Are you looking for a way to add a QR code for Stripe payments on your WordPress website?
QR codes, or Quick Response Codes, are a type of barcode that users can scan using their mobile phones. You can show a Stripe payment form using QR codes and help customers easily purchase a product or service.
In this article, we will show you how to add Stripe QR code payment in WordPress.
Why Add Stripe QR Code Payment in WordPress?
Stripe is a popular payment gateway that lets you accept online payments on your WordPress site or eCommerce store. It makes it very easy for customers to pay using their credit cards.
The best part is that customers don’t have to go through a lengthy signup process. They can simply enter their credit card on the website to make a purchase.
Adding Stripe QR code payments to your site gives customers the flexibility to complete a purchase quickly. Customers can simply scan the code to open the payment link.
This makes the checkout process very simple and fast. It helps people to easily buy a product and service on your online store. As a result, you’ll see a boost in conversions and reduced cart abandonments.
That said, let’s look at how you can add a Stripe QR code payment to your WordPress website.
Create a Stripe Payment Form in WordPress
First, you’ll need to add a Stripe payment form on your website to accept online payments from customers.
The best way to do that is using WPForms. It is the best contact form plugin for WordPress that’s super easy to use and easily integrates with Stripe. There are many form templates to choose from, and you can customize them using the drag-and-drop builder.
For this tutorial, you’ll need the WPForms Pro license because it includes the Stripe addon. There’s also a WPForms Lite version that you can use for free. It allows you to accept Stripe payments, but there’s a 3% transaction fee for payments made through your forms.
To start, you’ll need to download and install the WPForms plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you can go to WPForms » Settings from your WordPress dashboard and enter the license key. You can find the key in your account area on the WPForms website.
Simply enter the key and click the ‘Verify Key’ button.
Once that’s done, you’ll need to go to the WPForms » Addons page and install the Stripe addon.
Go ahead and click the ‘Install Addon’ button, and WPForms will automatically install and activate it.
From here, you can head to WPForms » Settings from the WordPress admin panel and go to the ‘ Payments’ tab.
Next, simply click the ‘Connect with Stripe’ button and follow the onscreen instructions to connect your account with WPForms.
Once Stripe is connected, you can go to WPForms » Add New to create a new form.
WPForms offers lots of form templates to choose from. You can select a simple contact form, an order form, or a Stripe payment form and customize it.
For this tutorial, we will use the ‘Stripe Payment Form’ template.
Next, you can customize your form using the drag-and-drop form builder. By default, you’ll see different form fields in the template.
However, WPForms lets you add more form fields to the template, like a dropdown, checkboxes, email, phone, address, website, and more.
You can also click any form field on the template to customize it further.
For instance, we changed the text for each item on your demo form and enabled the option to show prices after the item label.
Once you’re done editing the form, simply switch to the ‘Payments’ tab and select ‘Stripe’ from the menu on the left.
From here, ensure the ‘Enable Stripe payments’ option is enabled.
Next, you can switch to the Settings tab. Here, you’ll see options to change the notification and confirmation settings.
For instance, you can select what action should take place once a user submits a form. WPForms lets you show a message or a page or even redirect users to a URL.
You’re now ready to display your Stripe payment form on your website.
Simply click the ‘Save’ button to store your changes and then click the ‘Embed’ button at the top.
Next, WPForms will show a popup where you can choose an existing page or create a new one to embed your form.
We will choose the ‘Select Existing Page’ option for this tutorial.
Next, you’ll need to enter a name for your new page.
Once that’s done, simply click the ‘Let’s Go’ button.
You can go ahead and publish the page and visit the website to see it in action.
Now go ahead and copy the link of your payment form page, as you’ll need it to create a QR code.
Alternative Method: You can also create a Stripe payment form using WP Simple Pay. It is the best Stripe payment plugin for WordPress and helps you collect online payments without setting up a shopping cart.
WP Simple Pay is a more straightforward option compared to WPForms. It is perfect if you’re just looking to create a basic form to accept credit card payments.
However, if you’re looking for more customization options and form templates, then we recommend using WPForms.
Now that your Stripe payment form is ready, you can create a QR code for it and display it anywhere on your site.
There are 2 ways you can add a QR code to your site. You can use the Google Chrome browser’s feature or use a WordPress plugin.
1. Create QR Codes using Google Chrome
If you’re using the Google Chrome browser, then you can use it to share a webpage via a QR code.
First, you’ll need to open the Stripe payment form page in a new tab or window.
Next, you can click the share icon in the top right corner of the site address bar. From here, simply select the ‘Create QR Code’ option.
After that, Google Chrome will generate a QR code for your Stripe payment form page.
You can go ahead and download the QR code as an image.
Next, simply place the image anywhere on your site.
For example, you can show the QR code on product pages, so customers can quickly scan them and open the form to make a purchase.
2. Create a Stripe Payment QR Code using a WordPress Plugin
You can also add QR codes to your site using a WordPress plugin like Shortcodes Ultimate. It is a free plugin that lets you create over 50 different types of shortcodes, including QR codes.
Upon activation, you will see the Shortcode Ultimate welcome screen.
Next, you’ll need to edit a page or post to add your QR code.
Once you’re in the content editor, simply add a shortcode block.
After that, you should see an ‘Insert shortcode’ option.
You can simply click the double brackets icon to add your QR code.
Next, the plugin will display different shortcode options for your site.
Go ahead and select the ‘QR Code’ option.
After that, you’ll see options to enter details for your QR code.
In the Data field, you can enter the URL of your Stripe payment form that you created earlier.
Besides that, there is an option to enter a title for the code, which acts as an alt-text. You can also adjust the size of your QR code.
If you scroll down, then you’ll see more options to customize your QR code. For instance, you can change the primary color, background color, and more.
Once you’re done, simply click the ‘Insert shortcode’ button.
The plugin also lets you see a live preview of the code on your blog post or landing page.
Go ahead and publish your page to see the Stripe payment form QR code in action.
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.
Are you looking for the best WPForms alternatives?
WPForms is the powerful drag and drop WordPress forms plugin out there. It lets you quickly create contact forms, payment forms, surveys, and more without any coding at all. However, there are a lot of other forms plugins out there, and we want to help you find the one that works best for your site.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the best alternatives to WPForms.
Is There a Free Alternative to WPForms?
Yes, there’s a free version of WPForms! WPForms Lite gives you the most important features you need to get started with creating forms.
With WPForms Lite, you can access ready-made templates and create unlimited forms right in the form builder.
That said, let’s look at the best WPForms Pro alternatives.Â
We do think that WPForms is the best form builder available, and if you’re not ready to purchase a license just yet, we suggest that you give WPForms Lite a shot.
It is the best alternative WordPress form plugin to WPForms Pro and offers plenty of features for free. With over 6 million professionals using the product on their websites, it’s one of the most popular plugins available.
You can use WPForms Lite to:
Build unlimited forms without writing a single line of code
Get unlimited responses
Protect your forms against spam
Receive entry notifications by mail
Create payment and subscription forms with Stripe integration
Building forms only takes a few minutes, too. WPForms Lite lets you build many types quickly with its user-friendly drag and drop interface.
Simply choose your template and drag any field you want from left to right.
The Lite version alone has plenty of field options, including multiple choice, dropdown, reCAPTCHA, payment fields, and a GDPR agreement.
Also, with the free version, you can email users when forms are completed for confirmation or direct them to the next steps.
WPForms Lite can connect with Constant Contact for lead generation, too. Once users submit their information through a newsletter form, the new contact will be added to your email list. Newsletter signup and user registration forms are a powerful way to get more leads from your WordPress site.
You will want to use WPForms Pro to connect with other email marketing services like Mailchimp, GetResponse, AWeber, Drip, and others.
WPForms Lite also easily integrates popular page builders SeedProd and Divi so that you can create and embed contact forms without complex shortcodes.
But what if you want to connect your forms to a service that doesn’t have an addon? WPForms Lite connects with Uncanny Automator, which allows you to send WPForms submissions to other plugins and services.
Unlike most free plugins which lack proper customer support, WPForms Lite provides support in the WordPress.org forums, and you can expect a typical response time of 1 to 3 business days.
If you’re a Pro member, you get help even faster since you can open a support ticket and expect a response within 1 business day.
While it’s missing some advanced features like conditional logic and multi-page forms, WPForms Lite is the perfect tool for freelancers, creatives, or other business owners who only need simple forms.
Pricing: WPForms Lite is completely free to use. If you want to upgrade to the Pro version, WPBeginner users can enjoy an exclusive 50% OFF discount on all plans by using our WPForms coupon.
Formidable Forms is an advanced WordPress form builder and a great alternative to WPForms if you’re looking to create complex forms.
WPForms and Formidable Forms share many similarities. For instance, both have user-friendly drop form builders to create forms.
That said, Formidable Forms tends to favor developers and brands requiring complex forms with advanced functionality, while WPForms specializes in powerful forms that are easy to design and embed.
Formidable Forms lets you create calculation forms, which is very useful for businesses like real estate or finance businesses.
You also get unique templates like car payment, paycheck, and mortgage calculations (along with many others), making Formidable Forms really stand out.
Besides that, you can turn your form results into user-generated content. They create eye-catching reports, graphs, and charts using form submission data. The plugin can also export the data into many different formats, such as proposals, invoices, certifications, and more.
Pricing: Formidable form plans start at $39.50 per year. However, you can also use the free version of the plugin as an alternative to WPForms.
WP Simple Pay is a plugin that makes creating and accepting payment forms on your WordPress site super easy.
Your forms can capture one-time payments or recurring subscriptions to fit your needs. This is perfect for business owners, freelancers, and agency owners who want to accept payments on their site without the fuss of creating an online store.
With WP Simple Pay, you can accept over 10 different payment methods, including credit or debit cards, ACH, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and other payment methods. This is more than just any other payment form builder, including WPForms.
If you need to take payments or donations on your site, then WP Simple Pay is a great alternative to using WPForms payment forms.
Pricing: Pricing plans start at $49.50 per year, giving you access to unlimited payment forms and no monthly fees. Higher plans offer features like Buy Now, Pay Later installment plans, and dedicated landing pages to help boost conversions.
WP Charitable is the best plugin for building non-profit donation forms and fundraising campaigns.
Collecting and managing donations in WordPress can be difficult since most donation and fundraising plugins are either too pricey or too limited. Expensive platform fees can quickly add up and eat into your fundraising efforts.
If you’re building donation forms, WP Charitable is the best choice. Since the platform doesn’t charge transaction fees, you can be assured that your donors’ generous donations won’t be taxed on your website.
With WP Charitable, you can create unlimited fundraising campaigns and set goals for each cause.
The free version of WP Charitable supports PayPal donations and offline payments. With the paid plans, you can add other payment gateways like Authorize.net and Stripe.
Pricing: Plans start at $99 per year with access to unlimited campaigns and donors. With higher plans, you will get addons such as recurring donations, peer-to-peer fundraising and crowdfunding, and newsletter software integration.
Typeform is a popular form builder that allows you to create forms, applications, quizzes, and even surveys or polls.
Like WPForms, there’s no coding involved. There are over 120+ integration options, and everything from logos to videos can be edited in the Typeform software, so you can build an appealing form.
You can also choose from 100+ templates based on different industries and use cases, including ecommerce sites, medical institutions, and more.
That said, Typeform does have some drawbacks. The biggest downside is the cost. The Basic plan starts from $25 per month to create unlimited forms. That’s something WPForms Lite can do for absolutely free.
There’s also a cap on how many monthly responses you can receive based on the type of plan you choose. The Basic plan only captures a mere 100 responses, which isn’t enough for most small businesses.
Plus, the most expensive plans run $996 USD per year, which drives up the cost of running a website by a lot.
Also, it’s a SaaS (software as a service) tool, meaning it stores data onto external services. This can be a security threat since you’ll be leaving your customer’s personal data in someone else’s hands.
Pricing: Typeform’s Basic plan starts at $300 per year with a small limit of 100 responses. The most advanced plan costs $996 per year and gives you extra features like conversion tracking, custom branding, and priority support.
HubSpot Form Builder allows you to create simple contact forms. It is a great alternative to WPForms if you already use other HubSpot products like the HubSpot customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, or live chat tool.
What’s unique about HubSpot Form Builder is that you can create custom forms that meet your website need and automatically sync your new contacts collected from your forms into the HubSpot CRM.
You can create embedded forms, popup box forms, forms as standalone pages, or as dropdown banners. As a result, you can place lead generation forms at the right time and place in the customer journey.
Also, the plugin has an automation feature, allowing you to send emails to the user once they’ve submitted your forms. However, it’s only available as part of paid plans.
One of the biggest disadvantages is that the HubSpot Form Builder is quite limited in form templates, giving users only a handful of templates to work with. So if there isn’t a template to match your needs, you’ll have to create the form from scratch.
HubSpot Form Builder is part of a larger ecosystem of tools, meaning you don’t have to use third-party tools like Google Analytics for insights. You will have a built-in analytics dashboard to see how your forms are performing. And best of all, you can create a HubSpot form right in WordPress.
Pricing: The HubSpot Form Builder is free. However, if you want to access some of the other tools along with the form builder, pricing starts at $216 per year.
Gravity Forms is a powerful solution to create custom forms in WordPress.
With this plugin, you can build contact forms, surveys, and quizzes for your website with ease.
It comes with plenty of advanced features like conditional formatting, which shows or hides certain questions based on the user’s previous answer.
Gravity Forms also offers many addons to help you get the most out of the plugin. You can track users by geolocation, allow signatures, and collect partial form entries.
That said, Gravity Forms does fall short when compared to WPForms. It only comes with 15 templates and lacks a free version. If you’re using Gravity Forms on multiple sites, the licenses still provide a decent value for money.
Pricing: The Basic license starts at $59 per year, providing only access to 1 site and a few integrations.
Ninja Forms is another WPForms alternative you can start using for free. It features a drag and drop form builder so you can build interactive online forms without coding.
The plugin offers a wide range of addons for purchase, such as conditional logic, file uploads, Excel export, and multi-step forms. Unfortunately, you have to buy each one separately, which can quickly rack up, especially when buying more than one or two addons.
Out of this list, Ninja Forms offers some of the most integrations out of any tool. For example, you can connect them with different payment apps like Stripe and PayPal, CRMs like Salesforce, and other tools like webhooks and Slack.
Pricing: The base plugin is free to download in the official WordPress repository. However, you can buy a subscription with additional features starting at $99 per year or purchase individual addons.
Contact Form 7 rounds out our list because it is the oldest and most downloaded contact form plugin in the official WordPress plugin directory.
It is a WPForms alternative, but we don’t recommend that you use it. The only real benefit of using Contact Form 7 is that it’s free to use, and you can create simple forms. WPForms Lite does everything it can and more.
That said, Contact Form 7 is not user-friendly. There are no drag and drop builders or templates to use. Instead, you have to copy shortcodes to embed forms and toggle with dynamic merge tags to build the most basic contact forms.
Additionally, all forms are styled plainly. You can’t customize the style of your forms, making it hard to match the form’s design to your WordPress theme.
If you’re looking for a free WordPress contact form plugin, then WPForms Lite, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms Lite are all considerably better solutions than Contact Form 7.
Pricing: It’s a free plugin. However, it lacks many basic features, no real customization is available, and you get limited support.
What to Look for in an Online Form Builder
When you’re on the hunt for an online form builder for your WordPress website, there are many features and factors to consider.
Fortunately, WPForms offers all of these features and then some. This makes it the most comprehensive form builder plugin on the market.
Let’s look at a few of them.
Pre-built Templates
The best online form builders have pre-built form templates, allowing you to set up the forms you need in minutes. You never have to start from scratch as you do with plugins like Contact Form 7.
Instead, look for a form builder with a template gallery that includes the most popular forms needed for WordPress websites, like contact forms, newsletter signup forms, application forms, donation forms, order forms, and more.
In fact, the WPForms Lite version alone has 900+ form templates, meaning there’s a form to fit almost anything you could need.
Conditional Logic
In some cases, you may want to show or hide specific fields to users based on their responses.
That way, your visitors won’t see tons of empty fields that don’t apply to them.
You can use conditional logic to create dynamic forms that adapt as your visitor fills out the form. For example, you may want to:
Filter your survey questions based on a demographic question
Process payments only when certain conditions are met
Provide customized support based on the type of issues your customers are experiencing
Surveys & Polls
A good form builder should also include the ability to create survey forms, polls, and quizzes.
Unlike most professional survey tools, WPForms Pro lets you easily embed surveys and polls onto your site. This helps you share and distribute them to a wider audience.
Everything is housed and stored within WordPress, meaning all your survey responses will be stored on your website, so you don’t have to log into different platforms and you can ensure your users’ data is secure.
Also, you’ll see survey charts to visually see how responses are segmented. You can also download MonsterInsights, the best Google Analytics plugin, to measure your form completion rates as well.
Conversational Forms
Static forms can feel plain, which increases the likelihood of form abandonment. Online form builders should be able to create conversational forms.
This is a more interactive layout that only focuses on one question at a time rather than showing all of the questions at once.
Also, conversational forms can be completed using a keyboard only, making them more suitable for mobile users.
Multi-Page Forms
Long forms can be overwhelming, causing users to abandon the form altogether. However, creating multi-page forms splits your single-page form into smaller sections with a progress bar to help reduce fatigue.
Respondents are more likely to finish the form when separated into pages rather than seeing one long form.
Spam Protection
Online forms are vulnerable to spam bots that crawl through websites to find ways to email you through a non-secure form.
Since website owners often don’t give out their email addresses, forms are an easy way for hackers to add spam comments, send phishing links, and spread malware.
That’s why you need built-in security features in your online form builder to prevent spam emails.
WPForms features the latest spam defense methods. For example, you can add a CAPTCHA to bypass spambots so that only humans can submit your forms.
Which WPForms Pro Alternative is the Best?Â
In our experience, the best alternative to WPForms Pro is WPForms Lite. For many users, the options in the free version can get them started with their website or business. Â
It is a powerful and easy-to-use plugin that lets you build just about any type of form. The Lite version can do all of the basic functions users need without any of the bloat other contact form plugins have.
There simply is no other free forms plugin that has the same ease of use and number of features as WPForms Lite.
However, if you need direct CRM integration, HubSpot Form Builder is the way to go.
For more complex forms or calculations, Formidable Forms is the clear winner.
If you want to be able to choose and pay for only the features you will use the most, then we think that Ninja Forms is your best option.
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.
Do you want to display the estimated time it takes to read your WordPress blog posts?
An estimated reading time encourages users to read through to the end of a post since they know how long it will take. It can help to keep readers on your website and boost engagement.
In this article, we will show you how to easily add estimated post reading time to your WordPress posts.
Why Add Estimated Post Reading Time in WordPress Posts?
However, you also need to increase the time each user spends on your website. When visitors stay on your website longer, they are more likely to remember your brand, sign up for your newsletter, make a purchase, and visit again in the future.
This is why several popular websites show a reading progress bar as users scroll down a post.
Another way to encourage visitors to read your posts is to let them know in advance how much time it will take. Telling them that it will only take a few minutes to read the article can help them make a start.
That said, let’s take a look at how to easily display reading time in your WordPress blog post.
Displaying Estimated Reading Time in Your WordPress Posts
The easiest way to add estimated reading time is by using the Read Meter plugin. It’s a free WordPress plugin that helps you show the reading time and progress bar on your website.
First, you will need to install and activate the Read Meter plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit the Settings » Read Meter page from your WordPress admin panel to configure the plugin settings.
In the ‘General Settings’ tab, you can select the post types to show the reading time on.
For instance, the plugin lets you display the reading time on your blog posts and pages. If you have an online store, then there will also be an option to do this on your product pages.
You can also adjust the reading speed. By default, the plugin calculates reading time by estimating 275 words per minute reading speed.
There is also an option to include comments and images when estimating the time it will take to read the blog post.
Next, you can head over to the ‘Read Time’ tab to customize the exact text that will appear.
At the top, the plugin lets you choose whether to show the read time on blog posts, your home page, and your archive pages.
Besides that, you can change the appearance of the reading time notification.
There are settings for the font size, position of the read time, background color, text color, and a lot more.
When you have made the changes, don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button.
After that, you can go to the ‘Progress Bar’ tab and edit the settings. You will see options to select the position of the bar (top or bottom of the page) or completely disable it from your WordPress website.
You can also change its style, background color, primary color, and bar thickness.
After editing your progress bar settings, go ahead and click the ‘Save’ button. Now your readers will see the estimated reading time on each post.
You can now visit your WordPress website to see the reading time and a progress bar in action.
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.
Are you looking for an honest web hosting comparison of Hostinger vs. Bluehost?
These are two of the most affordable hosting companies on the market. However, beginners are often not sure which company to choose for their websites.
In this guide, we will compare Hostinger vs. Bluehost with their pros and cons so that you can make the right decision.
Bluehost is an official WordPress.org recommended hosting provider, and Hostinger’s plans start at an even more affordable price point. At WPBeginner, we recommend them as two of the top WordPress hosting services for all kinds of users.
In this comparison, we will take a closer look into the pros and cons of Hostinger vs. Bluehost in detail so you can see which is better for your needs and make an informed choice.
Are you wondering which is the best platform for your WordPress site? Here is a quick summary:
With that being said, let’s compare both services and see how they compare.
Hostinger Comparison
Hostinger is a popular web hosting provider with a reliable and user-friendly platform to launch websites. They offer affordable shared hosting plans with great customer support, a free domain name with most plans, a free SSL certificate, and more.
Their shared hosting prices are more affordable than most of their competitors. This makes them a good choice for beginners and small businesses looking for budget web hosting.
Pros of Hostinger
Hostinger has the lowest price hosting on the market, but what are some of their pros and cons? Let’s start with some of the benefits of using Hostinger as your hosting service:
Affordable Plans – They offer very low-cost hosting plans, making Hostinger a great option for people who just want to test out an idea or launch a small website.
Excellent Performance – Considering Hostinger’s low price point, their performance and speed are impressive.
Excellent Customer Support – They offer great customer support for all of their hosting plans, making them a great choice for beginners.
Cons of Hostinger
Are there any disadvantages to using Hostinger? Here are some of the downsides that you may want to know:
Plan Limitations – So that their low-cost hosting remains viable, Hostinger places limits on entry-level and low-level hosting plans. However, as your website grows, you can always remove those limitations by upgrading to more expensive cloud or VPS plans.
No Daily Backups – Hostinger’s single and premium plans provide weekly backups instead of daily backups. While this is a downside, we always recommend that users set up their own backup solution to be on the safe side.
Hostinger Review
Hostinger has a 5-star rating on WPBeginner based on over 800 user reviews. In our detailed Hostinger review, you can also see the results of our performance and stress tests on Hostinger servers.
If you would like a free domain name, then you won’t get one with Hostinger’s cheapest plan. However, their second-tier plan includes a free domain and is still a little more affordable than Bluehost’s cheapest plan. All Hostinger plans include a free SSL certificate.
We found their customer support team to be very responsive, with almost immediate response times over live chat. Plus, Hostinger has a detailed knowledge base with step-by-step tutorials that answer the most common customer questions.
Bluehost Comparison
Bluehost is an officially recommended WordPress host and one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world. Their hosting is designed for WordPress websites, and they provide great performance with fast servers.
Their hosting prices are lower than most other hosting companies, though their plans cost a little more than Hostinger’s. All the same, they are a good choice for beginners and small businesses with limited budgets.
Pros of Bluehost
Bluehost offers great value at low prices, but you might be wondering what their pros and cons are. We will start with some of the advantages of picking Bluehost as your hosting service:
Low Costs – Bluehost’s most affordable plan allows you to get started with your website for a low price. Overall, it’s excellent value for new small businesses, bloggers, portfolios, and other WordPress websites.
Ease of Use – Bluehost has one of the most user-friendly hosting control panels, which makes it easy to install WordPress with one click and manage your website with ease.
Free Domain – Bluehost provides a free domain name, and this saves you extra money on your start-up costs.
Free CDN + Free SSL – Bluehost provides a free CDN to boost your website performance, and all plans come with a free SSL certificate to improve security.
Website Speed – We found that Bluehost performed well in our tests, even without performance optimization. You can also add WordPress caching plugins to unlock further speed improvements.
Staging Sites + Dev Tools – Bluehost plans come with staging site access, automatic WordPress updates, the ability to change PHP versions, secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) access, and more.
Cons of Bluehost
Now, we will take a look at some downsides to using Bluehost. Here are some cons that you may want to know:
Higher Domain Renewal Price – Their renewal price for the free domain name is higher than average. This won’t have an immediate impact but is worth keeping in mind.
Upselling Addons – During signup, you will see a lot of upselling. Most beginners won’t need these products right away, so it is safe to skip them and add them later if needed.
Bluehost Review
Bluehost has a 5-star rating on WPBeginner based on over 300 user reviews and the high value they offer at low prices. You can also check out our detailed Bluehost review to see the results of our performance and stress tests on the Bluehost servers.
The best thing about Bluehost is all of their plans include a free domain, unlimited bandwidth and SSD storage on their Plus plan, and great overall value for what you pay.
Additionally, their eCommerce hosting plan for WooCommerce comes with over $1000+ in premium WooCommerce and WordPress extensions, which can save you a lot of money.
Hostinger vs. Bluehost – Which Is Better?
Now that we have compared the different features of Hostinger vs. Bluehost, you may still be wondering which one of them is better. The answer depends on your needs and requirements.
Hostinger and Bluehost offer slightly different services, but they are both great providers that offer hosting plans at affordable prices.
Both companies provide fast response times to visitors all around the world. Hostinger has a slight advantage in Europe, and Bluehost excels in North America.
Which hosting provider should you choose?
We recommend Hostinger to people looking for cheaper website hosting with some limitations. On the other hand, Bluehost is better for users looking for unlimited everything by paying a little extra.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
We have helped thousands of our users choose the best web host for their needs, and we have been asked quite a few questions. Here are some of the answers to the most frequently asked questions about Hostinger vs. Bluehost.
Where are Hostinger and Bluehost located?
Hostinger’s headquarters are located in Kaunas, Lithuania. Their servers are located in several locations, including the USA, Europe, Brazil, Indonesia, and Singapore.
Bluehost has their own in-house data center in Utah, US. It is a huge 50,000-square-foot facility that acts as its primary data center.
How did you test the speeds of Hostinger’s and Bluehost’s web servers?
We started by creating identical test sites on each hosting provider and installed the default WordPress theme. After that, we imported sample content, including images and media.
We then used independent third-party tools like Pingdom to time page load time and Bitcatcha to test response times under load and from different geographical locations.
Can Hostinger and Bluehost handle high traffic?
Yes, in our stress tests, the shared hosting plans of both companies were able to handle 100 virtual users without any slowdown.
These plans can handle reasonable and sudden traffic spikes. However, they are still quite limited in server resources. If you are expecting high traffic, then we recommend you upgrade your hosting plan.
Are there other hosting providers that you haven’t covered in this comparison?
This article compares Hostinger and Bluehost because they are two of the most affordable hosting companies on the market.
Do you have any special discounts for Hostinger or Bluehost?
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Do you want to remove the date from your WordPress URLs?
WordPress comes with an SEO-friendly URL structure. This includes several link formats, including one that adds dates to your WordPress post URLs.
In this article, we will show you how to easily remove the date from your WordPress URLs.
Why Dates Appear in WordPress URLs
By default, WordPress uses a non-human-readable link structure for post and page URLs, which looks like this:
https://example.com/?p=123
This uses the post ID in the URL, which doesn’t look good and isn’t very meaningful.
Luckily, the WordPress Settings » Permalinks page lets you easily change these default links to something more meaningful and SEO-friendly.
Some WordPress users choose the ‘Month and name’ or ‘Day and name’ options. These add date parameters to your WordPress URLs.
‘Day and name’ permalinks include the year, month, and day like this:
https://example.com/2023/09/03/sample-post/
‘Month and name’ permalinks include the year and month:
https://example.com/2023/09/sample-post/
These URLs are better than the default ugly URLs, and they are SEO-friendly as well. However, they are unnecessarily long, and in time, the dates will make your articles look old.
That’s why a lot of users prefer the ‘Post name’ URL structure instead. This removes the date and just uses the post slug keyword in the URL.
‘Post name’ permalinks don’t include any date information in the URL:
https://example.com/sample-post/
This URL structure is shorter, meaningful, SEO friendly, and won’t look dated.
Considerations Before Removing the Date From WordPress URLs
If you are starting a new WordPress blog and haven’t launched it yet, then it is safe to remove the date from WordPress URLs.
However, if your website has been around for some time, then there are a few things you should keep in mind.
Changing the URL structure may result in 404 errors for your users and search engines. This means you might see warnings and errors in your Google Search Console reports.
Plus, your search engine rankings may be affected since backlinks to your old articles will also now lead to 404 errors.
Both of these issues can be fixed by setting up redirects, and we will show you how to do that later in this article.
Changing the URL structure will also reset your social share counts. Unfortunately, most social share count services do not track redirected URLs and will reset the counts.
Removing the Date From WordPress URLs
First, you need to create a complete WordPress backup of your website. This will allow you to restore your website to an earlier stage in case things don’t work out as you expected.
After that, you need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page and choose ‘Post name’ as your permalink option.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page to store your changes.
WordPress will now remove the date from your WordPress URLs and only use the post name. It will do this both for your existing posts and pages and those you will add in the future.
Setting Up Redirects to Preserve SEO Rankings
Now that you have removed the date from your WordPress URLs, you will need to set up proper 301 redirects. As we said, this will stop your users from seeing 404 error messages when they follow an old link.
These redirects will send users to the updated URLs without showing a 404 error. This will also help search engines understand that the old URLs have been moved to the new URLs.
We will cover 2 methods you can use to create 301 redirects in WordPress:
Method 1: Setting Up Redirects Using AIOSEO (Recommended)
The best way to set up redirects is using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin. That’s because it includes a powerful Redirection Manager feature that lets you create bulk 301 redirects as well as automatic redirects, full site redirects, 404 error tracking, and more.
Note: You will need AIOSEO Pro to use the redirection manager. There is also a free version of AIOSEO, but it doesn’t include 301 redirects.
First, you need to install and configure the AIOSEO Pro plugin on your website. For more information, please refer to our step-by-step guide on how to set up All in One SEO correctly.
Once the plugin is active, you will need to go to All in One SEO » Redirects in your WordPress dashboard and then click the ‘Activate Redirects’ button.
You’ll now see the ‘Redirects’ tab in All in One SEO, where you can add your first redirect.
On this page, you will see settings where you can enter a ‘Source URL’ and ‘Target URL’.
The source URL will describe the old URL permalink structure, and the target URL will describe the new post URL permalink you need to redirect to.
To do this, we will use regular expressions, which are also known as Regex. Regular expressions provide a powerful and flexible way to search and manipulate specific patterns of characters. We will use them to match the permalink pattern in the URLs we need to redirect.
If you were previously using ‘Day and name’ permalinks, then you need to enter these Regex expressions into the source and target fields:
Source URL: ^/(\d*)/(\d*)/(\d*)/([A-Za-z0-9-*])
Target URL: /$4
You will also need to click the cog icon next to the source URL to display three checkboxes. Make sure that only the ‘Regex’ box is checked. This option will enable regular expressions in the source and destination fields.
However, if you were using ‘Month and name’ permalinks, then you will need to enter these Regex values instead:
Source URL: ^/(\d*)/(\d*)/([A-Za-z0-9-*])
Target URL: /$3
Once you have added the source and target URL values, you should make sure that the Redirect Type is ‘301 Moved Permanently’ and then click the ‘Add Redirect’ button.
Your redirect will be created. Now, if a user clicks on a link that uses your old permalink structure, then they will be automatically redirected to the correct post using the new name-based URL.
You can see your redirect by scrolling down to the logs section. You can see how many website visitors have been redirected in the ‘Hits’ column, and you can enable or disable the redirect using the ‘Enabled’ toggle.
Method 2: Setting Up Redirects Using Redirection (Free)
You can choose our second method if you prefer to use a free plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit Tools » Redirection and click on the ‘Start Setup’ button.
The plugin will then show you a couple of options. It can automatically detect and alert you if a post’s URL is changed and keep a log of redirects.
You can also leave both these options unchecked and simply click the ‘Continue’ button.
The plugin will then run some tests, and if everything looks good, then you can click on the ‘Finish Setup’ button followed by the ‘Ready to begin!’ button. The plugin settings will be stored in the WordPress database.
You will now see the plugin’s settings page. From here, you need to click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top of the page or simply scroll down to the ‘Add new redirection’ section.
You will see a form with ‘Source URL’ and ‘Target URL’ fields. The source URL will describe the old URL structure, and the target URL will describe the new URLs.
If you were using the ‘Day and name’ permalinks, then you will enter the following values in the source and target fields:
Source URL: /(\d*)/(\d*)/(\d*)/([A-Za-z0-9-*])
Target URL: /$4
If you were using ‘Month and name’ permalinks, then you will enter the following values:
Source URL: /(\d*)/(\d*)/([A-Za-z0-9-*])
Target URL: /$3
Don’t forget to select ‘Regex’ from the drop-down menu before you click the ‘Add Redirect’ button to save your changes.
The plugin will now redirect users to your new name-based URLs.
We hope this article helped you learn how to easily remove the date from WordPress URLs. You may also want to see our guide on the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them, as well as our expert pick of the best WordPress SEO plugins.
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.
Are you looking to improve the customer experience in your online store?
When you take time to understand your customers’ needs, you can improve their journey from first discovering your site to making a purchase. By optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey, you can increase conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction, and boost profits.
In this article, we will show you how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store, from beginning to end.
What Is a WooCommerce Customer Journey?
‘Customer journey’ refers to a customer’s entire experience when they visit your WooCommerce store, including all of their interactions with your brand.
Optimizing the customer journey involves understanding each stage and ensuring that the customer has a seamless and enjoyable experience throughout.
These are the five stages of the WooCommerce customer journey:
Awareness stage: Make it easier for potential customers to find your online store and learn more about your business.
Consideration stage: Make it easier for your customers to find and learn about the products they need.
Decision stage: Optimize your checkout to encourage your customers to make a purchase.
Service stage: Improve your after-sales communications, express your appreciation for the sale, and better support your customers.
Loyalty stage: Build long-term relationships with customers through excellent customer service, personalized recommendations, and loyalty rewards.
In short, you should simply look at your online store from your customer’s point of view and then make it awesome.
How to Optimize the Customer Journey for Your WooCommerce Store (12 Tips)
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store.
We will share actionable tips on how you can improve the customer journey at each stage. You can use the quick links below to jump to the different parts of our tutorial:
Here are some tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the awareness stage.
1. Understand How Your Customers Find You
The first thing you need is to see the journeys your users take before they make a purchase in your online store. This is where customer tracking can help.
The best way to set up WooCommerce customer tracking in Google Analytics is using MonsterInsights. It is the best analytics solution for WordPress and has a User Journey addon that can help you plan how to improve the user journey in your online store.
After that, you can see the path each customer took before buying your product. You get to view the pages they visited, where they clicked, and how much time they spent on a page.
This is really useful information to better understand your customers. You can see which product categories are performing the best and where customers are leaving your store during the purchase process.
It’s important to do search engine optimization (SEO) for your online store so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This will make it easier for potential customers to find you when searching for products and solutions that you offer.
Improving SEO involves writing SEO-friendly product titles and descriptions, using product categories and tags, adding alt text to product images, and much more.
We recommend using All in One SEO because it’s the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and is used by over 3 million websites. It will help you to optimize your entire store for SEO and get found by more customers.
Here are some tips for optimizing the customer journey in your WooCommerce store during the awareness stage.
3. Design an Eye-Catching Product Page
When a visitor clicks on a link to your website on Google or Facebook, you want to give a good first impression. You can do that by creating product pages and landing pages that are optimized for sales.
This is where SeedProd comes in. It is the best WordPress page builder on the market that allows you to easily create landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and even completely custom WordPress themes.
SeedProd comes with dozens of ready-made templates that are already optimized for higher conversions. Plus, it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that you can use to customize your landing pages.
SeedProd also includes a WooCommerce integration that allows you to add eCommerce elements to any page.
For example, you can display featured products that you want to upsell, product grids, add-to-cart buttons, and more.
You can also customize your WooCommerce product search results to help your customers find what they are looking for quickly and easily.
By default, WordPress and WooCommerce have a limited search function. That’s a problem because if your customers can’t find what they are looking for, then they may not come back to your online store.
We recommend using the SearchWP plugin. It’s the best custom search plugin for WordPress and is used by over 30,000 websites.
5. Keep Your Visitors Coming Back With Push Notifications
Push notifications are automated messages that show up in your customers’ browsers even after they have left your WooCommerce store.
You can use drip campaigns with multiple push notifications over time to promote products, build a relationship with your customers, increase sales, and get visitors to return to your store.
The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It’s the best web push notification software, and it is used to send over 15 billion push messages every month.
Customer reviews are a powerful form of social proof that can make your business seem more trustworthy and encourage people to buy from your online store.
But collecting, managing, and formatting customer reviews takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why we recommend using a customer review plugin to add different types of reviews to WordPress.
Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro allows you to show reviews from Yelp, Facebook, Google, and TripAdvisor. That way, you don’t need to install any extra plugins.
Next, you will want to help customers get through your checkout and buy your products. Here are our tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the decision stage.
7. Improve Your Checkout
You can easily personalize the purchase experience in your WooCommerce store using FunnelKit, a WordPress sales funnel builder and optimization plugin.
For example, it comes with a One-click Upsells feature, which allows users to add products to their carts on their way to the checkout.
You can also add one-click order bumps to your checkout for increased conversions.
FunnelKit lets you customize the user journey with pre-checkout offers, custom checkout form layouts, beautiful templates, and more.
On average, 60 to 80% of people who add items to their cart don’t actually buy the products. This means that if you have an online store, then you are losing out on a lot of sales.
Often when a customer has added a product to their shopping cart, they will need some reassurance that they are making the right decision. This often leads to cart abandonment.
It allows you to create beautiful popups, countdown timers, slide-in forms, and more to nudge users in the right direction.
For example, OptinMonster can tell when a customer is about to leave your website and display a popup offering free shipping or a discount before they do.
You can learn how to grab your customers’ attention with targeted messages at just the right time in our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup.
Provide Great Customer Service
After customers have bought items from your WooCommerce store, you will want to give them great customer service to keep them coming back. Here are some tips for optimizing the service stage of the customer journey.
9. Follow Up With Your Customers
When running a WooCommerce store, your customers will receive different transactional emails. These emails help them get order confirmations, track their order statuses, get invoices, learn about how to return a product, and find more information about your online store.
By default, the design and layout of emails sent by WooCommerce are plain and generic. When you customize these emails, it helps to build trust with your customers, boost brand awareness, and get them to return to your store.
It includes a growing library of pre-built WooCommerce email templates that are proven to get results. And you can use the visual email automation builder to make any changes that you need.
What makes FunnelKit Automations really powerful is the custom goals-driven email automation builder. It shows you in-line analytics for each email.
For example, here is a screenshot of a workflow for sending out a thank you email after a customer’s first order.
As your online store grows, it’s important to provide good customer service. This leads to repeat sales, which means more profits for your business in the long run.
One way to do that is to add live chat to your website. This will let you interact with the people who visit your website, answer their questions, and solve their problems in real time. This can get you more sales and encourage existing customers to stay loyal to your brand.
The easiest way to add a live chat feature to your website is by using LiveChat Inc. It is one of the best live chat solutions for WordPress, and we use it on our own OptinMonster site.
The LiveChat WordPress plugin is free, although you will need to buy a paid subscription to the LiveChat service.
Another option is to automate live chat by using Chatbot.com, the best AI chatbot software for WordPress. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills to use it.
Finally, it’s important to turn your users into long-term and happy customers. Here are a few ways to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for the loyalty stage.
11. Reward Loyal Customers
Creating a loyalty program can keep customers coming back to your online store and keep them away from your competitors. It can also be a great way to reward your best customers and make them feel valued.
You can give customers points for buying products and services, but also for creating an account, placing their first order, signing up for your email newsletter, and spending over a certain account.
It’s super easy to create a WooCommerce loyalty program using the Loyalty Program for WooCommerce plugin. It allows you to set up a loyalty program in just minutes and reward customers for buying products, leaving customer reviews, and more.
Adding gamification so that your customers are rewarded after they take certain actions on your website, like leaving a product review, posting a comment, or buying a product.
12. Automate Your Store and Focus on Your Customers
There’s a lot to keep track of when running an online store. Luckily, you can automate tasks to save time and money so you can focus on your customers while growing your business.
For example, you can use automation tools and plugins to send SMS messages to your customers, automate your payment processes, use social proof to increase conversions, automatically display your best product reviews, and much more.
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Do you want to show multiple blog posts in a WordPress loop?
Using the loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page. It formats them according to how they match specified criteria within the loop tags.
In this article, we will show how to display any number of posts in a WordPress loop.
What Is the WordPress Loop?
The loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. It is PHP code that’s used in a WordPress theme to show a list of posts on a web page. It is an important part of WordPress code and is at the core of most queries.
In a WordPress loop, there are different functions that run to display posts. However, developers can customize how each post is shown in the loop by changing the template tags.
For example, the base tags in a loop will show the title, date, and content of the post in a loop. You can add custom tags and display additional information like the category, excerpt, custom fields, author name, and more.
The WordPress loop also lets you control the number of blog posts that you show on each page. This can be helpful when designing an author’s template, as you can control the number of posts displayed in each loop.
That being said, let’s see how to add any number of posts to a WordPress loop.
Adding Any Number of Posts in a WordPress Loop
Normally, you can set the number of posts to be displayed in the loop from your WordPress admin panel.
Simply head to Settings » Reading from the WordPress dashboard. By default, WordPress will show 10 posts.
However, you can override that number by using a Super Loop, which will allow you to display any number of posts in that specific WordPress loop.
This will allow you to customize the display settings of your pages, including author profiles, sidebars, and more.
First, you will need to open a template file where you would like to place the posts and then simply add this loop:
<?php
// if everything is in place and ready, let's start the loop
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
// to display 'n' number of posts, we need to execute the loop 'n' number of times
// so we define a numerical variable called '$count' and set its value to zero
// with each iteration of the loop, the value of '$count' will increase by one
// after the value of '$count' reaches the specified number, the loop will stop
// *USER: change the 'n' to the number of posts that you would like to display
<?php static $count = 0;
if ( $count == "n" ) {
break;
} else { ?>
// for CSS styling and layout purposes, we wrap the post content in a div
// we then display the entire post content via the 'the_content()' function
// *USER: change to '<?php the_excerpt(); ?>' to display post excerpts instead
<div class="post">
<?php the_title(); ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>
</div>
// here, we continue with the limiting of the number of displayed posts
// each iteration of the loop increases the value of '$count' by one
// the final two lines complete the loop and close the if statement
<?php $count ++;
} ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
Note: You will need to replace the value of ‘n‘ in the if ( $count == "n" ) part of the code and choose any number.
An easy way to add this code to your WordPress website is by using the WPCode plugin. It is the best code snippet plugin for WordPress that helps you manage custom code.
By using WPCode, you don’t have manually edit theme template files and risk breaking something. The plugin will automatically insert the code for you.
Upon activation, you can head to Code Snippets » + Add Snippet from your WordPress dashboard. Next, you need to select the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.
After that, simply paste the custom code for the WordPress loop that we showed you above into the ‘Code Preview’ area.
You will also need to enter a name for your code and set the ‘Code Type’ to ‘PHP Snippet’.
Next, you can scroll down to the ‘Insertion’ section and choose where you would like to run the code.
By default, WPCode will run it everywhere on your WordPress website. However, you can change the location to a specific page or use a shortcode to insert the code.
For this tutorial, we will use the default ‘Auto Insert’ method.
When you are done, don’t forget to click the toggle at the top to make the code ‘Active’ and then click the ‘Save’ button. WPCode will now deploy the code on your WordPress blog and display the specified number of posts in the WordPress loop.
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.
Do you want to share users and logins between multiple WordPress sites?
Sharing customer, member, or visitor information between multiple sites can improve the user experience, by allowing them to log into multiple sites with the same account. It can also save you a ton of time if you need to add employees, students, or other users to several sites.
In this article, we will show you how you can share users and logins between multiple WordPress websites.
Why Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites?
If you have multiple websites, then you may want to share users and login information between them.
This can save your visitors time and effort since they only need to complete the user registration form once. For example, you might have a WordPress blog and a website where you sell online courses.
If someone purchases a course from your blog, then you can automatically add them to the site that has the learning management system (LMS). The user can then log into the LMS and start working on their course, without having to register using their email address, username, and other information.
If you’re a WordPress development agency or you work on multiple client sites, then you may need to manually create several accounts for each developer, tester, and other staff member. Instead, you can save time by registering each person once and then sharing login information between all the client sites.
With that in mind, let’s see how you can share users and logins between WordPress websites.
How to Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites
The best way to share users and login information is by using Uncanny Automator. It’s the best WordPress automation plugin and helps you create automated workflows that can save you a ton of time and effort.
When it comes to connecting several sites, many people assume you need to set up a WordPress multisite network. However, it’s often easier to use webhooks. These are bits of code that allow different tools and apps to share information in real time.
After installing Uncanny Automator, you can use webhooks to share information between WordPress websites, including user accounts and login details.
To start, you’ll need to install Uncanny Automator on the website where users will create their original account. We’ll call this the ‘source’ website.
You’ll then need to install Uncanny Automator on every website that should receive data from the source site.
Finally, you’ll use automation recipes and webhooks to send user information from the source to all the other websites that need this information.
With that in mind, let’s walk through the steps in more detail.
Note: There is a free Uncanny Automator plugin that lets you automate many common tasks and comes with 300 automation triggers and actions. However, we’ll be using Uncanny Automator Pro because you need it to use the ‘A user is created’ trigger.
Upon activation, you’ll be asked to install the free version of Uncanny Automator core. The free plugin has limited features, but it’s used as the base for the Pro version.
With that done, you need to head over to Automator » Settings and enter your license key.
You can find this information under your account on the Uncanny Automator website.
After entering the key, click on the ‘Activate License’ button.
You’re going to create a recipe that sends information to a webhook, every time a user registers with your WordPress website.
To get started, simply head to Automator » Add New. Uncanny Automator will now ask whether you want to create a ‘Logged-in’ recipe or an ‘Everyone’ recipe.
Logged-in recipes can only be triggered by logged-in users, but anyone can trigger ‘Everyone’ recipes. With that being said, select ‘Logged-in’ and then click on ‘Confirm.’
You can now give this recipe a title, by typing into the ‘Title’ field.
This is just for your reference, so you can use anything you want.
Add Triggers and Actions to the Automated Workflow
Each recipe in Uncanny Automator has two parts called Triggers and Actions.
To start, you’ll need to set the trigger by choosing an integration.
Uncanny Automator supports many popular WordPress plugins including WPForms, WooCommerce, and OptinMonster. The options you see may vary depending on the plugins you’ve installed.
To get started, select ‘WordPress’ and then click on ‘A user is created.’
Next, you need to tell Uncanny Automator what it should do when the recipe gets triggered.
To do this, click the ‘Add action’ button.
Uncanny Automator will now show all the different integrations you can use in the action.
To send data to a webhook, click on ‘Webhooks.’
This adds a new dropdown menu.
Here, select ‘Send data to a webhook.’
You’ll now see a new section where you can set up the webhook.
For now, scroll to the ‘Body’ section.
Here, you need to specify the data Uncanny Automator should pass to the receiving WordPress blogs or websites. As an example, we’ll show you how to share the user’s email address, first name, and username. We will not be sharing the user’s password via Uncanny Automator.
Instead, Uncanny Automator will generate a random temporary password. Later in this guide, we’ll show you how to send an email containing a password reset link, so users can easily create their own password.
Pro Tip: It is best practice to use a unique password for every account. For more on this topic, please see our ultimate WordPress security guide.
To go ahead and share the user’s email address, click on the field under ‘Key’ and type in ‘Email.’ You’ll be using the key in your webhook, so make a note of it.
Under ‘Data Type,’ choose ‘Text’ if it isn’t already selected.
Now, click on the asterisk next to ‘Value.’
This opens a dropdown with all the different data you can share. For example, you might share the person’s username, first name, and last name.
To share the user’s email address, click on ‘Common’ and then select ‘User email.’
You’ll typically want to share additional information, such as the user’s first name and last name.
To share more information, go ahead and click the ‘Add Pair’ button.
Then, type in a key, select the data type, and choose a value from the dropdown menu by following the same process described above.
For example, in the following image, we’re sharing the email, first name, and username.
This recipe is almost complete, but you still need to type in the webook’s URL. To get this link, you’ll need to set up Uncanny Automator on the website that will receive the data.
With that being said, leave the source website open in a background tab, and open a new tab.
Receive User Login Information using a Webhook
In the new tab, log into the website, blog, or WooCommerce store that will receive the user information and login data. You can now install and activate the Uncanny Automator plugin by following the same process described above.
With that done, it’s time to create a recipe that’ll retrieve the data from the webhook, and add it to a new user account.
To get started, head over to Automator » Add New. In the popup that appears, click on ‘Everyone’ and then select ‘Confirm.’
You can now type in a title for the automated workflow.
Once again, this is just for your reference so you can use anything you want.
Under ‘Integrations,’ select ‘Webhooks.’
In the dropdown that appears, select ‘Receive data from a webhook.’
This adds a new section, with the ‘Webhook URL’ already filled in. In a later step, you’ll add this URL to the source website.
For now, scroll to the ‘Fields’ section. Here, you’ll need to configure all the information you’ll retrieve from the webhook. These are simply the key/value pairs you created in the first automation recipe.
Under ‘Key,’ type in the exact key you used for the first piece of information. If you capitalized ‘Email’ earlier, capitalize it here, too.
After that, open the ‘Value Type’ dropdown and choose ‘Text.’
To configure the next key/value pair, click on ‘Add Pair.’ You can now simply repeat these steps to add all the key/value pairs.
With that done, click on ‘Save.’
Set the User Data in Uncanny Automator
If you’ve been following along, then Uncanny Automator will now share the user’s email address, username, and first name with this new website.
As we already mentioned, the recipe will create a password at random, so you’ll need to give visitors an easy way to reset their password.
The easiest way is by sending an email containing a link to your password reset page. You can also include other useful information, such as the person’s username, a link to your website, and your contact information.
To get started, click on the ‘Add action’ button.
Uncanny Automator will now show all the different integrations you can use.
Go ahead and click on ‘Emails.’
In the dropdown that appears, select ‘Send an email.’
This adds a new section with some settings already filled in. For example, by default Uncanny Automator will send all messages from your WordPress admin email. It will also use your site name as the ‘From name.’
To change any of these settings, simply delete the default value.
Then, either type in the value you want to use instead, or click the asterisk and choose a token from the dropdown menu. These tokens will be replaced with real information when the recipe runs, so they’re a great way to show personalized content to different users.
Your next task is getting the user’s email address from the webhook.
To do this, find the ‘To’ field and then click on its asterisk.
Next, click to expand the ‘Common’ section.
When it appears, click on ‘User email.’
Uncanny Automator will now show a popup, explaining that you need to specify where the user information will come from.
In the popup, click on ‘Set user data.’
Now, if you scroll up you’ll see a new ‘Actions will be run on…’ section.
You want to create a new user account every time the recipe runs, so select ‘New User.’
You now need to map each field to information retrieved from the webhook. Some of these fields are mandatory, such as the username and email address, but others are optional such as the display name.
To get started, simply find the first field where you want to map some data, and then click on its asterisk button.
In the dropdown, click to expand the ‘Receive data from a webhook’ section.
You can now choose the information that you want to show in this field. In our images, we’re retrieving the user’s email address from the webhook.
Simply repeat these steps for each field where you want to use the visitor’s information. Just remember to leave the ‘Password’ field empty, so that Uncanny Automator generates a new password at random.
By default, Uncanny Automator will create each new user as a subscriber. If you want to give them a different role, then open the ‘Role’ dropdown and choose an option from the list.
Finally, you can tell Uncanny Automator what to do if there’s already an account for this username or email address. Since you don’t want to create duplicate accounts, click on the ‘Do nothing’ radio button.
With that done, click on ‘Save.’
Create a Password Reset Email
You’re now ready to create the email that Uncanny Automator will send to your users.
To get started, scroll to the ‘Send an email’ section and find the ‘To’ field. You can now click on its asterisk button and select ‘User email’ from the dropdown menu.
When that is done, scroll to the ‘Subject’ field.
Here, you can type in any plain text that you want to show in the subject line. You can also personalize the email subject using tokens that Uncanny Automator will replace with genuine user data.
To insert a token, select the asterisk button and then click to expand the ‘Receive data from a webhook’ section.
You can now choose the token you want to use, such as the person’s username, first name, or last name. In this way, you can create a personalized subject, which may improve your email open rates.
When you’re happy with the subject line, it’s time to create the email’s body copy.
Similar to the subject, you can type plain text directly into the editor, or use tokens to create a personalized message. For example, if you’ve retrieved the user’s first name from the webhook, then you can address them by name.
You’ll also need to include a password reset link, so the user can create their own password and keep their account safe.
To include this link, simply click on the asterisk and start typing ‘User reset password URL.’
When the right option shows up, click to add it to the message.
When you’re happy with how the email is set up, click on the ‘Save’ button.
With that done, you’re ready to make this automated recipe live.
Simply scroll up and click on the ‘Draft’ toggle so that it shows ‘Live’ instead.
Connect Multiple WordPress Websites Using a Webhook
In the ‘Trigger’ section, find the ‘Webhook URL.’ Just be aware you may need to click to expand this section, in order to see the webhook URL.
The final step is adding this URL to the first recipe you created on your source site. To do this, copy the URL and then switch back to the recipe on your original website.
In this tab, scroll to the ‘Actions’ section and find the empty ‘Webhook URL’ field. You can then go ahead and paste the URL into this field.
As soon as that’s done, the source website is ready to share user login data and information.
To make everything live, just click on the ‘Draft’ toggle so that it shows ‘Live’ instead.
At this point, you have two live Uncanny Automator recipes on two separate websites.
Now, every time someone creates an account on the source website, Uncanny Automator will share their information with the second website. The user will also get an email with a password reset link.
Do you want to share users and login information with more websites?
Then simply repeat the steps above to set up Uncanny Automator on more websites. In this way, you can easily share user data with an unlimited number of WordPress blogs, websites, and online marketplaces.
Making Sure Your WordPress Email Is Being Sent Reliably
Sometimes, users may not receive your emails as expected. This is because many WordPress hosting companies do not have the mail function configured properly.
To prevent their servers from abuse, many hosting companies even disable the mail function completely. This can be a big problem, as your users won’t receive information about how to create their passwords and access their accounts.
Luckily, you can fix this easily by using WP Mail SMTP. This plugin lets you send your WordPress emails through a reliable SMTP platform which is configured specifically to send emails like SendLayer, Gmail, and Outlook.
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.
Are you looking for the best WordPress search plugin to improve your site search?
The default WordPress search feature is quite limited and ignores a lot of the content on your website. Thankfully, there are several WordPress plugins that can help you improve the default search experience.
In this article, we will highlight the best WordPress search plugins to improve your site search.
Why Use a WordPress Search Plugin?
WordPress comes with a built-in search feature that can help visitors easily find what they are looking for.
However, it is quite basic and doesn’t search all your site’s content, including comments, files, and products.
The good news is that there are several search plugins that can help you improve the built-in WordPress search feature. Some of these plugins are built for specific purposes, like searching WooCommerce products, while others improve the search experience across your entire WordPress blog or website.
That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress search plugins. Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the plugin you want to learn more about:
SearchWP is one of the best search plugins for WordPress. It is very easy to use and provides much more accurate search results compared to the built-in WordPress search.
SearchWP can search content that WordPress ignores by default, including custom post types, WooCommerce products, comments, PDFs, and more.
You can create a completely custom search algorithm, similar to the algorithms used by search engines such as Google. This allows you to assign a weight (importance) to each attribute.
Content that matches an attribute with high relevancy will appear higher in the search results. By contrast, content with an attribute that has less relevancy will appear lower in the user’s search results.
For example, if you have uploaded your menu as a PDF on your restaurant website, then this is important content, and you will typically want to show it high in the search results.
With that in mind, you can simply assign this content a higher attribute relevance so that matches appear high in the search results.
You can even include product attributes, tags, reviews, and custom fields and taxonomies in the WooCommerce search results.
In the following image, we have added ‘color’ and ‘size’ as searchable custom fields and added product tags and categories in the taxonomies field.
After creating a custom search algorithm, you can then create an unlimited number of custom search forms.
For example, if you sell digital downloads like eBooks, then you might make a search form that searches content with the ‘ebook’ tag. In this way, you can help shoppers find new books that they may want to buy.
Automatically integrates with the built-in WordPress search.
Looks great with any WordPress theme.
Built-in search statistics.
Integrates with many popular WordPress plugins, including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and bbPress.
Cons:
Doesn’t include live Ajax search. However, you can add this missing feature by installing the free SearchWP Live Ajax Search plugin.
No free plugin, so you’ll need to purchase a license to try SearchWP.
Why we chose SearchWP: SearchWP is a complete search toolkit that integrates perfectly with the native WordPress search. Simply create a search algorithm, and all the search fields and forms across your website will use SearchWP automatically.
ElasticPress is a hosted WordPress search service built on ElasticSearch.
Instead of running on your WordPress site, it runs the search queries in the cloud and shows results at lightning speed. It is extremely easy to integrate on any WordPress site and works with all the best WordPress hosting providers.
ElasticPress can search content that the default WordPress search ignores, including custom fields, tags, PDF files, Microsoft Office documents, metadata, and more.
ElasticPress has built-in live Ajax search, so you can show instant results as the user is typing. It also works well with WooCommerce, so shoppers can quickly find products they are interested in buying.
You can create your own search algorithm using the Weighting dashboard and can even customize the top search terms to display your most popular WooCommerce products or top-performing content first.
Pros:
Built-in autosuggest.
An advanced connector that can handle almost any search query.
Shows related posts and document content in the search results.
A hosted service, so ElasticPress won’t slow down your WordPress website.
Cons:
ElasticPress is a hosted service and is a lot more expensive than any other search solution on this list. This means it may not be the best choice for beginners, personal blogs, or anyone who is working with a smaller budget.
Why we chose ElasticPress: By offloading search to an external server, you can improve your WordPress search without slowing down your website. This may not be the cheapest search plugin on our list, but it’s a great choice for business websites or enterprise sites that need lightning-fast search.
Ivory Search is another excellent WordPress search plugin that replaces the default WordPress search.
To improve search results, Ivory Search looks at post types, image metadata, custom fields, shortcodes, attachments, and more.
You can also use Ajax to show live search results without reloading the page.
The plugin also integrates with the WordPress theme customizer, so you can change how the search form looks using the tools you are already familiar with.
With Ivory Search, you can create an unlimited number of forms with unique settings.
You can then add these forms to different areas of your site using a shortcode that the plugin creates automatically.
You can also add an advanced search form to any widget-ready area, such as the sidebar, using the Ivory Search block. This makes it easy to show the same form across your entire WordPress website.
Another option is to add the search bar to any navigation menu. In the Ivory Search settings, you can simply enable the toggle for the menu where you want to show the search field.
Studying the way that people use your website’s search can also help you learn more about your users. This includes finding any content gaps where visitors are searching for content that you don’t already have on your website.
To provide this data, Ivory Search integrates with Google Analytics. However, before you can use this feature, you will need to install Google Analytics in WordPress.
Easily change search form colors and messaging using the WordPress Customizer.
Add an advanced search field to any WordPress menu with the click of a button.
Supports multilingual search.
Integrates with popular plugins, including WooCommerce, Weglot, Polylang, and WPML.
Cons:
Ivory Search’s interface can be overwhelming and confusing to navigate, particularly for first-time users.
Why we chose Ivory Search: Although there’s a premium version, the free version is where Ivory Search really shines. If you are looking for a free WordPress search plugin that has everything you need to improve the default search, then the free download is a great option.
Pricing: The base plugin is free, while Ivory Search premium starts at $19.99 per year.
The free Advanced Woo Search plugin can look for matches in the product title, content, excerpt, categories, tags, ID, and SKU.
This can help shoppers find what they are looking for, including products they may not have found using the built-in WordPress search.
Advanced Woo Search has a straightforward settings page where you can toggle the different settings on and off, often with the click of a button. This makes the plugin very easy to set up and use.
Advanced Woo Search also shows some useful extra information inside the search results, including the product image and price. It also integrates the results into your current layout, so it will look great with any WordPress theme.
Once you have set up the plugin, it will synchronize the product data automatically. This means you won’t need to spend time manually re-indexing every time you update the product catalog. You can also add the search form to any page, post, or widget-ready area using a shortcode or widget.
Pros:
Supports stop words, synonyms, and plurals.
Supports multiple currencies and variable products.
Orders search results based on where they were found.
Easy-to-understand settings.
Cons:
The free plugin is missing some of the more advanced search features, including the ability to search product attributes and custom taxonomies.
Why we chose Advanced Woo Search: If you are looking to improve the default WooCommerce search but don’t have the budget for a premium plugin, then this is a great option. It also supports live Ajax search out of the box, so shoppers can see relevant results without waiting for the page to reload.
Pricing: You can download Advanced Woo Search for free from the official WordPress repository.
SearchWP Ajax Live is an addon plugin for SearchWP, but it works with any WordPress search form that uses the built-in WordPress template tags.
This addon enhances your existing WordPress search with live Ajax search results that show up as soon as the user starts typing. This provides a better user experience and can return accurate results without even reloading the page.
Live Ajax search can improve the search experience for all visitors, but it’s particularly useful if you are selling online courses, membership subscriptions, and other digital products. By helping visitors find relevant content faster, you can often get more sales.
After activating the plugin, every search bar on your site will use live Ajax search automatically. You can also add a live Ajax search bar to any page, post, or widget-ready area using a block provided by the plugin.
This includes areas you can’t edit using the standard WordPress content editor, like your site’s 404 page template.
Pros:
Works out of the box with minimal settings to configure.
Adds live Ajax search to your WordPress blog, website, or online store, similar to the live search feature used by search engines like Google.
Works perfectly with the default WordPress search or the SearchWP plugin.
Cons:
This plugin works out of the box with very few settings. While this makes the plugin easy to set up, it may feel limiting if you want more advanced customization options.
Why we chose SearchWP Ajax Lite: Live search can help visitors find what they are looking for, fast. This free plugin works out of the box and automatically adds live Ajax search to all your search fields without you having to configure any complicated settings.
Pricing: Free to download from the official WordPress repository.
YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search is a great WooCommerce product search plugin that helps customers quickly find products in your store.
It allows customers to search products by SKU, search within specific categories, and filter the results without reloading the page.
This plugin can also search content that WordPress ignores by default, including the product excerpt, product categories and tags, and variable products.
YITH WooCommerce Ajax search is highly customizable. You can include thumbnails, badges, prices, and promotions in the live search results. This can provide shoppers with useful information, which will help them decide which product pages they want to visit.
Both the free and premium versions of the plugin also allow you to customize how the search bar looks to better suit your online store.
The plugin works with WooCommerce stores in any language and is fully compatible with multilingual WordPress sites and stores.
Pros:
Shows results in real time.
Filter the results using categories and tags.
Search by SKU, which is perfect for stores with big product catalogs.
Highlight sales and promotions inside the search results.
Cons:
Although there is a free version of the plugin, it’s quite limited compared to other live Ajax plugins. For example, the free version doesn’t look for matches within product tags and categories.
Why we chose YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search: If you run a WooCommerce store, then live search can help customers find interesting products faster. With that being said, a live Ajax search plugin is a must-have, and this plugin integrates perfectly with WooCommerce. It’s also fully compatible with multilingual websites, which is perfect if you sell to an international audience.
FiboSearch is another excellent WooCommerce search plugin. It allows you to instantly fetch search results using Ajax without reloading the page.
FiboSearch can search for matches in the product description, short description, SKU, attributes, custom fields, product categories and tags, and more.
You can also exclude out-of-stock products from the search results. This can get you more sales since you are not distracting shoppers with products they can’t currently purchase.
You can also show more content as part of the live Ajax search. For example, you might add the product image, description, and pricing to provide shoppers with detailed product information without them even having to reload the page.
When the visitor hovers over an item in the live Ajax search, you can show an add to cart button along with a quantity field and extended product description. In this way, visitors can start the purchasing process without even visiting the product’s page.
The live Ajax search bar is also fully customizable, so you can add your own messaging, change the submit button, and choose different search bar layouts.
As you make changes, the plugin will show a preview of how the search bar will look on your online marketplace or store. In this way, you can easily try different settings to see what looks the best.
When you are happy with how the search bar is set up, you can add it to any page, post, or widget-ready area using either a shortcode or block.
Another option is adding the search bar to any menu in your WordPress theme. Simply go to Appearance » Menus and then add the new ‘FiboSearch bar’ item to any navigation menu.
Pros:
Integrates with the default WooCommerce search results page. This means that shoppers will see exactly the same results in both the live Ajax search and the standard search results page.
Support for many popular multilingual plugins, including WPML, Polylang, and qTranslate-XT.
Support for Google Analytics.
Advanced search settings, including synonyms and fuzzy search.
Cons:
Even if you upgrade to pro, FiboSearch doesn’t offer live chat or telephone support.
Why we chose FiboSearch: This plugin allows you to show detailed information in the live Ajax search results and even include an ‘Add to Cart’ button. In this way, you can show helpful, informative results to shoppers without them ever having to reload the page.
Pricing: The base plugin is free. The premium version starts at $49 per year.
It allows your customers to filter products by category, attributes, tags, taxonomies, meta fields, and price.
Husky’s filters generate SEO-friendly links that you can add to your sitemap file. In this way, Husky can help improve your WooCommerce SEO.
The Husky search form is fully customizable, so you can display the different options as radio buttons, checkboxes, multi-dropdown menus, and more.
You can add search and filtering options to any page, post, or widget-ready area using a shortcode that the plugin creates automatically. Even better, Husky supports live Ajax search, so you can show live results anywhere on your online store.
Husky is easy for beginners to set up but also offers tons of customization options for developers who want to use the plugin in custom product templates. For example, you can create a custom woo-products loop template and html-items for the search form.
Pros:
Advanced WooCommerce search.
Built-in live Ajax support.
See the products your customers are looking for with built-in search statistics.
The option for more advanced users to create custom layout templates.
Cons:
Although the plugin offers live Ajax search, according to the WordPress.org listing, this feature isn’t guaranteed to work with all WordPress themes.
Why we chose Husky Products Filter for WooCommerce: This plugin allows you to replace the limited built-in WooCommerce search, no matter what your budget is. Although the live Ajax search isn’t guaranteed to work with all WooCommerce themes, this is still a generous feature to include in a free plugin.
Relevanssi is another popular WordPress search plugin that improves WordPress search by fetching more relevant results.
Relevanssi adds PDF indexing and searching in WordPress, so visitors can search the contents of your site’s PDF files. Relevanssi can also search shortcode outputs, custom fields, user profiles, categories and tags, WooCommerce products, and more.
Relavanssi also supports fuzzy matching and exact matches and can highlight the search terms in the results page.
All of this can help visitors find what they are looking for, faster.
Relevanssi has compatibility issues with some page builder plugins, BuddyPress, NextGen Gallery, and a few more. If you do run into problems, then you can see our step-by-step guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support and get it.
Relevanssi may take up lots of database space. With that in mind, it’s not recommended if your WordPress hosting has limited space for database tables.
Why we chose Relevanssi: Many of the free search plugins on this list are designed for use with online WooCommerce stores. However, Relevanssi is a free plugin that’s a great fit for all kinds of WordPress blogs and websites. If you run a membership website, then Relevanssi also integrates with many of the top membership plugins.
Pricing: The base plugin is free. You can upgrade to the premium version for $109 per year.
WP Extended Search is a lightweight and simple WordPress search plugin that allows you to easily extend the default WordPress search.
You can just go to the plugin settings and select the options you want to include in the search results. For example, you can search in the author name, taxonomies, post types, meta data, and more.
The plugin extends the default WordPress search, so you don’t need to add any shortcodes or widgets. As long as you are using the built-in WordPress search, you simply need to install and activate the plugin, and you are good to go.
If you want to offer a more advanced search, then you can create multiple custom search forms with unique settings. You can then add these search forms to any part of your site using a widget, shortcode, PHP function, or HTML.
Pros:
Automatically improves the default WordPress search.
Create an unlimited number of custom forms.
Optionally exclude old content from search results.
Show partial matches or exact matches only.
Compatible with WooCommerce.
Cons:
Missing some more advanced features, particularly live Ajax search.
Why we chose WP Extended Search: If you are looking for a quick and easy way to enhance the standard WordPress search, then this plugin works out of the box. Although there are some more advanced settings you can explore, this is a very lightweight plugin that’s easy to set up.
Better Search is another free WordPress plugin that automatically replaces the default WordPress search.
This plugin allows you to search across all post types, including custom post types. It will also look for matches in the title, post content, excerpt, meta fields, authors, tags, and comments.
You can also change the weight of either the title or the content based on what better suits your website.
This plugin has a unique search heatmap feature that shows the most popular searches. You can add this widget to an area, such as the sidebar or footer, to encourage visitors to explore your site’s most popular search terms and content.
Pros:
Automatically integrates with the default WordPress search. If your WordPress theme doesn’t have a built-in search form, then you can add one by using widgets in WordPress.
The option to use your own template file or custom CSS.
Create a list of stop words that Better Search will filter out of search queries.
Cons:
No option to search based on category or product attribute.
Doesn’t support live Ajax search.
Why we chose Better Search: Better Search provides a good range of features for a free plugin, plus some unique functionality. In particular, their heatmap is an innovative way to encourage visitors to explore more search terms and content and may make this a stand-out plugin for some website owners.
Sometimes, you don’t want to include all your content in the search results. For example, if you are running an online store, then you may want to hide pages like your account page, custom checkout page, thank you page, and more.
Search Exclude allows you to exclude content that you don’t want to show in the WordPress search results. You can simply check a box to exclude pages, posts, WooCommerce products, and more.
Even better, this plugin doesn’t hide your content from search engine crawlers. This means the hidden content will still show up in search engines like Google.
If you want to hide lots of different pages, posts, and other content, then this plugin also integrates with the bulk edit feature.
You can go to the plugin’s settings at any point to see all the items that you have excluded from the search.
Pros:
A simple plugin that allows you to exclude content from the search results.
Doesn’t affect your WordPress SEO.
Cons:
This plugin simply hides items from the search results. This means you will likely still need to install extra search plugins.
Why we chose Better Search: This plugin does one task, and does it well. If you are happy with the default WordPress search, but simply want to hide a few pages, then this plugin is the perfect solution.
Pricing: Free.
Which Is the Best WordPress Search Plugin?
We believe that SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin for most websites. It allows you to search all the content types that the built-in WordPress search ignores by default and makes it easy to create a custom search algorithm.
After that, you can create an unlimited number of unique search forms and add them to any page, post, or widget-ready area.
Although the core SearchWP plugin doesn’t offer live Ajax search, you can easily add this feature using the SearchWP Live Ajax Search.
FAQs About WordPress Search Plugins
In this guide, we have covered all of the best WordPress search plugins. If you still have questions, then here are our FAQs about improving the built-in WordPress search.
Does WordPress have a search feature?
Most WordPress themes have a built-in search feature. However, the default search is typically quite limited and doesn’t provide accurate search results.
For that reason, we recommend installing an advanced search plugin like SearchWP.
Is the default WordPress search good enough for my website?
Although WordPress has a basic built-in search, we don’t recommend relying on it. By default, WordPress doesn’t search widgets, user comments, categories, tags, WooCommerce products, or PDF documents. It also doesn’t search image gallery titles, captions, or alt text.
When creating the search results page, WordPress will start by displaying any posts that have the search term in the post title, arranged in reverse-chronological order, meaning that the newest entries will be displayed at the top of the results.
After that, it will show any posts that have the matching term in the post content.
This may not be a problem for blogs that only have small amounts of content. However, this ordering logic can often show inaccurate or confusing results when you have lots of content.
The best way to improve the default WordPress search is by using an advanced search plugin like SearchWP. These plugins allow you to search content types that WordPress ignores by default and may even add useful features such as live Ajax search.
How do I add live search to my WordPress website?
The best way to add live search to your website is by using SearchWP Live Ajax Search. This free plugin instantly adds live search to all the forms and search bars across your entire WordPress website.
How do I make my WordPress website a search engine like Google?
You can create your own custom search algorithm using SearchWP. This allows you to assign weights to different attributes, such as the post’s title or its tags. In this way, you can control exactly where your content appears in the WordPress search results.
After that, you can add live search to your site using SearchWP Live Ajax Search. This plugin suggests results as the visitor is typing, just like search engines such as Google.
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Do you want to host multiple WordPress websites on a single server?
You can easily manage multiple domains from a single place by hosting them on one server. Plus, it helps save costs as you won’t need to purchase separate servers for each website.
In this article, we will show you how to host multiple websites on one server.
Why Host Multiple Websites on One Server?
If you’re planning on expanding your business from one website to more, then it’s a feasible option to host them on a single server.
That’s because it is easier to manage them from a single place. It can be time-consuming and inconvenient to log in and out of multiple WordPress websites on different servers. If all your websites are on one server, then you can simply switch between them from the same dashboard.
Hosting multiple sites on a single server will also help save and be more economical for your business.
Many hosting providers offer dedicated hosting where you have full control over the server and allow you to set up more than 1 website.
Instead of purchasing individual hosting plans for each site, you can choose a plan that allows multiple WordPress sites on one server. This will also allow you to fully utilize your server resources.
That said, let’s see how you can host multiple websites on one server.
Select a Hosting Service and Buy Domains
Before you can add any website to a server, the first step is to purchase a hosting service and domain names for your websites.
Choosing a WordPress Hosting Provider
There are many services to choose from, but we recommend Hostinger. It is a fast-growing web hosting provider that offers different types of hosting options.
For instance, you can get premium shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, managed hosting, and more.
In the Hostinger WordPress Starter plan, you can add up to 100 websites, get free email, an SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, managed WordPress, and more. You also get 1 free domain name, but you’ll need to purchase other domains.
The best part is that WPBeginner users can get up to 81% OFF on WordPress hosting plans. Simply click the link below to claim the offer.
Another advantage of using Hostinger WordPress plans is that WordPress comes pre-installed. You don’t have to manually install WordPress for your websites.
If you’re looking for alternatives, then you can also use Bluehost or SiteGround to add multiple sites to one server.
Purchasing Domain Names for Your Website
After choosing a web hosting platform, the next step is to purchase domain names that you’ll need to host on a server.
Hostinger lets you buy a new domain or transfer an existing domain. To purchase a domain, simply go to the ‘Domains’ tab from your Hostinger dashboard.
From here, simply select the ‘Get a new domain’ option.
Next, you can search for a domain name.
Go ahead and enter a keyword or brand name in the search bar.
From here, you’ll see a list of URL options along with different domain extensions and prices.
Simply select an option you want and click the ‘Buy domain’ button.
Next, a popup will open with different billing periods for your domain name.
Go ahead and choose a billing period.
After that, you can complete the checkout process by choosing a payment method and purchasing the domain name.
You can repeat this process to purchase as many additional domains as you’d like.
Alternative Method: If you don’t want to buy a domain from Hostinger, then there are many domain registrars that allow you to register a domain name with ease. For instance, you can use Domain.com as it offers top-level extensions, an easy domain registration process, and a bunch of features.
Adding Multiple WordPress Sites to One Server
After selecting a hosting provider and buying domain names, you can add multiple sites to one server.
From your Hostinger dashboard, you can go to the ‘Websites’ tab and click on the + Create or migrate a website option.
Next, Hostinger will walk you through the process of creating a new website on the same server.
For instance, you can select a website type. This includes an online store, blog, business, portfolio, and other types.
After that, you’ll need to select whether you’d like to create or migrate a website.
If you already have a website on another hosting platform, then you can transfer it to Hostinger. Simply select the ‘Migrate my website’ option and follow the steps.
For this tutorial, we will select the ‘Create a new website’ option.
Next, you can select a platform to build a new website. Hostinger will offer 2 methods, where you can use WordPress with artificial intelligence (AI) or use Hostinger’s website builder with AI to create a site.
Go ahead and choose the ‘WordPress with AI’ option.
From here, you’ll need to enter login details for your account.
Simply choose a language, select an administrator email, enter a password, and click the ‘Continue’ button.
In the next step, Hositnger will ask you to add WordPress plugins to your site.
You can simply select the plugins you want to install and click the ‘Continue’ button.
After that, you will need to select a website design.
Hostinger will load the default theme, but you can click the ‘Browse more templates’ option to view more designs.
From here, you can choose a different theme for your website.
You can also click the ‘Show More’ button at the bottom to load more templates.
Once you’re done, simply choose a design and click the ‘Select’ button.
Next, Hostinger will ask you to enter a brand name and a description of your business.
It uses ChatGPT to generate a few pieces of content for your website. Once you are done, simply click the ‘Continue’ button.
You can also skip this step by entering a name and brief description and then clicking the ‘Skip, I will write content later’ option at the bottom.
After that, you’ll need to enter a name for your website. Hostinger will show 2 options, you can either select the ‘buy a domain or ‘use an existing domain’ option.
If you haven’t purchased a domain name yet, then you can select the ‘Buy a Domain’ option and get one with Hostinger.
However, if you already have multiple domains on another provider, then you can select the ‘Use an Existing Domain’ option.
For this tutorial, let’s choose the ‘Use an Existing Domain’ option.
Next, you will need to enter the domain name and click the ‘Continue’ button.
A popup window will now open with details for pointing the domain to Hostinger nameservers.
You can see your domain’s existing nameservers and the required nameservers you’d need to change in the domain registration service. The instructions will vary depending on the domain registrar you’re using.
If you need help with domain transfer, then Hostinger offers step-by-step guides and documentation. You can also reach out to their support for further assistance.
Note: You’ll also need to ensure that the domain you’re transferring is not locked by the current registrar and that 60 days have passed since initial registration.
After noting down the nameservers, you can click the ‘Continue’ button.
Hostinger will then start to set up your website. It will take a few minutes for the setup to complete.
The final step is to click the ‘Connect’ button under the Connect Your Domain option after you’ve set nameservers in your domain registrar.
Once connected, you can view your website from the Hostinger dashboard.
Simply visit the ‘Websites’ tab to see your newly added site.
You can now repeat these steps and click the ‘+ Create or migrate a website’ option to add as many websites as you want to a single server.
Bonus: How to Create More Sites Using WordPress Multisite
A WordPress multisite allows you to run and manage multiple websites from a single WordPress installation. You’ll see multisite networks used by large corporations that need separate domains for each department, universities and schools, news outlets, online businesses, and more.
There is a slight difference between hosting multiple sites on a single server and a WordPress multisite.
In a multisite, you have the same parent domain (example.com), and the new sites are subdomains (blog.example.com). They can share plugins, users, and other elements based on your settings.
On the other hand, hosting multiple sites on a single server means you have different domain names for each website. They’re all completely separate from one another.
You can easily set up a WordPress multisite using any web hosting service, including Hostinger. Once it’s set up, you’ll be able to add multiple sites to the network and manage them from the same dashboard on one server.
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