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Elementor Review – A Powerful Page Builder That You Can Use For Free – UPDATED 2019

By Colin Newcomer10 Comments

Considering using Elementor on your site? In our hands-on Elementor review, we’ll give you a detailed look at this popular WordPress page builder and whether it’s right for you.

Since its launch in 2016, Elementor has quickly gone on to become one of the premier WordPress page builder plugins, active on over 2 million WordPress sites according to WordPress.org.

To give you a good look at this tool, we’ll divide our Elementor review into two sections. You’ll get a detailed look at:

  • The core functionality in the free version that’s available at WordPress.org. Without spending a penny, the free version already lets you do some pretty cool things.
  • Elementor Pro. With the paid version, you can build popups, add forms, and design your entire theme using the same drag-and-drop Elementor interface from the free version. Yeah, it’s pretty powerful…

If you’ve already played around with the free version at WordPress.org, you can jump straight to our Elementor Pro review. Otherwise, keep reading to start with a look at the free core version at WordPress.org…

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How to speed up WordPress – Part 2 – Hosting

By Colm Troy2 Comments

In Part 2 of our How to speed up WordPress guide (Part 1 covered some fundamentals WordPress speed bottlenecks) we take a closer look at the single most important thing you can do to speed up your WordPress website – find the right hosting provider.

If you’re reading this you’ve probably already spent hours researching WordPress hosting providers, trying to find the best one. You’ve narrowed down your choices to what people seem to be telling you are the best options available. Often you’ll be wary of choosing a host because your hear conflicting recommendations. HOST X is Great! HOST X is terrible – AVOID! Argh!

Who do you listen to?

Which WordPress web host selection strategy

We’ve all been here.

Finding the right WordPress hosting provider for your websites is one of the biggest problems most WordPress users face on an ongoing basis. In this part 2 of our How to speed up WordPress guide we’re going to take a dive into the world of WordPress hosting and guide you to my tried and tested way of finding the right host that best meets your needs.

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How to speed up WordPress – Part 1

By Colm TroyLeave a comment

Welcome to Part 1 of our How to speed up WordPress guide. If you’re having performance problems with your WordPress website, you’ve come to the right place. Stick with us on this high performance WordPress tutorial series and I promise you by the end of this journey you’’ll be rocking a blisteringly fast kick ass WordPress website that leaves the rest of ‘em in the dirt 🙂

The importance of the speed of your WordPress website.

The speed of your website is incredibly important. Study after study clearly shows that users despise slow websites. And why wouldn’t they! In this era of information overload where our attention is being demanded from an almost infinite number of sources, we simply don’t have the patience to hang around a wait for a slow website to load. If you’re website is slow you’re losing sales, leads and generally annoying your users. Even if you’re not selling directly online, a slow website reflects really poorly on your business reputation.

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How to Update Bundled Plugins that come with ThemeForest WordPress Themes

By Colm TroyLeave a comment

If you’ve purchased a WordPress theme from one of the big marketplaces like ThemeForest in the past few years there’s a good chance the theme came with extended licenses for one or more of the really popular Commercial WordPress plugins that are not available for download directly from the WordPress.org plugin repository. This includes popular plugins like Visual Composer, Layer Slider and Slider Revolution (and many more commercial plugins typically sold via CodeCanyon.

Most ThemeForest theme authors will typically use the TGM plugin activation class (TGMPA class) to make it reasonably straightforward to install these plugins upon first use. The TGMPA class also makes it straightforward for theme authors to provide plugin updates via their theme updates.

Yet despite this, thousands of WordPress websites are not running the latest versions of commercial plugins bundled via ThemeForest themes. This is a pretty big problem as all it takes is one major security vulnerability in one of these plugins (like that which happened with Slider Revolution a couple of years ago) and we immediately have thousands of exposed WordPress websites that can’t be easily fixed.

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