many demos of Jupiter X it comes with a pre-designed popup template optimized for that particular demo. Most of the demos are packed with nice looking popups, especially shop templates.

Popups by Growmatik

It’s likely you already know about Growmatik, our product that automates your entire marketing arsenal and drives more sales via personalized web pages, emails and popups, all from within one tool. However, if you have not tried it before I highly recommend checking it out. Popups in Growmatik can be displayed for specific events or to certain users from certain locations. In order to create such popups, first of all you need to make sure you first integrate your website with Growmatik. Once this process is done, you can start creating popups from the Workshop page:

popups in Elementor - growmatik popups

Now, click on the button on the upper right side to add the popup. Basically, you have 2 options, to start from scratch or use readymade popups. These pre-made popups were created to fit the most common marketing scenarios like subscription, discount offer, content giveaway, new collection and many others.

popups in Elementor - growmatik templates

Starting with pre-built templates is the easiest option, of course, and will save you plenty of time. You’ll just need to change some text, images and the appearance settings of the popup window as everything else is already created and configured.

If you decide to start from scratch, it will take more time but your template will be fully customized. It’s all about your creativity! I love prebuilt templates but they do not always fit my needs, which is the main reason why you might want to start from scratch.

The best thing about Gromatik popups is that you are not distracted with other elements in the editing window. The sleek design helps you focus on your work, such as the important elements and settings window of the popup. Take a look at this screenshot to get an idea what the Growmatik interface looks like.

popups in Elementor - growmatik popup

Everything you may want from the popup, you have in your window. Growmatik boasts a responsive view, real time preview, the setup of the popup layout, overlay style and many other related settings that can be configured from a single window. That’s how easy it is!

Once your popup window is finished it’s time to create some automation. In other words, this popup now needs smart rules of appearance since we don’t want to show it for every user who opens our site. In this case, Growmatik has automation rules. To access these, you don’t even have to leave the  popup builder. From the same window, on the top left you’ll see the Options button. Choose “Use in automation” and then, depending on your marketing goal, choose who you want to show your popup: guests, leads or customers. In the window that appears next you will have the option to show your popup window to filtered users by parameters such as location, device used, period of the time and many others.

We will not review all the details of the creation process but let’s check this screenshot, where we decided to show popups to users from Georgia and Italy who are using mobile devices. We want our popup to appear after they scroll our page by 25% and this campaign should run from 8 August to 13 September. On the right side we chose which popup to show for this campaign:

popups in Elementor - create a rule

As we can see, creating this process is very easy, even for beginners, but be aware that we covered only the basics of the process. Actually, Growmatik is a versatile tool and it can be used for advanced marketing scenarios.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this article! I hope you now have more information on creating popups in Elementor and other key marketing programs. As you can see, making a great looking popup is not a big deal and it is super easy. Nowadays, you don’t need to design popups from the ground up, since many ready-made templates are available. You just need to change some settings and set up appearance rules. As a site owner, you always need to imagine yourself as a viewer of the site. Don’t create too many popups and don’t distract users, since only good looking and well-functioning popups can really increase leads

If you have any questions or tips to add, please feel free to comment below!

How to Build a WooCommerce Store with Elementor

WooCommerce store with Elementor featured

If you are going to create an Ecommerce website, you’ll be able to do it easily with the combined capability of Elementor, WooCommerce and the Jupiter X theme. These powerful programs allow you to design a fully-functional ecommerce website without any coding. In this post, you’ll find all the steps you need to take when creating your own WooCommerce store with Elementor.

The Tools You Need To Make A WooCommerce Store

There are two main tools you’ll need to create your online store beyond the WooCommerce plugin:

Jupiter X Theme – this is a premium WordPress theme that includes customization options, a bundled WooCommerce plugin and demo templates.

Elementor – this is a free page builder that will help you customize pages and add any content. It’s also bundled with the Jupiter X theme.

Next we’ll explain how to create and customize the product pages and make them look great.

Installing Jupiter X and WooCommerce Templates 

The first step you need to take in creating a WooCommerce site is installing the Jupiter X theme. The process is quite simple and is explained fully here. If you are new to WordPress and WooCommerce, or just want to save time, you can install a demo template to get an already built WooCommerce site and just replace demo products and other demo content with yours. In this post you’ll get a detailed instruction on how to import a demo template. 

Use Customizer to Edit the Settings

Jupiter X provides WooCommerce settings in the WordPress Customizer. You can edit some styles, enable/disable options and see the results right away on a real-time preview. 

So, after installing WooCommerce, you can access default WooCommerce pages, which can be styled in Appearance > Customize > WooCommerce.

Here are the sections you can customize:

  • Product Archive
  • Product List
  • Product Page
  • Product Catalog
  • Checkout & Cart
  • Store Notice
  • Product Images

WooCommerce settings like Store Notice, Product Catalog, Product Images are default settings and not related to Jupiter X. You can read about them in the WooCommerce documentation

Product Archive

In the “Product Archive” tab you can set margin and padding values that will be applied on WooCommerce archive/category pages. Also there is a “Styles” tab where you can edit the color, fonts for the title and description on the archive pages.

Product List 

The settings in “Product List” allow you to enable/disable different elements, set columns and rows for the products. Also you can style the elements like “Add to Cart” button, product title, Sale and Out of Stock badges, etc. Jupiter X documentation has an article related to Product List that describes the options in detail.

Product Page

This tab provides the settings for single product pages. There are 8 templates you can select for single products. You can view their examples on Jupiter X demo site (hover the Shop menu item and check the links Layout 1 – Layout 8).

WooCommerce store with Elementor - product page

There are also options to enable/disable different elements on the page like Categories, Tags, Short Description, Review tab, etc. In addition, you can disable Image Lightbox and Image Zoom. The “Styles” tab provides styling options for the elements, such as changing font family or font size for product name, setting border for an image, styling social icons and so on.

Checkout & Cart

The “Checkout & Cart” tab has an option to disable steps, which you have by default on the Cart and Checkout pages.

WooCommerce store with Elementor - customize cart

Additionally you can style these steps, headings, buttons, thumbnail and others in the “Style” tab.

Creating a Custom Shop Page With Elementor

WooCommerce creates a default Shop page that is not editable and other content can’t be added to it.In this case we have a solution: create a custom Shop page using Elementor editor where you’ll be able to add any content you need. Of course, you need to display products on your Shop page, and to do this you can add the JX Products widget to the Elementor editor.

WooCommerce store with Elementor - jx products

Its styles are taken from Customizer > WooCommerce > Product List. So, if you want to change the title color and font size or customize the button, you need to edit the Style settings in the Product List inside the Customizer.

By the way, any other content can be added to your custom Shop page in Elementor, including, for example, some custom text or a sidebar, search form and others.

If you wish to create custom templates for archive and single product pages, you have to install the JetWooBuilder plugin (it’s bundled with the Jupiter X theme). This plugin will help you build astonishing templates in combination with Jupiter X, Elementor, WooCommerce, and JetWooBuilder. 

JetWooBuilder allows you to override the default shop pages in WooCommerce from single pages to the archive and category pages. It also offers customization on checkout and cart pages. So, if you aim to build a completely custom shop page layout, you can make use of the JetWooBuilder plugin. Here is JetWooBuilder’s official website.

By the way, we already have a blog article about JetWooBuilder and what templates you can create for your store.

Although JetWooBuilder gives you the ability to override WooCommerce pages, another tool can be very handy: Jet Smart Filters. This plugin is also bundled with the theme. It allows you to use better filters on your archive pages to provide better usability for your end-users. 

JetSmartFilters plugin is made for the Elementor page builder and it’s very handy. You’ll give users a possibility to apply multiple filters. There are different filter types to add, including the checkboxes, range filters, search filters, etc. You can find detailed instructions on how to apply filters to WooCommerce products in this article.

Increase Conversion Rate

If you are looking for a way to monitor customer engagement, the best tool for this will be Growmatik. This powerful conversion tool will measure your marketing with conversion & growth reports. Growmatik is a robust marketing automation solution that automates your entire marketing and drives more sales through personalized web pages, emails and popups within one tool.

Learn more tips and tricks for improving conversion in this article entitled “What is conversion rate and how to boost it with personalization”.

Wrapping Up

Using a combination of WooCommerce, Jupiter X and Elementor allows you to build a custom ecommerce site without needing to write lines of code. All you need to do is:

  • Install and configure WooCommerce
  • Install Jupiter X and import a demo template if needed
  • Customize your product pages via Jupiter X Customizer settings
  • Create a custom Shop page with the Elementor page builder and use additionals tools like JetWooBuilder, JetSmartFilter

So give it a chance and build a WooCommerce store with Elementor. After that, you’re ready to sell your products!

Top 10 Free Browser Extensions All Support Staff Should Use

free browser extensions featured

As a WordPress support engineer, I face many challenges every day. Rather than skills that a technical support staff should have, there are tools people like me can use to be able to help their clients faster and better. In this article, I’m going to give an overview of the top 10 free browser extensions that have become part of my daily workflow over the years. I can divide these extensions into the following categories: emulation tools, scanners, recording tools, measurement tools, and operating tools

The tools may vary depending on the product you support but some tools, such as those that I’m going to talk about in the following article, might be commonly used by support engineers working with any kind of product. In fact, everyone may use these extensions for a different purpose, and while I work as a WordPress technical support professional, these extensions could come in handy in another way. In this article, I’m going to review the top 10 free browser extensions I use as a support engineer and the best thing about them is that all of them won’t cost you a dime!

Grammarly

Honestly, I can’t even imagine writing a letter or a response to a client without Grammarly. I’m even using it to write this blog post! This extension is a must-have for every one who is involved in writing any kind of text. It corrects grammar issues, fixes dictation in the free version and suggests improvements to your writing in the premium version. I’m already happy with the free version but if you believe you need more advanced writing assistance you may want to try Grammarly Premium. It already has 10+ million users.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer will detect the framework, technologies and programming languages that are being used on a website. It became my habit to check out the technologies being used on a website even if I don’t want to detect any problem. This free browser extension uncovers more than a thousand technologies in dozens of categories such as programming languages, analytics, marketing tools, payment processors, CRM, CDN and others, making it very useful for a web developer or a web support engineer. 1+ million users currently have this extension installed on their browser.

Awesome Screenshot

I think Awesome Screenshot is not only a handy tool for all support staff but a must have extension for everyone. Most of the time I need to show our clients how to do something, and a good tool like this saves me a lot of time. Mostly, I use the Full Page Screenshot feature and then crop the image with built in features of this screenshot. This way I don’t need to use photo editor softwares to edit the screenshots or to add notes over the image. 
If you don’t like Awesome Screenshot, GoFullPage – Full Page Screen Capture is another awesome plugin that does essentially the same job, but only uses one click to capture the entire page. I need to mention that the Awesome Screenshot free browser extension is also able to record videos from your screen. 1+ million installations for Awesome Screenshot and 4+ million installations for GoFullPage are proof of the usefulness  of these extensions.

User-Agent Switcher

User-Agent Switcher will emulate the user agent to any agent you want, which is extremely helpful for when you want to see how robots or different applications see your website. Detecting crawler issues such as Google search bots, marketing platform bots or even web scanners are all prime uses of this extension for me. Time after time, a Google search console detects issues for a client but without using this extension, resolving the issue becomes a hassle. This free browser extension has 90k+ active installations.

Screencastify

6+ million active installations for Screencastify means that it’s truly handy in many cases. I myself use it to record videos of my browser tab to prove that either an issue for a client is resolved or not happening. The free version of this extension has a 5 minute limitation per video and also only saves the video in WebM format, which so far has been enough for me as a technical support engineer.

 The extensions above were the most used extensions on my browser. I am using them on a daily basis and  couldn’t imagine my workflow without them. There are more handy extensions for support work that my colleagues are using, but I myself can live without them. In the following I will review my colleagues’ favorite free browser extensions as well.

The Great Suspender

Having so many tabs open on a browser is an issue support staff will always deal with. The bad thing about it is that it eats lots of memory and sometimes makes your device run slowly. The idea behind The Great Suspender is that it suspends the pages that are not being used and still open in the other tabs by replacing their content with the simplest HTML possible. It will free up the memory on your device and will keep your device from lagging.

WhatFont

free browser extensions - whatfont

Although you can inspect the elements on a page and use the developer tools to find out what font is being used for that element, some people prefer a faster tool to find which font is being used in different parts of a page. By using WhatFont free browser extension, you simply click on the extension icon and hover your mouse over the texts on the page. It will show the font name assigned to that text. 6+ million active installations may be due to the many designers that are using this extension rather than support engineers or developers.

Canned Responses – Tray

free browser extensions - canned responses

When you are being bombarded with lots of tickets or chat requests, saving even a second is gold. In these situations, every tool that can speed up your workflow will become handy. Canned Responses is one of those tools that can help you save some time in tough situations. You will collect your most common responses in it and use any of them quickly. It has 2+ K active installation, which is not too many, but it doesn’t mean it’s not handy.

Dimensions

free browser extensions - dimensions

The idea behind Dimensions extension is to detect the left, right, top and bottom distances of the pointer cutting to an edge. The cutting edge will detect color differences, making it a good tool for both designers and support agents as it can help to detect the design issues. This extension has 100+ K active installations.

Clipboard History Pro

free browser extensions -clipboard history pro

Clipboard History Pro is another tool that can help you manage your time faster and avoid back and forth copy/pasting some repetitive data. Indeed, it is very useful for support staff who are experiencing heavy workloads and want to save some time. It is common that you need to use a text that you copied onto your clipboard a couple of minutes ago. This will help you use it very quickly. This extension has 90+ K active installations. 

This rounds off our list of the top 10 free browser extensions for support staff! Please share your thoughts in the comments about this article or any other  useful extensions or tools that support engineers can use.

How to Create a Subscription Store with WooCommerce

subscription store with WooCommerce featured

Subscriptions are an important part of sales for any ecommerce store. This is the list of your gold users who are ready for repeat purchases, since sales by recurring subscription is a very popular and easy to maintain channel of income that doesn’t incur big expenses compared to the usual marketing techniques and every step can be managed by the software.

Subscription means recurring sales of products or services by your customers. You may recognize the subscription model everywhere on the internet, ranging from simple grocery stores to retailers like SaaS. It can be used everywhere to drive more sales. Customers love stores offering subscription plans because it automates the purchasing of products that last a short period of time, such as subscribing to receive shaving cream once every two months.

There are many different types of subscriptions for ecommerce. For example, you may subscribe to physical products or services, you may open different levels of support service or access different areas of the website.

If you are not using WooCommerce Subscriptions in your store, it’s a must try feature. In this article, we will dive into setting up one the most popular subscription plugins and we will also review some other popular plugins. You will learn how to quickly set up a subscription store with WooCommerce plugins and sell subscription-based products and services with a recurring payment. Those plugins can be used for any products, virtual or physical, over a predefined time interval. As with all of the transactional and marketing emails, you’ll want to customize WooCommerce subscription emails to be consistent with your brand voice.

YITH WooCommerce Subscription

In this article, we will dedicate more attention to this free plugin since it’s a very popular and widely used subscription based website, setting up this plugin is easy and can be done in several minutes.

First of all, you need to install the plugin from the WordPress repository. You can directly search it from your WordPress dashboard > plugins > Add new, and search for “YITH WooCommerce Subscription.” Here is the direct link to the plugin, so install and activate it.

Once you activate the plugin you can immediately start using it. Open any product and you will see a new checkmark in the product details tab. By selecting it, new options will appear on the General tab:

As you can see there are several settings options. However all you need to do is enable the subscription plan for this product, select price for a selected period of the time. While there is no option to set a time period of years, you may use a combination of months or days instead.

In the same tab you also have the option to set the time when a subscription period ends and options for subscription limits. For example, you may limit users to allow only one active subscription.

Once you’re done with the product setup it’s ready for publishing. You will see a notice about subscriptions on the product page:

That’s it, we’ve made it, so now when visitors check this page they will see this is a subscription-based product.

How does payment work?

By default, you need to configure payment in WooCommerce > Settings. PayPal is the payment option configured by default here, so during the predefined period of time (set in the product page) the payment system will charge users the amount of funds predefined in the product page. If funds are not enough, subscription will automatically be canceled and the user will be notified about this.

Users can also use different payment methods and the system will use that method for recurring payments. Please note that the system stores user payment methods and data, so customers will be charged automatically based on their payment method and details.

Where are my subscribers?

You can see all your subscribers in YITH > Subscription > Subscriptions. Here you can view all your current and canceled subscriptions. You also have different types of filters to filter subscriptions by date, status, payment method and customer. You can also bulk delete subcategories manually.

That’s pretty much everything that you need to start subscription-based products sales. We will not cover every piece of the settings in this blog post, so for more information check out the official documentation
The premium version of the plugin offers some other features and full control over subscription management. If you feel you are missing some configuration settings in the free version it probably is already covered in the premium version. Check this link for more information about Pro.

WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions, is managed by WooCommerce and is an excellent tool for setting up all kinds of subscription plans. It comes with 25 payment gateways for automatic recurring payment and you can set daily, weekly, monthly or annual billing to renew user subscriptions.

Plugin has great support and natively works with WooCommerce plugin It’s a paid plugin and costs $199 per year.

Subscriptio

subscription store with WooCommerce - subscriptio

Subscriptio is a premium plugin you can purchase on Codecanion.net. You can use it to sell subscriptions by default and it also has recurring revenue scheme options. This plugin is a great way to sell e-learning courses, magazine memberships, premium levels of profiles and more.

A regular license for the plugin costs $69 and if you want to extend the license it will cost $299.

SUMO Subscriptions by Fantastic Plugins

subscription store with WooCommerce - sumo

SUMO Subscriptions is a universal tool you can use to create a subscription store with WooCommerce. It can be used for any kind of product and it also can add a subscription feature to your existing products as well. It has 4 built-in payment options, including PayPal and Stripe.

A SUMO subscription varies between $49 to $490 depending on which option you choose.

Subscriptions for WooCommerce by WebToffee

subscription store with WooCommerce - webtoffee

WebToffee for WooCommerce Subscriptions is a simple yet powerful plugin that allows you to set up basic subscription plans to any kind of products in your store. This plugin also supports major payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe. 

The plugin can be tested as a free trial before making a final decision. For a single site it costs $89 and a business license for five sites costs $129.

Conclusion

Now that you have a little bit more of an understanding of how subscription for ecommerce works I believe you will have all the necessary information to choose the right plugin. Using the plugins we mentioned here you can quickly sell subscriptions-based products and services and create a subscription store with WooCommerce successfully. If you need more clarification or have any questions please leave a comment below.

Freelancer’s guide to Building a Dynamic Hotel Website with Jupiter X – Part 3 (Booking a room)

building a dynamic hotel website featured

In the first part of this series, we dove into creating a dynamic room listing with room attributes and a nice template that includes those custom attributes, both of which will be filled out by the receptionist. In the second part of the series, we saw how you can create archive lists and add filtering capabilities to them. Picking up from where we left off, we will now build a dynamic hotel website by creating booking forms along with pricing calculators and we’ll see where the entry data goes if someone books a hotel on our website. 

As you’ll recall, we created a custom post type for our room called Rooms and then created a listing for it. A listing is an embodiment of the meta fields in a custom post type with a particular design. In the first part, we built a custom post for our rooms and a listing and beautiful design for a single page. What we are going to do now is work on building a dynamic hotel website by modifying the single page template for our Room post type and using Jet Engine forms to add a booking form to each room page.

Enabling Jet Engine Forms

Jet Engine Forms are disabled by default. If you want to make booking forms using this feature, you first need to enable it via Jet Engine settings. Open the Jet Engine -> Jet Engine and make sure the Forms module is enabled.

Enabling the Forms module in Jet Engine

After that, the Forms menu will be available under the Jet Engine menu. Open the Forms panel and click on Add New to create a new booking form.

building a dynamic hotel website - add new form
Adding a new form in Jet Engine

The first step is to define a name for your form. Then, add the post ID as a hidden value in order to be able to use the form in dynamic pages. This will give you the option to see on what post the user submitted the form.

Defining a name for the form

Make sure the post_id field has these settings:

Type: Hidden
Required: checked
Field Value: Current Post ID

Post_id hidden field will be automatically populated by the current post ID value

Now we need to add other essential fields to our form to get the user booking information. I will add the check in date, number of nights of stay and number of guests in three separate fields. 

The Check In Date should be a datepicker field, so I will set its type as Date.

Inserting a date field to the form

The good thing about these fields is that you can change the width of the fields and change their alignment by simply dragging and dropping them into position. I want my fields to be placed in one line, so I will change the width of each field to approximately 33%.

Making the fields inline

I want to show the price of that room as soon as the viewer changes the numbers on the form. If I didn’t know that Jet Engine provides a “Calculated” field type, I would have to write this part via Javascript. Fortunately, I can do this easily if I just define my formula in a “Calculated” field type. In order to do that, I will add a new field named “cost” and then define a formula for how to calculate the cost. However, I need to get the price of the room from the meta fields first and then we can use it in our formula. So, let’s add a hidden field named “price”.

Get the price field by defining a hidden field populated by post meta

Now set the Field Value to be “Current Post Meta” and put the meta key “price” inside the “Meta Field to get value from” section. 

Now It is time to add a calculated field into the form. Add a new field and set it to be  “Calculated”. Then define the formula as follows:

%FIELD::guestsnumber%*%FIELD::price%*%FIELD::duration%

By using this formula, we are saying that we need to multiply the guest number by price of the room multiplied by duration in terms of nights.

building a dynamic hotel website - define formula
Defining the formula for our pricing calculator

So, if a room costs 50$ per night and a person, it would cost 50x2x3 = 300$ if there are two guests and they want to stay 3 nights in that room. 

After that, apply the changes and define how the form should act when the user submits it. Scroll down to the “Post-submit Actions / Notification Settings”  and add as much as you want. Here I just want to get notified via email but you can use MailChimp, Active Campaign, create a user or even call a webhook to connect your website to your hotel booking software (with a little bit of coding).

building a dynamic hotel website - define actions
Define actions on form submission

Now save your form and open the room’s single page template and edit that via Elementor. Then drop a “Form” widget from the jet engine widgets and then select the form you created.

building a dynamic hotel website - adding jet engine form
Adding the jet engine form as the booking form on the room’s page template

That’s all. Now save the page template and visit one of the hotel’s pages.

By submitting this form, since I set the notification email to be sent to my website admin, she will receive an email as soon as someone books a room.

building a dynamic hotel website - the booking form
The booking form within the page

Building a dynamic hotel website series ends here and we hope that it shed some light on the possibilities and features offered by the Jupiter X theme and its bundled plugins. Some users may need advanced booking forms. The booking forms here can get really advanced and complex. However, advanced features such as integration with WooCommerce or storing the data in custom tables are possible via the Jet Bookings plugin, which is not bundled with Jupiter X. 

If you have any questions or feedback on building a dynamic hotel website and this series in general, feel free to post it in the comments below. We love getting feedback and would like to hear from you.

Common WordPress Mistakes to Avoid

common WordPress mistakes featured

WordPress is the most popular CMS platform out there. If you’re reading this article, you probably already use WordPress for your site, but it’s important to be mindful. Many users, especially beginners, make mistakes when they start managing a website. But many of these mistakes are easy to avoid, and if you read further, you’ll be able to fix mistakes before they harm your website. Let’s check out the list of the most common WordPress mistakes you should avoid

Ignoring website backups

A lot of website users think “It won’t happen to me,” but that’s wrong. One day you can find that your site was compromised and all data was lost. The server may crash or the site may be hacked. You’ll be so upset if you need to start everything from scratch. If you didn’t make a backup, that will be your only option.

If you don’t know how to create a backup, you can do this with plugins. The article “How to Backup Your WordPress Database Like a Pro” will be helpful for you.

When installing WordPress, you are provided with setup options. One of the options is to set a username for your account. By default the username is set as “admin”, but you should change it ASAP. The security of using “admin” as your username is weak and if you use a weak password as well your website will definitely be hacked. You should avoid using short and weak passwords. Your password must be long and consist of a letter, number, and symbol combination. Avoid using any common usernames, like “admin” or “administrator”.

You can also add two-factor authentication to your WordPress website. This article will give you more information about it.

Ignoring updates

There are regular updates for WordPress plugins and themes. When you install these updates, you’re getting new features and security improvements. Many users choose not to update as they are afraid their website will crash. If you are afraid of this too, you can run updates on a staging site and then proceed on a live site to see if everything runs smoothly. If you keep old versions, your website will be open for hackers. You should always update as soon as a new version is released, whether it’s for your WordPress sites, themes or plugins.

Forgetting to install a caching plugin

Deciding not to use a cache plugin is a bad idea. These plugins will help you speed up site loading and optimize your site. If your website loads too long, your visitors will probably close the page and move to another website.

There are a lot of great WordPress cache plugins out there and you’ll definitely see the benefits if you install one of them. If you are using the Jupiter X theme and want to optimize the site to speed up loading times, you can follow the instructions from this article.

Leaving images unoptimized

common WordPress mistakes - image optimize

Using data-heavy images will slow down your website, causing it to take too long to load. So, before uploading images to your WordPress site, you need to optimize them. We already have the article “How to Optimize Your Images for SEO and Speed” where you’ll find detailed instructions on how you can optimize images to improve performance.

Adding Forms to your website without anti-spam validation

When creating a contact form on your website, it’s important to protect it from spam. If you don’t do it, one day you’ll wake up and find your mailbox full of spam. To prevent such issues, it’s recommended to use captcha for the contact form. You can read about custom contact forms in this article.

If you created a website with the Jupiter X theme, you can find how to enable captcha for Jupiter X Contact Form here .

Allowing spam in the comments

It’s a great idea to allow your visitors to leave comments under posts, but a mistake you may make is failing to moderate the comments and deactivating the Akismet plugin. If you approve spam comments, it will hurt your SEO.

The Akismet plugin is one of the best methods of protection. It will block blog comments and pingback spam. Keep it activated to filter out spam messages.

Using ugly plain permalinks 

Permalink structure is very important in a WordPress website. Many website owners use a default URL structure like yourdomain.tld/?p=18. It’s bad practice to leave permalinks like this, since it’s bad for both SEO and for user experience. 

Creating custom permalinks in WordPress is not difficult. To avoid this common WordPress mistake, log in to the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks and update your permalinks.

common WordPress mistakes - permalinks

Forgetting to remove a default favicon

WordPress themes come with a default favicon. It is a mistake if you don’t remove it! Instead, it’s better to replace it with a favicon of your own, so your site looks professional. Usually a company logo is used as a favicon. It’s displayed in the tabs and bookmarks of a browser, and users will identify the site by its icon.

Leaving test pages published

Sometimes you create test pages to test some elements or features on your site or leave sample pages that come with WordPress themes or plugins. You’re making a mistake if you are not deleting them. Such pages will be indexed by search engines and will be recognized as duplicate content or even spam and your SEO score will decrease. So, before publishing the site, make sure you have deleted demo content and test pages.

Wrapping up

WordPress is a great choice to manage your website. While it’s an easy and powerful tool, it’s also easy to make mistakes with it, especially if you’re a beginner. To avoid such mistakes, it’s better to pay attention to each step in this article. If you are aware of other common WordPress mistakes that are missing here, feel free to share them in the comments.

How to Improve Your WooCommerce Conversion Rate

WooCommerce conversion rate featured

About 4.4 million e-commerce websites are using WooCommerce in 2021. In order to survive and prosper, you should know where you stand in this competitive and crowded community and find a way to attract the attention of users as effectively as possible. In addition, you should try your best to make it easy for the attracted users to find what they are looking for as soon as possible. 

For average users, some say you have about 15 seconds and others say 50 milliseconds to capture their attention. According to some studies, shopping cart abandonment emails sent within an hour increase conversions by 6.33%. One thing that is obvious from these numbers and this vicious market is that you should be precise and speedy to attract users so they may consider you as an option and also keep track of your marketing actions to increase and optimize the chance of converting them into customers. But how can you achieve that? Is there any tool to help you do all of this?

Some believe your website personalization strategy has the largest effect on improving your WooCommerce conversion rate – prior to website design. In this article we will show how to tap into a user’s interests, attributes and behavior and track conversion in your WooCommerce store.

First, let’s figure out what conversion rate is.

What is Conversion Rate?

Simply put, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take the action you want them to. This could mean subscribing to a newsletter or placing an order on an e-commerce website. Depending upon the goals you have set at different stages of your site, once visitors reach those goals, you can consider them converted users.

Dividing the number of converted users for the specific event by the total users involved in that event will give you the conversion rate.

Why is it important to measure and track your WooCommerce conversion rate?

1. Get a better understanding of your users and what really works

Tracking conversions means mapping the path that visitors take on your website before they are converted. You can learn plenty of useful things from this information: what ads are performing the best, which of your webpages gets the most traffic, what the most popular item in your ecommerce store is or which social media posts have brought the most traffic to your site. Armed with this data, you can develop more effective marketing strategies and tweak your campaigns to attract higher traffic, convert more visitors and help you reach your goals faster!

2. Boost ROI while lowering costs

Every business aims to get a high return on investment, but how can you achieve it? Let’s take a look at an example: if you track the conversions made from an ad you are running, you can determine how many customers the ad has converted versus how much you invested in the ad. This kind of analysis will help you decide whether to tweak or pause the ad to lower costs or improve its performance.

3. Segmenting your audience

In order to categorize your audience into the most effective segments, it’s vital to learn what specific content or web pages appeal most to each part of your audience. With that information at hand, you can target those groups of customers with relevant content specifically tailored to them, as with retargeting campaigns. You could also use RFM segmentation to segment active and inactive customers to target with personalized campaigns.

Analyzing your WooCommerce conversion rate

Let’s run a little thought experiment. What if, during the first week after your website launches you receive a total of 100 visitors. Out of those 100 visitors, 20 register on your website. That would make your conversion rate a whopping 20%, right? Not so fast. A meager 100 visitors is not a big enough number for statistical analysis, nor is a week a long enough time to show what routine traffic will be like. Lean Analytics places the average conversion rate for an ecommerce site at just 1% to 3%, while more popular sites boast rates between 7% and 15%. Amazon, for example, had a 2020 conversion rate of 9.55% based on total clicks (adbadger).

Improve conversion rate with personalization

A 2016 study by Emerald involved analyzing data from 85 of the top 100 US online retailers. According to this study of conversion rates, there is a statistically significant relationship between conversion rate and user experience. But user experience does not just depend on your site design and user interface. Rather, providing a good user experience is about delivering the right content to the right people. In short, a good user experience is all about personalization, but not limited personalization like addressing a user with their first name in emails and on the website. Instead of shallow, one-size-fits-all personalization, you need a strategy for personalization at scale that is deep, harmonized and cross-channel to get the best conversion rate. The following are some key personalization tips to help boost conversion.

Which tool can help improve WooCommerce conversion rate?

To improve conversion, you’ve got to be able to track it. The most well-known tool for the job is Google Analytics. While there are a number of analytics plugins on the market that track conversions, most of them get their data from Google Analytics anyway.

While Google Analytics sets the industry standard, it does come with a few disadvantages:

  • Google Analytics tracks data via cookies, which means it cannot access the WordPress or WooCommerce user base and the valuable information contained there.
  • Google Analytics conversion reports do not give long term historical data but are based just on individual sessions. There’s no chance to look at the behavioral trends behind those sessions. 
  • Google Analytics does not distinguish between leads and customers. This means that it treats all sessions as the same without differentiating the type of user. 

What alternative to Google Analytics can address these shortcomings? Is there a tool out there capable of generating accurate conversion reports to help you improve your rates? You’re in luck!

Growmatik is an all-in-one tool that has access to WooCommerce data and keeps track of leads and customers throughout their journey in your online store. It provides reliable reports on conversion and revenue on each marketing activity on every marketing channel as well as helping you to drive more engagement and sales by automating and personalizing those activities.

Growmatik

Growmatik is a marketing automation tool that specializes in automated personalization. It works across channels, helping you personalize your customer journey through custom popups, emails and landing pages. It also creates reports based on data collected from visitor sessions and cookies, plus WordPress and WooCommerce data to help you analyze the behavior of different user types. Thanks to all of the sources of information that Growmatik utilizes, it composes detailed reports on user behavior and in-site activity to help you better tailor your marketing materials.

You can track conversion in 3 different sections of the Growmatik interface, each with their own approach to analytics: the General analytics page, customer journey and automation performance report.

Measure and compare conversions via Analytics page

Growmatik boasts a built-in tracking, analytics and metrics system for compiling reports with comprehensive analytics about your audience and the kind of traffic reaching your site. You can use this powerful tool to track all kinds of metrics about engagement, sales and customer behavior. Growmatik even collects data based on engagement and performance for your email campaigns. Since these reports are time specific, you can track the changes in a given metric over a specific time period.

Track conversions with Customer journey

To examine the different funnels on your site, especially top performing funnels from referral sources, subscription channels to landing pages, use Growmatik’s customer journey feature to help plan your next steps. This feature can help you determine which channel brings the most traffic, what products customers buy the most, who your loyal customers are, how visitors navigate through your site and what you should invest in for marketing.

This information ultimately helps you craft better customer segments, which in turn means more effective and cost-efficient marketing campaigns. To get a better idea of how it all works, let’s look at a clothes ecommerce website and examine 5 key dimensions of its customer journey over a period of 3 months.

In the image above, you can see the top performing channels in the 5 key dimensions. Visitors to the clothing website come primarily from the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, India and Germany. Amazon is the primary referral source for traffic from these countries, most visitors landed on the homepage before performing any action, popups were the primary channel for newsletter subscription and most customers bought jeans as the last step of their journey.

In Growmatik, you can select a specific funnel to track the customer journey specifically through that funnel. Let’s take a look at the location.

Check out the performance of each campaign 

The automation reports provided by Growmatik will help you track the performance of each automation you create, allowing you to measure and manage conversion and ultimately plan your next step. You can automate everything from email campaigns to personalized site content and popups, all while tracking how each automation type performs by monitoring specific metrics.

Improve conversion rate by Automating personalization

In Growmatik there are two simple steps to implementing automated personalization for WooCommerce:

  1. Create segments- This means grouping users you’d like to personalize your content for. These will be the segments of WooCommerce customers or leads that matter to you based on the attributes and behavior you’re targeting.
  2. Create personalized automation for each segment- To improve WooCommerce conversion rate through personalized automation, we can create automations by using the “IF this THEN that” structure. Once the condition(s) is triggered, the action(s) will be executed.

Some practical examples using personalization to improve conversion rate

Let’s check out some real world personalization examples that you can use for your e-commerce store. All of these can be done using Growmatik.

Please your loyal newsletter subscribers with exclusive offers 

To motivate your active newsletter subscribers and keep them engaged, you can send an email with special discounts to those who clicked your emails more than specific numbers; for example, customers who have clicked on more than half of your emails. Go to Growmatik’s People page and select all leads or all customers and input the following filters:

Subscription > Number of clicked emails > more than X

We can design our email and use some dynamic keywords such as the user’s first name in the content of our email and send them a custom offer. In Growmatik, do the following: 

  1. Go to Workshop > Emails
  2. Click Create Email 
  3. Select a template to get started
  4. Edit the template by selecting text and clicking on . Then, click on Dynamic Keywords to insert any keyword.
  5. Save the email template and send it to the targeted segment.
WooCommerce conversion rate - discounts

Encourage users to purchase based on their page visit

Chances are, customers will want to see content related to the products and information that they frequently browse on your site. Give them what they need by sending them emails or popups with discounts related to their in-site activity.

For example, create a segment for users who visited the watch page. Go to the people page and select all leads and input the following filter.Site activity > Visited pages (URL) > Contains watch collection

For creating a popup, go to Workshop > Popups and click on Create Popup.

WooCommerce conversion rate - popup

Show abandoned items on the homepage

According to Baymard, more than 69% of online shoppers abandon their carts without checking out. You should definitely carry out a strategy to encourage them to finish their shopping. It’s a good idea to display their abandoned cart items and remind them to finish the purchase.

Go to Growmatik’s People page and select all leads or all customers and input the following filters:

Shopping activity > has abandoned cart > yes

WooCommerce conversion rate - abandoned

Then you can go to the WorkShop > personalization and click on create personalization. Then, select the page you want to add items to:

  1. On the selected section of the page, click the icon to open the elements list, then select products.
  2. Click on the and, by clicking on the content (which shows most recent by default), you can choose abandoned cart items to be displayed on the webpage.

Click save & exit

WooCommerce conversion rate - abandoned cart

To automate this, go to the  WorkShop > personalization and find the personalization you want to create a rule for. Then, click on the icon, choose Automate and select an audience type.

WooCommerce conversion rate - personaization

Then you will be redirected to the Automation page, where you should give a name to your automation, and click on the Create Rule button to automate that personalization.

WooCommerce conversion rate - abandoned items

Display an engaging exit-intent popup

Consider a user who visited a sunglass product page on your WooCommerce site and didn’t buy it. By offering a good discount on this product at the last moment, you can increase the chance of converting him to a customer. Exit-intent popups are effective if you know where and how to use them properly.Just go to the Automation page and select the Pageview as a condition and enter the URL of that specific product.

WooCommerce conversion rate - show popup

Then select Show Popup as action and choose On exit. Now click on the Create Popup button and design your popup.

WooCommerce conversion rate - popup sunglasses

Using FOMO to re-engage inactive customers

You can use FOMO “fear of missing out bias” to reactivate your inactive users. Catch their attention by talking about latest updates or anything else that may have happened at your business while they were gone.First, You should identify inactive customers. In order to do that I suggest using RFM segmentation. In Growmatik, go to the People page, select All Customers and add the following filters for Shopping Activity.

Purchase date > more than X days

Number of orders > less than x

Order value > less than x

WooCommerce conversion rate - rfm segmentation

Now you can send an email to these users and include products with discounts for a limited time. Go to WorkShop and click on Create Email, choose a template and add your discounted products in your email.

WooCommerce conversion rate - discounted products

Now you can automate this by going to  WorkShop > Emails and finding the email you just created. Then, click on the icon, choose Automate and select an audience type.

WooCommerce conversion rate - email automation

It will redirect you to the Automation page. There, choose the created segment for your inactive customers and give a name to your automation. Then, click on the Create Rule button to automatically send emails.

WooCommerce conversion rate - inactive customers

Final words

In this article we showed some samples in three main marketing channels – Email, popup and webpage. Personalization is quite a simple process nowadays, but it’s a necessity for WooCommerce businesses hoping to stay relevant.Fortunately, you can now improve your WooCommerce conversion rate using personalized automation tools faster and easier than ever before.