weeblrAMP Review: More Flexible Google AMP For WordPress

By Colin NewcomerLeave a comment

If you’re not already familiar, AMP, short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a Google-backed initiative aimed at providing a framework to help publishers create quick-loading, mobile-friendly content.

While there are some detractors, most publishers seem to view it as a positive thing because AMP pages consistently drive more impressions and return visitors. As a result, AMP now powers over 2 billion mobile pages across ~1 million domains.

But if you want to add Google AMP to your WordPress site, you’re going to need a plugin. Which is what I’m looking at in this weeblrAMP review.

weeblrAMP is a freemium plugin from Yannick Gaultier that gives you a ton of flexibility for how you implement AMP on your WordPress site.

If you’re not sure why to use Google AMP, he has a good slide presentation on that subject. And if you’re not sure how to use Google AMP, you should read this review!

Read Full Article

Jilt Review: Send Cart Abandonment Emails for WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads

By Colin NewcomerLeave a comment

Did you know that, on average, 69.23% of shoppers who add an item to their cart end up not actually purchasing that item?

That’s shocking, right? I mean – I’m definitely shocked.

You spend so much time and effort getting people to your store so that they’ll actually click the Add to Cart button. Then, 69.23% of those people never even complete their order. Ouch!

Jilt aims to change that. It’s a cart abandonment plugin/app for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (and Shopify, if that’s your thing).

Basically, Jilt tries to help you convince some of the people who abandon their cart to come back and make a purchase by sending smartly timed cart abandonment emails.

There’s pretty good data to back up the idea that cart abandonment emails are a good strategy. But just how easy does Jilt make it to send cart abandonment emails on WordPress? That’s what I aim to find out in my Jilt review.

Read Full Article

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.

Read Full Article

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.

Read Full Article

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.

Read Full Article