How to Manage Large-Scale WordPress Sites

manage large-scale WordPress sites featured

You probably know WordPress as a popular blogging platform, but only few are aware of the real possibilities and power that WordPress contains. The platform has tremendously improved over the past few years, and nowadays the number of large-scale WordPress-powered sites are increasing every day. 

As of March 2021, WordPress hosts 40% of all the websites on the web (you can see the official statistics here). That number was just 32% three years ago, and WordPress’ growth is showing no signs of slowing down. It’s extremely likely that we will see higher numbers in the coming years.

From large-scale blogs to multi-million dollar online shops, WordPress can power literally anything.

62% of the top 100 fastest growing companies in the US (Inc. 5000) use WordPress.

Nelio Software

Let’s take a look at a very brief list of well-known websites powered by WordPress from different categories:

There are so many more out there.

Before we go any further, let’s clarify what I mean by “large-scale” websites. We are not talking about large-scale bank transactions, SAAS services with millions of users, or telecom operators with huge databases. Rather, a large website could mean a big magazine website with hundreds of thousands of articles, or an online shop with tens of thousands of products and transactions. Scale refers not only to the amount of data, but also to traffic. To provide an example, a website with around 1 million weekly hits can be considered a large-scale WordPress website.You may be wondering if WordPress has any limitations in scaling or if the rules change when handling large scale websites. Let’s find out! In this article, we will cover the most important tips you need to manage large-scale WordPress websites.

Choosing the right hosting 

Hosting infrastructure probably plays the biggest role in the scaling of a WordPress site. Good hosting can greatly improve your site performance in many ways Hostings that place limits on server space use are not the best choice, as a simple traffic spike may cause your site to crash without warning. This is why you should choose the best hosting partner for your project.

There are many different hosting options out there for you to choose from, so let’s list the several types that can be used for large-scale projects. Please note that I will not cover shared hosting, as it’s not a great option for the purposes of this article.

VPS or virtual private server

VPS hosting can be used for middle- to large-scale projects. It’s a step ahead of shared hosting and dedicated WordPress hosting, as it provides a unique space for each project on the server and keeps your data separate from that of other users. However, while it’s a great choice in terms of customization options and storage space, VPS hosting can have issues dealing with high traffic levels and spikes. If you decide to go with VPS hosting, make sure it offers plenty of resources and options for scaling in case your site experiences increased demand.

Dedicated WordPress hosting

First and foremost, using this kind of hosting requires an advanced level of knowledge of server maintenance. This kind of hosting involves renting a server yourself, allowing you to have full root and admin access to anything and anywhere. While everything is under your control, sometimes this degree of control comes with a price: dedicated hosting is one of the most expensive hosting options. While it can be used for high levels of web traffic, it’s best for projects where you need complete control of the server and definitely requires technical expertise to maintain.

Cloud hosting

This kind of hosting involves several computers working together to provide cloud infrastructure. As the web project therefore runs on combined computing resources, this kind of hosting is very good for scaling your project. Cloud hosting allows you to increase the resources for your project with a single click. Plus, the website owner pays only for resources used and there is rarely a fixed price. With cloud hosting, resources are spread across many servers, meaning that project downtime is reduced to almost 0.

Managed hosting

This type of hosting does not rely on its own infrastructure, but instead offers hardware and software configuration, maintenance and technical support for third party large-scale hosting providers. This is basically a simplified version of dedicated hostings, but a properly configured server can handle high level traffic spikes. 

One important point when choosing your hosting partner is scalability. It’s unlikely that your project will see extremely heavy traffic all the time, but it should be able to handle heavy loads in the event of traffic spikes. 

In some cases, you’ll need more physical resources from your hosting to handle such traffic. Both CPU and RAM are crucial, and your server should be able to keep up with increased traffic and must provide enough hardware resources when needed. That’s the key to vertical scaling! 

In the instance that not enough physical resources are available to handle increased need, any type of server may end up bottlenecked. To prevent this, you’ll want to balance your increased traffic across multiple servers. This is what we mean when we refer to Horizontal Scaling! Good servers should be able to autoscale when needed by adding more web nodes.

Performance and optimization

It goes without saying that large-scale websites must be better optimized than casual blog sites. When it comes to large-scale website optimization, every little detail counts. There are several points that are especially important when working on optimization, so let’s review them.

Updated software is a must

We all know that WordPress is an open-source project with frequent updates. Every new update not only fixes previous problems but also provides new security solutions and optimized features. As a large-scale website owner, it’s your responsibility to always keep your project updated.

Background Processes optimization

There are a number of background tasks that operate behind the scenes in WordPress. If you run a large-scale website, then you will likely have to deal with even more background tasks at a larger scale Some examples include backups, various CronJob tasks like publishing posts, products, settings, Cron job for update verification, search engines trying to fetch new content from the site and much more. Some of these tasks have a minor impact but tasks like file backup may require lots of resources, so you should always distribute your server resources in a way that will not affect overall functionality.

Use CDN

CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is old news for web developers. The location of the web server may impact user experience. For example, if you have servers in Germany, your site will load faster for users in Germany than users in the USA. That’s where CDN comes into play‒‒it can fix this issue by holding static files of your website in a network of the servers around the globe. These static files include images, CSS and Javascript. This way, when visitors click to your website, they are loading files from the closest server to their location.

Always use themes optimized For speed

As mentioned before, every detail matters when it comes to the large-scale WordPress sites. That’s why you need to choose your theme carefully; while you may like stylish and modern-looking templates, if they are poorly coded they will end up slowing down your site. 

Best practice in this matter shows that it’s always better to use simple themes or niche-oriented themes instead of general themes that are bloated with thousands of functions you may not even use. You can always extend functionality of simple themes through using plugins or adding custom functions.

Choose faster‒and fewer‒plugins

As is the case with themes, you only need to use plugins that follow WordPress coding standards and offer regular updates and good support.

In terms of plugin quality, it’s worth it to mention that the amount of activated plugins you use is also important. It may seem rather basic, but the more plugins you have activated, the more server resources you are using and the slower your website will operate in the end, so it’s always important to limit the amount of plugins you use for your site. 

Avoid storing media files on WordPress

I’m sure you are aware that when you upload video onto a WP site, it is automatically displayed in a HTML5 player, but this may not be such a good idea.

Hosting audio and video files on your server will cost you bandwidth, as media files usually consume lots of bandwidth data, increasing your final invoice from the hosting company. These kinds of files also need more backup space, which means more hosting space. Plus, loading such files usually slows down your website. A good alternative is to try to host audio or video files on sites like Youtube, Vimeo or SoundCloud and use the Embed function to display them on your site.

manage large-scale WordPress sites

Managing your Cache

WordPress cache is a feature that stores data in temporary memory on the server in order to decrease the loading time of the content of your site. When it comes to large-scale websites, your web server may often struggle to deliver service to all users. This is where the caching feature works best; by preparing data for the users, a caching plugin will speed up your site between 2.5X to 5X.

A good caching solution is a must-have for your website, no matter whether it’s a large-scale project or a small blog site. There are a lot of good caching plugins available in the market, both free or premium options. They are easy to configure and you will notice a major improvement from the first activation. The most popular plugins for cachings are:

Also, many companies like Bluehost, Siteground, Cloudways and others have developed caching plugins specifically optimized for their server environment.

manage large-scale WordPress sites

Database optimization

Large-scale websites store and collect lots of Information in their database. Apart from important data, there is temporary data (logs, revisions, spam comments, trash, etc.) that is not necessary to store for extended periods and will regularly be cleared. A poorly optimized database becomes slow and unwieldy in size, which will accordingly increase the back-up size of your project.

Default and native database optimization can be done via PhpMyadmin by selecting all your tables and choosing “Optimize Table” from the dropdown list. This action will recreate selected tables and remove any excess local data utilized by that table.

There are other, more user-friendly methods to optimize your database utilizing WordPress plugins such as:

manage large-scale WordPress sites

Security

Last but not least, security is one of the most important points for any large-scale website. Is WordPress secure? The answer to this question depends on you. If you use the right techniques to secure your WordPress website, then it will be secure. 

The WordPress core is very secure, as it’s reviewed regularly by hundreds of industry professionals and developers. However, there are still many factors that can negatively impact site security, such as outdated server software, poor server administration, outdated core, plugins and themes. Let’s dive into the key points on how to keep your site as secure as possible. Please note that it’s impossible to cover every security consideration in one article.

Keeping WordPress Updated

Notice that we’ve mentioned this point twice? Every update of the WordPress core brings new features and fixes bugs, but it also implements best practices for coding standards. It goes without saying that using the most updated software for your project is a must.

Passwords and User Permission

Stolen passwords and low user permission are the most common WP security flaws. For large scale projects, having a long and secure password is not up for discussion‒always use a strong password generator to create secure and unhackable passwords. This applies not only to the WordPress dashboard but to anything at all, from hosting accounts and database access to FTP details, custom email addresses and more. 

WordPress backup

Be ready for any situation with a solid plan B. Are you performing an important update? Create a backup beforehand. Are you installing an important plugin? Create a backup. Cleaning out your database? Create a backup. Are your files infected with a virus? Restoring the working version is the easiest and quickest solution. A good back-up plugin can save a ton of time and won’t affect visitor experience. .

WordPress security plugin

This kind of plugin is a must-have tool that can save your site from various attacks, and improves the overall security of your site, some of these plugins will have a firewall as well. Don’t work without this plugin.

Web application firewall (WAF)

WAFs block suspicious traffic and malicious software before it reaches your site. Consider using the web application firewall offered by Sucuri.

Use secure protocol SSL/HTTPS

These are encrypted data transfer protocols between your web site and the end user. This encryption makes it harder to mine your data or steal information. Nowadays, many hosting companies offer free SSL certificates in their hosting plans.

Limit Login Attempts

This is an easy and smart way to prevent hackers from accessing your WordPress dashboard. This method blocks potential hackers after several unsuccessful attempts. Login LockDown plugin is one of many free plugins for this purpose.

Two-Factor Authentication

This provides an extra layer of security by restricting access to the dashboard to those who are registered by the admin. Users who are not registered can only access the dashboard via their mobile phone or via extra security steps. Two Factor Authentication can be used for this security feature.

This list could go on for much longer, as security is a never ending process. To keep your site as secure as possible, do your best to stay up to date on the best practices for WordPress security.

Conclusion

I hope that, now that you’ve reached the end of the article, the issue of scalability is much clearer than before. You can scale your site as you see fit. While there are no real limits, you should adhere to best practices of large-scale WordPress site management whenever possible. The same goes for smaller blogs; use the best practices to provide the site experience you strive for. So, let’s recap the five best practices we discussed in this article:

  • Choose the right hosting method 
  • Maintain performance and optimization
  • Manage your cache with best practices
  • Prioritize database optimization and management
  • Secure your setup

There are many other things that should be considered when you manage large-scale WordPress sites. Website monitoring tools are a good example of a topic we did not cover in this article. Make sure any extra tools and instruments you opt for are already included in your hosting plan, as they will greatly improve the management of the whole project.

Do you have any questions? Don’t hesitate to click on the comment button below and we’ll be in touch with you!

Understanding WordPress Link Previews

WordPress Link Previews featured

The term “link preview” is pretty self-explanatory. When you share a link via a social media post or via channels like Slack, the automatically generated preview will show key bits of information about the link destination. This information usually includes a title, caption or description, and an image. However, each social media site collects this information differently from the destination site, so the final preview for the same link can differ between social media sites.

It’s important to recognize that link previews are the first line of interaction between your WordPress site and potential customers. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through some simple steps to optimize your WordPress link previews for popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Open Graph Protocol

Link previews are superior to plain URLs for a number of reasons: they present valuable contextual information about the site by adding an image, title and description. They also draw in web traffic by making the link more clickable.

The Open Graph protocol refers to the practice of describing a website by identifying its rich objects (such as images or audio files). Built by Facebook for social networks, OGP uses <meta> tags to achieve this. These tags help social media sites decide what key information to pull when generating link previews for your site. The most common meta tags include:

og:title: the title of your content.

og:type: the type of content, such as a video or web page.

og:image: the URL of the image used to represent your content.

og:url: the unique URL of your content that will be used as its permanent ID.

og:description: the description that summarizes your image.
Check out the following example from the official site. This chunk of code describes the movie “The Rock” on IMDB’s website:

If you look at the <meta> tags, you can see  that the website’s title is “The Rock”. The HTML also includes an image link and a URL leading to the same website.

OGP was initially designed specifically for Facebook, but many other web services now support it. Linkedin, Twitter and Pinterest are all social networks currently supporting  OGP.

It’s important to realize that OGP can also affect your SEO. That being said, there are plenty of reasons to care about link previews: they are a key tool for making sites more accessible by giving potential customers and subscribers a summary of a site’s content. 

Link preview editing in WordPress

You can edit your link previews via your WordPress website. To change key elements of your link previews, from featured image to text description, you don’t need to write a single line of code–you just need a plugin! The Yoast SEO plugin is a great option, as it allows you to preview what your text will look like.

This Yoast SEO article gives a detailed description of how to edit link previews.

Here are the steps for setting a general image when there isn’t one for your post or page: :

  • Go to SEO > Social in your WordPress backend
  • From there you can add all your social URLs for Google to track.
  • Next, you need to go to the Facebook tab, where you will be able to upload a default image for sharing your website on Facebook.
  • Save your settings.

Let’s say you’ve added a new image, but the old one still shows up when you share your link via social media. Most social media sites, Facebook and Twitter included, cache link information for several days so that they don’t have to download new information everytime you add a link. This cached information is refreshed every few days automatically. Fortunately, there are tools that allow you to refresh your link immediately!

Best practices for nice link previews

When you share content via social media, it’s important to recognize that not all platforms are created equal. For Facebook link previews, it’s vital to optimize image size by

 Using images that are “at least 1080 pixels in width ensures the best display on high res devices” (Facebook for Developers). For the best looking Facebook link preview, your page images should be 600 x 600 pixels minimum.

Photo posts generate more likes and comments than text-based posts, so optimizing Facebook previews is very important for generating engagement. Taking the time to code your URLs helps to boost engagement and potential traffic  anytime someone shares your links on Facebook.

Facebook Link Debugger

Facebook Debugger is a helpful tool for refreshing posted links. It even allows you to see what information Facebook is collecting from each page on your site. After updating the featured image for a specific post or page, copy and paste your URL into the Repost Debugger search field and click on the “Debugging” button.

You’ll then be able to see all the information that Facebook collected from that page when it last scraped your page. If the updated image and preview text are not displaying, simply click the “Repeat Scraping” button once or twice to giveFacebook a chance to gather the new information.

WordPress Link Previews - facebook preview

The next time you share that URL on Facebook, the refreshed preview should display updated information..

LinkedIn Post Inspector

LinkedIn also has a tendency to show old data in a link preview. To fix this issue, you can use LinkedIn’s custom debugger, Post Inspector. Just like the Facebook Link Debugger, this tool refreshes the link preview. To use it, just paste your URL in the Post Inspector and click “Inspect”.

LinkedIn Debugger also tells you when the link was last scraped and includes other information about the URL and metadata gathered from the shared page.

WordPress Link Previews - post inspector

Twitter Cards Validator

Twitter supports link previews in a different way than either LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Twitter’s version of a link preview is called a Twitter Card. Only sites that have Twitter Card information available will display a preview when shared via Twitter.
However, you can also check your link preview on Twitter. Their debugger tool is called Cards Validator, which will show you how a link will look when you post it on your Twitter feed. Just need to fill in the URL and click on “Preview Card” to see it.

WordPress Link Previews - twitter card validator

To see the information Twitter has collected from that specific link, check the “Log” section. A “WARN” message in the Log section will also tell you if anything is wrong.

Common Questions

What do you do if a post that’s already been published to your Facebook Page is missing an image?

Sometimes the featured image will appear correctly in the link preview but doesn’t display later in your News Feed. Unfortunately, Facebook still has not developed a clear solution for this issue..

Instead, you’ll have to force Facebook to clear the cache usingFacebook Debugger (as described above), then perform the following steps: 

  • Go to Publishing Tools on your Facebook Page;
  • Under Published Posts, find your post and click on it;
  • Hit Refresh share attachment;
  • A pop-up window will open – if the new information is correct, click Save.

More common questions and their answers can be found on Facebook’s FAQ page.

Wrapping Up

We interact with and use link preview every day, but chances are you haven’t given them much thought. Fixing a link preview that’s showing old info may seem like a hassle, but thanks to powerful debuggers from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, you can refresh cached data faster and post links with correct previews. Now that you know how to use Facebook Debugger, Twitter Card Validator and LinkedIn Post Inspector, you can start using WordPress link previews even more effectively than before.

Top 5 Places to Store Jupiter X Form Submissions

store Jupiter X form submissions featured

One of the questions that always pops into my head when I want to make a form for a client is “Where should I store the data?” The answer to this question really depends on what the client needs. Sometimes, sending a copy of the data entry to a specific email is enough. However, there are other options that make it easier for them to access the data entries. There are plenty of form plugins available for your WordPress website, and each one has its own way to store data entries. In this article, however, I’m going to discuss 5 places you can use to store Jupiter X form submissions. 

For more information about Jupiter X Forms, please follow this link. For the purposes of this post, I assume that you already have a form like the one pictured below and that you have added your desired design customizations and fields.

Jupiter X Forms

To get started, add an action to the form and configure the action settings. The action will be triggered when the user clicks on the Submit button. Actions are beyond the scope of what I’m going to cover here, but you should be aware that knowing how to use them opens up almost unlimited possibilities. Let’s see how we can store our form entries based on the available actions. 

Email

The simplest way to store form submissions is via email. Just add an Email action to Form Settings -> Add Action and configure your email settings.

Adding the Email action to a form

Once you add the Email action, the email settings section will appear below the settings section. Configure it and save the form. You can also set it to send a copy of the form to the person who submitted it by enabling the “Confirmation” option.

Configuring the Email action on a Jupiter X form

Now you will be able to use your form and submit entries. If you click on the Send button, you should see a green message confirming that the form was sent successfully .

The form was sent successfully.

You should then be able to see an email in your inbox that has all the form fields listed, plus some additional information such as date, time and page url.

Form entry results stored in a mailbox

Email is a good place to store form entries. It is secure, has search and archive capabilities, can filter out the incoming messages, and includes lots of features that can help you organize your form entries. These advantages make email the number 1 option for storing any form entry. 

Slack

Slack is one of the most popular team communication platforms out there. It comes with the ability to create a channel and store data on it. 

In order to add Slack integration to your form for data storage, simply add the Slack action to it.

Adding Slack integration to Jupiter X Forms

Right after adding the Slack option, you will see Slack settings appear below it. Open the link in the help tip to add the Slack integration app to your Slack account.

Open the Slack integration app settings

Add a username to your Slack integration on the resulting page and set the channel or person you want to send the form entry to.

Customizing the Slack integration app with Jupiter X forms

Then, save the settings, copy the Webhook URL and paste it to your form’s Slack integration field.

Setting up Slack integration

Enabling the Form Data option allows you to attach form fields to the message. Remember that, in order to organize multiple form entries in Slack, you can add a Pretext field to each of them and then use a hashtag or text to distinguish each form. You will receive a message like this on the channel you assigned the integration to:

Jupiter X Form entry on Slack

This is also a good way to get notifications when you need to act immediately after a form has been submitted. Please note that you can use multiple actions on your form. This means that you can combine Email and Slack integration with all other actions simultaneously. 

MailChimp

You may know of MailChimp as an emailing platform. While it’s primarily a mail and newsletter platform, it also has some key marketing features that will make your life easier when you want to collect information on a project or marketing campaign. Typically, you can create a campaign, add a couple of forms and place them on your website pages using the form-embed code. However, you are limited to the MailChimp form design. What if you want to do more than this? MailChimp offers its own API that allows you to integrate with different forms. We are lucky to already have MailChimp integration as part of Jupiter X Forms, so, with just a few clicks you can store your form entries in MailChimp as well. 

In order to add integration to your MailChimp account and store your form submissions, simply add the MailChimp action to your form.

Adding the MailChimp action to a Jupiter X Form

Once you’ve added the MailChimp action, MailChimp settings will appear below it.

MailChimp API key is required for integration

You will need an API key to integrate the form with your MailChimp. In order to get the API key, login to your Mailchimp account and navigate to Account -> Extras -> API Keys. Then, either create a new API key or use one of your old API keys if you already have some.

store Jupiter X form submissions
Adding a new API key to MailChimp

Copy the API key and paste it into the MailChimp API key field in your Jupiter X Form. It should then show the audiences and forms that you already have in your MailChimp account. 

Configure it to make sure the form submissions will be sent and store them within this list.

store Jupiter X form submissions - configure mailchimp
Configuring the MailChimp list

Add your field mappings and update the page. Now, when you submit an entry, it will be stored in your MailChimp as a new audience.

store Jupiter X form submissions
A new contact is added to the audience list in MailChimp after form submission

The good thing about storing data in MailChimp is that you can simply hand it to your marketing team and let them convert form submitters into real customers with the tools available for email marketing. 

Growmatik

Growmatik is a new marketing platform that combines all other marketing tools and services into one integrated solution. It allows you to segment your audiences, show popups, send customized emails and personalize websites for different users. Plus, it boasts many other useful features to measure the growth of your website, generate leads and convert them into paying customers.

store Jupiter X form submissions - growmatik
Growmatik website personalized by its own features showing user locations to them

The great thing about Growmatik is that, since it combines a variety of useful marketing features in one place, it will give you a better chance to convert the leads coming through your website into paying customers. 

We are lucky to have Growmatik integrated with Jupiter X Forms already, saving you the hassle of integrating it using its own API. 

In order to integrate your form with Growmatik, you’ll need to install and activate the Growmatik plugin first. Simply go to WordPress -> Plugins and add the Growmatik plugin via the WordPress plugin repository.

store Jupiter X form submissions - install growmatik
Installing the Growmatik plugin

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll need to connect your website to the Growmatik platform.

store Jupiter X form submissions - connect growmatik
Connecting Growmatik to your website

If it’s the first time you’re integrating your website with Growmatik, you’ll need to add site descriptions to the page. Fill in the forms and click the Next button.

store Jupiter X form submissions - add website to growmatik
Adding your website to Growmatik

Once the site is integrated, you’ll have access to its dashboard via the Growmatik website:

store Jupiter X form submissions - growmatik dashboard
Growmatik dashboard

You will also notice that the Growmatik plugin status has changed to “Connected”. For more information on how to integrate your website with Growmatik, please read this article. 

Once you’ve integrated your website with Growmatik, you will see the Growmatik action among your Jupiter X Form actions.

store Jupiter X form submissions - add growmatik
Adding the Growmatik action to the Jupiter X Form settings

Add the Growmatik action and you’ll see the Growmatik settings below it right away. Name your form and add field mappings.

Configuring Growmatik integration with Jupiter X Forms

If you have any custom attribute that you want to show up here, you’ll first need to add a Custom Attribute to your Growmatik dashboard.

Adding a custom attribute to allow field mapping in different forms

All done! Save your page and submit a form entry to see the result. All form entries in Growmatik will be considered new “contacts” that you can turn into paying customers. In order to see the form entry, navigate to the “People” section. 

To filter through the results, click on the “Add Filter” button and choose Subscriptions -> Form. Choose the form you named in Jupiter X Forms to see the filtered results.

Filtering the results to show only form entries in the People section

You can see the results here. Now, save your segment, go to the automation section and convert these users into paying customers by sending marketing emails and showing them personalized content and products. 

Google Sheets

There is a way to integrate your forms with Google Sheets and store the data on it without writing a single line of code. Jupiter X Forms is capable of triggering a web hook and sending the data entries to that hook using the POST method. This gives you a great chance to integrate it with any other web service out there. 
Zapier is a service that acts as a hub for other services. It works like this: you first add a web hook from Zapier to the Webhook section of your form. Ten, as soon as someone submits the form, it will trigger Zapier. Whatever integration you made with Zapier will then operate. One of the possible integrations is Google Sheets, meaning that you can store your data on Google Sheets as well.

Adding a webhook action to Jupiter X Form

Log in to your Zapier account and make a new ZAP.

After that, search for Webhooks by Zapier. Add the ZAP and trigger the event with “Catch Hook”.

store Jupiter X form submissions

Continue to set up the trigger.

Copy the Custom Hook URL and paste it into the WebHook field of your Jupiter X form.

Update the page and return to the Zapier tab. Now you should test the web hook. Click on Test Trigger, submit a post entry on your website and click on Test the Trigger to ensure you receive the data.

Then, add an action to your web hook. Find the Google Sheets option and click on it.

store Jupiter X form submissions

Since we want to add a new row to the sheet with each form submission, click on “Create Spreadsheet Row” in the action event field.

Now you’ll need to sign into the Google account you’ll use to select your sheet. Grant access to Zapier to read and write data on your Google Drive.

Next, you’ll need to map the fields of your sheet with data entry fields. Then, click Continue.

Now test your action and turn on your ZAP.

store Jupiter X form submissions

All set! You should have the form entry in your Google Sheet, as shown in the image below:

store Jupiter X form submissions

Wrapping up

In this article, we reviewed 5 ways to store Jupiter X form submissions data. The best options are those that make it easy to access stored data and provide you with multiple ways to use that data. These 5 places are not the only options for storing data — you can also use other services such as ActiveCampaign while building a form in Jupiter X. Jupiter X also allows you to combine all of these methods if desired. Feel free to ask questions or make suggestions below in the comments section and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for upcoming blog posts.

Top 5 WordPress Hacks for Every Website in 2021

Often when you are setting up a WordPress website, you want to get the job done as quickly as possible. However, small issues always slow down your progress. It’s a real pain spending a lot of time fixing small details that you didn’t intend to happen. In this article, I’m going to cover 5 common issues with WordPress websites and introduce quick fixes that can truly speed up your web projects. We can call these “WordPress hacks”.

Using code snippets is always preferred for the sake of performance. However, if you’re looking for more functionality than simple hacks, it’s better to use plugins. Let’s see what hacks we can use to boost our WordPress projects!

Register users without emails

Let’s say  your client asked for a custom registration form that doesn’t require an email address. These days, there are many different authentication methods for login and registration, and these aren’t limited to just using emails. I.E. you made it possible to use SMS authentication for both registration and login. While email addresses are part of the core functionality of a WordPress website when dealing with users, what will happen if you don’t have an email field filled in your database? It’s simple! Your functionality will break down. For example, you can’t post a comment or use comment plugins such as wpDiscuz.

So what can we do? Fortunately, there are a couple of workarounds. First, you can find the code in the plugins that use emails and remove the email check fields. But wouldn’t it be easier to assign a random email address for your users while registering? You needn’t have an email field for this. Instead, you can assign a fake email address that you know does not exist and, by doing that, fix all possible conflicts with not having emails. Using the snippet below will assign a random email address to each user when they register. 

add_action("user_register", function ($user_id) {
    $user = get_userdata($user_id);
    if (empty($user->data->user_email)) {
        $args = array(
            "ID"         => $user->id,
            "user_email" => uniqid() . "@yourdomain.com",
        );
        wp_update_user( $args );
    }
});

Just add this snippet to your child theme’s functions.php or use it via your preferred PHP snippet plugin.

Change the post type slugs

Now let’s say you have a post type made in one of your plugins or your theme and you want the slug to be different. A good example of this is the Jupiter X portfolio post type. Instead of: 

https://yourwebsite.com/portfolio/single-1

You want:

https://yourwebsite.com/projects/single-1

The process of doing this WordPress hack is already outlined here in this article. However, the quickest workaround is to add a snippet in your child theme’s functions.php and then re-save the permalink settings. The snippet is as follows:

add_filter( 'register_post_type_args', 'wpse247328_register_post_type_args', 10, 2 );
function wpse247328_register_post_type_args( $args, $post_type ) {

	if ( 'portfolio' === $post_type ) {
		$args['rewrite']['slug'] = 'projects';
	}

	return $args;
}

It is also possible to achieve this using a third party plugin. However, loading a third party plugin just to change a slug may cause performance glitches and is best avoided if you care a lot about performance.

Remove version number from static resources

If you’ve checked your website performance via GTMetrix or any other scanner, you have probably noticed that even when you activate the browser caching and expiration of headers on static resources, some of the resources are not getting cached by the browser. This reduces the overall performance score of your website. This is actually intentional. WordPress adds a “ver=xxx” parameter to the end of the static resources to avoid caching. But this can cause performance problems as well. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of plugins that do remove the version number from the static resources. Some have this option included in their performance optimizations (mostly, caching plugins). However, it’s better to do this without using a plugin if you can, right? Using snippets always affects performance less than using a caching plugin.

WordPress hacks - Remove version number from static resources

The ver parameter at the end of static resources keeps the browser caching from working. 

In order to remove the query strings from the static resources, simply add this snippet to thefunctions.php of your child theme. 

function remove_ver_static_resources() {
   if(!is_admin()) {
       add_filter('script_loader_src', remove_query_strings, 15);
       add_filter('style_loader_src', remove_query_strings, 15);
   }
}

function remove_query_strings($src){
   $output = preg_split("/(&ver|\?ver)/", $src);
   return $output[0];
}
add_action('init', remove_ver_static_resources);

Skip the cart and go to checkout after adding something to the basket

Sometimes, if you have a shop with only a few products in it, it’s easier for users to skip the cart page and directly navigate to checkout right after they add something to their cart. This would be considered a user experience hack in WooCommerce. This WordPress hack has two steps:
1 – Disable the redirect to cart page after adding something to the cart. 
2 – Add code snippets to your child theme. 

In order to disable the redirect to the cart page after adding something to the cart, you need to open the WooCommerce -> Settings -> Products -> General and uncheck the two options in front of “Add to cart behaviour”. Then, save the changes.

WordPress hacks - Skip the cart and go to checkout after adding something to the basket

After that, add this snippet to your child theme’s functions.php file:

add_filter('add_to_cart_redirect', 'cw_redirect_add_to_cart');
function cw_redirect_add_to_cart() {
    global $woocommerce;
    $cw_redirect_url_checkout = $woocommerce->cart->get_checkout_url();
    return $cw_redirect_url_checkout;
}

Now your customers will be redirected to the checkout page as soon as they add something to their carts. 

Change WordPress login URL (using a plugin)

This is one of the handiest and most used hacks for WordPress. Changing the login URL means plenty of security benefits for you. If you hide the door from hackers, they will have less of a chance to get through that door. By default, these URLs are the WordPress login addresses:

https://yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php

https://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/

Although this is a useful hack, it’s highly recommended that you do it using a third party plugin because it is not a simple hack like the others mentioned above. In order to perform it, install any of these plugins and configure your login page address:

There are many more plugins that can perform this hack. However, if you only want to change the login URL, it’s recommended that you use a plugin that does just that. Multipurpose plugins can potentially cause overloads on your website. For this example I’m using the first plugin Change wp-admin login – By Nuno Morais Sarmento. Once you install this plugin, you just need to navigate to WordPress -> Settings -> Permalinks and provide the new login URL and redirect page in case someone tries to access your default login page:

Then, save the permalinks and exit.

I’m looking forward to hearing your comments and suggestions in the comments section below.

How to Make Your WordPress Website GDPR-Compliant with Jupiter X

If you’ve spent some time on the World Wide Web lately, you’ve probably heard of GDPR. With data breaches becoming a more and more common occurrence, GDPR has become a real hot topic. Although the European Law passed relevant legislation back in 2018, the discussion around GDPR is still confusing. In this article, we’ll answer your questions about GDPR and how you can make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant with Jupiter X.

What does it mean to be GDPR-compliant and why should you care?

GDPR, short for General Data Protection Regulation, is one of the biggest changes in user data regulation law in recent years. Simply put, GDPR law regulates how the internet deals with user data, regardless of whether the website is public or private.  

This law was approved back in 2016 by the European Commission to protect the rights of all EU citizens (in 28 Member countries) by protecting their personal information. The rollout of this plan was scheduled for 2018 and it came into effect on 25 May 2018. While GDPR regulation was invented to protect EU citizens, it affects everyone on the web. How? Well, if your website is collecting data from EU visitors, your need to make your website GDPR compliant as well!

If you are interested in getting into the nitty-gritty, you can find all the details you need on this site.

How to make Jupiter X GDPR ready

As a website owner, you need to provide clear information about your data collection policies, what data you are collecting and how, as well as displaying an option for your visitors to opt out of data collection in order to make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant.

Now, let’s check what you need to know about GDPR when using our Jupiter X theme. First of all, our Jupiter X theme does not collect any information from visitors, not even personal information such as IP address or contact details. However, it’s important to recognize that some third-party solution providers like Google Fonts or Google Maps may do this.

Google Fonts

Jupiter X uses the Google Fonts feature to help you add different fonts to your website. If you are using this extension on your site, you will need to let your visitors know by displaying a notice via popup windows or any other clearly visible banner (don’t worry, we’ll walk you through how to do this!). If you are not using Google Fonts, feel free to disregard this part of the process.

How to make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant with Jupiter X - Google fonts

Google Maps

This extension, which appears as the Google Maps widget within the theme, also collects user information like IP address. Since IP address is treated as personal data, so to make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant you have to warn users about this if you are using Google Maps on your site.

How to make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant with Jupiter X - Google maps

Forms

Forms can also collect data from the users. If you have a contact form on your site (or any other kind of feedback form such as a subscription form, newsletter form, or any kind of survey), make sure you clearly outline what information you are collecting and why. 

A pro tip: you can use the Acceptance field at the bottom of the form to warn users about your data policy!

How to make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant with Jupiter X - forms

How can you inform users about GDPR policies? You may already know that showing different popups is a great way to do this. You can place your popup banner anywhere on your website, as long as it’s clearly visible for visitors. You can also use a popup window. The good news is that Jupiter X already has a quick and easy solution for this. JetPopup , a popular plugin already included in Jupiter X, can help you create all sorts of warning banners and popups for GDPR.

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped you fully understand what to consider when building your project using the Jupiter X theme. GDPR is a big deal, and it’s here to stay. To get an idea of how serious it is, check out this link regarding GDPR fines stats. With this in mind, it’s important to review our sites and make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant with Jupiter X.

One more thing: we are not lawyers, so this article is just a collection of tips on how to make your WordPress website GDPR-compliant with Jupiter X. For a complete walkthrough of all the details, we recommend contacting a GDPR consultant or lawyer to make sure your website is fully compliant from a legal perspective, especially if your business is operating in the EU.

If you still have some questions or if I missed something in this article, feel free drop your questions and comments below!

Why and How to Use Social Proof on Your WordPress Website

Social Proof on Your WordPress Website featured

This is a guest post contributed to Artbees Themes blog by Elisa Abbott.

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that many businesses use to boost their sales. It serves as an additional confirmation for every potential buyer that a particular product or service deserves their attention. More precisely, it confirms the value and quality of a service or product.

The good news for businesses is that adding social proof on their WordPress website is not challenging. First of all, there are different types of social proof that they can add. Some examples include case studies, certifications, customer reviews, etc. Of course, the effectiveness of this marketing tool depends on the way businesses use it.

Many tools can help people add all forms of social proof to their website and make the entire process a lot easier.

What are these tools? In this article, you will find out all the ways to increase social proof on your WordPress website. Go on reading to learn the essential details that will help you increase your sales.

The Importance of Social Proof for Businesses

The first thing people look for when they land on a website is the features and benefits of a product. Of course, the product description for each item needs to be clear and engaging.

However, customers need one more piece of evidence that will convince them to take action. This is the moment when social proof becomes essential. First-time customers need to feel that they are not alone. A large group of previous customers raving about the benefits that a brand provides is sure to be a good sign for potential customers. They will get confirmation that people with the same problem found a solution here.

Companies, on the other hand, use social proof as an external confirmation of their quality and expertise. In that way, they aim to boost the reputation and convince potential customers that this company is the right choice. In this case, companies do not need to spend money and effort on direct promotions. Their satisfied customers will do the work for them.

Using the right method to deliver social proof to customers can be tricky. The good news is that businesses can use different channels. They can place customer reviews on the landing page of a WP website, somewhere across checkout pages, within their email campaigns, etc.

Entrepreneurs should know that social proof comes in different shapes and sizes. By knowing all of the possibilities, business owners will be able to determine the best one for their needs. Besides, they will also manage to determine the right place to share these external confirmations.

Types of Social Proof

Different types of social proof are effective for different purposes. Which one you use depends on your goals.

Customer Reviews

Social Proof on Your WordPress Website - customer reviews
Source: Bizzabo

The way Bizzabo did it can serve as an inspiration for many WordPress website owners. Bizzabo is an event software that helps planners and marketers boost the quality of the events they organize. Here, they used an entertaining background to make the customer reviews look interesting. Additionally, they shared the full names of the customers that are satisfied with the way the platform works. This helps first-time visitors recognize that these reviews come from “real people.” They will also get the necessary confirmation that the platform can address their needs as well.

Certifications and Licenses

A license is a piece of evidence that companies receive from third-party authorities. Depending on the industry they are working in, they will need to have a confirmation that everything they do is legitimate.

An excellent example of how licenses can boost the reputation of a business are companies that produce toys. We can use Lego as an example. They are proud that their product meets all the requirements of the US Consumer Product Safety Act and the EU Toy Safety Directive.

Parents would never allow their kids to play with toys that are made of materials that could potentially be harmful. Once they see the license, however, they have additional confirmation that Lego toys are completely safe. This type of social proof protects the reputation of Lego and boosts their sales.

Social Proof on Your WordPress Website - lego
Source: Lego

Reviews and Testimonials of Celebrities

Small businesses probably won’t have the opportunity to collaborate with celebrities. However, the solution to that problem is out there. Such companies can hire social media influencers. Logically, picking the right influencer is the main important point here. Brands should chase those that already interact with their target audience. After they have established a collaboration, they can also add a video or image of the influencer using their product.

The strongest brands in the world use the exact same tactics. A good example of that is the PUMA sneaker brand, which uses the influence that Selena Gomez has. The first thing people will see when they visit Puma’s website is Selena wearing Puma shoes.

Social Proof on Your WordPress Website - puma
Source: Puma

The same rule counts for individuals that plan to offer their services on a WordPress website. You can check out the example below and see how Kristi Hines did it. She asked some of the experts in the digital marketing niche to share their reviews of her work.

Source: kristihines.com

Case Studies

Customers come to your website because they are looking for a solution to their problem. As we’ve mentioned before, they need confirmation that your services or products can help them solve the problem they have. However, they also want to know how a strategy, tactic, or item has solved similar problems for others.

Case studies can confirm a couple of things. First of all, the customer will see what the entire process of reaching the goal looks like. He will also manage to see what the brand has achieved. Finally, case studies often serve as a marketing tool to talk about other brands or individuals they collaborate with. The way Lane Bryant did it is a perfect example for others to follow.

Of course, making the case study engaging and valuable is not an easy task. Entrepreneurs should also use different content writing strategies to make it more interesting. If they struggle to do that, they should work with paper writing websites to help them reach their goal. With the help of professionals, the quality of their case study will likely increase.

Tools to Add Social Proof to the WordPress Website

Adding social proof to a WordPress website does not require advanced coding skills. Instead, people should focus on using different tools that will make the entire process easier. Here are a couple tools that deserve special attention.

WPfomify

Source: Wpfomify.com

There are three reasons why WPfomify is a good tool for adding social proof to a WP website. Each time that someone purchases a product or signs up to the website, the plugin displays that notification on the homepage. This allows a business to benefit in three different ways.

First of all, their conversion rate will increase. Similarly, thanks to social proof on the website, their credibility and reputation will improve. Finally, both benefits will result in a bigger number of sales and increased revenue.

TrustPulse

WordPress website owners can help people in a couple of different ways. First of all, TrustPulse helps website owners leverage social proof power. In this way, they will be able to improve conversion rates via their website. Thanks to its features, TrustPulse users can track all the signups, purchases, and other customer activities.

The best feature of all is the program’s smart targeting feature. Website owners can determine the time that they want to show the social proof on their own. They will also be able to see exactly who can see their social proof.

Final Thoughts

We have finally come to the end. WordPress owners should add social proof on their WordPress website for many reasons. It can increase the conversion rate and lead to a bigger number of sales.

Social proof is one of the most effective marketing tools of all. For every potential customer, there can be a valuable confirmation. They will see that your brand provided a solution to people that have had the same issue. Thanks to different tools, placing social proof on your WordPress website has never been easier. With a small dose of creativity, entrepreneurs can boost their reputation and impress their target audience.

How to Convert Your Design to WordPress Using Jupiter X and Elementor

convert your design to WordPress featured

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platforms, and using its Elementor page builder will allow you to create a fully functional website from PSD without any coding. It makes the process much easier! While there is no magic button to press to convert your design to WordPress, Elementor is very user-friendly. You’ll see how easy it is to recreate your PSD in no time.

Do you want to convert your PSD to WordPress, but aren’t sure how? In this article, I will show you how to convert your design to WordPress using Elementor and the Jupiter X theme, step by step.

Why Elementor is better with Jupiter X

Advanced Customization – Jupiter X offers different customizations, allowing you to easily style your pages by setting the typography and layout options in the Customizer, and much more. 

Pop-up Builder – Popups are very important in online marketing. Elementor Pro has this feature, but with Jupiter X you can avoid paying for the Pro license. Artbees has bundled in the JetPopup plugin so that you can create great popups with the free Elementor version. 

400+ Layouts – Both Elementor and Jupiter X provide a wide variety of layouts for your site. You’ll find them in the Elementor library and will be able to import these layouts as full pages or as sections. It will help you to create the site much faster, and you may find interesting layouts that you want to try.

Templates – Jupiter X provides a lot of demo templates that you can use. Find the ones that match your design and your site will be ready in no time. Just install a template and replace the content with yours. You’ll get a fully designed template!

Mobile Preview – In Elementor’s editor you can preview the pages on mobile and edit content instantly. The same preview is available in the Jupiter X Customizer so that you can modify styling and check immediately how it looks on mobile devices.

Email Integration – Jupiter X provides the option to integrate email with different email marketing tools like HubSpot and MailChimp.

Excellent Widgets – Elementor has its own widgets that help you make your pages functional. Jupiter X expands on this feature by additional widgets, such as the widgets from the bundled plugin JetElements, so you can have more fun.

One-time Payment –  With Jupiter X you pay only once and get full-time updates and additional features, in contrast with the subscription for Elementor Pro, which you need to renew each year. 

Selecting Design

Whether you create your design with Photoshop, Sketch or Adobe XD, it will be easy to convert it with Elementor. PSD is short for PhotoShop Design. It’s one of the most popular design tools used to create designs for WordPress sites.  There are a lot of readymade PSD designs that you can download directly from PSDHUB. This will save you time when creating a design. But, if you decided to create the design yourself, here are the factors you need to cover in your design:

  • Clean Layout: your design must be elegant. This will help you make a pixel perfect website.
  • Follow Direct Tasks: the design must clearly fit your site’s purpose. For example, you’ll probably want to use a hotel website PSD to create a hotel website. 
  • Complications: try to avoid complexity when choosing design. Often, the simpler it is, the better your website will turn out. 

The First Steps to Convert PSD To WordPress

WordPress is a very popular platform thanks to its ease of installation. The installation process is simple. So installing WordPress is the easy first step for converting your design to WordPress. If you need guidance throughout the process, WordPress support provides a detailed article on “How to install WordPress”. It should take less than five minutes of your time.

Once WordPress is installed, you should then proceed with the installation of the Jupiter X theme. The detailed process is described in the following Artbees article: “Getting Started with Jupiter X”.

The next step is to install the Elementor plugin. As it’s bundled with the theme, you can enable it by navigating to Jupiter X > Control Panel > Plugins. For more information, check out this article. Also you can install the JetElements plugin, which is also bundled with the theme to extend default Elementor functionality and provide users with more additional widgets.

The installation stage is completed. Now you’re ready to convert the PSD to WordPress using Elementor and Jupiter X.

Converting PSD To WordPress

Before starting to create new pages, you can look for ready-made templates in Jupiter X. Perhaps you’ll find the one that suits your design, making the conversion process much easier. Follow these steps to convert your design to WordPress:

Add a New Page

First you need to create a new page from the WordPress dashboard. On the top left side of the WordPress dashboard, click Pages > Add New. Then, click the “Edit with Elementor” button to enter the Elementor Page Builder. You will see an Elementor panel.

convert your design to WordPress - add new page

Build a Page From The PSD File

To build a page according to your design, you should consider three main things: Sections, Columns, and Widgets. Sections are the largest blocks, and can be divided into Columns. You can place Widgets inside Columns. 

Add Header And Footer

In Jupiter X, a header and footer can be created in Elementor as well as pages. You’ll need to create a Header template and assign it in Customizer > Header, as described in this article. The process is similar for the Footer template. Also, you’ll need to add a logo for your site. To learn how this can be done in Customizer, read more here.

Add Hero Section

Now, let’s convert the hero section. This is the first thing that your visitors see when they visit your site, so it’s the perfect place to make a great first impression. You can add a background image in the Section settings, then add columns with content and icons.

convert your design to WordPress - section background image

Add Inner Section With Columns

Using the Inner Section widget in Elementor, you can add background and text between two columns. For example, you can add some text and banner images within the section column.

convert your design to WordPress - inner section

Publish the Page

Once you are done building your page from the PSD, you can preview your work and then publish it. You can also edit a published page or save your work as a draft (it won’t be public until you finish the page and publish it).

Check Heading Structure

Heading tags are very important in web page content. When used correctly, they add semantic meaning, help with accessibility and can increase your search engine rankings.
The <h1> tag should be the main heading, which is followed by <h2>, <h3> and so on. The `<h1>` is usually the boldest one, whereas <h6> font size is the smallest.

Search engines scan your site for headings. Using H1-H6 tags shows them how different blocks of content are connected with each other. Google will try to use the content of your headings to understand what the page is about. If your headings effectively inform users as to what your page is about, they’ll help Google understand your content too, so your search engine rankings will increase.

Mind the Responsiveness

Making your site responsive on different devices is a very important step! Elementor provides the possibility to modify sections, widgets, columns for mobile, tablet and desktop layouts. You can set different margins and padding for mobile or tablet devices so your content looks clean on different devices. There is also a feature allowing you to hide/show some sections or widgets on mobile or desktop. It’s useful if you don’t want to show some large content on mobile.

Wrapping Up

In this article you saw that converting your design to WordPress is quite an easy process with few possible complications. I’m sure that once you try using Elementor and Jupiter X for this process, you’ll continue to work this way, as the steps described above will help you quickly convert your design into a stunning WordPress site.

How to Use FileBird to Organize WordPress Media Library

organize WordPress media library featured

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

Why to organize WordPress media library?

WordPress media library is where you can find all of your documents and media uploads. It comes with a sort feature by file type and a month and year-based filter function. This is quite sufficient for personal bloggers.

However, if your blog is media heavy and it has to hold thousands of media files, it will take some time to find the files you are looking for. Or when you want to do a post revamp and delete the old files, the decluttering process is hard with this categorization way by default.

Therefore, organizing WordPress media library requires a category management of files. That is where FileBird comes in to help.

What is FileBird – WordPress Media Library Folders?

FileBird is a file manager plugin dedicated to WordPress media library. It adds an integrated folder tree on the left sidebar to help you drag and drop files into the folders easily.

This WP media folder plugin is loved by many photographers, fashion designers, and food bloggers, who are extensively using media content in their WordPress pages and posts. It works magic on WooCommerce, Elementor and all popular themes including Jupiter X.

In this article, I am going to show you how to organize WordPress media library with FileBird, keeping track of all those media uploads and displaying them in an impressive fashion blog in the shortest amount of time.

Create folders in WordPress media library

FileBird is a plug and play plugin, meaning it’s ready to use right after activating. Take a look at the FileBird folder tree and you will see everything is intuitive and easy to navigate, just like what you do on your computer.

It offers one-click to create a folder. So go ahead and click that button to create several main categories/parent folders such as Fashion, Collections, and Marketing.

This media folder area comes with a smart context menu, meaning you can right-click to interact with the folders. For instance, if you right-click on the folder Fashion, you have various options including:

  • New folder: to create a nested folder inside Fashion
  • Rename: to change the folder name
  • Cut and paste: to easily arrange folders
  • Delete: to delete a folder while keeping all those files in the All Files location
  • Download: to download a full folder with its files and folder structure in a ZIP file

Please note that the Download full folder feature is currently available only in FileBird premium version. It helps you download the original versions of media files, not bunky with different auto-generated image dimensions when you download them via FTP or Filester file manager plugin.

You can quickly try all of these options risk-free because it causes no loss at all. Even when you move files to a wrong folder, you can easily fix it by dragging and dropping it again to the destination folder. 

On top of that, FileBird does not change the permalinks to your media files so they won’t break or get damaged when you move the files around.

Upload files and folders to your media library

When editing pages or posts, you can also choose the specific folder to upload multiple files. This folder list drop-down in Add media makes it quick when you want to upload and categorize those files at the same time and with only one action. 

Small as it may seem, it is a big time saver when you have to manage multiple websites and publish a bunch of posts on a daily basis.

As for uploading folders, FileBird also keeps it down to the minimum effort. When you need to upload multiple folders with their contained files, you can bulk select those folders then drag and drop them into WordPress media library in a single blade. This action also keeps the same folder order and structure respectively, meaning you literally transfer the categorization system from your hard disk to WordPress.

If you have come this far, you might be already familiar with how FileBird drag and drop works. Depending on the requirements of your website, you may need to create 20+ folders for your media library. Keep in mind that the FileBird free version allows up to 10 folders. If you need more folders/categories, upgrading to the paid version is recommended.

Add image gallery and document gallery in Gutenberg

In this step, I will be showing you how to create an eye-catching gallery using Gutenberg block.

Create a smart image gallery

In order to showcase a collection of your fashion blog, you can easily find FileBird Gallery block > Select the collection folder from the folder list.

After choosing the desired folder, you can go ahead and tweak your gallery appearance with these options:

  • Column number: choose to show your gallery in 1-4 columns
  • Crop images: enable it to get your gallery well-aligned
  • Caption: display caption below each image
  • Delete: dismiss specific images that you don’t want to show in this gallery
organize WordPress media library - gutenberg image gallery

Create a document gallery

Sometimes you may want to share advanced files other than basic image formats. If so, you have reached the right place.

With the help of FileBird and a document gallery plugin, you can showcase your SVG, ZIP or other document files with good-looking auto-generated thumbnails.

FileBird supports Document gallery plugin’s shortcode to help you display a list of document files. You only need to fill the folder ID in the shortcode and embed it in any page or post.

organize WordPress media library - document gallery with shortcode

With user-friendly file thumbnails, your gallery will be much more appealing to your visitors. On the front-end, your new document icons look like this. Here’s the outcome of my blog post on JupiterX theme.

organize WordPress media library - Jupiter X document gallery

Best practices when using FileBird media manager

There are some hidden features of FileBird that you will find useful:

  • Collapse the folder tree sidebar to easily hide it
  • Resize the folder tree sidebar to get an overview of all folders with their full names
  • Press ESC to exit the bulk select mode (applicable to both files and folders)
  • Use advanced sort features to clean up the outdated files
  • Set startup folder

For the start-up folder, you have two options to choose from. 

  1. Select a specific folder: this is fixed and you will reach this folder first whenever you access WordPress media library
  2. Select previous folder: this is dynamic and, as a result, you can come back to the most recently opened folder to quickly continue the task you have been on
organize WordPress media library - set startup folder

FileBird is an easy-to-use plugin for all bloggers using WordPress as their favorite platform. I hope this tutorial has helped you learn how to use FileBird to organize your WordPress media library and make the most out of it.

Choosing FileBird – WordPress media library folders helps extend the functionality of your blog back-end so that it can handle thousands of media files.

How do you navigate images and media on your website? Don’t forget to share your thoughts and experience in the comment box below.

5 WordPress Best Practices Every Developer Should Follow

WordPress best practices featured

As one of the most popular open source CMS in the world, WordPress really makes it easy for us to create stunning websites. However, this advantage can easily become a problem if developers of themes and plugins don’t follow certain standards when developing new products. Most of the WordPress best practices are already covered in the Codex, but I think it contains so much information that it can be difficult to understand where and how to start. To make things easier, I decided to refine these recommendations for you.

You have probably seen hundreds of WordPress tutorials, standards and guidelines covering WordPress development practices. In this article, I’m going to cover the 5 most important WordPress best practices when developing WordPress themes or WordPress plugins. The main focus will be writing better code, managing and testing it, and delivering best practices.

WordPress coding standards

This section is directly relevant for the developers of WordPress themes and plugins. When we talk about best practices of writing code, we need to jump in at the deep end and cover details like programming language specific tools for managing code. First, let’s discuss methods of delivering better coding practices

Readability – When you write any code in any programming language, always remember that you are not only one who will use that code. Your code must be clear and readable for any developer to use.

Your code must always include thorough notes, which will help you and other developers to understand and tweak it if necessary in the future. These notes will help outline details such as the code’s function, why it was coded in a certain way, who wrote it or where you got it from.

You can read about this in WordPress’s coding standards. Remember the Golden Rule: “When in doubt, space it out.”

Reliability – It’s likely that you already know how to write the code that it runs without any problem on several hosting environments. However, this is not always the case for everyone, and your code may fail for hundreds of reasons in different environments and with different users. As a result, you should always use tested WordPress APIs as much as possible. Even if you’re a professional coder, it’s impossible to test that code for millions of users and thousands of different server configurations.

To prevent naming conflict with other themes and plugins, always prefix your function names, class names, post types and taxonomy names.

Flexibility – The greatest benefit of WordPress is flexibility. If the code for your plugin or theme is properly written, you can take it and implement it into your project without causing a single issue. Unfortunately, errors can always happen, and the main cause of error is not following best practices.

It’s probable that your code will be reviewed in the future for tweaking or adding new functionality. Make sure your code is flexible enough to be edited in the future. For example, use relative URL paths whenever possible so that if your URL changes, you won’t have to edit all your codes depending on the URL used.

Reusability – If you think copying and pasting will make your code reusable, you’re unfortunately mistaken– copy-pasting code is a terrible idea when coding. Just imagine what happens when you want to make small changes to a code that you have already copied 15 times to different places and files? Always make sure you are not repeating yourself. If you discover that you are repeating yourself again and again, stop for a second and think about it. In a coding standard, instead of copying, you can create and pack such functions in a separate plugin. This will allow you to use it in other places and easily maintain it.

Managing code 

Writing code using the best practices and standards is one thing, but managing this code is a different matter entirely. It’s important to ensure that managing the code is easy and doesn’t involve repeating steps.

Version control is an option that makes the cowboy style of writing codes and managing versions of that code a thing of the past. Version control allows you to easily track all of the changes to your code, from start to finish. This allows you to restore your project to any specific day, divide your project into several branches to test new functions and add new features without affecting the main body of the code.

Git is the most popular version control system used for this. However, WordPress uses Subversion as a code management tool for themes and plugins. The main benefit of Subversion is that it allows you to work with others and manage different versions of your code. It’s also specifically optimized for WordPress’s needs.

Version control is the best problem-solving option out there, not only for working as a team but also for individuals. I think it’s the first thing you need to learn before starting to code anything. Another benefit of version control is that you can save your code to your local machine and host it online, using services like GitHub or BitBucket to host your codes in the cloud. This is also a great way to publish open source code and projects for others to use.

Testing code

Even if you are creating a premium product for free, it’s important to test your code in many different environments. In our case, when we develop a WordPress product, we have to test it in different hosting environments and with different versions of PHP as the main programming language.

One of the best tools you can use to test your code in many different environments is Vagrant.

WordPress best practices - vagrant

Many developers don’t spend a lot of time testing their code. Some may not even put in much work to debug it. One basic way to test your code is to enable WP_DEBUG to be true in wp-config.php. This action will show you if your code has any warnings, notifications or critical errors. However, if you are a serious developer, you will definitely want to use one of the best IDE and debuggers, such as XDebug.

Deploying code

WordPress best practices - deploying code

Put simply, every time you click “Update” for a theme or plugin, or even install a plugin or theme,you are deploying the code. This process is very important, as installing untested code might even break your project. For this reason, some hosts create a workflow of deployment for their code so as to prevent issues related to the installation of untested code. This is where the testing or staging environment comes into play. In order to keep user’s projects, this environment offers a stage copy of the site where you can install and update anything without breaking the main site. Once you make sure everything is working properly, you will be able to implement changes to the live environment. If something is not working, it happens only on staging and not on your site.

The main idea in code deployment is to have a flexible workflow that reduces the chances of breaking something. Errors or other issues can always happen, so you should have easy steps to roll back or restore the previous working environment.

There are several different paths you can take to deploy your code smoothly. You may use the version control system we talked about above or use deployment tools like Capistranorb or Ansible.

Code Comments and documentation

WordPress best practices - documentation

Comments and documentation are a developer’s best friends. Whenever you write code, think about whether that particular line is easy to understand and make sure you don’t need any comments to explain why you did what you did. But, trust me–when you come back to that line in the future you may not remember why you did what you did in the past. Even easy-to-understand code snippets can become a headache if you don’t leave comments related to them.

The issues with cowboy style coding are even more evident when your code must be reviewed by someone else, or when you work with a team. As we mentioned before, WordPress is an open source project, so your code might be reviewed by others at any point, and without proper documentation of the code, it might be very difficult for other users to understand it.

Comments are always welcome when writing code, not just in PHP but in HTML and CSS as well.

Conclusion

I hope you found this article useful! The WordPress Codex covers the WordPress best practices mentioned in this article in greater detail, so before starting to create new themes or plugins, make sure to familiarize yourself with the standards of creating user-oriented products.

15 Marketing Automation Recipes to Turn your WooCommerce Customers into Evangelists

marketing automation recipes featured

Whether we like it or not, our lives are becoming more fast-paced each day. Automation helps us keep up, but it never seems to be enough, so we are always searching for new ways to save time. This applies to the world of marketing, too. Better and faster automation methods emerge on an almost daily basis, and one of the newest methods is something known as “automation recipes.” Just like food recipes, marketing automation recipes are sets of instructions, or rather formulas. Unlike food recipes, automation recipes are used to design campaigns to acquire, activate, and engage customers.  

What are marketing automation recipes?    

The Cambridge dictionary defines a recipe as “a set of instructions telling you how to prepare and cook a particular food.” In marketing, recipes instruct you on how to implement meaningful automation rules to achieve tangible results .

For example, when using email automation software, you typically have to decide to whom and when an email should be sent. Planning and implementing this can take a fair amount of time. Picking a pre-constructed recipe and following its instructions could save you that time.

How to get marketing automation recipes

Googling “marketing automation recipes” can help you find a number of tools. Some are quite interesting. Choose a recipe that fits your business needs and follow the instructions to design a campaign using your automation software.

In this article we will use Growmatik to practice different marketing automation recipes. Growmatik is a Cross-channel Marketing platform for WordPress & WooCommerce. It gives you recipes to choose from AND does the cooking for you too! Just pick a recipe, and Growmatik does all the heavy lifting. 

Let’s take a look at some essential marketing automation recipes that suit most businesses in driving engagement and customer conversion. All of these recipes are part of the Growmatik database and are just a click away.

1- Scroll behavior popup

If your customer keeps scrolling down the page, pique their interest with this pop-up and offer an incentive to keep them engaged.

2- On-exit popup

Offer your site visitors a deal they can’t refuse by displaying this pop-up when they attempt to navigate away from your website.

3- Christmas discount popup 

Offer coupons to your site visitors via this pop-up promoting a calendar occasion such as Black Friday, Christmas, Easter and so forth.

4- Page personalization for mobile traffic

Engage your mobile audience with responsive and relevant content, like adding a WhatsApp link to your homepage banner.

5- Geolocational page personalization 

Cater to your audience by offering localized services specific to their region on your landing page.

6- Page personalization based on time of the day 

Personalize your landing page content to match the time of day. For example, a food delivery service could greet customers with a “good morning” and a peek at the breakfast menu.

7- Page personalization based on purchase history 

Help your online store match customer needs by using their record of purchases to personalize your landing page with the content and products they’re looking for.

8- Personalized greeting on the homepage 

Address your audience by name with this personalized welcome on your homepage.

9- New customer welcome email

Use a cheerful, personalized email to welcome new subscribers.

10- Cross-sell items email

Send customers a personalized email that includes listings of products similar to those they’ve viewed to encourage them to buy more from you.

marketing automation recipes - cross selling

11- VIP customer appreciation email

Send a personalized email to your most loyal customers, complete with a discount coupon to encourage them to keep buying from you!

marketing automation recipes - vip appreciation

12- Annual report email

A great opportunity to remind customers of their relationship with your brand! These highly personalized report emails summarize how the customer has interacted with your business over the past year.

marketing automation recipes - annual report

13- Cart abandoner follow up emails 

Do you have customers leaving the site with unpurchased items in their shopping carts? Send them a reminder email encouraging them to come back.

marketing automation recipes - cart abandoners email

14- Reactivation email

Re-engage customers that have been away for a while with this follow-up email. Choose exciting content to encourage them to revisit your website.

marketing automation recipes - reengage with away customers

15- New customer appreciation email

Show your appreciation to first-time customers with this personalized email, recommend related products and offer a discount coupon to encourage future purchases.

marketing automation recipes - thank you email

Wrap up

As you can see, marketing automation recipes can save you hours of work. However, remember that these are merely templates that can be made more effective by customizing them to match your own brand and business criteria. They’ll save you plenty of time with brainstorming and implementation, but it’s up to you to make them your own!

With Growmatik, a single click can activate any of the above 15 marketing automations, plus so much more. Pre-built email and popup designs are just a few of our other time-saving offerings.

Good luck cooking up successful marketing campaigns 🙂