Ananda Projapati | Torque All the Word that's fit to Press Fri, 25 Dec 2020 19:25:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 10 Plugins to Help Service Businesses Capture and Nurture Leads in 2020 https://torquemag.io/2020/01/10-plugins-to-help-service-businesses-capture-and-nurture-leads-in-2020/ https://torquemag.io/2020/01/10-plugins-to-help-service-businesses-capture-and-nurture-leads-in-2020/#comments Fri, 03 Jan 2020 16:12:00 +0000 https://torquemag.io/?p=88680 Many marketers agree that lead generation is a major struggle Lead capture and nurture plugins can take a lot of the stress away while helping your business generate more customers. These plugins are quick and convenient tools that integrate directly into your WordPress website. They give you the ability to create opt-in forms, segment subscribers, capture users before they exit, push data to your CRM, follow up with leads over time, and more. Keep reading if you’d like to learn about the top 10 lead management plugins available today for WordPress. 1. vCita There’s no shortage of things you need […]

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Many marketers agree that lead generation is a major struggle

Lead capture and nurture plugins can take a lot of the stress away while helping your business generate more customers.

These plugins are quick and convenient tools that integrate directly into your WordPress website. They give you the ability to create opt-in forms, segment subscribers, capture users before they exit, push data to your CRM, follow up with leads over time, and more.

Keep reading if you’d like to learn about the top 10 lead management plugins available today for WordPress.

1. vCita

There’s no shortage of things you need to do when managing sales flows for your business. vCita takes care of all of them at once. 

Most importantly, their scheduling feature allows customers to schedule meetings and appointments directly through your website on any device. 

But vCita offers many more features that make it different from other appointment schedulers. The personalized client portal interface conveniently allows users to schedule, reschedule, or cancel appointments on the fly. You can also use it as the home base for all conversations with leads and clients. Additionally, payments can be made through the scheduling portal. 

This all-in-one platform, which also offers a few different WordPress plugins, offers a built-in CRM to contact and manage leads in one location. Many plugins don’t offer these capabilities, forcing you to install several plugins to achieve the same result.

Looking to capture more leads from your Facebook Page and Google My Business listing? vCita’s tools allow you to add scheduling capabilities there, or on a vCita-hosted landing page, as well. They offer a mobile app to manage your leads on the go, too. 

Additionally, vCita enables you to follow up with your leads using email or SMS, which is more important than ever seeing as everyone is tied to their smartphones these days. Overall, they give you all of the necessary tools to capture leads and nurture them into high-quality customers. 

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp, as their name suggests, specializes in email marketing services to help you generate and cultivate relationships with more leads. 

Their WordPress plugin enables you to implement embed, popups, and scrolling opt-in forms to your website to collect prospect’s information. These subscribers can then be funneled into automated or custom campaigns.

Professional and optimized themes help you convert for any goal, such as driving sales, pushing traffic to a website, or simply sharing a story.

Do you know what the best part about Mailchimp is? Its free version is far more powerful than others. You can use their software for absolutely no charge until 1,000 contacts. This means you’re able to test the platform to ensure it’s right for your needs.

3. OptinMonster

OptinMonster offers some of the most sophisticated technology when it comes to lead generation. This includes their trademarked exit intent triggers, which help you capture users right as they’re about to leave your website.

How many times have you had users slip through the cracks? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Use custom triggers like scroll percentage, two-step initiation, time control, and more to perfectly optimize your lead capture CTAs down to a science. 

Furthermore, try out their content upgrade feature that allows you to offer downloadable content to audience members while they’re reading your blog. Brian Dean found that this type of lead capture converts 785% better than what he had been doing prior.

Better yet, use OptinMonster’s in-depth analytics to discover information that will improve the performance of your campaigns. 

For example, you can analyze the click-through rate, views, and conversions of your offers to determine how to improve them.

4. Tawk.To Live Chat

Studies say that 79% of customers prefer live chat because it allows them to instantly engage with a sales rep. That’s why the Tawk.To live chat plugin for WordPress is a priceless tool to improve communication and relationship building.

This app instantly integrates a live chat system into your website that you can manage through your WordPress dashboard, Tawk.To account, or mobile app. 

Messages can be completely automated and integrated with other tools to create a lead gen system that requires little more than the push of a button to execute. Track conversations and their analytics to improve future engagement while you’re at it.

5. WPForms

WPForms is a free plugin that can be used to integrate custom forms on your WordPress website. There are also paid plans available that increase the functionality including drip campaigns, spam protection, and geolocation-based personalization triggers. 

Whether you wish to capture the emails of users for retargeting, selling a product, or promoting content, there’s no limit to what you can do with this plugin. 

Their drag-and-drop system allows you to create beautiful and effective forms in minutes, as well. There’s no need to have high-level design or programming skills when it’s all done for you with WPForms.

6. Constant Contact

If you’re interested in collecting feedback from users to improve your WordPress website or growing an email list, Constant Contact is a worthy investment. 

This lead generation plugin will add emails you collect directly to a chosen Constant Contact list, and you can sign up for a free trial directly through the plugin.

Forms can be customized to seamlessly align with your website’s theme, and they’re mobile responsive out of the box. They can also be customized to only collect specific data such as a lead’s first name and email address. 

7. Sumo

Available for WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and Google Tag Manager, Sumo is the easiest way to convert visitors into customers as an e-commerce company.

If there’s one thing you know about e-commerce, as well, it’s that abandonments are typical. That’s why Sumo features high-converting popup windows and takeovers that will help capture user’s information to help them return later.

Unlimited split testing empowers users to find winning combinations of creatives and copy, too. Use custom targeting afterward to display different bars towards segments for maximizing new subscriptions.

8. Hollerbox

Hollerbox has one focus: banners, content upgrades, and popups that promote discounts, offers, and new products. They are the definition of a simple but effective plugin that does what you need if you aren’t looking for CRM and complex features.

You can integrate forms with Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and other tools to automatically build lists on other platforms. Likewise, forms can be integrated with lead magnets and upgraded content to provide further value while increasing how many opt-ins you drive.

Don’t forget to enable their sales notifications feature to act as social proof displaying recent customer purchases. 

This is the perfect plugin for minimalist e-commerce businesses.

9. Bloom

Bloom is a lead gen plugin for WordPress that contains over 100 professional and optimized templates that businesses can use to drive better engagement.

There are six different display types to take advantage of, including pop-ups, fly-ins, in-line popups, embeds, and more. This gives users a variety of how they reach and interact with prospects.

Here’s what their popups look like, for example:

Lastly, use their various triggers to display your most relevant form at the precise time and for testing different strategies. These include scroll percentage, after someone leaves a comment, or following a purchase. 

10. Thriveleads

Thriveleads integrates with more than 19 tools to speed up and optimize your email building processes. Advanced A/B split testing tool helps you find the highest converting messages and display types, as well.

Their unique SmartLinks feature is one of the most helpful tools you’ll gain access to. It enables you to present a different offer and message for segments. Since the behaviors between current subscribers and a brand new visitor are very different, this is extremely useful for maximizing new sign-ups.

You simply create a new SmartLink with the following information:

  1. Where you’d like to forward subscribers.
  2. Which type of users you wish to target.
  3. The behavior type of the form such as hiding it from existing subscribers.
  4. The duration of the SmartLink.

Once you’ve done this, ThriveLeads will take care of the rest and you can watch the new signups roll in.

Wrapping up

Lead generation is easily one of the most important parts of growing any business. Likewise, it’s the most difficult.

Take the stress off of your shoulders by using a lead gen plugin like the ten we looked at today. 

They will enable you to add optimized forms, promote lead magnets, split test creatives, analyze reports, and follow up with your prospects – all of which help to improve conversions and funnel performance.

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6 Tips From Experts on Optimizing Websites for Google’s Lighthouse 3.0 Speed Tests https://torquemag.io/2019/07/6-tips-on-optimizing-websites-for-googles-lighthouse-3-0-speed-tests/ https://torquemag.io/2019/07/6-tips-on-optimizing-websites-for-googles-lighthouse-3-0-speed-tests/#comments Wed, 24 Jul 2019 15:57:22 +0000 https://torquemag.io/?p=87347 So much SEO advice focuses on aspects of optimization around content strategy, outreach, and competitor tracking. But even the best backlinks can’t replace a fast and easy-to-use website. Even though site speed has been considered a ranking factor for nearly a decade, the technical side of SEO tends to get ignored. While WordPress does have some features that make SEO easier, it also has several aspects of it that need adjustment for each site. And depending on your setup, you could be sabotaging your own site load speeds. Indeed, the content management system you use is only the beginning of […]

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So much SEO advice focuses on aspects of optimization around content strategy, outreach, and competitor tracking. But even the best backlinks can’t replace a fast and easy-to-use website. Even though site speed has been considered a ranking factor for nearly a decade, the technical side of SEO tends to get ignored.

While WordPress does have some features that make SEO easier, it also has several aspects of it that need adjustment for each site. And depending on your setup, you could be sabotaging your own site load speeds. Indeed, the content management system you use is only the beginning of the crucial decisions you need to make to optimize your website for search rankings.

Thankfully, Google has created resources to help you with these decisions.

Since it’s their main goal to keep clicking through the search engine, it’s in Google’s best interest for the sites they list on page one to be fast and friendly for users, regardless of what device they’re using or where they’re browsing.

Because of this, Google’s built lots of tools to help us optimize things, like PageSpeed Insights and Chrome DevTools. But as different measurement tools have been built in order to focus on different aspects of speed optimization, they sometimes gave conflicting or inconsistent information. This left site owners, designers, developers, and marketers with gaps in their knowledge and a lack of actionable insights.

At least, that was true until the release of Lighthouse 3.0, most recently updated this past May. With the latest Lighthouse rollouts, it’s easier to identify the most burning ways you have to improve your site speed, and therefore your search positioning.

Here’s how a few top experts recommend optimizing websites for Lighthouse 3.0.

Know Your Needs and Stick to Them

One of the most common killers of your website’s speed is bloating it with unnecessary features. Without a strategic approach to implementing them, you can easily slow down your site without adding any benefits in exchange. 

To prevent this, here’s what Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva, recommends: 

“When evaluating potential website features to implement, here are the four questions you should be asking. First, what exactly are we trying to solve for? This should be a hard number, such as driving an increase in monthly email newsletter signups. Next, why now? Is this even a real priority right now? For example, why do you need email newsletter signups now? You may need more website traffic first, before even making the case for more email newsletter signups.

Three, why can’t you use existing solutions? For example, you may already have a component in your tech stack that can execute what you’re trying to solve for, but you probably haven’t exhausted all your options. 

And finally, what are the risks or tradeoffs involved, and what’s the impact? This is precisely where site speed comes into play. Every time you add weight to your load, site speed is affected. You should ask if this is absolutely necessary, and if so, how can you deploy the technology in a way that won’t harm load times too much. An example of this would be deploying scripts via Google Tag Manager, rather than hardcoded.”

Choose Themes With Clean Code

If you go through the above questions for your website and confirm you indeed need to add a tool or plugin, realize that this is like adding a technology partner to your business. Research and vet them appropriately.

Even if you have been using the same theme for several years, if you really want to get serious about optimizing for speed, you might be better off starting fresh with a different one and only adding plugins and customizing CSS once that’s in place. Otherwise, you’ll just be doing patchwork on top of patchwork.

Natasha Lane recommends that you tackle your theme selection process extremely carefully since this will determine the code that your site needs to function and render properly. 

On the Devrix blog, Lane explains:

“A WordPress theme is more than a splash of color, and plugins are more than just an added bit of functionality. Neither of them affects just a single isolated part of your website, and as such, there is no room for errors in their coding.”

Optimize Heavy Elements

Other than themes and plugins, another common site speed problem is heavy media elements like images, gifs, and videos. While multimedia can improve the overall site experience when done right, the files and their hosting solutions need to be optimized carefully. You’d do well to use a third-party video host like Wistia, for example, and a CDN for your image files.

And be sure to either compress those visuals well before uploading them to WordPress, use a WordPress plugin to optimize them on upload, or host them externally and embed the content as needed.

Portent’s Ian Lurie recommends that you use a tool named Squoosh, or he might need to hound you with follow-up reminders:

“Compress your images. Don’t roll your eyes at me. I’ve looked at your site. Do it. Try Squoosh. The name alone makes it worth it. 

Use Lazy Loading

Another way to optimize images and heavy elements is to take advantage of lazy loading. 

Duda CEO Itai Sadan explains:

“Lazy loading is important because it prioritizes content, specifically images, that are at the top of a page when a visitor first accesses a web page. As a user scrolls down the page, additional site elements will load. 

We’ve tested several sites that have implemented lazy loading and saw an average of a 10 point bump in Lighthouse score. 

The reason this is so important for Lighthouse is, Google is trying to offer a real-world, comprehensive view of how a website performs and lazy loading is a positive factor in this equation. Most other website speed checkers just look at a site’s total download size and time to load.”

Let Plugins Handle Important Functions

Yes, plugins can weigh your site down, but some can also make it easier to implement changes that help with speed.

Some of the features worth turning to third-parties for are the most important ones. This is because it can be easier to turn to a trusted third-party than for developers to do it themselves. 

Cybersecurity plugins can make sure that your hosting isn’t receiving too many queries from malicious bots, while cache management plugins can keep the most commonly accessed visuals in your host’s RAM for faster access.

Albacross Marketing Specialist Oksana Chyketa explains:

“Even though WordPress comes with thousands of free and useful plugins, there is no need to install all of them. Choose the basic ones, such as for SEO, security, and cache, and try to avoid those that you can successfully do without.

Plugins are a good thing, but many plug-ins can negatively affect your website’s performance, such as reducing its speed.”

Remove Unused CSS

Finally, minifying your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files is one of the most commonly cited ways to shorten load times. 

But as Nick Braithwaite, the founder ChooseWP, explains, minifying CSS is just the tip of the iceberg:

“You’ve minified your CSS and it’s not too big! But before you put your project live, it’s worth asking how many of those CSS rules are actually being used?

At the easier end of the spectrum, let’s say you’re using a CSS framework like Bootstrap for your new site, but you’re only really using the buttons and grid. In this case, using the @import rule, you can select which parts of Boostrap you need

CSS bloat happens a lot with WordPress themes, as they need to account for a number of different layouts. To avoid this, use a lighter theme or one that comes with dependency management capabilities. Understrap is a good example and one to which you can apply the @import rules mentioned above. 

Once the easy wins are out of the way, there are tools out there that can go through your CSS on build and see if there are any unused rules, if you’re using the NPM JavaScript package manager, then UnCSS is a neat little tool for this.”

Does Your Site Make Lighthouse Happy?

If you’ve never optimized for site speed before, your first results from a Lighthouse audit might be disappointing. But following the above advice from experts who know WordPress inside and out should get you closer to the grade you want.

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How to Become a More Customer-Centric Agency in 2019 https://torquemag.io/2019/04/how-to-become-a-more-customer-centric-agency-in-2019/ Thu, 25 Apr 2019 21:06:00 +0000 https://torquemag.io/?p=86914 Offering great customer experience has been a focal point for companies for a long time, but today it’s all about being customer-centric. It’s a subtle shift in emphasis, but it needs to encompass your entire business – from the way you find prospects, to how you onboard clients, to the way you deliver mockups and launch products, to your project recap surveys. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, famously left one chair empty at every meeting for “the customer,” the most important member of the corporation. Now, each meeting is attended by an employee who has been trained to play the […]

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Offering great customer experience has been a focal point for companies for a long time, but today it’s all about being customer-centric.

It’s a subtle shift in emphasis, but it needs to encompass your entire business – from the way you find prospects, to how you onboard clients, to the way you deliver mockups and launch products, to your project recap surveys.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, famously left one chair empty at every meeting for “the customer,” the most important member of the corporation. Now, each meeting is attended by an employee who has been trained to play the part of the customer, called a Customer Experience Bar Raiser.

Customer-centricity is about building your business around ensuring a positive customer experience. It’s no longer left as the purview of your account managers alone. Instead, it’s woven into the fabric your entire business and all of its processes.

In 2016, a Gallup poll noted that 71% of B2B customers would switch vendors for better customer experience and that higher customer engagements drive revenues 50% higher. Some 59% of individuals already feel that companies have lost touch with the human side of customer experience.

And Forrester research has found that 95% of customer-centric companies reported that their customers are satisfied, as opposed to only 46% of non-customer-centric organizations.

How to be more customer-centric

Transforming into a customer-centric agency requires a complete culture overhaul to generate a customer-centric focus in every department and on every level. Here are three steps to start making your agency more customer-centric in 2019.

1. Increase self-service options

Clients appreciate feeling in control, and one of the best approaches is through a secure customer portal.

One key way to optimize the customer experience is by enabling clients to troubleshoot issues themselves before submitting a request – or to view information about project statuses through a dedicated web presence. Client Portal, an aptly-named WordPress plugin, makes this easy to implement.

For a web design company, this could mean giving clients secure, limited access to certain areas of your website back end. Presenting real-time progress reports and important website metrics for immediate, round the clock customer access, instead of waiting for the client to make a request, can also be done smoothly with a secure client portal.

2. Listen better

Next, start to listen more closely to the client. For example, a web design and management agency might classify certain design requests as “minor issue”’ which don’t demand priority resolution. But for the client who’s handling hundreds of daily sales through the site, each “minor” issue can add up to several thousand dollars in lost sales. When your agency takes the client’s complaints seriously, the client feels better cared for and is willing to renew their contract.

In order to be able to offer this kind of response, you first need to create an environment where your client feels comfortable approaching you with feedback and complaints. Just like B2C companies, service agency organizations should offer as many channels of communication as possible.

Email and telephone support are good, while adding live chat and text is even better. If you want to go above and beyond, use a webinar platform. ClickMeeting, for example, allows agencies to hold regular virtual client meetings embedded in a dedicated client portal and synced to all stakeholders’ calendars. You’ll be able to strengthen your relationship with your client, understand their needs, and help the client to feel truly heard.

3. Make it personal

It might seem hard to believe, but data from Drift showed that 58% of companies don’t respond to inquiries from cold leads on their website. That’s an expression of neglect and disinterest that service agency customers won’t forgive in a hurry.

Web design agencies have many ways to personalize their offerings. If you’re providing management services as well as one-off designs, you could send a “happy anniversary” email each year to mark the date that you began your professional relationship, perhaps with a discount coupon for an add-on service.

You might want to send seasonal offers that are relevant for different types of clients too. For example, your retail clients might appreciate a template for a landing page for the winter shopping season, or high-end jewelry industry clients could use a discount on building Valentine’s Day landing pages for them.

When not to listen

It’s important to note that being customer-centric doesn’t mean giving up on your leadership position. You want to strike a careful balance between remaining proactive and innovative as well as becoming customer-led. Bear in mind that your customers might not know what they want.

As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Steve Jobs took a similar approach by pushing the iPad at a time when no customer had ever considered such an item.

By becoming customer-centric, you’ll be vigilantly tracking what your customers are asking for, and listening for their real needs beneath their words. It’s up to you to offer web designs that match their real needs as well as incorporating the features and styles they request.

Customer-centric business practices are good for every business

Although you might think that customer-centric business practices are mainly for B2C businesses, your web design business has a lot to gain from incorporating some of the same approaches.

By listening better, offering more control, and improving personalization, you can realign your business to focus on your customer without losing your authority or undermining your credibility as a B2B business.

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How to Improve Your WordPress Site Load Time (and Why You Should) https://torquemag.io/2018/01/improve-wordpress-site-load-time/ https://torquemag.io/2018/01/improve-wordpress-site-load-time/#comments Fri, 19 Jan 2018 20:30:17 +0000 https://torquemag.io/?p=83575 Simplicity of use has made WordPress the most popular CMS in the world. You can set up a beautiful-looking WordPress site by simply installing a theme, and achieve more complex features with the help of plugins. While this simplicity is a great advantage, if it isn’t used wisely, it can really work against you. A badly coded theme or too many plugins can slow down your site, and cause slow loading, a common problem for many WordPress users. So, in this article, you’ll learn what is potentially making your WordPress website slow and receive actionable tips for improving its load […]

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Simplicity of use has made WordPress the most popular CMS in the world. You can set up a beautiful-looking WordPress site by simply installing a theme, and achieve more complex features with the help of plugins.

While this simplicity is a great advantage, if it isn’t used wisely, it can really work against you. A badly coded theme or too many plugins can slow down your site, and cause slow loading, a common problem for many WordPress users.

So, in this article, you’ll learn what is potentially making your WordPress website slow and receive actionable tips for improving its load time.

But first, let’s see why everybody talks about website speed and why it’s so important.

Why speed is important for a website

In this fast-paced world, nobody likes waiting—especially your visitors. So, if your website takes a while to load, people might hit the back button. This increases your bounce rate and eventually, Google will penalize you by dropping your ranking.

Lower ranking means fewer visitors, less sales, lower revenues, and the list goes on.

How slow is your website and why?

There are a few online tools you can use to check your current website loading speed.

Here are three of them to consider:

Some of the most common reasons for slow loading time include:

  • Web hosting. A poorly configured web server can have an impact on your website speed.
  • External scripts. Too many external scripts from fonts, JS (JavaScript) libraries, and ads can hurt your website loading time.
  • Unoptimized images. Unoptimized images can make your website very slow.

How to improve load time

Now that you know the reasons why your website is slower than it could be, it’s time to take the steps necessary to improve your load time.

Optimize Hosting for Geo-location or Use a CDN

If you have a readership base hailing from one central location – then you’d want to find a host with a local data center, which will improve your site’s loading times in that area. To help you get started – HostingRaja has data centers around India, LCN is a UK web host with a great foothold in the British isle, and Amen.fr is a host with data centers around western Europe. Alternatively, if you have a global site – then you’d want to go the extra mile and invest in a CDN.

CDN (content delivery network) is a network of servers placed all around the world, and using this type of setup can help improve your website speed across the board for readers no matter where they are.

Basically, CDN’s store static elements like CSS (cascading style sheets), JS (JavaScript), and images of your website, so when a user tries to access your website, it fetches these things from the server closest to them. This improves their load time considerably.

Always use trusted hosting

Web hosting quality can have a major impact on the website performance. So, while cheap options are available, you ultimately pay the price in terms of performance when taking this route.

Many hosting companies have catered to demand by offering WordPress-specific hosting packages. Additionally, shared hosting can be a great starting point when making the initial investment in a good hosting company.

However, once your website grows large enough, you’d benefit from switching to managed hosting providers. With managed hosting, you get a highly optimized server for your WordPress site, and everything is maintained by them to keep it fast.

Optimize your images

Images are one of the most important content elements when it comes to user engagement. But if you don’t optimize them before uploading them, it can have an adverse effect.

The same image can have different file sizes depending on the file format and compression method. Though normally, JPEG, PNG, and GIF are the standard formats used throughout the web.

JPEG is the most compressed version as it reduces file size, but it will also likely decrease some image quality. PNG is the uncompressed version, so it won’t reduce image quality, but it will have larger file sizes.

GIF is another image format which supports animation. It too reduces image quality, but not file size. So, it’s generally only used for showing little animations. For images with 1 or 2 colors (like icons), use PNG file formatting as it will have better quality with less file size than JPEG.

You can use Photoshop or any other image editing software to optimize your images. In Photoshop, go to File > Save for Web & Devices or hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S (Windows) or Cmd + Opt + Shift + S (Mac) to optimize your image for web.

If you want to optimize existing images on your WordPress site, use plugins like WP-Smushit or Imagify. These will optimize new images while uploading as well.

Take advantage of caching

We’ve already talked about how CDN leverage caching technology to serve your content faster. Similarly, you can also take advantage of caching via some plugins.

W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are both great options. These cache a copy of the static elements and serve the content faster. On average, caching can make a site 2-5 times faster.

Minify CSS and JS files

Minifying CSS and JS can reduce the load time of your site by reducing file size. In the minify process, multiple files are combined into one, so the server doesn’t have to call from many different areas. This makes your site load faster.

If you check your site using Google page speed, it will also likely recommend minifying CSS and JS. WordPress has a few plugins—like BWP-Minify or W3 Total Cache—that work for this purpose too.

Keep everything updated

Though keeping things updated may not increase your site speed, the outdated version will make your site vulnerable to security threats thus making it slow, so always use the latest WordPress version. Plus, WordPress frequently releases new updates to counter security concerns and you want those updated to save you and your visitors lots of potential headaches from being hacked.

Similarly, your theme and plugins will release updates from time to time, so keep them updated as well.

Clean up your repository

As your site gets older, there may be images, plugins, and themes that are no longer used. Maybe you found a better one and left the unused one in the library. With time, these types of actions can use up your valuable server space, making your site run slow.

As a webmaster, it’s your responsibility to keep the repository optimized. To do this, use Media Cleaner plugin. This will find and delete unused images from the media library.

For plugins, check the inactive tab to locate inactive plugins. Delete them if they’re no longer required.

Reduce the number of HTTP requests

Minimize the number of HTTP requests made to the server, as the higher the number of requests, the more time it takes the server to produce the content.

Images, external CSS, JS, and fonts make an HTTP request, so minimize the number of these types of files as much as possible. This is also where minifying of JS and CSS comes in very handy.

Excessive external fonts will add more time too, so you might just want to use them as little as possible.

Don’t upload videos directly to the library

You can upload videos directly to the WordPress media library, but that doesn’t mean that you should because videos take huge bandwidth from your server, making your site slower.

Instead, upload your video to YouTube, Vimeo, or some other video hosting company, then embed it directly in your WordPress editor. This will save your server’s bandwidth and make your video (and your site) run faster.

Split up long comments

If you have a highly engaged site, you probably get lots of comments. That’s great. But the downside of this is that many comments loading at once can really slow down the page.

The solution is to split the comments into multiple pages, and WordPress has this feature built right in.

Just go to Settings > Discussion and check “Break comment.” Adjust the settings as required.

Use excerpts on your blog listing page

If your blog listing page shows full content, it’s not good for your site’s speed either. Instead, show only excerpts. Some themes show excerpt content by default; some show full content.

Though this feature is completely theme dependent, you can still make your content excerpt with Advanced Excerpt plugin. It’s a simple plugin with very few settings, but it does the job quite well.

Use optimized themes

A badly coded theme can make your website slow too. Alternatively, a good looking theme with lots of features doesn’t guarantee best coding practice. That’s why it’s always good to start with a theme or framework that has good coding standards. TwentySeventeen theme or some frameworks like Genesis have solid coding bases.

You can always add features later, through quality plugins.

Optimize your database

As your WordPress site gets older, your database’s size will increase and some old data will no longer be required.

For good performance, remove this unnecessary data. You can use the WP-Optimize plugin to do this task for you.

Conclusion

Load time is very important for a website as just one second can be the difference between revenue and rejection. These are some tips that can help you optimize your website for better performance.

You don’t need to implement them all, just implement the ones within your scope and knowledge and you’ll see improved load time. After you do, feel free to share your experience in the comments section below!

The post How to Improve Your WordPress Site Load Time (and Why You Should) appeared first on Torque.

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5 of the Best Free Pricing Table Plugins to Check Out Right Now https://torquemag.io/2017/05/5-best-free-pricing-table-plugins-check-right-now/ https://torquemag.io/2017/05/5-best-free-pricing-table-plugins-check-right-now/#comments Wed, 17 May 2017 16:56:09 +0000 https://torquemag.io/?p=81734 Pricing tables are very important for sites that offer any service or product or even membership. They help visitors easily compare the various plans and pick the right one for them. Making plans easy to find will increase conversion and allow for more users to sign up for your service. Of course, you can design one yourself, but there are plenty of plugins that will help you make beautiful, and responsive pricing tables to put directly on your site. Let’s go through some of the best. Pricing Table by Supsystic Pricing Table is one of the best free pricing table […]

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Pricing tables are very important for sites that offer any service or product or even membership. They help visitors easily compare the various plans and pick the right one for them.

Making plans easy to find will increase conversion and allow for more users to sign up for your service. Of course, you can design one yourself, but there are plenty of plugins that will help you make beautiful, and responsive pricing tables to put directly on your site. Let’s go through some of the best.

Pricing Table by Supsystic


Pricing Table is one of the best free pricing table plugins you will find in WordPress library in terms of features and accessibility. It has a visual editing mode which makes creating the perfect table fast and very easy.

Features

Even though it’s a free plugin it comes with seven free themes, and you can switch between themes anytime without losing your data. Easily add or delete row and columns. The intuitive interface allows you to add or delete row and columns with a click of a button. The plugin also has a very good drag and drop feature where you can drag a column or a table item to rearrange. Of course, it is fully responsive so you can easily view the table on mobile.

There are a number of design options. You can add a logo, badge, or header of your choice, as well as decide from a wide arrange of colors. Every element in the table can be edited from font to size. Even add images or videos. Add inline style or custom CSS to really make it your own. Have another site you need to add a table to? Just clone the one you’ve already made. Easily import and export it.

Cons

As we stated above, you can customize the CSS, but this may not be easy to a beginner WordPress user.

Pricing Table Builder

Pricing Table Builder by Fatcat Apps is a very simple plugin to use with good enough features to make modern pricing tables.

Features

This plugin has a very simple interface any one can use it easily. It allows you to rearrange columns with its drag and drop feature, and add or delete columns with one click. Adding row is even easier just press the enter button you’ll have a new row. You can even set a certain column as featured so it always stays at the top.

Use the design tab to adjust font size, button colors etc. If you have CSS knowledge you can make more changes from its custom CSS section.

Cons

While it is easy to change the design, there is only one theme to choose from. This can make the design feel very limited.

Responsive Pricing Table

Responsive Pricing Table by WP Darko is very easy to use, and as the title says, it is incredibly responsive.

Features

It has a simple and clean interface that makes it easy to use. This plugin has a unique feature where you can add your own custom button like PayPal with its code. This makes it easy to integrate with whatever you use.

Cons

The design options are very limited. You can’t make any design changes apart from the button colors. It doesn’t have any custom CSS option either so you must design changes is though from admin panel. Another issue is, this plugin doesn’t have any drag and drop features. Also, if you want a table with more than five columns then you might have to use a different plugin.

Pricing Table Builder 

Pricing Table Builder by Huge-IT is a simple plugin which comes with a good variety of pre-defined themes.

Features

Pricing Table Builder gives you 14 pre-defined themes to choose from. You can preview each theme with your data in the preview window. The plugin too allows drag and drop feature to help you rearrange columns, and you can easily clone a table here.

Cons

Though there are many themes to choose from, you can’t modify them, and there is no CSS option. You can add maximum six columns so if you need a bigger table might have to consider different plugin. Also, the columns are not fluid for large screen i.e. if you have less than six columns it will not cover the entire container.

Price Table

Price Table is a lightweight plugin from pickplugins, and it offers many customization options within one theme.

Features

The plugin allows the user to drag and drop the columns. Though it has only one theme but offers multiple pre-design options, so you can choose different packs for background and font color in each column. You can adjust the font family as well as font size. You can also set a different width for each column. This option is not available in above-mentioned plugins.

Cons

It offers only one theme to work with but you can create different variations with its pre-defined options. However, you can’t create custom styling and must choose from those options. The featured texts are predefined too, so if you want a unique text you can’t add that.

Conclusion

To conclude then it’s hard to pick up a clear winner here all of them have some pros and cons, you need to decide which one is best for you according to your requirements.

Let us know if we missed any of your favorites in the comments below.

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