WordPress Free vs. Paid Themes: Which is The Best?

It is one of the most asked questions. Many times it is asked by the beginners whether to choose a free WordPress theme or premium theme. Many WordPress developers and designers ask what the difference between free and premium themes is. If you too have these questions, don't worry you will get the answers and then you will be able to decide which theme is right for you.

Free themes are pre-installed in WordPress and can be used by the users for free which are listed in the official WordPress.org themes directory whereas premium or paid themes are the ones for which you will have to pay a certain amount in order to use that theme.

In this blog, we will discuss the Free WordPress Theme vs. Premium WordPress Theme and its pros and cons.

Let's First Discuss The Pros of Free WordPress Themes

1.  It's Free

The most basic pros of the free WordPress theme is that it's free. The biggest benefits of a free WordPress is its cost, free. Although many people have questions regarding the free theme. When people hear free, they begin to doubt their quality. Often people think that free themes are low quality but that's not always the case. Free themes are quite good in quality and those who don't want to spend a lot such as small business owners or beginners can definitely go for this.

2. Easy to Use

Free themes are preferred mostly for the beginners and therefore are simple and easy to use. Before approving any theme, WordPress developers should make sure that the themes can be used by a beginner as a part of their testing process. These free themes are also compatible with most of the plugins.

3. Strict Review Process

Free WordPress themes are actually held to a higher quality standard. All the themes in the official WordPress theme directory go through a strict review process. There are very talented people in the theme review team who examine these themes before they are included in the directory. Free WordPress themes are tested for their quality, standard code, quality HTML and CSS, security, privacy, etc. Free WordPress themes are built by expert WordPress developers.

4. Speedy WordPress Design

WordPress usually comes with a limited number of features and minimal design. When the website does not have a lot of plugins, the site will be leaner and therefore quicker to load. This could make for a speedy WordPress website which will eventually improve the technical SEO of your site.

Although there are many pros of WordPress free themes for many small business and newbies just like anything, it has some limitations as well.

Some of The Cons of Using Free WordPress Themes Now

1. Limited Support Options

Free WordPress theme developers offer support through WordPress forums, but they fail to reply to the support queries. Free themes offer no support if there is an issue and this can be troublesome for some webmasters if they need any assistance or solutions, they will not be able to find one because of the lack of strong support.

2. Limited Features and Functionality

Even though free themes do support most of the standard WordPress features, sometimes it's just not enough. Many features don't offer extra functionality like creating buttons, using shortcodes, create landing pages, etc. Free themes fail to provide the best of the features that a website requires.

3. Free Themes are Not Unique 

Even though free WordPress themes are considered preferable for many small businesses but free WordPress themes are not as unique as premium WordPress themes. Since free themes are downloaded by everyone without any barrier, many websites will make the use of the same themes and the themes become common and repetitive and themes lose their uniqueness.

Unlike free themes, premium themes have to be bought from various third-party WordPress theme shops and marketplaces. 

Let's Discuss The Pros of WordPress Premium Themes Now

1. More Features and Customization Options

The biggest advantage of a WordPress premium theme is that you get many more features and customization options. There is a tough competition in the premium theme industry and therefore theme stores are always trying to offer more features at lower prices.

2. Better Support and Updates

Premium WordPress themes have a better support team and it also comes with regular updates. The main reason behind such great support is because they are actually making money from their services and not providing for free and where there is money, they will offer proper services.

3. It is More Unique

Since you have to pay for premium themes, these themes are not downloaded by many people as compared to free themes. Premium themes also have customization options and give you the ability to personalize your theme. By using premium themes, your website will stand out and look unique. 

Premium WordPress themes have some great features but not all the premium themes are perfect.

Some of The Disadvantage of WordPress Premium Themes

1. Poor Code

Sometimes even the most beautiful looking premium themes have poor coding standards which could make it incompatible with some of the plugins. This could be because these themes don't go through a review process.

2. Few themes are expensive with a monthly license fee

Premium themes are quite expensive sometimes. The cost of some themes are very expensive and on top of it, they also charge a licensing fee every month. This might be a little too much for small and medium businesses as they cannot afford to spend this much. Only those who have a big budget and large business can afford the premium themes.

3. Unnecessary features

In order to sell themes, the WordPress theme developer sometimes adds too many features in their WordPress Premium themes even when they are not necessary or important. Users will not even use these many features into their themes. They will probably never use all these features and they make your website slow unnecessarily.

So, You Decide!

WordPress without a doubt is a leading website developing platform which is popular worldwide. It is suitable for all kinds of businesses. WordPress themes are very important for the overall look of the website and WordPress has many free pre-installed themes. Although these free themes are great for small businesses and work just fine it does not have all those functions that you require for a great theme. WordPress premium themes have some outstanding features and its features surely outweigh its cons.

If you are a beginner and have a small budget at the beginning, you can go for free WordPress themes but if you have a large business, you can go for premium WordPress themes. But again, it depends completely on the users. Only the users can make a decision based on their business and preferences. A specific website developer of the project should also be able to make such a valuable decision. 

If you have any other ideas to share, please share them in the comment section below. We would like to know more from different perspectives. If you have any other questions or queries, do ask us. Feel free to call or mail us, we will assist you in whatever means possible.

WordPress Hide/Show Widget Plugin

WordPress Hide/Show Widget allows you to display or hide widget on particular pages, posts and custom posts as well posts categories.

Hide/Show Widget allows you to display or hide widget on particular pages, posts and custom posts as well posts categories.

This plugin will add select option to each and every widget. Go to widget setting and update option according to your requirement.

Change your sidebar content for different pages, posts, custom posts, and categories. Avoid creating multiple sidebars and duplicating widgets by option to each widget in the admin which will either show or hide the widgets on every site page. Great for avoiding extra coding and keeping your sidebars clean.

What Makes a Great Website? Effective Strategies

What is a great website for you? You can define a great website development in a variety of ways. A great website is the one which promotes sales and the one which earns profit.

Your website also needs to clearly communicate with your audience about what you do, why do you it, and who you do it for. No matter how great you think your website is, there is always improvement needed.

So, what do you need to know to improve your website design?

Let us discuss some of effective strategies which will help you improve your website's performance. So let us begin!

1. Have a plan

You have to set some goals for your website. Don't just start designing your website. You need to have a plan. There should be a strategy. A strategic website's core purpose is to serve, support and sell. Other than that, there are other things too that have to be taken in consideration such as which pages are the visitors going to view, which content are they going to read and what other offers are they going to get benefited from. The designing of the website comes after all the initial questions have been answered in the right order. So having a plan is the first step which must not be ignored.

2. Build a solid foundation

Your website can't be great unless it's built on a solid foundation. Your website shouldn't depend on social media apps such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr or any other such platform. You can build a foundation for your website by purchasing one unique domain that your company owns, housing it on a reliable hosting platform and using a content content management system that enables you to publish anything easily.

3. Include social share and follow buttons

if your website currently doesn't have social share buttons, you could be missing out on a lot of social media traffic that's generating from the people who are reading your blog. Social share buttons are generally found on the top or bottom of the blog post. They contain icons of different social media apps and allow you to share the pages directly on the social media app you choose. These buttons are used as a medium of sharing the post with more and more people. Thus you must have these social share buttons for people to share them with their friends and family. You post will receive more views and reach.

4. Develop and maintain your brand

Your brand isn't defined by one thing such as a logo. Your logo, tagline, color scheme, fonts, design, voice, and overall customer experience, everything matters. The challenge is to define the elements that define your brand and what you are dealing in. Developing brand name of your website in the market is a challenging task. People must recognize your brand by its logo or tagline.

5. Make it fast

The pages of your website should load fast. According to a research, if a website takes more than 4 or 5 seconds to load, the visitor may leave your website and moves to some other site. Slow loading pages will chase away and negatively impact your search engine rankings. There are numerous ways to make your site load faster. Oversize images are the biggest culprit and easiest fix. Crop the oversize images because they take a lot of load time and slows the speed of your website. But make sure to maintain the quality of the image because images are what customers will see when they decide to buy a product.

6. Navigation

Navigation is the key when designing your website. It's the map that displays the core places that the users can visit. A website with improper and disorganized navigation is worse and confusing. To improve your website's navigation, it's important to ensure that your visitors can easily find what they are looking for. If users can't find what they are looking for, they will leave your site in no time which you don't want to happen. To reduce the bouncing rates on your website, make sure your navigation is clear and proper for the visitors to understand.

7. Mobile optimization

Top positions on the search engine result pages receive a majority of the impressions and clicks, so ranking higher in search results can result in significant traffic on your website. SEO is one of the most cost effective and crucial marketing strategy because it targets users who are looking for the products or services that your website deals in. SEO also makes your website more navigable for users as well.

8. Mobile friendly

We live in a mobile age where there are more mobile users than laptop or PC users. If you want to beat the competitors and want to create successful brand name in the market, you need to make your website or application mobile friendly. Imagine a friend sends you a link via Facebook and when you click on it from your mobile phone, an unorganized website appears in front of you, what will you do? Of course you will leave that site in no time. If you don't want to lose a large number of customers, make your site mobile friendly. Because, mobile friendliness is directly proportional to the number of customers you will get.

9. Clear call-to-action button

A call of action is a short phrase containing two or three words as “write now”, “Call now” or “click here”. A call to action button should be short and sweet. An effective call to action button has two to five words. The call to action button should not be blur or hidden somewhere rather it should be clearly visible and written in bold big letters which is visible to everyone who visits the websites in one look.

Final words

Here you go! We have discussed nine of the effective strategies which can help you improve the performance of your website and make it a great website if implemented properly. Go through these tips and work on them and you will definitely see a difference. If we have missed on some points, feel free to share them with us in the comment section. You can also paste a link of the tips you think are important and helpful. We will definitely go through those points. If you have any more queries or questions, feel free to ask in the comment section.

Keep implementing the strategies, keep improving!

nopCommerce Ajax Search Plugin

nopCommerce Ajax Search Plugin allows the user to search product by category and products attributes on the home page with ajax filtering. nopCommerce Ajax Search Plugin supports nopCommerce 3.9 and nopCommerce 4.0 version. It is easy to install and configure the plugin and you are good to go ahead to use it in your nopCommerce Store.

Check out this video for installation:-

1. Nop Ajax search plugin allows the user to search product by category and also products attributes on home page with ajax filtering. 2. It is easy to install and plugin supports the nopcommerce 3.9 and nopcommerce 4.0 version.

https://shop.ncodetechnologies.com/product/nopcommerce-ajax-search-plugin/

Bootstrap 3 Template For Travel Website

Travel Zone Bootstrap3 theme for all services related to tourism such as hotels, resorts, package tours, events, honeymoon, travel agency, tour operator and much more. Travel theme is a perfect theme for all sorts of travel websites.

Key Features 

• Bootstrap 3 
• Responsive Template
• Cross-Browser Compatibility: Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE10+
• Use Google Fonts! 
• Pixel Perfect 
• Clean & Unique Design 
• Easy to customize

To buy this plugin check below link:-

https://shop.ncodetechnologies.com/

Some Web Designing Tips That Boost up Your Sales

Just having an eCommerce website is not enough until and unless it doesn't drive the sales. It may happen that your website has a lot of traffic but lesser customers, you are lacking something and you need to identify what it is that's not working in your favor. Most of the first time visitors of your website do not buy from the site. They might compare the prices of your website's products with other competitors. You have to make sure that the sales on your site are increasing to have a profitable eCommerce website.

Do you know web design has an impact on the website's sales? Yes, you heard that right!

Here are some of the web designing tips that boost up your sales -

1. Limited customer information

It is important to ask only the limited and precise customer information in the contact form such as name, email address, and zip codes. Visitors may think you are asking for too much information if you put in more fields. Besides, people hate filling out lengthy forms. They might even not fill the form and leave your website rather than filling out lengthy forms.

2. Design for easy navigation

If the navigation of your website is easy, the visitor will spend more and more time on your website and that increases the chances of sales. Dividing categories clearly, making navigation elements clickable links and putting a search feature are just some of the web design elements that make your site easily navigable.

3. Fast loading time

A customer gets irritated if the site is taking way too much time to load. According to recent studies, 47% of customers expect the website to load in less than 2 seconds and most of the customers will leave the site if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds. Make sure that the loading time of the site is fast enough that the customers will stick to the site and visit the site which may ultimately result in sales.

4. Give away free stuff

Who doesn't love free or complimentary stuff? Sometimes all people need to engage is to see the word FREE on the page. Giving them free stuff will encourage them to buy more from your eCommerce store. Offer them what you can and boost your chances of getting more conversions.

5. Mobile friendly website

A successful website is the one that runs on all the devices such as laptops, tablets, and cellphones. You might build a great website that looks great when viewed on desktop or laptop but looks unorganized and cluttered in cell phones. It is not said to be a responsive website. Responsive designs adjust to the size of your browser automatically. Mobile friendly and responsive website designs are essential these days. So a website must be mobile friendly and work properly on mobile phones as well.

6. Make a video of your products

There are many people who find reading articles boring and would rather watch a video than reading the article. So in order to reach out to customers, you can make a video highlighting your products and services. Videos are more engaging and are easier to make. It would be better if the duration of the video is kept short to about three minutes because longer videos might be time-consuming for the customers and they might not watch it till the end.

7. Display testimonials

Genuine testimonials from previous customers are great for spreading a word for your products or services. So whenever you receive a positive message from the previous customer, always put it up on your website so that the customers can see. You can also use an entire page or section of your website for testimonials since they attract potential customers on your site and build their trust in your website and its products.

8. Visible call-to-action (CTA) button

A call to action button is the one from where a visitor/customer can directly contact you while exploring your website. Make sure that the CTA is highly visible on your website. You can also put it in a different color such as in vibrant colors like orange or red to attract the customers. You must put it on the home page of your website so that it can be clearly seen by everyone.

Conclusion

The tips mentioned above were some of the web designing tips that help in boosting up your website's sales. Work on these tips and you will definitely see a rise in the sales and ultimately your business will grow. These were some of the tips that we think are beneficial for web designing that can work in your favor. Do you know of other web designing tips as well? If yes, please share them with us in the comment section below.

The Ultimate Guide to Page Speed Optimization for WordPress

Imagine visiting a website which takes a lot of time to load, will you stay at that site or will you leave it? Of course, if a site takes more than 4-5 seconds to load, you will get irritated and leave the site finally. Having a great page speed loading time in WordPress benefits your business and visitors will stay on your website for longer time and search engines will rank your sites higher in search results as well.

Having a website with slow page loading speed will affect your business as nobody wants to waste their time on a slow site. Internet users do not have a lot of patience when it comes to page loading speed.

Why is having a fast loading site is important?

1. Fast page loading speed helps increase your site's ranking in SERPs

2. Slow page speed will decrease your site's bounce rate.

3. Faster page speed increases conversion rates

4. It leaves the visitors of the site happy and satisfied.

When you talk of page speed, it is simply the measurement of how fast your site's contents load. So when you talk of page optimization, page speed is one of the things you should be working on.

So here are some of the steps that can help you in improving the page loading speed of your WordPress site-

1. Backup your site

It is very important to make a backup before doing any major changes to your site. You can back up your site easily by installing a backup plugin. It is important to create a backup so that you don't lose data and it helps you restore data of the previous version. Restoring the data to the previous version is better than doing it all over again.

2. Optimize your site's images

High-resolution images take more time to load and this affects your page speed. While uploading images in the site, make sure to choose the correct image file type. The file type has to be chosen on the basis of which colors the image has. If the image is rich in colors with no transparency, use JPEG format in it. GIFs fit images with flat colors. Most of the times, site owners make use of JEPGs and PNGs file types for images. If you want to have quality images, make sure to select high-resolution images and reduce it into a smaller size. This will create a better quality for images rather than using a small resolution image.

3. Choose an appropriate theme

WordPress has a lot of themes to choose from. WordPress themes look good and have all the features that you can imagine they might decrease the speed of your site as they don't pay any importance to the site's performance. To create a successful blog or website, choosing the right theme that prioritizes performance is very important. Priority must be given to theme's performance than its features because no matter how many features it has if your site isn't performing well, then it's useless. No matter what theme you choose, always prioritize performance over features.

4. Install WordPress caching plugin

WordPress pages are dynamic. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it all together and then display it to the user. This process takes a lot of time and involves a lot of steps and can slow down your website when many people visit your website at the same time. That's why we recommend you to use a WordPress caching plugin as it makes your site much faster. So you must have installed and used a WordPress caching plan for your website as it makes your WordPress site nearly from 2 to 5 times faster.

5. Use faster plugins

Poor WordPress plugins may affect the performance of your site and slow down the loading speed of your website. It increases your page load time and slows down the site. So it is very important to choose the right plugin that will help in improving the performance and loading speed of the site. To help you choose the right plugins, we think the following are our picks of the most common and best plugins for WordPress-

• Wpforms

• Solilioquy

• Shared counts

• Envira gallery

Apart from these, you can test other plugins as well. Simply run the speed tests before and after installing the plugin and compare its impact on the site's performance.

6. Use appropriate social media buttons

Social media has always been a big and important part of digital marketing. Placing the social media buttons on the right and appropriate place makes it easier for the users to share the content of your site with others. Thus, there is no doubt that one of the best ways to share the content and products of your site on other social media platforms is by adding social media buttons on the site. Thus, make sure to add these social media buttons on your site and place them where they can be easily visible to the visitors.

Results and conclusion

As we said at the beginning of this blog that WordPress page speed optimization is very important and is a must for improving the site's performance and for increasing site's page load speed. The points mentioned above were some of the steps and techniques which will help you learn how to improve your WordPress site's speed and performance. Go ahead and try out these techniques. Don't forget to check the site's speed before and after implementing these practices. You will be surprised how these practices work for you and boost your WordPress site's performance and speed.

Also if you know of other practices as well, do share them with us. We would love to know about ore practices that will boost the performance of the WordPress website. Do share them with us in the comment section below.