Whether you’re a design pro or a total newbie, you’ll find a great tool in this list that will take your website skills to the next level.
WORDPRESS
Original Gallery or a Plugin: What’s Better for a Website?
Loading time is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to a website’s conversion and rankings. Slow and sluggish pages are costing their owner’s potential visitors and money. It will drive your website down in searches, and affect SEO.
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS’s with over 60% of the market share. This means that WordPress powers 33,5% of websites. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and all you have to do is purchase a domain name and hosting.
Images and videos are an inseparable part of every webpage. That’s why it’s so important for every WordPress user to use them most efficiently. But do you know how to add a to a website and be certain that it loads quickly for your users?
What Is a Plugin?
A plugin is a program that extends the functionality of a product with one specific function. Plugins can add new features to your website and boost its performance.
WordPress plugins are a group of plugins written in the PHP programming language. They are integrated with WordPress. They make it easier for users without an IT background or any web design experience to add new features to their pages.
The library of WordPress plugins is vast. There is an official directory with a lot of them available for free. Except for using free ones, there is an amazing number of plugins accessible commercially.
Image Galleries
If you experience problems with your website’s speed, the first thing you need to check is your image quality. Images a big part of a page and not only when it comes to aesthetics. The right image has to be optimized for a website, but most people don’t know about it and have no idea how to do it. They just buy some stock photos or add the ones they made.
Photos like that may have excellent quality, but they are also very heavy. That can be the main reason your page started slowing down.
The other problem is the image’s format. Popular formats like PNG, JPG, or GIF are mostly compressed, so they are small and load fast and nicely, but formats like TIFF and BMP will take a lot of time. Be careful what you add.
Your site shouldn’t be slowing down if you have up to 10 images, beyond that, the browser will need some extra time to load them. This is happening because every image must be downloaded and displayed each time you enter a site.
Optimizing Your WordPress
The most significant merit of plugins is speeding up your pages. Most of them won’t slow down your site, only the number of bad ones. According to WpBeginner, plugins gained a bad reputation because of support technicians who were explaining the site’s troubles with having too many of them.
Yes, plugins can slow down your website, but it’s rather about quality than quantity. Dozens of good quality plugins won’t affect your website’s performance, but even one bad apple in the family and the whole site may crush.
Adding a Lazy Loading plugin to your site may improve the user experience. Basically, it allows you to load and render only one section instead of the whole page. On-demand loading reduces time and memory usage, so it optimizes content delivery.
Another useful plugin lets you paginate your page. Having a few pages on your website reduces server load time. It’s not only useful for optimizing your page but also for creating better user comfort. Most of the time, users aren’t interested in all the data, but only the most recent or interesting content.
Video Gallery
Image adding is something that most WordPress users know how to do, but there is no build-in option for doing this with videos. Having a video gallery can help you display the content quickly and in nice aesthetics. Youtube gallery WordPress plugins may help you to organize and sort content and later, present it in a pretty neat way to users.
These plugins support not only Youtube but a load of other popular video websites including Vimeo. As an admin, you can build whole video channels on your site to increase revenue and content opportunities.
Some plugins offer customizable gallery templates, which are most useful when you are not experienced in creating websites. It’s not easy to choose the right colors, fonts, and layouts without particular skills and talents. Templates provide consistency to your page, so it is nice to look at. Having a template also reduces the time you would have to spend on building it from scratch.
These plugins are a great option when using WordPress. It is good to figure out which options and features would be the best for you and your business.
Conclusion
If your WordPress page is small enough and you have no need for plugins, it’s ok just to use original galleries, but if you want it to grow, it’s best to consider using specialized plugins. Using plugins will be a great help with optimizing your page and boosting performance.
WORDPRESS
How to Make $5000 of Passive Income Every Month in WordPress
Are you looking for a low-maintenance side gig to generate some extra income? Selling digital downloads might be the answer.
I’ve been personally selling digital downloads for over a decade. It’s a painless way to make money because you don’t have all the overhead of selling physical goods, and you can set up an online store with little effort using a free WordPress plugin.
Let me share my experiences with you and tell you how you can make $5000 of passive income per month selling digital downloads on WordPress.
Note: Keep in mind that running an online business takes time and requires your constant attention. Selling digital downloads, however, is as close to passive as it gets.
This is a guest post by Chris Klosowski, the president of Easy Digital Downloads, the best digital eCommerce plugin for WordPress. This is an expert column that we publish every Thursday, where we invite a WordPress expert to share their experiences with our readers.
Why Digital Downloads Are a Great Way to Make Passive Income
You’ve heard the expression, ‘No pain, no gain.’ This means that achieving something worthwhile normally requires sacrifice and hard work.
But what if I told you that you can make money with your WordPress website while you sleep?
That’s passive income.
Passive income is money that you earn with little to no ongoing effort. Think of earning interest on your savings account or renting out a spare room.
Or selling digital downloads.
Compared with selling physical products, digital downloads are a breeze. There’s no need to keep track of inventory, no running out of stock, no need to hire storage space or workers to manage it, and no shipping and handling.
Like everything, it requires a little setup. You’ll have to create or obtain the files you want to sell. And you’ll need to set up a WordPress website and install an eCommerce plugin.
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is one example of a plugin designed specifically for digital downloads. It lets you get started for free, and you can purchase extensions to add the features you need as you grow.
Once your online store is set up, you can continue to sell your digital product over and over again. So, the money you make will require very little ongoing effort.
You can even use automation to save time and effort and make the income truly passive.
How Much Passive Income Can You Earn With Digital Downloads?
The amount of money you can make by selling digital downloads varies a lot, depending on your skills, experience, and the type of digital products you are selling.
When starting out, it’s typical for beginners to make just a few hundred dollars a month in initial sales.
That being said, in time, it’s not uncommon for established sellers with a loyal audience to achieve $5,000 or more per month.
For example, Emily McDermott tells the story of how she made a promising $700 in her first month of selling attractive business documents. After just three months, she was making over $7,000 a month. Plus, she spends just a couple of hours a week working on her online store.
The potential doesn’t stop there. Top earners make tens of thousands of dollars each month. But this is rare and will take more effort.
This extra work may take it out of the ‘passive’ income category. But with that sort of revenue, you’ll probably want to spend more time working on your online store anyway.
A number of our Easy Digital Downloads customers have achieved this. For example, Set Sail Studios has made $236,000+ selling fonts, and Escape Room Geeks has made $390,000+ selling printable escape room kits.
Are you interested in making this kind of passive income? Your first step is to decide on a digital product to sell.
The Best Types of Digital Products for Passive Income
The best digital products for creating passive income have a high perceived value but require little ongoing maintenance. They should generate a profit and line up with your business niche.
Potential customers will only buy your digital download if it solves a problem or meets a need. A unique product in a specific niche will help you stand out and attract an engaged audience.
To create passive income, you need to choose digital products that don’t require ongoing effort.
For example, software products like WordPress plugins and themes can be quite profitable, but they often require continuing development and support. That takes an ongoing investment in time, so they are not the best options for a side gig that makes passive income.
On the other hand, a simple software program or web application that solves a common problem may be perfect. The EDD Software Licensing add-on can be used to activate the buyer’s copy of the software without your direct involvement.
eBooks are another profitable option. If your blog contains a lot of useful information, then you can easily repurpose the content as an eBook. You could create multiple books by choosing blog posts on specific topics, such as your most engaging and popular posts in specific categories.
Alternatively, you may be able to repurpose the content as an online course and sell ongoing subscriptions to access the material. This offers more value than eBooks but also takes more time to set up. I will talk more about subscriptions later.
Perhaps you gained a lot of insights when you set up your business and are passionate about helping others do the same. You could sell an eBook about the key steps to creating a successful business or offer useful business documents and Excel templates.
Just make sure you choose a product you have expertise in. For example, Sam Parrett from Set Sail Studios creates and sells unique brush fonts, and this aligns well with his graphic design website.
Photographers could create a stock photo library, and designers could sell digital art products, printables, or Canva templates.
The types of digital products that can generate passive income are endless. For inspiration, you can read about the pros and cons of many categories in this post on the most popular digital products to sell on the EDD blog.
How to Reduce Your Workload With Automation
When making passive income, you’ll want to be as hands-off as possible. In my experience, the best way to do this is to use automation to work smarter, not harder.
Luckily, you can get your website to perform many routine tasks automatically using automation.
These include email marketing, social media, customer service, admin tasks, and more. It’s simply a matter of choosing the right automation tools and setting them up correctly.
If you are using Easy Digital Downloads, then the software will automatically email purchase receipts and order confirmations to your customers. You can even personalize your automated eCommerce emails, leading to increased customer engagement.
Using some extra tools, you can also automate your email marketing. This means that instead of writing emails manually one by one, you write them just once and set up triggers based on user activity to personalize the emails and send them automatically.
Personalized emails based on user activity are 320% more effective than generic emails.
You can set up the triggers using the FunnelKit Automations plugin for WordPress and send out the emails using a top email marketing service like Constant Contact.
Additionally, you can use automation to reduce cart abandonment. By offering incentives and reminding visitors about their forgotten purchases, you will be able to build customer loyalty and encourage future purchases that contribute to your passive income stream.
For example, OptinMonster‘s exit-intent technology will watch the user’s mouse to determine when they are about to leave your website. It can then automatically display a popup just in time, offering an incentive to complete the visitor’s purchase.
There are plenty of other automated workflows you can use while selling digital downloads. To learn about the best automation tools, see how to use eCommerce automation to save time and money.
Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Passive Income
I mentioned earlier that you can get started selling digital downloads by using the free version of Easy Digital Downloads. Let me introduce you to some paid marketing tools and add-ons that can help you make even more passive income.
In my last guest post, I talked about how order bumps are one of the best ways to encourage customers to spend more money on digital downloads. This is when you offer the buyer extra or upgraded products during checkout.
This is a great strategy when you are selling multiple digital products. You can automatically add order bumps with the EDD cross-sell and upsell add-on to boost your sales.
For example, if you sell music downloads and a customer purchases a song, you can offer them the option of purchasing the entire album while checking out. They may appreciate the suggestion and make the larger purchase.
Alternatively, if you are selling your digital products through WooCommerce, then you can see this tutorial on how to create an order bump for WooCommerce.
Another strategy is to turn a one-off payment into ongoing income by offering subscriptions or recurring payments.
This is a good strategy when you are selling online training or access to cloud-based software. Subscriptions allow your customers to avoid a large initial bill and bring in ongoing revenue to your business.
Subscriptions are easy to set up with the EDD recurring payments add-on. And because it’s an automated system, you will get fewer late or missing payments.
I hope these tips help you make passive income from your WordPress website. You may also want to see these guides on the right way to create an email newsletter and the best AI chatbots for your website.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
WORDPRESS
10 Amazing WordPress Design Resouces – WordPress.com News
Designing a beautiful website from scratch can be difficult for developers of all skill levels. Luckily, in today’s Build and Beyond video, Jamie Marsland reveals his ten favorite WordPress design tools and websites to elevate your next build.
Get inspiration for your next website’s design and then start building with WordPress.com. Ready to get going? Click below to embark on your free trial today:
Here are the sites and resources mentioned in the video:
Heikei
Stunning backgrounds and visuals
Shots
Easy mockups for products and thumbnails
Coolors
Generate color palettes with a click
Join 110.1M other subscribers
WORDPRESS
[GET] The7 Website And Ecommerce Builder For WordPress
The7 website and ecommerce builder for wordpress is the most customizable WordPress, Elementor, and WooCommerce theme available on the market up to …
Source link
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Google Core Update Volatility, Helpful Content Update Gone, Dangerous Google Search Results & Google Ads Confusion
-
SEO7 days ago
10 Paid Search & PPC Planning Best Practices
-
MARKETING5 days ago
5 Psychological Tactics to Write Better Emails
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Weekend Google Core Ranking Volatility
-
MARKETING6 days ago
The power of program management in martech
-
SEO6 days ago
WordPress Releases A Performance Plugin For “Near-Instant Load Times”
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 15, 2024
-
PPC5 days ago
20 Neuromarketing Techniques & Triggers for Better-Converting Copy