DEV Community: alexxpaull

Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals

alexxpaull — Sat, 24 Nov 2018 06:58:41 +0000

Looking for some amazing deals this Black Friday? Then Hurry Up! Here are some amazing Black Friday deals to avail.

Cloudways is covering all the WordPress and WooCommerce Black Friday Cyber Monday deals.

Avail this deal getting 30% OFF for 3 Months PROMO CODE: BFCM18
Cloudways has listed the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals on WordPress themes, extensions, and plugins. Let’s read on!

Cloudways WordPress Black Friday Deal

We firmly believe that most of our readers are waiting for Cloudways WordPress Black Friday Deal to launch their projects. And to welcome those newbies here is a great deal:

30% OFF FOR 3 MONTHS
Use coupon code BFCM18 when you sign up for Cloudways account.

TemplateMonster
SKTThemes
CyberChimps Annual Club
CyberChimps Premium WordPress Theme
CyberChimps Prime
CyberChimps Multipurpose Theme Bundle
7Theme
OceanWP
ThemeGrill
Create and Code Theme
Flothemes
Super Theme
Tesla Themes
Show Themes
My Theme Shop
Visual Modo
Profile Press
Themify
GretaThemes
Themeum
Mystery Themes
ProteusThemes

CSSIgniter
WPeka Club Membership
WP Buffs
WP Everest
BlogVault
MalCare
Barn2Media Plugins
AMP for WP
Fly Cart
WPMaN/AgeNinja
WP Security Audit Log
MailOptin
Ultimate Dashboard PRO
Premium Add-On for Page Builder Framework
ProfilePress
WP Stagecoach
Beaver Builder Addons
WP Coupons and Deals
SlideDeck
GeotargetingWP
Page Builder Sandwich
Envira Gallery
SoliloquyWP
Weglot Translate WordPress plugin
Mage Worx
Elementor
Imagely
Extended Widget Options
Modal and Sliding Widget Options Add-on
Power Pack Elements
WPFomify

Beeketing
YITH
Tyche Software
Astra
AliDropship
DropShipMe
Easy Login Styler Pro
CSS Hero
PixelEmu
Elasticsearch Extensions
Shoptimizer — Fast WooCommerce Theme
Aelia WooCommerce Plugins
CustomizeWoo
HumCommerce lifetime deal
Mycred
Wisdmlabs Deal One
Wisdmlabs Deal Two

Speed Up WooCommerce Store

alexxpaull — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 06:36:59 +0000

Speed definitely adds value to online store as visitors browse your store more conveniently; spends more time on your website which results in less bounce rate and ultimately makes a purchase.

Perfect recipe for fast loading WooCommerce store contains the following ingredients:

1. Cleanup the Setup
To compare our results, it is important to test the site before starting with the optimization process. This can be done using Pingdom site testing tool. Now begin with cleaning up the clutter accumulated over the time by extensive usage of themes and plugins in your online store.

Start by cleaning up the database. For this, there is nothing better than the WP-Optimize plugin. This plugin allows you to not only remove problematic revisions but also clean up the entire WooCommerce store database. Next go ahead and get rid of unnecessary plugins and extensions which are sitting there for ages and use only those which you really need and the ones which get updated more often than others.

Also limit revisions, external resources which is not hosted on your WooCommerce server and use simple share buttons instead of social sharing plugins.

2. Image Optimization
Heavy images take more time to load then light images. Indeed, images often represent the majority of the bytes downloaded for a page. As a result, image optimization often results in a reduction of page size; hence it helps you speed up WooCommerce store.

The best way to optimize images in your WooCommerce store is to use a good plugin such as WPCompress or Smush.it. Be careful not to upload unnecessarily large images than necessary at your WooCommerce store. Resize images manually or use a plugin to automatically resize images to acceptable dimensions.

3. Quality Hosting
Your WooCommerce store depends heavily on its hosting. Hosting the key behind supplying high-performance software and hardware to your WooCommerce store so it can not only withstand the heavy traffic flows but also function optimally all the time.

Cloud hosting offers the best mix of performance and costs for WooCommerce stores. If you do not want to spend too much time on configuring your servers for top performance, managed WooCommerce hosting is the best solution for your store.

4. Caching
Taking advantage of caching in the WooCommerce store can help you in achieving better results in terms of performance. The free WordPress cache plugin, Breeze is the easiest and the fastest way of speeding up WooCommerce website. This plugin can help you in configuring both server-side caching as well as client-side caching which allows repeat viewing of the pages much faster.

5. Content Delivery Network
A CDN servers static elements of your store from the location closest to the visitors. This significantly speeds up the experience for the users because the page loads up quickly. Integrating CDN to WooCommerce store can ensure the same fast loading websites across a global audience.

5 Optimization Techniques for WordPress Websites

alexxpaull — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 10:12:39 +0000

Have you ever been confronted with slow websites? Did you like them? No, no doubt!

Websites that take time to load annoy us. They greatly depreciate the user experience. Moreover, the statistics prove it. If your website is too slow, visitors may not have the patience to wait and sometimes prefer to go to your competitor!

In addition, the search engines, especially Google, is very sensitive to website performance. Indeed, it uses this parameter for referencing its results. If you want to increase the chances of being on the first page of Google, you will have every interest to have a quick website! Of course, speed is not the only SEO criterion used by search engines, but it is still part of it.

Do you feel that your website is slow? There are various tools online allowing you to test the speed of it. Here are three:

Pingdom Tools
GTmetrix
Google PageSpeed Insights

However, do not take their results as the absolute truth. Each of these tools uses different weights to test your website's performance. This is why there are sometimes huge differences in results between these platforms. Now let's move on to the 5 optimization techniques for your WordPress.

1. WordPress Hosting

Without a quality web hosting, getting a fast website is virtually impossible. For WordPress Hosting, I would say that there are 2 scenarios:

Scenario #1
Either you know a little server and you install your WordPress website on an unmanaged hosting (including Shared or VPS hosting). This is the best value for money you can get and total flexibility on how you configure your server (PHP version, server-side caching, etc.). However, you will need the skills or a SysAdmin to configure your server.

Scenario #2
Otherwise, use the services of a quality web host as Cloudways — WordPress Managed Hosting — specializes in hosting WordPress websites. All their WordPress offers PHP 7+, HTTPS/2, a pre-configured cache system (known as ThunderStack), and development environment so you do not have to make your changes on the live version of your website. For me, Cloudways has the best quality/price ratio of the market for hosting WordPress website and I advise you to take a look at their offers.

2. WordPress Themes

Your theme is the foundation of your WordPress website. If it's important for the aesthetic side, it's also fundamental to the loading speed and code quality of your website. WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and has an incredible number of themes (which is its strength). But this diversity is double-edged! There are also a lot of themes that look pretty on paper but are poorly coded and will only slow down your website.

For this reason (among others) I use only Genesis Framework of StudioPress for all the themes that I develop (more details on why I choose Genesis Framework). I recommend you take a look at all Genesis compatible themes as they have all been developed to be fast with quality code.

3. WordPress Cache Plugin

There is also a whole range of cache plugins for WordPress (more or less good quality) that allow you to activate different things that I tell you in our guide like:

caching pages
Gzip compression
the browser cache
the minification of files
CDN integration
possibly other options depending on the plugin

Personally, I use Breeze, a free WordPress cache plugin on all the websites that I develop. This plugin is free, compatible with Apache and Nginx web servers and will allow you to configure all the elements I mentioned above in a minimalist way.

4. WordPress CDN

A Content delivery network (CDN) is used primarily to effectively disseminate the content of a website, whether the visitor is in any part of the world. The servers of the network being distributed all over the world, the visitor will always have a point that is close to him and who can provide the content more quickly, reducing the download time (latency).

5. WordPress Plugins

Plugins are great but do not overdo them. Each plugin can lower not only the security of your WordPress website but also and above all its performance. That's why I can only advise you to keep only those that are really essential to you.

When installing a plugin, do not forget to look at the date of the last update. If it's been 2-3 years since there was more, beware! It should not be up to date and there is, therefore, a strong risk that it is no longer optimized for recent versions of WordPress.

To help you detect plugins that slow down your website, you can install Query Monitor. "Queries by Component" lists the plugins that are loaded as well as their speed.

By applying these optimization techniques, you will already optimize much of your WordPress website compared to a normal installation. As you will see in the Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix,
And Google PageSpeed Insights reports, there are still other ways to optimize a WordPress website.

10 Great Hacks to Boost Your Sales this Holiday Season

alexxpaull — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 06:28:55 +0000

If you want to sell your products and build your customers for long-term then you must have to offer them some advantage that makes them buy your product. As a WooCommerce owner you should have to overlook on all of the marketing aspects including your niche, your targeted audience and of course your product that is your asset and after focusing on all of these things you will start building your store for the Holiday Season.
As we know that launching a WooCommerce store and then managing is not an easy task. Mostly owners miss small things while taking the store online that has a big impact on the revenue as well as the performance of the store during the Holiday Season.

Most customers have a certain expectation from an online store. If these expectations no going to meet then your customer will never return and might share a bad review regarding your product and services.

To help you out, here are 10 simple Hacks to prepare your online WooCommerce store for the Holiday Season.

1. Choose Your Platform

There are a lot of options in the market but I suggest you launch an online store on WooCommerce. The community around WooCommerce is awesome and also you will find several extensions that help you to make your WooCommerce store perform well.

2. Choose Managed WooCommerce Hosting

Managing your online store is a long-time job and during this phase, you will face a lot of challenges managing your store. Most of the store owners not experience in managing the servers and security-related issues. That is the reason experts recommend Managed WooCommerce hosting for launching an online store. All of the issues whether it is related to the server, hosting etc will be managed by the hosting providers. They also ensure you for the regular backups.

3. Fast Speed can Boost Sales

The speed of your online WooCommerce store is one of the important factors that directly affect your revenue. Slow online stores with a high page load time sour up the user experience even one delay seconds can cause your conversions to drop so optimizing your online stores is necessary to avoid bad user experience.

4. Responsive Design

Most the sales come from the smartphone in Holiday Season. That is why your store must have a responsive design to ensure that your WooCommerce store is easy to browse.

5. Attractive Design and Layout

Most of the customers bounce back just because of the messy store. Customers want a shop that is attractive and easy to find thing what they are looking for. Investing time and money for a well-designed store pay them back through high conversions.

Recommended Top 2018 Themes

Astra Theme
OceanWP Theme

6. Create a Page with Gift Ideas

Creating a gift page is one of the best ways to boost your sales because a visitors always looking for some good collection of gifts in Holiday Season for their loved ones. Also, you can offer some deals, offer discounts this Holiday Season to attract the customer towards your store to boost your sales.

7. Offer Free Shipping

Most of the shoppers irritate to pay the shipping amount for their purchases. If possible give them a free shipping in Holiday Season or offer any discount on a specific amount of purchase.

8. Use Secure Payment Gateways

Customers nowadays more concerned about their payments and the security of their credit cards. They looking for secure payment gateways that ensure the protection of their credit card. On WooCommerce store you can easily set up a secure payment option through Stripe Payment Gateway or any other extension available.

9. Involve Your Customers

Boost your sales using social media launching a small campaign for this Holiday Season. CUstomers use social media as an alternative resource to buy products. This is the best way to engage your customers in the sales promotion process.

10. Simplify Purchase Processes

Most of the customers feel annoying while filling in several forms during the checkout process. This Holiday Season, plan to replace your checkout process with a simple one-page checkout.