Category: Plugin Review

The standard emails WordPress sends  out are just okay.  Nothing more nothing less, in this post I want to show you how to customize your WordPress emails and jazz them up a little.

Every interaction with your site visitors is a marketing opportunity and a way to promote your brand chance to promote your brand.

They are a little bit lacklustre and don’t promote your brand very well.

What Emails Are Sent?

WordPress sends out a number of emails, here are some examples

• New user registrations (to the admin and to the new user)
• New comments
• Password reset
• Admin emails (new comments, new users but why you would need to edit these are beyond me).

Why Customise Emails

The emails WordPress sends out are not that great, they are plain text, have standard responses.

The emails use your standard WordPress admin email and name, sometimes you want to change those.

You might want to add a logo, call to action or just bring the WordPress emails in line with other emails you send out, you need to customise your WordPress emails to do this.

There’s A Plugin for that

As always if there is a problem to be solved in WordPress, there is a plugin for or, or quite a few, here are my two favourite plugin to customise the emails

WP Better Emails

You can download this plugin from https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-better-emails/

WP Better email creates a template to wrap around the default email content.  You cannot change the content of the emails but you can wrap a good looking template around it.  WP Better Emails also allows you to change the name and from email of the email sender.

Email Templates

This plugin can be downloaded from https://wordpress.org/plugins/email-templates/

This plugin adds an area into the theme customizer area (not a fan of that area, but that’s a different post).

This plugin has a few more options you can change, such as header footer and email content, the last point is where this plugin is more powerful.

Wrap Up – How To Customize Your WordPress Emails

If you want to customize your WordPress emails to keep them more on brand I recommend these plugins.

If you site has lots of client logins such as an e-commerce store or membership site, branding your emails is a good marketing idea.

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Most readers of this site will know about the excellent contact form plugin Gravity forms.  It is a premium plugin that allows you to collect information from your site visitors, but did you also know it can be used to take payments with gravity forms for products or services?

How It Works

When a site visitors goes to send a message to you via a form, you can add a payment option.  You can add one – off payments, a drop down list of different amounts or even setup a subscription.

You can embed a credit card payment form into your gravity form or use a service like paypal where you would collect form details then send them to Paypal for payments.

Here is an example form with a single payment for $99.

Uses

How would you use this functionality I hear you ask, here are some examples:

Subscriptions – you can setup a subscription payment via gravity forms, for example I could setup a subscription for my maintenance service via a form using gravity forms so each month a payment is taken for this service.

Donations – take donations for you not for profit organisation, along with your donators name and address

Payment for services – you could add a drop down on services people can buy from you, payment is taken when the form asking for that service is submitted.

E-commcerce – for a smaller e-commerce setup with a limited number of products you could use gravity forms, but I would opt for something like Woocommerce for bigger stores.

Pay to submit – if the form adds an entry to a directory or allows people to add content to your site you could charge them before the content is submitted.

Payment Gateways

Gravity form integrates with a number of different payment gateways including:

• Authorize.net
• Stripe
• Paypal – standard and pro (pro is where you can take payments on your site).

These add-ons come with the development license for gravity forms.

Remember HTTPS

If you are planning to capture credit card information on your own site, remember you will need to install an SSL certificate on your site so the details are encrypted before being sent to your payment gateway, see your host for details of SSL certificated.

Wrap Up – Payments With Gravity Forms

Gravity form is much more than just a contact form, it can take payments, do surveys, add content, register users, the list goes on, GF is one of my all time favourite plugins and I use it on all the sites we build.

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In a previous post about migrating to WP Engine I talked about having to do a search and replace across the whole database to change a temporary URL wpdude.wpengine.com to wpdude.com, to do this I used a plugin called Better Search And Replace.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/

What Is Better Search And Replace

You have probably used search and replace in a word processing document where you can select  a phrase in a document and change it for something else with a bulk exercise.

Better search and replace does the same thing, but across then entire database of your WordPress site.

So I can search for the name Neil and replace it with Bob, we can choose to do this on just the content of your site, or across everything, so any mention of Neil is our posts or pages will be updated and perhaps any users called Neil will also be updated.

When You May Need To Do A Search And Replace

There have been a number of cases where I’ve needed to run a search and replace:

• When migrating my site (or clients sites)
• When moving a staging development site live
• When I’m bulk changing URLs, for example one of the products I’m an affiliate for changed the URL of their affiliate link.
• When I found corruptions with characters sets and needed to do a bulk change on the corrupt characters.
• The list goes on.

Warning

Search and replace will change your database directly, please please take a full backup first.

Video Demo

Here is a video demo to show you how to use Better Search And Replace, please note the video dies for about 15 seconds around the 4 minute mark and there is audio only.

Tables To Edit

As mentioned in the video, the post and page tables are wp_{TABLE_PREFIX}_posts and wp_{TABLE_PREFIX}_postmeta

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Large images slow down the load speed of your WordPress site.

Clients and Google don’t like slow sites, clients get impatient and click away, Google will affect your rankings if you have a slow site.

There is a way to compress your images and make them smaller so they load more quickly.  You can do this with the plugin WP Smush https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

We were asked to tune the performance of one of our maintenance clients sites and one of the things we did was optimize his images.

How Do I Know If I Have The Issue

A quick test to see if you have image load problems is to go to the Google page speed insight page and test your site

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you are told to optimize your images, WP Smush will help.

What It Does

WP Smush losslessly (is that even a real word) compresses your images files.

Say again; WP Smush removes all the unnecessary stuff contained in your images files such as date and time stamps, device used to take a picture etc, there is a lot of meta data in an image that can be stripped out without affecting image quality, that is why it is lossless compression.

How It Does It

Once you have installed WP Smush a new menu item is added under media -> wp smush.

In there you can batch smush your existing images.

It’s a pretty slow process, so settle down for the long haul with a nice cup of the beverage of your choice.

The free version smushes 50 files per pass, the pro version smushes everything in one go.  I’m cheap so I just clicked the smush button 16 times.

Ongoing Smushing

As you add new image into your site, they are smushed automatically on upload so the initial bulk smush is a one off process.

The Result

Our clients site load speed increased a lot.

Performance tuning WordPress sites is a bit of a dark art not a science, with a mixture of cache plugins, CDNs, smushed images and decent hosting you can get great speed gains.

WP Smush is definitely now part of my tuning tool box.

Wrap Up

If you need help speeding up your WordPress site check out our maintenance plan, as a matter of course we optimize our clients site speed.

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One of our maintenance clients came to us with a little challenge and asked us to recommend a plugin that counts downloads of PDF files they make available to their customers.

Added this she wanted to know which individual logged in users also downloaded the file.

This type of detailed knowledge of what people are doing with your downloads is important in many ways, how are clients using your information?  Is it useful enough that people even want to download it.

We went on a search and found Download Monitor to fit the bill.

What Is Download Monitor

It’s a plugin that lets you create a series of downloadable files in the backend of WordPress.

It controls who can download them, any user or logged in users.

It creates a shortcode so you can embed those files in posts or pages

Finally any most importantly it allows us to log and record downloads as a total per file and by user.

Adding A File

Adding a download file is much like creating a new blog post, give it a title, add some descriptive text about the file to be displayed.

Then you upload the actual media file.

Once added you can set various options for the file, one very useful one is to restrict logged in users to download only.

Embedding A File / Download Links

The file to be downloaded can be added as a shortcode into a post or page  as an example.

[download id="11347"]

Or you can send out a special download link to the file rather than a direct link so downloads can be recorded, here is an example of this.

https://dev.neilmatthews.com/download/11347/ (don’t click the plugin has been deactivated)

Logs

This was the main feature my client needed, a log of who had downloaded a file.  We can see a log of total downloads or we can see a list of individual downloads by user

All of this data can be downloaded as a CSV file for deeper analysis.

Wrap Up

If you want insights into what is being downloaded by your site visitors or logged in customers Download Monitor is the best out there.  We tested about 12 other plugins and this came out tops for reporting.  Many can create the total download number but none gave us per user logs.

One of the services we offer to our maintenance clients is a plugin finding and testing service, why not give us a go.

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I was looking for a frequently asked question (FAQ) plugin so I could display the questions and answers of regularly asked questions people send to me before buying a WordPress support job from us. I looked through a number of FAQ plugins and eventually settled on WP Awesome FAQ.

In this post I’ll tell you why I selected it.

What Is  A FAQ

An FAQ are those questions you find potential customers asking over and over again.

These are obviously questions you have not addressed correctly in your sales copy and are creating objections in your clients mind before they buy your product or service.

Creating a list of frequently asked questions (and of course answers) helps to overcome those potential custom objections and cuts down your customer support time.

What I Needed In An FAQ Plugin

I always approach hunting for a new plugin with a series of requirements in the back of my mind.  I wanted the following:

• Easily create a series of FAQs on the back-end of WordPress
• Ability to add new FAQs as they become available after client questions
• An accordion functions to hide answers people don’t need so people can quickly scan through the questions
• Short codes to embed the FAQ on sales pages and other pages

WP Awesome FAQ Does All This

As you might be guessing WP Awesome FAQ does all this and a little more, it also has FAQ categories so I can control which FAQs are displayed  and where.

Downsides?

I’m not 100% thrilled with the styling of the drop down content, for example I have some bulleted lists in there and the bullet point is dropped, I’m going to have to spend some time recoding the styling to get it 100% as I need it.

 See It In Action

I’ve got the FAQ plugin installed on my home page, click through and have a look

As you can see the shortcode presents a list of FAQs click on one and it opens up in accordion stylie for you to see the answer to your question.

Here is a screen dump of the back end editor for your FAQs

Outro

Awe – noun – a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder

Can a plugin be really awesome?  Nah, but this fills the functionality hole on my site to perfection.

If you have any questions about our services not covered in our FAQ please ask away and I’ll add them in.

One of my clients came to me with an interesting issue.  She was embedding ads into her blog posts. they were wide ads 728 x 9 px and these looked great on desktop devices, but terrible on mobile devices.  Most of the ad was being cut off.

She wanted a way to easily embed both mobile and desktop versions of her ads in her posts.

You Can Code it up

It’s a relatively simple job for a code monkey like me to write some scripts to do this, WordPress has a built-in function call wp_is_mobile that does exactly that.

My client wanted to do this easily without coding so following my mantra of “there’s always a plugin to do that” I went hunting.

Enter WP Mobile Detect

The solution to the problem was WP Mobile Detect https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-mobile-detect/.

What this clever little plugin does is to provide a series of short codes that let you show or hide content based upon the device a user is using .

You can target phones, desktops or tablets.  You can target operating systems like Android, iOS or Windows mobile.  You can also have combinations of them too.

How It works

You add a short code into your post wrapping the content you want to change, I’m not using the plugin on my site but here is an example

[phone]

This text would be displayed on phones

[/phone]

[notphone]

This text would be displayed on desktops and tablets

[/notphone]

Other Short Code Available

As I have mentioned there were other combinations available, here is a list of what you can do.

• [phone]Put content here that you only want displayed on Phones NOT Tablets or Desktops[/phone]
• [tablet]Put content here that you only want displayed on Tablets NOT Phones or Desktops[/tablet]
• [device]Put content here that you only want displayed on Phones OR Tablets NOT Desktops[/device]
• [notphone]Put content here that you only want displayed on Tablets OR Desktops NOT Phones[/notphone]
• [nottab]Put content here that you only want displayed on Phones OR Desktops NOT Tablets[/nottab]
• [notdevice]Put content here that you only want displayed on Desktops NOT Phones OR Tablets[/notdevice]
• [ios]Put content here that you only want displayed on iOS devices[/ios]
• [iPhone]Put content here, that you only want displayed on iPhones[/iPhone]
• [iPad]Put content here, that you only want displayed on iPads[/iPad]
• [android]Put content here, that you only want displayed on Android devices[/android]
• [windowsmobile]Put content here, that you only want displayed on Windows Mobile devices[/windowsmobile]

Not Just For Ads

You can wrap any type of content in these short codes, for example a mobile friendly contact form as opposed to a long form that would be difficult to fill in on a phone.

You could have a click to call button that only appears on phones that would be useless on desktop.

Outro

I love the fact that the WordPress community is developing solutions for nearly every issue there is and then distributing it as a free plugin.

90% of the time building and maintaining a WordPress site is very easy, it’s the final 10% we are here for.

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I’ve been using a plugin that is new to me called Plugin Organizer to speed up slow loading client sites and my own sites.

I just wanted to share this knowledge with you, if you have a slow loading site.

What Is Plugin Organizer?

Plugin organizer is a plugin (no Sh!t Sherlock) that allows you to control where and when plugin are loaded.

It allows you to control the order plugins are loaded, load plugins only for particular post types or not load a plugin on particular URLs.

I’m writing a couple of posts to cover what it does, but in this on I want to look at excluding plugins to speed up page load times.

Using Plugin Organizer to Speed Up Sites

The way WordPress normally works is to load plugin code for a plugin across all pages,  the more plugin code loaded, the longer a page takes to render in a web browser.

Why not stop plugins loading where they are not required.  Less plugin code = faster page load time.

Finding What Plugins Are Loading On Your Page

So the next challenge is to find out what plugins are loading on particular pages.

There are lots of in-browser add-ons that allow you to see what plugins are being loaded, but my favourite is httpwatch.com.  You only need the free version BTW.

Once loaded into your browser you can record what scripts and components are being loaded.  Use this list and search for anything under wp-content/plugins/{PLUGIN-NAME} and you will see plugin code.  Here is a screen dump from my home page with some plugin code highlighted.

Example

On my site I use Woocommerce, but I don’t need Woocommerce to load on my main pages such as home, about hire us etc.  So I set about excluding this plugin from certain URLs.

Step One – Install the plugin

Step Two – Enable selective plugin loading, go to Plugin Organizer -> Settings, and check the box Enable -> Selective Plugin Loading:

Step Three  – Add a plugin filter, go to Plugin Organizer -> Plugin Filter, add a new filter, give it a name, set the page URL and deselect the plugins from the list.  I was able to disable a large number for my home page

Test Test Test

We are fundamentally changing the way plugins work with these changes so this knowledge comes with a caveat to test, test and test again to make sure you posts and pages retain the functionality you need after excluding plugins.

Wrap Up

Next up I’ll show you another cool way to use plugin organizer when you get a plugin clash.

If you are looking to speed up your WordPress site, I have a performance tuning package, why not get a no obligation quote for my fixed price performacne tunining package

Hat tip to David Risley for alerting me to Plugin Organiser on this post

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