WPForms makes it easy to create forms in WordPress. There are plenty of options to choose from with the paid versions and the free version helps to get you started
Our favorite feature with WPForms are the add-ons. There are over 100 ready-made forms you can choose from. You can even accept payments with your forms.
Astra recently has reached over 800K installs! To celebrate this milestone, they are taking 30% off the original pricing of their products. This is a huge savings for anyone that has been wanting to try it!
Astra makes it easy to design a website in a matter of minutes. You will have the opportunity to choose from several ready-made templates. After you choose the template that you want to use, you will be able to import that template with the click of a button! If you fancy selling items online, you can check out our blog post about "Why Astra is 100% ideal for your eCommerce Website?"
Take advantage of this deal now before it ends in 3 days! This deal is perfect and will be a great investment if you are a freelance designer or web developer! There is no promo code needed at all for this deal! All you have to do is choose the plan that is right for you!
Astra (and Astra Pro) is a light-weight and highly customizable theme that helps create a fast, feature-rich and beautiful WooCommerce store within minutes. We’ve used other eCommerce platforms before and it was a pain to setup. One of the best things about the Astra and WooCommerce is the minimum setup.
If you on are on the fence about using Astra, you will be delighted to know that Astra theme now powers over 700,000 websites and has over 3,300+ five-star.
When it comes to running a successful eCommerce, the amount of time it takes your site to load is key. Remember time is money and your potential customers don’t want to have to wait around for your site to load very long. Under the hood, Astra has clean, performance-optimized code that ensures your store's load times make the user experience satisfactory.
The majority of your customers will possibly be shopping from a smart device such as an Apple iPhone or iPad or an Android smartphone or tablet. With customers using a mobile device, you want to ensure that the WooCommerce website is mobile-friendly and adapts to the device.
Luckily, Astra theme offers options for mobile, tablet and desktop devices to ensure the optimal user experience for your customers.
Because the Astra Theme is well-coded, you can rest assure that your WooCommece site will be SEO compliant. This will allow search engines like Google to crawl your site for viable information. So when users search any related to the information on your site, it will show up in the search results. Keep in mind there are additional ways to help improve your chance of your website showing up in search engines. This may include using keywords in your content and structuring your menu structure.
Astra’s free theme(Astra Pro) make making changes to your site easy without the need to touch any code. If you need any extended functionality for customization Astra Pro gives you more leeway to do so.
You can control design of your blog posts & archive pages with limited options in the customizer. You can also manage width, content and even meta.
You can even choose a number of columns to show products on all kinds of devices. Additionally, you can choose how many products you want to display per page.
There is also an option that will allow you toggle to show a sidebar on WooCommerce pages, and an add-to-cart option in your website header menu.
For more information on additional features and customization settings with Astra Free Theme + WooCommerce, check out the documentation.
Astra Pro allows you to take your design to another level—giving you the ability to fully control the design of your site. With Astra Pro you will obtain some WoCommerce specific features that will take your site to the next level.
With Infinite Scroll, your eCommerce products will load seamlessly on one page and the user will not have to worry about changing to another page to see more products.
With the off-canvas sidebar feature, the sidebar moves out off the screen and out of view as well. To make the sidebar appear you have to set trigger in the form a button, or a link is given. When you click on the trigger, Off Canvas Sidebar appears. This option works very well with all the responsive smart devices.
As shown in the animation above, the user will be able to filter products by price. You can also filter any products by categories or by variations such as the color of a product or even various sizes of a product.
With Quick view, your users will be able to preview details about the product without clicking on the product to open up a new page. This makes the shopping experience seamless and makes the user experience enjoyable.
Gallery options will allow you to show product images in a flexible width gallery that can be easily adjusted horizontally and vertically. You can set the image to open in a light box or even pan the images to see how the products looks.
In the checkout page options, you will be able to choose whether to display the coupon field to allow users to use a coupon code. You can also display an order note to allow customers to leave any messages pertaining to their orders. As shown in the figure below, there are other options to select from as well to make the customer experience a seamless experience.
There are other features available as well in the customized settings that will allow you to enhance the customer shopping experience. You can learn more about those settings in the documentation.
One of our favorite things about using Astra is the starter templates. In order to access the starter templates, you need to install the Starter Templates plugin. This plugin makes it easy to get started on your WooCommerce website in a matter of a few minutes. Once the plugin is installed, you will be able to preview any of the available pre-made templates. There a plenty of templates available to help you get started.
You can view some of the ready-made website demos listed in the article here. One thing to point out that the ready to use websites can be imported as a complete website or you can pick individual pages at your discretion.
Although you get use Astra Theme for free, there are some paid options that will enhance you ability to take your WooCommerce website to the next level!
The pricing structure for Astra is as follows:
Annual Pricing:
One-time Lifetime Pricing:
Both annual and lifetime customers will get access to one-on-one support, detailed and helpful training, and unlimited website usage for various website design projects.
Customer support can make or break a company. Great customer service often attracts potential and frequent customers to buy your product. The customer knows you and your support team with resolve any issues that may arise.
With Astra, you will have access to various in-depth articles, and video tutorials that show and explain how to use Astra’s features.
If you need to reach support, Astra has a support team that can be reached by email 24/7 and it will submit a ticket. An Astra support team member will contact and reply to your support concerns as soon as possible.
Another way to get help or support is to join the dedicated Facebook Group with over 10,000+ active members. We recommended taking this course of action because you can really learn from other fellow Astra Theme users. There always something you can learn from members in the Astra community.
If you need to create a beautiful online store, look no further than Astra Free Theme paired with WooCommerce. There are paid add-ons option available as well to help enhance customer experience. There are several beautiful ready to use demo websites available, allowing you to create a quality website.
With Astra Free Theme or Astra Pro and WooCommerce, the possibilities to create an online store are endless. We recommend it to anyone needing a user friendly theme to start selling goods or products online.
It’s that time again for us to showcase our top 3 WordPress themes from Template Monster. In case you do not know, we are an affiliate with Template Monster so any sales generated via the affiliate links will help us obtain commission. So let’s get started!
The Monstroid Multipurpose WordPress Theme has been in the game for some time. We used it on projects when it the theme had Template Monster’s Powerbuilder and it was GPL3 licensed—allowing own to use on multiple projects. Now it comes equipped with Elementor page builder paired with Zemez’s plugins featuring the Jet Elements plugin. This plugin extends Elementor’s features. It is perfect for those who do not have Elememtor Pro.
The selling point for this WordPress Theme is the number demos. With over 20 demos to choose from, you will be able to choose a theme that suites your project needs. You’ll be able to install the demos easily with “one-click” demo install.
Ascendio Corporate and Business Theme is perfect for all businesses both small or large. There are plenty of homepage options available. It uses the Elementor page builder to help design and edit pages with ease.
The BeClinic Multipurpose Medical WordPress Theme has several kinds of site types to choose from. If you are a medical professional or clinic that needs a fresh website design, look no further than this theme.
The theme uses the Elementor page builder to do the designing. It has 9+ premade pages, 100+ widgets, and the plugin timetable for events and scheduling.
This concludes our top 3 WordPress themes we like and recommend to our readers. Each theme uses the Elementor page builder and is packed with various plugins and addons. Which page builder or theme do you like?
Try 1 month of Interserver for $.01 by using the Interserver coupon code: TRYINTERSERVER
When it comes to choosing a web hosting company to host a website, one of the main selling points is the amount of time the company has been in operation. Often times longevity may signify that the company has a product and excellent customer service. Interserver caught our attention because of their years in business and their reputation. As a result, I decided to try out their Standard Web Hosting Package.
Interserver has been in the web hosting business since 1999. They pride themselves on three cores principles: quality, service, and support. Interserver has two data centers operating in Secacus,New Jersey and a data center in Los Angeles, California .
There a plenty of things to love about Interserver. I will discuss the features I love about Interserver the most.
One of the first things that stood out was the pricing for the various service types. I paid for the Standard or Shared Hosting Package. Let’s see how the pricing compares with other services below:
The upside of the pricing structure is it allows one to pay either annually or monthly. We tend to pay annually but as of late paying monthly has been beneficial especially if you are on a tight budget. You can cancel at anytime as well. Having used services like GoDaddy, you will often see a low introductory rate and then a price hike a year later. With Interserver you can take advantage of their price lock policy. You won’t have to worry about any extreme price hikes after year one. Prices are likely to stay locked for a great length of time.
This is something you do not see often even with some of Interserver’s competitors. I’ve seen this with one other hosting company but not many others. If you do not have the time or know how to migrate your website data from your old host to Interserver, you can contact support and they will handle it for you free.
One of the features I look for on a site is a chat feature. It saves so much time versus waiting to speak with someone. Interserver offers 24/7 chat support and 24/7 telephone support if you need to talk to someone. One neat thing I learned is that they will not take any more than 100 new clients a day. The reasoning may seem strange to some but I like it. Interserver wants to focus on their new customers to help them and let them know that their needs are a priority. What’s not to love about the type of customer attention!
To help cut down on users contacting support on some issues, you can find common solutions to various issues. There 1000's of support articles to choose from to assist you!
All companies state that they have reliable up-time! So far with the WordPress site I setup (which is in basic form), I have not experienced any down-time. So far so good! From their website they state: “Industry-leading reliability of service and content delivery. We partner with Cloudflare and utilize its global network of caching data center.“
I have used Cloudflare and I can assure you the speeds are fast!
I setup a WordPress site easily via cPanel. You can also setup Joomla, Drupal, Prestashop, and many more content management and eCommerce platforms. If you don’t want to use any of those you can use the site pad website builder. There are plenty of options to choose from.
Although there isn’t anything that would stop me from using or recommending Interserver, it has its drawbacks.
Disclaimer: I am not suggesting Interserver is trying to purposely mislead anyone. They have a different approach on domain purchasing when signing up for web hosting.
Upon signing up for the web hosting, I was asked to register a new domain or use an existing domain. I chose to register a domain. Unlike most hosting companies, if you register a new domain you, you end up paying for it along side hosting. Since I was prompted at check-out to pay for the domain, I thought it was included for free.
What you have to do is buy the domain after you have purchased your web hosting.
It’s definitely not a deal breaker. It’s that I have grown accustomed to signing up for hosting and the domain at the same time.
I must admit that I am impressed with the Interserver. Own major feature I love and I think you’ll love is the price lock guarantee. This means you will not have any surprise price hikes after year one—prices should be consistent year to year. This is encouraging.
You can pay monthly or yearly depending on your budget needs. When compared to the likes of GoDaddy you will save some money.
For me navigating the website was not challenging and I was able to find the pages I needed. If you have used cPanel with another host, you will find it easy to setup your website whether you choose to install WordPress or use the SitePad website builder.
With guarantee uptime and reasonable speeds, I recommend Interserver to anyone looking for a proven company that has quality customer service and quality services such as WordPress Hosting, Windows ASP.Net Web Hosting, VPS, and Dedicated Servers.
Try 1 month of Interserver for $.01 by using the Interserver coupon code: TRYINTERSERVER
Happy New Year! To start the new year off, I would like to introduce to you the top 3 WordPress templates for the month of January.
The Generisys Business Consulting Multipurpose Template is ideal for a small to mid-size consulting business. I love the color scheme of the template--white background with splashes of orange and blue text.
The Adam Smith Creative Personal Tattoo Pro WordPress Theme has a nice and subtle design. With its white background and black text, it will surely make the website stand-out to the viewer. What I like about it most is the use of the black and white photos throughout the site especially in the portfolio.
Monstroid 2 is still a viable option for those who need a selection of different kinds of designs. There are quite a few options to choose from in terms of style and type of WordPress Template. It all depends on what your needs are.
Each of the three templates above use the Elementor page builder and Jet Elements to enhance the use and functionality of the site. You will have several elements to use when editing the template of choice. You cannot go wrong with any of the themes I have shared with you. If you need to check out more templates, please feel free to head on over to Template Monster!
Divi 4.0 Coming Soon
Today, I opened my email and saw an email from Elegant Themes. At first, I thought it was a tutorial of some sort. Boy was I wrong.
Come to find out, the email was about Divi 4.0. I clicked on the link to the announcement in the email. I then saw the heading below:
The Divi 4.0 Countdown: Win A Free MacBook Pro While You Wait For The Official Launch of Divi 4.0 The Divi Theme Builder
I immediately scrolled down and began to submit my entries via the Gleam entry form. Guess what? You can do the same thing. Go ahead and head over to the Elegant Themes website and enter to win a MacBook Pro. They also put a countdown clock counting down to the official release date.
What I’m looking forward most is the theme builder. Like Elementor and Oxygen Builder, you’ll be able to create your header and footer with ease.
I’m hoping I’m the winner of the new MacBook Pro and I wish each entrant the best of luck. Oh, and I can’t wait to see what additional features will be released.