Before I start, let me be clear that this isn’t a review of a plugin that helps you create a website for your deli. No, friends, this is a review of a new‘ish plugin that helps you manage and create newsletters and opt-in forms right from your WordPress dashboard. DeliPress comes with a great-looking drag ... Read moreDeliPress Review: Send Newsletters Right From Your WordPress Dashboard
Creating a great website which customers will love is already stressful enough without adding languages. Besides, if you’re a small company as long as it’s in English it should be fine, right? Wrong on both counts. First, regardless of if you are Walmart or the local corner shop down the road, customers want to be ... Read moreHow WPML Can Help You To Make Your Business More Successful Internationally
Are you looking for the best WordPress calendar plugin for your site? WordPress calendar plugins come with a variety of different features. Some are made for simple event management while others are more complex with booking, ticketing, and scheduling features. In this article, we have hand-picked the best WordPress calendar plugins for your site.
How to Chose a Calendar Plugin for WordPress?
As we mentioned earlier that there are many different kind of WordPress calendar plugins available catering to the needs of different users.
Some calendar plugins are simple allowing you to just display events on a calendar. Others have more advanced features like appointments and bookings, scheduling, ticketing, and integrations with third-party services like Google Calendar.
You need to choose a plugin that fits your requirements. For example, if you want to sell event tickets, then a calendar with just the booking feature may not be good for you.
Let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress calendar plugins that you can try.
The Events Calendar is a powerful event management system for your WordPress site. It is feature-rich but extremely easy to use due to a neat user interface that blends into your WordPress admin area.
The Events Calendar allows you to easily add your events and manage organizers / venues. You can choose to display Google Maps for your venue locations. The plugin’s settings page gives you full control on how you want to manage your events and calendar.
Want to sell tickets for your events? The Event Calendar has paid add-ons to integrate it with WooCommerce, Eventbrite, and more.
All in One Events Calendar is a powerful event management plugin for WordPress. Its intuitive user interface makes it extremely easy to use even for beginners. You can easily add events, sort them into categories / tags, and choose from three built-in themes for the calendar display. You can also display your event venues using Google Maps right along the event details.
You can tweak the calendar theme by choosing different colors. It also allows you to add events from any other calendar that supports iCal format including Google Calendar. It doesn’t have ticket selling integrations, but you can add URLs to third party ticketing services.
My Calendar is another free and powerful event management solution for WordPress. It supports multiple calendars, event groups, categories, and locations. It also comes with a shortcode generator and widgets, so you can easily add calendars to your posts, pages, or sidebars.
This is a highly configurable plugin with an extensive settings page. You can control almost every aspect of how your calendar is displayed on the front-end. It comes with six built-in skins for calendar display.
For advanced users, there is a style editor to upload your own custom CSS. It also supports Google Map display on single event page, and on event popup.
Google Calendar Events brings Google Calendar to your WordPress site. You can create and manage your events through Google Calendar. This plugin simply display those events on your website. All you have to do is provide your Google Calendar feed URL.
The plugin comes with a powerful set of features. You can control the display of your calendar and events using the shortcodes. You can even control the appearance of the calendar using custom stylesheets.
The plugin does not support a ticketing system, but you can still use third party services to sell your event tickets and enter the ticketing page URL right into your event listing on Google Calendar.
As the name suggests, Booking Calendar is a booking management plugin for WordPress. It allows you to add a calendar to the front-end of your website where users can fill in a simple form to submit their booking requests. You can then accept or decline their booking request.
Booking Calendar comes with CAPTCHA support to avoid spam. You can control who can add a booking in the admin area. One downside of the plugin is that you cannot add new input fields for booking form in the free version of the plugin.
It can be used for booking any kind of service. However if you are particularly looking for a hotel booking system, then you should checkout our guide on how to add a hotel room booking system in WordPress.
We hope this article helped you choose the best calendar plugin for your WordPress site. For other plugin recommendations, see our list of the essential WordPress plugins for your website.
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Need to add an ads.txt file to WordPress? Or, have no idea what an ads.txt file is? If either of those situations applies to you, you should read this Ads.txt Admin review because I’m going to: Explain what ads.txt is and whether or not your WordPress site needs it. Show you how you can use ... Read moreAds.txt Admin Review: How To Add ads.txt File To WordPress
Are you looking for the best WordPress image compression plugin for your website? Image compression plugins allow you to easily optimize images in WordPress for better speed and performance. In this article, we have compared the best image compression plugins for WordPress.
When Do You Need a WordPress Image Compression Plugin?
Images are larger in size than plain text which means they take longer to load and can slow down your website.
However you’ve probably heard the saying: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Images make your content more engaging and interactive.
To improve your WordPress website speed, you need to optimize your images for the web. The best way to do this is by using Photoshop or another image editing software before you upload the image to WordPress. This gives you a lot more control on the quality of images on your website.
However, not all users are comfortable working with image editing program. For some optimizing every single image they upload sounds like a lot of work.
Luckily, there are several WordPress image compression plugins that can help you with that. These plugins optimize your images by automatically compressing them and using the smaller sized version on your website.
That being said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress image compression plugins, and how they stack up in terms of image optimization, performance, and quality.
reSmush.it is the best WordPress image compression plugin. It allows you to automatically optimize images on upload as well as offer a bulk optimization option for older images.
It uses the reSmush API to optimize images and allows you to choose the optimization level for your uploads. The downside is that it doesn’t have different compression levels. It also limits optimization to uploads lower than 5MB in size. You can exclude individual images from compression in case you need to add an image in full size.
EWWW Image Optimizer is a great option for WordPress image compression plugin. It is easy to use and can automatically optimize images you upload on the fly. It can also compress and optimize your previously uploaded images in bulk.
It performs all compression on your own servers which means you don’t need to sign up for an account to get an API key. It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and stored outside your media library folders. It doesn’t require an account to use the plugin, but you can sign up for their API to get additional features.
Compress JPEG & PNG is created by the team behind TinyPNG, and you will need to create an account to use the plugin. You can only optimize 100 images each month with the free account. It can automatically compress images upon upload, and you can also bulk optimize older images.
The plugin settings allow you to choose which image sizes you want to optimize. Additionally, you can also set a maximum size for your original uploads. Images larger than that size will be automatically resized by the plugin.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer is another useful WordPress image compression plugin. It requires you to get an API key by providing your email address. The basic free account allows you to compress up to 100 images per month, and you will need to upgrade to their paid plans to increase this limit.
It starts compressing images as soon you as activate plugin and stores your original images in a separate folder. It also allows you to compare the original file with the compressed version to see the quality difference. ShortPixel is packed with advanced features and gives you the ability to choose comparison formats.
WP Smush is another popular WordPress image compression plugin. It automatically compresses images on upload and can also be used to compress and optimize your older image files. You can also set maximum image resolution, and your images will scale down to more reasonable sizes while being compressed.
The free version of plugin doesn’t require you to create an account to use their API key. The bulk optimization feature allows you to optimize up to 50 images at a time, and you can rerun the bulk optimizer to compress more images.
Comparison Test Scores for Image Compression Plugins
Now that you know about the different WordPress image compression options, let’s take a look at how they compare against each other in terms of performance.
To measure this, we ran test by uploading the same image using each of these plugins.
Testing JPEG Image Compression
We used the following JPEG image for our tests, it is 118 KB in file size.
We didn’t touch any of the plugin settings and tested the compression with out of the box settings. Here are our test results:
Plugin
Compressed Size
Saved (%)
Method
reSmush.it
76 KB
30.59%
Lossless
EWWW Image Optimizer
112 KB
5%
Lossless
Compress JPEG & PNG images
114.7 KB
2.8 %
Lossy
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
69.2 KB
41.94%
Lossy
WP Smush
112 KB
5%
Lossless
Testing PNG Image Compression
Next we wanted to test a PNG image to see how our contenders optimize it.
We used the following PNG image for the test, and it is 102 KB in file size.
Here are our test results:
Plugin
Compressed Size
Saved (%)
Method
reSmush.it
36 KB
63.8%
Lossless
EWWW Image Optimizer
97.5 KB
1.9%
Lossless
Compress JPEG & PNG images
34.3
64%
Lossy
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
37 KB
63.5%
Lossy
WP Smush
99 KB
2.9%
Lossless
Which is The Best Image Compression Plugin for WordPress?
If you are not looking for flexible options in your image compression plugin, then reSmush.it gives you the best results in terms of performance by making the real difference in image file size.
If you are willing to pay for image compression, then you can try ShortPixel which performed really well in our tests.
EWWW Image Optimizer is a great plugin with flexible settings, but you will need their paid API key to get access to compression levels which make the real difference.
We hope you found this comparison of best WordPress image compression plugins useful. You may also want to see our list of common image issues in WordPress and how to fix them.
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.
Forcing people to fill out registration forms is so early-2000s. Type in the username and email. Type in the password. Confirm the password. Click the activation link in the email… It’s a time suck. And as hesitant as I am personally about handing over my digital life to Facebook and Google, I do it anyway ... Read moreNextend Social Login Review: A Quality Social Login Plugin For WordPress
Do you want to create an online poll on your WordPress site?
Polls are an interactive way to engage your audience while getting useful information from them. You can get feedback from your users and find out what they like.
In this article, we will show you how to easily create and add a poll in your WordPress.
Which Tool to Choose for Adding a Poll in WordPress?
Adding interactive polls to your website is a great way to engage users, as it instantly grabs their attention. You can generate leads using polls and, at the same time, collect valuable feedback from your audience.
That said, there are plenty of plugins and online tools that allow you to embed polls on your WordPress site. Many of them require you to create an account, some store data on their own servers, and others have a terrible user experience.
If you are looking for a good user experience with full control of poll data, then you’ll need WPForms. It is the best WordPress form builder plugin and includes powerful surveys and polls addon.
With WPForms, you’ll be able to do the following:
Create polls in WordPress using a drag-and-drop form builder
Gather poll results on your own websites
Show votes count when user submit their vote
Display poll anywhere on your website
Show poll results anywhere on your website
With that, let’s look at how to easily create online polls in WordPress using WPForms.
You will need the WPForms Pro plan because it includes the survey and polls addon. WPBeginner users get an additional discount by using the WPForms coupon code. There is also a WPForms Lite version you can try for free.
Upon activation, you need to visit the WPForms » Settings page to enter your license key. You can find this information in your WPForms account.
Next, you need to visit WPForms » Addons page and scroll down to the Surveys and Polls addon.
Go ahead and click on the ‘Install’ addon button.
Now you are ready to create an online poll.
You can start by going to WPForms » Add New page to create a new form. First, you need to provide a title for your poll form and then select the ‘Poll Form’ template.
This will launch the WPForms drag-and-drop form builder interface.
You will see a pre-made poll form template with example fields already added to the form.
There are options to add new form fields from the left column. All you have to do is drag and drop the field you’d like to add to the form.
Besides that, you can just point and click to edit any field, rearrange them, or remove them.
For example, if you click the poll question in the template, then you will see more options in the menu on your left. Simply rearrange the order, and edit their titles, labels, and more.
Next, you need to click on the Settings button from the left menu and then go to the ‘Surveys and Polls’ tab. Here you can enable or disable the poll results option.
By default, the WPForms poll template will display poll results to users after they submit their votes. If you disable this option, then users will not see the poll results.
On the other hand, you can show users a custom message or redirect them to another page or URL.
Simply go to the ‘Confirmation’ tab. Here, you can choose the Confirmation Type from the dropdown menu.
Once you have created the poll form, go ahead and click on the ‘Save’ button to store your form settings.
Adding The Poll to Your WordPress Website
WPForms makes it easy to add your online poll anywhere on your website, including posts, pages, custom post types, and sidebar widgets.
You can click the ‘Embed’ button in the form builder to add your poll form. Once you do that, a new popup window will open. You can select an existing page or create a new one to embed your form.
Let’s select the ‘Create New Page’ button for this tutorial.
In the next step, you’ll need to enter a name for your page. After that, you can click the ‘Let’s Go’ button.
Another way of adding your form is by using the WPForms block. Simply click the ‘+’ button to add the WPForms and select your form from the dropdown menu.
Next, you’ll see a preview of your form.
You can save or publish your post/page and visit your website to see your poll in action.
You can also add your poll to a sidebar or widget-ready area.
To do that, you need to go to the Appearance » Widgets page and add the WPForms widget block to a sidebar where you want to display the poll.
In the WPForms widget block, you need to select the poll form you created earlier.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Update’ button to store your widget settings. You can now visit your website to see your online poll displayed in a sidebar or another widget-ready area.
Viewing Live Poll Results
If you have enabled poll results, then your users will see the results after submitting their votes.
You can also view poll results at any time without submitting a vote.
Simply visit WPForms » All Forms page and click on the ‘Survey Results’ link below your poll form.
This will take you to the poll results page, where you will see poll responses in an interactive chart.
You can change the charge type and export the results in JPEG, PDF, and print formats.
Embed Poll Results Anywhere in WordPress
WPForms also allows you to easily embed your online poll results anywhere on your website. This is particularly useful if you have disabled poll results and want to share them later.
First, you will need to find out your poll form’s ID. You can do this by going to WPForms » All Forms page and looking for the shortcode next to your poll form.
In the shortcode, you will find your poll’s ID number. For example, our test poll’s ID is 76, as shown in the screenshot above.
Next, you need to find out the field ID. This is the field in your form for which you want to show the results.
Simply edit your poll form and click on the poll field. You will find the field ID in the left column.
Now that you have both required IDs, you can go ahead and add the poll results shortcode like this:
Don’t forget to replace the form ID and field ID values with your own. You can use this shortcode in WordPress posts, pages, and text widgets.
Here’s a preview of what your poll results will look like:
Are you seeing the mixed content error in WordPress? Mixed content error in WordPress is caused by incorrect HTTPs/SSL settings. Often times it doesn’t affect your website’s functionality, but it can have adverse affects on your website’s SEO and user experience. In this article, we will show you how to fix the mixed content error in WordPress.
What is Mixed Content Error in WordPress?
It is highly recommended to add HTTPS / SSL in WordPress because after July 2018 Google Chrome will mark all http versions of website as insecure.
SSL adds an additional security layer around data transferred from your website to users’ browsers. Search engines like Google recommend using SSL on your website as well.
If you have correctly implemented SSL on your website, then you will see a green padlock icon next to your website’s URL in the browser address bar.
On the other hand if your HTTPs/SSL settings are not properly setup, then you will see an info sign or a broken padlock icon in the address bar.
This indicates that while your website is using a SSL certificate, some content on your website is still served from non HTTPS urls.
You can find out which content is served through insecure protocol by using the Inspect tool. The mixed content error will be displayed as a warning in the console with details for each mixed content item.
If it is just a single item that you can manually fix, then you can go ahead and fix it by editing the post, page, or theme file where it appears.
However, in most cases these items are added dynamically by WordPress or stored in your database. In that case, it will be hard to detect all of them and fix them manually.
That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily fix the mixed content error in WordPress.
Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » SSL Insecure Content page to configure the plugin settings.
This plugin provides different levels of fixes to the mixed content error. We will explain each one of them, what they do, and which one is best for you.
1. Simple
This is the fastest and recommended method for all beginner users. It automatically fixes the mixed content error in WordPress for scripts, stylesheets, and WordPress media library images.
2. Content
If the simple method doesn’t fix the mixed content error on your website, then you should try this method. It will use all the features of simple, in addition to checks for fixes inside WordPress content and text widgets.
3. Widgets
This includes all fixes applied in content level plus an additional fix to resources loaded in all WordPress widgets on your website.
4. Capture
This method captures everything on every page of your website from header to footer and replaces all URLs with HTTPs. It is slower and would affect performance of your website.
5. Capture all
When all above levels fail, then you can try this method. It attempts to fix everything which may result in some unexpected behavior on your website. It will also have the most negative impact on performance.
After selecting a content fix level, you need to scroll down to the HTTPS detection section. This is where you can choose how to detect the HTTPs content on your website.
The default option is to use a WordPress function, which would work for most website.
Below that you will find other options which are particularly useful if you’re using Cloudflare CDN, nginx web server, and more. Go ahead and select the method that you think applies to your website depending on your particular setup.
Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.
You can now visit your website to see if this resolved the insecure content issues on your website. Make sure to clear your WordPress cache before checking your website.
If the mixed content error in WordPress is not fixed, then revisit the plugin’s settings page and readjust the fix levels.
We hope this article helped you learn how to fix the mixed content error in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them.
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.
If you’ve been using WordPress for some time, you probably know that it’s a horrible idea to use the WordPress Media Library to host videos on your site. Not only are those files large and going to use a lot of bandwidth, but your visitors are probably going to have an equally horrible experience because ... Read moreSwarmify SmartVideo Review: A Better Way To Embed Videos In WordPress
Recently one of our readers asked if it is possible to disable specific WordPress plugins on the mobile version of their website? Like with anything in WordPress, there’s a plugin for that. In this article, we will show you how to easily disable specific WordPress plugins in mobile version of your site.
Why Disable Specific WordPress Plugins for Mobile Users
WordPress does not load inactive plugins when someone visits your website. However, it does loads all the active plugins and then depending on a plugin it will load required scripts and stylesheets as well.
See our guide on how WordPress works for a behind the scene look at how it loads plugins.
All good WordPress plugins try to only load when needed. However, sometimes it is difficult for plugin authors to guess whether you will need the plugin or not. In such situations, they opt to load the required files just in case.
Some users who want to get a perfect score in the Google speed and performance test, often want to disable specific plugins for mobile.
That’s where this article can help.
Let’s take a look at how to easily disable individual WordPress plugins for mobile version of your website.
Important: Plugin organizer is a very powerful plugin. Reordering or disabling plugins can cause conflicts and unexpected behavior which could make your site inaccessible. We recommend that you create a complete WordPress backup before disabling or reordering any plugins.
Upon activation, you need to visit Plugin Organizer » Settings page to configure plugin settings.
Apart from default options, right now you just need to turn on the following options.
Selective plugin loading
Selective mobile plugin loading
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Settings’ button to store your changes.
Creating a Must-Use Plugin for Plugin Organizer
Plugin Organizer needs a must-use plugin to work properly. It will automatically try to create it for you, but if it fails, then you will have to create it on your own.
Let’s start by checking if the plugin was able to create the MU plugin automatically.
You can do this by going to the Plugins » Installed Plugins page. You will see a new link labeled Must-Use and clicking on it will show you the installed MU plugins on your site.
If you don’t see the plugin or Must-Use plugins link, then this means that the plugin organizer failed to create the file, and you will need to manually do it yourself.
First, you need to connect to your website using an FTP client or File Manager app in cPanel.
Next, you need to go to the /wp-content/mu-plugins/ folder. If you don’t have a mu-plugins folder in your /wp-content/ folder, then you need to create one.
After that you need to go to /wp-content/plugins/plugin-organizer/lib/ folder and download the file called ‘PluginOrganizerMU.class.php’ to your computer.
Next, you need to go to the /wp-content/mu-plugins/ folder and upload the file from your computer.
The Plugin Organizer can now use this file to properly manage your plugins on mobile as well as desktop.
Disable Specific WordPress Plugins in Mobile Version
Plugin Organizer makes it very easy to disable any WordPress plugins on mobile. Simply head over to the Plugin Organizer » Global Plugins page.
You will see two columns on the screen. The first column is for ‘Available items’ which contains all your installed WordPress plugins. The second column is for ‘Disabled items’ with disabled standard and disabled mobile boxes.
First you need to click on the Disabled Mobile box to expand it. After that drag and drop the plugins you want to disable from the available column to the disabled mobile box.
After adding the plugins don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your changes.
That’s all. The plugin organizer will now disable these plugins on your mobile site.
Plugin Organizer also makes it easy to disable individual WordPress plugins for specific posts, pages, user role, and other parameters. For more detailed instructions, see our guide on how to use Plugin Organizer to speed up WordPress.
We hope this guide helped you learn how to easily disable specific WordPress plugins in mobile version. You may also want to see our list of must have WordPress plugins you should install on your website.
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.
