Posts for wordpress

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First Fridays – Plugin Edition

Noelle Festa | January 7, 2017

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January 2017 – WPtouch Mobile

First of all, Happy New Year everyone! We hope 2017 is getting off to a great start. To kick-off our first, First Fridays of 2017 we want to share a plugin that is useful for anyone wanting to be more mobile friendly… WPtouch Mobile.

This WordPress plugin provides you with a mobile friendly theme automatically. It is also customizable allowing you to make adjustments to the look and feel of your website on a mobile device. The best part about this all, you don’t have to change any code on your website’s desktop theme for this plugin to work! It’s awesome!

Require something a little more robust? You can always look into the different packages which include WPtouch Pro, business, developer and enterprise. Each one offers a little something extra, like advanced font controls and premium support.

If your website isn’t already mobile friendly, you should definitely consider installing this plugin.

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Improve Functionality of your Favorite WordPress Plugins with searchIQ

Rahul Arora | December 13, 2016

We’re proud of our search plugin! Not only are the features incredibly useful for publishers and site builders, but it also integrates nicely with other popular WordPress plugins. In most cases it makes sense to use searchIQ with these plugins, as they compliment one another. To explain what we mean we’ve decided to share some plugins we think work great with searchIQ.

bbPress

bbPress is a WordPress plugin that converts your blogging platform into a fully featured forum application. Forums are popular as they allow like-minded people to engage in a focused discussion. Most forum software is slow and hard to manage, where as bbPress focuses on speed, ease of use and integration. A new bbPress forum can easily be set up and once sub-forums and categories are added, users can start posting topics.

Forum applications by nature are search oriented, so implementing a search plugin along with bbPress is an added advantage. Using searchIQ with bbPress enhances your user experience. For example, a forum will have various sub-forums, categories and each category will have several topics making it essential for a website admin to integrate search that will display desired content. searchIQ will help the user to search on topics of interest and will help them get to that content quickly, allowing them to participate in the discussion rather than having to browse across hundreds of threads.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress sites. It is a powerful and extendable ecommerce solution with endless flexibility and access to hundreds of extensions providing complete control to the admin. WooCommerce offers various features for an online marketplace, from product to shipping. Premium extensions can also be used to offer bookings, memberships and subscriptions. You can list a product with various variations (size, color etc.), style your store, offer promo and coupons, and integrate payment gateway with shipping.

There are many benefits to using searchIQ with WooCommerce. Apart from title, body content, tags and categories, searchIQ has been designed to index product attributes, custom fields, system fields, post excerpts and taxonomies as well. Even if you have hundreds of products, searchIQ will display the desired items immediately based on the keyword(s) searched. The autocomplete feature allows users to view the most relevant products in accordance to the search term(s). This is important because you want to convert someone from a visitor to a customer as soon as possible. Get site visitors to what they are looking for fast and don’t leave them searching for long periods of time and risk losing them to another website.

Events Manager

Events Manager is a powerful and full-featured event registration plugin for WordPress. It supports almost all the features of event registration management including recurring events, calendar, location, Google map integration, booking management and more.

The event registration process is simple and the option to create single day/recurring event registration is available. Features like approvals, rejections, export CVS, template tags and short codes are available to be used in your posts and pages. It also allows you to assign and view events by location, support event categories, event custom attributes, Google maps and various widgets for events.

The advanced functionality of searchIQ further enhances the capabilities of Events Manager. As the events/locations are custom post types, searchIQ makes it easier for users to search the desired event by title or location. Apart from these fields, events can also be searched with tags, categories, and custom attributes.

WP Frontpage News

WP Frontpage News is a plugin to display latest posts from a category, page or tags. This awesome news plugin gives you the ability to display content in a dynamic way and it’s easy to navigate. This plugin was built to automatically format your content in a specified way and display more information in a limited space, which will help to catch the eye of more users and prevent a break in the layout.

A news website can’t ignore the fact that it needs efficient search functionality. searchIQ offers advanced features to give users a unique way to search news content. Synonym aliasing and relevance refinement are just a few of searchIQ’s features that would help to make WP Frontpage News content more searchable. And we can’t forget to mention real time indexing! Newsworthy stories come about at the drop of a hat, so with our real-time indexing all new posts are catalogued immediately, allowing visitors to search new articles right away.

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First Fridays – Plugin Edition

Noelle Festa | December 1, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-08-05 at 2.17.38 PM

December 2016 – BuddyPress

This December we want to feature BuddyPress! Especially around the holidays we love the idea of bringing people and communities together, and to know that BuddyPress does just that for WordPress is what we really enjoy about it.

With BuddyPress you can make profiles, groups and niche communities. You can pose questions and create unique forums where people can collaborate and share ideas. It’s a fantastic way to incorporate communication on your website or blog. If you are looking to add a social element to your website give BuddyPress a try!

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First Fridays – Plugin Edition

Noelle Festa | November 4, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-08-05 at 2.17.38 PMNovember 2016 – WP Smush 

This month we are sharing WP Smush, another one of our favorites. This plugin helps “smush” your images. No no, not in a bad – distorted image – kind of way. WP Smush works to compress your images, which in turn helps to optimize your site and increase your page speed. It basically does all the work for you.

Don’t compromise your site, you can now have both a fast website and beautiful images with WP Smush!

 

 

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4 Advanced Ways to Reduce the Bounce Rate of a Website

Rahul Arora | October 24, 2016

Does your high traffic website lack conversion? Are you struggling to keep your website visitors from straying to other sites? Do you worry your website visitors are leaving without even browsing the content, resulting in high bounce rate?

Bounce rate is one of the most powerful metrics used to measure the quality of your website content or landing page. It indicates whether or not visitors are hanging around or bouncing back from the landing page. If visitors bounce, it shows either the web page content is not relevant or the page is not user friendly.

A high bounce rate can be alarming and may suggest that visitors are not engaging with content, or your call-to-action is not easily found or converting into leads. It’s a clear signal that your site content and user experience need some help.

Here are 4 recommendations to help reduce the bounce rate of your website:

UI / UX

Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate of a Website

The first deciding factor for a visitor to stay or leave is the design. Good UI engages visitors and evokes a curiosity to continue exploring a site. Great UI combined with great UX is a huge plus. You want visitors to find what they are looking for easily and you want the site navigation to be as simple as possible. Don’t frustrate users and complicate their journey. Remember to always keep the user in mind when thinking about your site’s UI and UX, we even recommend getting some friends or colleagues to test out a website and provide feedback before going live. It’s always helpful to have a second set of eyes to test out your site.

Site Search

Another way to keep your visitors browsing longer is search functionality. Your website needs to have a search bar to help users get to what they are looking for. You don’t want to lose customers because you don’t offer search. Make sure to keep your search results accurate and relevant to help users find desired content easily and quickly.

Landing Page

The landing page holds an important role in deciding whether your visitors will stay or leave. Keep your content relevant and have a compelling call-to-action. Your landing page shouldn’t mislead the visitors to read irrelevant content.

Avoid Popups

Popups can be obtrusive and annoying, as they disrupt the reader and could potentially cause someone to leave. They can also be very distracting and may increase your bounce rate. Avoiding irrelevant and excessive use of popups builds the reputation of your site and encourages visitors to stay longer.

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