Adding payment gateways to the WordPress Hotel Booking system was just a matter of time. And we are pleased to announce that this time has come! Now you can feel safer about your bookings asking the guests to pay online in order to reserve the rooms.

However, if you stick to offline payments, nothing changes for you. Both ways are possible.

So, how can your guests pay? There are several methods so far.

Offline payments

It means guests can reserve a room online, but pay only after arrival to your hotel.

You can set it up in a couple of clicks (it will disable all payment gateways on the Booking submission page). Go to Accommodation > Settings > General > scroll down to Booking Confirmation screen.

Here you have 2 options to allow guests reserve a room:

1. By customer via email (the email is sent automatically to a valid address; they’ll click on the confirmation link to confirm booking request);
2. By admin manually (you’ll receive emails on new booking requests and will need to confirm each one manually).

In both cases guests don’t pay right away and their booking requests are simply confirmed in any of mentioned ways.

Online Payments

Guests should pay to reserve a room. You can give them payment gateway alternatives that are now available with MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin.

For the payments to go through properly, you should apply the following settings:

At first, you should specify general settings: go to Accommodation > Settings > Payment Gateways > General Settings tab.

1. Set either deposit (fixed ot percent) or full amount payment;
2. Enable secure Checkout payments if needed (make sure you installed an SSL certificate);
3. Create or choose Successful and Failed transaction pages, where the users will be redirected after the payment;
4. Choose which default gateway to display on the checkout page;
5. Specify how many minutes you give users to complete the booking.

And then adjust each needed payment gateway (toggle between tabs):

PayPal

1. Enable it;
2. If you want to test it, switch on test mode;
3. Edit title and description of payment methods;
4. Specify your PayPal Business email;
5. Disable or enable IPN verifications (instant payment notifications)

2Checkout

1. Enable it;
2. If you want to test it, switch on test mode;
3. Edit title and description of payment methods;
4. Specify account number and secret word.

Stripe

1. Enable it;
2. If you want to test it, switch on test mode;
3. Edit title and description of payment methods;
4. Specify secret key and public key;
5. Upload your logo (a link to it);
6. Enable or display the “Remember me” option, collect or not email addresses, accept or not Bitcoins;
7. Specify the language of Checkout page.

Test Payments

If you want to test how it all works for your site, go to Test Payment tab:

If all payment methods are switched on, your guests will be able to choose the preferable one on the frontend:

These are just first steps on improving the payment system of the Hotel Booking plugin.

More options on the way, so stay tuned!

Hospitality-centric business is much easier manageable in this technological era. If you are already running your hotel website on WordPress, you’ll be offered a lot of fancy software, design alternatives and marketing tactics to build a better online business, sometimes even free of charge.

But what’s really difficult here? To find and use the tools your particular website is really in a need now.

To help you understand what you are already good at and what should be improved, we’ve prepared some quick and effective tips for your online hotel business on WordPress. 

So, what problems are we trying to solve with these tips?

In the book “Hotel Management and Operations” by Michael J. O’Fallon and Denney G. Rutherford, you can find a circle of hotel marketing process (so, you see it’s not a step-by-step process):

Using the following tips, you’ll make some great steps to have better outcomes at the following aspects (assuming you’ve already done some job with the rest of aspects):

1. Creating awareness and stimulating demand for your hotel
2. Making the hotel available
3. Managing revenue

Time to get down to details!

1. Add a reservation system

It’s simply a necessity. If you want to provide a great full-circle services to your guests, a booking engine should be the priority tool for your independent hotel website on WordPress.

Online property booking service is much quicker and safer for guests. They don’t have to make calls (you don’t have to take any) or deal with more worrisome things.

MotoPress Booking plugin was created exactly for this purpose – to create more demand for your hotel establishment serving the needs of modern travelers.

This is a useful tool when you want to move away from “middle man” monopolists like established booking and travel agencies. If you want not to cut your revenue using the third-party services. A hotel booking engine on your independent website is now very easy to implement with WordPress. It can be set up without technicians, it’s wisely automated and it lets you and your guests have peace in mind with the reservation system.

This WordPress plugin resolves a couple of problems at once – enables online booking services and makes it possible to submit bookings from any device, as the plugin is optimized to mobile and tablet screens.

The entire system allows you to build a great gallery of your hotel rooms/ apartments / villas with photo galleries, amenities, and services. Plus, the travelers can book a needed accommodation easily – with or without upfront payment (you decided this).

The best thing about this plugin is that it’s a standalone solution – it will look beautiful and functional in any WordPress theme.

2. Get a piece of accounting software

If you are not an accountant but have to deal with your hotel business accounting, all this stuff is probably driving you crazy sometimes. This is what requires a bit of automation and reliable technology (and can become your perfect time-saver, by the way!).

Try to get a piece of accounting software to eliminate your expenses and keep track of hotel expenses automatically. Something that can help you manage cash flows, send invoices to clients, manage taxes, payrolls and more.

As we found out, there are not a lot of complete solutions on the WordPress market – the vast majority of plugins perform just some specific tasks, like managing invoices, for example, or are tied to a particular plugin like WooCommerce.

However, you can give a try to WP ERP Accounting free WordPress solution to manage all this. They promise to track your real-time sales and expenses transactions, generate invoices, etc.

If you stick to cloud accounting, there are several tools  like QuickBooks or FreshBooks trusted by thousands of users from over the globe.

3. Add panorama tour

You are probably thinking that your hotel is not Buckingham Palace and it doesn’t need any 3D panorama. But the technologies grow faster than you think and lots of hotel marketers experiment with adding this feature to show room details in a more advanced way. In a way the modern users want to see it.

There is no need to overdo this and supply each room with this feature overloading the site, but at least one small individual gallery with the hotel exterior/interior and some best rooms will bring you more visual promotion.

You may find a couple of great free plugin to add this functionality to your hotel website. We recommend iPanorama 360 Virtual Tour Builder Lite – this plugin will help you create awesome tours through your hotel right in the WordPress dashboard. It’s also comes with a hotspot feature to make a virtual tour even more exciting and informative for your guests.

A great innovative tool to outperform your competitors.

4. Dramatically improve your SEO

Image source: MOZ

One jaw-dropping SEO aspect for hotel websites is not that hard competition as online-only businesses undergo.This aspect is called a local SEO.

Imagine you don’t have to compete with all the hotels in the world, you just need to optimize your website to compete well in your local area. Of course, it’s not a piece of cake, especially if you are not a tech person (at all), but it’s easier to manage it yourself even without SEO agencies.

So, what are the core tips to improve SEO of your hotel website?

1. Consider reading the best general practises on how to optimize your WordPress website for SEO demands in 2017.
2. Set up a free Google AdWords account and start using Google’s Keyword Planner tool – it will suggest you the most relevant keywords for your area. That is, it will show you keywords and phrases your potential customers use while searching for hotels in your area.
3. Optimize your core pages like home page and services with proper names keywords – repeat the name of city, country, hotel name, etc.
4. Pay special attention to Google reviews, optimize your hotel website for Google maps.
5. Optimize your social media channels – post often, share educational and engaging content, communicate with potential customers. This way you’ll have a chance to get great social proof and share it on your official website as well.

5. Follow security approach

If you want to receive upfront payments for room reservation or other services, you should provide your guests with maximum evidence that the process is secure. Money is a very sensitive topic for customers and they (customers) should feel secure in your hands. That is, your WordPress website should be protected.

If you use MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for reservation purposes, it will allow you to force SSL certificate to enable secure payments. You may (and you should) install this certificate beforehand. However, if you use any other WordPress solution, it will more likely work in the same way.

To secure your website in many other ways, you can try to install such reliable free WordPress plugins (with lots of premium features as well) like iThemes security.

Conclusions

There is a lot of opportunities to improve your online hotel business on WordPress, you just need to balance out all small aspects and pay a bit of attention to each – automation, accounting, services, SEO, presentation on the web, etc.

Hopefully, these quick tips will help you move forward a bit. Got a question or just want to suggest more effective WordPress tools for hoteliers? Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

WordPress Hotel Booking plugin by MotoPress is a great solution to build hotel rooms listing and enable online reservation services. But how much easier would your job be, if we created even better guest experience and more flexible admin dashboard?

Actually, you can already check it yourself as we polished the plugin with several amazing updates!

Let’s not waste time and see what was done.

New algorithm of displaying accommodation pricing

This new algorithm is more logical in displaying relevant prices. This is how it works:

1. If the site visitor specifies check-in and check-out dates in the Search Availability form, the system will show minimum prices for accommodation;
2. If the site visitor doesn’t specify check-in and check-out dates, the property listing will show minimum price from the present day and for the next fixed number of dates. Here is how you can specify it in settings (Accommodation > Settings):

3. If the site visitor specifies check-in and check-out dates, the system shows a total price for all dates or the price for “minimum days to stay” (you set it in global booking rules):

As for new admin tools, the plugin now allows:

1. To add payments manually. This is especially useful if you require to pay deposit booking price and then customers have to pay the rest after arrival. This way, the manager can simply go to the needed booking and click “Add payment manually”, so it’s much easier to keep all income calculations in one place.

2. To search booking by email or ID in the list of bookings.

3. To filter payments by status and search them by email or ID in the list of payments – an easier way to find and manage all bookings.

4. To customize a new email template

As one of the ways for guests to confirm a booking is to pay for it, you can automate this process by sending an appropriate email. That is, this email will notify the client (and administrator) that the booking is paid and confirmed. To find and brand your new email template, navigate to Accommodation > Settings > Admin emails > Approved Booking email (via payment).

5. To enable comments for accommodation and services

If you want to allow guests to leave their feedback about your properties and services, simply tick “Allow comments” for each needed room type or service. Here is an example from WordPress Hotel Booking Demo:

6. To create a better image gallery

If you upload property images in different sizes, you should not worry about non-attractive presentation in result. The gallery is now set to thumbnails ensuring that photos in the gallery are of the same size, while each of them is also available in original size (if you open it in the lightbox):

By the way, if you haven’t noticed it yet, one more plugin translation into Arabic language is added!

And await for even more new features!

If you have any awesome idea to improve the plugin, this is exactly what we are looking for – don’t hesitate to share it in comments.

Have been waiting for delicious WordPress discounts? It’s time to get one. Due to multiple requests we decided to launch a cool 30% discounted bundle and sell it on a regular basis – it includes the MotoPress Visual Page Builder plugin for WordPress with all its premium addons.

The good news, it comes with 2 licenses – personal (single website) and developer (unlimited).

So all MotoPress newbies (and everybody) can start building their websites with all premium extensions at hand much easier now!

Extensions in the bundle

If you don’t have any idea about the addons, here is a quick list of what you get purchasing the bundle (apart from the builder itself, of course):

1. Video Slider and Video Lightbox to create much more engaging video content for your WordPress site, with less efforts
2. Google map Pro to build a much better and more attractive Contact us page
3. Pricing Table – animated tables with elegant design to show pricing of your products and services
4. Simple Contact Form with editable fields
5. Image Hotspot to supply your images with more information in a creative way
6. Countdown Pro to create a sense of urgency for your shoppers and more.

   Example of the Pricing Table addon

Additionally, the Developer’s bundle comes with extra White Label addon that allows to re-brand the builder.

Pricing benefits

Each bundle comes with 30% discount. It means, you can get

1. A personal bundle for $69 instead of $101 (a saving of $32)
2. A Developer bundle for $179 instead of $258 (a saving of $79)

Where to proceed

The offer is properly presented on the MotoPress Visual Page Builder plugin page, so you can find the bundles scrolling down to plans:

Grab the needed bundle and build more creative and professional website pages!

If you run into any issues or would like to ask something, don’t hesitate to speak your mind in comments.

Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Expedia… Hoteliers are lured by their money and power, these companies seem too important to ignore. Developing our WordPress Hotel Booking plugin, which is meant for direct accommodation bookings from independent websites, was a kind of risky path. Can it be compatible, is there any demand?

We decided to dig deeper. To be perfectly honest, some in-depth analysis is beneficial for both sides: it delivers insights for your hospitality business and lets us create a better version of MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for your WordPress website (however, the info will be useful even if you use another CMS).

Here are major questions we are trying to answer:

1. Should you submit your hotel to popular booking websites only – OTA (online travel agency) like Booking.com?
2. Should you provide booking services on your independent website only?

Or probably you should use both?

To get some up-to-date answers directly from hoteliers, we’ve created a survey to collect data and see what choice they make.

You still can participate and  help us get more data, we’ll make sure to update the post.

As the chart shows, the vast majority of our respondents run hotels:

Choose property type of your business

The biggest number of hoteliers (40 percent) prefer the direct bookings from their websites only:

Do you provide online property booking service for your guests?

20 percent don’t have any booking system, another 20 percent already have an experience with booking software, but are looking for alternatives.

In the WordPress industry, all of the hotel business dedicated booking plugins come with different functionality, so it’s quite possible that people try different solutions.

None of the respondents currently uses OTAs.

However, as the last chart shows:

How are you satisfied with popular booking systems like Booking.com?

20 percent of hoteliers want to try them (OTAs). Again, 40 percent don’t use OTAs at all and 20 percent were not satisfied with them (don’t use them so far).

To sum it up quickly, the vast majority of hoteliers either use the hotel booking system or are going to implement it. As for OTAs, only 20 percent of respondents want to try and 20 percent were not satisfied with them. Others use direct website hotel bookings.

What are the reasons for these tendencies?

A love-hate play between hotel brands and OTAs has started with the rapid growth of technologies and travelers’ demand for hotel brands transparency.

Just think of this. You are the boss on your own website and more likely you won’t “allow” negative reviews on your site. The “marketplace” concept of OTA, on contrary, won’t generally allow you to filter good and bad reviews, so the travelers often feel much safer relying on them.

However, it’s not clear which path is actually best for your hospitality business – building a booking system on your website or compete with other hotels on your area using OTAs.

There are perks and pitfalls of both.

Pros and cons of direct hotel booking website and OTAs

We analyzed the major pros and cons of both alternatives. So we can touch more aspects and provide you with more general details.

The Pros for hoteliers

The Cons for hoteliers

Is OTA any good?  

Good question.

Customers trust them. From their perspective (I also use OTAs sometimes), all seems pretty easy and clear. But another side of a coin, where the industry representatives compete, is darker.

There are many controversial facts about OTAs.

For example, in March, 2017, the Association of Turkish Travel Agencies took the radical way to get rid of world-known booking monopolists – a Turkish court simply banned Booking.com website:

“Lawyers for the Association of Turkish Travel Agencies had argued that Netherlands-based Booking.com was engaging in unfair competition in the marketing of hotels in Turkey.

Anadolu said that government authorities are expected to block access to the website as soon as they receive official notification from the court”.

Image source: Independent.co.uk

So far, Booking.com website is still running and you can book a needed accommodation in Turkey.

Probably this is a battle for domination and we, WordPress guys, are just scratching the surface here. But the fact that local hotel businesses want to fight with “cannibalizing” their natural hospitality market signals that businesses are not satisfied and they are looking for changes and alternatives.

The only clear thing is that hotels relying on one OTA alone risk a lot.

Of course, this is just one case. However, many questions arise. Do the OTAs create a healthy and fair competition environment?

In addition to positive answers, hoteliers across the net claim that the top positions in hotels listings in OTAs are all bought, the search algorithms are too tricky and there are no chances for hotels with little to know bargaining power to be noticed by travelers.

All in all, hoteliers face different troubles. Are there any real conspiracy theories behind those claims? Yes, it’s impossible to satisfy every hotelier, but there’s no smoke without fire.

Another example, back in 2012, TripAdvisor was involved in countless lawsuits across the world being asked to remove a word “trusted” form their website as the company couldn’t prove their reviews were honest.

In the article “What You Don’t Know About TripAdvisor. How the World’s Largest Travel Monopoly Ultimately Hurts Travelers & Small Businesses” published in 2016 Heather Stimmler-Hall stresses that hotels use so-called “reputation manager” companies to polish and “fix” their reviews on TripAdvisor which definitely leads to unfair competition.

Image source: Medium.com

TripAdvisor is also often accused of promoting their own companies’ business listings above those independent ones. In the same article Heather tries to look at the problem at different perspectives:

“I have experienced TripAdvisor over the past 15 years as a professional travel writer, as a business owner of a tour company, and as an independent traveler. While TripAdvisor may have started as a sort of consumer watchdog site empowering hotel guests, I’ve watched it turn into a greedy travel monopoly profiting at the expense of both travelers and small businesses.”

And finally, she gives an advice for travelers (interesting, how many conscious ones have already stumbled upon her research?):

“Whenever possible, book hotels, tours, restaurants, cooking classes or any other travel service DIRECTLY with that business. TripAdvisor knows we’re so busy we prefer the easy one-click option on their site (even if the price isn’t cheaper), but by booking direct you are helping support small businesses (and they’re happier to have you as a client), keeping overall prices down, and cutting out the middleman in the communication and accountability chain in case something goes wrong.”

Probably some of those facts surprised you or, on contrary, you can tell even more about the side effects of working with popular hotel booking platforms. OTAs help many small businesses. And sometimes they don’t. Each case is different.

What about customers?

If you are now evaluating what’s the best option for your business, brand, occupancy, revenue, etc, don’t forget about one of the most crucial points – customer satisfaction. Your hotel establishment doesn’t serve your business only, it serves your customers.

You know your requirements. But what are the requirements of modern travelers? In a couple of words, the vast majority of travelers want the entire hotel room booking process to be handy, fast and secure.

These are features OTAs provide on a high level.

These are features MotoPress developers found really hard to polish developing a WordPress hotel booking plugin for independent websites: creating a smart search algorithm, implementing lots of payment methods and making them secure, translations and multilingual support, creating modern lightweight design – the experiments and hard work took mostly a year to achieve good results.

So, you can only imagine how much money the OTAs invest into improving their platforms to outperform local hospitality businesses. And many travelers across the globe use OTA marketplaces, they trust them.

And do people want to use the direct booking service on your website? Do you think you can offer something as reliable as OTAs do? Well, it depends on the booking software you use and your audience. As for software, we’ve already made a quick note a while back. As for audience…

To solve this puzzle, hotels should try to find the answers to the important brand questions:

Who is your guest segment ? What kind of traveling is the most popular among guests  – business or budget?

If you know “your people”, you are more likely make your choice wisely.

For example, budget travelers are always looking for the best deal, so they might surf through many hotel comparison services, so OTAs are generally their first choice. These travelers generally don’t care about a hotel brand, they are much more interested in reviews, location and value.

What about business travelers? It’s often a case when business people don’t book an accommodation by themselves. Someone from the office staff does. Chances are, they will be interested in revising the hotel brand website – generally business representatives are more interested in hotel brand recognition. However, reviews and location still come in the first place.

As you see, there are a lot of factors you should consider.

Conclusions

Let’s get back to our questions and see whether we’ve moved a little forward.

1. Should you submit your hotel to popular booking website only – OTA (online travel agency) like Booking.com?
2. Should you provide booking services on your independent website only?

Let’s add another question – should you use both? As with all pros and cons, each of the channels (OTA and direct booking) is a good resource of generating hotel bookings.

The answer is – it depends.

If you don’t have any marketing and SEO concept for developing your brand, just start building your hotel recognition, don’t have time and money for that, ready for marketplace business competition and for all kinds of positive and negative reviews, ready to share your revenue with the OTA, and primarily deal with budget travelers, the first option might be a good way to start.

On contrary, if you want to be fully responsible for your brand name, ready to improve your hotel marketing on your own, cut expenses on commissions and be independent, don’t play the middleman game, have more peace in mind that your website will be up and running when you want it, deal with conscious budget and business travelers, the second option looks more attractive.

There may be tons of your own circumstances and experiences which can lead you to absolutely different answer.

For example, some hoteliers can find the balance using both channels. On the one hand, it looks like the battle of your own channels, but on the other hand, it’s a fact that many travelers go to visit the brand website after finding it in any of OTAs. In this way, you’ll generate some direct booking from your website and from OTAs too. However, managing two channels you’ll need to double your business workload and resources as well (more work = better results).

As you might sum up, here we are only trying to make an attempt to find the answer by providing you with some logic, facts, and basics of customer psychology.

Focus on what your hotel is today and what you want it to be tomorrow – balance out all your resources and expectations.

Your turn! As a customer, how do you book a room? As a hotelier, which path do/will you follow?

Creating content for your blog is definitely the art and science. But when it comes to content managing, sharing and promotion, you may spend dozens of hours doing a repetitive work.

Especially if you try to share your content across all possible social networks (it’s hard to count all of them today!), there is simply no point in doing this task manually.

There are so many professional WordPress plugins for sharing your website posts automatically on social media. So, we’ve done some research for you and collected free and premium WordPress plugins for social media auto sharing.

What is the main purpose of them, by the way? They help you save lots of your precious time and make your social media marketing workflow much more effective and less time-consuming. Sounds good to give it a whirl, agree?

We’ve highlighted the main features, supported social media networks and, of course, pricing, so it should be easier for you to choose the right one.

Let’s get down to details.

CoSchedule WordPress Editorial Calendar

DETAILS

CoSchedule is a popular editorial calendar with drag-and-drop interface for more intuitive editing work. If you regularly update your WordPress blog with a new content, this plugin will be a great helper in planning and sharing your posts on social media directly from WordPress dashboard.

It significantly eliminates the need to manage different social media accounts, extra tools thanks to a fully automated social media sharing process.

Supported social media networks: fully integrated with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Buffer, and Tumblr.

Pricing – 14-day free trial, prices start at $15.

Revive Old Posts

DETAILS

Revive Old Post is a popular WordPress plugin for social media marketing. A great solution to revive your old evergreen content and bring more traffic to your website without fresh posts. This WordPress plugin will automatically share your old but yet useful posts on social media (you may also schedule new posts for auto sharing).

You have full control over what goes published on your social media accounts and can automate the whole process quite quickly and easily.

Supported social media networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and Tumblr are your options in PRO version;

Pricing: PRO version – prices start at $75 (personal plan)

Free version supports Twitter auto sharing only.

NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

DETAILS

This WordPress plugin for auto posting offers the biggest variety of social networks you can integrate your site with.

You can use it for personal and business accounts, social media communities, groups, etc (using a free version you’ll be able to use one account for each network).

Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+(Google Plus), Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, LiveJournal, Flipboard, Instagram, Telegram, DreamWidth, Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, ok.ru, Pinterest, Plurk, VKontakte(VK.com), YouTube, Scoop.It, WordPress, XING

Pricing: free (some of the social networks are unavailable in a free version). Prices for PRO version start at $49. Compare the Pro and free versions here.

JetPack Publicize

DETAILS

A popular Jetpack plugin offers lots of WordPress website enhancement and analytic features. Jetpack Publicize, as one of them, can help you share the posts automatically.

This is a very quick and straightforward solution to automatically share your posts on chosen social media networks once you publish a new one on your blog. You can manually adjust all settings, select/deselect the blog posts that should be automatically shared on social media platforms. It can also publicize scheduled posts, which is a pretty helpful option.

Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Path, Tumblr and Google+

Pricing: free

Microblog Poster

DETAILS

Microblog Poster is a great plugin which helps you automatically share posts, pages and custom posts types of your WordPress site. Both free and PRO versions are pretty feature-rich. If you have more than one social media account, the plugin will allow you to connect all of them to your WordPress site (the plugin allows to auto post to group and communities on different social media platforms).

Within PRO version you can also enable category-driven auto-publishing, multi-author mode, auto publishing to Twitter with images, etc. You may quickly check the full list of differences here.

Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Xing, Tumblr, Google +, Plurk, Delicious, Diigo, LinkedIn, Blogger.com, Instapaper, VK, Pinterest, Flickr.

Pricing: free. The prices for PRO version start at $49

AccessPress Social AutoPost

DETAILS

Social Auto Post plugin by Access Press is a great tool to enable auto posting on multiple social media accounts. Simply apply all needed settings and define which content should be automatically published across your social networks.

With a help of this plugin you can customize your post formats, filter them by categories and view logs, enable/disable auto posting right from the post screen.

Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Linkedin

Pricing: $20

Juicer

DETAILS

If you are looking for another type of the plugin that will create a social media feed on your website, Juicer was created exactly for these needs. It will help you generate a stylish feed on your site automatically publishing the posts from your social media accounts. Juicer will update the feed each time you publish a new post.

To make it all work, you’ll need to embed the appropriate shortcode anywhere on your site. However, the plugin won’t work without a Juicer account.

Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus, Tumblr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine, RSS, Spotify, Slack, LinkedIn, Flickr, Vimeo, Hashtags, Yelp and DeviantArt.

Pricing: free (2 source accounts, Juicer branding watermark, 1 update during 24 hours). Prices for PRO version start at $19.

Social Media Auto Publish

DETAILS

Another great free WordPress plugin for publishing your site posts across social media accounts automatically.

It’s fully packed with all needed settings for plugin of this nature: it allows to post to Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin with images, filter items by categories and custom post types, and customize format of your messages (the plugin supports post title, description, excerpt, permalink, blog title, and user nicename).

It’s also required to create an application for each profile – it’s an easy process aimed to delete “shared via xxx” from your social media messages.

Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Pricing: free. PRO – $29 (see the comparison of free and paid versions here)

Social Auto Poster

DETAILS

Social Auto Poster by WPWEB is another great solution that allows auto posting of your WordPress website content. As usually, you’ll need to configure the main settings and for your social media account and the posts will go live automatically.

The plugin allows to publish different post types (each with individual settings), shorten URL, and schedule automatic posts publishing on social media networks.

Social Auto Poster also works well with popular WordPress eCommerce plugins and is fully translatable.

Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Delicious, BufferApp.

Pricing: $29

Hopefully, you’ll find the most useful and affordable solution for your website on WordPress!

Figuring out how to integrate your WordPress website with a couple of useful Google services? It should not be difficult! There are lots of reliable WordPress plugins that are ready to connect your site with popular Google services.

In this post you’ll find SEO and Google Analytics tools for WordPress (which are useful for all WordPress sites no matter their niche ), popular advertising Google Adsense plugins, and some multifunctional tools to add useful Google functionality to your site.

Let’s start with WordPress plugins that will improve your WordPress website SEO and will connect it with Google Analytics services.

SEO and Analytics

Google XML Sitemap

-DETAILS-

Website sitemap is a must-have thing for your WordPress website to get indexed by search engines. In other words, it’s one of the key tools for proper SEO optimization.

The plugin makes it easier for the search crawlers to scan your site, so they find it quicker and easier. The plugin is dynamic and will update the structure of the sitemap automatically each time you update the site. This free WordPress plugin is trusted by more than 2 million users and won’t take much time or skills to be set up, so you should definitely start using it.

As for Analytics plugins, there are a couple of good ones.

The most popular ones are Google Analytics by MonsterInsights, Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress and Google Analytics WD (the youngest one). A free version of the first two plugins is already used by more than a million WordPress users. Google Analytics WD currently comes with around 20 thousand of downloads.

One more interesting plugin we’d like to add is WP Google Analytics Events that will not only count the page views, but will provide you with more custom website navigation and user actions metrics (used by more than 10 thousand people.)

All these plugins are reliable solutions, so choose one that will better serve your needs.  Let’s take a closer look at each.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress

-DETAILS-

This plugin simplifies your work with Google Analytics tracking code allowing you to view all stats directly from WordPress Dashboard. The plugin will also generate custom detailed page and post reports with performance data. In result, you’ll have your real-time analytics without a need to go to a Google account.

You are also allowed to customize the tracking code for more advanced data collection. What’s important, the plugin is compatible with WordPress Multisite network, and is well-documented.

What users really like about GA Dashboard for WordPress is it’s very easy to set up for newbies and is easily manageable for developers with multiple domains.

Google Analytics WD

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This plugin can be used for the same purposes – it lets you add the Google Analytics tracking code, customize it and track all activities from your site backend.

All real-time statistics, demographics, page views, and more will be provided in detailed reports, which can be exported into CSV or PDF files.

It’s worth mentioning that this plugin is a certified member of Google Analytics Technology Partners Program

Google Analytics by MonsterInsights

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A feature-rich and easily manageable plugin that we’ve recently featured in the list of Free versions of top premium WordPress plugins.

You’ll set up the tracking code without technical help. Real-time stats, reports – all tools are at your disposal. The plugin also offers a variety of helpful addons for for eCommerce and ads tracking.

WP Google Analytics Events

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This awesome plugin will help you track users activity – and it’s not based on page views only. It will send events to Google Analytics once a user scrolls to a point of interest (e.g. your prices, FAQ, etc.) on your site or when they click any page button  (submit a form, watch a video, banner clicks. etc.)

So, if you were looking for more custom metrics, this free WordPress plugin will serve your needs perfectly. Here are several goals you can achieve with this plugin: track page navigation, compare call-to-action buttons performance, count the number of people who get to the end of your web pages, track links and contact forms submissions, etc.

Google PageSpeed Insights

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Page speed is a crucial factor for your website SEO. And a couple of pagespeed analytic tools will definitely help you understand the overall situation and issues with website performance.

The plugin tracks PC and mobile web performance, so you can stay updated with the pagespeed data and improve it when needed.

Advertising WordPress plugins

AdSense Plugin WPQUADS

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One of the most popular WordPress plugins to integrate your site with one of the most loved Google services among bloggers – Google Adsense.  This plugin is a forked version of Quick Adsense, which was abandoned by its creators and is not updated for several years already.

With this plugin you’ll have a full control over the ads displaying – you may disable them on particular devices. If you want to integrate it with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), AMP by Automattic plugin should be installed.

Google AdSense by BestWebSoft

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Another good alternative. It lets you wisely integrate Google Adsense with your WordPress site and place the ads to any place you want (pages, posts, custom posts, search results, categories, tags, and widgets.)

As usually, you can customize the ads appearance, get ads from your Google Adsense account or add via the plugin.

Google Adsense Ads Manager by Crunchify

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Not that well promoted, but still useful WordPress plugin to configure Google Adsense from WordPress dashboard. It’s very easy to set up and work even for WordPress beginners.

The Adsense code is customizable, so you may adjust the visibility, alignment and other options for the Adsense code. The team behind the plugin has also built a great educational resource for your WordPress needs, so you can find some useful tips there as well.

WordPress plugins to integrate your site with multipurpose Google services

Google Maps Pro

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This is one of the most popular extra WordPress plugin for MotoPress Visual Page Builder. It lets you make you Contacts page (or whatever page you want) more attractive and interactive.

So, if you wish to turn your Google Maps into attractive “wow” content piece, grab this plugin and do a bit of customization work. You may add lots of custom markers, icons, upload images, add media files, adjust texts and custom styles, etc.

Using this plugin, you are free to customize the maps appearance without any coding skills.

Google Drive WP Media

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It’s a great feeling to have access to your Google Drive from any device. Now, with a help of Google Drive WP Media plugin, you can have a direct access right from your WordPress dashboard, namely, you can upload the files from your WordPress website to Google Drive and vice versa.

So, if you constantly work with Google Drive, think of what level of automation this plugin can give you and test it. A great time-saving tool for bloggers and photographers. Google Drive Embedder is another good alternative.

Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA)

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Another useful plugin by BestWebSoft, which aims to protect your WordPress site forms from spam. reCAPTHCA by Google is one of the best anti-spamming tools. Two simple reasons why: it’s created by professionals (so you know it’s secure) and it’s much easier for users, who don’t need to solve a complex standard CAPTCHA.

Using this WordPress plugin, you can add Google reCAPTCHA to registration forms, login forms, contact forms, comments forms, custom forms, etc. The Pro version of the plugin comes with compatibility with many popular WordPress plugins such as Contact Form 7, WooCommerce, BuddyPress, etc.

Google Fonts for WordPress

Among several great Google Fonts plugins for WordPress, we recommend Easy Google Fonts trusted by more than 300 thousand WordPress users and Google Typography used by more than 10 thousand users.

Any of them will help you add and use more than 600 beautiful Google fonts on your WordPress website without coding. The plugins come with tons more useful options you can benefit from.

Google Language Translator

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If you need to integrate your WordPress site with one of the best machine translation programs by Google, this plugin is a good choice. It lets you insert the translator anywhere you want on the site, customize its appearance and let readers quickly see the translation of the needed content.

Conclusions

Here we’ve listed top useful WordPress plugins that provide integration with Google services, some with several alternatives. Thanks to these plugins you can supply your site with really reliable and useful services, enhancing the overall website performance and user experience as well.

Choose and install only those you need, not all alternatives and not all listed plugins. If you can share your experience of using any of the presented WordPress plugins, we’d be happy to hear it!

We are rolling out ideas, facing challenges and developing new WordPress products for almost 4 years. There is already a good bunch of plugins and themes, I must say!

And we decided that this is the time to launch the MotoPress Membership Club! We want to give you access to absolutely all products, existing and upcoming, at a low price, so you can take advantage of using them!

The idea of membership is not new in the industry, but our way that led to its emergence was long. That’s why we are so excited about eventually releasing it.

Don’t you mind if I buzz about it a little?

What are your perks of being a MotoPress Club Member?

You’ll get everything! Literally – all products. Plus, support and updates for a year as regularly. All these with a huge discount. Consider it the biggest and the cheapest bundle ever!

Personal or business project?

If you found that lots of our products meet your needs, Membership is the best option to get them all with discount.

Developers?

You can garner an awesome toolkit of WordPress plugins and themes to use now or later in a range of (unlimited!) clients’ projects!

Your field is wide: drag-and-drop Visual Builder suitable for any business or personal website (with tons of extra addons), WordPress plugins for hospitality industry (hotels and restaurants), business and creative WordPress themes, Demo Builder plugin to create frontend demo and backend trials for potential customers, and yes – even more.

Overall, we are sure that all this will help you feel a bit more punchy, prolific and motivated in your work.

All future WordPress plugins and themes are also included!

You’ve probably seen our quick ‘teaser’ on social networks about a future WordPress theme?

And wait, not just one theme!

We’re also styling all of our current plugins to look maximum natural in the future themes, so you’ll get the complete design and functionality solutions. Put another way – all inclusive

Yes, our small WordPress kitchen is very busy these days. And, being a member, you’ll get all upcoming products as well, without additional cost.

Our plugins and themes

Let’s put a list of our current products, so you just get the idea of what is included:

1. WordPress drag-and-drop Visual Page Builder

2. Addons (plugins of extra functionality) for the Visual Page Builder:

Video Slider and Video Lightbox

Google map Pro

Pricing Table

Simple Contact Form

Image Hotspot

Countdown Pro

White Label

3. WordPress Responsive and Animated Slider
4. Hotel Booking plugin
5. Delivery and Toppings plugins for a free Restaurant Menu plugin
6. Demo Builder
7. WordPress themes:

Emmet – multipurpose business theme

Profit – financial business theme

Artwork – creative photography themes

Entrepreneur – for small business and entrepreneurs

What’s the price and terms?

The Membership price is $199. You pay for products + support and updates for 1 year.

You can use any of the products on an unlimited number of websites.

This means a very good discount. Here is the math: the total price of all products with the unlimited license is more than $1,000! And these are numbers without future products taking into consideration.

So, we feel the Membership price is fair.

Moreover, if you cancel your Membership (this is what you can do at any time), you’ll still be able to use the products. However, to receive updates and support, the Membership license should be extended ($199 for another year).

Special early birds discount!

We’ve prepared an engaging surprise for our first 50 members and will give them a chance to own MotoPress Membership with the 50% discount. Moreover, if it will be bought for a half price now it can be also renewed for the half price in a year. Follow us on Facebook to be informed on the exact days of MotoPress Membership Club opening, or subscribe to our blog (subscribe button is on the right) to get a line about the beginning of the deal.

Share your thoughts and ideas in comments, we are always more than simply happy to see them!

The most pleasant moment – is the moment of giving new opportunities for our users!
MotoPress Membership Club is officially open. Now you are able to buy all plugins and themes for unlimited sites for one fixed price.

During first seven days the whole set of products will cost $99 only, after the 1st of June the permanent price will be $199.

If you also want to get all MototPress products for this extremely low price use the discount code below at the checkout:

Your discount code: earlybird

What’s included in MotoPress Membership?

All our existing and upcoming plugins, themes and addons:

WordPress Drag & Drop Visual Builder and all its addons: Video Slider and Video Lightbox, Google Map Pro, Pricing Table, Simple Contact Form, Image Hotspot, Countdown Pro, White Label.
WordPress Layer Slider to power your website with the engaging product demonstrations.
Hotel Booking plugin for your hospitality business.
Delivery and Toppings plugins for a free Restaurant Menu plugin.
Demo Builder for building beautiful and functional demo for your products.

WordPress themes:

Emmet – multipurpose business theme.
Profit – financial business theme.
Artwork– creative photography theme.
Entrepreneur – business theme with the appointment form.

We actually have never done that before for newly released products. But this time we decided it would be great to provide a 50% discount for our first members!

If you already made up your mind, there is no reason to wait, use the magic discount word: earlybird and save $100.

Get All Products for $99

One more bonus – if you buy the Membership with this limited-time discount, you’ll also renew it with the same discounted price for the next year and onwards!

So, welcome to the MotoPress Club – enjoy equal rights and equal access to all our WordPress products and get your rewarding experience!

Your comments are welcome!

Why do so many people think that WordPress is insecure? This is one of the top important questions and ongoing discussions in the WordPress space. And while lots of developers overestimate or underestimate WordPress security, many users couldn’t care less.

People simply don’t have time or wish to dig into all this security stuff and prefer (at least something!) to go with a security plugin only. Are you among them?

Of course, press-the-button-the-site-is-secured tactic is pretty hassle-free. But this is just an extra layer for all other important security measures available. And probably that carelessness is one of the reasons for those regular insecurity talks.

However, neither software is 100% secure. And lots things on your WordPress website depend on your own actions.

It’s never too late to secure your WordPress site better. Once you are here, there are some quick WordPress security tips you can try today:

Switch to HTTPS (use SSL)

This is already an obvious thing and you’ve probably seen this tip multiple times. There is a reason – it’s really serious. Basically, if your site domain name includes HTTPS, all your data, purchases, logins are sent encrypted across the network.

This helps protect your all your important website info against exploitation and, at the same time, improves your Google ranking. A pleasant bonus, isn’t it? Contact your hosting company to get more details on this.

Make sure you use a reliable hosting provider

There is a lot of info on how to choose a hosting provider, and lost of representatives, too. To make things short and clear, we’ll look at the hosting from the security perspective only. Overall, here are a few things to consider:

1. Dedicated hosting is better than shared for your WordPress website security;
2. A good hosting provider comes with current software options (Apache, PHP, MySQL);
3. The hosting provider ensures secure and constant data backups;
4. Available and helping support team ready to address security issues quickly.

Upgrade to PHP 7

If you want your WordPress website to be more secure “by default”, consider upgrading it to PHP 7. This version is much faster and secure, so after upgrading, more likely you’ll have to make less efforts in order to protect your site.

The good news is that you can do that in a manner of clicks if your hosting provider allows it (if so, your host is awesome!). For example, Siteground provides this option, with Bluehost it’s also quite a simple process (btw, for all new Bluehost WordPress customers, they are adding in PHP 7 by default).

The bad news is that you should be sure that your plugins and themes are compatible with PHP 7 as well. And even those good plugins like PHP Compatibility Checker  cannot give you 100% correct results. As plugin creators claim:

“Please note that linting code is not perfect…“

In any case, to upgrade safely, a help of developer might be necessary.

Use reliable WordPress security plugin

How could we make this list without security plugins?

It’s important to understand to that there is no perfect WordPress security plugin, each provides limited security measures. And the plugin is just one of the security layers.

There is a bunch of WordPress security plugins out there. However, some are limited in functionality or have bad reviews.

One of the best ones is a free All in One WP Security and Firewall. This is an all-around security WordPress plugin has a great reputation among non-tech users and developers. The plugin is tested to the latest WordPress core version, is regularly updated, comes with positive ratings and is really feature-rich.

What does it offer, actually? Best recommended WordPress practices and techniques for users registration, login and accounts security, login monitoring and statistics, database security, file system security, easy backups, blacklist functionality, firewall protection, and more.

One more useful WordPress security plugin is WP Security Audit Log that will monitor everything that is happening on your site. This plugin is especially useful if you run a multi-user website.

Improve website login security

Approx 90% of brute hacking attacks begin with the login page. This is one of the top priority things you should protect. Here are some best WordPress practices to make your login pages secure:

1. Again, the easiest way is to use plugins like Login LockDown, which is particularly good at improving your login pages security through limiting login attempts;
2. Create really strong passwords and change them regularly (you may use password generators for this purpose);
3. Set a custom, unpredictable login URL (usual /wp-login or /wp-admin are more frequently attacked and more easily hacked). The plugins like iThemes Security or WPS Hide Login can help you with this. Remember that changing the URL alone won’t fully protect your site; this is just a component. It’s still important to have strong credentials, unique admin username, and WordPress SSL installed.

Constantly back up your site

Back up your site on a regular basis – it’s much safer to have copies of your site files at hand if anythings happens.

To make the process easier, you can use UpdraftPlus – a great reliable plugin to always keep your crucial website data.

Use only quality plugins

Being a key powerhouse of WordPress, plugins are at the same time a source of problems, including security ones. But only bad quality plugins. One of the recent impressive news in the WordPress industry was that one about the Fake WordPress SEO plugin that infected 4000 websites.

So make sure every plugin you install is reliable: check whether it’s tested with the latest WordPress core versions, has positive reviews, is trusted by many users, regularly updated and supported.

Eliminate spam

Too many spam is not a good sign for your website security – it attracts malicious behavior and decreases your website reputation.

To fight with spam attacks, you can simply go with a trusted anti-spamming plugins like Akismet or go manually through the process of adjusting default article settings wisely (for example, close comments for articles older than … days, paginate comments pages, enable email notifications, manually moderate comments with links, etc.)

Conclusions

See? There are lost of affordable and easy ways to bring your WordPress website to a higher security level. Think about it before something bad happens. By the way, is there anything else we should add to this list?

The problem with choosing a right WordPress Membership plugins is actually the number of different problems it should solve. The needs of all projects are very diverse and there is simply no universal solution.

You’ll probably spend a lot of time evaluating all available plugins and figuring out which one is a good fit for your business.

Some projects have to code the membership system from scratch to meet their complex needs – billing, product or service purchase, compatibility with other plugins, etc. This is exactly the process the MotoPress Membership system underwent, when we started selling all MotoPress plugins and themes for WordPress in one discounted membership package.

The developers had to roll up the sleeves to make a complex system work properly. But before that we also took a look at some good solutions available on the market to understand how it all works.

Some of existing WordPress Membership plugins are difficult to set up and manage for beginners so the problems start already on the first stages, others are not custom development friendly (which can be crucial for many projects).

There are lots of things to evaluate, that is. Here are some major things you should take into consideration when choosing a plugin:

1. Hierarchy of membership levels (easy to set up content restriction rules)
2. Intuitive member interface
3. Customizability (hooks to tweaks plugin’s behavior)
4. Expandability
5. Compatibility with other installed plugins
6. Integration with popular plugins and services
7. Payment gateways
8. Content dripping
9. Upgrades
10. eCommerce features

And now let’s see what the WordPress market offers.

MemberPress

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A bunch of useful features is offered by MemberPress WordPress plugin – this is one of the most popular niche representatives. The ease of setup process is one of the most noticeable things about the plugin. It’s widely recommended by users and professionals.

With its help you can create and manage an unlimited membership subscriptions with unlimited access rules (in addition to pages and posts, you can restrict access to tags and categories as well).

The good thing is that so many useful options like unlimited members support, unlimited digital products support, etc are available in both – Business and Developer editions.

MemberPress also supports content dripping, integration with a lot of services (like MailChimp, AWeber, MadMimi, etc.) and unlimited coupons and pricing pages. Pricing plans come with support of different useful addons like Match Captcha, Corporate accounts, etc.

As for disadvantages (for some countries), the plugins offers only 3 payment gateways – PayPal (Standard, Express Checkout and Pro), Stripe and Authorize.net (this one is included into Developer license only).

Pricing: Business 119/year and Developer 239/year

Get MemberPress plugin

Paid Member Subscriptions

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Paid Member Subscriptions is another good WordPress Membership plugin with a great list of options. The plugin is quite a feature-rich and the pricing is relatively affordable. The developers focus on the ease of setting up and managing the plugin, development flexibility and a variety of extra features you might need when building your membership community.

To get a first-hand experience of working with Paid Member Subscriptions, you can use a fully functional free version of this plugin. However, different paid addons will more likely be a must, so consider checking payment plans as well. And yes, describing more features, we’ll be talking about Pro plans as all necessary things are in there.

Alike other niche plugins, Paid Member Subscriptions plugin allows to manage unlimited members, comes with a flexible content restriction control (by taxonomies and post types as well), reCAPTCHA spam protection and a well thought-out content dripping option.

As for payment gateways, all major ones are included: PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, PayPal Express, Stripe, and Recurring PayPal payments into paid versions. The “Hobbyist” (for one website) payment plan comes with Unlimited PayPal Standard and Free Subscriptions only.

Pricing: Hobbyist (1 website) $69 and PRO (unlimited websites) $149.

Get Paid Member Subscription plugin

Ultimate Membership Pro

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You’ll be simply impressed by a variety of features offered by the Ultimate Membership Pro plugin for WordPress. Looks like the “ultimate” is a very suitable name for it. By the way, this is the best selling WordPress Membership premium plugin on CodeCanyon marketplace.

Let’s have a bird’s-eye view on what it offers to understand whether it’s better than others. It’s hard to highlight all features, probably you’ll never need some of them. However, the plugin should work as it’s supposed, not limiting your management work.

The plugin is powered by WooCommerce functionality, so you can sell subscriptions as products via a variety WooCommerce payment gateways available: PayPal (single and recurring payments), Stripe, 2CheckOut, BrainTree, Authorize.net, Payza, and Bank Transfer.

Ultimate Membership Pro plugin supports free and paid unlimited membership subscriptions, different content restriction levels, content dripping, social media member login, coupon codes, buddyPress integration and much more.

Moreover, it will let you customize the visual part of the content with lots of pre-made designs, login templates, colors, and a built-in Visual Composer plugin.

The plugin is ready to meet lots of complex customer needs: it allows to use pushover notifications, printable Membership cards, gift vouchers, multi-level membership access, and so much more.

Just take a look at all features presented on the plugin’s page to discover more benefits in detail.

Pricing: $34

Get Ultimate Membership Pro plugin

Restrict Content Pro

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Restrict Content Pro is a Membership plugin by a respectful WordPress developers from PippinsPlugins, so if the plugin’s functionality suits your needs, you should rest assured that the code quality is guaranteed.

The MotoPress developers also tested this plugin – it is definitely one the best solutions in terms of development flexibility – if you ever need to tweak the functionality with your custom code, the plugin will give you a lot of freedom.

If you happen to already sell your digital products with a popular Easy Digital Downloads plugin, than Restrict Content Pro should work just fine for you.

This WordPress Membership plugin is very easy to set up, intuitive and comes with a built-in integration with many important payment gateways – Stripe, Braintree, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal Standard and Express.

With its help you can also create and sell unlimited Subscription packages, set the needed restriction rules, monitor reports and perform all basic tasks to set a fully functional membership community.

Pricing: prices start at $99

Get Restrict Content Pro plugin

Magic Members

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Magic Members is a great WordPress Membership plugin, which is particularly good at building membership community for selling online courses (another good alternative is LearnDash plugin). However, it will work good for other purposes as well. This plugin offers a huge bunch of features for an affordable price.

Magic Members plugin comes with a smart content dripping feature (Sequential Course Delivery System) and unlimited membership level, content restriction for individual pages, posts and views, ability to create discount codes and other necessary feature for creating a membership website. You may even allow unregistered users perform a guest purchase of a particular piece of content.

Magic Members also provides an integration with tons of popular services such as AWeber, InfusionSoft, GetResponse, Constant Contact, iContact, AutoResponse Plus, Sendy, GVO and MailChimp.

An integration with a variety of payment methods is impressive: you can accept payments via 1ShoppingCart, PayPal Standard, PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal Express Checkout, 2CheckOut, Stripe, CCBill, Authorize.net, ClickBank, WorldPay, MoneyBookers, iDeal, Epoch, Payza, Ogone, SagePay, eWay, PagSeguro and Manual Pay. So from this perspective, you can serve a huge global audience.

As an administrator, you’ll be also provided with lots of management opportunities: you’ll be able to customize emails, set automatic email reminders, view sales reports and even more.

Pricing: prices start at $97 for a single site

Get Magic Members plugin

MemberMouse

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MemberMouse if one of top popular WordPress Membership plugins with a special attention to no-brainer settings for non-technical users. You may start with a 14-day free trial to test it firsthand.

It’s worth mentioning that plugin creators claim their developers have architected systems for WalMart, British Airways, Sony Pictures and other popular brands, so you may rest assured that this plugin is a reliable solution for your site.

Alike other solutions, MemberMouse allows you to sell digital products, subscriptions. It offers flexible content restriction rules, password-protected members area and more.

You may customize the products you sell depending on the membership level, duration time, etc. One outstanding feature is that the plugin is supplied with SmartTags that will display content dynamically, all upsells and downsells, member details, offers and other data.

As for billing details, the plugin is integrated with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, Braintree, ClickBank, CoinBase and some others. In terms of services integration, the plugin allows to use MailChimp, GetResponse, AWeber and iContact.

Overall, apart from a standard functionality to run a membership website, MemberMouse gives you more management and marketing tools.

Pricing: the starter plan is $19.95 / month

Get MemberMouse plugin

Paid Memberships Pro

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Paid Memberships Pro will give you a great opportunity to start creating a membership subscriptions website without paying a dime as it comes with a free version. Of course, the possibilities of a free version are very limited, but this can be a great starting point.

We’ll generally take a look at pro features. This WordPress Membership plugin comes with a solid functionality to create unlimited member levels, provide paid and free trial periods for members, drip content release, extendability with dozens of helpful addons like Affiliate Tracking, Donation addon, Multisite membership, etc. Overall, you may charge for any content, including videos and downloads.

Members can pay via different popular payment gateways: PayPal (Standard, Express, Website Payments Pro, Payflow Pro), Braintree, CyberSource, and  2Checkout. You may also sell subscriptions with a help of WooCommerce addon (it’s also required for Recurring subscriptions).

To sum up, the plugin is very feature-rich, extendable and well-documented.

Pricing: Core is $97 and Plus is $197.

Get Paid Memberships Pro plugin

WishList Member

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WishList Member is another powerful WordPress Membership plugin with a very rich content restriction management toolkit. It allows to create as many membership levels as you want, provide free, trial and paid memberships, set auto-upgrades, show and hide certain content for non-members, etc. The drip content option is also included.

All in all, your list of instruments is huge. However, it will be hard to modify the plugin to your needs with some custom development as plugin’s code is encrypted.

Integration with popular payment gateways is also there: your members can pay with PayPal, Stripe, Infusionsoft, ClickBank, PayPal Pro, Authorize.net, Recurly, 1ShoppinCart (API), 2Checkout, eWay, JVZoo, Pin Payments, SamCart, Premium Web Cart, UltraCart, Red Oak Cart and Cydec.

Also, there are lots of services the plugin can be integrated with (e.g. MailChimp, Aweber).

In a word, WishList is a good WordPress Membership plugins alternative if you are not going to tweak the code and are satisfied with its default toolkit.

Pricing: $197 for a single site and $297 for multiple sites.

Get WishList plugin

Have you found the solution for your future membership website on WordPress? Already run one? We are eager to know details!

Jetpack is an all-in-one WordPress plugin by one of the most knowledgeable and trustworthy teams in the industry – Automattic, WordPress creators. This fact alone means a lot.

For those unfamiliar, I should clarify that the plugin was created for WordPress.com users, who exist in their own .com environment and rely on .com developers only. But the plugin became so popular that Automattic developers made it available for all wordpress.org self-hosted websites as well.

Put another way, the “all-inclusive” functionality, optimization, analytics, and marketing plugin, created by first-class WordPress professionals, is available for all wordpress.org users. By the way, it offers a lot of options that are free as in beer.

Why have we actually started this talk? There is a reason: we had to find several cool widgets for our future WordPress theme. And we stopped our choice on Jetpack. As for why, that will take some time to explain.

We had a chance to look at it with fresh eyes in today’s WordPress realities of jetpack-bloats-or-improves-your-site discurs and want to share all pros and cons with you.

But at first, let me tell you a story.

The first experience with Jetpack

As someone familiar with code happening on the .org repository, I honestly consider Jetpack plugin as a chance to take advantage of the product that was born in a wordpress.com world. Exactly – a chance. An opportunity to use a powerful .com solution on a self-hosted .org website.

After some testing I realized that I was right: the plugin meets lots of my expectations. On the .org repository, Jetpack is like a real movie among spaghetti westerns. Top key factors that made me feel so are: brand, trust, and quality.

It’s already clear about the brand. The other things follow.

While I’m writing this post, the WordPress repo says that the plugin was “updated 2 days ago”. Just look at the numbers.

Several days ago I’ve also received a notification about Jetpack 5.0: Spring Clean, where they tell about recent improvements: more secure and robust code, better compatibility with third-party plugins, with WordPress 4.8, and some other pleasant things.

All this gives you a very important feeling of being in good hands. You can only imagine how many resources are put into the product development.

Yes, I won’t deny that Jetpack plugin is heavy (it’s equipped with so many modules), so another practice is widely advised across the net: to use different plugins for different purposes. This makes sense, too. But if you need a lot of different functionality, are you sure that you’ll find all alternatives of the same good quality? Having all needed functions in one plugin is always less hassle.

One more thing, updating one plugin is always easier than expecting for updates from ten or twenty different plugins. Also, there is more risk that individual plugins can be abandoned and not supported one day.

What’s more, I think that a well thought-out toolkit of content modules is a kind of “hint” for WordPress beginners: a default toolkit “suggests” what instruments are important for a WordPress website.

For example, not every WordPress newbie will think about image optimization or website ownership verification for the search engines. So, with Jetpack, non-tech one-person businesses can easier focus on business goals rather than spending hours on reading WordPress blogs like this one.

“I don’t want a multipurpose plugin beast with strange modules”

Me too.

But you can actually enable only those modules you need not overloading your site with unneeded functionality. Jetpack allows that.

Moreover, there are a couple of ways to enable just some particular modules using a free plugin even without connection to WordPress.com server.

For example, Development Mode option.  It doesn’t require connection to WordPress.com servers and can be activated on a localhost WordPress installation.

You can work in this mode by adding define( ‘JETPACK_DEV_DEBUG’, true ); to your wp-config.php file or enable it through the plugin.

If activated, the plugin management is pretty easy (because lots of options are simply disabled and don’t require a connection to WordPress.com servers).

The dev mode allows you to use several good options like Testimonials module, Portfolios, lightbox for galleries, sharing buttons and some others.

Jetpack in dev mode

I especially like the lightbox feature (Carousel), because it allows site visitors to see the details and leave comments under individual images that are previewed in a lightbox slideshow.

For example, for many photographers it will be a hard task to find a quality plugin with a similar functionality (if the theme doesn’t support anything similar). Even the trivial screenshots of our Demo Builder for WordPress plugin look better in the lightbox slideshow created with Jetpack:

As for Testimonials widget, we are going to include it into one of the future WordPress themes (of course, users may opt out of installing it, I believe in democracy.)

What’s not perfect about Testimonials, is actually that you have to add them yourself via WordPress dashboard – so this is more like a promotion stuff (not real testimonials in site visitors’ eyes).

Of course, you can add links to real testimonials to make them sound more real. This is not the issue with Jetpack, actually, but rather with the current marketing standards. Well, demand creates its own supply.

The alternative way to use only some chosen Jetpack modules is installing the free WordPress plugins like Module Control for Jetpack that gives you more control over Jetpack modules. For example, you can remove unneeded modules, allow activation without wordpress.com connection, etc. I did not test it, but looks like it works as it’s supposed to.

Fee Jetpack version is very rich

A full free version is not bad, too.

Especially if you just start building a site and the amount of info about marketing, optimization, functionality plugins is simply driving you crazy, free Jetpack is a quality starting point in this case. The list of of modules is changing and more likely you’ll see new ones soon.

Over time you’ll see that the site cannot be perfect on all levels with a help of one plugin only, but Jetpack can be your good friend while you are just diving in.

I’m sure this is also a good choice for developers who want to add some specific tool or a couple of tools to clients’ websites.

Let’s list some useful modules so you can use for free on your website:

1. Carousel – a lightbox-style slideshow with lots of useful options
2. Comments – a fully functional comments form
3. Contact Form – a basic contact form
4. Gravatar Hovercards – to show more info about users who are engaged on your site
5. Infinite Scroll – to load your content dynamically
6. Likes – easily added social media “like” buttons
7. Markdown – compose posts using regular characters and punctuation marks
8. Photon – allows to speed up image loading
9. Post by email – a fancy option to write and “deliver” your posts to WordPress site via email
10. Publicize – to schedule and share posts across different social networks automatically
11. Related posts – to show contextual posts to your readers
12. Sharing – easy social media sharing buttons with a “universal” design
13. Site Stats – to get data about site views, comments and more
14. Site verification – verify your site ownership for search engines
15. Sitemaps – to improve your SEO
16. Spelling and Grammar check- to type fast and still remain a Hemingway
17. Subscriptions – to enhance your email marketing
18. Testimonials – to show testimonials in a very attractive way
19. Portfolios – really cool portfolios
20. Tiled Galleries – your images, displayed perfectly
21. WordPress.com Toolbar
22. Login with WordPress.com acount
23. Extra Sidebar – add all you want to your sidebar

As you might see, there are tons of basic options for any WordPress website: statistics, automatic social sharing via Publicize, content optimization, SEO tools, writing enhancement tools, lots of useful widgets, and much more.

Jetpack pros and cons at a glance

Evaluating my personal experience with Jetpack, I’d definitely recommend it, but only to people who find more pluses than minuses for their particular projects.

Actually, here is the list of those pros and cons I managed to create.

Pros +

1. Lots of useful and professional content modules, where unneeded ones can be switched off.
2. A great starting point for people who don’t know much about WordPress.
3. Beautiful Tiled Galleries and Carousel (lightbox) with lots of useful options (hard to find free alternatives on the market.)
4. One plugin is easier updated than many different ones.
5. Your content is not lost if you change the theme.
6. A plugin from top-class WordPress developers: technically safe, visually stunning.
7. Photon! Great image delivery via CDN (fast cloud image hosting with .com servers.)
8. Handy, well-categorized user interface.
9. You can add so many cool quality stuff to your site still being in a free mode.
10. WordPress.com account is also very rich, so you can control your .org site from its dashboard as well.
11. One site and multi-site compatible.

Cons-

1. It offers too much functionality (there is something you’ll probably never need.)
2. Quite a heavy plugin; some users report problems with website performance. But usually there is no proof that Jetpack is the only  reason. On contrary, some database processes are less intensive in Jetpack.
3. To use all free options, you’ll need to connect your site to WordPress.com (in means you’ll need to register a free account on WordPress.com.)
4. You or your clients might not like the feeling of “being forced” to be connected to WordPress.com.
5. Photon! More likely, your images found in search engines won’t redirect to your site (if you use Photon.)
6. The number of “Upgrade” buttons may be frustrating for users. However, this is a standard practice to charge for advanced options.
7. You may experience (and may not) conflicts with other plugins and themes, but this this is a usual thing in imperfect tech world.

Conclusions

To sum it up, my quick and probably obvious recommendation would be: if it serves your WordPress needs, Jetpack is undoubtedly one of the best WordPress plugins out there.

And I’m sure it’s a great tool for WordPress users of all calibres. It solves lots of problems for non-tech WordPress newbies. For developers, Jetpack is a professional plugin to include into clients’ websites to run any specific functionality.

You may download a free Jetpack for WordPress version and connect it to your WordPress website, use without connection,  or even start with a paid plan if you need more options.

I hope your enjoyed this quick write-up from the MotoPress dev stage. If there is something you’d like to know our answer to or you just want to share experience, use the comments field below.

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. if you click on one of the product links and then purchase the product, we may receive a small fee (no additional cost for you.)

If you are new to all this WordPress stuff and just try to figure out what is the best way to start, this is the right place for you. We decided to create a quick and simple beginner’s guide to creating a WordPress website, without redundant nuances.

Let’s sketch out the plan of our lesson:

1. WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
2. What you should know about domains
3. Choosing hosting
4. Installing WordPress
5. Themes and plugins
6. Site pages

1. WordPress.com or WordPress.org?

The confusion between .com and .org websites is a never-ending problem for beginners. But once you know the difference, you’ll never have problems again!

At first, we should clarify that WordPress itself is an open-source software, it’s absolutely free for everyone. But there are 2 different websites that provide plugins, themes and services for WordPress.

WordPress.org is the main website dedicated to WordPress software project. Here you can download WordPress, find free themes and plugins for your site, read all step-by-step guides, participate in discussions on forums, etc.

Basically, this is exactly “that” WordPress people mean when talking about a “free WordPress platform” and “self-hosted” WordPress websites. Namely, wordpress.org allows you to have full control over your site. Read: this is a non-commercial foundation.

WordPress.com is the website by Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, creators of the WordPress project itself. It works as a subscription-based service, with a free account available (within a free account your domain name will include a wordpress.com subdomain, e.g. yoursitename.wordpress.com).  Here are the current plans:

Check details on the official website

So far, WordPress.com offers 350 ready-made themes (pre-made designs; different plans come with different themes available) for your future site, essential plugins and lots of other things which you can understand from their plans. Basically, WordPress.com is a ready-made solution if you don’t want to manage domain/design/hosting/installation/plugins things individually. And this is also one of the most quality services in the industry, because it’s provided by WordPress creators. Read: this is a commercial project.

As you might sum up, WordPress as software is free, but all other necessary things like hosting, domain, design, etc. are generally paid things and can be handled in different ways.

In this post all the things will be about wordpress.org self-hosted websites.

2. What you should know about domains

Domain name is your network address that identifies your site to users (e.g. mydomain.com). If you now take a look at the address bar in your browser, you’ll notice that getmotopress.com is the domain name of this site. In other words, the domain name indicates your legal ownership of the piece of the Internet space.

There are also 3 important aspects to remember about domains:

www before the actual domain name: it’s optional, but technically it’s safer to use www for massive sites with a huge traffic (thousands of visitors).

top-level domains: this is the name for the end of your domain name, for example, .com, .org, co.uk, etc.

http:// – this is a protocol to tell browsers how to send data. Currently, it’s strongly recommended to use https:// (secure) protocol to send your data encrypted across the web and protect your WordPress website (moreover, it’s good for your search engine optimization). Using https:// can be handled with your hosting provider.

When choosing your domain name, try to keep it short and simple. The brand name of your business is the best domain name (however, remember that it can be already taken if your brand name consists of common names). Also, make sure to avoid domain name trademark infringement when selecting the domain name for your site.

It’s up to you where to buy the domain name – compare the pricing plans and features to make up your mind.

Usually, all hosting companies that sell domains offer hosting packages as well. For newbies, it’s very convenient, but not very secure to buy hosting and a domain name from one company. For example, if someone hacks your hosting account, the domain name itself won’t be damaged and vise versa. When your domain name and hosting are located at different places, you risk less.

3. Choosing WordPress hosting

We’ve already clarified that domain name is your website ownership identifier. As for hosting, it’s just a space on the hosting server to store your site files (in other words, there are physical servers to store your virtual site files).

Choosing a hosting provider is not a simple task. There are too many nuances you should take into consideration. We’ve already created a detailed post with all main hosting types, highlighting main features, details about Linux and Windows hosting packages and pricing.

Just to give you the idea, here are the types of hosting providers (one and the same company can provide different types of hosting):

Free: it offers very limited services, but can be fine for some non-critical website. The major disadvantages are: slow connection speed, frequent downtimes, and automatically added advertising banners (e.g. Weebly, Wix.com, Yola.) We wouldn’t recommend it for serious website owners.

Shared: the most economical option for hosting, as the overall cost of server maintenance is amortized over many customers. The main downside is a low speed and security problems. For example, the problems with other sites can cause the problems on your site as you share the same hosting environment with others (e.g. SiteGround, BlueHost, HostGator.)

Dedicated: typically, you won’t own the server, but will get full control over the server and responsibility of the security and maintenance. Dedicated hosting server comes with better performance, security, and email stability. Most dedicated servers are packaged with the control panel. A good choice for all serious websites that need a higher level of security (e.g. SiteGround, GoDaddy, BlueHost).

Managed: this hosting type if one of the most flexible ones allowing you to manage website data via any remote tool (generally, FTP server with your website files). The provider can guarantee service quality and support. The server is typically leased to the client. It comes with great storage facilities for the server (e.g. HostGator, DreamHost, GoDaddy).

Colocated: one of the most reliable and powerful types of the hosting servers. Owing this type of the server (literally, hardware and software at your disposal), you have full control over it and can install any apps or script you need (e.g. Rackspace, Interoute).

Cloud: this is a reliable decentralized kind of hosting, which is based on clustered server. One big plus is that this hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed. Privacy concerns sometimes may arise because of the decentralized hosting model (e.g. SiteGround, GoDaddy, BlueHost).

You may also take a look at the list of our best WordPress hosting providers recommendations based on our 4-year experience.

For the domain name and hosting to work properly together, you should point your domain name to the hosting server (you can do this by changing nameservers with a help of your hosting provider.) The process can take up to several days.

If you won’t be satisfied with your hosting, you can actually transfer your site files (as well as domain name) to another provider any time.

4. Installing WordPress

Many hosting providers offer quick and simple one-click WordPress installations or manual ones.

If you need to install WordPress manually, the process is a bit more time-consuming, but not difficult. You may check out the official guide by WordPress Codex on how to install it.

Basically, you’ll need to download WordPress, upload your files to the domain name folder, create a database, point your browser to the domain name and follow the instructions.

When you are done, congrats, you can start doing the most interesting task  – picking pieces of functionality and design for your WordPress site!

5. Themes and plugins

WordPress.org repository offers lots of free plugins and themes, your choice if huge.

This is not the only place where you can get them, there are lots of independent WordPress vendors and marketplaces that provide quality plugins and themes (free and paid), packaged with support.

It’s worth mentioning that free plugins and themes are generally not worse than paid (premium) ones. In fact, most of them are released under “freemium” business model – it means that you can use any theme/plugin for free, but it comes with fewer options than the paid version of the same theme/plugin.

So, if you are okay with limited options, you can continue using a plugin or theem for free. However, if you need more freedom and options, you can upgrade to a paid version.

Themes

Surfing through the WordPress themes, more likely, you’ll choose a theme depending on your niche – a business website, a personal blog, a photographer’s portfolio, a shop, etc.

For example, a WordPress business theme generally features main blocks like Services, Teams, News, Contact form, etc.:

None theme is “the best” one – everything depends on how well it suits your needs, its design-functionality balance and ease of customization.

In short, what makes a WordPress design really good? There are a few other things to mention

– readability (simple fonts, a lot of white space, good content modules hierarchy)
– compatibility with the latest WordPress versions,
– compatibility with popular plugins,
– high customization control,
– active support and proper documentation.

Plugins

As for plugins, you’ll choose the ones to perform specific tasks (for example, a slider plugin).

There are also some common plugins that are very useful on different types of websites, no matter their niche. For example, SEO (search engine optimization – for your website to be indexed better by engines like Google), performance, security and other plugins.

For beginners it may be easier to start with an all-around (performs different tasks) plugin, so you don’t spend time searching for different ones.

For example, you may give a try to Jetpack plugin (created by wordpress.com, but available for wordpress.org users as well). It’s used by more than 3 million of wordpress.org users so far, and not only beginners!

The best thing about this plugin is that it’s multifunctional, created by one of the most professional WordPress teams and comes with tons of free options (that you can easily set up yourself).

The thing you might not like about Jetpack is that it will require connection to wordpress.com (it means you’ll need to create a free wordpress.com account). It will take a minute to register that account, but it will give you access to many cool Jetpack options. Let’s list some of them:

1. Carousel – a lightbox-style slideshow with many great options like comments, showing image title, etc.
2. Comments – a fully functional comments form
3. Contact Form – a basic contact form
4. Gravatar Hovercards – to show more info about users who are engaged on your site (if they are registered on Gravatar – the service of globally recognized avatars)
5. Infinite Scroll – to load your content dynamically and improve user experience
6. Likes – social media “like” buttons
7. Markdown – compose posts using regular characters and punctuation marks
8. Photon – allows to speed up image loading
9. Post by email – a fancy option to write and “deliver” your posts to WordPress site via email
10. Publicize – to schedule and share your WordPress posts on different social networks automatically
11. Related posts – to show contextual posts to your readers
12. Sharing – easy social media sharing buttons
13. Site Stats – to get statistics about site views, comments and more
14. Site verification – an option to verify your site ownership for search engines
15. Sitemaps – to show your website more properly in search engines like Google
16. Spelling and Grammar check- to correct your spelling
17. Subscriptions – to allow site visitors subscribe to your site news
18. Testimonials – to customize and feature testimonials
19. Portfolios – good-looking portfolios
20. Tiled Galleries – your images, displayed perfectly
21. WordPress.com Toolbar
22. Login with WordPress.com account
23. Extra Sidebar – add all you want to your sidebar

All these tools are offered by one plugin and won’t require any coding skills. So you may consider it a good starting point. On the official website, you may download a free version and see what’s offered within a paid one (if you want to make money with your site, consider pro versions).

There are also other essential plugins you can check out.

To set up and improve your SEO, you can check up the following plugins: Yoast SEO (more suitable for blogs) and All in One SEO Pack (for shop and massive sites). However, they are interchangeable, so you may install the one you you like more.

You’ll also need to backup your site files sometimes, there are several plugins that can help you with this. One of the good solutions is a free Dropbox Backup and Restore that will easily create a full backup of your site and database which you can optionally store on Dropbox.

To protect your site from spam, you can rely on Akismet – another super powerful plugin by Automattic (WordPress and Jetpack creators) that will block comments and contact form submissions spam.

For beginners, it’s also important to get maximum customization freedom. If you want to be able to build pages with different types of content absolutely visually, just dragging and dropping the content, you may try a free MotoPress Visual Page Builder plugin. Unlike many other similar plugins, it will save your content even if you uninstall the plugin.

You might also need the W3 total Cache plugin – a great caching solution that will speed up your website, improving performance and overall usability.

Another great plugin we’d recommend is iThemes Security – while you’ll be learning about multiple ways to secure your WordPress site, this plugin will serve as a great multifunctional security layer. If you have time, check out our fresh WordPress security tips.

To track the user’s behavior on your site, sales and all other important statistics, you can use such advanced and professional tools like Google Analytics. If you prefer to view all statistics from Google Analytics from your WordPress dashboard, you can install such a free plugin as Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress.

We’ve also created a collection of top popular and quality free WordPress plugins for easier maintenance, SEO and marketing, you’ll probably find the one to your liking there.

Remember, don’t install unneeded plugins, several alternative plugins or plugins with shady reputation. It’s very important to choose quality plugins and themes – your WordPress website security, performance and SEO depend on them a lot. That is, try to choose the ones with good reviews, high rating and a big number of active installs (1000+). Poorly coded plugins and themes can have a bad effect on your website.

Site Pages

There should not be problems with setting up website pages, each theme should come with a detailed documentation to help you understand where to start.

The only confusion that many WordPress beginners face is a front page (home page): it can be either dynamic (with your recent blog posts – once you publish your posts, they appear on the front page automatically) or static (it will display static content modules like a gallery, slider, call-to-action block, services, etc.) To choose the preferable home page, you should go to Settings > Reading.

Conclusions

I hope this was enough quick and simple WordPress lesson, so you feel more confident about building your own WordPress website

Of course, building a site is not a piece of cake and you’ll need some time to figure out all details. Also, you should always stay updated with latest WordPress news, search for new tools for your site, learn deeper about website optimization, protection and promotion.

This is a long and interesting process of polishing your website and achieving your goals!

Oceanica is something completely new in the product line of WordPress themes by MotoPress: it’s much more lightweight, modern-looking and deeply integrated with the native WordPress functionality.

Oceanica was created for the hospitality-centric industry: hotels, apartments, vacation rentals, hostels, guesthouses, inns and similar businesses.

The reservation system of the theme is powered by the MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress, allowing you to feature your hotel establishment in the best light and rent out your accommodations in a real time.

As both design and development needlework of Oceanica was done by MotoPrss guys, its design and a powerful booking engine work together as one seamless solution and help you power direct bookings for your hotel. Exactly as we announced – a one-stop WordPress theme for your hospitality business needs!

Want to know details? Let’s take a closer look at its design and functionality.

Clean and lightweight WordPress design

As you might already noticed, Oceanica is very clean and clutter-free. This is extremely important to provide your guests with a great user experience of a property reservation, so they won’t feel lost.

You’ll also enjoy elegant and readable fonts, responsive layouts that will look sharp on any device and overall usability. Here is the cutie:

You are free to tweak colors, hover colors, background, etc.

It’s also important to mention that Oceanica comes with a deep native integration with WordPress functionality (e.g., you may add your Features listing using child and parent pages), which means easier customization and saving your content even when switching the theme.

For example, here is the ‘Activities’ block featured on the front page – it’s a child page of the parent ‘Oceanica” front page:

Layouts are far from complex as well: you can use a full-width or full-width grid for a front page, your blog posts, etc. Take a look:

You may also use a more standard layout with the sidebar or grid with sidebar. For example:

Overall, Oceanica is a very lightweight WordPress theme without redundant functionality and wrong plugins, easy in navigation and optimization. That’s a great news for search engines and for your guests in their fast and dynamic journeys.

Main features of Oceanica

Oceanica is a fully customizable WordPress theme, you should not have any problems making your updates.

The front page can be set up in a few steps with the visual WordPress Customizer:

1. Update your site identity (site title, tagline and logo).

You may also change colors and background image. Here is a piece of Oceanica with the background image (do you think it look better now?):

Additionally, you can create up to 4 different menus (3 in the header and 1 in the footer) with site pages, widgets, icons, contact details or any other info you need:

You may also change the location of the menus or completely hide unneeded ones.

Take a look a step-by-step tutorial for Oceanica and see how to work with the menus.

The widgets area (your content blocks) can be also quickly added with the WordPress Customizer: you can choose what widgets to add to the front page top and bottom, and to the 3-column footer.

For example, by default, Oceanica comes with the Search Availability calendar at the “front page top”, but you can add/replace the widget with any one to your liking:

Oceanica comes with a custom set of different social media icons you can link to your accounts (you can add them to any menu via Menus):

Testimonials are integrated into Oceanica via Jetpack plugin (all the pros and cons of this plugin are described in one of the previous articles by Steve Collins, a lead developer at MotoPress.) In the Oceanica, Jetpack plugin adds stylish and functional galleries for your images and enables Testimonials module:

However, if you are not interested in those modules, you may opt out installing the plugin.

To configure whether the front page should show your latest blog posts or the static page with your content blocks, navigate to Static Front Page via the WordPress Customizer (or go to your main WordPress dashboard > Settings > Reading).

A powerful property booking engine

An accommodation booking option in Oceanica is powered by the MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin, created specifically for direct online accommodation reservations. It means you won’t need to work with other third-party companies and can fully rely on MotoPress team when it comes to the theme functionality.

The styles of the plugin are maximum polished to look perfect in the Oceanica. Moreover, you save a pretty good sum of money with the plugin that folks often buy separately!

Let’s get down to the main features of the WordPress Hotel Booking plugin built into Oceanica:

1. Real-time search availability form – the guests see the only rooms available for their dates and can book them online.

You also can add this calendar to the sidebar through Widgets menu.

2. Properties listing – add your rooms/ apartments /villas through a handy dashboard, specifying all details such as in-room amenities, extra services available, capacity, etc. You may also add an image gallery for each accommodation.

All of them are stored at one place in the WordPress dashboard:

Visit frontend demo to see how the rooms look in the wild.

3. Seasonal pricing – you can regulate the priced depending on any date/dates/season. For example, you want to rent out your apartment for $100 on the weekdays and charge $120 on the weekends. Just set the prices accordingly in the Seasons menu.
4. Rates – you may set different rates (prices) for one accommodation type depending on extra benefits (e.g. a room with/ without breakfast included). Your guests will be able to choose the rate when reserving a room.

5. Extra services – are you selling any extra service? A baby sitting, or, maybe the parking is paid? You may allow guests choose the needed services and pre-order them reserving an accommodation.

6. Custom booking rules – you may specify when the rooms are not available for booking, i.e. block rooms at specific dates/days.

7. Payments – you can charge your guests online via PayPal, 2Checkout, Braintree, Stripe, and Beanstream/Bambora (more coming soon). Alternatively, you may set the plugin for after-arrival payments.

8. Confirmation of reservations – you can confirm each reservation manually or automatically after the payment.

9. Email templates – customize and send your brand email notifications automatically.

10. The backend and frontend tools of the plugins are professionally translated into multiple languages (so far, there are Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, French, Arabic and German languages available). So, if you run a non-English website, there will be much less work with the plugin!

11. View and manage real bookings via Bookings menu (view them in a list or in a handy calendar view).

It’s worth mentioning that the plugin is in the process of regular updates and there are lots of things on the roadmap (for example, discounts, iCal synchronization, etc.)!

Pricing

You can get Oceanica WordPress theme for $55 (for 1 website) or $99 (for unlimited websites). By the way, the theme is free for unlimited websites for all MotoPress Members!

Visit Demo

View Theme Details

Conclusions

In a word, Oceanica WordPress theme is a very powerful solution for any hotel establishment, a complete solution for managing your online business, even without tech expertise. It’s a great solution for your independent hotel to gain access to a global travel audience!

Got any question or idea? Speak your mind, we are eager to hear your feedback!

Before releasing these new updates of the MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress, we’ve made some research in hospitality and tourism industry and asked experts about market essentials and trends. We hope this helped us made the product development itinerary a bit more clear in terms of business/technology balance.

So, which aspect should take a capital letter according to people who have a broad experience in hospitality business?

In addition to a hotel reputation, presentation, boutique hotel trends, a consumer decision-making strongly depends on the the usability of your hotel website (we are particularly interested in the booking process). That is, there is no place for complexity.

Modern people do everything on the fly and they cannot bear the websites peppered with unnecessary things. If a guest only loses their time on your site trying to figure out which button to click to make a room reservation, all your marketing efforts don’t mean a thing. That’s also a technique we followed creating Oceanica – the latest hotel booking WordPress theme.

That’s why major updates of the WordPress Hotel booking engine for a diversity of hotel establishments were made around enhancing a user experience: a smarter search algorithm to faster the booking process, multiple properties booking within one reservation, and lots of other things were released.

And we are going to talk about them right away.

Booking multiple accommodations at a time

It may have been stressful for customers to reserve several rooms within different reservations, but this is no longer a problem! The updated plugin version offers you no limits in setting the number of adults and children for the search availability form. Consequently, it will allow guests reserve several accommodations depending on a number of guests and add all of them to one reservation.

Recommended accommodations

The search algorithm of the plugin can offer the best set of the rooms/apartments for a number of people requested in the Search Availability form.

How to set it up: If you want the system to recommend the rooms, go to your Admin WordPress dashboard > Accommodation > Settings > General > scroll down to Misc > find and check the “ Enable search form to recommend the best set of accommodations according to a number of guests.” box.

If this box is checked, it’s better to change the Search options as well and increase the maximum number of adults and children. Staying in the same General tab in Settings, scroll down to Search options:

So, when a guest is looking for a stay for 9 people, for example, the system will suggest the available rooms:

If the guest is not satisfied with the recommendation, they may alternatively choose the accommodations manually from the available ones and add all of them to the reservation.

The macros for email templates were also slightly changed, so if you allow multiple accommodations booking, make sure to update the template: simply delete the current text, update the template and save changes (go to Customer and Admin emails tabs in Settings):

Compatibility with Jetpack gallery and lightbox modules

If you are a lucky user of the popular all-in-all Jetpack plugin for WordPress, you should know the MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin is now more compatible with the gallery and lightbox modules. It means your property images can look even better in the gallery and will be previewed in the lightbox! You may turn on the Lightbox in the Display options (General tab in Settings). Here is the example of the gallery:

A theme-friendly pagination option for properties and services

You may specify how many accommodations/services should be featured per page.

By default, it depends on your WordPress theme, but you can change it for accommodations and services in the Shortcodes menu: go to Accommodations > Shortcodes > Accommodation types listing > find  posts_per_page

For example, I own 4 villas (a dreamer!) and want to show only 2 ones per page, so I modify my shortcode accordingly and set it to:

[mphb_rooms posts_per_page="2"]

And here are 2 villas on the first page and 2 villas on the second page:

MotoPress Hotel Booking for WordPress demo sites

Booking cancellation option

You can now use a cancellation email macro to send cancellation emails. If you allow guests to cancel their reservations, go to Accommodation > Settings > Booking Cancellation > check “User can cancel booking via a link provided in the email”. Then, try to edit any needed template and use the tag

%cancellation_details% – Cancellation Details

Improved usability

Taking into account that multiple accommodations booking may involve including multiple guests and rooms into one reservation, the Price breakdown table on the checkout page was supplied with the “Expend info” option. This way, the data on each booked accommodation doesn’t overlay the screen and a guest can expend the only needed details.

Request full or limited guest details

It’s up to you what info your guest should provide when placing a booking request. To set it up, go to Accommodation > Settings > General tab > Booking confirmation > check the fields with info that is required to be provided during the reservation. It can be:

• A country of residence only
• Or full address fields

15 designs for Search Availability Calendar

Now you have more design alternatives for your WordPress booking engine, a search availability calendar in particular. Go to Settings >Display options and find all of them, choose the one that suits your theme the best.

That’s all for the MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress for today! Make sure to check up the settings one more time and make your work easier. It’s in your best interest

There are a lot of new important updates that will be released soon, so don’t forget to follow MotoPress on social networks or simply subscribe to the newsletter.

Got a question or idea? What is it about?

Working for a financial sector or just need to build an impressive WordPress financial website for a client? We’ve got you covered!

This is an up-to-date collection of great WordPress financial themes that will suit any purpose – accounting, financial consulting, bookkeeping, insurance services, cryptocurrency, etc.

The major criteria we took into account when choosing the themes for this collection are: niche-focused and color-wise design, powerful customization tools, demo data import, great mobile and desktop performance, though-out UX, positive feedback and theme reputation.

What else is important for such a theme? A genuinely professional look. It helps build credibility with your audience.  Those providers who went a step further, now offer lots of different demos within one WordPress theme, which give you design alternatives and at the same time limit for the sake of simplicity and professional website look.

In the hands of users those designs can easily become messy. So it’s very important to either have a good choice of pre-made layouts and a good bunch of user-friendly tools like WordPress Page builders that can not only simplify the whole editing process, but also help you not spoil a good theme design.

However, if you try to stick to the initial design almost religiously, there are no chances (well, a few) you’ll spoil a good template. You should also stick to simplicity and not let yourself pile up different content modules in a chaotic order.

Many renowned financial companies choose blue color scheme for their websites (remember PayPal?), that’s why lots of WordPress finance themes have at least one demo blue in color (this color is associated with financial establishments more than any other color). However, the overall design and user experience are more important than color, that’s why many WordPress theme creators already include several options with different bright color styles. So it’s always up to you.

We’ll try to be terse when describing the following WordPress themes, highlighting only important things. Let’s go?

Fintech WP

Fintech WP is a stylish WordPress theme with lots of well thought-out demos for financial business purposes: you may choose from wealth and investment management, financial software, insurance solutions, etc. All demos come with a great clutter-free design, simple and complex content modules, a variety of color schemes, etc.

A one-click demo importer will help you get started much faster. Everything in this theme is completely customizable with a bunch of different user-friendly tools allowing you to edit a header, fonts, colors, apply different shortcodes to get more functionality, flexible widgetized footer area, and more cool things you’ll enjoy.

Profit

Profit is a professional snazzy WordPress theme for a wide range of financial services. It comes with a classic blue layout, with a nice dose of transparency. The front page is definitely rich and complex, a good choice if you want to showcase everything about your business right on the front page.

Slider and the majority of the front page sections are powered by a free Profit Theme Engine plugin that lets you keep your functionality separate from design (a good way to go if you want to fully customize the site yourself).

Profit has a special focus on details, lots of call-to-action blocks and useful real-time financial widgets. A great combo of style and innovation in design.

Finance Experts

A decent theme for any financial project. It rocks thanks to a whopping 25 demos of the home page, with absolutely diverse color schemes and concepts, providing you with the opportunity to stand out of the crowd. It’s not limited to one field, so if you run any insurance, consulting or any other sort of business, the theme is going to suit your needs perfectly.

This theme is integrated with the Visual Composer plugin letting you go about the editing with peace of mind.

Jevelin

Jevelin is rather a multipurpose WordPress theme, but it comes with several ready-made templates that will help you conduct financial business globally. The theme offers a great choice of pre-designed templates, each with its unique character.

The theme is packaged with all needed tools to build and run a corporate or personal financial website wisely: demo-data installation, WooCommerce ready layouts, Contact Form 7, MegaMenu, Slider Revolution, etc.

Absolutely user-friendly tools like Page Builder and Slideshow Builder tools are also offered in the theme package. The theme also supports Parallax backgrounds, video backgrounds, animation effects, social icons widget and more. So if you are looking for a fully armed WordPress theme, this one will be a smart choice.

Industry

Industry theme comes with a classic design and several pre-made home page layouts, unlimited color skins, 5 different header styles and multiple service detail layouts, so you can feature all your services easily and edit everything quickly. As the theme is integrated with the Visual Composer plugin, you’ll be able to edit posts and pages without coding.

The theme is supplied with a one-click demo data importer tool that will help you get started faster. The theme is integrated with WooCommerce and is WPML translations ready.

Cryptic

If you are looking for a financial WordPress theme specifically for cryptocurrency, this one looks like a good choice, in terms of both design and functionality. It comes with a real-time cryptocurrency calculator, pre-designed pages for featuring all needed content blocks like services or team. As for extra premium plugins, Cryptic comes with Visual Composer builder, Slider Revolution and Essential Grid ones.

The theme is quite simple and not overloaded with useless tools – just the ones you’ll need to start a cryptocurrency website without tech help.

Financed

Financed is a great WordPress theme for financial consulting businesses, brokers, investment, tax and cryptocurrency related businesses. It comes with a retina ready design, one-click demo data importer, PSD theme files and icons pack included.

As for additional plugins, the theme comes with Slider Revolution, Visual Composer, and MegaMenu. The theme also allows to create informative pop-ups for any needs (2 styles available) and Pricing Tables. As you may see, the theme is especially flexible in terms of customization allowing you to create a unique, professional financial WordPress website.

Broker

Broker is one of the best selling WordPress financial themes that can suit the needs of brokers and other financial professionals. Several pre-made home page demos come with different designs and color schemes letting you choose the most suitable one and import demo data for it in one click.

You’ll be able to customize the Broker using custom theme options, Visual Composer and Layer Slider. The theme also supports RTL, sticky header, different sidebars and background images, unlimited colors and typography.

Emmet

Emer is rather a multipurpose WordPress theme for a diversity of business niches, including a financial one. It’s clean, lightweight, user-friendly and content-rich. You can add and customize literally any sufficient module like Team, Features, Services, Pricing tables, etc. A default color scheme can be easily transformed into a commonly used blue one (or any other to your liking).

Emmet includes a premium WordPress Page Builder – MotoPress Content Editor that is great at helping you with custom content creating and editing, without shortcode mess and tech staff. A one-page style and awesome Parallax effects of Emmet makes it really easy to provide the site visitors with smooth navigation experience on any device and a professional look of your financial establishment.

The theme is the best selling business and consulting WordPress theme by MotoPress – it’s used by thousands of business and personal projects worldwide.

Consulting

Consulting is one of the most widely used consulting WordPress themes that can be used for financial companies as well. Lots of colored schemes are focused on blue, so you’ll definitely have this strong ‘’financial feel” with any of the theme demos.

There is also a good choice of other design solutions, some of them feature even RTL ready demos.

Consulting includes 3 premium plugins for free: WordPress Page Builder, Slider Revolution, and Booked (for booking appointments online). The theme also works great with WooCommerce, WPML, BBPress, MailChimp and other top popular WordPress plugins.

Accountant

Accountant is a multiconcept WordPress business theme, with a special focus on financial services. So if you deal with loans, taxes, legal help, banking, bitcoin mining, etc, the Accountant is quite a good choice. Thanks to on-click demo import feature, you’ll get started much easier and will be able to tweak the theme without financial help.

The theme features several home-page demo layouts you can choose from. It also comes with a nice hierarchy of wide-screen and boxed content modules. It’s just great for featuring different charts, analytics and similar data. It’s claimed that the theme is fully compatible with Contact Form 7, Mailchimp, Yoast, Events Calendar, etc.

Fintech – Sturtup

Fintech is another perfect solution for any online financial institution or personal startup. The overall design is very clean and neat, with interesting accents and great readable typography. Its main perks include: one-click demo installation, RTL and WooCommerce support (which means endless possibilities if you want to run an online shop).

Visual Composer live editor and LayerSlider (to feature sponsor logos or just your key services) premium plugins are included for free into the theme. Fintech also includes lots of video tutorials to support you in the process of customizing your theme.

Crypton

Another clean and professional WordPress theme for cryptocurrency agencies. It’s advertised as “the most modern cryptocurrency WP theme”. And looks like it’s especailly cool for blogging. Here is what they offer to back this claim: powerful ThemeREX addons for managing your custom posts, drag-and-drop header and footer builder, per-built customizable pages, one-click demo data installation, support for all popular plugins, customizable color scheme and more. Even more than enough customization tools, what do you think?

The theme also supports sticky menus, Parallaх effects, post animation and more. The roadmap also promises great updates such as pre-made WooCommerce shop, crypto trading coach and trainer, etc.

Financity

Financity is created with the best financial design traditions in mind: blue color schemes and classic layouts. You’ll get Financity with several high quality demos, perfect mobile navigation and endless customization tools.

The theme is powered by the GoodLayers Page Builder with a great user-friendly admin panel. You’ll be able to take advantage of Google fonts, 14 blog layouts, 9 portfolio layouts, 6 gallery layouts and more perfectly pre-made template to ease your job. The Slider Revolution is also there. The theme supports WooCommerce and WPML.

Finance Plus

Finance Plus is clutter-free WordPress theme designed for financial business sector. Being able to choose from 6 home pages, you have a chance to create a unique website keeping your authenticity.

Among the customization features are 12 premade color schemes, 6+ headers and one-click demo data importer. There are lots of premium plugins included with the theme: Page builder plugin, Slider Revolution, Essential Grid plugin and Templatera plugin. It’s also WooCommerce, Contact form 7 and MailChimp ready. The theme is literally chock full of a variety of multipurpose tools, so you’ll unlikely need to look for any extra solution.

The post 15+ Best Financial WordPress Themes for 2018 appeared first on MotoPress.

As you’ve probably heard, Lazy Images module for Jetpack WordPress plugin is a new outstanding tool to increase the whole website speed and performance via image lazy loading effect, which means only the images visible on the screen will load.

And now it can be turned on as any other Jetpack module. This effect is so useful and widely used because it loads images faster by loading only those ones the site visitor can see, while the offscreen images are not visible until the user scrolls down to them.

In other words, lazy load effect is so far one of the best practices to take care of one of the heaviest assets of any WordPress website – images.

It has a positive impact on the website speed, UX and overall performance; the module performs well no matter the viewport. Users don’t need to wait long for the page to load and can instantly see the images while scrolling. What’s the outcome? Better SEO rankings and happier users – you guessed it.

As you probably remember, after lots of testing and reviews, we decided to accompany our Nifty Fifty WordPress Photography theme and Creatista Portfolio WordPress theme with Jetpack plugin.

Now we are happy to use the Lazy Images module as an awesome enhancement that comes with the rest of Jetpack options. As for now it looks like a sustainable solution for hypothetically heavy websites with tons of photos.

And this module does its job pretty cool, much better than other popular lazy load WordPress plugins.

Nifty Fifty Minimal Photography WP theme – available in dark and light skins

The process of loading the images is very smooth.

Creatista WordPress Portfolio theme – great for designers and other creatives

In addition to many vital pros, a new enhancement of Lazy Images module, released in the newest version 5.7 is timely and useful (especially for WordPress portfolio themes as in our case). Lazy Images were updated with a callback for processing image attributes array when attempting to lazy load images are loaded via attachment_image. It means now Jetpack users have more flexibility in setting up lazy load images in WordPress, even if they don’t dig deep into image settings.

What about cons?

Well, there is no perfect software and, of course, there is always a risk that heavy images will load too slowly so that the users can simply lose patience or even leave the page not realizing that there are more images to be loaded.

My quick experiment with our Creatista theme showed that small jpeg images (up to 500 KB) are loading up to 0.5 s (sometimes less).

On the other hand, such a delay in not critical taking into account all the perks of this feature.

Probably a sort of pre-set preloader instead of a 1х1 placeholder would make sense? We can replace the placeholder with our own image, but any out-of-the-box solution would definitely eliminate the need to spend the time on this. Just IMO.

Another issue that is sometimes risen around lazy load effect is that Google bot cannot see the images and they are not indexed. I’m afraid I cannot say whether it’s true or not, because it requires proper testing.

The images of our themes Creatista and Nifty Fifty are indexing properly, probably because they were crawled before the Lazy Image module was switched on.

If we take into account the fact that Google tries to understand pages better by executing JavaScript, that gives ground for assuming that the images should be indexed fine. Do you probably know the answer to this question or have any experience to share? I’d be happy to know what you think.

All in all, if you are thinking about wise ways to increase the overall website performance through improving the page speed for your image-centric WordPress website, Jetpack and its Lazy Images module is a tried and trusted way to go.

Disclosure: this page contains external affiliate links and we may be paid commission if you buy products featured above. The thoughts on this page are our own and have not been based on the payment.

The post Lazy Images Module by Jetpack for WordPress: How Good Is It? appeared first on MotoPress.

What makes a multipurpose WordPress theme “best”? I noticed that a “big player” theme reputation is commonly associated with a big brand behind it. Each new theme by the established vendor is gaining popularity faster even with less promotion; this is only natural.

But even a truly breakthrough WordPress theme may stay unnoticed on a no-name website (or not-big-name-yet), but I’m sure modern WordPress users owning critical thinking skill are not afraid to go an extra mile when looking for their own “best” WordPress theme.

And they not necessarily opt for big names, but rather for that theme that meets their particular needs perfectly. Let’s move in this direction as well.

This time we are going to revise “multipurpose themes”. Many people call them “crazy monsters” as it’s not entirely clear what’s inside those themes and what real businesses they have in mind. But multipurpose themes are hugely popular, feature and design rich – it means they still make sense for many personal websites and businesses. For yours as well if you are here.

Let’s make our effort now and present you to all range multipurpose free WordPress templates, both popular and not, but still deserving to be “best” for you. Enjoy the freedom of choice!

Hestia

Hestia is one of the most awesome free multipurpose WordPress themes designed by Themeisle – a reputable WordPress theme provider. Used by thousands of people, Hestia offers a professional, balanced one page design that comes with powerful and user-friendly functionality: widgetized footer, custom backgrounds, MegaMenu, 1-click demo data installation and more.

The theme is compatible with the majority of free WordPress page builders, so no matter the builder you prefer (if you do), the theme should work with it smoothly. It’s also compatible with WooCommerce, Flat Parallax Slider, Elementor, Travel map, etc. You’ll also be able to update major front page info via a familiar interface of WordPress Customizer.

Talon

Talon is a clean-looking WordPress theme suitable for any sort of a business website, startup, creative agency, etc. It comes with a bunch of fundamental features to run any website. The theme is highly customizable: you may choose from several theme header options, unlimited colors, beautiful icons, blog layout alternatives, Google fonts, etc. You are free to apply the majority of changes online via the Customizer.

This theme comes with a pretty popular SiteOrigin page builder which will help you create content-rich website pages without coding. Overall, it won’t bloat your site with unnecessary stuff and will help create an outstanding professional online presence even without lots of tweaks.

Flash

Flash is soft and elegant free WordPress theme with several pre-made demo designs, focused on food, construction services, and multipurpose one-page solution.

On contrary to many competitors, a free version of this theme is very rich: you made add up to 5 slides to feature your key offerings, apply several Google fonts and feature your content in grid and full-screen layouts. Lots of essentials widgets (like Testimonials, Portfolio, Call-to-action) are also available. The theme is compatible with WooCommerce plugin opening up many opportunities to set up and customize your online store.

Fredo

Fredo is a beautiful one page WordPress multipurpose theme designed for presenting any project, it features all necessary content blocks for it, which you can customize with clicks. The theme looks really stylish, with the right dose of animation, stunning responsive design and a distinctive blog.

Functionally, the theme is also very rich: it will let you make edits in the Customizer (upload your logo, edit sidebar and footer widget, etc.). A free version also support RTL and is WPML translations ready. Even if you plan to sell anything, it’ll be easy to do that with a free Fredo and WooCommerce plugin integration.

Sela

Sela is still one of the coolest free multipurpose WordPress themes with a clean code and soft look. Modern and slick design of this theme offers lots of space to present your projects in a bold way, with multiple high quality images. It allows you to go with a full width or grid page template.

Sela is also a well-widgetized theme, so you can customize the content and position of your widgets quite easily. Colors and backgrounds can be easily tweaked as well. The brand identity and menus can be changed via the WordPress Customizer. You are free to add bright testimonials and customize their look.

Emmet Lite

Emmet Lite is a lightweight one page multipurpose free WordPress theme, designed for a variety of business and personal portfolios: to present your services, projects, and team in style. The theme is used by several thousand of websites and is highly rated on the official repository. All professional front page content modules of Emmet are powered by a free plugin, which lets you work on design and functionality independently and keep your content no matter the theme. Smooth Parallax scrolling will make the navigation a breeze.

Emmet Lite offers unlimited colors for customization, different page layouts, customization via live frontend Customizer and full compatibility with MotoPress Content Editor (WordPress Page Builder plugin), WooCommerce, bbPress, BuddyPress and more. A great theme to start your future empire with!

Mesmerize

Mesmerize is not just a stunning design, it’s a customization monster. Thanks to a powerful WordPress page builder built in, you get access to dozens of pre-made editable content blocks, well-designed layouts and tons of stylish options. The free version of the theme also offers 5 header designs, video and slideshow backgrounds, more than 30 page content sections, a portfolio section, widgetized footer and more.

If you always wanted to give a theme dashboard test-drive, Mesmerize is ready to provide you with this chance, just go to its page and proceed with “Test online” button. But keep in mind that customization of logo, typography, colors and some other essential features are unlocked only in a Pro version.

Illdy

Illdy WordPress theme is a highly-functional and extremely attractive design based on Bootstrap framework. It comes with a wise color scheme, lots of white space and all necessary functionality. You may edit it visually via the WordPress Customizer, change icons, colors, connect WooCommerce plugin to build your online store and more.

If you use this theme on your WordPress website, the visitors will especially enjoy creative portfolio presentation and a distinctive blog. What’s more important, Illdy looks perfect and performs smoothly on all modern devices.

Bento

Bento is rather a classic WordPress theme with a perfectly balanced content blocks and quite a polished look which I think may suit perfectly any services company or educational project. Bento is packed with a drag-and-drop builder to help non-tech people create websites without a help of designers and developers. As for general features, Bento allows to edit colors, change fonts, experiment with layouts and general customization work easily.

The theme is supplied with a child theme which will help you make theme edits with peace in mind, keeping your changes despite main theme updates. It feels like Bento above all is very SEO-literate and coded complying with all WordPress standards.

Polmo

Polmo is a corporate free WordPress theme which can be a great suit for any business niche, which aims at presenting their portfolio in a professional way. It comes with a rich widgets set letting you add only necessary functionality.

A free version of Polmo supports background image, Google map and Contact form 7. Unfortunately, a full customization flexibility is offered in Pro version. You can translate the theme easily with WPML plugin.

Unicons Lite

If you are looking for a very simple and clean WordPress design for a startup or marketing project, check out Unicons Lite. It comes with several pre-made demo layouts which you can import in one click. The customization should be pretty straightforward as well: update pre-designed section featuring your services, team, projects, etc. You also get freedom to update colors, fonts and icons to give your website maximum authenticity.

All major tweaks are applied via the WordPress Customizer, so you should not face any issues with all basic theme changes.

Activello

Activello Business WordPress theme is a popular minimal theme that you can use for multipurpose projects, either business or creative. At first glance, the theme looks like a great fit for a lifestyle blog, but on closer inspection you can see that it’s really flexible and powerful. You may build any sort of business landing page with the live WordPress Customizer, build a shop with WooCommerce, a stunning photography blog and more.

Business Epic

Looking for an epic WordPress theme to present your business? This one may be a good choice! Business Epic comes with widescreen layouts to present your projects and images in a bold way, lots of white space, a slider to dynamically present your key offers, social integration, several pre-made layouts and more.

With a great set of icons you can give your website a really stylish and professional look. WooCommerce shop can be also built with this theme. IMO, making default blog layout a bit cleaner and changing the main font can give this theme much more tasty look. But it all depends!

Integral Lite

Integral Lite is a fantastic WordPress theme mainly thanks to a genuinely creative and simple design which takes you through awesome typography, a stylish feature sections, a neat projects gallery, stunning animation and lots of other attractive and functional content modules and experiences the site visitors will definitely enjoy.

Thought the free version comes with a breathtaking design, it’s pretty limited in functionality. If you are okay with the bare-bone features of the free version like features section, testimonials, services, Newsletter and some others, then Integral theme is a good way to go.

Avior

Avior is a new WordPress theme that primarily aims at blogging, but you are free to transform it into any design to suit your purpose. The toolkit that comes with the theme should be enough for that. You may edit footer, header, menus, sidebar, colors insofar that you won’t need to fuss with tech at all. A really no-big-deal customization job!

The stylish, neat design of Avior makes it perfectly suitable for a personal, corporate, travel, or any other sort of a blog.

Himalayas

Himalayas is a stunning one-page multipurpose WordPress theme which looks great from a dual perspective: it performs quite quickly which should ensure proper user experience and it features a well-balanced, professional design. Parallax scrolling will make the process of surfing though the theme even smoother.

The slider, call-to-action widget, services widget, featured posts and some other great modules are included into the free theme. A full-screen portfolio widget will help you present your projects in greater detail.

Sydney

Sydney is a minimal WordPress multipurpose template that is a long time player on the market. It’s used by thousands of business and personal projects, always receiving only the highest ratings.

This free WordPress theme will help customize the site on all essential levels: change fonts, colors, site identity, header image, etc. The theme focuses on imagery, neat typography and simplified content presentation – all these things are just perfect for the overall UX and readability.

Profit

Profit is a snazzy and clean-looking WordPress theme for a wide range of services, though the main demo is focused on financial sector.

It can serve a perfect landing page for small business companies that want to showcase their main services and works portfolio. The majority of the front page sections in demo are powered by a free Profit Theme Engine plugin that lets you keep your functionality separate from design. A blue and white color scheme is a perfect choice for all types of financial sector focused website.

Tracks

Tracks is not very popular, but really nice WordPress multipurpose theme – “bold and beautiful”. It’s minimal in design letting you put in the spotlight only those things you really want. It will most likely suit blogging purposes, but if you want to build a unique website to present your creative project like musical band, it will also be a good fit. The site identity, footer and header are customizable.

Excellent

Excellent is a clutter-free multipurpose WordPress theme for businesses, freelancers and creatives. Within the free version you’ll be able to customize the front page content elements, use a range of Google fonts, update colors, customize the sidebar and use template layout alternatives. WooCommerce support is also included into a free theme.

Safreen

Safreen WordPress theme can be a very nice space for presenting your creative portfolio or design works. I’d say it’s most suitable for rich photo-blogging. It features an ultra modern flat design which will look just great on any screen. It also comes with several demo layouts and limited customization options. The theme supports WooCommerce, MailChimp and Contact Form 7. It’s worth mentioning that Pro version offers lifetime updates.

The post 20+ Best Free Multipurpose WordPress Themes 2018 appeared first on MotoPress.

Taxes and fees imposed on your hotel establishment should be properly recorded and shared with customers. Using the newest version 2.4.0 of the MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress, you’ll be able to include the taxes and fees info into the summary of accommodation charges.

This will ensure legal compliance making your guests aware of all the charges! To start configuring your pricing information, go to Bookings > Taxes and Fees. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Here you can add all types of taxes and fees you must include into the accommodation charge.

Fees

1. Add all needed fee labels that will be displayed to guests on the checkout page (e.g. resort fee, service fee).
2. Select a fee type – per guest/per day or per accommodation/per day.
3. Set the charge per adult and per child if needed.
4. Set for how long the fee should be applied: set a number of days or don’t set a limit at all.
5. Select a specific accommodation the fee should be applied to (or set it to All).

Accommodation Taxes

1. Add all needed tax labels – they will be also displayed to guests on the checkout page (e.g. occupancy tax, city tax).
2. There are 3 types of accommodation taxes you may set: per guest/per day, per accommodation/per day and per accommodation (%).
3. Set the charge per adult and per child.
4. Set for how long the tax should be applied: set a number of days, 1 day for one-time charge or don’t set a limit at all.
5. Select a specific accommodation the tax should be applied to (or set it to All).

Service Taxes

So far, you may set the service taxes for all accommodations.

1. Add the labels for all service taxes – remember that they are visible to guests on the checkout page (e.g. service tax).
2. The only one currently available type is percentage.
3. Set the amount of a service tax (e.g. 10%)

Fee Taxes

If it’s needed to include specific fee taxes (taxes on fees) in your hotel establishment, you can do it with Fee Taxes menu.

1. Add the labels for all fee taxes – remember that they are visible to guests on the checkout page.
2. The only one currently available type is percentage.
3. Set the amount of a service tax (e.g. 10%).

On the frontend

The accommodation prices displayed on the site listing don’t include taxes and fees charges, just the basic rates are shown.

The travelers will see all the pricing info in the final Summary of Charges table (before completing a purchase). It’s collapsed by default:

But they can expand it to see the details, including all taxes and fees:

Once the customer completes the purchase, you can see the pricing info with all taxes and fees details in the admin dashboard. For example (a random booking)

As you see, it’s extremely easy to set up the system and record your hotel / vacation rental charges in the right way. Test a new version of the WordPress booking system for hotels and don’t forget to send your questions and suggestions!

Try in action

The post MotoPress Hotel Booking Plugin for WordPress News: Manage Taxes and Fees appeared first on MotoPress.

Are you using MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress and missing any important payment gateways?

It’s not a problem anymore! With a new Hotel Booking WooCommerce Payments add-on you can extend the number of payment gateways available in WooCommerce, with no tech skills or extra developer’s help.

The process is quite simple, you just need to install the addon, add free or premium WooCommerce payment gateways and configure some settings.

Let’s create a quick guide to make it even more clear.

How it works

1. Install MotoPress Hotel Booking WooCommerce Payments addon and activate it.
2. Go to WooCommerce on your WP dashboard and create one product that will be used for all bookings (its price will be generated according to the guest’s charge).
3. Now go to MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin settings > Payment Gateways tab > activate WooCommerce.
4. Input the title and description for this payment method – remember that it will be displayed on the frontend, so make it clear for your guests. For example, most likely, you’ll need to use the names of WooCommerce payment gateways you are using (e.g. your title may sound like Pay with FirstData gateway).
5. In the drop-down menu select that WooCommerce product you created for reservations (see #2) and save changes.

Here is an example of the checkout page with Hotel Booking WooCommerce Payments addon enabled:

What’s important, you are absolutely free to enable MotoPress payment gateways and WooCommerce ones at the same time. That means you can enable only those WooCommerce payment gateways, which are not offered in the Hotel Booking plugin.

Additionally, you may sell any other products on your property rental WordPress site with WooCommerce – so just add them along with your “Reservation” product. However, guests will need to purchase products and ”bookings” (as a product) separately. You may find more answers to your specific questions in FAQ section of Hotel Booking WooCommerce Payments extension page.

If you want to see how the extension works on the backend, register demo with Villagio theme.

Pricing

The addon’s price for a single site is $89 and $179 for unlimited sites. There are around 95 payment gateways available in WooCommerce, some of them are free and others are premium, so keep those potential expenses in mind as well.

To sum up

We hope that this awesome addon will remove the limitations you might have experienced with the MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress. As usually, your priceless feedback helps make the plugin a truly ultimate WordPress reservation system for property rental business. Do you agree?

View Demo

The post Meet New Addon to Integrate MotoPress Hotel Booking Plugin with WooCommerce Payments appeared first on MotoPress.