WordPress: 11 Things to Consider When Selecting a Theme

With seemingly thousands of Free and Premium WordPress themes out there, it can be tricky to pick the right WordPress theme for your business.

While launching a website seems easy, hardest part is finding a theme that meets your content requirement. There is not a single WordPress theme that would meet all the needs of all website owners. Every theme is built for a specific purpose and has its own strengths and weaknesses. Your job is to find the theme that meets your business’s needs.

While there are themes that do it all, they tend to be heavy and bloated because they are designed to meet the requirements of a wide range of website owners. In other words, they do everything but specialize in nothing.

Choosing these resource-consuming and feature-heavy WordPress themes is like getting operated on by a surgeon who has nothing but a Swiss army knife to perform all surgical tasks.

Finding the right WordPress theme requires more than just picking a theme based on look. In this article, we will provide some tips on what to look out for when choosing a WordPress theme. We will also recommend some free tools to help you check a theme’s credibility.

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Storefront Theme Visual Hook Guide

Here’s a visual hook guide for Storefront Theme by WooCommerce.

This visual guide belongs to my “Visual Hook Guide Series“, that I’ve put together so that you can find WooCommerce hooks quickly and easily by seeing their actual locations. Also, you can copy & paste in seconds and speed up your customization time.

Let me know in the comments what you think about this resource! Enjoy!

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WordPress: 15+ Best Premium Portfolio Themes

These WordPress Portfolio Themes are recommended for photographers, graphic designers, web designers, artists and whoever has something cool to show on a website!

If you didn’t know, a portfolio website is an essential tool that should be able to generate more business and increase your personal brand awareness. There is no doubt that TODAY, a portfolio website is definitely more important than a CV, no matter what creative industry you work in.

Portfolio websites (and therefore themes) usually have a striking image-based and categorized portfolio section, from where each project can be accessed and studied. Besides, huge importance is given to the “about me” page, where the artist should be able to display her skills, abilities, photo and social media feeds. They should also focus on the most important call to action: “contact us”.

Well, we hope you like our collection of WordPress Portfolio themes. Enjoy 🙂

 

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WordPress: 10+ Best Premium Recipe Themes

If you have a passion for cooking and want to showcase your recipes (or even turn your hobby into a profitable business!), here are 15+ WordPress Professional Themes you should take a look at.

Whether you plan to build traffic to your recipe blog, set up a membership-only website or even sell your own creations, a ready-made WordPress theme might help you go live fast and concentrate on what you can do best: cooking awesome stuff!

Here’s my selection of recipe themes – look at their demos and see if any of them fits your purpose. Remember, it’s a little investment as opposed to getting custom website development – start small and easy and once you start monetizing you will have more time to grow and add sections to your website 🙂  Continue reading WordPress: 10+ Best Premium Recipe Themes

WordPress: 10 Free Themes you Can Really Use!

Sometimes it’s easier (and cheaper) than you think. WordPress Theme Development companies do offer some of their themes for free to build their reputation (and increase their premium sales of course).

Here’s a collection of Free Themes for WordPress that you just can’t miss. From portfolio websites to furniture sales, from business to personal brochures, you’ve got a wide choice. Download for free, install, set up quickly and go live with $0…

Following themes are completely free of charge, as well as documentation and support. When you encounter the term “Lite” or “Light”, it might be a freemium model i.e. the theme is free but if you upgrade to premium you can get extra features.

Enjoy, and if you can leave a comment below 🙂 Continue reading WordPress: 10 Free Themes you Can Really Use!

WooCommerce: Search Products By SKU

The frontend WooCommerce product search, for some reason, doesn’t work for SKU numbers. If it does, then your theme developers were smart enough to include this in their code, because this is a big problem especially for B2B stores.

Today, we’ll study how to alter the product search query, as well as the wc_get_product_id_by_sku() function, which is super helpful to determine the product ID for a given SKU. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: How to Make Your Store More Mobile-Friendly

In April 2015, Google released an algorithm update that favored mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile oriented search results. This algorithm was named “Mobilegeddon”, and it gave leverage to those sites that display perfectly on smartphones and other mobile devices. 

Clearly, having a mobile-friendly website not only makes it easier to engage and convert mobile using customers, but also paves the way for better ranking and visibility on search engines.

While it is good practice to get a WooCommerce mobile app for your store, it is also important to optimize your website and make it more mobile-friendly.

We will first discover the benefits of making your website more mobile-friendly, and then learn the tips and tricks to optimize it for small devices.

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WooCommerce: How to Automate Upsells and Discounts?

We all want to grow our WooCommerce store sales but creating offers for thousands of products is a nightmare.

What if I said you can grow sales on autopilot and without pouring sweat and money into your business?

This post covers how you can set up automated WooCommerce upsells, discounts, order bumps and other offers – so that you can focus on other aspects of your business while your website does its magic.

Select from ready-made offers, run them on your sites, count your sales, relax.

Without further delays, let’s get started.

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WooCommerce: Donation / Fundraising Plugins

Are you looking for ways to raise funds for a charity event or a non-profit organization? There are a multitude number of ways to go about it.

You can host an exclusive or virtual fundraising event, run email campaigns to collect funds, or even encourage friends and families to contribute their parts to the fund. However, these ways require a lot of legwork, including finding a place to host fundraising events, inviting guests, or hiring an email strategist to run marketing campaigns – which is time-consuming and expensive. 

The solution? Collecting online donations via WordPress or WooCommerce plugins to effectively raise funds for special causes, such as charities, non-profits, or relief funds. 

This article shares the best, easy-to-use, affordable WooCommerce fundraising and donations plugins you can use. Let’s get started!

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WooCommerce: How to Set Up a Multi Vendor / Marketplace Website

Are you looking to build a marketplace where multiple vendors advertise and sell their own products?

Would you like to build the next eBay, or perhaps Etsy, while earning commissions or fees for each vendor or marketplace transaction?

In this article we’ll take a look at the main features, challenges and advantages of building a multivendor platform based on WooCommerce. 

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WooCommerce + Elementor: Let’s Build Cool Stuff

Do you want to tweak and design your WordPress website without hiring a developer? Good news: it’s completely possible with WordPress page builder plugins. 

A WordPress page builder plugin comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to create beautiful custom pages and websites. Thus, regardless of your skillset or technical know-how, page builder plugins make designing your ideal website a breeze without writing a single line of code. 

Now, if you’re wondering which WordPress page builder plugin you should consider, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll review one of the most popular options: Elementor, which is considered the gold standard. Elementor is the second most-installed WordPress plugin with 2 million active installations – used by around 15.9% of WordPress websites

We’ll start with Elementor’s brief overview and further review the plugin’s interface, features, and pricing to help you determine whether it’s the right choice for your site. Let’s go!  

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WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better?

Do you intend to create an online store? Cannot pick between self-hosted WooCommerce and cloud-powered BigCommerce? Don’t worry, you are not on your own. 

The only way to truly determine which of these two eCommerce solutions is more suitable, is to compare them side by side – we will take a look at their features, price, convenience of use, cost, support, security, customization, and many other factors.

In this article, we’ll help you determine which ecommerce solution more appropriate for your business requirements. Self-hosted or cloud? Subscription or free in theory? Customization or integrations? Huge or small community? There are lots of questions you may have.

So, are you ready for the battle of WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce? Let’s get started.

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WooCommerce: How to Send Newsletters to Your Customers

Sending emails (newsletters, broadcasts or similar) to customers is an integral part of a WooCommerce marketing strategy. Email marketing is an outstanding tool that allows you to connect with your customers, keep them informed about your products, services, or discounts, get them to return to your site, and drive new sales. 

Unlike other popular channels, like social media – emails provide a personal touch and let you reach your target consumers directly in their inboxes. Statistics suggest that while 87% of B2B marketers leverage email as a distribution channel – 79% of B2C marketers use emails to promote their new blog posts and articles. 

And one such critical email marketing solution is email newsletters. They are extremely beneficial to stay in touch and build trustworthy relationships with existing and potential customers. 

So, if you’re looking for solutions to send automated newsletters to your WooCommerce customers – you’re at the right place. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of actually sending newsletters. 

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WooCommerce: Switch Shop Columns Responsively

Ok, I may need an English language refresher… But the point I was trying to make was that yes, there is a way to switch the number of columns in the WooCommerce shop page, however that’s static.

What if I wanted to show 5 columns of products on large desktops, 4 columns on desktops, 3 on tablets and 2 on smaller devices? Well, this “dynamic” behavior is – this time around – managed by CSS. Let’s see how it’s done!

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WooCommerce: 10 Crucial Issues That Should Be Fixed Right Now

I just spent the last 3 days in Porto with another 2,300 WordPressers at the first in-person WordCamp Europe since Berlin 2019. I had a blast, held a nice (yet long) workshop, spoke to many, but got tired too soon.

Later on, I realized that that tiredness was something more serious – in fact I tested positive against COVID for the first time in my life, and I’m now in self-isolation hoping it won’t last long… Another 7 days without my kid – send help!

Anyhow, what really struck me at WCEU 2022, and based on various chats and some data that I’ll share below, is that the WooCommerce ecosystem is in trouble.

A nicer way to put that? WooCommerce is not moving forward as fast as it should, and unless some key issues are addressed right now, in a few years time we all may pay the consequences.

Please note, this is not a rant. It’s a proper analysis, full of actionable information.

@ WooCommerce team - if you're reading this - my plan is to give you constructive feedback and tell you what the community (really) thinks, needs and wants, so that you can get a better picture of the current situation. I know you've already started working on this, so this is just a recap/reminder and a way to get the whole community realigned. 

In this post, I will share my worries, my fears, the current WooCommerce issues, some data I collected at WCEU 2022 and then a list of actionable solutions that may be implemented in order to clear the backlog and get back on track – asap. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: 10 Most Popular Free Plugins

WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that allows you to launch your online business, build high-functionality online stores for your clients, or take your brick-and-mortar store online.  

Powering over 28.19% of all online stores, WooCommerce’s versatility and open-source nature allow businesses to build their dream store, add unlimited products and consumers, take orders, and increase sales.

The core WooCommerce plugin holds 68% of the usage distribution – the highest on the internet. However, despite its popularity, the official WooCommerce plugin lacks several features you might need for your eCommerce store. But to make up for that, it offers several plugins that allow you to enhance your store’s functionality and improve customer experience. 

But choosing from over 4228 WooCommerce plugins from WordPress.org can get overwhelming. So, to make your job easier, we’ve hand-picked the best free WooCommerce plugins you can use on your store to take it to the next level. Let’s dive in!

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WooCommerce: Why Use A Product Configurator Instead of Variations

One of the biggest marketing trends in recent years is the increasing shift towards delivering customized and personalized product experiences to customers. 

Customers are increasingly looking for online and eCommerce stores that provide order customization options for gifting purposes and the ability to add their personal and unique touch to their orders. While 90% of the U.S. customers find the idea of personalization appealing – impersonal shopping experiences frustrate 71% of customers

Thus, as a WooCommerce store owner – it’s important to strive and meet the increasing consumer demands to prevent dissatisfaction, improve their shopping experiences and increase the overall sales.  

This article will see some easy yet impactful ways to deliver a personalized customer experience and order customization. But first, let’s see how it can benefit your WooCommerce store. 

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WooCommerce: Top Product Filter Plugins For Your Store

As your WooCommerce store grows – so do its product variants. On average, a WooCommerce store owns hundreds of inventory items and product variants for sale. 

While your goal might be to offer maximum product options to your visitors, with such a wide range of product variations – it can get challenging for your customers to find the exact product they’re looking for. 

This is where product filters come into play. Statista suggests that 61% of buyers consider the ease of finding products the most important aspect of an online shopping experience.  

No one has time to browse through the long product listings as it’s easier for customers to switch to another store that facilitates product discovery. Thus, product filter options enable your customers to browse through products of their preferences – positively impacting the user experience and increasing the chances of sales. 

This article shares the top product filter solutions for your WooCommerce store. But first, let’s learn more about their benefits and how this simple option can affect your store’s bottom line. 

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