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WooCommerce: 27 SEO Tips (For Non-Techies)

I had the pleasure to speak at WordCamp Milano 2018, and I had a blast! I believe the topic was pretty interesting, so you all deserve a long post recap with actionable tips and screenshots to understand basic WooCommerce SEO (video of the presentation will be available soon).

The following WooCommerce Search Engine Optimization tips are mostly non technical, and are aimed at WordPress and WooCommerce users who never heard of “schema”, “long tail”, “301” and “hreflang” (although if you did, please have a read anyway, make sure to post a comment and contribute to this post with your expertise).

The thing is – SEO is never going to die. Besides, Google & co. constantly improve their website ranking algorithms. This means what you learned 5 years ago in regard to SEO might not work today, and what you learn today might not work in 2 years time… you get the point.

In this blog post, we will analyze and study 27 evergreen SEO factors for WooCommerce websites. These should be applied (or not applied, as there are many “not to do” tips as well) to your ecommerce website at all costs if you believe you deserve better ranking (who doesn’t?). And as they’re evergreen, they’re likely not to go away for a few years at least 🙂

So, let’s get started!

WordPress: 15 Themes for Bloggers-To-Be

Are you thinking of starting a WordPress blog?

Great – let’s take a look at what we’ve got here: awesome templates for personal portfolios, food and beverages blogs, cooking blogs, fashion blogs, lifestyle blogs, magazines, speakers, book clubs, travel and photography blogs, and so on… there is really a wide choice of topics out there!

But with the content being the number 1 objective for your blog, don’t forget you also need good functionalities and design features. By opting for a professional WordPress theme from the very beginning, for a little investment, you can get everything you need out of the box:

Responsive design + cross browser compatibility – very important for mobile browsing
Shortcodes to display content blocks in any page / post, which significantly speed up customization
Advanced customization settings – you can change typography, logo, navigation, slider, page templates, footer so that every detail is in line with your brand
Predefined page templates for various standard pages like customers’ testimonials, about page, contact page. Every page of your blog can look different
Compatibility with WordPress Customizer, so that you can view the amendments in real time

There are many, maybe unlimited, professional WordPress themes for personal blogs – so here’s a quick roundup of 10 that might catch your attention. Have fun! Continue reading WordPress: 15 Themes for Bloggers-To-Be

WooCommerce: 10 Best Fashion & Clothing Themes

Maybe this is the right time to update your clothing WooCommerce store and give a more professional look to your fashion business…

Maybe you also want to build custom pages without getting into coding, as default WooCommerce is too “boring”…

Still think your online project requires a fresh hand?

Well, if that’s the case, feel free to keep reading and view my favorite 15 WooCommerce clothing themes. Continue reading WooCommerce: 10 Best Fashion & Clothing Themes

WordPress: MailOptin Forms Plugin Review

For sustainable growth in an online business, one has to pay critical attention to list building. The email list is an essential aspect of every successful business, it is one way of marketing that never goes old. As far as emails continue to exist, people will continue to make use of it for business and communication.

With Email marketing, you can continually reach out to your loyal customers regarding products and services information with minimal effort compared to reaching out to random people every time you need to push out information about your business. The email list ensures that re-targeting an audience doesn’t stress you out.

While re-targeting your customers via a mailing list is key to profitability online, the problem lies in building an email list. As this has become a great challenge for list builders, a lot of developers have tried to create marketing solutions overcome the challenge. Not many have succeeded in the quest, however.

Well, that is not to burst your bubble, there are a couple of email marketing software that has really made list building easy, achievable and cost-effective. If you are really serious about building a profitable email list, you won’t find it on a free-to-use solution. The best features that you can use to improve conversion with action-based messages and understand the behaviour of your visitors are found in premium list building plugins.

In this article, I want to talk extensively about one of such plugins called MailOptin. This WordPress plugins is designed to help you start your list building journey in next to no time. Within a few minutes, you should have your optin form for collecting email addresses from your visitors. One of the things MailOptin lets you do is to decide how you want to grow your list, you can use an aggressive approach; displaying your optin forms on page load or the less intrusive approach; displaying your optin forms only when a visitor is about to leave your site. This whole phenomenon is called Exit Intent, and we are going to delve into it later down this review, but before then, let’s walk through what MailOptin has to offer.

WooCommerce: 15 Best Food & Restaurant Themes

The most efficient way to turn your restaurant / food business into a money-making machine is to cater to your customer’s needs better than you do now. Supposing you have a modern interior design, tasty food, friendly atmosphere, professional personnel, etc… what else can you do for your business?

You need a bombastic online presence. You need to – maybe – rebuild your restaurant website. Thankfully, if you don’t know much about web design, it’s not a big deal. No need to do anything from scratch nowadays (we entrepreneurs value our time and effort, right?).

If you want to enable online food ordering, sell restaurant gift cards, turn your takeaway into an optimized online booking system, or give online users the freedom to build their custom pizza, it’s time to switch to a WooCommerce theme.

By picking one of the 15 themes described in this article (oh, by the way – here’s the full list of 50+ restaurant WooCommerce themes you can pick), you can immediately take advantage of the most popular ecommerce plugin (WooCommerce) and its free or premium extensions to increase your food business sales and profitability. Continue reading WooCommerce: 15 Best Food & Restaurant Themes

WooCommerce Workshop: DCU 2018 Slides

I had the pleasure to speak at the Dublin City University Business School in April 2018. I was kindly invited by Grace Fox, a lecturer who looks after the Masters in Digital Marketing.

The workshop title was “WooCommerce Workshop. INSTALL. SET UP. PUBLISH. SELL.”, aimed at helping students build an ecommerce enabled website with WordPress and WooCommerce.

During the 4 hours workshop we covered the following topics:

1. Introduction: Things You Should Know Before Installing WC
2. DEMO: How to Install WC
3. DEMO: Walk-Through of the Most Important Settings & Payment Gateways
4. DEMO: How to Publish Your Products & Test Checkout
5. WooCommerce A.M.A. & Intro to Customisation

Here are the slides of the live demonstration I held.

Continue reading WooCommerce Workshop: DCU 2018 Slides

WooCommerce: How to Sell ANYTHING with WordPress (WP Dublin 2018)

I had the pleasure to speak at the Dublin WordPress Meetup in March 2018. The presentation title was “How to Sell A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G with WordPress + WooCommerce”, aimed at both beginners and more advanced designers.

Some of those who are only starting with WordPress didn’t know you can transform ANY WordPress install into an Ecommerce website in a matter of minutes.

Those who are pretty familiar with it, on the other end, they’re maybe entrepreneurs who want to set up a Marketplace, a Membership site, a Classified Ads platform or implement some of those Ecommerce features only Amazon and Ebay seem to be able to code with their million dollar budgets. Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Sell ANYTHING with WordPress (WP Dublin 2018)

WordPress: The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing (WC Rome 2017)

I had the pleasure to speak at WordCamp Rome 2017. Yes, the very first WordCamp in my hometown (I left Rome in 2007 to move to Ireland)!

I was super happy to present a talk called “The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing” (OMG how difficult it was to speak in English in front of my Italian friends…).

The talk covered my 5 years of content marketing, and how I’ve seen it all while creating content on my WordPress website: during the first 2 years I wasted time and energy to write blogs no one would read. Then I found my inspiration, my path, my content strategy – and in the last 3 years website traffic has risen from 0 to 15,000+ users (and still growing) per week. Now my blog is my only source of sales leads.

I first and foremost described what mistakes (sins) I made. What about saving 2 years of your life?

Then I listed the “10 Commandments of Content Marketing” – 10 simple tips you can take away to increase your website traffic and focus on the only purpose of content marketing: teaching.

In the final part of the talk, I recommended a few WordPress plugins and email marketing strategies to implement the whole system. Continue reading WordPress: The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing (WC Rome 2017)

WooCommerce Customization Masterclass: WordCamp Dublin 2017 Slides & Video

I had the pleasure to co-organise the very first WordCamp Dublin this year. We welcomed 26 amazing speakers, 250 attendees, incredible sponsors and enjoyed a great venue and tasty food.

Just because organising, MCing, managing speakers and writing website content were not enough, I also decided to run a 45mins workshop titled “WooCommerce Customization Masterclass” and I have to say I received great feedback despite the lack of voice, sleep and energy (thank you)!

I spoke briefly about WooCommerce customization, my WooCommerce visual hook guides, the difference between snippets and plugins and finally demoed a few snippets to add, remove and move WooCommerce content to/from the Single Product Page.

Continue reading WooCommerce Customization Masterclass: WordCamp Dublin 2017 Slides & Video

Storefront Theme Extensions – The Complete List

The WooCommerce Storefront theme is quite basic, so sooner or later you’ll need to customize it to your needs. For this reason, I’ve written a thorough list of plugins you can install to immediately get that functionality that you wanted.

WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WooCommerce.com is dropping its 50% extension renewals, and moving to a 100% renewal business model.

I found this out at WCEU 2017 and then via WP Tavern. Unfortunately, this announcement is not on WooCommerce blog, on its social media channels or even Automattic.

And yes, this is retroactive – we are now all paying 100% renewals. So, let’s see what I think about this “still not official” news. Continue reading WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WordCamp EU Paris 2017: My 5-minutes Opinion

I’m just back at my desk, after 4 amazing days in Paris for WordCamp Europe 2017! To make it easier on you, I’m now going to tell you my opinion without spending too much time.

Reading time: 5 minutes! Continue reading WordCamp EU Paris 2017: My 5-minutes Opinion

WordPress: Top 20 “Customizer” Frameworks

WordPress Customizer allows users to tweak their website and let them see a live preview of the changes. It uses the WordPress Customize API introduced in WordPress 3.4. You can easily access the WordPress Customizer interface from Dashboard -> Appearance -> Customize.

Customizing WordPress themes for end users was starting to become a nightmare. There was no unified approach to customizing a theme. Each developer chose what they were comfortable with.

WordPress contributors wanted to introduce a default editing experience. So, on 2015, April 22 it was made mandatory to all WordPress.org themes to use Theme Customize API for theme options.

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Working for Yourself

I’ve been working online while travelling throughout South America for almost 3 months so far and I’ve had a lot of time to think about solopreneurship. After 5+ years as a sole trader, it’s now the right time to write my thoughts. I really hope to give you at least one idea, one tip you can take away.

I would love if you could spend some time to think about it, and leave your comment below to tell me what your thoughts are.

WooCommerce: “uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize” Error

You may have seen this error at least once, if you have used WordPress. When installing a theme, plugin or uploading a image or file, you may find this dreaded message on your screen.

Well, it has nothing to do with themes or plugins. The issue is with your server settings which limit the maximum size for uploaded files.

It’s a common error and it can be easily fixed. This error message is an indication of that the file you are trying to upload is larger than your web host allows (WordPress default file upload size is 2 MB).