Smart Slider Review: Build Beautiful Sliders With Drag and Drop

By Colin NewcomerLeave a comment

If there’s one thing that WordPress users seem to universally love, it’s WordPress slider plugins. Two of the top four best-selling plugins at Code Canyon are, you guessed it, slider plugins.

This fascination has led to the bundling of Slider Revolution with pretty much every theme for sale at Theme Forest. But Slider Revolution and Layer Slider (#4 at Code Canyon), are far from your only options for creating sliders for your WordPress site.

Smart Slider offers a user friendly, well-designed slider experience. And in my Smart Slider review, I’ll take a deeper look at this freemium slider plugin and see if it can go toe-to-toe with the big names.

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8 Helpful WordPress Analytics Plugins That Aren’t All Named Google Analytics

By Colin NewcomerLeave a comment

You’ve got a WordPress website – congrats! Now you need to figure out how to make your website better. And part of doing that is learning more about your content and your visitors. Figuring out what content is the most popular, where your visitors are coming from, what they’re clicking on…

That all helps build a more successful website.

But if you want to do that on WordPress, you’re going to need help. That’s where WordPress analytics plugins come in. And that’s also where most WordPress blogs rattle off a list of Google Analytics plugins and call it a day.

To avoid that, I’m going to spend this post covering a variety of WordPress analytics plugins. Yes – one of those plugins deals with Google Analytics – but the rest open up new analytics options you might not have known about.

*Note – I’m going to refer to all of these as “plugins” because they all offer a dedicated WordPress plugin. But a few of these tools are technically SaaS products. The plugin terminology is used for simplicity.

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Gutenberg Editor Review: Thoughts on the New WordPress Editor

By Colin Newcomer6 Comments

For the longest time, you’ve been writing your WordPress posts in the open source TinyMCE Editor that’s included in the core WordPress software. Sometime soon, likely WordPress 5.0, that’s slated to change with the introduction of the brand new Gutenberg Editor.

Yes, the WordPress team is in the process of completely changing the content creation experience. It’s a pretty big deal.

Just recently, the team released the beta version of the Gutenberg Editor to the public. It’s listed on WordPress.org, so you can try it out for yourself (though don’t do that on a production site).

But before you run off to experiment, I thought I’d dig in and give you my very own Gutenberg Editor review.

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Thrive Leads Review: Is It Actually The Ultimate List Building Plugin?

By Colin NewcomerLeave a comment

If you’ve read any advice on building a successful website, I can almost guarantee that you’ve been told to “build an email list” at some point or another. At the risk of annoying you, I’m going to tell you one more time that building an email list is an amazing way to create an evergreen resource that isn’t subject to the whims of Google.

But I only remind you of that because I’m about to review a WordPress plugin that gives you heaps of options to build an email list.

It’s called Thrive Leads, and it’s one of the products from the conversion-focused Thrive Themes team. The Thrive Themes team bills it as “the ultimate list building plugin for WordPress”.

So is it?

Ultimate is always a tough phrase to justify…but I can say that Thrive Leads is absolutely packed with deep targeting and analytics features.

And in my Thrive Leads review, I’ll give you a hands-on look at what all those features can do.

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Ninja Forms Review – A Stellar Form Plugin With Heaps of Add-ons

By Colin Newcomer1 Comment

If you have a website, you need forms. Forms make the world go around. They let you do everything from accepting simple messages from your visitors to setting up detailed appointment booking forms, accepting payment for your services, and more.

Perhaps that ubiquity explains the abundance of contact form plugins available on the market. Gravity Forms, WPForms, Caldera Forms, Contact Form 7, and…Ninja Forms, the subject of today’s review.

Ninja Forms is a free core plugin with a variety of paid add-ons that add conditional logic, email marketing integrations, payment gateways, and tons of other helpful features.

In my Ninja Forms review, I’ll go hands-on with the core version and then tell you a bit more about what the add-ons tack on.

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