Friday, September 11, 2020

14 Best AI Chatbots Software for Your Website (Compared)

Are you looking for the best chatbot software for your site?

Chatbots allow you to free up time by automatically answering common customer questions. They can also be used to generate leads, improve user experience, and make more sales.

In this article, we have handpicked the best AI chatbots software for your WordPress site to improve customer experience and boost conversions.

The best AI chatbots software for WordPress

1. ChatBot.com

The ChatBot website

ChatBot allows you to easily make chatbots using their drag and drop chatbot builder. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills.

It even comes with pre-built templates that you can use as a starting point to quickly get your AI ChatBot up and running. These templates include different scenarios like selling products, customer service, recruitment, bookings, and more.

ChatBot integrates with your WordPress website and can be used along with top live chat software well as other popular apps that you may be using to grow your business.

ChatBot is also a great chatbot for Facebook messenger powered by the same AI-driven software. This gives you a powerful tool to retarget customers on Facebook, collect data, and spend money wisely on Facebook ads.

They offer a free 14-day trial (no credit card required) which helps you try it out before choosing a paid plan.

Integrating ChatBot within our own businesses is a big priority for us currently. ChatBot is a great tool for us because it lets us seamlessly forward users to our live support teams where needed.

Pricing: ChatBot costs from $50 per month, which includes 1 active chatbot and 1000 chats per month.

2. ManyChat

The ManyChat website

ManyChat is a Facebook messenger chatbot builder. With more than 1.3 Billion people using Facebook Messenger, it allows you to have a wider reach and more powerful retargeting options on the Facebook platform.

In simpler words, it helps you make sales, decrease cart abandonment, capture leads, and more by using Facebook Messenger.

It comes with a simple drag and drop interface which makes it super easy to set up a chatbot for your Facebook page. You can automatically welcome new users, point them to products, schedule messages, respond to specific keywords, and much more.

Pricing: ManyChat has a free plan that you can use to get started. This includes basic quick-start templates, 2 drip sequences, and up to 10 tags for audience segmentation. The premium plan has unlimited drip sequences and tags, plus split testing, buy buttons, and more.

3. Freshchat

The Freshchat website

Freshchat allows you to build chatbots for WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple Business Chat, mobile, and web.

It is powered by Freddy, their artificial intelligence algorithm. It is designed to detect intent and engage with the customer, rather than simply being intended to free up the time of your live chat agents.

Using their machine learning technology, Freshchat can even provide you with a list of customer and prospect questions that need precise or better answers.

Pricing: You will need Freshchat’s ‘Forest’ plan for enterprises to use their chatbot. This isn’t cheap, at $69 per user per month when billed monthly.

4. Drift

The Drift website

Drift lets you combine live chat and an automated chatbot, like many of the tools on this list. It also integrates with the most popular CRMs and email marketing services.

Drift allows you to proactively start conversations with customers that are already engaged with the products or services on your website. It is designed to use conversations for conversions and allows you to create scenarios that help you get more sales.

It offers integrations with many third-party tools such as Zendesk, Help Scout, and more.

Drift is more suitable for fairly large businesses, and the pricing reflects that. If you’re just starting to make money online, we recommend that you try one of the other tools on our list.

Pricing: Drift costs from $400/month billed annually. This includes 5 users. (There is a free plan available too, but that doesn’t have the chatbot features.)

5. Chatfuel

The Chatfuel website

Chatfuel is a powerful chatbot platform for Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram. You don’t need any coding knowledge or previous experience to use it.

Lots of different companies use Chatfuel, including large brands like Adidas, T-Mobile, LEGO, TechCrunch, and more.

You can use your bot to increase sales, to qualify leads, or to provide answers to frequently asked questions. This lets you save a lot of time for your customer service team.

There is plenty of documentation on the Chatfuel website to help you build a bot easily. This includes advice on how to make sure you follow Facebook’s rules for using a Messenger bot.

Pricing: Chatfuel costs from $15/month, with no user limit. There’s also a free plan that offers a fully-featured bot and up to 50 users.

6. MobileMonkey

The MobileMonkey website

MobileMonkey lets you create bots using their OmniChat™ technology. These bots work in web chat, in Messenger, and even through SMS text messages.

This saves you time and money creating different bots using different tools. You can create a single bot and use it across multiple platforms.

Your customer service team can easily respond to messages. MobileMonkey has desktop and mobile apps that give you a single inbox to easily monitor and respond to messages from different channels.

It also offers integrations with third-party software that you may already be using such as CRM software, email marketing service, webinar provider, and more.

Pricing: MobileMonkey costs from $14.25/month, billed annually, for an unlimited number of leads. There’s also a free version with unlimited leads but fewer features.

7. Tars

The Tars website

Tars is a tool that lets you create conversational landing pages. Essentially, this means replacing a traditional landing page with a chatbot.

It lets you easily qualify leads. Tars is particularly well optimized for mobile users, providing a natural and easy chatbot conversation.

Making a chatbot is quite straight forward using Tars. You can either create a conversation workflow from scratch, or you can use a pre-built template.

Pricing: Tars costs from $83.25/month, billed annually. There’s no free plan, but you can take a free 14-day trial (no credit card required).

8. Tidio

Tidio

Tidio is a live chat platform powered by chatbots. It allows you to communicate your clients by using web and mobile friendly chatbot, Facebook Messenger chatbot, and more.

It comes with an easy dashboard and a mobile app to answer all user inquires at any time from anywhere. You can also use automation as much as you like to answer customer questions and design funnels that lead to conversions.

You can use a chatbot template or create your own chatbot scenarios based on keywords and customer behavior on your site. It is easy to use and integrate with your eCommerce platform, email marketing, and help desk software.

Pricing: Starting from $18 per month. They have a free plan too but it does not include chatbots.

9. Zendesk Chat

The Zendesk Chat website

Zendesk Chat is part of Zendesk, a popular customer support platform for businesses. It has features that let you handle support tickets, chat live with your customers, and more.

You can use automated messages within Zendesk Chat, such as triggering messages based on what your customers are doing. You can also optimize your messages by testing which ones have a high engagement rate.

You can even integrate it with other chatbot tools if you want more advanced chatbot features.

Pricing: Zendesk Chat costs from $14 per agent per month, when billed annually. You can take a 14 day free trial (no credit card details needed). There’s also a free Lite version, which only lets you have 1 agent and 1 chat at a time.

10. Quriobot

The Quriobot website

Quriobot is a simple chatbot that has a free plan, making it a good option for small companies on a tight budget.

Like other chatbot software, it has a simple drag and drop interface. You can either build conversations from scratch or use one of the available templates. You can also create several bots at once.

You can adjust Quriobot’s styling to fit your website’s color scheme and you can even add custom CSS if you want to.

Quriobot integrates with help desk software such as LiveAgent, if you want a complete solution that gives you a support desk, live chat, and more.

Pricing: Quriobot has a generous free plan that allows you up to 500 chats per month, with unlimited bots and organization members. If you want more chats per month, or if you want to remove the Quriobot branding, you need to pay from €9/month. (Quriobot’s pricing is in Euros.)

11. Intercom

The Intercom website

Intercom is a flexible tool that can be used as a chatbot or for live chat with an agent. You can use it to automate your marketing and to engage users.

Intercom’s whole approach is designed to be conversational, to help you build relationships. It’s easy to scale as your business grows, too.

With Intercom, you can personalize your chatbot’s interactions with customers. You can filter and target customers based on what they do (or don’t do) and you can group them into segments based on their attributes and behavior.

Intercom integrates with email marketing services, Slack, Google Analytics, CRM software, and more.

Pricing: Intercom’s Start package costs from $39/month. However, to use the chatbot features, you need at least the Growth plan from $99/month. You can take a free 14 day trial of either of these plans (credit card details are required).

12. SnapEngage

The SnapEngage website

SnapEngage is designed to help you with both sales and support. You can use it on your WordPress site. It also integrates with Facebook Messenger, and other popular software.

It comes with ready-to-use bots, such as the Info-Capture and the Answer Bot. You can also create custom bots using the custom bot API.

If you run a healthcare site, then SnapEngage offers ‘Health Engage’ to provide secure, HIPAA-compliant chatbots, live chat, and SMS messaging.

Pricing: SnapEngage costs from $16 per user per month (with a minimum of 3 users), billed annually. Their HealthEngage option costs from $26 per user per month, again with a minimum of 3 users.

13. LivePerson

The LivePerson website

LivePerson offers live chat software, as you might expect from their name. You can also use it to create automated conversation flows using a chatbot.

Your chatbots can connect potential buyers to a live agent, send offers based on the customer’s interests, and even schedule appointments or meetings. Customers can also check on their order status, find out their account balance, and get answers to billing or payment questions.

As well as integrating with your WordPress site, LivePerson can be used on Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Pricing: LivePerson doesn’t provide a standard scale of prices. Instead, you need to contact them for a quote.

14. Ada

The Ada website

Ada is a chatbot that can tailor its responses and recommendations based on the customer’s information, intent, and interests. It’s designed to be simple to use, so that your support team can set everything up. There’s no coding involved.

You can also integrate Ada with your live chat so that customers can move seamlessly from the chatbot to a live agent. It also integrates with your team calendar to schedule appointments and bookings.

Pricing: Ada doesn’t provide prices upfront. Instead, you need to chat with the sales team or request a demo to find out how much it will cost you.

Our Pick: Best Chatbot Software

For most businesses, we recommend ChatBot.com as the best AI chatbot software because it’s easy to use and comes with pre-made workflows.

They also offer many built-in integrations with third-party marketing services, and the pricing is fairly affordable compared to other solutions.

If you’re looking for alternatives, then please take a look at FreshChat or Drift.

We hope this article helped you learn about the best AI chatbots software for your WordPress site. You might also want to take a look at our guides to the best live chat software and best business phone services for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 14 Best AI Chatbots Software for Your Website (Compared) appeared first on WPBeginner.


September 11, 2020 at 05:30PM

Thursday, September 10, 2020

How to Easily Add Custom CSS to Your WordPress Site

Sometimes you may find yourself needing to add Custom CSS in your WordPress site.

Perhaps it’s because you’re following a tutorial on WPBeginner or our YouTube channel. For most beginners, using FTP is too confusing, but there are other ways to add custom CSS.

In this article, we will show you how to easily add custom CSS to your WordPress site without editing any theme files.

Adding custom CSS to your WordPress site

Video Tutorial

If you prefer written tutorials or want to move at your own pace, then continue reading the instructions below.

Method 1: Adding Custom CSS Using Theme Customizer

Since WordPress 4.7, users can now add custom CSS directly from the WordPress admin area. This is super-easy, and you would be able to see your changes with a live preview instantly.

First, you need to head over to the Themes » Customize page.

Launching the theme customizer

This will launch the WordPress theme customizer interface.

You will see your site’s live preview with a bunch of options on the left pane. Click on the Additional CSS tab from the left pane.

Additional CSS option in WordPress theme customizer

The tab will slide to show you a simple box where you can add your custom CSS. As soon as you add a valid CSS rule, you will be able to see it applied on your website’s live preview pane.

Adding custom CSS with live preview

You can continue adding custom CSS code, until you are satisfied with how it looks on your site.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save & Publish’ button on the top when you are finished.

Save your custom CSS changes

Note: Any custom CSS that you add using theme customizer is only available with that particular theme. If you would like to use it with other themes, then you will need to copy and paste it to your new theme using the same method.

Method 2: Adding Custom CSS Using a Plugin

The first method only allows you to save custom CSS for the currently active theme. If you change the theme, then you may need to copy and paste your custom CSS to the new theme.

If you want your custom CSS to be applied regardless of which WordPress theme you are using, then this method is for you.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Simple Custom CSS plugin. Upon activation simply go to Appearance » Custom CSS and write down or paste your custom CSS.

Simple Custom CSS

Don’t forget to press the ‘Update Custom CSS’ button to save your changes.

You can now view your WordPress website to see the custom CSS in action.

Using a Custom CSS plugin vs Adding CSS in Theme

Both methods described above are recommended for beginners. Advanced users can also add custom CSS directly to their themes.

However, adding custom CSS snippets into your parent theme is not recommended. Your CSS changes will be lost if you accidentally update the theme without saving your custom changes.

The best approach is to use a child theme instead. However, many beginners don’t want to create a child theme. Apart from adding custom CSS, often beginners really don’t know how they will be using that child theme.

Using a custom CSS plugin allows you to store your custom CSS independently from your theme. This way you can easily switch themes and your custom CSS will still be there.

Another great way to add custom CSS to your WordPress site is by using the CSS Hero plugin. This wonderful plugin allows you to edit almost every CSS style on your WordPress site without writing a single line of code.

Editing custom CSS with CSS Hero plugin for WordPress

We hope this article helped add custom CSS to your WordPress site. You may also want to see how our guide on how to create a custom WordPress theme without writing any code, and the best WordPress drag & drop page builder plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Easily Add Custom CSS to Your WordPress Site appeared first on WPBeginner.


September 10, 2020 at 05:00PM

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

How to Create an RSVP Form in WordPress (Easy)

Are you planning a big event like a birthday party, fundraiser, or even a wedding? Then you need an easy way to collect RSVPs from your guests.

If you run a WordPress website, then you can easily add an RSVP form without writing any code.

In this article, we will show you how to create an RSVP form in WordPress to improve your planning.

Creating an RSVP form in WordPress

Why Create an RSVP Form in WordPress?

Creating an RSVP form on your website can save you hours of time.

Normally, guests might reply in lots of different ways to your invitation. They could respond by email, text, phone call, or even by telling you at another event.

This can be very difficult to manage. It’s easy to forget who has replied.

That’s why it’s always a good idea to create an RSVP form in WordPress. This means everyone will reply in the same way. Even better, the RSVPs will be saved in your WordPress database.

Creating Your RSVP Form in WordPress

First, you will need to install and active the WPForms plugin for WordPress. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Tip: We recommend using the WPForms’ Pro version or higher. That way, you have access to useful form templates to speed up the process of creating your RSVP form. However, you can use the WPForms lite version to also create the RSVP form.

Upon activation, go to WPForms » Addons in your WordPress dashboard:

The WPForms addons page in your WordPress admin

Next, search for the Form Templates addon. Go ahead and click the ‘Install Addon’ button to install it.

The Form Templates addon for WPForms

Now it’s time to create your RSVP form. First, go to the WPForms » Add New page. Here, you need to type in a name for your RSVP form:

Naming your RSVP form

Below this on the page, you will see the Additional Templates section. Go ahead and type in ‘RSVP’ to see all the RSVP form templates.

We are going to use the Party Invitation RSVP Form, which is suitable for any type of party.

Choose one of the RSVP form templates

Once you have selected your template, WPForms will open it up in the drag and drop form builder:

The party invite RSVP template in the WPForms form builder

Here, you can change anything you like about the form. Simply click on the part of the form you want to change and then edit it on the left hand side.

For instance, we are going to click on the ‘Name’ field and change it to the ‘Simple’ format:

Changing the name field in WPForms

What if you want to add extra options to the ‘Will you be attending’ field? Just click on it then use the (+) button to add more choices:

Adding more options to the multiple choice field

It’s easy to use the ‘Add Fields’ tab to drag and drop more fields onto your form, too:

Adding new fields to the RSVP form

We have added a ‘Single Line Text’ field to ask about allergies and dietary requirements.

Adding a simple text field to ask about allergies and dietary requirements

Once you’re happy with your form, don’t forget to click the Save button at the top of the screen before moving on.

Make sure you save your RSVP form

Next, go to the Settings » Notifications page for your form. This lets you control where the RSVPs are sent.

Checking the notification settings for your RSVP form

Simply change the ‘Send To Email Address’ to the email address you want to use. By default, it goes to {admin_email} which is normally the email address of whoever set up the WordPress site.

Changing the Send To email address for your RSVP form

If you want RSVPs to go to more than one person, follow our instructions to create a form with multiple recipients.

You can also change other settings here, such as the subject line of the emails.

Next, you may want to change the message that guests will see after submitting the form. To do this, click on the Confirmations tab. Simply delete the existing message and type in the message you want to use instead.

Editing the confirmation message for your RSVP form

Again, don’t forget to click the Save button before exiting your form.

Adding Your RSVP Form to a Page in WordPress

It’s easy to put your RSVP form on any post or page on your website. You can even add it to your sidebar using the WPForms widget.

We are going to create a new page for our form. To do this, just go to Pages » Add New. Then, go ahead and enter any content you want for your page.

Adding a page for your RSVP form in WordPress

To add your form, simply click the + icon to add a new block. Then, search for the WPForms block.

Adding a WPForms block to your page

Once you have added that block to your page, you need to select your RSVP form in the dropdown list:

Selecting the RSVP form from the WPForms dropdown list

Finally, go ahead and publish or preview your page to see your form on your website:

The RSVP form live on the website

Checking Your Guest List in WordPress

Once people have had a chance to RSVP, you will want to construct a guest list.

Luckily, WPForms makes this process quick and easy for you. Instead of going through all the notification emails, it’s easy to download the guest list from WordPress (this feature is only available in WPForms pro version).

First, go to WPForms » All Forms in your WordPress dashboard.

The Entries page for WPForms in the WordPress admin

Then, click on the name of your form at the bottom of this page:

Click on the name of your form to view the entries

You will now see a table that summarizes the RSVPs. Just click ‘View’ next to any of these to see the full details.

To download the whole guest list, simply click the ‘Export All (CSV)’ button.

Export a CSV of your RSVP form's entries to produce a guest list

WPForms will then prompt you to confirm which fields you want to include. By default, all will be checked:

Confirm the fields you want to include in your export

Simply scroll down and click the ‘Download Export File’ button:

Downloading your export of RSVPs

It will now download to your computer as a CSV file. You can be open it in Excel or any spreadsheet program like Google Spreadsheet.

We hope this article helped you learn how to create an RSVP form in WordPress. You might also want to see our guide on how to create a professional business email address, and how to create a custom WordPress theme (without writing any code).

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Create an RSVP Form in WordPress (Easy) appeared first on WPBeginner.


September 09, 2020 at 05:00PM

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

How to Change Sender Name in Outgoing WordPress Email

Do you want to change the default sender name and email address for outgoing WordPress emails?

By default, WordPress uses ‘WordPress’ as the sender name for all outgoing WordPress notification emails. This doesn’t look very professional, and you may want to change that to your business name.

In this article, we will show you how to easily change the default sender name and email address in outgoing WordPress emails.

Changing sender name and email address in outgoing WordPress emails

Why You Should Change the Default Sender Information in WordPress?

WordPress sends several email notifications to the site administrator as well as other users on your website.

This includes very important email notifications such as forgot password emails, website error and recovery emails, new user registration, and more.

By default, it uses ‘WordPress’ as the sender’s name and a non-existent email address (wordpress@yourdomain.com) as the sender email.

Many spam filters block your WordPress emails believing it to be spam. Sometimes it does not even make it to the spam folder.

For more on this topic, take a look at our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue.

The outgoing email notifications are important, and you should use your own brand and email address. This increases the authenticity of your brand and increases name recognition among your users.

For instance, if you run an online store, then you would want customers to get email notifications with your store name as the sender.

See our guide on how to get a free business email address for your website in 5 minutes.

Having said that, let’s see how to change the default sender name and email address in outgoing WordPress email notifications.

Method 1. Changing Default Sender Name and Email using WP Mail SMTP

This method is easier and recommended for all WordPress users.

For this method, we’ll be using the WP Mail SMTP Pro plugin. It is the best WordPress SMTP plugin on the market, used by over 1 million website owners.

This plugin allows you to easily change the default sender name and email address for outgoing WordPress emails. It also helps you fix the WordPress email deliverability problem.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Mail SMTP Pro plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit WP Mail SMTP » Settings to configure plugin settings. Under the Mail section, you can simply enter the email address and the name you want to use to send WordPress emails.

Change sender name and email in WordPress using WP Mail SMTP

Below that you can find the options to set up an SMTP server to send WordPress emails. By default, the plugin will use PHP method provided by your WordPress hosting company which is less reliable.

We recommend using any of the listed SMTP services to properly send WordPress emails for higher guaranteed deliverability.

Select mailer

If you choose an SMTP service, then follow the on-screen instructions to connect the plugin with your SMTP service provider.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Settings’ button to save your changes.

Test Your WordPress Emails

WP Mail SMTP Pro also allows you to test your WordPress email settings. Simply go to the WP Mail SMTP » Settings page and switch to the ‘Email Test’ tab.

Test WordPress emails using WP Mail SMTP

From here, you just need to provide an email address that you can access and then click on the ‘Send Email’ button.

The plugin will now send a test email to the address you provided. You can check your inbox to make sure that you can receive WordPress emails, and it has the correct sender name and sender email address.

WP Mail SMTP works with all popular WordPress plugins like WooCommerce, WPForms, and more.

For more detailed instructions, you may want to see our article on how to use SMTP to send WordPress emails.

Method 2: Changing Default Sender Name and Email using a CB Change Mail Sender

This method is only recommended if you don’t use an SMTP service, or the first method is not working for you.

Using this method does not improve your WordPress email deliverability or make it easier to troubleshoot email issues. However, if your WordPress emails are working, then it will allow you to change sender name and email address.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the CB Change Mail Sender plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will notice a new menu item labeled CB Mail Sender in your WordPress admin bar. Clicking on it will take you to plugin’s settings page.

CB Mail Sender

You will need to enter the name and email address you want to be used for outgoing WordPress emails.

Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

That’s all, your WordPress notification emails will now show the name and email address you entered in plugin settings.

There is no method provided by the plugin to test your email settings. You can do that by performing actions that generate WordPress notification emails like creating a new user, requesting a password reset, and more.

Method 3: Manually Change Sender Name and Email Address

This method is not recommended for beginners. This method requires you to paste code into your WordPress files. It also does not fix any email deliverability issues and is harder to troubleshoot.

If you are new to adding code in WordPress, then take a look at our beginners guide on pasting snippets from web into WordPress.

You will need to add the following code in your theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plugin.


// Function to change email address
function wpb_sender_email( $original_email_address ) {
    return 'tim.smith@example.com';
}

// Function to change sender name
function wpb_sender_name( $original_email_from ) {
        return 'Tim Smith';
}

// Hooking up our functions to WordPress filters 
add_filter( 'wp_mail_from', 'wpb_sender_email' );
add_filter( 'wp_mail_from_name', 'wpb_sender_name' );

This code simply replaces the default WordPress sender name and email address with your custom sender name and email address.

You can test this by adding a new user, changing passwords, or any other action that sends a WordPress notification email.

We hope this article helped you learn how to change the sender’s name and email address in outgoing WordPress emails. You may also want to see our guide on the best bulk email marketing services to bulk send email to all your users, and our comparison of the best WordPress page builder plugins to customize your site without any code.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Change Sender Name in Outgoing WordPress Email appeared first on WPBeginner.


September 08, 2020 at 05:00PM

Monday, September 7, 2020

How to Remove the Date from WordPress URLs

Do you want to remove the date from your WordPress URLs?

WordPress comes with an SEO friendly URL structure. This includes several link formats including one that adds dates to your WordPress post URLs.

In this article, we will show you how to easily remove the date from your WordPress URLs.

Removing date from your WordPress URLs

Why Dates Appear in WordPress URLs?

By default, WordPress uses a non human-readable link structure for post and page URLs which looks like this:

https://ift.tt/1uHJSlG

It uses post ID in the URL which does not look very good or meaningful.

However, WordPress also allows you to easily change this to more meaningful and SEO friendly URLs. It gives you a bunch of options to choose from under Settings » Permalinks page.

Permalinks page

Choosing the ‘Month and name’ or ‘Day and name’ options will add the date parameters to your WordPress URLs. They will then look like this:

Day and name: https://ift.tt/2ZfqCCv
Month and name: https://ift.tt/3bzjVQF

These URLs are better than the default ugly URLs. They are still SEO friendly as well. However, they are unnecessarily lengthy and the dates make your articles look old.

That’s why a lot of users want to switch to just ‘Post name’ URL structure which will remove the date and just use the post slug keyword in the URL.

Name: https://ift.tt/32aI1OV

It is shorter, meaningful, SEO friendly, and doesn’t look dated as time passes.

Things You Should Consider before Removing Date from WordPress URLs

If you are starting a new WordPress blog and haven’t launched it yet, then it is safe to remove the date from WordPress URLs.

However, if your website has been around for some time, then you will need to keep the following things in mind.

Changing the URL structure may result in 404 errors for your users and search engines. This means you may see warnings and errors in your Google Search Console reports.

Your search engine rankings may also get affected as the link backs to your old articles will now lead to 404 errors.

Both of these issues can be fixed by setting up redirects, and we will show you how to do that later in this article.

Changing the URL structure will also reset your social share counts. Unfortunately, most social share count services do not track the redirected URLs and will reset share count for them.

Removing Date from WordPress URLs

First, you need to create a complete WordPress backup of your website. This will allow you to restore your website to an earlier stage in case things don’t work out as you expected.

After that, you need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page and choose ‘Name’ as your permalink option.

Change permalinks

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.

WordPress will now remove the date from your WordPress URLs and start using the name-based URL structure.

Setting up Redirects to Preserve SEO Rankings

Now that you have removed the date from your WordPress URLs. You need to set up proper redirects.

Redirects will send users to the updated URLs without showing a 404 error. This will also help search engines understand that the old URLs are now moved to these new URLs.

First, you need to install and activate the Redirection plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Tools » Redirection page and click on the ‘Start setup’ button.

Start redirection setup

The plugin will then show you a couple of options. It can automatically detect and alert you if a posts URL is changed and keep a log of redirects. You can also leave both these options unchecked and simply click on the ‘Continue setup’ button.

Continue setup

The plugin will then run some tests and if everything looks good then you can click on the Finish setup button. After that, it will store plugin settings into the WordPress database.

Once finished, you will see the plugin’s settings page. From here, you need to click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top or scroll down to the ‘Add new redirection’ section.

Add new redirect field

You will see a form with Source and Target fields. ‘Source’ is the field where you’ll describe your old URL structure and ‘Target’ is the location of the new URL.

If you were using the ‘Day and name’ URLs, then you will enter the following values in the source and target fields:

Source: /(\d*)/(\d*)/(\d*)/([A-Za-z0-9-*])
Target: /$4
Redirect rules for day and name URLs

If you were using ‘Month and name’ URLs, then you’ll enter the following values:

Source: /(\d*)/(\d*)/([A-Za-z0-9-*])
Target: /$3

Month name redirects

Don’t forget to select Regex and click on the ‘Add Redirect’ button to save your changes.

The plugin will now redirect users to your new name-based URLs.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily remove the date from WordPress URLs. You may also want to see our guide on the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them as well as our collection of the best WordPress SEO plugins.

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The post How to Remove the Date from WordPress URLs appeared first on WPBeginner.


September 07, 2020 at 05:00PM