Plugin Highlight: Monster Insights You're Reading: Plugin Highlight: Monster Insights In Resources Contact us Subscribe Monster Insights say it best, they are the #1 Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress. We love MonsterInsights! Having access to accurate, user-friendly Google Analytics data is a game-changer. With MonsterInsights you can see useful information about your visitors right inside your WordPress dashboard. Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative What does it cost? Basic MonsterInsights is free and provides ample information to analyze and adjust your web traffic efforts. For those who need just a bit more data the Plus version is a great option, however does ring in at $99.00/year. In our opinion, with updated Google Analytics 4 and basic MonsterInsights, you are good to go! It’s so easy to install! Unlike a lot of Google Analytics data plugins, MonsterInsights is straightforward to install. Other plugins require multiple verifications, the addition of coding, and complicated Google Analytics linking. What used to take Web Developers like us upwards of two hours for installation now takes a fraction of the time! Interested in using MonsterInsights on your website? Check out the extremely handy video below for instructions! We install MonsterInsights on every single one of our sites. To install on our client’s site we need access to the Gmail login details for the business that is attached to Google Analytics. While the verification process for us to log in with Gmail can be tedious the results are well worth it. Analytics tracking The amount of information MonsterInsights can provide is honestly a bit overwhelming. Even we as a web development company don’t use it all! But...
Pod Creative VS Go Daddy Shared Hosting: What’s the difference? You're Reading: Pod Creative VS Go Daddy Shared Hosting: What’s the difference? In Resources Contact us Subscribe Let's go over the differences between Pod Creative's dedicated, managed hosting and Go Daddy hosting. Many of our clients have used GoDaddy’s hosting and domain services before they switched to Pod Creative. For beginners, GoDaddy can be a quick and relatively easy solution to getting online fast. However, GoDaddy’s tiered service plans can leave users in a lurch with nowhere for their website to grow. Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative What is hosting? Web hosting is the place where all the files of your website live. It is like the home of your website where it actually lives. Your website lives on a special computer. Think of your domain name as the address of your house, and your hosting as your actual home. Your domain name (address) provides direction to your website’s home (your actual house). Are there different types of hosting? There absolutely are, and each type of hosting provides a vastly different experience. We’ve discussed the different types of hosting in the past, but to sum it up there are three types of hosting. They are: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and virtual private server (VPS) hosting. Shared hosting means many different sites, thousands, all on the same server (computer). For low traffic sites, this is often a good way to go as the cost is low. However, your site is competing for resources with all the other sites on the server. And, there is a chance that malicious software...
WooCommerce for Beginners You're Reading: WooCommerce for Beginners In Resources & Tutorials & WordPress Contact us Subscribe Woocommerce is our go-to plugin to turn your WordPress site into an e-commerce store! WooCommerce is one of the most recognizable brands in the WordPress ecosystem. In fact, it’s one of the most recognizable brands in ecommerce thanks to its incredible marketing, great design, and fantastically accessible cost. (FREE!) Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative We love Elegant Themes! We are loud and proud Divi users and tote their theme to anyone who will listen! The amazing creators of Divi, Elegant Themes, have written many posts on Woocommerce and have provided us with ample resources to share with you. Watch these recommended videos! This first video by Mak is an incredibly helpful tool for getting your WooCommerce shop up and running! Yes, it is just over 1.5 hours long but by the end of this complete WooCommerce tutorial video you will be well on your way to finishing your online shop. One little caveat, this video is geared towards Divi WordPress users, Mak does have another video that is geared towards users who do not have a specific page build. This walkthrough, also by the talented Mak, is a fantastic tutorial on creating a custom shop page using Divi! Creating custom shop pages can enhance your branding, add style, and tie your shop into the rest of your website. The next two videos (again, thank you Mak!) walk you through how to create a custom WooCommerce Product Category Page with Divi’s Theme Builder, and how to create a custom checkout page design in Divi...
Plugin Highlight: Smush You're Reading: Plugin Highlight: Smush In Resources & WordPress Contact us Subscribe Smush for WordPress is a powerful plugin! We install Smush for WordPress on all our sites. This powerful plugin provides image compression, lazy loading, and so much more! Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative Free or paid version? Smush is a free plugin that provides image optimization, and so much more. While they do have premium upgrades available in our opinion the free plugin is the way to go! Smush has been benchmarked and tested number one for speed and quality. It is also the award-winning, back-to-back proven crowd favorite image optimization & image compression plugin for WordPress. What does it do? The single, most important function Smush provides is increased website load speed. By optimizing and compressing your photos (without sacrificing the quality of the photos!) smush allows your website to load faster while maintaining the high-quality photos on your site! Large photos are a drain on web resources and can even cause pages to not load or produce time out errors. Faster! Slow-loading websites are frustrating for everyone! The average load speed of a website is expected to be under 5 seconds nowadays. Smush is one of the plugins we use to speed up our sites. Want to know more? Check out this post! Lazy Loading and Page Speed Smush also enables the ability to lazy load your images. Normally when a user opens a webpage, the entire page’s contents are downloaded and rendered in a single go. While this allows the browser to cache the web page, there’s no guarantee that the user...
Mailchimp for Beginners: Adding Contacts You're Reading: Mailchimp for Beginners: Adding Contacts In Resources Contact us Subscribe Let's learn how to import contacts into Mailchimp! Mailchimp is a fantastic marketing tool for any sized business or non-profit and can help you extend your customer reach. Collecting emails from customers, clients, and others is a great way to keep in contact and update people on what your business is doing! Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative Adding contacts: There are a few ways you can add contacts to your Mailchimp account. You can add a single contact, you can import a sheet into Mailchimp with all the contact information, or you can add an opt-in form on your website! Adding a Single Client It’s extremely straightforward to add a single client in Mailchimp. We recommend using the add client option when you have only a few to add, otherwise it gets rather tedious. To begin, start at the home page for your Mailchimp account (you need to be logged in!). Click on the Audience button on the left-hand side. Click on the All contacts option on the yellow bar (highlighted in green above). This will bring you to the Audience portion of your Mailchimp where you can view subscribers, manage contacts, add contacts, and much more! Click on the Add Contacts tab and select the Add a Subscriber option. Now you can add in the new Subscriber! Fill in the required information and add or create a tag if you wish. Make sure you have permission from the subscriber before adding them to your Mailchimp, you do not want to violate...
Plugin highlight: Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore You're Reading: Plugin highlight: Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore In Resources Contact us Subscribe Updraft Plus is an incredible plugin to back up, migrate, or clone your site! Updraft Plus is our go-to pro plugin to backup, migrate, and restore sites. Hacking, server crashes, dodgy updates, or simple user error can ruin your WordPress site. Having a reliable backup plugin can mean the difference between having a site, and having to completely remake your site from scratch. Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative What is a backup? Simply put, a website backup is a copy of all of your website data. The backup can include a backup of the database, plugins, themes, uploads, and more. With your website’s backup, you can clone or restore your site to the point of the last backup. If something goes wrong such as a hack or a bad update, your site can be restored to the last backup point. As a rule we at Pod Creative backup all files, and we recommend you do too! Set a schedule! One feature of Updraft Plus we absolutely adore is the ability to schedule your backups. Depending on the size of the site and the amount of new information that is added, we range from daily to monthly backups for our scheduled backups. The best part? If you decide to do a one-off backup, such as before a large website update or after the addition of an important post, you can simply perform a backup! One-off backups can be performed at any time, even the day before a scheduled backup. Choose your preferred...
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