WPBeginner Turns 9 Years Old – Reflections and Updates

It’s the ninth fourth. On 4th of July, nine years ago, I started WPBeginner. Can’t believe we’ve come such a long way.

Like every year, I want to take a few minutes and do a quick recap of all the major things happening in business as well as my personal life.

WPBeginner Story

I started using WordPress when I was 16 years old and started WPBeginner at age 19 with a single mission: make WordPress easy for beginners.

Since then WPBeginner has become the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners.

For those of you who’re new, you can read the full WPBeginner story on our about page and use the Start Here page to get the most out of WPBeginner.

Personal Updates

My son, Solomon, is now 20 months old. Time is flying, and he’s growing up so fast. Amanda (my wife) and Solomon have been joining me on a lot of my business trips, and we have taken several fun trips as well.

Since the last WPBeginner anniversary post, we’ve been to Turkey, Dubai, Pakistan, Mexico (Cabo, Punta Mita, Cancun), and Bahamas (twice). Solomon also attended WordCamp US in Nashville which brings his WordCamp attendance count to a total of 3.

Earlier this year, I received an outstanding Young Alumnus award from University of Florida (alma mater). I also got to attend the college football game from the President Suite and got to meet tons of amazing people.

I have started working out of a physical office 3 days out of the week. This has been great because it allows me to focus and get more done. Also when I’m home, I can spend more time with Solomon. Last year, I expanded my real estate portfolio and added a Wells Fargo building. I have created my office on one of the floors, and it’s nice to have the bank as my tenant.

WPBeginner Updates

Thanks to you all, WPBeginner has continued to grow in double-digit percentage (year over year). There have been several notable updates from last year, that I’d like to highlight.

1. We passed 100,000 YouTube subscribers

One of my goals last year was to pass 100,000 subscribers on YouTube before I write this anniversary post. We did it.

We’re now at over 102,000 subscribers and our videos have over 10 million views.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, then please go ahead and subscribe to WPBeginner on YouTube (it’s free).

Now I’m just waiting to get my 3rd YouTube play button

I have a Gold Play button and Silver play button from my other website, List25 which has over 2.3 million YouTube subscribers.

2. SSL and Push Notifications

You might have noticed that WPBeginner is now using SSL. Starting July, Google Chrome is marking all websites that are not using SSL as insecure. Even though we don’t collect any payments on WPBeginner, we went ahead with the change because we value our readers security.

If you’re looking to switch to SSL, then see our step by step guide on how to get a free SSL certificate.

As part of adding SSL, we also added Push Notifications to WPBeginner. You might have already noticed the notification to subscribe. It’s a great way to stay updated with new posts and guides from WPBeginner.

3. Audit and Rewrites

One of our goals this year is to do a major content audit of our older posts. WPBeginner has over 2000+ free WordPress tutorials. We have expanded our team, so we can bring our older posts up to date in a timely manner.

We are also preparing for a major content overhaul once Gutenberg launches. This is going to be a huge challenge for us later this year.

4. Improved WPBeginner Server Infrastructure

Just about every other week, I get an email from a user asking about the secrets behind WPBeginner’s blazing fast speed. The answer is infrastructure and caching.

As WPBeginner grows, we need to continuously invest in our server infrastructure. Our WordPress hosting partner, HostGator, has worked to build us a completely custom infrastructure spread across multiple data-centers to ensure high availability. This past year, they improved our hardware as well as improved the caching layer that we’re using on the site.

I have been a HostGator customer since 2007, and WPBeginner has been hosted with them since day 1 (see my full HostGator review). I want to thank their entire team that helped us with the upgrade.

Note: WPBeginner is using HostGator’s multiple dedicated servers (not shared hosting).

On top of HostGator, we also use Sucuri for our web application firewall and MaxCDN as our CDN provider both play a major role in our overall website speed.

Please refer to our ultimate guide on how to speed up WordPress for more details.

Product Updates

It still surprises me when I hear people say: “I didn’t know WPBeginner was behind that product”. We even have a products page in the main website menu.

Our suite of WordPress plugins are now running on over 6 million websites (doubled from last year). Below are some notable updates:

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It helps you see all the stats that matter right inside your WordPress dashboard.

MonsterInsights has become one of my most favorite WordPress plugin this past year because of the brand new reporting interface and the updates our team has pushed.

The main reason why I love MonsterInsights is because it helps me grow our business with confidence. I sincerely believe that it’s easy to double your traffic and sales when you exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights helps me make data-driven decisions to grow our business.

It offers custom reports for Publishers and Ecommerce sites with actionable insights that I can use to grow our revenue.

If you aren’t using MonsterInsights, then you’re seriously missing out. You can download the free version of MonsterInsights from WordPress.org, but you really need the MonsterInsights Pro version to see the true benefits because Pro version comes with more robust tracking and reports.

P.S. MonsterInsights is active on over 2 million websites.

WPForms

WPForms, our drag & drop WordPress form builder is now over 2 years old. We have stayed true to our mission: build the most beginner friendly WordPress form plugin, and it has resonated tremendously well with the larger WordPress community.

WPForms has passed over 10 million downloads and is actively running on over 1 million websites. The best part is that we have an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 with over 2100 five-star reviews.

This past year we introduced a brand new surveys and polls addon, which I believe offers the most interactive reporting in the industry.

Aside from that, we added the NPS field, new Drip email marketing integration, multi-column form layout, 100+ pre-made form templates, custom form template generator, and more.

You can download the free version of WPForms or get WPForms Pro to unlock even more powerful features.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most popular conversion optimization software for WordPress. It helps you generate more subscribers and revenue from the traffic you already have by recovering abandoning visitors.

Our team recently released version 5.0 that comes with a brand new drag & drop campaign builder, more powerful targeting and segmentation options, and so much more.

The best part about OptinMonster is that it integrates with all popular email marketing services, so you can easily use it to grow your email list and get more subscribers.

WP Mail SMTP

This past year, we acquired WP Mail SMTP, the most popular SMTP plugin for WordPress. It helps users fix the WordPress not sending email issue.

This is a huge problem for the larger WordPress community including our users, so we decided to acquire this plugin and completely revamp it to make it beginner friendly.

It integrates with Gmail, Mailgun, SendGrid, and basically any other SMTP solutions. Whether you’re running a blog, membership site, or an online store, you need this plugin if you want to make sure that your WordPress emails are getting delivered.

This is a 100% free plugin, and it’s now active on over 900,000 websites

Envira Gallery and Soliloquy

If you read our last year’s anniversary post, then you know that we also had Envira Gallery, a premium WordPress gallery plugin, and Soliloquy, a premium WordPress slider plugin.

This past year, we decided to sell those two WordPress plugins, so we can better focus on our fast growing suite of growth tools.

I wrote about it on my personal blog: 5 lessons from selling a multi-million dollar WordPress plugin business.

One of the “problems” of a fast growing business is that you have to carefully choose what to focus on, and this decision has already helped us see great success in 2018.

Thank You Everyone

I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported us in this journey. I really do appreciate all of your retweets, personal emails, content suggestions, and the in-person hugs / interactions at the events.

You all are AMAZING and without you, there is no WPBeginner.

I look forward to another solid year ahead of us, and we will be planning something big for the next year because it’ll be our 10th anniversary.

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

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Source: Wordpres

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How to Create a Product Catalog in WordPress (without a Shopping Cart)

Do you want to create a product catalog in WordPress without adding a full-blown shopping cart? Sometimes businesses want to take order by phone while still displaying their product catalog on the website. In this article, we will show you how to easily create a product catalog in WordPress without a shopping cart.

Why Add a Product Catalog without Shopping Cart>

Some businesses have products that they can’t sell online because they have an undetermined price. This makes it impossible for them to use a shopping cart plugin, but they still want to make a website, so they can showcase those products and attract potential customers.

Normally, people associate eCommerce platforms with online shopping. However, you can still use them to display products without using shopping cart feature.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily create a product catalog in WordPress without using the shopping cart feature.

Getting Started with Your Product Catalog in WordPress

The best way to create a product catalog in WordPress is by using WooCommerce. Don’t worry, you will not be using any of its shopping cart features.

If you already have a WordPress website, then you can go ahead and install and activate the WooCommerce plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

If you don’t have a WordPress site setup, then see our guide on how to create an online store to quickly set up WordPress with WooCommerce.

Once you have installed WooCommerce, you can move on to creating your product catalog in WordPress.

Creating Product Catalog in WordPress without Shopping Cart

By default, WooCommerce displays an add to cart or buy button next to all your products. This makes it difficult to create a product catalog without the shopping cart feature.

Luckily, there’s an easy solution that fixes this problem.

First, you need to install and activate the YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit YITH Plugins » Catalog Mode page to configure the plugin settings.

First, you need to check the box next to ‘Enable YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode’ option to enable the plugin. After that, you need to choose where you want to hide the ‘Add to cart’ button.

You can choose to hide it on the shop pages or product details pages.

But in this case, you should go with the last option which allows you to disable shop feature everywhere by disabling the checkout page, cart page, and removing all add to cart button everywhere.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

Adding Products to Your WordPress Product Catalog

You can now go ahead and start adding products to your site. Simply visit Products » Add New page to enter your product information.

On the products screen, you can provide product title, description, short description, product image, and product gallery. Under the ‘Product’ data section, you will find the price options. You can leave them blank if you don’t want to display product pricing.

Once you are finished, go ahead and publish your product. Repeat the process to add as many products as needed to build up your catalog.

Viewing Your WordPress Product Catalog

You can visit your WooCommerce shop page to view your default catalog in action. Your shop page is usually located at a URL like this:

http://example.com/shop/

Replace example.com with your own URL to view your WooCommerce shop page in the catalog mode.

If you don’t want to use the shop page, then you can also display your products on any WordPress page and use it as your product catalog.

All you have to do is create a new WordPress page or edit an existing one, and add the following shortcode in the content area:

[products columns="4" limit="8" paginate="true"]

Feel free to change the number of columns and the items per page limit to your own requirements. Once you have adjusted the shortcode, go ahead and save or publish your page to preview it.

You will notice that the product pages will not show any add to cart or buy buttons. You can click on any individual product to see the product details page.

It will show all the product information images, description, gallery, without an add to cart or buy button.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily create a product catalog in WordPress without the shopping cart feature. You may also want to see our list of the best WooCommerce themes that you can use for your product catalog website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Create a Product Catalog in WordPress (without a Shopping Cart) appeared first on WPBeginner.

Source: Wordpres

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How to Convert WordPress Categories to Custom Taxonomies

Do you want to convert your WordPress categories into custom taxonomies? Categories are one of the two default taxonomies that help you sort your content. However, WordPress also allows you to create and use custom taxonomies. In this article, we will show you how to easily convert WordPress categories into custom taxonomies.

Why and When Do You Need to Convert Categories to Custom Taxonomies

Categories and tags are the two default taxonomies in WordPress. Taxonomies are used to sort and organize content into different topics.

Apart from the default taxonomies, WordPress also allows you to create custom taxonomies which you can use with existing post types or with custom post types. For more on this topic, see our article on when do you need a custom post type or taxonomy in WordPress.

As your website grow, you might find a need to convert your categories into a custom taxonomy. For example, let’s say that you have a category called topics with a lot of sub-categories. It would be time-consuming to edit each post and file it under your new custom taxonomy.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could bulk convert some or all of your categories to the new custom taxonomy?

Let’s take a look at how you can easily convert categories to custom taxonomies without manually editing each post.

Converting WordPress Categories to Custom Taxonomies

First thing you need to do is install and activate Taxonomy Switcher plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Tools » Taxonomy Switcher page in your WordPress admin area to convert categories to custom taxonomies.

On this page, you can select the taxonomies you want to convert. For this tutorial, we will select ‘Categories’ as the taxonomy we want to switch from, and ‘Topics’ as the custom taxonomy we want to switch to.

If you want to convert all categories to a custom taxonomy, then you can go ahead and click on the ‘Switch Taxonomies’ button.

The plugin will convert all categories to your selected custom taxonomy. You will see a success message like this:

If you just want to convert specific categories, then you will need to add the IDs of those categories next to ‘Comma separated list of term ids to switch’ field. See our article on how to find category IDs in WordPress for more details.

Additionally, if you want to skip child categories of a specific category, then you can add the IDs of the parent category next to ‘Limit taxonomy switch for child terms of a specific parent’ option.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Switch Taxonomy’ button to save your changes.

Setting Up Redirects from Category to Custom Taxonomy

After you switch categories to a custom taxonomy, the category archive page will now show a 404 error page. This is nothing to be worried about if your website is not live yet.

However if your website is live, then search engines may have already crawled your category pages and indexed them. This means that those pages can appear in search results and users coming from search engines will see a 404 error page.

To fix this, you need to redirect users to the new taxonomy page for each category.

Luckily, there is an easy fix for that.

First, you will need to install and activate the Redirection plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Tools » Redirection page. In the Source URL field, you need to enter /category/.* and in the Target URL field you need to enter your custom taxonomy slug, e.g. /topic/$1

Next, you need check the box next to ‘Regex’ option, and then click on ‘Add Redirect’ button.

This redirect will now send all category archive traffic to your custom taxonomy. Only use this, if you don’t want to use categories at all.

If you want to redirect individual categories to a custom taxonomy page, then see our beginner’s guide on setting up redirects in WordPress with detailed step by step instructions.

We hope this article helped you learn how to convert WordPress categories to custom taxonomies. You may also want to see our guide on how to style individual categories differently in WordPress to style your custom taxonomy templates.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Source: Wordpres

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How to Create a Survey in WordPress (with Beautiful Reports)

Do you want to create a survey in WordPress? Surveys help you gather valuable information, so you can use to make data-driven decisions. In this article, we will show you how to easily create a survey in WordPress and generate beautiful reports.

Choosing The Best Survey Tool for WordPress

There are many online services that allow you to create survey forms and embed them in WordPress. The downside of these forms is that the data is stored on third-party servers, and you have limited customization options.

Some of these forms are also limited to the number of responses you can collect. You have to pay extra to get more responses and usually these services have high monthly costs.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could run surveys on your own website without relying on third-party services?

This is where WPForms comes in. It is the best WordPress form builder plugin in the market.

They recently announced a powerful new WordPress surveys and polls addon that you can use to easily create survey forms on your website.

With WPForms survey feature, you get the following:

• Powerful drag and drop form builder to create surveys
• Smart survey fields like Rating, Likert Scale, and more
• Conditional logic to personalize survey fields based on user input
• Interactive survey reports with bars, graphs, charts, and tables
• Ability to export survey graphs as JPEG, PDF, or Print Formats
• Export survey results as CSV to use elsewhere

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily create and add survey in your WordPress website.

Disclosure: WPForms is created by the same team behind WPBeginner. It is one of our premium WordPress plugins.

Creating a Survey in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

WPForms surveys and polls addon is part of their Pro plan. WPBeginner users can use our WPForms coupon to ge 10% OFF on all WPForms licenses.

Once the plugin is activated, you need to head over to WPForms » Settings page to enter your license keys. You can find this information under your account on the WPForms website.

Next, you need to visit the WPForms » Addons page and scroll down to the Surveys and Polls addon. Go ahead and click on the Install addon button to install the survey addon. Once installed, you need to click on the ‘Activate’ button to start using the addon.

Now you are ready to create a survey form.

You need to visit WPForms » Add New page to create a new form. This will launch the WPForms’ drag and drop form builder interface.

First you need to provide a title for your survey form and then click on the Survey Form template.

This will load a sample customer feedback form template with several fields already added into the form.

You can just point and click to edit any field, rearrange them with drag and drop, or remove them from the form. You can also add new form fields from the left column.

WPForms supports all commonly used form fields including drop down, radio buttons, checkboxes, likert scale, text input, rating scale, and many more. This makes it super easy for you to build highly interactive survey forms.

WPForms also includes conditional logic which means you can personalize your survey questions based on user input in one of the previous fields.

Once you have created the form, you need to click on the save button to store your form settings. You can now click on the close button to exit the form builder.

Adding The Survey Form in Your WordPress Website

WPForms makes it very simple to add your forms anywhere on your website. You can easily add your survey form in any WordPress post, page, custom post type, or your sidebar.

To add the survey form in a WordPress post, page, or post type, you need to visit the post edit screen and click on the ‘Add Form’ button.

This will bring up a popup where you can select the survey form you created earlier and click on the insert form button to continue.

You will now see the form shortcode added into the post editor.

Once you are done editing the post, go ahead and publish it. You can visit your website to see your survey form live in action.

WPForms also allows you to easily add your survey form into any sidebar or widget ready area. Simply head over to the Appearance » Widgets page in your WordPress admin area and drag the WPForms widget to any sidebar.

In the widget settings, select the survey form you created earlier and don’t forget to click on the save button to store your changes.

You can now visit your website to see your survey form displayed in the sidebar.

Viewing Your Survey Form Results

WPForms shows survey results in beautiful charts and graphs. You can also print survey results and export them to use in your favorite spreadsheet software.

To view your survey results, you need to visit WPForms » All Forms page and click on the ‘Survey Results’ link below your survey form.

On the results page, you will see your survey responses displayed in an interactive chart and tables. You can export responses to a single question, as well as the entire survey.

On the top, you will see options to switch to different chart types and the export option. You can save individual survey results as JPEG, PDF, and Print formats to easily share them on presentation slides, blog posts, or social media.

Convert Any Form into a Survey

WPForms also allows you to make any form into a survey form and display past results as a survey. You can even select specific form fields that you want to be treated as survey fields.

This is particularly useful if you want to gather data through other forms like a contact form, user registration, or newsletter sign up forms.

To convert an existing WPForms form into a survey, simply edit the form in WPForms and go to the Settings » Surveys and Polls section. You need to check the box next to ‘Enable Survey Reporting’ option and save your changes.

To enable survey reporting for an individual form field, simply edit the form and then click on the field that you want to enable.

Under the ‘Field Options’ section on your left side, you need to click on the Advanced Options and check ‘Enable Survey Reporting’ option.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily create and add beautiful survey forms in WordPress. You may also want to see our beginner’s guide on how to track user engagement in WordPress with Google Analytics.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Create a Survey in WordPress (with Beautiful Reports) appeared first on WPBeginner.

Source: Wordpres

Anik