Google Docs is the go-to document creation tool for both teams and individuals. It offers advanced editing and collaboration tools for free without any limitations. However, when it comes to moving the document from Google Docs to your WordPress website, it doesn’t play very well. You will lose all the images and formatting in the process. Well, not anymore.

Automattic has recently released a Google Docs add-on that allows you to directly save Google Docs documents as a draft on your WordPress website.

In this post, I will show you how you can use this add-on to save documents in your wordpress.com or your self-hosted wordpress.org website.

Prerequisites

Below are some of the requirements for the add-on to work.

For wordpress.com websites

• A Google account to create documents and connect it with the wordpress.com website.
• Any browser.
• A wordpress.com website with administrator access (i.e. wordpress.com account).

For self-hosted wordpress.org websites

• A Google account to create documents and connect it with the wordpress.org website.
• Any browser.
• Must have administrator access to the self-hosted wordpress.org website (i.e. only the owner can connect the add-on).
• Jetpack plugin must be installed and active in the wordpress.org website. It’s compulsory to make the add-on work on self-hosted websites.

Before following the below instructions, make sure you fulfill all the above requirements depending on your website type.

Install the add-on

Before using the add-on, you must install it and connect it with your WordPress website. To get started, open the WordPress.com for Google Docs add-on page and click on “FREE” to install the add-on.

A Google Docs document will open up in a new window and you will be asked to provide the required permissions. Simply click on “Continue” and then “Allow” to provide the permissions and install the add-on.

Connect your WordPress website

After installing the add-on, you need to connect your required website. To do so, click on the “Add-ons” menu in Google Docs and select “Open” in “WordPress.com for Google Docs” add-on.

This will open the add-on in the right sidebar. Click on “Authorize” button here to start the authorization process.

A new tab will open up where you will be required to login with your wordpress.com account (if not already logged-in). You will be asked to select your website from a drop-down menu listing all the websites that are connected to your wordpress.com account. Just select the required website and click on “Approve” button to authorize it.

The window will close and you will see the authorized website in the Google Docs sidebar. If you like to authorize more websites, then click on the “Add WordPress Site” button at the bottom of the sidebar and authorize it. You can repeat the process to add as many websites as you like.

The authorization process for a self-hosted website is also the same. Just make sure the Jetpack plugin is installed and active and then authorize it using the above instructions.

Save Google Docs documents in WordPress

It’s very easy to save your documents in WordPress as a draft. When you are done editing your document, click on the “Save Draft” in the sidebar next to the website name. The document will be sent to your WordPress website and saved as a “Draft”.

If you need to update the draft, simply edit the Google Docs document and click on the “Update Draft” button in the sidebar.

The add-on will ensure most of the formatting and all of the images are as it is moved to the WordPress website editor so you won’t have to make any changes. Of course, the add-on is still not perfect and may skip some of the advanced formatting (like designs). However, most of the common formatting stays intact.

For testing purpose, I created a Google Docs document with dummy text and few images. I also applied most of the common formatting to see how they pass on, including headings, bullet points, bold, italic and underline, etc.

When I opened the draft in the WordPress editor, almost all of the formatting was perfectly migrated except for the text that I color coded. The images were perfectly aligned as well.

I also checked the HTML code of the post and it was perfectly fine without any unrequired entries. You can see it in the screenshot below.

Basic Troubleshootings

WordPress.com websites should have no problem getting authorized. However, many users have faced problems while trying to connect their self-hosted wordpress.org website with Jetpack installed.

The add-on is still new and has many bugs, and it also depends on the “Jetpack” plugin for now.

Many users will face problems based on their website configuration, Jetpack plugin configuration, and other reasons. Below I am going to mention some of the common solutions that have worked for most users to fix the authorization problem.

You can refer to them if you face similar problem.

• Make sure the website you are testing on is at least 3 days (72 hours) old. Jetpack plugin faces problem authorizing domain names that are recently registered.
• Confirm that the latest version of Jetpack plugin is installed.
• Disable all the other plugins except for Jetpack and try. You can re-enable them if it works.
• Disable Cloudflare security if you are using it. You can enable it again afterward.
• Change your theme to WordPress default (if possible) and see if it fixes. It could be a problem with the theme.
• Security solutions are known to cause authorization problem. Try disabling your security solutions temporarily and try authorizing.
• Here is a list of errors that are associated with the Jetpack plugin. If you face any, just follow the provided instructions to fix it.
• Contact Jetpack support if you are still unable to solve the problem.
• You may even have to contact your hosting service to ensure there is no problem at their end. However, I will recommend you to contact Jetpack support first and get their advice.

Summary

WordPress.com for Google Docs add-on is definitely a breakthrough in the WordPress community. You no longer have to spend extra time formatting the document in WordPress or messing with the HTML code.

Although I still recommend you to double-check your imported document to see if everything is moved precisely or not. The add-on is new and it may make some mistakes. However, this should not make you flee, the add-on will keep improving and should be usable for all the users soon.

The post Write in Google Docs, Publish in WordPress. Here’s how. appeared first on Hongkiat.

Many of you, I believe, are familiar with the WordPress login page at wp-login.php. It looks nice, and works fine. But when it comes to creating a website for clients, you might want a more customized login page, so that it integrates nicely with the website design as a whole. In addition, having a customized login page could also give your clients a good impression of your skills.

If this is something that you want to achieve on your site, here’s how you can build a fully customized WordPress login page.

Custom Login Page

First, we need to create a custom page template for the login page. To do so, you can create a new page template and name it – for example – page-login.php. Then, create a new Page from the WordPress backend and set the permalink to login so that WordPress will automatically take the page-login.php template for the page.

The Login Form

Put the wp_login_form tag in the page-login.php page template to display the login form.

 <?php wp_login_form(); ?> 

The following is optional, but could be useful in certain cases. You can configure a few things for the login form, like specifying the redirecting of URL after the user has successfully logged in, changing the ID of the username, and the password input field.

 <?php $args = array( 'redirect' => home_url(), 'id_username' => 'user', 'id_password' => 'pass', ) ;?> <?php wp_login_form( $args ); ?> 

Furthermore, you can also add something aside. It could be your logo and a little description of your site, for example.

 <div class="login-branding"> <a href="#" class="login-logo">Hongkiat.com</a> <p class="login-desc"> Hongkiat.com is a design weblog dedicated to designers and bloggers. We constantly publish useful tricks, tools, tutorials and inspirational artworks. </p> </div> <div class="login-form"> <?php $args = array( 'redirect' => home_url(), 'id_username' => 'user', 'id_password' => 'pass', ) ;?> <?php wp_login_form( $args ); ?> </div> 

Now, let’s make the form nicer with CSS. You can make the CSS up on your own as per your site requirements. In this example, here is how my login form looks like. It has black background, with a blue button, which fits quite well with the Hongkiat.com site theme.

Validation

At this point, the login page is already functional. We can try logging in, and if suceeded we will be redirected to the URL that we have specified in the redirect parameter above. But, there is something that we need to address.

First, the wp-login.php page is still accessible. It would be better to redirect the wp-login.php to our new login page to deliver a unified experience to our clients.

To do so, you can add the following codes in the functions.php of your theme.

 function redirect_login_page() { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); $page_viewed = basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); if( $page_viewed == "wp-login.php" && $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'GET') { wp_redirect($login_page); exit; } } add_action('init','redirect_login_page'); 

Remember to change the $login_page variable to your own login page (thanks to Montana Flynn for the tip).

Second, the login page can work as expected when we are successfully logged in. But if an error occurs like when submiting invalid user and password combinations, or submitting an empty field, we will also be thrown away to wp-login.php. To solve this issue, add the following functions in the functions.php.

 function login_failed() { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); wp_redirect( $login_page . '?login=failed' ); exit; } add_action( 'wp_login_failed', 'login_failed' ); function verify_username_password( $user, $username, $password ) { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); if( $username == "" || $password == "" ) { wp_redirect( $login_page . "?login=empty" ); exit; } } add_filter( 'authenticate', 'verify_username_password', 1, 3); 

These two functions perform two tasks. They will redirect the user upon failing, and append a login query string to the URL with the value of either failed or empty.

The last problem is we will also be redirected to wp-login.php when we have logged out from the site. So, we also need to specify the redirecting URL upon logging out, like so.

 function logout_page() { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); wp_redirect( $login_page . "?login=false" ); exit; } add_action('wp_logout','logout_page'); 

Error Message

We will display an error message, showing the user when the error occurred, and when they have logged out by using the query string that we have put in the URL. To get the value from the login query string above, we can use $_GET.

Put this code below in the login page template.

 $login = (isset($_GET['login']) ) ? $_GET['login'] : 0; 

The above code will check whether the login variable contains value, otherwise it will set to 0. Then we will display different notification messages based on the value of $error, like so.

 if ( $login === "failed" ) { echo '<p class="login-msg"><strong>ERROR:</strong> Invalid username and/or password.</p>'; } elseif ( $login === "empty" ) { echo '<p class="login-msg"><strong>ERROR:</strong> Username and/or Password is empty.</p>'; } elseif ( $login === "false" ) { echo '<p class="login-msg"><strong>ERROR:</strong> You are logged out.</p>'; } 

And below is what the error message looks like.

Conclusion

There are several things that we could do to improve our login page such as adding Lost Password link, Register Link, and a personalized error message. But, at this point it is now functioning well enough for our users to login and logout, and it could also be a good start to create a more advanced login page.

We hope that you find this tutorial useful.

The post How to Build A Fully Customized WordPress Login Page appeared first on Hongkiat.

Readability, minimalism and good user experience are common things that a premium WordPress theme should have. Usually, in case of a church websites, not much attention is given to the design aspects. However, a modern church WordPress theme can accommodate latest design trends and useful information for its users.

There are also a number of other useful elements a church website may need, such as church calendar, an attractive blog for sharing messages and if your church is collecting donations, you may need a suitable way to collecting them online. Following collection of WordPress themes have all the necessary elements and even more for a modern church.

Premium Themes

Grace

Grace is a nice clean template for churches, Christian prayer groups, charity and non-profit organizations. It has a useful easy event calendar to notify visitors about upcoming church events.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Jesus church

This church theme is user-friendly and readable. It has a beautiful combination of soft color scheme and nice typography.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

HelpingHands

HelpingHands is a powerful charity and donation theme for WordPress. You can easily edit the site and collect donations with PayPal or other payment processing systems.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Salvation

Salvation is a nice church WordPress theme with pink colors. It features an event management system, a donation form, and custom widgets.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Christian church

Christian church theme comes with everything you may need for a modern clean church website. It has even Bootstrap functionality, audio player and video integration, several sliders to choose from, and archives.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Adore Church

Adore Church is an SEO-optimized WordPress theme with an event calendar and a blog. It has unlimited color options, 150 line icons, and Google fonts to customize the design for your own needs.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Right Way

Pure white background and slider images with floating light are amazing for a church website. Main website content is divided into three columns and combined with images.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Angel

This amazing theme for charity organizations and churches features nice image background, donation form, donation counter, about us area, image gallery, and easy contact form.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

If you look forward to increasing sales and conversions on your blog or website, landing pages are one of the best tools to go for. They interact with the customers, bring in leads, and market your product all without needing you to be around for the action to happen.

But not all of us have the design skills, budget and/or the designer to build one. However, if you know how to work a plugin, you can still get your own landing page or coming soon page.

Here are 10 WordPress plugins that let you create and manage landing pages, track and respond to leads, build forms, create auto-responders and generate conversions.

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder consists of a set of content modules that assists in building layouts of the landing pages. It also supports third-party widgets and shortcodes for creating layouts easily. Moreover, the plugin supports almost all WordPress themes.

Beaver Builder is optimized for mobiles and tablets, creating responsive landing pages, for better user experience on mobile. The plugin also allows developers to build custom widgets using the plugin system.

The “pro” version gives you access to additional documentation and superior support for extending the builder through custom modules.

WordPress Landing Pages

WordPress Landing Pages lets you design a landing page for your site with its visual editor, which enables you to view changes on the fly. You can clone the old splash pages, run A/B tests on the conversion pages, and extend the plugin using third-party add-ons.

The plugin lets you opt from several custom landing page designs or implement your blog’s theme on the landing pages. It’s built with the best inbound marketing techniques that help you gain and convert high numbers of leads.

You can also install WordPress Calls to Action, and WordPress Leads to implement and use a lead generation system.

Landing Page

Create lovely landing pages and switch between themes to find the right design for your page. All the steps include auto-optimization and require zero coding knowledge. On top of that, you can even run A/B tests. It also supports MailChimp subscription forms out of the box.

The plugin also offers integrated SEO features to help boost your sales. And you can also create email newsletters straight from your WordPress dashboard for building eye-catching HTML emails for your leads or subscribers, also in the mix, sales, and coming soon pages.

Unbounce

WYSIWYG builder offers effortless page editing and instant previews. 80 landing page templates optimized for responsiveness. Run A/B tests, integrate the plugin with leading marketing tools like MailChimp, HubSpot, SalesForce, etc.

Coming Soon by Supsystic

Build a responsive coming soon landing page with ready-made professional-looking templates. The building can be done with drag-and-drop, and further customization is possible with custom CSS and HTML.

Aitasi Coming Soon

A coming soon landing page builder which gives you responsive, professional-looking designs. Add a company logo and social icons, change the background color, and customize the style of the page to suit your branding.

Elementor

This is one of the most popular page builders in the WordPress ecosystem. It features its own page builder interface that allows you, the user, to simply drag-n-drop elements or modules the Buttons, Texts, Images, Columns, and sections to create a nice-looking landing page.

Even more so, you can drop-in the pre-built templates, which is a huge time safer to create the landing page.

Page Builder by SiteOrigin

Page Builder by SiteOrigin allows you to compose a page by simply drag-n-drop widgets right from the WordPress post or page. It integrates well with WordPress and also built with developers in mind.

Developers can quickly build a custom widget as well as a pre-built template using the API that they’re already familiar with.

AtomicBlocks

AtomicBlocks is a WordPress plugin that registers additional blocks to Gutenberg (WordPress’s new editor interface).

It consists of pre-built components, like the so-called Spacer and Divider, Call-to-Action, and it also now comes with Pre-designed page layouts, which makes creating a nice-looking page layout on WordPress using Gutenberg a lot easier and faster.

Getwid

Getwid is a collection of comprehensive Gutenberg blocks and unique pre-built block templates to help you quickly build a beautiful landing page on your Website with the new editor in WordPress.

At the time of writing, the plugin consists of 40+ custom blocks and 35+ templates.

The post 10 WordPress Plugins to Create Landing Pages Easily appeared first on Hongkiat.

BuddyPress — the “social network in a box” for WordPress — is the most powerful tool for creating communities or social networks using WordPress. The plugin unlocks various social networking capabilities for users like creating profiles, sending messages, building connections and groups, and many more.

BuddyPress comes with tons of features for creating a rich community or social network website powered by WordPress. However, you require a killer theme and some add-ons for BuddyPress to build a social network that tests the limits of your imagination. And it’s not easy to find them — not the best ones.

That’s why I’m going to introduce you to the best ten add-ons for BuddyPress that brings additional or better features to BuddyPress. Let’s get going!

rtMedia for WordPress

A full-featured media solution for WordPress and BuddyPress, rtMedia allows your users to post media to activity status updates — just like Facebook. It adds new media tabs under BuddyPress Profiles and Groups. Also, it lets the users create collections (more like albums) to organize their photos and videos.

rtMedia avails a responsive lightbox, video player, and upload screen that works across all device sizes. Its privacy features allow users to control the visibility of media files and albums. Last but important, you get to customize its every aspect, thanks to its rich templating system and a wide variety of settings.

Activity Plus Reloaded

Another plugin for enhancing media capabilities for BuddyPress, Activity Plus Reloaded adds Facebook-like features to your social network. With this plugin, the users can attach photos, videos, and web links with their networks — just like Facebook. It adds quick-share or upload options to the activity stream.

Your users can also embed videos from video-sharing services including Vimeo and YouTube. Also, it lets them embed web links like any modern service, i.e., the web link is shown along with its title, description, and thumbnail image.

iFlyChat – WordPress Chat

iFlyChat is one of the best chat solutions for WordPress and BuddyPress. It adds real-time chat features to your community or social network, which then helps in boosting the user engagement in your network. The users can privately chat with each other and chat in groups or public chat rooms — like Facebook.

Its best feature is “chat moderation” — you can moderate the chats including link spamming and swearing in the chats. And the complete chat history is saved until you as the admin or moderator delete them. But that’s not all, it allows the users to send emojis, share files, video-chat with others, surprisingly!

However, it limits the features — especially the concurrent users using the chats — in its free plans. Its free plan allows just ten users, but you can opt for its paid plans, which offers support for 60 to 300 users and more features.

BuddyPress Global Search

Another one of the crucial plugins, BuddyPress Global Search adds global search functionality in your community or social network. Thus, it allows every user to search for every component of BuddyPress — pages, posts, and custom post types like activities — all from a unified search bar showing live results.

BuddyPress Global Search is easy to set up as well. You just need to install this plugin and every search box works as Global Search. It shows the results in a tabbed interface — live results auto-styled per your default template.

Broadcast Live Video

Broadcast Live Video adds support for live video in your community or social network website. It allows users to broadcast live-streaming channels on your website via various sources like webcam, video playlists, and desktop or mobile encoder apps. The best part is it supports both desktop and mobile.

However, this plugin works directly through your web hosting, so your hosting platform must support streaming services. Fortunately, it also means that you get complete control and ownership of the live-streaming content.

BuddyPress Docs

BuddyPress Docs adds Google Docs-like capabilities to BuddyPress, i.e., your community or social network website. It brings collaborative workspaces — part document editing, part shared folders, and part wiki — to your network. Then, it’s not the best part; it even offers the users complete privacy levels.

The docs are linked to your users or user groups with support for tags and taxonomies. The users can manage filterable and sortable document lists — all created using the TinyMCE (the well-known editor shipped with WordPress). Moreover, it helps users avoid losing content or overwriting documents. Last but important, you can check out a doc’s revision history like Google Docs.

BuddyDrive

As BuddyPress Docs brings Google Docs-like capabilities, BuddyDrive brings Google Drive-like capabilities to your BuddyPress. The plugin allows your network members to share files and folders in an easy way. Moreover, it offers numerous privacy settings like BuddyPress Docs and Google Drive.

A user can just upload a private document, share it with friends or user groups, or share it publicly with everyone in your community. Surprisingly, it also allows securing a file or folder using a password to share with added security.

BuddyPress Edit Activity

BuddyPress default features don’t allow editing activity posts after a user creates them. With this plugin, your community users can edit their activities long after they create them. Also, this time limit is customizable through the WordPress Admin. It’s easy to set up: install the plugin and it will do the rest.

Spam Destroyer

You as a blogger or website owner don’t like spam, right? It’s also true for your community members or social network users, but it’s not easy to stop spam — at least using traditional methods. Spam Destroyer helps you stop automated spam (i.e., bot-based spam) on your website without obstructing real users.

BuddyPress Registration Options

BuddyPress Registration Options doesn’t follow nomenclature. Unlike its name, it doesn’t focus on registration options but moderation options regarding user registration. The plugin helps you moderate new user registrations in your community or social network, which helps fight spam and other abuse.

You can block or restrict new users to their profiles only; they can’t visit all of the community until they’re approved. It allows customizing messages and email notifications to tailor them per your community or social network.

Bonus: Youzer

Youzer is one of the best plugins for enhancing user profiles on BuddyPress or WordPress. It adds several powerful add-ons and features to user profiles, which lets you create Facebook Timeline-like profiles to your social network. It brings social wall, groups, messages, notifications, and whatnot to your website.

Also, it adds activity stream, social login, emoticons, and groups and members directories to BuddyPress, making it a powerful community or social network. Then, it offers multiple color schemes, header styles, and profile widgets along with privacy settings and support for showing custom advertisements.

Though you can download and try the plugin for free, Youzer doesn’t avail a free plan, unfortunately. But it avails a big list of features, making it worth a try.

That’s all; you may not require all of these plugins for creating your dream community or social network using BuddyPress and WordPress. That said, you must decide and get the plugins that add or help add the feature you’re looking to provide to your users. Or the ones you need such as Spam Destroyer.

Did you find the list helpful? Did I mention one of your favorite plugins for BuddyPress? Write a comment below or tweet to me at @aksinghnet.

The post Top 10 BuddyPress Plugins for WordPress appeared first on Hongkiat.

There are many elements in web design that require your full attention. Typography is one major element although we usually don’t place its importance high up the priority list. However, use the wrong type face or fonts that are too small and you will leave a bad impression amongst your readers.

On that thought, I have put together five WordPress plugins that can help you do more with your fonts, such as change their color, size, appearance. On top of that, these plugins also help you better manage, highlight and display fonts on your site, make instant pull quotes and tweets, disable auto-formatting on the backend and more.

1. Use Any Font

With this plugin, you can use any font you have (in TTF, OTF, EOT, WOFF, SVG, dfont formats) so you don’t have to depend on font embed services that usually come with a limited number of fonts. Just upload the font to your WordPress and use it.

2. Google Typography

There are several hundreds of Google Fonts you can put to good use via this Google Typography. And you don’t even have to write a single line of code to utilize this. You can customize the site fonts from the WordPress Customizer; select one, and it’ll appear right on the preview.

3. Simple Pull Quote

Pull quotes help break down hefty textual offerings so that readers don’t engage in the TL;DR mode and skip your whole post. Simple Pull Quote allows you to insert pull quotes into your blog posts fast and easy – basically, just click the pullquote button. You can also change the fonts, colors, and backgrounds of each pull quote in your theme’s CSS file.

4. FontAwesome

Font Awesome is one of the popular font-icon libraries on the Web, and you can use this plugin to add the font collection to your website. It is an entirely new plugin; written from the ground-up and maintained by the FontAwesome team directly. You can load the icon as an SVG or a Web Font. Loading it directly or use the CDN.

5. Custom Typekit Fonts

This plugin allows you to connect to Typekit (now Adobe Fonts) to add their font collection to the website easily. It works with a couple of popular themes and theme builders such as the AstraTheme, Beaver Builder Theme and Plugin, and Elementor Page Builder.

Bonus: Custom Fonts

With this plugin, you can create your own custom font collections, literally. The plugin provides a Setting in the dashboard where you can upload the font to your website. Then you can select the font from the WordPress Customizer. It’s also compatible with popular page builders such as Elementor and Beaver Builder.

More about Typography:

• Quick Guide to Typography
• Understanding Typography: 10 helpful tools and resources
• Understanding Typography: Writing for the Web
• Showcase of Web designs with beautiful typography

The post 5 Best WordPress Plugins to Deal With Fonts On Your Site appeared first on Hongkiat.

When you’re starting a business, you need a website; and web hosting service is one of the key components of a successful website. With the best web hosting, you can boost SEO, which helps in growing your products’ outreach and sales.

No matter if you’re starting your first blog on WordPress or your next business’s website on WordPress, a quality hosting service will save you a lot of troubles including almost zero to no downtimes and quick response on support issues. That’s the reason the best websites are hosted on the best-hosting services.

The question arises: how to find the best web hosting services for WordPress? Fortunately, there are some websites that provide expert opinions and user reviews about the hosting services. These services help you to choose the best hosting provider per the reviews of hundreds if not thousands of real users.

Finally, let me share the key factors of a hosting service for WordPress before I introduce you to the best five places to look for legitimate hosting reviews.

• Server requirements – WordPress’s latest versions require PHP 5.6.20 or later, MySQL 5.0.15 or later, and Apache or Nginx with mod_rewrite.
• Speed – The rule of thumb: the faster, the better. Your website must load within a second (you can check via website speed and performance tools).
• Uptime – The hosting service’s uptime must be greater than 99.9%. If it’s any lesser, you may lose probable customers and visitors on your website.
• Support – The provider must provide 24/7 support — even if it’s just live chat. The reason being: you may need urgent support if your site is down.
• Pricing – You’ll already know this: the cheaper, the better. But you must ensure that the website’s speed and uptime must not suffer for pricing.

HostAdvice

HostAdvice is one of the best web hosting review services. It avails both user and expert reviews, allowing customers to compare prices, policies, support, and other features of the web hosting providers. Its expert opinions discuss the ease of use, pricing, speed and performance, and support of the hosting services.

What’s good

• Allows comparing two or more services side-by-side.
• Allows sorting reviews based on newest, helpful, best, etc.
• Offers discount codes (coupons) and plans and features details.
• Supports filtering reviews per service used, language, and the category of reviews like domain, pricing, reliability, speed, support, and more.
• Supports a list of tools such as Web Hosting Advisor, Plans Search, Who Is Hosting This Site?, etc. to help you find the best web hosting service.

What’s bad

• Its design may appear a bit crowded since it offers a lot of information.

WhoIsHostingThis

WhoIsHostingThis aims to provide you with expert reviews and resources along with user reviews to help you on choosing a web host. User reviews share info about hosting services’ features, quality, support, and the overall value. On the contrary, expert opinions provide a highlight of their features in detail.

What’s good

• Allows comparing hosting services based on the budget, server types, speciality hosting, programming languages, CMSs like WordPress, etc.
• Offers a library of useful resources to get started, like most services.
• Offers deals and discounts, mostly like HostAdvice.

What’s bad

• Doesn’t offer side-by-side comparison of web hosting services.

Digital.com

Digital.com helps you find the best web hosting service by providing you ratings based on comments on Twitter. That is, it uses sentiment analysis algorithm on publicly-available comments and tweets about the web hosting services.

That’s why Digital.com is a one-of-its-kind review service that helps to share the voices of real people (though it can’t be accurate since Twitter has bots too!). However, it promises to mitigate some issues using machine learning.

What’s good

• Offers side-by-side comparison between two services, like HostAdvice.
• Avails detail analysis and reviews on web hosting, website builders, and ecommerce builders, and resources on building and hosting a website.
• Offers coupons and discounts for the web hosts, like the above tools.
• Avails sections about CDNs and email platforms under More Services.

What’s bad

• Limited comparisons compared to the above hosting review services.

WPBeginner

WPBeginner — a site focusing on resources for WordPress — provides hosting reviews as well. It provides customer reviews and expert overviews on web hosting services which are focused on their performance, response time, hosting plans, customer support, and other features including pros and cons.

What’s good

• Offers coupons and discount codes, like most review services.
• Provides performance statistics of the web hosts, unlike many others.

What’s bad

• Focuses solely on the web hosts for WordPress, unlike other services.

Serchen Marketplace

Serchen is a marketplace and search engine, offering digital solutions for your business. The website has hundreds of categories featuring cloud hosting, web hosting, etc. Unlike most other services, it offers an overview of the hosting service along with its key features and user ratings and reviews.

What’s good

• Allows sorting by Serchen Index, highest rated, most reviewed, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, YouTube subscribers, and more.
• Lists a web host’s social following, unlike most tools on this list.

What’s bad

• Directs you to a web host’s page for its features, pricing, etc.
• No discount codes or coupons, unlike many on this list.
• Doesn’t offer side-by-side comparison between two services.

The post 5 Reliable Sites to Get WordPress Hosting Services Reviews appeared first on Hongkiat.

Group buying is one of the hottest trends in online shopping arena these days. And why wouldn’t it! With so many websites offering bulk deals at incredibly low prices, everyone wants to be that clever guy who got the better deal – and this is what brings these websites so much profit.

So, if you want to be a part of this bandwagon by launching your own group buying website, then what’s stopping you?

Well, the missing link between you and your successful group buying website is an ideal WordPress theme and useful plugins. So, in this post, I’m featuring the best WordPress themes and plugins that enable you to start your own successful group buying website. Let’s take a look.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce by Automattic has immense support for all kinds of products; thus it is an ideal choice for building group-buying sites. Moreover, this tool is extensible through plugins, allowing you to add or remove features as and when required.

A fantastic feature I see is, you can quickly make your site accessible to the whole world with WooCommerce, thanks to its support for multiple languages and 140+ region-specific payment gateways. Last but not the least, it is an open-source product, so you can customize its source to meet your needs if its features are not enough. (Free)

WP eCommerce

WP eCommerce is another e-commerce solution that supports extensive customizations and provides marketing tools to take your group-buying site to the next level. Because it has provision for dozens of payment gateways like eProcessing Network, XERO, AffiliateWP, etc., you can conveniently process payments across the globe.

Surprisingly, WP eCommerce supports multisite environments too unlike some other plugins and provides multilingual support as well. Moreover, you can manage your listings with its powerful inbuilt tools and integration with the popular courier services. (Free)

WooCommerce Group & Daily Deals

WooCommerce Group & Daily Deals is a mobile-ready plugin that allows creating groups and different types of deals. The deals can be easily customized based on the categories of customers and you can also schedule the deals to promote on select days only. Another exciting feature is that it makes your site translation-ready.

This plugin offers a lot more configuration options like it lets you assign limited time for a deal and you can customize the front-end display of the deals. Moreover, it can also generate detailed reports, an unusual feature which I find missing in few other plugins. ($21)

WP Coupons and Deals

WP Coupons and Deals is a lightweight plugin to showcase deals and coupons on your website. A unique feature I see is that it provides a live preview of a coupon while inserting it in the post straight from the post editor. You can also categorize the coupons and show your exclusive coupons and deals anywhere on the site using widgets.

Moreover, the plugin also lets you set and display expiration dates of your coupons, which is another great option. Some of its pro features include options to hide coupons, create coupons using templates, and show or hide coupons conditionally. (Free)

Affiliate Coupons

Affiliate Coupons helps you earn money through affiliate referral offers by promoting product vouchers and deals. An interesting feature I see is, you can link your coupons to vendors to categorize them and display them easily using a shortcode.

The vendors can be created with predefined affiliate links. Also, there are multiple options to sort your coupons and many configuration options to customize the look and feel of them. (Free)

Woocommerce Role Pricing

Woocommerce Role Pricing plugin provides an option to set rates and discounts according to the role of the viewer. While visiting your site, every customer can view the store with or without discounted prices – a unique feature that sets this plugin apart from others.

You can set direct discounts to editors, subscribers, or customers, and choose between applying discounts or amounts based on regular price or sale price. Also, its premium edition offers many more features such as providing discounts by variables or categories. (Free)

WooCommerce Group Buy and Deals

WooCommerce Group Buy and Deals plugin works as an extension to the WooCommerce plugin mentioned above on this list. This extension helps to design group-buying sites which work exactly like Groupon and are heavily customizable as well.

You can set up a deals site in less than an hour using this plugin and start showing deals and promotions to your visitors. You can show or hide deals for a specific time, use plenty of supported shortcodes, and configure more options using this plugin. Moreover, you can let your users view active and purchased deals on their ‘My deals’ page. ($21)

20 WordPress Group Buying Themes And Plugins for 2018

Kupon

Kupon helps you create terrific-looking coupons and deals site and sell physical as well as digital products. The theme offers numerous premium features that save you from buying premium plugins, for example, daily deals marketplace support and a feature to track failed deals and fund money manually for them.

The theme supports child theme and multisite network, which I find is absent in other themes. Moreover, with some of its paid extensions, you can enable gift certificates, allow users to shop with the booking feature, and do a lot more. ($59)

WPGroupbuy

WPGroupbuy allows the creation of a beautiful and flexible deal website. A unique feature of this plugin is, it lets your users create business accounts and submit deals and track sales directly on your website. Moreover, you can even view advanced reports and stats, and export the report data to a CSV too.

Another feature that makes your job easier is, it supports multiple payment gateways and on-site credit card payment methods as well. Also, its localization support on top of former feature helps you to design multilingual site and sell deals in multiple regions. ($99)

Daily Deal

Daily Deal is a featureful coupon theme that helps to create deal sites. You can create various types of coupons and sweepstakes and customize homepage as needed. Using its “Submit Deal” form, you can even allow your users to submit deals. Also, you can customize the submission form, add different types of deals, and configure email notifications.

An interesting feature is, it includes a built-in blog so that you can provide updates on the latest or upcoming coupons and offers. Last but not the least, the theme includes an affiliate module to build and manage affiliates and supports several payment gateways. ($59)

CouponHut

CouponHut is a coupon-specific theme for WordPress that comes with a clean, responsive design, allowing you build deal and coupon sites. You can add percentage based discounts, expiry dates, and time triggered events to your coupons – a fantastic feature I find only in this theme. Also, it provides various ad blocks to display ads.

Moreover, there is an integrated rating system that allows people to give and view ratings for every deal. I also liked its powerful front-end search functionality, which provides various filters to users, helping them to look for deals or coupons as easily as possible. ($69)

CouponXL

CouponXL is optimized for creating websites to sell coupons, deals, and offers. I found it amazing that one can enable its membership system and manage affiliates and other members. You can even allow them to showcase their deals and products.

Moreover, the theme supports various types of coupons, different fee schemes, multiple types of deals, and many more customization options. Another interesting feature is, it integrates well with PayPal and more payment gateways. And you can also allow social profile signups and view statistics about visits, clicks, and more. ($49)

Read Also: 32 Coupon Sites for Shopping Deals & Bargains – Best of

Clipper

Clipper comes with easy monetization tools and features to earn by creating a coupon website. I found a unique feature called custom write panel, which lets you easily edit the vouchers from the admin dashboard. With its submit coupon form, you can easily accept coupons from your visitors and list them on your site.

Along with custom schemes and layouts, Clipper also offers support for child themes and avails an API for customizing its functionality. Moreover, you can import coupons from other systems, manage ads, and check out statistics about daily views. ($69)

Couponer

Couponer is a discount and coupon theme which can be customized with multiple options. You can easily create vouchers and show daily deals to your visitors. The theme offers premium design, membership features, unlimited colors, and more.

Also, you can restrict coupons and discounts to members and opt for more configuration options. You can add widgets like coupon text, coupon social, coupon categories, newsletters, etc., and use its page templates to create pages. Moreover, the theme offers various coupon listing options, numerous custom post types, etc. ($49)

Deals

Deals is a fully functional theme incorporating a coupon management system that lets you create and show discounts and coupons and earn money through ads. Interestingly, the theme includes a user rating and voting system that allows your visitors give their feedback and helps improve your site’s visibility.

The theme is translation ready and also brings you multiple layouts, custom menu options, various widgets, and a powerful image slider to showcase the exclusive coupons on your website. ($39)

DealPress

DealPress transforms your site to a group buying website that offers various fully-functional features. The theme makes it easier for you to post deals and write blog posts to attract organic traffic. An interesting feature is, it supports numerous payment gateways to help you monetize your deal site and charge the members.

Moreover, DealPress offers native support for Google Maps and Google Analytics that helps you to track your site’s traffic and user engagement. Last but not the least, it also integrates well with social networks like Facebook and Twitter to help grow popularity. ($69.99)

The post 10+ WordPress Group Buying Themes And Plugins appeared first on Hongkiat.

WordPress is the most popular website-building platform for a variety of reasons. One of them is the vast array of tools and design options and aids it places at your disposal.

Still, there are times you’ll want to invest in a multipurpose or specialty theme if you are to have everything you need at your fingertips.

That may be enough, but if not, and a desired website feature or capability is still out of reach, you have four options:

• Go without it
• Code it yourself;
• Get a developer to do the work for you
• Find a plugin that will do the job

We suggest the latter option. After all, there are more than 55,000 plugins in the WordPress directory; admittedly more than you might care to have to plow through.

We’re willing to bet that you could use one or more of the following 8 top 2020 plugins to put your website on steroids.

One more thing — they’re free to try or use.

1. Brizy Website Builder for WordPress

If you’re in the market for a free quality website building tool to supplement what the WordPress platform provides, the Brizy plugin could be just what you’ve been looking for.

There are several good reasons for choosing Brizy including —

• Ease of setup and ease of use because of this plugin’s intuitive user interface
• No coding is required, and since Brizy is drag and drop you can build a page in mere minutes
• It bears repeating that using Brizy won’t cost you one cent. You can download it and start working with it today if you want to.
• There’s no shortage of useful design aids and options, including 500+ pre-made blocks, 40 popups, 150 layouts, and thousands of icons, colors, and font styles.

Should you run into a problem or want to learn as much as you can about where this plugin can take you, there’s plenty of documentation and an excellent selection of tutorial videos.

2. wpDataTables

When confronted with vast amounts of data (thousands and thousands of rows) gathered from several sources and presented in several formats is precisely what wpDataTables plugin can do to prepare colorful, informative, responsive, and editable tables or charts. Without wpDataTables, it could take you hours or even days to complete the task.

On the other hand, it would take wpDataTables only a few minutes. That, in a nutshell, is one of the reasons why you might choose this WP plugin to do the heavy lifting for you.

wpDataTables can work with data from most, if not all, standard sources such as Excel and CSV files, MySQL queries, JSON feeds, and Google spreadsheets.

It’s ideal for presenting data relating to operational or financial statistics, complex analysis, comparison data, or building and maintaining a product catalog.

3. Logic Hop — Content Personalization for WordPress

It’s 2020, why is your website showing the same content to every visitor? With Logic Hop, you can display personalized content to each person that visits your site. Why? Because personalized websites perform 200% better. That’s more sales, more signups, more conversions, and lower bounce rates!

Logic Hop automagically pulls over 50 points of data, including geolocation, that can be used to personalize almost any aspect of your site. Want to show a different CTA at night? Easy. Want to show coupons for returning visitors? Done.

Take our word for it; Logic Hop is hands-down the best personalization plugin for WordPress. It’s fully integrated with your favorite page builders like Divi, Beaver Builder, and Elementor, and it’s surprisingly easy to use. Another plus, Logic Hop, is the only personalization tool that works with caching — And it’s GDPR compliant! Give it a try and see what personalization can do for your site.

4. StarCat Reviews

Product reviews can often play a key role in eCommerce sales. StarCat Reviews is a WooCommerce Review plugin that replaces outmoded WooCommerce reviews with a review and rating system designed to give your business a boost by increasing your eCommerce conversions.

These reviews can feature Multiple Rating options, products, or services. Pros & Cons and overall review scores. You can manage the review process easily. You can display product ratings on Google search pages, and you can put into play premium add-ons like the Photo/Video Review add-on to make the reviews more effective. 

5. Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin

The Amelia plugin does three essential things for you and does them well.

• Automates your business’s appointment and event bookings; saving you a ton of money and time in the process
• Keeps customers happy by enabling them to book, cancel and reschedule appointments online 24/7
• Keeps your employees happy by matching customer appointment bookings with their availability and preferences

Plus, you can manage bookings from a central location and customize the design and application questions to match your business needs.

6. Heroic KB — Knowledge Base Plugin

A hallmark of excellent customer service is the ability to offer a speedy, informative response to their questions. An FAQ page is one approach, but not always a satisfactory one.

Customers always appreciate getting knowledgeable answers and information, especially when they can get it on a 24/7 basis. The Heroic KB knowledge base plugin’s features include live search, article feedback, and answers based on its analysis of actions visitors have taken while visiting your site.

7. Rank Math SEO

You can tie yourself in knots trying to make a website as SEO friendly as possible. Rank Math, with its clean and straightforward interface together with a host of SEO-enhancing features, will do the job for you, saving you a lot of time and needless stress in the process.

Key features include Automated Image SEO, WooCommerce SEO, Automated Image SEO, and several Local SEO options. It will also evaluate 40 different SEO factors to help make your site an e-commerce powerhouse.

8. WordPress Review

WordPress Review gives you an ideal solution for setting up your website to review books, games, videos, or anything else. You can choose among several types of reviews, circle, star, percentage, and thumbs up, for example, as well as creating product comparison tables.

WordPress Review provides 19 time-saving rich snippets and 16 pre-defined website designs to work with. This plugin is compatible with any WordPress theme and integrates with WooCommerce.

This little gold mine of 8 top plugins for 2020 likely contains one or more nuggets that can put a new or an existing website of yours on steroids. Each provides features or functionalities lacking in most WordPress themes, including specialty themes.

Since they are free to try or use, don’t wait to try one or more of them out to see where you might put them to good use.

The post These 8 WordPress Plugins Will Save You Time appeared first on Hongkiat.

For different kinds of sites running on WordPress, you need some particular type of plugins. For instance, for an online store, you need e-commerce plugins. Similarly, for a photography site, you need image-related plugins. However, if you’re a multisite admin, you can administer a WordPress Multisite network along with some useful plugins to help you manage your different websites.

So, in today’s post, I am going to showcase a list of handy and useful WordPress plugins for managing multiple websites. I know you may have already heard about some of these plugins, but I kept them to compile a complete list of multisite plugins that work for everyone — even newbies. Let’s take a look.

Jetpack

Jetpack, the multi-module plugin from Automattic, provides numerous features for multisite installations. What makes it interesting is that it protects your sites from brute force attacks and also monitors the uptime of your websites for free. Moreover, you can also configure 2-factor authentication for your users, and check stats and analytics in a single panel.

With Jetpack, you can also avail of its content creation and optimization tools, including an image CDN, simple embeds, carousels, slideshows, extra widgets, etc., and discussion tools like email subscriptions, social login, and many more.

WP Multisite Content Copier

A quite handy plugin to manage content on your WordPress site installation. It allows you to copy or update from one site to the other sites (sub-sites). The plugin supports all kinds of post types in WordPress, including the post, page, terms like the category and tag, media, and can perform a single copy of it or in bulk.

Multilingual Press

MultilingualPress takes WordPress multilingual content quite differently. Instead of creating new fields or meta, it works with sub-sites in WordPress Multisite. You can create a sub-site, set the locale language for the site, and associate the website and the content with the ones from the other sites.

The plugin does not lock you in since it does not create custom fields for the content. When you deactivated the plugin, your content will still be there. It’s a pretty smart way to manage multilanguage content.

Delete Me

Managing users across multiple WordPress sites can be a tedious task. This plugin may give you a little convenience on that by adding the ability for the users to delete their accounts themselves. It’s also shipped with plenty of settings. You can enable it Network Wide, which will allow you to remove the user in all the subsites, enable it for a specific user role, and customize the email confirmation as well as the authentication.

Multisite Toolbar Additions

This plugin adds an additional menu to the WordPress Multisite admin bar, as we can see below. It’s like shortcuts. Instead of clicking several steps, you can click once to get there immediately. These can help you to save quite an amount of time when managing the site on the dashboard.

Multisite Enhancements

This plugin improves the dashboard’s network area for super admins with more info and quick utilities. These include adding useful items to ‘Network Admin’ admin bar, stating sites are having a particular plugin or theme enables, etc.

You can even change the footer texts to get stats on RAM, SQL, etc. Not only these, but this plugin also helps you to remove the WordPress logo from the admin bar and add favicon beside site name in the admin area, helping you to identify any site quickly. Though these may seem small improvements, I bet they can save you a few minutes a day.

WP Super Cache

This popular caching plugin generates static HTML files for your WordPress blog’s PHP scripts, and then after, your web server serves static files. WP Super Cache is backed by the Automattic team and provides multisite support, meaning you can install it on a multisite network and configure its settings, and it speeds up every site on your network.

It provides various options to do the same, and you can also enable or disable caching per sub-blog on your multisite network. And that means your website will have better page loading speeds, and that also means better search page rankings.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO improves your site’s SEO from all required aspects. It enables you to prepare your posts for search engines, including optimizing the use of focus keyword, optimizing the post’s meta information. The plugin is multisite compatible, and it’s even possible to configure a set of default settings for all blogs on the network.

Using its snippet preview, you can determine how your post will look in the search results, and also edit its meta title and description. The plugin helps you to improve your site’s ranking in search result pages, and increase the click-through rate for organic results.

BackWPup

This plugin helps to save and store your WordPress installation in full, including the “wp-content” directory. And in the case of an emergency or data loss, you can easily restore everything with a single .zip backup file. The plugin being multisite compatible, you can take backups of the whole network, or any sub-blog without any hassle.

As a requirement, the plugin does enable you to store the backup to a cloud drive to prevent file loss or damage. That being said, you can also push the backups to an external backup or storage service like Dropbox, S3, FTP, etc. Moreover, the plugin does additional optimization tasks optimizing and repairing databases, etc.

WP Security Audit Log

WP Security Audit Log is a comprehensive audit log and user monitoring plugin that keeps a record of all activities occurring on a multisite network. Using this plugin and checking its notifications, you can track suspicious activities and prevent security issues.

Not only this, you can even monitor user activities, .e.g, when someone logs in or out from their dashboard, when a new user is created, etc. You can think it like a security camera in your office that tries to protect things and records video to check on thieves.

Of course, you can later deactivate or delete a clone same as you can do with any other sub-blog on a multisite network. Though it works as expected, yet it misses a feature, using which I could specify which all things (posts, plugins, etc.) should be cloned.

User Role Editor

User Role Editor lets you change the roles of users, excluding the administrator, of course. You can simply edit user roles and assign them capabilities per their responsibilities, e.g., a writer must have “create_posts” and an editor must have “publish_posts” capabilities.

Apart from that, you can create and delete the self-made roles for users having restricted or mixed types of capabilities. Moreover, as a bonus feature, you can also remove the unnecessary roles left behind after uninstalling other plugins.

User Switching

With the User Switching plugin, you can instantly switch user accounts by quickly logging in and out as your preferred user. The switching process is entirely secure, and only super admins can do this on multisite installs. This plugin uses the cookie authentication system while remembering the accounts, thus also prevents leaking passwords.

Then after, you can quickly swap back to your super admin account with a single click using the “Switch back” link on the dashboard screen or in the profile menu. That being said, this plugin is great for test environments where you need to log in and out between different accounts, e.g., if you wish to test a user role’s capabilities set by the above plugin.

Unconfirmed

This plugin shows a list of inactivated user registrations, wherein you will be given the option to resend the original activation email, or you can also manually activate those users. It helps you catch false registrations and resend emails for genuine registrations that may have been caught by spam filters.

Multisite Language Switcher

This plugin adds multilingual support to a multisite network’s blogs, and thus, enables you to manage translations of posts, pages, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies. That means, using this plugin, you can easily translate your blogs and reach out to more people who will like to read your blog posts or reach to you in a new language.

Multisite Robots.txt Manager

This plugin helps you manage all robots.txt files for all sub-blogs on a WordPress Multisite network. You can create unique robots.txt files for individual websites, and amazingly, this plugin also allows you to mass update all the sites in the network. You can even scan and clean the old robots.txt files across blogs of the multisite network.

Wrapping up

I always suggest to install as less WordPress plugins as required or possible, and this post is no exception. And although I feel all above plugins are useful for a multisite network, but let me tell you that even I have not installed all of them on my network.

Happy administering, and remember, less plugins means more performance and security.

The post 5 Essential Plugins to Manage Multiple WordPress Sites appeared first on Hongkiat.