Email is an inexpensive yet highly effective channel of communication. It’s been here for a while now – it’s turning 50 in October 2021 – and its popularity doesn’t seem to be waning. Some statistics project the number of emails sent out per day in 2021 will near 320 billion. That’s over forty emails per every person alive today – a staggering number.

What’s even more mind-boggling is that a large chunk of those emails never reach the people they were aimed at. For good reason, too – there are plenty of emails that are unsolicited, harmful, or deceitful, and the place they often end up in the spam folder.

The problem with the spam folder is that the emails you send as part of your email marketing campaign can easily end up in it. This is why it’s important to understand not only how to prevent emails from going to spam, but also how it can get there in the first place.

It seems we have our work cut out for us! We’ll cover:

Why Do Emails End Up in the Spam Folder?

The most obvious answer to this question is because a spam filter caught the emails and placed them into the spam folder. Often enough, it will do it because the emails are indeed spam – they are unwanted junk emails sent out in email blasts to whoever might get them.

But what if your emails don’t fit that bill? What if they’re sent with all the intention and purpose of a highly-targeted email campaign, and they end up flagged as spam anyway? Some of the things that might have gone wrong include:

The good news is that you’ll be able to address most of the issues, if you want, either on your own or through cooperation with the email recipient. There are plenty of things you could be doing, so let’s start tackling them one by one.

Pick Your Email Service Provider Wisely

It’s common knowledge that WordPress’ email sending capabilities aren’t always up to the assignment you give them. And while you are more than welcome to dive into the reasons behind WordPress’ bad track record of mail deliverability, you would do much better to try and fix it.

Among the methods you have at your disposal is configuring SMTP for your WordPress website, which means updating it to use the latest protocol. One way to do it is by using SMTP service providers, some of which can also serve as email service providers.

Choosing a good email service provider is important because the reputable ones will do their share to help your emails reach the recipients and not the spam folders. So besides working hard to keep their record squeaky clean, they should also be able to help you set up email authentication – a very important step for helping your emails appear less spammy to spam filters. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are authentication methods your email service provider should help you use.

Get the Names Right

Two names appear in your email address – the domain name and the sender’s name. There’s no reason to try and change the domain name or otherwise mask it – you want the recipient to recognize that they’re getting the email from your website, after all.

As for the sender’s name, WordPress’ default is set to “wordpress,” which isn’t that impressive and might turn off some of the recipients. It doesn’t just look generic, it is generic. Luckily, there are more than a couple of ways to change the sender name in WordPress, and any one you use could work wonders.

Just keep in mind that, even if it doesn’t say “wordpress,” the sender name can still make your emails look spammy. Avoid names that include lots of words, gibberish, or long sequences of numbers.

Using Double Opt-In

Using double opt-in verification significantly reduces the likelihood of emails being flagged as spam for several reasons. First of all, a double opt-in confirms the validity of the subscriber’s email address, ensuring that messages are sent to active and engaged users. This practice also minimizes the chance of fake or mistyped email addresses entering the mailing list, which can trigger spam filters. Finally, double opt-in demonstrates a clear consent from the recipient, enhancing sender credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of email service providers.

The second step of the opt-in can be a welcome or confirmation email, with a link that the users need to click on to complete the subscription, or a checkbox. If you’re using one of the emailing and newsletter services like Mailchimp or Constant Contant, you will find double opt-in among the features.

Build Your List

If you’re working with WordPress, you’ll have plenty of awesome contact form plugins to help you build your mailing list. Sure, just putting a contact form on your website might not build you a mailing list overnight, but it’s a start. You’ll still need a way to get people to the page that has the form, and you’ll still need to give them an offer that will make them give you their emails.

Still, it’s worth the effort because doing it any other way just means trouble. You should never try to buy email lists and expect to see delivery and open rates as you would with organically grown mailing lists. You shouldn’t even expect to avoid being blacklisted for long if you go down the path of buying email lists. Just don’t do it.

Respect Your Subscribers and Handle Them with Care

When you’re collecting people’s email addresses, you should notify them that they will receive emails from you in the future. It might seem like it’s common sense that you’ll take an email address so that you can send emails to it, but you should do your best to let the people know what they’re signing up for.

When you send them the first email, it’s always a good idea to ask the recipient to whitelist your email address. They can do so by adding your address to their contacts list. It only takes a second to do it, and it can save you a world of trouble later on.

Finally, you should give your email recipients a way out – the unsubscribe link or button. You want it to be visible and marked, as it’s not something that should stay hidden. If you’re choosing between having your emails marked as spam and losing a subscriber, it’s always better to lose a subscriber. When enough people mark your emails as spam, you’ll have a much harder time getting through the spam filter.

Be Mindful of the Contents

The contents of the email matter, but so does the subject line. It shouldn’t look spammy. Exclamation points, dollar signs, offers that are just so obvious and aggressive might be something to avoid. Keep it real, informative, and don’t waste people’s time.

As for the contents of the email, you should be mindful that images tend to get blocked when emails are loaded by the recipient, so try not to use too many of them. Make sure that the subject and the contents match. The contents should be written plainly, using proper grammar, and with no spelling errors.

Dynamic scripts, images that are too big, adding too many links, and a bunch of attachments won’t have the desired effects on the spam filters. On the other hand, adding your physical address – if your business has it – to the email might make you appear more trustworthy.

Keep Good Hygiene with Regular Checkups

Every single component of an email marketing campaign can and should be subject to regular checkups. Everything from your IP to the email addresses on your list and the copy you use should be reviewed and tested regularly to ensure a timely reaction in case something is wrong.

Some of the things you should be checking include:

Of course, keeping an eye on the KPIs such as open and bounce rate is equally important for gauging the success of your campaign. Remember that, if something goes wrong, you want to know about it sooner than later and address the issue promptly.

Complying with Relevant Internet Privacy Regulations

This one is not something that necessarily guarantees the delivery of the emails in the right inbox, but it can significantly affect it, as it helps bypass some IPS blocks. In the past few decades, a whole array of internet privacy laws and regulations has emerged to protect internet users and their sensitive data. One of the most important such regulations is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which covers the European Union and all businesses and entities having customers or visitors in the EU. Make sure to check out our guide on GDPR for WordPress, as well as the list of the best GDPR plugins.

Also important is the CCPA, which we covered in our piece on CCPA and WordPress compliance, as well as the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), and CAN-SPAM Act.

Bear in mind that compliance to these an similar regulations relative to your operations is mandatory even outside the concerns for emails ending up in spam. It’s always easier to simply adhere to them than to face legal repercussions of ignoring them.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

It’s really hard to imagine the internet without email. The technology’s older than most internet users, and it managed not to lose a smidgen of its usefulness or allure over time.

However, it’s also hard to imagine email without imagining spam emails. It’s unavoidable, but you should still do your best to prevent adding to the problem. Go through all the steps of making your emails less likely to end up in spam folders, and you’ll be doing yourself, the recipient, and the internet as a whole a huge favor.

Downtime is an integral part of having a website. Your business website, online store, or even a WordPress blog, will not be up and running one hundred percent of the time – periods of downtime are bound to happen for one reason or another.

Still, you shouldn’t let that dissuade you from doing whatever you can to prevent your WordPress website downtime. There’s a difference between a website that’s down a couple of hours a year and one that’s only up a couple of hours a year.

Before we share our tips, let’s go through some common causes of website downtime and explain why downtime matters.

What Causes Website Downtime?

The fact that your website is down doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with it. Server maintenance is a perfectly normal occurrence that can cause website downtime. Website maintenance is another cause of website downtime, and you can perform it even when nothing is wrong with the website.

Still, even these benign reasons for downtime can become an issue if they happen too often. A server that goes down for maintenance for more than a couple of hours a year isn’t good. A website that requires lots of maintenance might benefit from a serious looking into and troubleshooting.

Then, there are bad things that can happen to your website and cause it to be unreachable. It can undergo a DDoS attack. It can experience a crippling plugin incompatibility issue. You can put a piece of code on your website that just – breaks it.

Sometimes, the things you do to prevent some causes of website downtime might become causes of downtime, too. You can use a CDN to prevent DDoS attacks or lighten the server load. Then again, using a CDN can sometimes lead to a 504 gateway timeout error. Plugins are incredibly useful for optimizing your website, but they’re among the more common causes of the 503 service temporarily unavailable error. It takes skill, patience, and sometimes trial-and-error to run a website well. Downtimes can happen, and you can cause them.

Why Does Website Downtime Matter?

The simple and most obvious reason why website downtime matters is because a website that’s down can’t perform the function you gave it when you built it. A business website that’s down does nothing for your business. An online store can’t sell when it’s not online. People can’t read your blog if they can’t reach it.

But even if you’re confident that your website visitors will come back later after they found that your website is down – which you most likely shouldn’t be – you still want your website to be up and running as much as possible.

A website that doesn’t work well also doesn’t speak well of the person or entity that’s running it. If you can’t be bothered to ensure the proper running of your website, you will look unprofessional, uncommitted, and you’ll start losing your visitors’ goodwill to stick with you through any issues your website might be experiencing.

Now that you know that some website downtime is fine, but lots of website downtime is awfully bad, let’s see what you can do to minimize it. Some of the steps might be obvious but even they bear repeating because there’s nothing as easy – or as embarrassing – as overlooking something very obvious. Here’s what to do:

Use a Good Hosting Provider and an Appropriate Service Packagee

Every hosting provider worth their salt will offer some kind of a server uptime guarantee. Usually, it’s 99.9% – the golden standard which means that, in a year, they guarantee the downtime won’t surpass the eight-and-a-half-hours threshold.

One of the ways to spot a sketchy hosting provider is by looking at what they promise – if they don’t offer any guarantees, or if they guarantee absolutes. The chances of not having a single minute of downtime during a year are slim, so no provider should be able to offer a 100% server uptime guarantee.

A hosting provider shouldn’t be able to offer incredibly good packages at ridiculously low prices. That’s another red flag and one that you should take very seriously because your service package can affect downtime.

If your website doesn’t have the resources it needs to run properly with the load it usually operates under, it will go down. You should pick a hosting provider that will let you switch to better, more expensive packages as easily as possible. When more visitors start coming in, it would be best to have the option to upgrade – the alternative is migrating to another hosting provider, and that can be a hassle.

Monitor Your Website’s Uptime

Here’s one of those obvious pieces of advice we mentioned before: you need to know that your website is down to stop it from going down in the future. You have to know the problem exists to try and solve it, right? With a website, this means monitoring its uptime.

There are several monitoring options you can choose from. Some options, such as the popular UptimeRobot, are freemium. Other options, such as Pingdom, are fee-only. While pricing is an important thing to consider, as these services with small fees tend to pile up after a time and present a sizeable expense, it’s much more important that you get the type of service you need.

For example, a free service might check your website a couple of times a day and send you an email if something is wrong, or a report stating your website’s status for the day. If that’s fine with you, great. But if that doesn’t suffice, and you need things like push notifications or SMS alerts and a more frequent check, then you should make sure you get those services even if it means spending a couple of bucks more on your website every month.

Be Careful with Plugins and Themes

Plugins and themes are a huge part of what makes using WordPress great. They can transform your website from a bland, featureless collection of pages on the web to a powerful tool for growing a business, making money, or finding new ways of self-expression.

That being said, plugins and themes are a common culprit for website downtime. Why? Because they have code, and some code doesn’t play well with other code. Incompatibility issues happen all the time. You should catch them before they do some real damage.

There are a couple of things you can do to avoid issues with plugins and themes. The easiest one would be to go through the plugin’s or theme’s documentation, reviews, or support tickets – if you can access them – and see if there are known issues.

You can also create a staging site – a copy of your website that’s not available to the public – and test any plugin or theme or even a setting before you implement it on your live website. Finally, choosing premium plugins and themes will sometimes give you access to support personnel, so you can have help when troubleshooting issues.

Keep Your Website Fully Optimized…

Your website might be up and running, but people still might have trouble accessing it. Slow loading times can cause people to think the website isn’t up. Bad internal links might cause some people to think that parts of the website don’t work. Badly optimized websites might contribute to some client-side errors that can cause people to not be able to access the website.

In general, if you’re running a WordPress website or any other kind of website, speed should be a major concern. You want your website to load as quickly and easily as possible because visitors might not be too keen on waiting for a slow website to load.

There are other reasons to optimize the website, too. But the bottom line is that this part of the work contributes to your website’s proper functioning and it will, either directly or indirectly, contribute to reducing downtime – actual as well as perceived.

…And Safe

Finally, you should do your best to keep your website safe, not only for your benefit but also for the benefit of all the people who use it. If you store sensitive data or process payments on your website, any neglect in the safety department might lead to real, palpable, damage to the people who’ve put their trust in you to keep their information safe.

It shouldn’t be pointed out that having a malware-free website is a good thing, and that using security plugins is a very good allocation of your resources. If you find your website is often under DDoS attacks, using services that offer DDoS protection – as some CDNs do – can help your website stay online despite the attacks.

You should also follow some safety and security best practices. You can, for example, limit login attempts as a measure against brute force attacks. You can also backup your website regularly – if something does happen, you’ll have a much easier time restoring your website to normal if there’s a backup you can use. Putting up a firewall can prevent suspicious traffic. There’s plenty you could do, and you should do whatever you can to keep your website safe.

Perform Regular Maintenance

Regular monitoring is a must, but these things can easily slip through the cracks especially in peak times when there’s a lot of other work to be done. That’s why it’s handy to come up with some sort of maintenance routine to be performed regularly, perhaps with a calendar alert to remind you. A lot of tasks can be scheduled and even automated, but you definitely want to be on top of things and creating a maintenance routine schedule can be very helpful.

The schedule can be weekly, monthly, or even daily. That’s really up to you and your website’s needs. Complex websites that get a lot of traffic and are prone to sudden spikes, such as eCommerce websites, probably need to perform maintenance checks more frequently. Smaller websites, like personal blogs, as well as portfolios, can even do it quarterly.

The maintenance routine should contain the following steps:

Distribute the Traffic Load

One of the most common reasons for website downtime is traffic overload. Traffic spikes are common for all sorts of websites, perhaps most notably for news and eCommerce ones, as they are prone to seasonal or circumstantial spikes when the traffic becomes much heavier than usual.

When this happens, the server can’t handle all the requests coming in at the same time, which may result in your website going temporarily down.

The fix for this problem is not something you can do with your website as such, and actually depends on your hosting plan. If you want to make sure your website can handle increased traffic load and to successfully scale up and down as needed, you need a hosting provider that has a global network of servers. With servers located strategically all across the globe, the content of the website is distributed to the users from the server that is nearest to them. Plus, if one data center experiences an issue or becomes overloaded, the content can still be served from another location. Combined with CDN, this guarantees excellent uptime and ensures your website can be accessed at all times, despite the traffic and server circumstances.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

While WordPress website downtime is something you can count on, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything you can to ensure your website is online as much as it can be. People usually create websites to put them online, and if yours isn’t an exception to the rule – you’ll have to take steps to prevent and reduce downtime.

Keep in mind, however, that running a website well is a balancing act, and there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Going overboard with safety plugins – installing too many of them – might become a cause of downtime in its own right. So, make sure that you’ve covered all the corners and spread around the downtime-combating measures evenly.

There are billions upon billions of possible domain names. The number of existing domain names is in the hundreds of millions. What are the chances to have your preferred domain name taken when you go to the registrar? Math would say slim.

Experience, however, proves otherwise. Coming up with a combination of letters and numbers is one thing. Making sure the combination produces a good domain name is a completely different process. There are simply not that many good ones to choose from.

This is exactly why it’s possible that, when checking domain names, you’ll find that someone has already registered your top picks. These things happen. We’ll show you, however, what your options are if it happens to you.

You’ll read about:

How to Check If a Domain Name Is Available

When you want to create a website and you’re trying to figure out that perfect name for it, you’d be smart to come up with a couple of ideas in case one of them is already taken. You can figure out the name is taken during the brainstorming or research process if you simply type the domain name into your browser’s address bar and press enter.

Three things can happen. You can visit a website, which means that your domain name is taken. You can be directed to an error page, which likely means your domain name is free for you to grab. Finally, you can be served a sales page asking you to contact whoever owns the domain name and has put it up for sale.

If you worry that visiting an unknown website poses a security risk, you can check website availability at websites such as Whois.com, a tool you might want to remember because we’ll come back to it in a moment or two. Also, some hosting providers that work as registrars might offer you to look up the domain name of your choosing online without going to the website.

In the case of bad news, which can be any news except that your preferred domain name is free to use, you can continue further in two ways. You can either do whatever you can to keep the name, or you can find hacks or alternatives that might work. Let’s explore both options a little bit.

What to Do If You Want to Keep the Name?

When you want to use a domain name that is already taken, your first course of action would be to figure out who owns it. Head back over to Whois.com and type in the address. If the contact information of the owner is available – if it’s not made private – you’ll be able to see it and contact the owner directly. If not, maybe the website itself will have some contact information about the seller.

How to Handle the Purchase of a Second-Hand Domain Name

If they’re willing to sell – great, you only have to navigate buying a domain name from a person or company you’ve only ever met online. Usually, this means using services that will help you make the exchange.

A service like Escrow can help. You and the seller agree on the terms and then you put your money in escrow at Escrow. The seller then transfers the domain name to you – something every registrar has a procedure for, you check and approve the domain name, and they get the money.

What to Do if You Can’t Purchase the Website?

Things get more complicated if they’re not willing to sell. In that case, you might try to get your lawyers involved and sue the owner for cybersquatting. Depending on how it’s handled legally in your country, you might be able to win the suit, but only if you prove that they’ve infringed on your trademark, or are generally sitting on the domain name with bad intent.

If you don’t want to get your lawyers involved, or if you simply can’t find out who the owner is, you can try purchasing the domain name with an alternative TLD. So instead of .com – we’ll suppose you went straight for it, as you always should – you can try buying the .org or .net version of the website. Keep in mind, however, that this can lead to some confusion and maybe even brand dilution.

Also keep in mind that people trust .com domains more than any other. A lot of country code TLDs are perceived as spammy (this is particularly the case with .cn and .ru). But then, there are country codes like .me that can be perfect for certain brands. TLDs like .tv are great for businesses from the entertainment, video or gaming industry. Extensions like .net, .tech and .store are also popular, trusted and can make a great fit for a variety of businesses.

In some cases, you might even manage to split your domain name into two and use the second half as the top-level domain. So, for example, you can get examp.le instead of example.com. Again, this might cause some confusion and it might work better if the domain name is made up of two words.

No Luck? Pick an Alternative

For one reason or another, you can also decide to avoid the hustle of figuring out how to get the perfect name and choose an alternative. This can be an exceedingly difficult decision if the domain name you wanted is your brand name, too, but these things happen often, and brands find ways to work around them.

You don’t want to use a name that has absolutely nothing to do with your business, blog, or whatever you tried to register. There still has to be some kind of connection to the original idea.

Expand the Original Domain Name

There are certain words you can add to the original domain name that wouldn’t distract from its meaning – they might even serve to amplify it. The exact thing you can add will vary based on the domain name, the type of business, the industry, and a whole lot of other factors.

But let’s say your domain name of choice was “something.” You can expand the domain name by adding an appropriate verb, such as “dosomething” or “buysomething” or “readsomething” and “makesomething.”

Use Related Words

There are also several kinds of related words that might work as a domain name instead of your brand or business name. Again, these will work better for some brands and businesses than others, but they still might be worth a shot.

You can, for example, use a keyword instead of the brand name. So instead of “something” you can use “beststoreinlondon,” for example, or “orlandoplumber.” In this case, the name of your business doesn’t have to match the name of the domain.

If there’s a way to make a word out of the original domain name that’s similar and brandable, you might also try to do that. So, for a magazine that’s called “something,” the website can have the domain name “somethingians.” You can let your imagination run wild, but you should always make sure that it ties somehow to the brand, business, product, or industry.

Add Location to Name

This is not a solution that can fit all brands or businesses, but it can work great for many. If you’re looking for a domain name to start a website related to a business with physical locations, like a shop, a bar, a restaurant or a cafe, a local output of a big company or franchise, you can only benefit from adding the name of the city, country or neighborhood to the name. It is good for SEO and it is good for user experience since it provides more complete information than just the name.

For instance, if you have a pet store named Paws, and it’s located in Prague, and paws dot com is, as expected, taken, you can go for pawsprague dot com, or even pawsinprague.

It’s even easier if you’re operating in an entire country or region – pawseurope or pawsgreece dot com are quite solid domain names.

Look Into Domain Hacking Options

Although it sounds like something not quite lawful or right (and it shouldn’t be confused with domain hijacking), domain hacking is actually a legitimate practice. It consists of creating a domain name that’s a combination of a word, phrase or name, and the extension, ie. of the adjacent levels of the domain name, to create a name that suggests a word. An example will explain it better – for instance, the WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has a blog with the domain name www.ma.tt. The .tt extension is the official ccTLD of Trinidad and Tobago. Clever, right?

The Montenegro ccTLD .me is a particularly productive one, and a lot of brands already use it: even Facebook has an URL version fb.me, then there’s WordPress with wp.me that redirects to wordpress.com, and a particularly smart one is ti.me, used by the famous news magazine.

Another good one is the top level country code TLD for Lybia: .ly. It’s particularly popular with lifestyle, fashion and cosmetics brands, but in a lot of other industries, too – just think of bit.ly. If you’re based in the US, but even if you’re not, you could also look into .us, to create a domain nam consisting of an adjective ending in -ous, like delicious, righteous, gorgeous, etc.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Domain names are important, and you needn’t look further than the reseller industry for proof. When you’re choosing yours, make sure you have a couple of alternatives. If you go to the registrar determined to get one name and it turns out to be taken, you can end up signing yourself up for an unpleasant and maybe even expensive ride. It might be much better to show some flexibility – something that even big brands had to do when faced with a domain sitter who wouldn’t budge.

There’s nothing like a good, clean table to present your audience with a bunch of data in a way that allows for comparison and appreciation of precision. There’s no need for the flashy visuals of charts, or the flowing relational representation of graphs – a table is there to give your audiences the data and let them do the rest of the work for themselves if they want to.

So whether you need a way to display a list, or arrange a bunch of product information from your online store in a way that makes it easy to compare, you could use a way to create a good table. And even though you can create a table using the Gutenberg block editor, it might lack the options you’d be able to get using plugins.

For that reason, we’ve compiled a list of the best WordPress table plugins for your data. The list includes:

Qi Addons for Elementor

We’re kicking off our list of the best WordPress table plugins with a collection of widgets for all sorts of purposes that packs not one but several solutions for creating data tables – Qi Addons for Elementor.

The plugin includes 100+ Elementor widgets for everything from showcase and infographic elements to business, SEO and eCommerce solutions. Among them, you’ll find a couple of widgets designed specifically for creating data tables. The Data Table widget, for instance, provides a simple yet efficient way to display data, add icons, and illustrations, adjust headings and items, add background, pagination, and much more. Then there’s the Comparative Table widget, ideal for when you need to compare items, prices, show what’s included in a plan or service, and so on. Like the Data Table widget, this one is also highly customizable in terms of appearance.

And if what you want to display and compare are prices, there’s the Pricing Table widget, with six predefined layouts (standard and cascading), icons, images, ribbons and badges. You can opt for vertical pricing tables or minimalistic ones, and adjust everything from typography to colors, and more.

The best thing about Qi Addons for Elementor is that it’s a plugin that, for the price of one, offers an astonishing array of features and functionalities, so if you decide you need something else and not just tables, you will find it right there in your Elementor dashboard.

Qi Addons for Elementor currently costs $49 for a single site license.

TablePress

With over eight hundred thousand active installations and a nearly flawless five-star rating, TablePress is the most popular table plugin you can find on WordPress.org. It has the top spot for good reason, too – TablePress is a plugin that offers an incredible lot, and it doesn’t ask you anything in return. An awesome plugin you can use for free.

TablePress lets you create tables you can populate with all sorts of data – images are as welcome and supported as are numbers or text. The very process of making the tables is straightforward and easy, as you can do it all from your dashboard. You add the tables to pages or posts using a shortcode, you can change their style using CSS, and you can import and export tables to and from the plugin.

You get all of that with the basic plugin. If you choose to install the extensions available from the plugin’s website, your tables can become responsive, you can enable row filtering and sorting options, and even set up an automatic import for tables. Some of those extensions are premium, but they don’t come at a set price – you’re encouraged to donate instead of purchasing them.

Ninja Tables

Ninja Tables is the free version of the Ninja Tables Pro plugin. The plugin has plenty to offer in terms of speed and ease of use, as it will help you create a table in no time. It also has plenty of features that could make it your go-to WordPress plugin for tables, but to get the most of it you will need the pro version.

With the Ninja Tables version you can download off WordPress.org, you can create or import a table, select one of three styling libraries, and choose among the style options, and export the table. You can also set global styling options and choose limited color options.

The Pro version makes Ninja Tables more vibrant and fuller of features. So not only do you get more colors for your tables, but you get advanced options such as Google Sheets integration, a WooCommerce product table functionality, and even frontend table editing and export. And that’s just a taste of what a $49, single-site annual license gets you.

wpDataTables

Another plugin that comes in a free – Lite – version and a full one you have to pay for, wpDataTables is more than capable of taking care of your data-presentation needs even with the free version – as long as you don’t need too much from your table plugins. In that case, the paid version would serve you much better.

Using wpDataTables starts with providing the data for the table. With the free version, you can either create the table from scratch or create a table that’s linked to an existing data source – an Excel, CSV, or JSON file, for example. You’ll be able to do things such as merge cells, enable sorting and pagination, and customize the table to some extent.

With the Premium version, you’ll get support for creating tables from Google Spreadsheets, multiple database support, responsive tables, front-end editing, and lots of other features and functionalities a website that uses a lot of tables would require. The Premium version is available for annual subscription or lifetime purchase, with the most affordable option setting you back $59 a year.

Posts Table Pro

Here’s one plugin that takes table creation and puts a twist to it – Posts Table Pro will use the data from your website to create tables. So instead of allowing you to, for example, import tons of data you’d later display using a plugin, this plugin will help you display the content you already have – in table form.

How does this work? Well, if you’d like to display a table that contains your website’s posts or pages, or even products, documents, or audio or video content – you simply use this plugin to create a table. The process is simple and streamlined, and your table will be updated as your content is.

Of course, you’ll be able to customize the table and have functionalities such as search, sorting, and filtering. All of this comes at a price, however, as the plugin doesn’t have a free version, and the starter package will cost you $69 a year.

League Table

One of the benefits of getting a paid-only table plugin for your WordPress website is that you don’t have to think too much about which options are included in the free version and which aren’t. With League Table, for example, you’ll get a whole lot for the price you pay for it, and you won’t have a single doubt about what it can and can’t do.

The $29 price gets you a plugin that’s fast but not furious, so you’ll have no trouble wielding it. Each table has 105 different options you can set. Each cell has 17 options you can set. There are also 13 general options, totaling a whole lot of tinkering possibilities for those who want an incredible level of control over their tables.

If you’re not too interested in having that many options, it might suffice to say that the plugin will let you do all the useful things like import and export data, create responsive tables, and install the plugin in a WordPress multisite environment.

WP Table Builder

Want a drag and drop WordPress table builder? Why not try WP Table Builder. This plugin comes in a free and a premium version but is more than capable of impressing you with the free version alone.

For starters, it is a drag and drop builder – you’ll have seven different elements at your disposal to populate cells, including buttons, lists, star ratings, and custom HTML. You’ll be able to customize those elements much as you would elements on your website, with setting borders and padding and the like. All the normal functionalities you’d expect from a table plugin, such as export and import, are also supported.

The paid version, which starts at around $39.99 per year, brings five new elements you can add to your tables, including ribbons and icons. It also provides support for choosing different border colors, column and row separation, and functionalities such as column or row duplication. On top of it all, the paid version also gives you access to prebuilt tables.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

From sports scores and stats to lists of products, it’s hard to imagine a better way to display information than with a table. Even though you can create tables with the Gutenberg block editor, the only way to supercharge your tables is to use a plugin to create them. The ones we listed here are some of the best you’ll find.

WooCommerce has a special place among WordPress eCommerce plugins for a couple of reasons. It lets you sell any kind of goods, including affiliate products. It helps you manage your inventory, handle payments, and calculate shipping. But to get to what makes WooCommerce so great, you only need to visit the Extensions Store on WooCommerce’s website. There, you’ll be greeted with close to seven hundred different extensions.

WooCommerce is endlessly extensible. The extensions you can find on the WooCommerce website aren’t the only ones you could use. Go over to WordPress.org and search for “WooCommerce” among the plugins and see how many you can count with a 4-star and above rating. You’ll soon realize there’s no point to it, and that this variety can easily turn away some users who don’t want that many choices and just want to get on with things.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the best WooCommerce extensions for your WordPress shop you can find on either WooCommerce’s or WordPress’ website. It’s not a definitive list and it won’t contain every good WooCommerce extension that exists, but it should at the very least save you from some trouble when looking for good WooCommerce extensions – or plugins – for your store.

The extensions and plugins we’ll include are:

QODE Wishlist for WooCommerce

We’re kicking off the list with a remarkably well-rounded and conversion-driving plugin from the Qode Interactive workshop – QODE Wishlist for WooCommerce. In its free version, the plugin helps shop owners elevate the UX and drive engagement by placing a convenient Add to Wishlist button to product lists. The button is fully customizable in terms of position, behavior and appearance. Admins can enable automatic removal from wishlist for an item that’s added to the cart, as well as automatic redirection of users to the cart page once the product is added to cart.

The premium version supports the creation of multiple wishlists per user, with visibility options that include public (and searchable), private and accessible via link, providing shoppers with great flexibility. In addition, admins can choose to allow only registered users to create wishlists, which is convenient for lead generation, or opt to make the feature accessible to all as guests.

The wishlist layout can be adjusted and the same goes for the page where multiple lists are displayed. There’s the option to add an “Ask for Estimate” module and the robust admin options include marketing features like tracking user behavior and sending promotional emails (on sale, back in stock, promo, etc). On top of all that, admins can provide quick wishlist access on their pages using two widgets – dropdown and sidebar.

Stripe for WooCommerce

Choosing a good payment extension is probably one of the first things you’ll want to do if you want to make your WordPress shop accessible to more people. Stripe for WooCommerce is a good choice, and not only because it has stellar ratings – that’s just the icing on the cake.

With this plugin, you can add a whole lot of different payment options to your store. Stripe for WooCommerce supports credit cards, sure, but also Apple Pay, Google Pay, as well as local payment methods, and it can display them on product and cart pages besides the checkout page.

WooCommerce Google Analytics

When insight into your customers’ behavior is what you need, what is that one company you should turn to? With the free WooCommerce Google Analytics extension, you can track basic data such as sessions, users, and events. You can also get basic eCommerce data like product views.

If you want to turn it up a notch, you can opt for a Google Analytics Pro extension from another developer. At an annual price of $79, this plugin adds checkout behavior analysis, advanced settings, and tracking dimensions.

Google Listings and Ads

Staying in the realm of Google and its services, having an easy way to connect with Google Merchant Center can save you lots of trouble if you plan to run Google Ads. Thanks to the Google Listings and Ads extension, however, you can cross that off your list of things to worry about.

This free extension allows your WooCommerce store to automatically sync your product information to Google Merchant Center. From there, you can use that data for free listings in the Shopping tab in Google search, as well as ad campaigns you create with Google Ads.

Mailchimp for WooCommerce

Email is one of the most consistently effective tools marketers and advertisers have in their arsenal. Email marketing can do wonders for your WordPress store, too – if you have the right extension for it. So why not Mailchimp? Mailchimp for WooCommerce is a free plugin, as is the basic Mailchimp service – and the paid plans make it ideal for small and medium businesses, too.

With the plugin, you’ll be able to connect your WooCommerce store to Mailchimp’s system and easily share information between the two. From there, you can use any of Mailchimp’s services for email and marketing automation you have access to based on your Mailchimp plan.

Name Your Price

Do you want to let your customers set their own prices for the products you’re selling? The name-your-price model could be risky but rewarding. Thanks to the Name Your Price extension, you’ll be able to try it out in a couple of novel ways.

Name Your Price works with many different product types you can sell through WooCommerce. You can use this extension along with subscriptions, gift cards, bundles, but you could also use it to collect donations. Name Your Price is a premium extension, and it costs $49 per year.

QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce

Is there a better investment for a store than accounting software? Good booking is essential for any store’s success, and WooCommerce accounting can be easy – if you have the right tool. QuickBooks is one of the best ones, and QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce is the extension you need to be able to use this tool with your WordPress store.

With the extension, you can sync your store with QuickBooks for two-way sharing of data on orders, customers, inventory, products, and anything else you can throw at QuickBooks. The services you’ll get from the platform, however, depend on the type of package that you have. While the extension might be free, QuickBooks offers a free trial, and the basic plan starts at $25.

Smart Coupons

Need a way to attract more customers? Coupons, gift cards, and giveaways are a time-honored sales method to give the bottom line a boost. When talking about coupons and WooCommerce, one of the first extensions that have to cross the mind is Smart Coupons.

This extension has everything you need to be able to create coupons and other types of special offers for existing and prospective customers. Whether you want to create a fixed amount or percentage coupon, offer free shipping, offer a discount via a shareable link, or set up store credits of vouchers – you’ll be able to do it. The extension is premium, and it costs $99 per year.

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce

Sometimes, a little bit of social proof is all your store needs to fly to stellar heights. Customer reviews are great social proof, and thanks to the Customer Reviews for WooCommerce extension, you can incentivize your customers to leave reviews, too.

The extension’s major draw is its streamlined process. When someone makes a purchase and some time passes, they receive an email asking for a review. The extension provides a form for the review, and once the form is filled and submitted, the review gets published on your website. You can even send a thank-you coupon. The extension is freemium, with the paid version offering lots of customization and branding options, and starting at $7.99 per month plus VAT.

Discount Rules for WooCommerce

Who doesn’t love a good discount? If you want to make the most out of this natural proclivity towards good deals, you’ll tie it with something like – volume. Offering bulk discounts and other types of dynamic pricing is very common, and thanks to the Discount Rules for WooCommerce extension, it’s easy, too.

This extension will let you apply any type of discount you can imagine. You can set rules based on date, products, count of items, order total, cart size, quantity range, and many other variables. The premium version of the plugin – $49 per year – even offers discount rules that turn this extension into a genuine product-bundling plugin.

Variation Swatches for WooCommerce

Some extensions are so good that, even though they’re freemium, their free version is useful enough to easily be one of the best free WooCommerce plugins you can use. Variation Swatches is one of those extensions.

What this plugin does is necessary if you’re offering variations of the same type of product. The plugin allows you to create variation swatches based on color, size, brand, image, and label. The swatches will be displayed automatically instead of the usual dropdown menu. The Pro version, which starts at $49 per year, adds a whole lot of functionalities such as blurring and multi-color swatches.

Advanced Shipping Tracking for WooCommerce

Shipment tracking is one of the modern conveniences that take the edge off usually frustrating things and having to wait for a package without knowing where it can be frustrating. If your shipping provider offers to track, use one of the best shipping extensions out there, the Advanced Shipping Tracking extension, to keep the customers in the loop.

This extension lets you add tracking numbers to orders, fulfill the orders when the number is added, and provide your customers with a link where they can check the status of their shipment. With the pro version, which starts at $129 per year, you get access to additional features that include a fulfillment dashboard, built-in integration with third-party plugins, and more.

Product Recommendations

Upselling is a fine skill that takes plenty of practice and knowledge to master. At least in-person upselling is. If you have a WordPress WooCommerce store, all you need is an extension like Product Recommendations.

This extension allows you to show your customers products that are frequently bought together with the product they are browsing. You can add recommendations manually, as well as let an algorithm take care of it for you. The extension even lets you create your recommendation engine. A premium extension, Product Recommendations costs $79 a year to use.

FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce

It’s a generally good idea to make a customer’s journey from landing on your website to getting what they’re there for as quick and frictionless as possible. Search bars play an important role in removing that friction, and FiboSearch is one of the best search bars for WooCommerce you’ll find.

The free version of the plugin supports search by product title, description, terms, and SKU. It shows product image, price, and description in the results, and allows you to limit the number of suggestions that are displayed. The paid version, which starts at $49 per year, adds synonyms and fuzzy search to the list of features, as well as search for posts, pages, tags, categories, and attributes.

Checkout Field Editor

Just like any other part of your store, the checkout page needs occasional optimization. Since this is another one of the fields where core WooCommerce doesn’t excel, you’ll be better served by an extension. Checkout Field Editor is just the one.

With this freemium plugin, you’ll be able to add seven new types of fields, as well as customize the existing ones that are already on the checkout page. There are options for arranging, renaming and validating checkout fields. With the premium version of the extension, which starts at $49 per year, you’ll get additional custom fields, conditional display of fields, custom validations, and many more options.

Request a Quote for WooCommerce

In some business models, it makes sense to give shoppers the option to send you a request for a quote. If you’re selling in bulk, or if you run a B2B store, this might make perfect sense for you. In that case, you’ll need an extension like Request a Quote for WooCommerce to help you out.

Request a Quote for WooCommerce is a premium extension that adds a “request a quote” button to specific products. You can display it instead of the “buy” button or create rules for when it appears. You can customize the form they then use to ask for the quote. The annual price for the plugin is $69.

Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce

If it ever bothered you that WooCommerce doesn’t allow you to add custom product tabs to your website, don’t worry – you’re not alone. With over a hundred thousand active downloads, Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce is proof that this is a much-needed feature.

Luckily for you, the extension lets you add it effortlessly. Once you create the tabs, you can move them around and delete them – it’s as simple as that. The plugin has a premium version, too, which starts at around $30 and includes additional features, such as the inclusion of tabs content into search results.

WooCommerce Zapier

When you have to integrate a number of disparate tools and services, you usually turn to an in-between, a platform, or a service that lets you set it all up easily. Zapier is one of the most popular integration platforms that also offer automation tools. With WooCommerce Zapier, a premium plugin with an annual price of $59, you can use the platform for WooCommerce, too.

Zapier works with a combination of triggers and actions, allowing you to automate certain processes. For example, you can use a sale in WooCommerce as a trigger, and “add to Google Sheets” as an action. It’s a simple yet powerful way to bring different services together without having to do too much work.

WooCommerce EU VAT Assistant

Who can keep account of all the rules and regulations of doing business with the EU? Thanks to the WooCommerce EU VAT Assistant, you don’t have to when it comes to charging for value-added tax. The extension will do most of the work for you.

You can use WooCommerce EU VAT Assistant for a variety of tasks. The extension will gather necessary information, including customer location. It will validate VAT numbers and perform currency conversions for you. Most importantly, it will automatically apply the VAT rates for you. It will do all of this free of charge, although you’re welcome to sign up for premium support from the developer.

WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips

How tedious would it be if you had to create an invoice or packing slips manually after every sale? Not that you have to, though – all you need to do is download and install the WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips extension, and you’ll be done with most of the work.

This free extension lets you create and customize invoices and package slips you can automatically attach to WooCommerce emails of your choosing. You’ll be able to download them, too, generate them in bulk, and include sequential invoice numbers.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

With a wide user base and a strong development community around it, it sometimes seems like WooCommerce very much resembles WordPress itself. Both are extensible endlessly with third-party tools, and both seem to suffer for it – even though they still dominate their markets. Still, if you know where to look, you can easily sort through the rubble and find some great WooCommerce extensions. The ones we’ve listed here are among the best ones.

It’s been a long while since the internet has even remotely resembled a lawless new frontier with absolute freedom and perils threatening you with every click you perform. Not that there’s not a lot of freedom to be had online. The internet sure isn’t a safe place, either. But it manages to be all of that while still having regulations that affect every one of its users — you included.

If you happen to own a website, you might have additional responsibilities to meet certain regulatory standards. The most recent such regulation that caused a lot of fuss is the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. If you’re not familiar with it, and you’re wondering what WordPress GDPR compliance entails, we’ll try to help you understand. You’ll read about:

But before we start, it’s important to make it clear that this article in no way constitutes genuine legal advice. It hasn’t been written by a lawyer. It hasn’t even been written by a person who plays one on TV. For legal advice regarding GDPR, you should consult a lawyer. And while we’re on the topic, make sure to check out our article on how to make your website CCPA-compliant, too.

What Is GDPR?

In April of 2016, the European Union’s legislative bodies adopted a set of rules regulating the collection of EU citizen’s personal data. Called the General Data Protection Regulation, and commonly abbreviated as GDPR, this set of rules was adopted in replacement of an existing rule, the Data Protection Directive of 1995.

Take a moment to think about how much has changed in the time between the two regulations were adopted. The original Directive was created before social media, Google Ads, engineered lead-capturing forms. The text of the Directive was brought forth in the same month Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer that supported cookies.

GDPR was introduced to put additional protections on the personal data of EU citizens, expanding on those previously offered by the Data Protection Directive. Because it serves to protect the rights of EU citizens, any entity that gathers or processes their personal data must abide by GDPR, even if they’re an entity registered in a non-EU country.

The enforcement of the Regulation launched on 25 May 2018 to a rocky start, with surveys showing that up to two-thirds of organizations weren’t GDPR-compliant. GDPR fines, which can be up to $20 million or 4% of annual turnover in the year before, were levied in the thousands of euros in the first year, only to swell to millions in 2019. To this date, the biggest fine ordered under GDPR was the £183.39 million British Airways had to pay over a user data leak.

The biggest change that came into effect with GDPR was the fact that it started applying to anyone who wants access to the EU market. So as long as EU citizens can access your website and you plan to gather some of their personal information, you are no longer capable of handling their data any way you want just because you’re established outside of the EU.

What Are the Provisions of GDPR?

So, let’s say you have a website that collects data it then sends to third-party services for further processing. In the GDPR, a European citizen whose data you’ve gathered is called the data subject. You, the owner of the website, are a data controller — an entity that decides why the data needs to be processed, and how the processing is supposed to happen. The entity that performs the processing is, of course, the processor.

Adhering to the Stipulated Principles

When a soon-to-become data subject lands on your website, you need to ensure that, if you’re collecting data that is considered personal, said data needs to be:

As the controller, adherence to these principles is your responsibility. You’ll also need to make sure that you have a legal basis for processing the data, as stated in the first principle. Processing data to comply with legal obligations, execute a contract, or pursue your legitimate interests while not infringing the rights of the data subject are some of the legal basis for processing you can use.

Honoring the Rights of the Data Subject

While you have to ensure that the data is collected and processed for a legally sound reason and that it is treated in a certain way, you also have to honor the rights of the data subject. This means, among other things, allowing them:

While this might sound like a lot — and it sometimes is — you’ll see that there are often easy solutions that can move you towards upholding the rights of the data subjects and adhering to all the principles. A checkbox here, a couple of words there can do wonders.

But there’s also some finesse in working towards GDPR compliance. So, using the latest version of WordPress and only using GDPR-ready plugins is a definite must. But is it all you should be doing? Probably not. You’ll need to put in a bit more effort.

WordPress and GDPR Compatibility

WordPress has done its share of the work to help your website be GDPR compliant. Roughly a week before the enforcement of GDPR began, WordPress 4.9.6 was released, ensuring that WordPress’ core product is GDPR-compliant. If you’re using that version of WordPress or any that came after it, you’re capable of giving consent options, building a Privacy Policy page, and exporting and erasing user data that was collected by WordPress and participating plugins.

Plugins stepped up, too. WooCommerce, for example, made a page dedicated to informing store owners about WooCommerce and GDPR compliance. It started dealing with GDPR compliance with update 3.4, but it was also active in ensuring the core WordPress system has all the features it ended up having in version 4.9.6.

Some plugin developers created plugins specifically to help with GDPR compliance. You can find a number of plugins that let you set up consent for the use of cookies, for example. There are a couple that can help test your website’s compliance with the regulation, too.

But it’s important you understand that, even though the core WordPress product is GDPR-compliant, and you decided to use only the plugins that are GDPR-ready, it doesn’t mean that your website is 100% compliant. APIs can affect your GDPR compliance, as can the extensions you use with your plugins. And remember, as the controller, it’s your responsibility to ensure that everything that happens with data subjects’ personal data is within the guidelines stipulated by GDPR.

How to Know Is My Website GDPR Compliant?

Because WordPress websites are so far away from being enclosed, static systems, you’ll need a way to occasionally assess whether you’re on the right side of the line with GDPR. So let’s see what options do you have in this area.

Perform a Self-Assessment

A great way to ensure the level of compliance of your website with the GDPR is to perform a self-assessment. The one provided by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission will, for example, guide you through areas ranging from personal data and data subject rights to data security and breaches.

After answering all the questions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how your website handles visitors’ data and what you can do to make it better. The only downside is that, usually, you will need a bit of knowledge about GDPR, its principles, and the terminology used before you’re able to navigate these self-assessment tests.

Get a Website Audit

Some businesses will offer a website audit as a service. Ideally, you’d want someone who understands both the European legal landscape and the intricacies of web design and online security to have a look.

There are also automated tools you can use for the same purposes. You can find tools that can assess the areas where you must put in a little bit of extra work to bridge the gap and get your website compliant.

Go Nuclear — Don’t Become a Subject of GDPR

This might be the most drastic measure to remove yourself from under the thumb of the EU regulators, but for some websites, it might be worth it. The two ways you can do it are simple enough — you either collect data but ban European citizens from accessing your website, or you don’t gather any data.

The problem with these methods is that either way, you must give up something valuable. The European market is huge and affluent, so cutting it off would mean forgoing potential profits. On the other hand, if you don’t gather any data, you’ll have a tough time monetizing your website or making it work at all in some cases.

How to Move Towards GDPR Compliance

Even when you know where your website stands concerning GDPR compliance, you can have no idea how to take it that extra step or two in the right direction. There’s no single method that can ensure that your website is absolutely compliant, but if you combine a couple of them, your chances of creating a website that will conform to all the rules set forth by the lawmakers from Brussels go up.

Here are some of the things you should do to make your website more GDPR compliant.

1. Consult a Professional

Once again, we have to restate that reading a blog post about GDPR is not the same as getting valid legal advice from an expert. Whether you hire a legal theme to perform an audit or put your legal counsel in the team that’s putting the compliance measures in place, make sure that there’s someone who understands both the law and the tech involved. At the very least, have them perform an audit after you’ve done every other thing on this list.

2. Make Sure You Understand What Personal Data You Gather and Why

One of the more important things GDPR did was update the definition of personal data to include any type of data you can relate to an identifiable person, including IP addresses, RFID tags, and cookie identifiers.

You should take the plugins you’re using, APIs, extensions, and pour over their documentation in search of the explanation of the data they gather. Everything from Google Analytics to your store’s payment processing service needs to be examined, and you need to be aware of which piece of data goes where. You are accountable for it all as a controller.

3. Let the Visitors Know What You’re Gathering and Why and Give Them the Ability to Consent

Your Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and other documents should contain a reference to the use of personal data where appropriate. You have to disclose the data you’re gathering and the reason why you’re doing it.

You can rely on the Privacy Policy WordPress now generates by default if you’re new to creating these kinds of documents, at least for inspiration. The Policy should reflect the data you collect and the reasons you have for collecting it.

Also, keep in mind that consent needs to be explicit under GDPR, and it needs to be provided in an active manner. So you have to give users something to do that signifies their explicit consent to have their data processed. Usually, a checkbox will do.

4. Review All the Points Where You Gather Data

Some plugins have to collect personal data to work properly. Other plugins have data collection as their sole purpose. You’ll need to revisit specimens of both kinds that have their place in your website and check if they’re compliant. Remember, consent is usually the easiest ground to legalize data processing, but it’s not the only one.

Here are some of the more popular services and plugins and how you can go about making them GDPR compliant:

5. Add a Cookie Consent

If you haven’t already, install one of the many plugins that inform the users about cookies and asks for their consent. GDPR Cookie Consent is a popular option.

6. Provide Data Portability Options

Your website visitors should be able to retrieve from you every single piece of their data that you’ve gathered. They should also be able to ask you to delete their data. Since WordPress 4.9.6, you’re able to comply with these requests. You just need to be able to receive them.

The solution to this issue can be as simple as putting your email address in the Privacy Policy and letting website visitors know they can use it to request a copy of their data. You can also use contact form plugins with custom request form templates to make it all look a bit fancier.

When you receive a request, head over to your dashboard and, Under Tools, navigate to either Erase Personal Data or Export Personal Data. Here you’ll find a list of website users who have requested to review their data or to have it removed. You will have to send them a request email and once it’s confirmed, WordPress will automatically create a downloadable ZIP file, for users requesting data export. For erasure, the final step is deleting their data from your database.

7. Revisit Your Security Provisions

Hacking and other cybercrime acts often target user data and data security is one of the key GDPR principles. Frequent revisions of your website security measures is a good practice at any rate, and especially so when making sure your website is GDPR-compliant.

In addition to using one of the many excellent WordPress security plugins, you may also want to consider using HTTPS protocol. Together with SSL, this protocol protects the data transfer between you and your users. These days, both these solutions are basically a given – a lot of browsers have settings that notify users when they’re accessing a non-HTTPS website, and SSL certificates are included in all the best hosting packages. Still, if you’re not using them yet, now’s the time to start. And make sure to check out our ultimate WordPress security checklist to make sure you’re covering all the angles.

8. Report a Breach if It Happens

Under the GDPR, you have an obligation to inform authorities about data breaches within 72 hours of their occurrence. If the breach presents a high risk to an individual, you should let them know, too.

9. Consider Server-Side Tracking

Server-side tagging and tracking is one of the solutions that’s recently been touted as a great workaround for cookie deprecation and reduced client-side tracking abilities. In this form of tracking, data is collected and processed on the server, which means more secure and reliable data management. Server-side tagging or tracking will not make you automatically GDPR-compliant, as you’ll still have to implement things like consent management, data privacy provisions, data erasure when requested, and so on. In addition, you will still require user consent. But, you will get to control which data third parties get, remove sensitive data and personally identifiable information, as well as modify it before sending it to any vendor.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation sure can be tough. But if you want people from the EU to visit your website, it’s a reality you simply have to deal with. But you shouldn’t let that scare you — many websites are managing to color within the lines as set by the Regulation.

There’s no reason why you wouldn’t be one of them. There is work that needs to be done, if you want to be sure that you’re reasonably compliant with the GDPR, that’s for sure. But if you’re thorough and use the very principles GDPR has in its core as your guidelines, you have every chance of creating a safe environment for your website visitors’ information. And that is, after all, the reason why you should be chasing after WordPress GDPR compliance.

What does your local ma-and-pa store have in common with a high-end e-commerce website? Both can use search engines to drum up business. For the online store, the good-old search engine optimization is there to make sure it appears as close as possible to the top of the first page of search results. And the ma-and-pa store can use local SEO to increase sales.

For many, however, this thing called local SEO is still a bit of a mystery. Search engines have been working on localized query results for over fifteen years, but the local SEO field has only recently started to blow up. Now, it’s slowly becoming the norm for any type of business that offers services in a certain geographical area.

In this article, we’ll show you:

What Is Local SEO?

In the simplest terms, local search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your business’ online assets so that it ranks well in search results that answer a query with a local component. When someone is looking for a hairdresser in the area where you have a salon, you want your business name to be the first thing they see. Local SEO should help with that.

The thing that makes this kind of searching so important is the fact that it’s highly effective at bringing people through the door of brick-and-mortar businesses. One of the reasons is because people who search for things locally tend to present qualified traffic.

A lot of searches for local things happen from mobile devices, and they don’t always include a geographic term as much as the term “near me.” So, you have people who are probably on the go, looking for nearby shops that sell things that they want. It would be hard to find a stronger indicator of purchase intent than that.

The numbers might vary, but most would say that at least seven out of ten local searches end with an in-store visit. That’s the power of local search and the reason why, ever since Google’s 2014 Pigeon update, which focused on improving local search results, businesses have increasingly been relying on local optimization.

How Does It Work?

Local search results work a bit differently than regular search results. The way they are presented might vary slightly between different search engines, but there are certain similarities you can notice.

For example, the results are grouped in a pack that appears at the top of the results page. Google’s users will see three results underneath a map showing the business’ location. Bing’s users will see the same, but with five results.

Here’s how it looks on the respective search engines for the search terms “hairdresser near me” and “hairdresser nearby.”

These aren’t the only results the user can get. Businesses should work towards appearing in this “snack pack” of search results because it increases their visibility, but they can still appear in the results when the viewer presses “view all” or “see more results.”

This time, the map becomes bigger, and there are more results visible. Click on one of the results will show a plethora of information about the business in question. This information includes name, ratings, address, working hours, contact information, website address, images, and user reviews.

From your end, local search results work in a way that has you register your business with the search engine’s business directory of the equivalent and then provide as much information about it as possible.

That’s the short version, at least, because providing all that information includes getting users to review your business, have it listed on business directories, and do lots of other optimization stuff. For starters, however, let’s see how you can claim your business in the search engine’s business service.

Claiming Your Business Listing on Search Engines

This type of search engine optimization works without a website because it relies on the search engines’ business listing type of service. You can think about it almost like a social network for businesses where everything revolves around creating a good profile.

For Google, this service is called Google My Business. For Bing, it’s called Bing Places for Business. Either way, your local SEO journey starts with claiming your business there. Here’s how you can do it on Google.

Go to google.com/business, and click on the Manage Now button.

You’ll be asked to find and manage your business. If this is the first time you’re making the profile, you can go ahead and click on the blue hyperlink that says “Add your business to Google.”

The next couple of steps will guide you through providing the necessary information for creating a listing. First, you’ll be asked to provide the name of your business. Next, you’ll be able to choose the category your business belongs to, whether you want to add a physical location or not, the address, the location on the map, optional phone number, and website, and that’s it! You might be asked to verify your business. That should be enough to get your website online – but you shouldn’t do it just yet.

Before you decide to go online, you should go to Google My Business and check out the Info option in the dashboard. It will list all the information available about your business.

Among the information you can add, you’ll find highlights, accessibility options, amenities, business descriptions, and photos. Some of the options you can find here are the same ones you can choose from the dashboard. For example, you can choose Photos from the dashboard and there you’ll be able to add photos including a cover photo, logo, photos of the interior and exterior of your business, and even your team members.

The bottom line is that you should check out all of these options and fill them out with as much information as you can. Every bit of information you can add here matters a lot. Once you’ve finished, you’ll be able to get your listing online. That’s great news, but that won’t be nearly enough.

Claim Your Business Wherever It’s Possible

Your next step should be, of course, to go through the same process on Bing Places for Business. It doesn’t matter if you think that no one uses Bing – the whole idea is to have your business information appear in as many online directories as possible, and you can consider Bing Places for Business as one.

From there, you can head over to real online directories such as Foursquare and Apple Maps, and claim your business in those places, too. Next, you’ll want to head to Yelp and other review websites and claim your business there as well. Every place where your business name appears with your business’ information is a citation, and the more of these you have, the better. Plus, it will make it easier for people to find you.

Does your business use social media? No? Well, what are you waiting for? It’s possible to create a Facebook Business Page, just as it’s possible to create a listing on other networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn. Make the most out of these. If you don’t plan to use them, at least provide the relevant information and keep it up to date.

Handle Reviews

You want your website to have reviews. Google will use its reviews, but any review your business can have online will count. You should run a campaign for people who’ve used your business to leave reviews.

A campaign doesn’t have to be as complex as it sounds – you can simply print out a QR code linking to your website’s listing on a review website, put it somewhere near the cash register, and just ask people to leave a review if they have the time.

You might want to skip asking people who don’t look like they would give a decent review – this might be cheating a bit, but it’s really important to have as many good reviews as possible. Of course, consistently providing a good user experience might be the best way to ensure that the reviews you get are good. If you do get a bad review, you should reply to it. It’s review management 101, so make sure you follow all of the best practices.

Just so you know, your ideal review should be well-written and positive. It should also contain keywords and references to your business’ location.

Optimize Your Website

When you’re optimizing your website for local search – or building it from scratch to rank it for local search results – you don’t do things too differently from when you’re optimizing or building a regular website. You’ll still create a homepage, add metadata, and research keywords – you’ll just do it so that they include local terms or queries people in your area might have. Let’s see some examples where you should focus your attention.

The Homepage

When a visitor comes to your homepage, it shouldn’t take them more than a couple of seconds to figure out who you are, what you have to offer, and where you’re located. Google’s crawler isn’t exactly the regular website visitor, but you should still provide them the same information.

Your homepage has tags and meta descriptions that should be edited to include terms that can identify your business’ location. That can be, for example, the name of the city. In a big city, it can also be the name of the part of the city where the business is located. If it helps Google understand which area the business is located in, it could go in the homepage’s tags and descriptions.

Metadata

If you’re updating the title tags and metadata on your homepage, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do it on every other page you have on your website. The data might differ from one page to another, but the general rule is the same for all of it.

Good SEO practices state that you should have keywords in the metadata. For local optimization, you should ensure that you also include terms that denote your business’ location – the name of the city, county, neighborhood, whatever you want to focus on.

Keywords

You will, of course, have to research relevant keywords for your website – whether you plan to optimize it for local search or not. However, if you’re researching locally-relevant keywords, you’ll have to research with a twist.

While you’re using Google AdWords, Ahrefs, Google autocomplete, and even Craigslist to find out what words people are using to search for stuff, make sure that you always focus on searches that happen on a local level. So, either narrow down the search to a specific geographic area, if your resource allows it, or include a toponym of your choice in the keywords you’re looking for.

Content

The content you create for your website should always include the keywords that are relevant to the area where your business is located or where you offer a service or sell a product. You can achieve this, for example, by including plenty of local geographical terms in the content.

However, if you want to create good local content, and catch the eye of someone who’d want to maybe link to it, you might want to adopt another strategy. Instead of creating content you optimize for local search by using local keywords, you should create locally relevant content. Find topics that matter to the people who live in the area and cover them in your content.

Website Structure

As a business owner, you don’t have to limit yourself to a single area. Sure, proximity is one of the key factors for appearing in the snack pack of search results, but that has nothing to do with how you do your business. If you’re a plumber in a big city, you don’t have to focus on providing a service in a two-mile radius around your location. You’ll venture to other parts of the town, too.

The trick is to have a separate page for every part of the city where you can go – whether it’s a borough, a neighborhood, or however the city is divided. Then optimize the page specifically with keywords and metadata for that specific sub-location.

Add the LocalBusiness Schema

Using LocalBusiness schema, you can make sure that a search engine has the right understanding of all the elements on your page and that it knows how to display them so that people can read them. This is what you get by using schema markup on your website, and it can be incredibly helpful to users.

The LocalBusiness schema contains the properties that are relevant to local businesses. Google will require you to add only a handful such as an URL, physical address, and name of the business. You can also include anything from geographic coordinates to menus, working hours, contact information, and reviews. If you’re not sure how to get started with it, Google has made a tool to help with that, as well as a tool to test your page after you’ve added the code you’ve created with the markup helper.

Consider Local SEO Tools

A lot of processes in setting up local search engine optimization can be streamlined with the right tools.

For instance, Yoast has a handy Local SEO plugin designed to help brands reach more local customers. The basic Yoast plugin doesn’t have these specific features out of the box, but if you combine it with a specialized plugin, it can help you grow your local customer base quickly. The plugin organizes the data that’s relevant for local visibility on Google, such as business name, address, opening hours etc, by using Schema markup. This sort of structured data sends direct information to Google and it does so for each of your pages – not just your contact page. The plugin also takes care of the technical SEO and helps you optimize Google listings for all your locations, in case you have more than one.

When it comes to local SEO, keywords are particularly important. Now, you can do keyword research by yourself and follow the keyword density guidelines, but you can also consider using SEO Keyword Hound, a tool designed for optimizing your keywords. You can use it for competitor analysis, create keyword lists and track their performance through crucial metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, etc. The best thing about this plugin is that it suggests a range of keywords to target in order to maximize your reach and visibility. The plugin itself is not designed specifically for local SEO but if you use location as part of your keywords and instruct the plugin to include it, it will work just like any specialized local SEO solution.

If you’re on a budget, there’s a great free plugin that can help your local SEO. Five Star Business Profile & Schema creates a detailed business card with all your information and structures it in Schema. You can add the business card as a Gutenberg block or a shortcode anywhere you like, and the plugin will make sure Schema is applied so that Google can pick up the information.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

When you’re optimizing a website for local SEO, you should understand that some circumstances will be out of your hands. The proximity of the searcher, for example, is a strong ranking factor and you have no control over it whatsoever.

But the things you can do, you should do diligently. Fill out as many listings for your website as possible. Always be on the lookout for comments, and ready to reply. And make sure that you produce content the locals would find interesting.

It’s safe to say that the space between coming up with an idea for a website and creating that website has never been smaller. These days, we can do a lot with very few resources and basic coding knowledge because big site builders such as WordPress make it easy for us.

WordPress isn’t doing it all on its own. It is trying, though, as we’ve seen from the release of the Gutenberg editor. But what makes WordPress such an easy system to use for creating a website are page builders.

The Elementor plugin has quickly become one of the most widely used WordPress page builders in the world. And today we’ll find out just what makes it so special and show you how you can use it to create stunning WordPress pages. In our beginners Elementor tutorial, we’ll cover the following topics:

What is the Elementor Page Builder

The role of a page builder comes down to two things: to help you make the most out of what your content management system offers and to do it in the most convenient way possible. Because WordPress is a content-oriented website builder, you’d expect a good page builder to allow you to easily add all kinds of content to a page or a post. And Elementor certainly does it.

Elementor is what is called a drag-and-drop builder, which means that you perform a lot of the tasks in it simply by dragging certain elements to where you want them to be. It’s also a front-end page builder, which means that you’re building it by manipulating the same page elements your website’s visitors will see. And it’s a live builder, so you’ll see all the changes as you’re making them.

But that’s just Elementor as a page builder. As a WordPress plugin, it’s one of the most popular ones, counting over four million installations as of April 2020, and a five-star rating based on around five thousand user reviews. Its core functionalities are free to use, but you can also shell out for the Pro version and get some useful options such as additional widgets, predesigned templates, a popup builder, and more.

Elementor is also becoming more frequently included in bundles with premium themes. We’ve integrated Elementor with Bridge, our flagship theme, so our customers can choose between it and WPBakery, a veteran page builder. But that’s not all. We’ve also started shipping more WordPress themes with Elementor, where it’s the main page builder plugin.

How to Install and Set Up Elementor

If all of this sounds exciting to you, great. It should. Especially if you’re in the market for a versatile page builder that will allow you to build stunning pages without having to write a line of code! So, let’s look at how you can install and set up Elementor on your WordPress website.

You start by going through the same plugin installation steps you would for any other plugin. Find Elementor in the plugin finder, click the “Install” button, and then click “Activate.”

After you’ve activated the plugin, you can adjust Elementor’s setting. You don’t have to, however, because it comes set up well out of the box. Still, let’s go through the options you’ll be able to access right from the dashboard.

Settings

In the General tab of the Elementor settings, you’ll be able to select the post types you plan to use, as well as disable default colors and fonts — something you should do if you want your website to have the colors of the theme you’re using.

Under the Style tab, you’ll find options that include setting default generic fonts, tablet and mobile breakpoints, as well as a checkbox to enable image Lightbox. You’ll be able to access some of these options later, from within the editor.

The Advanced Tab is filled with things only advanced users should be concerned with. This is where you set the CSS print method, switch the loader method when troubleshooting server issues, and enable SVG support.

Under Features, which is a relatively new addition to the Elementor settings interface, you will find a range of new and “experimental” features, some of which have already become permanent. Here you can toggle on or off features and “experiments” such as Grid Container or Editor Top Bar, as well as stable features, in our case Optimized DOM Output, Improved CSS Loading, and the Flexbox Container.

Role Manager

Different types of users can have different levels of access to your website, depending on their role. Elementor gives you some rudimentary role managing options, allowing you to exclude users from having access to the editor. If you have the Pro version, you can also limit the users’ access only to content.

Tools

The general tools will let you regenerate the CSS on your website and sync your Elementor library manually If you need to. This is where you enable the safe mode and the debug bar, both of which come in handy when troubleshooting your website.

The Replace URL tab is a place where you can, as the name says, replace the URLs if you changed the site address. In the Version Control tab, you can roll back to a previous version of Elementor and become an Elementor beta tester. Neither of these things is something you should do without a clear reason.

In the Maintenance Mode tab, you get all the controls over the website’s maintenance mode you’ll ever need. Besides enabling maintenance mode, you can set who can access your website while it’s enabled and select or create a template for the maintenance mode page.

The remaining settings are either informative or accessible only by Pro users. Under System Info, you’ll see the information about the server environment, the WordPress version, the theme you’re using, the plugins you have installed, and more. Getting Started is an Elementor tutorial section with a button that leads you straight to creating a new page. Finally, Custom Fonts and Custom Icons are two sections you can use if you have the Pro version of Elementor to add custom fonts and icons.

How much you decide to dig into these settings is up to you. For some, such as the ones you find under the General settings, getting to them early would be a good idea. Others, such as the ones you find under the Tools settings, are only there for certain occasions.

The Anatomy of the Elementor Page Editor

When you’re comfortable with the options you’ve chosen for your Elementor installation, head over to Page > Add New. We’ll create a new page and then edit it with Elementor to show you how you can navigate around the page builder. So once you’ve given your page a name, press the blue “Edit with Elementor” button.

Right away, you’ll notice that the page is separated into different parts: the Elementor panel on the left, and the Elementor editing screen on the right.

The editing screen is usually bigger than the panel, even though you can drag the rightmost edge of the panel further to the right to make them of roughly equal size. Let’s see all the great things you can find in the panel first.

Navigating the Elementor Panel

Right off the bat, you’ll notice that the panel is dominated by square icons. These are the Elementor widgets, and we’ll get to them in a second. First, however, we want you to look up to the very top of the panel, at that red stripe that says “Elementor.”

The Topmost Menu

The square on the right will always bring the panel back to the view you see now, with all the widgets listed. The menu button on the left, however, will give you access to certain options.

Site Settings

Under Site Settings, that you’ll reach by clicking on the hamburger icon in the left corner of the menu, you’ll find a range of options that apply globally, from colors and fonts to theme settings like typography, images, etc.

Elementor allows you to pick a color palette for your website if you choose not to use your theme’s default one. You’ll have a choice of premade palettes, and you’ll also be able to pick a primary, secondary, text, and accent color of your liking.

In the Global Fonts options, you’ll be able to choose the fonts for the primary and secondary headlines, as well as the body text and the accent text. You can choose the font family and the weight of the characters.

The Theme Style options only work if you’ve disabled Default Colors and Fonts on the Settings Page. In these options, you’ll be able to adjust anything from typography to form fields. It’s also the place where you can use Custom CSS to change the way your website looks if you have the Pro version of the builder

Particularly important are the options under Settings, where you will set your global layout options, lightboxes, page transition, etc.

The Theme Builder section is reserved for the Pro users, and it’s where they get to set site-wide options for every part of the site, from header to footer, like they’re building their own theme.

Finally, under User Preferences, you can set some of the things that will make your Elementor experience more tailored to your needs, like the UI theme (light or dark or autodetect), responsive preview and so on.

Under these Settings, there’s the Navigate from Page section, which is rather self-explanatory. You get options to search available apps, use the Finder to find anything in Elementor, and the View Page button that will shift you to a preview of the page you’re editing. The Notes are a Pro feature.

The Widgets

Right under the Search Widget bar, you’ll find Widgets — elements that work like units of content. You’ll see a Widget for the header, images, video, button, even dividers — these are the most minute building blocks of your page in Elementor.

You won’t have access to the full range of widgets in the free version. However, between the basic widgets, the general widgets, and the ones provided by the theme you’re using, you’ll have more than enough to populate a page with content.

The Bottom Stripe Menu

Finally, on the bottom of the panel, you have another bar with very useful options and functionalities.

Settings

The Settings are the place where you make changes that affect the whole page. General Setting will, for example, allow you to change the title of the page and its status. This is where you can add an excerpt and the featured image to your page, but also hide the title and select the page layout.

The Style settings are limited to the Body Style, where you can choose the type of background and the padding. As for the Advanced Settings, that’s where you can add custom CSS if you’re using the Pro version of the page builder.

The Navigator

Hands down one of the most useful tools of Elementor, the Navigator is indispensable when you’re creating big, complex pages with lots and lots of elements. As you’re adding content to a page, it will also appear in the navigator window in the hierarchical order of Elementor elements. It will allow you to easily navigate through every section, column, and widget you add to your page.

History

Elementor will keep an eye on all the actions you perform while creating a page or a post. When you want to see what you did, all you need to do is press the History icon and have a look at the Actions tab. And if you’ve saved previous versions of a page or a post, you’ll be able to find them under the Revisions tab.

Responsive Mode

Clicking this icon will bring up a top menu where you can choose between different types of devices. Picking one will give you a preview of how your page looks on that type of device. You’ll be able to pick between a desktop computer, a tablet, and a mobile phone.

Preview Changes

When you click this icon, a preview of the page will open in a separate browser tab.

The Elementor panel is also where the options for all the widgets and elements you place in the editing screen will appear. But before we see that in action, let’s have a closer look at the editing screen itself and the elements that make up a page in Elementor.

The Editing Screen and the Elements

Initially, you won’t see much in the editing screen apart from the header and footer that come with your theme. You won’t be able to edit them through Elementor unless you have the Pro version. But don’t worry, you can put a lot of content between the two for free.

See the rectangle with the words “Drag widget here” and two buttons in the middle of the page — that’s called a section and it’s where all the fun happens.

The section is one of the elements you use in Elementor to create a page. On its own, it doesn’t do much. But you can look at it as a small part of the page where you can set certain rules that are different from the rest of the page. To create a section, you only need to drag a widget to it or press that plus button. You’ll get the option to choose the structure of the section. We’ll pick the one with the section split in two halves. The Elementor has introduced a feature called Container, which provides a new, more flexible way to edit page content. You can add as many of the containers as you like, and you can add containers within containers. These elements define the layout of a section – the number of columns, the direction of the content, and so on. Adding a container should be the first thing you do when you start editing, and you can add one by clicking on the plus sign in your editor.

At this point, you can choose a layout for the container, which means the way the content will be distributed, and in how many columns.

We can place lots of widgets in any one of these columns. You simply need to drag a widget from the panel and into the column, and you can easily stuff six widgets into two columns like this.

Thanks to these containers, you can just stuff your columns with the widgets of your choice, and you can add containers within containers. Each container can be adjusted by dragging its border left or right, which is an easier way to create a ratio between the columns. You can create a Russian doll out of your sections, or you can stack container below container – it’s up to you.

To add a new container, either within an existing one or below it, simply click on the plus sign.

How to Customize Elements in Elementor Page Builder

Each of the elements (the sections, the columns, and the widgets) in Elementor has settings of its own. They will appear in the panel on the left as you add a new element, and you can edit them then and there. If you don’t want to do it that way, don’t worry — you can access all of them later.

There are a couple of ways you can edit elements when you decide to do it. Simply clicking on a widget will be enough to bring up the editing options in the panel.

To bring up the options for an element in the container, click on the little pen in the upper right corner.

Similarly, if you hover anywhere within a container, you’ll see three buttons appear in the middle of the top border of the section. The left one (the plus sign) serves to create another container, the right one (the “X”) lets you delete the existing one, and the middle one (the six dots) serves to bring up the options.

If you don’t want to chase those buttons around, a more organized way to access all your elements and their respective options is using the Navigator. Bring it up by clicking the second icon from the left in the bottom stripe menu of the Elementor panel. Click on any element you find within it, and you will bring up its options in the panel.

Finally, you can right-click on any of the containers in the editing screen to bring up a menu that includes options ranging from editing the container and duplicating it, to saving it as a template or deleting it.

As for the editing options you can access, they will vary from one element to the other. For both the sections and the columns, the options are separated into several groups.

Layout

This section contains the options that pertain to the physical appearance of the content that’s within the element, as well as its structure in the case of sections. There is a difference between the layout options you’ll get when editing a column and a section — the section will always have more extensive editing options.

Widgets will have their content-specific options instead of the layout in the first group of options. If you’re working with a text widget, for example, you’ll see different options than those you see when you’re editing a spacer widget.

Style

Background, border, and typography are the options that sections and columns have in common in the style group. If you’re styling a section, you’ll also be able to set up shape dividers and the background overlay.

As for the widgets, their styling options will again vary depending on their contents. If you’re working with video, you’ll be able to set the aspect ratio here. For buttons, you’ll get a lot of options that include typography, padding, and border settings.

Advanced

The Advanced group of options gives you the most extensive customization choices. Starting from setting the margins and paddings — something you’ll be doing a lot when building your pages — and moving to motion effects, background and border settings, and even responsiveness settings, this is the group of options you’ll want to pay attention to.

It’s also the group where you’ll see the most similarities between the options you get for sections, columns, and widgets. You’ll be able to add attributes and custom CSS, too, both of which are a Pro feature.

Elementor in Action: How to Make a Page

So there you have it: you’ve installed Elementor, you’re familiar with the editor, the basic elements and their options, and you have a blank page waiting for you to give it life. First, however, you have to figure out what kind of page you want to build.

If you understand landing pages, you probably know that there are certain things a landing page needs to efficiently do its job. It’s a completely different thing, however, to create an “About” page, because that page will require an entirely different set of elements.

So the bottom line here is that, before firing up Elementor, you first need to figure out every piece of content you’ll want to have on the website. Next, you need to figure out how to best spread that content across different sections. Then, you can use one of three different ways to create a page.

1. Do It From the Grounds Up

With this method, you’re relying on what you’ve learned in this Elementor tutorial to get you through creating your first page. Don’t worry — it’s easy and can be lots of fun. Just remember to approach the content of your page one element at a time. Let’s see how to create a “team member” section for your “About Us” page, for example.

As you can see from the Navigator, we’ve used three sections here. The topmost contains one column and a spacer widget to separate this area of the page from the rest of it. The second section contains one column and a heading widget, while the third section contains three columns, each equipped with an image box widget.

We’ve slightly changed the bottom margin of the second section to make more room between the heading and the image boxes, and that’s it. If you have the time and curiosity, you can experiment all you want with your website. Elementor makes it very easy. One section after another, and you’ll have yourself an awesome page.

2. Use Pre-Made Blocks

If you don’t want to spend too much time on building sections for your website, you can always rely on a premade block to, at the very least, light a fire under the heels of your imagination. So instead of pressing the “plus” button in the section-to-be, you can press the “folder” button and go to the Elementor library.

In the library, you’ll find whole pre-made blocks you can download to your page and then further customize to your liking. It’s a great way to get your creative juices flowing, although it’s just as likely to stifle your creativity and get you to settle for something that wasn’t custom-made for your website. You will need an Elementor account to access blocks, and some of them are only accessible by Pro users.

3. Use Premade Pages

If you want to spend even less time on building your website, you don’t even have to arrange the blocks on your page. You can simply go to the Elementor library and pick a whole premade page for your website. Some pages are available only to Pro users, and all of them require you to create an account for free.

For someone who is in a hurry, or who doesn’t see the intrinsic value in having custom-made pages for their website, or who simply saw a layout they liked, pre-made pages are a great option. They are hands down the easiest way to populate your website with all the pages it will ever need.

Let’s Wrap it Up!

Most of us wouldn’t get too far in the digital world if it weren’t for entities such as WordPress that actively try to make it easier for everyone to participate. But even WordPress has its blind spots, which is why we have such a lively and vibrant plugin scene.

Page builders are among the more important members of that scene because, without them, it would be prohibitively difficult for most people to create a WordPress website. But if there’s a page builder involved, and if it just so happens the builder in question is Elementor, you can rest assured that the website will be up and running quickly and smoothly. And if you need some help along the way, you can always come back to this Elementor tutorial to get it.

If there’s one thing you can be sure of when starting a gaming website, it’s that you’ll never, ever run out of content. The gaming industry is huge and it’s growing even bigger. The niches are plenty and more are popping up by the second. The ways to approach the industry and create content from your own unique angle are many and open to exploration.

Gaming is also a part of the culture that seems to bring out much passion in the people who enjoy it. For all these reasons and many others, you might find yourself with something to say about the industry, the culture, or the tech that underpins it. However, instead of looking for websites that will allow you to submit content for publishing – or because you’re done doing that – you think about starting your very own gaming website.

If this sounds at all familiar, you’re in the right place. We’ll help you with the basics of how to start a gaming website with WordPress, covering topics that include:

Why Choose WordPress?

The first thing to settle when figuring out how to start a gaming website is what platform or framework you want to use. For many, WordPress is the very first thing that comes to mind. The next question you might want to ask yourself is why choose WordPress for your gaming website, and not even the free kind, but the self-hosted kind that costs money? What it boils down to is the level of control and customization that comes with using WordPress. You won’t be able to find it anywhere else – not even on WordPress.com.

For starters, WordPress is notoriously easy to install. Many hosting providers offer things like one-click installation for WordPress. Some even offer managed hosting that takes a lot of the behind-the-scenes work from your hands. You should consider these options when choosing a hosting provider.

Then again, you don’t have to go with a regular hosting provider at all. You can install WordPress on most cloud service providers, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. You should always do a cost/benefit analysis when choosing the host, as some might give you more than your gaming website actually needs and at a higher price. But that’s one level of control you have with WordPress that some other website builders don’t offer.

With your own hosting and your own website, you’ll also get to choose what monetization model you employ. You can use AdSense or its alternatives, offer affiliate links, have a store section, put your content behind a paywall – you name it, you’ll be able to make it happen with WordPress. How? With plugins, of course.

Plugins – and themes, too – are what make WordPress genuinely great. Thanks to them, you can easily change how your website looks and behaves, add or remove functionalities to it, and spend ridiculous amounts of time making sure that every detail is just the way you want it to be. WordPress is a powerful facilitator of your creativity, and that’s something you’ll learn to love about it.

What Kind of Gaming Website Do You Want?

The very first question you should answer when considering how to start a gaming website is exactly what kind of a gaming website you want to create. Because gaming is an incredibly diverse term that encompasses technology, culture, social phenomena, economy, probably even politics – there are just so many different ways to approach gaming.

As you might have imagined, creating a website that’s home for the speedrunning community is quite different than creating a website for, let’s say, an indie developer. A regular gaming website that features reviews and news, might look completely differently. Then again, if the website is the presentation of yourself and your gaming persona, or even your gaming team or guild, you might want to build something unlike anything we’ve mentioned so far.

Then, you should consider whether you want your website to be game-specific or genre-specific. It might also be completely devoted to the nerd culture and all the beautiful and quirky ways fandoms manifest themselves. You can create a website that tracks gaming events and tournaments or even a website that hosts them.

The possibilities are endless, but you’ll need to narrow them down as much as possible because that’s the kind of option that will affect other choices as you move on. So for starters, know what kind of gaming website you want to build.

Choosing the Hosting

We’ve already covered the wide variety of hosting options that you might look into when starting your gaming website. If you decide to go with a hosting provider – something that’s a popular choice, even with the availability of cloud hosting platforms, you should take your time and research them properly.

The things you might want to look into include:

Some other things you might consider when choosing a host is whether they allow you to register a domain name with them, or you have to go to an independent registrar. Even more importantly, you should make sure that they have a package that would facilitate you building a gaming server on it if that’s what you’re creating the website for. The demands will depend on the game you plan to run, so do your research beforehand and check for leeway to expand later on.

Picking the Name

Choosing the name for your website is an important step for a couple of reasons. The name is a part of your website’s brand, and as such is a recognizable symbol for everything that you do with the website. But semiotics aside, it’s also a word you might want to use in your domain name. It would be best to have one before registering your website’s domain name.

How to pick a good name? It’s not that easy to tell, especially given all the fantasy elements that are readily found in games, which expand the possible vocabulary tremendously. Things would be complicated enough without them, too, as gaming is a truly global culture that draws upon influences – and words – from national cultures as diverse as Eastern Asian, English-speaking, or even Slavic.

Still, some best practices to follow include:

Finally, you should always come up with a couple of strong choices for the name for your website. In case the domain name is taken, you’ll want to have a fallback.

Installing and Customizing the Website

One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s ubiquitous, which means most hosts have an easy way for you to install it. WordPress is a CMS with a lot of features, so even if the installation is easy, you’ll want to spend some time learning your way around it.

For starters, you should learn what themes are and how to install them. Your gaming website should have all kinds of elements and layouts depending on its niche, and while it’s possible to build them all from scratch, choosing the appropriate gaming WordPress theme can save you a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Artorias Theme

So let’s say you’re building a website to support a game you’re publishing. You’ll probably want to have a landing page that packs a big hero image, possibly even animated, and then shows off a game trailer, maybe some copy about the setting, some cards showing different races or classes people could play in the game, a quote from someone who played an early version, maybe an email capture form, and even a countdown clock – why not. You can either build a page with all of that from scratch, or find a theme with that kind of layout, ready for you to upload your content to it.

The same really goes for any other kind of gaming website. For an eSports website, you’ll need a theme that supports easy YouTube and Twitch integration, has layouts for match lists, and layouts for team presentations. Leaderboards, tournament lists and timetables, and player lists would also be nice features to have.

Overworld Theme

For a news type of website that also does reviews, elements that enable you rate games or products would also be must-haves. You can even stray away from gaming themes and look for a technology theme that might work better for your type of website, as would a blog or magazine theme. What’s important is that you match the look and features of the theme with the feature you need for your website.

Then again, you can use plugins to make it even better.

Leveraging WordPress Plugins

That’s the other thing about WordPress you’ll need to figure out – what plugins are and how to use them. While you might not need plugins to, let’s say, live stream to your website, you will need them for security, updating, optimization, and a whole host of other things. You can take a hint from business websites and look at the plugins they commonly use, and that should give you a good idea of where to get started with adding your plugins.

For instance, if you already have a website set up with a theme you like and don’t want to change, but that doesn’t come with Twitch integration out of the box, don’t worry. You can quite easily add Twitch integration to your existing website and stream the games directly from your pages using a plugin.

We recommend using StreamWeasels, a free WordPress plugin designed for embedding Twitch streams. It works with Gutenberg – after installing it, you will find a brand new block in your block editor, which you can use to stream games. If you’re not using Gutenberg, the plugin also provides a shortcode with the same function.

The plugin offers a variety of sleek premade designs for the stream, and you can customize it in a variety of ways: start muted, autoplay, embed chat, different color schemes, embed heights and widths. The best thing is that the Twitch API is not required, which really makes things simple.

Another gaming-specific functionality you might need a plugin for are game reviews. If you plan on having them (whether you want to write them yourself or have your visitors write them and benefit from user-generated content), you will probably need a plugin (although some themes have reviews by default).

Game Review Block is another block-based plugin that you can use for this purpose. It adds a review functionality with 1-10 rating system that you can place anywhere you want and your visitors can use it to rate your game, or any other game in case you’re publishing game reviews. What’s important is that this plugin adds Schema.org structured data to your reviews, meaning they qualify for Google rich results. Rich results, just like featured snippets, help you rank higher, boost traffic and significantly improve your CRT rate.

Finally, extending the functionality of your gaming website using plugins doesn’t necessarily mean installing a bunch of them – there are plugins that represent collections of widgets or blocks that can be used for anything from typography and infographics to SEO and business features. One such plugin is Qi Addons for Elementor, with 100+ remarkable widgets, and if you prefer block editing, there’s Qi Blocks for Gutenberg, so make sure to check them out.

What’s Next?

After you’ve taken care of the domain and hosting, installed WordPress, the theme, and have a couple of valuable plugins to keep your website safe and working well – you’ve started your very own gaming website and you could even teach others how to start a gaming website! Congrats!

Now comes the hard part, however. You need to start populating your website with content – whatever type of content you choose to create. You’ll need to hustle to promote the website on social media, monitor its performance, look for ways to reach new audiences, work on it with the utmost diligence while waiting, patiently, for the numbers to start showing that it’s taken off. It’s maddening, but that’s why we love it. We hope you will, too.

Between your website, social networks, and search engine ads, you have plenty of ways to communicate with your customers and clients, both current and prospect. But the list doesn’t end there – there’s also email, blogs and content, and push notifications. And that doesn’t even come close to exhausting the list of the channels and tools at your disposal to market your business.

The best thing about this plethora of tools is that, at least partially, they can work on autopilot. Lots of the tasks that form the core of marketing practices can be automated to a certain degree. In this article, we’ll show you some tools that will provide a degree of marketing automation for your WordPress website.

The tools we’ll cover include:

HubSpot

It would be unfair to label HubSpot as just a marketing automation tool. Sure, it does include extraordinary features for automating your inbound campaigns, but it would be best described as a complete and full-fledged CRM with all the solutions required for connecting content management, marketing, sales and customer relations. It’s an all-in-one solution designed to help scaling businesses grow faster, in a more streamlined way.

Focusing on marketing automation and WordPress, HubSpot includes a comprehensive Marketing Hub, which gathers all the marketing tools in one place, both native ones and integrations. The features include email marketing, live chat, landing pages and form builders, CTAs, SEO, social media, and, in advanced plans, predictive lead scoring, adaptive testing, custom reporting, and so on.

The Marketing Hub comes in a free (albeit a bit limited) plan and paid plans start at $45/mo.

HubSpot has developed a WordPress plugin, which is completely free and can be used to manage contacts, create and manage email campaigns, build forms, engage with visitors via live chat, and more. It also features a powerful analytics dashboard.

ActiveCampaign

If you’re looking to start your marketing automation by jumping into the deep end and see what you can find there, how about using a customer experience automation platform? That’s what ActiveCampaign is – a powerful platform that can help you with email marketing, marketing automation, and even CRM and sales automation.

Sticking with marketing automation, ActiveCampaign offers a comprehensive solution that will help you map your customer’s journey and monitor their activities on your website. The platform will allow you to automate marketing activities such as sending follow-up emails based on the customers’ actions. You’ll even have access to a map that shows all of the automations you’re using and where they’re creating a bottleneck.

And that’s nowhere near to everything you could get with ActiveCampaign. The platform can automate your communication via several channels, including email, chat, and messaging. The platform has a wide spectrum of applications across various industries. The packages start at $15 per month.

Chatbot with IBM Watson

Who wouldn’t want the power of IBM’s Watson Assistant to automate their chats across multiple channels? Thanks to the Chatbot with IBM Watson plugin, that’s exactly what you’re able to do – and you might even do it without spending a penny.

With this chatbot, you’ll get an AI-powered bot that boasts better accuracy and faster learning than its competitors – and it’s always striving to be even better. For you, this means that the chatbot will be able to offer useful answers or chat pleasantly, use images and clickable responses, and it will be able to do all of this on multiple channels.

Employing the Watson Assistant to power your chatbot comes with some powerful perks that include using it for phone calls or VoIP or advanced features like onboarding support. So while the Lite package offers an awful lot at no costs, as soon as you hit the 1,000 monthly active users wall, you’ll have to consider upgrading to the plus plan, which starts at $140 per month.

YARPP

Using every opportunity to plug your own content is very much in the spirit of digital marketing. Marketers do it on social media all the time, and in newsletters and other channels, too. Thanks to Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – YARPP – you can promote your posts or pages to your website’s visitors while they’re on your website.

With over a hundred thousand active downloads, YARPP claims to be the most downloaded related posts plugin for WordPress. This status is achieved by using a customizable algorithm that takes into account all kinds of variables like post titles, tags, and the content itself, when offering content related to whatever page or post your website visitors are viewing. You’ll have control of how the results are displayed and where.

You can use YARPP free of charge.

SureTriggers

SureTriggers is the new way to automate. It’s a flexible platform that enables almost any type of app or platform to connect and communicate with one another. Think Zapier but cheaper and much easier to use.

SureTriggers has been designed to make life easier for businesses, website owners, store owners and anyone that spends time on repetitive tasks. It enables you to work smarter and improve the customer experience with very effective automations.

The tool is simple to use – choose an app you want to use in your automation, choose a trigger for it, add an action and you’re done.

SureTriggers comes with a smart canvas builder you can use to create automations visually. You can set when it’s triggered, what apps communicate and the actions they take. It’s super-simple and can be used by anyone.

There’s a free version to get you started and two premium plans that cost $99 and $199 per year.

Post to Google My Business

Good local search engine optimization on Google hangs on the quality of a Google My Business profile. There are a couple of ways you can integrate WordPress with Google My Business, to avoid updating your GMB profile every time you make certain updates to your website or vice versa. With Post to Google My Business, you can automate content sharing.

With this plugin, every time you publish a new post on your WordPress website, it will also appear on your Google My Business page. The GMB post will be built using a template and the featured image from your WordPress post, and it will be published on your GMB page without you having to log into it.

While the basic version of the plugin is free, you can also opt for the Premium version if you want advanced features such as post scheduling, post recycling, picking location per post, and even managing posts for third parties. The starter Premium plan starts at $7.99 per month.

TrustPulse

There’s nothing like some social proof to instill trust into your website’s visitors and nudge them towards making a purchase or signing up for your service. Thanks to TrustPulse, you can deliver social proof in a dynamic fashion – to the people that need to see it the most, at the time they need to see it.

TrustPulse is a platform that packages actual visitor activity on your website into morsels of social proof which it then shows to other visitors to your website. You’ve probably seen those messages that notify you how John has just made a purchase from the store you were browsing, or how Tammy just signed up for the service whose website you were visiting. That’s what TrustPulse can do for you – let your visitors know what they’re missing out on.

TrustPulse offers a limited trial. The paid plans start at $9 per month, and they give you access to an additional feature that includes advanced layout options, action messages, and the ability to remove the TrustPulse branding.

Advanced Coupons

Coupons are a time-honored sales tool that’s taken many different forms over its history. They are still as popular as they’ve ever been, and they can do wonders for your sales. If you happen to run a WooCommerce store on your website and you want to up your coupon game, you might consider using the Advanced Coupons plugin.

Some of the features that make this plugin stand out are the buy-one-get-one type of coupon, the cart rules that make coupons only applicable to carts that meet the criteria, and an easy coupon application with a link. As far as automation goes, the plugin lets you schedule coupons. It helps the customers, too – it lets them add a product automatically to the cart when the coupon is applied. You can also set up the plugin to automatically apply coupons, without any involvement from your customer.

You can try a limited version of the plugin for free. If you want access to more features, you’ll have to use a Premium version of the plugin, which starts at $99 per year. You might often find them at a discount, though.

Internal Link Juicer

You probably know what internal link building is – the practice of including relevant links to your website into the content on your website. It’s a useful way to help your visitors navigate the website, but it also plays a role in search engine optimization. You can’t have content marketing without proper linking, and with Internal Link Juicer, an SEO auto-linker for WordPress, you can automate internal linking.

What the plugin does is simple – you create a post, configure some keywords, and let the plugin do the work. It will automatically add the links with maximum diversification for a natural linking behavior. You can, of course, customize the links, and configure the linking behavior, and you’ll have access to a dashboard to stay in the loop.

If you choose the Pro version, which will set you back $69,99 for one website, you’ll get access to even more features. You’ll be able to use taxonomies to whitelist posts. You’ll also be able to use terms for blacklisting posts that can’t be linked to.

Automate.io

Today, finding a tool that does the exact thing you want it to isn’t the difficult part. The trouble starts when you start integrating these tools with your website, trying to make them work together, and creating good workflows. That’s where a platform like Automate.io can help you tremendously.

This platform allows you to set up integrations and automate tasks. For example, you can use it to make sure that every time you post something on your website, your Facebook page is updated. But triggers and actions aren’t the only things you can add to an automation chain – thanks to delays and conditions, you can use Automate.io to automate complex workflows.

The best thing about Automate.io is that you can give it a good go free of charge. You’ll get to create five automations – or bots, as they’re called – which will be able to fire three hundred times a month. For anything more, you’ll need to use a paid plan, and they start at $9.99 a month.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Even though digital marketing opens up a sea of opportunities to reach audiences and customers, it can also easily add a lot to the regular workday’s workload – especially if you’re running a small business and have to juggle a couple of roles at the same time. Thanks to automation, however, you don’t have to give up on one type of marketing to devote more time to another – you’ll probably find something to automate in both and make the situation manageable.