So you’ve decided to use WooCommerce to power your store, great! You got it installed, created your first product and clicked on the product link with excitement. However, all you see is this:
Where is the add to cart button? You wonder. How can someone buy your product without that button?
Don’t panic! This issue is quite popular and quite simple to fix too. Let’s find out why your add to cart button is not showing and how can you fix.
Why your add to cart button is not showing
The reason why you don’t see the add to cart button on your product page is because your theme doesn’t support WooCommerce. It sounds strange to you but not all themes out there support WooCommerce.
When you started your site, you might not expect to sell anything. For example, you started a blog to write about your favorite topics. Your intention was to share the idea. You didn’t anticipate one day you’ll sell a book on your site.
And that’s normal. Our lives are filled with surprises.
So, what can you do about this? Let’s discuss the solutions.
How to get the add to cart button to show up on your WooCommerce product page
There are two solutions for this problem. As the cause is your theme lack WooCommerce’s support, you may see the first solution is to change to one that supports WooCommerce. That’s the best solution, if you can afford it.
Changing theme for your site is easy when you haven’t done much customization based on your current theme. However, if you have built a child theme to extend your current theme’s functionalities, changing it to something else can be very expensive.
Even when you don’t have many attachments with the current theme, finding a new theme can take days.
So, in case you can’t change or don’t want to change your current theme, read on.
Fix add to cart button not showing by customize your theme file
You are about to enter some code but don’t worry, it’s very simple. Let’s go to Appearance->Theme Editor. You may see a dialog says be careful. Click on I understand and proceed.
Now, look at the right side. You’ll see something similar to this (chances are you are using a different theme so the list of the files are not identical):
current-theme-files
Pay attention to these two files:
single.php
index.php
If you see single.php, click on that. Otherwise, click on index.php
Since my theme has single.php file, I click on that. Yours could be different. However, it should contain the line starts with get_template_part as I highlighted in the screenshot below:
now copy that line and replace it with the following code:
if ( is_singular( 'product' ) ) {
wc_get_template_part( 'content', 'single-product' );
} else {
//paste the line you copied here (replace the whole line, including //)
}
Make sure you replace your own line (the one you copied) to the second block.
Finally, save the file. Let’s check out my product again.
As you can see, the add to cart button appears. I also have the PayPal button appears since I installed PayPal gateway plugin.
Conclusion
As you can see, it is quite simple to fix add to cart button not showing up on your product page. However, even when it is fixed, the product page’s appearance may not be what you like. In that case, you may need to hire someone to customize that page for you. Any decent WordPress developers would be able to do that for you.
If you are serious about your WooCommerce store then the emails sending function is very important. Most of the time, you send emails to your customers following their purchases, their contact form submissions. You may also send emails contain coupons to your customers on their birthday. You also need to get emails regarding your store status. None of those things happen if you have WooCommerce not sending emails problem.
The prevalent of emails problems in WooCommerce (and WordPress)
By default, WooCommerce uses the wp_mail function of WordPress to process its emails. wp_mail in turn based on the mail function of PHP (the programming language that made WordPress). Without proper configurations, the mail function rarely works. On the occasions it does, most of your emails will go to spam folder. In fact, most sites use default mail settings, which make the mail sending success rate pretty low.
How to fix WooCommerce not sending emails
As you can see, WooCommerce has nothing to do with deliverability of its emails since it utilizes the function from WordPress. So, the right question to ask is how to fix WordPress not sending emails.
Fortunately, the fix is quite simple.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Get a free email (gmail, mail.ru…)
The first step is to register an email. The reason is we are going to use the mail server of those email providers (gmail, mail.ru) to send our emails, not our host’s server. Using those email providers’ servers increases email deliverability (the success rate of sending email) greatly.
Step 2: Get the STMP configuration of your email
The configurations depend on the email service you use. For example, Gmail SMTP settings would be:
Now, you got the configurations. Let’s move to the next step:
Step 3: Install Easy WP SMTP plugin
Our next step would be installing Easy WP SMTP plugin (click on the link to download or you can install from your dashboard). It’s a plugin that let you specify the SMTP settings then wp_mail will use the mail server you put in this plugin to send email instead of your website’s host.
Now you have the plugin installed and activated, click on the settings link under its name:
You’ll see the page where you put all the details as below:
As you can see that, I use an account from mail.ru. However, with other email providers, you can enter the same details except these fields:
From email address: that’s your email address
From name: this is what your customers see in the sender name of your email. So, pick something that represents your store
Reply to email address: When the recipients hit the reply button, which email will receive that reply. This could be a different email, maybe your dedicated email to handle supports
SMTP host: the smtp server you got from Step 2 above
SMTP user name: your email
SMTP password: your email’s password (or app password in case of Gmail)
Now, with all the info entered, click on save changes.
Step 4: Test your email settings
The final step would be testing if the configuration works. Still in Easy WP SMTP, click on test email.
Enter a valid recipient in the To field and some dummy text in subject and message field then click on Send test email. If your setup is correct, you’ll see the email goes through:
As you can see, I got the test email in my other account.
Conclusion
Emails are still very important for any ecommerce store. In fact, it’s the main channel to communicate with your customers. If your WooCommerce store fails to send emails, that’s a big problem. Hopefully, the tutorial I made it this post can help you fix WooCommerce not sending emails problem. Notice that free email services have their limits on how many emails you can send per day (500 in the case of Gmail). If you go pass that limit, exceeding emails will not be sent. In that case, you may want to use a dedicated email service such as Amazon SES or Sendgrid to deliver your emails.
There are many ways to reward your customers. One of the most common methods is to offer coupons. However, the problem with coupons is the customers need to remember the code. There is a better way to reward your customers. That is to use WooCommerce store credit. This post will show you how you can create store credit in WooCommerce for one or many customers so they can use the discounts on your store without remembering the coupon code.
Get WooCommerce Smart Coupons Plugin
WooCommerce by default doesn’t support store credits. To use this feature, you need to install an external plugin called WooCommerce Smart Coupons.
Send WooCommerce store credits to customers by email
Now you have WooCommerce smart coupons installed and activated. Let’s go to WooCommerce->Coupons:
If you visited WooCommerce’s default coupons screen before, you’ll notice there are many differences. However, our focus in this post is WooCommerce store credit. Let’s click on “Send store credit” tab.
As you can see that, the interface is quite simple. You need to first, specify the list of emails of the recipients. If you have more than one email, then separate them with commas. Next, you enter an amount that you want to give to the customers as credit. Then, finally, you can enter some messages to the customers.
After that, you hit send. This is what the customers receive:
Now, you can see that the email owner has got a coupon code. If the emails you entered are from store’s customers (they already registered on your store), then that person can login and use the WooCommerce store credit without remembering the coupon code. Otherwise, she will need to copy that coupon. Sounds confusing? Let me demonstrate.
Apply WooCommerce store credits on checkout
The email I sent to above is from a registered customer. Now, if he login in to the store and add items to cart, nothing happens. However, on the cart page, the customer will see this:
If I click on the coupon, the discount will be applied instantly:
Now, if the customer decides not to use the credit but give it to someone else, she can just send the coupon code to that lucky person. In this case, that lucky person needs to enter the coupon code on cart page to get the discount:
After clicking on Apply coupon, you’ll see the discount applied:
Now, it works just like a coupon.
Conclusion
As you can see, store credit is basically a coupon. However, it offers more flexibility to you as store owner. You can create and send credits to many users at once. If the customers are registered, they don’t need to enter the coupon code and just like coupon codes, they can give it to other people to shop on your store. Make sure you get WooCommerce smart coupons plugin here first.
By default, WooCommerce products have fixed price. That means if you want to change the price of a particular product, you need to login and edit the product price. This is where the idea of WooCommerce dynamic product pricing came from. With dynamic pricing, you can set rules so you can offer some flexible pricing structure to your product. Take these cases for example:
You want to encourage your customers to buy more products from your store. For example, if the customer buy one product A they will get another item for free (it doesn’t need to be buy one get one, you can set the rule to buy X get Y and they don’t have to be the same products. For example, you want to create a promotion program that if a customer buy a jacket, they will get a belt for free or 50% discount).
You want to reward customers with large purchase. If they order more than $200 (but less that $300), you’ll give then 10% discount. If they order more than $300, you’ll give them 20% discount.. and so on.
You have variable products and only want to offer discount on a particular variation.
Give the customer discount based on number of product they purchase. For example, buy 10 get 10% discounts, buy 30 get 15% discounts…
Let’s discuss each case and find out you can achieve that with WooCommerce dynamic pricing.
Get WooCommerce dynamic product pricing plugin
To follow along, you need to have WooCommerce dynamic product pricing plugin from WooCommerce.com. You can get it following this link.
Now, let’s go through each case and find out how to do that.
Case one: The classic buy one get one (BOGO)
As the name suggests, you want to give the customers a reward for purchasing a particular product. For example, I have an electronic store that sell smartphones and smartwatches. I want to create a rule that:
If the customers purchase two phones, I’ll give a smartwatch for free.
You can apply this rule to create many kind of creative incentive to encourage your customers to buy more from your store. Here are some examples:
Buy one (any number here) shirt, get 50% off socks
Buy 2 items, the next item is free…
OK, let’s get back to our example. Here is the list of all products on my store:
As you can see, I have one smartphone and three smartwatches. In this example, the rule I’m going to create says: For customers who buy 2 ZTE phones, I’ll give one IYOU smartwatch for free.
Now, let’s go and edit the IYOU watch. Let’s scroll down to the product data section, you’ll see there is a new tab called Dynamic Pricing. Click on that at set the options as following:
Here is the quick explanation of each fields in the picture:
Applies to: This rule applies to everyone. There are two more options, which are Guest and Specific Role. That means you can apply this rule to customers with specific role only. It’s a good option to create a reward to specific group of customers.
Quantity based on: This is the base to calculate the discount. As the rule I mentioned above said: “buy two smartphones will get one smartwatch for free” so count the quantity based on Category and the field #3, I set the category to smartphone.
Product/Variation: You can select to give a specific variation of this product as a reward (if the current product is a variable product).
Rule process mode: There are two modes: Bulk and Special Offer. For buy X get Y free, we are going to use Special Offer.
Date: You can specify the date range that this offer is valid.
Finally, the rule. As you can see, I set the purchase number to 2, the receive number to 1, percentage discount to 100. That means if the customers buy two products from the category I specified in field #3, they will get one product (the one that we are editing) with 100% discount. The repeating is currently set to No. If it is set to yes, that means the customers can buy 4 smartphones and get 2 smartwatches, 6 smartphones and get 3 smartwatches and so on
Now, let’s save the product and make a test purchase of two smartphones and one smartwatch (the IYOU). Sure enough, when go to cart, I see this:
As you can see, the watch has a 100% discount.
Case two: Offer discount based on cart amount
Now, there is a new scenario. You want to reward customers with large purchases and also encourage them to purchase large quantity. Here is the discount structure based on cart amount:
Order amount
$100 to $200
$200 to $400
More than $400
Discount amount
10%
20%
25%
Now, let’s get this setup. Under WooCommerce, go to Dynamic pricing:
You can see that there are three tabs. We focus on the first tab in this case, which is Order totals.
So, let’s click on Add pricing group button and setup the rules:
As you can see, the rules are quite straightforward. We create the rule based cart total, applied to everyone and have no specific start and end date. In the table at the bottom, there are something you need to pay attention to:
WooCommerce’s precision is up to cent. That’s why I need to enter 200.01, 400.001. If I entered 201 or 401, if someone buy more than 200 but less than 201, they will not have any discount (same goes with the case of 400 and 401)
In the third rule, as I mentioned at the beginning of this case, we apply a 25% discount on orders > $400. In the max order total, I entered the * (shift + 8) symbol. This is required by the plugin if you don’t have the limit.
You can enter as many rules as you want, simply click on the (+) icon on the right to add more row.
Now, let’s save the rule and make a test purchase.
10% discount on order more than 100 but less than 200
20% discount on order more than 200 and less than 400
25% discount on order more than 400
Case 3: Offer dynamic pricing on bulk order
There is a another way to reward your customers is to give discount on large items purchase. For example, you want to implement this discount structure:
Amount purchase
10 to 20 items
21 to 30
31 and more
Amount discount
discount $5 per item
discount $15 per item
discount $20 per item
Let’s take my store for example and I want to apply this structure on the ZTE phone. So, I edit the product and go to Product Data -> Dynamic Pricing and add rules like this:
As you can see, this discount is for everyone, based on this product’s quantity (not based on products from other categories as in the first example) and the Rule processing mode in Bulk (instead of Special offer).
I think you have no problem understanding the table at the bottom. Now, save the product and make some test purchases:
No discount for quantity less than 10:
If the purchase is more than 10 items, a 5 discount is applied to all products:
For order from 21 to 30, customer gets a $15 discount on each product:
Finally, if the customers buy more than 30 items, they will get a 20 discount on each product:
You can easily change the discount type to percentage instead of a fix amount. In addition to these two option, you can also set the product price to an amount. For example, when the customer purchase 10 items, the price is $100, when they purchase 100 items, you may set the price to $50. This is just an example to show you how flexible WooCommerce dynamic product pricing is.
Conclusion
As you can see, with WooCommerce dynamic product pricing, you can create some great offer for your customers to encourage them to buy more products. At the same time, the customers are rewarded for their purchases. It is a win-win situation and any store can apply this to increase more sales and customers’ loyalty. You can get WooCommerce dynamic pricing plugin here to get started.
Are you a complete WordPress beginner? If so, this WordPress For Beginners post is for you. After completing this post, you’ll have what it takes to create awesome WordPress sites right away.
WordPress is an awesome platform for creating all kind of sites. It started as a blogging platform. However, nowadays, people use WordPress for all sorts of purposes. I use WordPress for blogging, selling products and even building web API. If you are a complete beginner to WordPress, this post is for you. It will be long since I’ll try to cover every important parts in WordPress. However, to make it easy for you to read and understand, I will break the content down to atomic pieces so you can quickly grasp a new WordPress concept.
Let’s get started
WordPress.org and WordPress.com
As a beginner, you may be confused these two sites together. They are owned by Automattic, the company that develop WordPress. However, on WordPress.org, you will download a piece of software and install on your own domain to create your site. If you go to WordPress.com, you can create a blog to start writing away without any setup. Let’s compare these two sites to see their pros and cons:
WordPress.com
PROS
You can create a free blog that ends with .wordpress.com
It’s completely free
There is no setup, the site is done for you.
CONS
You don’t have much control over the site
The site is owned by WordPress.com so you cannot install plugins, themes, edit files
The storage is limited to just 3GB.
You cannot use WooCommerce to sell products
WordPress.org
PROS
It’s completely free
You have full control over your site
Since you are in complete control, you can install themes, plugins, edit files
You own your own domain
CONS
You have to install it on your own server. That means, you must buy hosting and domain. This part is easy though.
So, as you can see, each choice has its own pros and cons. If you just want to create a free blog and write content, go with the first option. However, if you are serious about your business (even blogging business), by all means go with option 2 (buy domain, hosting and install WordPress download from WordPress.org).
In this post, we are going to talk about the version that you install on your own server.
Next, we will find out how you can add content to your site via pages and posts and how to customize your site’s look and feel using themes and plugin.
Getting familiar with the admin panel
After creating your site, you usually go to yoursite.com/wp-admin to access the admin panel of your site. This is the place you do all the managing tasks from creating, deleting content, adjusting site appearance, install, remove plugins…
Here are the most important sections places in this admin panel you need to pay attention to. Each section has its own sub sections to provide you maximum flexibility when working with WordPress.
You can view your site clicking on this section
Click here to manage your posts. You can create, edit, delete your posts here.
Media is where you manage files, images, videos.
Create your pages here. Similar to the posts section, you can add, remove and edit pages here
Comments is the section where you manage comments on your site. When you add content to your site, if you enable the comment functionality, then people visit your site can leave a comment to share their opinions.
Appearance is the place you manage your themes. Theme determine how your site look so it is very important. In WordPress, there are many free and good themes for your to select from. If you want to use more advanced designed, you may need to buy and install premium themes.
Plugins are the software that created to extend the functionalities of your WordPress website. In this section, you can add, remove plugins with just a few clicks. WordPress has a free plugin repository that contains many good plugins. However, similar to themes, you may need to buy premium plugins to achieve some specific features.
Users are where you can update your name, your password, your email… If you are the administrator, you can add and delete other users on your site.
Settings is where you can set many important options for your site such as site’s title, site’s description, permalink structure (the way your URL display).
OK, now you have a basic understanding of the admin panel. Let’s dive right in to some of the most important sections.
Creating content with posts and pages
Post is the most common type of content on any website. In WordPress, everything is a post. A page is a post, a product (WooCommerce) is also a post (it is called a custom post).
To create a post, simply click on Posts. You’ll see the menu on the left of the admin panel expand:
As you can see, under Posts there are some new items:
All posts: Show all posts on your site
Add new: Add a new post
Categories: Manage posts categories. You can divide posts in to as many categories as you like. For example, you write about phones so you can have two categories: iPhone and Android. Your categories may also have child categories. For example, under Android, you may have: Samsung phones, HTC phones, Google phones…
Tags: Tags are similar to categories. They are another way to group posts together. For example, if you write one post about HTC phones, another for Samsung phones, you can add the tag “android phone” for these two posts. There are no limit on how many tags you can have per post.
Now you have a basic understanding of the posts section. Let’s start creating a post. To create a post, you can click on Add new. There are two locations, you can click on either one.
After click on Add new, you’ll see this:
If you don’t see an interface like above, don’t freak out. You’d probably see something like this:
Why there are two editors? Why is this confusion? You may ask. The answer is from WordPress version 5, the new editor (named Gutenberg) is the default editor. Before that, WordPress used the classic editor. If you like working with the classic editor, you can install this plugin to disable Gutenberg.
How to create new post with the classic editor
Creating a post with the classic editor is super easy. You just enter the post title, post content then hit the publish button and your content is live. The post will have an URL (similar to an address) that you can send to other people to read your content. Let’s inspect the classic editor to see the most important sections:
As you can see from the picture, there are 7 important areas when creating posts with the classic editor:
Post title: This is the title of your post. It should not be blank (though you can leave it blank and publish)
Post content: This is where you put the content of the post in. Think about an article you have just read. The article content should be written in this section
Categories: Here you can select categories for the post. As mentioned earlier, one post can have more than one category. The default category is “Uncategorized”. However, you can create new categories and set them to the new post
Add tags: tags are important parts of your post since it’s a way to group posts that share topics together. Unlike categories that must be pre-defined, you can enter whatever you like.
Preview post: After creating the content, you can hit the Preview button to see how it looks like on the website.
Save draft: If you are not ready to publish yet, you can save the post as a draft and continue to work on the post later. A draft post can be seen only by the editor/author/administrator (sounds confusing? These are the roles of users in WordPress). People who don’t have access to the admin panel don’t know this post exists, even search engines.
Publish: When you are ready to present your post to the world, press this button.
For example, I published a new post on my site. Here was what I got after clicking on the publish button:
Now you can click on “View post” link to view your post.
Creating your post in Gutenberg editor
Gutenberg is the new WordPress editor that has made default from version 5. There is a fact that not many people like it. If you look at the Gutenberg plugin on WordPress.org, you’ll see it has very low rating.
The reason partly because of people are used to the classic editor and at the beginning, Gutenberg was buggy (it still has some bugs but I saw great improvements since the first version).
Gutenberg is known as the “Block Editor”. Let me show you what it has that name:
As you can see how Gutenberg is different from the classic editor. Instead of entering all content in a giant box, now, you add “blocks of content” to the post by clicking on the (+) sign. For me personally, I prefer to work with the traditional classic editor since it’s simpler. However, Gutenberg editor has some advantages that the classic editor can only dream of:
With Gutenberg, users can have columns. Meanwhile, in classic editor, you write content in one column
You can insert various elements, including buttons. In the classic editor, if you don’t know HTML, it is hard to create such elements in post
Adding more custom blocks is another strength of Gutenberg editor. You can add more blocks to the editor if you know code. If you don’t, there are plugins available that let you insert all kinds of elements to the post. You can think of Gutenberg is the new page builder such as Elementor, Visual composer…
WordPress Pages vs Posts
As I mentioned earlier, page is a type of post. However, pages are designed to be good for static content (content that don’t change or need update). Usually, you would use a page to create contact us page, about page…
Unlike posts, pages don’t have categories.
Change your site’s appearance with themes
Now you’ve known how to create pages and posts. It’s time to style your site to match your taste.
To manage your themes, go to Appearance-> Themes
As you can see, I have three themes installed: Twenty Nineteen, Twenty seventeen and Twenty Sixteen. These are the default themes come with the latest WordPress installation.
Activate and deactivate themes
Take a look at the first theme: Twenty nineteen. You’ll notice that it has the word “Active” before the theme name. That means the theme is currently active. In fact, when you activate a theme, it will be moved to the first position of the themes list. For example, if I activate the theme Twenty Sixteen, you’ll see it at the first position.
To activate a theme, simply hover your cursor over that theme:
Then, click on the Activate button. You can also click on Live Preview button to see how your site look with the new theme before deciding to activate the theme or not. This feature is very helpful when you have a site running and you don’t want to constantly surprise your visitors by switching through many themes.
Activating one theme will deactivate the current active theme. There is no deactivate button. This makes sense since your website always need to have an active theme.
Installing new theme from WordPress repository
As mentioned earlier, there are thousands free themes available on WordPress.org. To add a new theme from this source, simply click on Add new button at the top of Themes screen:
Then, you’ll see next screen with full of themes:
As you can see from the part that I underlined with a blue bar, there are options to filter the themes. You can browse featured, popular, latest… themes with just one click. If you know the name of the theme or a feature (one column, light weight…), you can enter the search phrase into the search box to search for the themes.
To install a theme, simply hover your cursor onto that theme, you’ll see the Install button appears:
If you click on install, WordPress will go ahead and download and install the theme. After the installation is done, the theme will be available in your list of installed theme (You can click on Appearance -> Themes again to see the list of installed themes).
Install new theme from a .zip file
In many cases, free themes don’t have the features you are looking for. It’s time to purchase a premium theme. After purchasing the themes, you will be given a .zip file. Then, you need to upload that .zip file to your site to start using the theme.
To install a theme from a zip file, simply click on Appearance->Themes->Add new:
Click on Upload Theme button, you’ll see a new section where you can upload the zip file:
Now, click on Choose file, you’ll see a file selector window appear. Let’s navigate to the zip file on your computer and select it to start uploading:
In the screenshot, I select the famous Flatsome theme (one of the most popular theme for WordPress sites that run as a shop). With the file selected, click on Open.
Notice that I’m using Windows. If you use Mac or Linux, you will see a slightly different interface when selecting the zip file. However, I believe that you have no trouble selecting files for upload in those platforms.
After selecting the zip file, I’ll click on Install now to start uploading and installing the theme.
Depending on the size of your theme, the process may take from a few seconds to about a minute.
If there is no problem with the upload and install process, you’ll see the the screen above. You can preview the theme by clicking on Live Preview or click on Activate to activate the theme right away.
Add additional functionalities with plugins
Now you know how to work with themes, working with plugins is much easier. Adding, removing plugins are similar to what of themes. Similar to themes, there is a free repository of plugins on WordPress.org.
What are plugins?
Plugins are software that add new functions to your WordPress site. They may modify a default function of WordPress. Earlier in this post, I mentioned that you can disable Gutenberg editor and enable the classic editor using a plugin. That is an example of how plugins work in WordPress.
Plugins are powerful. Later, you will find out about WooCommerce. It is a plugin that turns your site into an ecommerce store. WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce solution on the internet today.
States of a WordPress plugin
A plugin installed on your site has two states:
Activated
Deactivated
Only when activated, the functions of the plugin can take effect. If one plugin is deactivated, it has no effect on your site.
Manage plugins on your site
To manage plugins on your site, simply go to Plugins->Installed plugins on the left menu of your dashboard:
Then you’ll see the list of installed plugin on your site. In the screenshot, you can see that I have two plugins called “Classic Editor” and “LaunchPage.app Importer”. You can see that they are both deactivated (since there is a “activate” link under each plugin).
Activate & Deactivate plugins
To activate any plugin, click on the Activate link under that plugin’s name.
For example, I’m going to activate “classic Editor”.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the background of “classic editor” turned to light blue. The link below it changed to “Deactivate”. Also, there is a notice at the top of the screen says: “Plugin activated”.
Now, if you want to deactivate any plugin, simply click on “Deactivate link” under that plugin.
Delete a plugin
You can only delete a plugin when it is deactivated. From the screenshot above, you can see that under “Launchpage.app Importer”, there is a red link called “delete”. Simply click on that and confirm you want to delete the plugin to permanently wipe that plugin from your site.
Install plugins from WordPress respository
To install a new plugin from WordPress.org repository, you simply click on Plugins->Add new
By default, you’ll see the list of featured plugin. Similar to add theme screen, you can switch to Popular, recommended tabs to see other sets of plugins. If you connect your site to your WordPress.org account, (a free account that let you participate in WordPress.org forum and review plugins, themes) you can see your favorite plugins in the Favorites tab.
You can also search for plugins using the search box.
As you might notice, there is a “Install now” button at the right of every plugin. If you want to install a particular plugin, click on that button. WordPress will start to download and install that plugin for you.
The button’s status will change to “Installing”
When the installation is done, that button will change to Activate.
You can click on the Activate button to activate the plugin.
Manage access to your site with user management
What are users?
Simply put, users are the ones that have access to the admin panel. To login to the admin panel, all users need to enter their username/email and their password.
What are user roles?
Not all users in WordPress are equal. Users are differentiated by their roles. The role of a user determines what he can and cannot do on the site. By default, WordPress has the following roles:
Subscriber
Contributor
Author
Editor
Administrator
The subscriber has least power while the administrator has the most power.
How to add new users
To add a new user, you must be an administrator. By default, when you first create your site, you are give an account with administrator role.
Now, click on Users->Add new to add a new user:
You can see that there are a few fields that required. You must give the new user a user name (no space, no special characters) and an email. If you create an account for someone, make sure you enter the email correctly since the password creation link will be sent to that email.
You can also create a password for that user (by clicking on Show password button) to set the password yourself.
Finally, make sure you select the right role. Be very careful when you create Editor or Administrator account since these accounts can do much damage to your site (since they have much power) if the one who own those accounts are malicious or not careful.
To create the account, click on create account button at the bottom.
How to remove users
To remove a user, you also need to be an Administrator. Now, go to Users->all users to see the list of users on your site:
Now if you hover your cursor on the user, you’ll see the Delete link appears with the red color. To delete any account, click on the Delete link right below it. You’ll see this screen appears:
Click on the button “Confirm Deletion” to delete the user. If you go back, the user is not deleted.
Configure your site settings for SEO
To write about WordPress SEO, I may need to write a complete book. However, with some basic initial adjustments, you can setup your site for SEO success.
Setting up the site title correctly
If you are serious about your site (I know you are), setting up the site title correctly is very important. Site title is usually short and have little SEO effect. However, it reflects your website, your brand. Later, people may search for your site to get to your content. So, choosing your site title is very important.
To set your site title, you go to Settings->General
Here, you can change the site title and the tag line in the boxes that I underlined with blue color.
After entering the title, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page to click on Save changes to store your change to the database.
Setting up SEO friendly URL with permalinks
For years, the URL has played a big part in SEO. WordPress offers extensive support for SEO friendly URLs. Click on Settings->permalinks:
By default, you have six options for your permalink. (permalink is the structure of the URL of your pages/posts). It is recommended that you choose the URL format that when someone see it, he can tell what’s the content is about.
Take the first structure for example (Plain), you cannot tell much about the content. If someone knows WordPress, he can tell that that’s the link to a page/post that has the ID 123. However, take the structure 2,3,5 for example. The URL contains human readable text that tells exactly what the content is all about.
I usually go with the “Post name” structure to keep the URL short. However, you can choose Day and name or month and name structures if you want to include publishing date in the url
Conclusion
This is quite a long post that give you a brief introduction of WordPress. There are a lot more to learn about WordPress and I hope you’ll stick with me in this journey.
I’ll keep updating this post so make it more extensive and up to date. If you have questions, please let me know in the comment section below.
Are you a dev? Checkout programming tutorials here: datmt.com
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