Are you looking to add a countdown timer to their WordPress website?
Countdown timers are a great way to build anticipation, excitement, and create a FOMO effect on your website. There are many different countdown plugins that let you create a countdown timer, so which one should you use?
In this article, we’ll share the best countdown plugins for WordPress and explain the key features of each.
What is a Countdown Timer Plugin & When You Need it?
A countdown timer WordPress plugin allows you to display a timer that counts down to a specific time or date.
Savvy marketers use countdown timers to build excitement and create a sense of urgency among their customers. It helps them take advantage of the FOMO effect to boost conversions.
There are many plugins that allow you to add countdown timers to your website. These countdown timers can be divided into two groups:
Normal Countdown Timers
A normal countdown timer, sometimes called a static or fixed countdown timer, is what most people think of when they imagine a timer. This timer counts down to a certain fixed time. That might be the launch of a WordPress website, the end of a sale, or another event.
The countdown clock’s endpoint is the same for everyone and doesn’t change depending on who’s viewing it.
Evergreen Timer
An evergreen countdown timer, sometimes called a dynamic countdown timer, is specific to each user. It begins counting down when the person arrives on your site. For instance, they might have 4 hours to take advantage of a special offer.
This can be a powerful marketing technique as it lets you create a sense of urgency.
Note that most WordPress plugins are designed to run normal countdown timers, and only some let you run evergreen timers.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the best countdown timer plugins for WordPress.
There are lots of ways you can position your countdown timer using OptinMonster. One of the best is to use a floating bar that sticks to the top or bottom of your page. That way, it stays visible at all times.
Here’s a countdown timer we created using the OptinMonster plugin:
You’ll need the OptinMonster’s Pro plan or higher to use countdown timers.
They allow you to add countdown timers on popups, floating bars, full-screen welcome mats, scroll boxes, and inline widgets. On top of that, you can personalize the timers based on the user’s location, which page they’re on, where they’re visiting from, and more.
SeedProd is the best WordPress website builder and landing page plugin. It is a great option if you want to add countdown timer animation to your landing pages.
SeedProd lets you easily set up a special landing page and put your site into coming soon or maintenance mode. Plus, it has a powerful drag-and-drop website builder. You can easily customize your WordPress theme without touching a single line of code.
With this plugin, you can create a normal and evergreen timer for your website. It offers lots of customization options, including pre-built templates for countdown timers.
Here’s a countdown timer we created using SeedProd’s Coming Soon Page Pro plugin:
Countdown Timer Ultimate is another good option to consider if you want to create a normal countdown timer. It’s a simple plugin that allows you to show timers on the entire website or specific to individual site visitors.
You can use Countdown Timer Ultimate to make as many countdown timers as you want, and you can customize how they look to some degree.
Here’s a preview of the countdown timer that you can create using the free version of the Countdown Timer Ultimate plugin:
The pro plugin gives you more advanced options. These include being able to show specific text when the countdown expires and extra design features.
Countdown Builder is a simple countdown timer with multiple different styles built in. These include circle countdowns, flip clock countdowns, and even a coming soon page.
You can place your timer within a post or page in the WordPress block editor by selecting the ‘Countdown’ block or using a shortcode. You can also choose to display it automatically on specific posts or pages.
Here’s a preview of a countdown timer you can create using the plugin:
If you want, you can edit how your clock looks in detail, changing things like the font size, the labels, and the animation style. You don’t need to do this with CSS. There’s a built-in editor in the plugin.
Evergreen Countdown Timer is the next countdown plugin on our list. It lets you create evergreen countdowns, as you might expect from its name. You can also use it to create normal countdowns as well.
You can choose how the plugin detects visitors by a cookie or their IP address.
To add the timers to your page, you’ll need to enter a shortcode. You can simply copy and paste this from the Manager section of your countdown timer settings.
Once your timer hits zero, you can automatically redirect the visitor to a URL of your choice. For instance, you could send them to a registration page if you’re counting down to the launch of your new course.
Here’s a timer we created using the Evergreen Countdown Timer plugin:
There’s a pro version of the plugin, which gives you lots of extra options. It also lets you choose more colors than just black or white for your timer.
With the Pro version, you can provide a countdown for available spots, such as seats or tickets. This could work well if you’re selling places for a paid webinar or another live event.
HurryTimer is a free countdown timer plugin that lets you create both evergreen and regular timers. The evergreen timer uses both cookie and IP detection to display the right timer to each individual user.
You can also set up timers to run a countdown between two fixed dates. This is useful if you want to get ready for an upcoming sale in advance.
The timer works with WooCommerce, though you don’t have to run WooCommerce to use it. You can display your timer several times on the same page if you want to.
Here’s a timer we created using HurryTimer:
If you have the Pro version, you can set up a recurring timer. This is a timer that runs according to the rules that you specify. For instance, you could have a timer that shows shipping cut-off times.
With the pro version, you can also create an announcement bar that sticks to the top or bottom of the screen to keep your timer visible.
7. Sales Countdown Timer
Sales Countdown Timer is designed for WooCommerce stores. It helps show timers for sale events, promotional offers, and the latest campaigns.
You can easily integrate the plugin with your WooCommerce products. Plus, it offers different customization options. You can change the style of the timers, edit the message, change the colors in the timer clock, and more.
Besides that, the plugin also lets you choose the location of the timer, whether you’d like to make it sticky, and also select which type of product pages you’d like to show the countdown timer.
Here is a look at the countdown timer we created using the plugin:
Are you tired of your website emails being marked as spam?
Have you ever wished there was an easy and reliable way to get your website emails delivered to your customer’s inbox WITHOUT the high costs?
If you’re like me and most other smart website owners, then you have at least wished for this solution a couple times in your WordPress journey.
Today, I’m excited to announce my new product, SendLayer, which will level up your website’s email infrastructure.
We built this tool to help you get your website emails into your user’s inbox with maximum deliverability, reliability, and scalability.
What is SendLayer?
SendLayer is a SMTP email service API that helps your website emails get into customer’s inbox without being marked as spam.
It offers blazing fast email delivery while protecting your domain reputation from spam filters and giving you detailed email logs along with open & click analytics.
SendLayer seamlessly connects with WordPress, so you can use it to reliably send website emails like store receipts, confirmation emails, shipping notifications, password reset emails, and other WordPress emails with maximum reliability.
Why Do You Need SendLayer?
If you’re like most users, then you have likely run into the problem of WordPress not sending email issue. This is one of the most commonly asked questions on WPBeginner.
Many of our beginner level users ask us why their contact form plugin is not sending emails, or why they are not seeing any WordPress notifications.
That’s because most WordPress hosting servers are not configured to send emails using the default PHP mail() function.
And even if your hosting server is configured properly, many email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, and others use sophisticated tools to reduce email spam. These tools try to detect if an email is really coming from the location that it claims to be.
Emails sent by WordPress websites often fail the test.
This means that majority of the emails sent by your website will either land in user’s spam inbox or not get delivered at all. This include your website’s contact form plugin emails, your online store receipts, password reset emails, admin notifications, and more.
This is why most smart website owners use SMTP for sending emails in WordPress.
And this is why I created the free WP Mail SMTP plugin which is used by over 3 million websites.
But the problem was that a lot of beginner users still didn’t know how to set up SMTP properly because simply installing the plugin isn’t enough.
You still needed to use a SMTP email service that’s built for maximum deliverability, reliability, and scalability. We integrated with numerous service providers like Amazon, Google, etc, but they were all quite difficult to use for beginners.
So after listening to a lot of our user feedback, I decided to work with my team to finally create a beginner-friendly SMTP service, SendLayer, that works for all types of websites including WordPress.
Whether you’re using WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel, Drupal, Joomla, or any other platform, you can use SendLayer to improve your email deliverability.
SendLayer gives you access to:
Awesome email deliverability
Spam Filter protection
Detailed email logs
Open and click analytics
Event-based webhooks to setup custom notifications
SMTP relay API for those that want to use SendLayer inside custom apps
Simple suppression list to protect your delivery reputation
… and a whole lot more.
Basically, if you’re serious about your website and want to grow your online business, then you know that email deliverability is important.
And SendLayer offers you one of the best email infrastructure in the market.
Once connected with your WordPress site, it automatically ensures that all your website emails get delivered in your user’s inbox.
While I’m sharing the SendLayer news with you today, SendLayer has actually been out since April of 2022. After extensively testing it through out 2021, we did a soft-launch earlier in the year and have since onboarded thousands of website owners already using the platform.
We have a really exciting roadmap ahead of us, and I’m really proud of our team.
We are working on building ,pre cutting-edge email delivery tools to help small business owners and online store owners get their emails delivered into their user’s inbox, so you can continue to maximize your revenue growth.
Do you want to know about the history of blogging?
If you are thinking about starting a WordPress blog today, then you might like to know that there are 1.9 billion websites in the world, and the blogging industry makes up one-third of it. But it didn’t start out that way.
In this article, we’ll share the small beginnings of blogging, the powerful blogging platforms that evolved, and how WordPress came to power over 43% of all websites.
1993-1994: The First Blogs Were Published
Blogging was born sometime around 1993 or 1994. No one was expecting the impact it would have on the world, and the word ‘blog’ didn’t even exist. As a result, there
were no historians watching out for it, and no one kept careful records.
We know that Rob Palmer started a plain text journal online in late 1993. In an
article on how he became the first blogger, Rob explains how costly it was to run a website in those days. The domain name cost him $100, and basic hosting cost over $100 a month (for comparison, it costs $2.69 per month now).
However, it’s more widely recognized that the first blog was created by 19-year-old student Justin Hall. His home page contained hyperlinks to interesting content he found online, and articles he wrote himself. The content included basic HTML text formatting and small images.
Ten years later, the New York Times Magazine named him the “founding father of personal bloggers”. You can still find an early version of Justin’s page preserved on links.net.
Three or four years later, the tech blog SlashDot was launched in September 1997.
December 1997: The Term ‘Weblog’ Was Coined
Originally, blogs didn’t have a name. They were thought of as online journals or diaries, or personal home pages.
In December 1997, Jorn Barger came up with the term ‘weblog’. He maintained an internet culture website called Robot Wisdom, and the term reflected his process of ‘logging the web’ as he browsed.
August 1998 was the first time a traditional news site tried blogging. Journalist Jonathan Duke ‘blogged’ about Hurricane Bonnie for the Charlotte Observer, but didn’t use the term itself.
October 1998: The Open Diary Platform Was Launched
Creating websites was technical, so eventually blogging platforms were created that made it easy for users to record their thoughts and experiences online.
One of the earlier ones was The Open Diary, which developed an online community by allowing users to comment on one another’s posts.
Here’s an early screenshot preserved on the Internet Archive. Notice that blogs were designed for much lower-resolution screens back then.
March 1999: RSS Made Blog Subscription a Reality
RSS is an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It was initially released in March 1999 and is a format used for delivering frequently changing web content from websites and other online publishers.
It allows users to keep track of updates to their favorite websites without having to visit each site individually. They are able to read the latest content in an RSS feed reader or their email.
In April 1999, developer Peter Merholz added some humor to his website, Peterme.com. He broke up the word ‘weblog’, into two words, ‘we blog’. This caught on, and the term ‘blog’ was born.
April 1999: LiveJournal, an Early Blogging Platform, Was Launched
In April 1999, programmer Brad Fitzpatrick launched the LiveJournal platform as a way to keep in touch with his high school friends. It quickly grew into a community of people recording their thoughts online.
LiveJournal was easy to use because it provided a single open text area. Its competitors at the time offered form-based text fields.
In January 1995, the blogging company Six Apart purchased the company that operated LiveJournal, and the platform is still operating today. Although a lot of LiveJournal users have switched to WordPress by following our guide on how to move from LiveJournal to WordPress because WordPress is more powerful and easier to use.
In July 1999, another blogging platform called Metafilter was launched. It was known as MeFi, and its members could post entries to be published on the main website.
August 1999: Blogger Was Launched by Para Labs
Blogger is another early blogging platform, first launched in August 1999 by Pyra Labs. It offered a quick and easy way to create a blog for non-tech-savvy users.
Every entry on Blogger was given a permanent and shareable URL or permalink. This made it easy for users to access the content they were searching for and made Blogger the platform of choice for a lot of writers.
Later in 2003, Google acquired Blogger and over time redesigned it into the product we know today. It is WordPress’s largest competitor, and you can learn more in our comparison of WordPress vs Blogger (Pros and cons).
In January 2000, the first known vlog entry was created by Adam Kontras, and also the popular blog Boing Boing was born.
Early 2001: b2/cafelog, the Precursor of WordPress, Was Launched
In early 2001, the French programmer Michel Valdrighi launched a personal publishing system with a new design known as b2 or cafelog.
In contrast with most other blogging systems at the time, the software needed to be installed on the user’s own web server, and it dynamically created pages from the contents of a MySQL database. WordPress users will find this familiar.
b2/cafelog became popular and was eventually installed on about 2,000 blogs. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned, paving the way for its source code to form the basis of WordPress in 2003.
October 2001: The Moveable Type Blogging Platform Was Released
The company Six Apart launched the Moveable Type blog publishing system in October 2001. Like b2, it needed to be installed on a web server. They introduced a trackback system in version 2.2 that has been adopted by other blogging platforms including WordPress.
In February 2002, Heather Armstrong lost her job for writing about her work colleagues on her personal blog, dooce.com. As a result, ‘dooced’ has become a term that means ‘fired for blogging.’
April 2002: TheMommyBlog.com Was Founded
In April 2002, Melinda Roberts started TheMommyBlog.com, one of the first blogs focussing on parenting and family life. This would inspire more than 3.9 million other parenting blogs over the next ten years.
The popular Gizmodo blog was also launched in July 2002.
August 2002: Blogads Allowed Blogs to Be Easily Monetized
Blogads, the first broker of blog advertising, launched in August 2002. This allowed many bloggers to turn their hobby into their primary source of income.
Less than a year later, Google launched AdSense, a competing platform.
November 2002: The Blog Search Engine Technorati Was Launched
Technorati provided a search engine for bloggers in November 2002, allowing blog readers to easily find useful content. In 2008, Technorati also launched an ad network.
Gawker, the first gossip blog, was launched in December 2002. It ceased operations in August 2016 after a legal battle and was later relaunched in July 2021.
February 2003: The Birth of Live Blogging
In February 2003, The Guardian made use of live blogging during the Prime Minister’s question time. They called this ‘live text’ and started to use it frequently for sporting events.
Today live blogging has taken many forms from self-hosted live blogs done on CNN and other blogs, to even real-time tweets which in essence are a form of live blog.
In February 2003, Google acquired Blogger, which was at that time the biggest and most successful blogging platform. It continued to grow in popularity until mid-2010.
However, since then WordPress steadily rose in popularity, and has been beating Blogger and dominating the trends since 2014.
Blogger remains the second most popular platform used by about 0.4% of blogs, while WordPress used is
by an astonishing 97%.
In March 2003, an anonymous Iraqi blogger known as ‘Salam Pax’ blogged about the Iraq War to a worldwide audience.
May 2003: WordPress Was Released
In May 2003, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little released the first version of WordPress. It was based on the code of an earlier blogging platform, b2/cafelog, that they were involved in. The new software retained the best parts of the older platform and added new features.
Like b2/cafelog, the software needed to be installed on a web hosting server, and dynamically created web pages from a MySQL database, just as the current version of WordPress does.
One goal of the platform was to be easy to set up. Here’s a preview of the WordPress 1.0 basic settings screen:
After purchasing Blogger, Google launched its online advertising platform Adsense in June 2003. Its unique feature was to match ads with blog content, and it made it easy for bloggers to start making money.
Jason Calacanis founded Weblogs, Inc. in September 2003. It eventually grew into a portfolio of 85 blogs. In 2005 he sold the company to AOL for $30 million.
TypePad, a commercial blogging platform based on Moveable Type, was released in October 2003 and hosted blogs for major multimedia companies such as the BBC.
February 2004: The Year of the Video Blog
In February 2004, videographer Steve Garfield started to upload one or two short videos each month to his personal blog. These often covered news events such as protests and rallies.
Other video bloggers started doing the same, and this became known as ‘vlogging.’ Steve Garfield dubbed 2004 ‘the year of the video blog.’
This led the way for YouTube to be launched the following year.
In September 2004, Darren Rowse launched ProBlogger.net.
December 2004: ‘Blog’ Was the Merriam-Webster Word for the Year
In 2004, the most looked-up word in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary was ‘blog’. It became their word for the year.
This shows how much blogging was impacting the mainstream world. In fact, 32 million Americans were reading blogs at the time according to one study.
In February 2005, WordPress 1.5 was released, introducing themes.
February 2005: YouTube Was Launched
With the growth of video blogging, YouTube was launched in February 2005. This made it much easy for users to upload video content to the internet.
It would be purchased by Google the following year.
Blogging continued to grow in credibility. In March 2005, Garrett Graff became the first blogger to be granted a press pass for the White House. The popular tech blog TechCrunch was launched in June 2005, and Mashable the following month.
August 2005: Automattic Was Founded
In August 2005, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg founded a new company, Automattic. The following year, it launched a new blog hosting service known as WordPress.com.
This allowed you to create a WordPress blog for free, but without the advanced features of self-hosted WordPress. You could purchase additional options like a custom domain name, additional storage, and other premium services.
Because of the similarity in names, beginners often start with WordPress.com thinking they are getting the powerful WordPress.org software.
In December 2005, it was estimated that $100 million worth of blog ads were sold that year. Also, WordPress 2.0 was launched, introducing the new admin dashboard.
November 2005: Google Analytics Was Launched
To create a successful blog, it’s helpful to know how users interact with your website, including the blog posts they enjoy and those they don’t. In November 2005, Google Analytics was launched to help website owners track user activity.
It was initially developed from other analytics software acquired by Google, including Urchin on Demand and Adaptive Path, and additional features were added in the following years.
March 2006: Launch of Twitter, the Popular Microblogging Platform
In March 2006, Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter and sent out the first tweet. This new platform restricted posts to 140 characters or less, introducing the concept of microblogging.
You can use WordPress Twitter plugins to include your recent tweets on your website or encourage visitors to share your blog posts.
Automattic filed for trademark registration for the WordPress name and logo in March 2006. At the time there were 50 million blogs on the internet according to Technorati.
August 2006: The First WordCamp Was Held in San Fransisco
WordCamps are locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. The first WordCamp was organized in San Francisco by Matt Mullenweg in August 2006.
Since then local communities around the world have organized hundreds of others. If you would like to attend one, you may be interested in our infographic on what a WordCamp is and why you should attend.
October 2006: Wix Hosted Blogging Platform Was Launched
Wix was launched in October 2006. It is a popular hosted platform that offered a drag-and-drop website builder, allowing small businesses to easily build a website without coding skills. However, themes were limited, and you had to pay for every third-party plugin.
Wix currently has over 110 million users across the globe. Learn how it compares with WordPress in our article on Wix vs WordPress.
Google acquired YouTube in October 2006.
February 2007: Tumblr Microblogging Platform Was Released
Tumblr was launched in February 2007. It’s a microblogging platform with social networking features including following other blogs, reblogging, built-in sharing tools, and more.
The platform was purchased by Yahoo in 2013, then acquired by Verizon in 2017. It is currently owned by Automattic.
Posterous, a similar microblogging platform, was launched in May 2008. On an unrelated note, the White House started its own blog in January 2009.
July 2009: WPBeginner Was Launched
In July 2009, the WPBeginner blog was launched by 18-year-old web developer Syed Balkhi. He decided that instead of maintaining his clients’ WordPress websites, he would teach them to do it themselves.
He scoured the web to find a resource that could help his clients and other new WordPress users, but most WordPress tutorials were written by developers for developers. So he created WPBeginner as a resource targeted toward WordPress beginners and DIY users.
Since then, WPBeginner has become the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry.
In June 2010, Automattic donated the ‘WordPress’ trademark to WordPress.org. By the end of the year, there were more than 152 million blogs across all platforms and 11% of bloggers were earning their primary income from blogging.
August 2012: Medium Was Launched
Evan Williams, a co-founder of Pyra Labs which created Blogger, launched a different type of blogging platform called Medium. It works like a social network where you can publish articles.
Medium has grown into a community of writers, bloggers, journalists, and experts. It is an easy-to-use blogging platform with limited social networking features.
April 2013: Ghost Minimal Blogging Platform Was Launched
Ghost is a minimalist blogging platform with features entirely focused on writing blog posts. It was launched in April 2013 and is available as a hosted platform, and also a version that you can host on your own server, though this is tricky.
Ghost now has over 3 million installs with an active monthly user base of over 10,000. You can learn how it compares with WordPress in our WordPress vs Ghost guide.
In April 2013, LinkedIn acquired the Pulse blogging platform, which was rolled out to all users over the next couple of years.
September 2013: OptinMonster Was Launched
In September 2013, Syed Balkhi and Thomas Griffin co-founded OptinMonster, the most powerful conversion optimization software. It was designed to help bloggers grow their email lists in WordPress and convert website visitors into subscribers.
Over the years, Syed had tried numerous techniques to get more email subscribers. He was able to get 70–80 new subscribers each day by adding a sidebar form, contact form, and other landing pages to his site.
When he started using OptinMonster, he started getting 600% more email subscribers even though his blog was getting the same amount of traffic as before.
In April 2015, there were more than 227 million blogs worldwide.
March 2016: WPForms Was Launched
The following year, Syed Balkhi co-founded another product, this time with Jared Atchison. WPForms is a powerful WordPress plugin that makes it easy for bloggers to create forms using templates and drag and drop.
You can easily create a contact form, online survey form, email subscription form, donation form, billing order form, or any other type of form with just a few clicks without hiring a developer or learning how to code.
In April 2016, Syed Balkhi acquired Yoast Analytics, the most popular Google Analytics integration in the world, and rebranded it as MonsterInsights. The plugin allows you to easily install Google analytics in WordPress and shows you helpful reports in your dashboard.
Google Analytics shows you how your audience interacts with your website, which is crucial for a successful blog. The best part about using MonsterInsights is that you can add the Google Analytics tracking code without editing code or hiring a developer.
In May 2016, WordPress introduced the .blog domain extension as an alternative to .com, .net and .org. By February 2017, there were more than 300 million blogs online.
November 2017: Substack Was Founded
Substack, an online newsletter publishing platform, was founded in November 2017. It allows you to easily send newsletter emails to your subscribers.
You can have both paid and free subscriptions, and Substack gets a share of all your paid subscription fees. Apart from newsletters, you also get a basic website and podcast hosting.
However, Substack doesn’t have all the functionality of a typical blogging platform or a content management system. You can learn how it compares with WordPress in our guide on Substack vs WordPress: which one is better?
WordPress 5.0 was released in December 2018 and introduced the block editor, codenamed Gutenberg.
October 2018: SeedProd Joined Awesome Motive
In October 2018, SeedProd, the popular coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress joined Awesome Motive through a merger, along with the plugin’s founder, John Turner. At the time it was used by 800,000 WordPress sites.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the WPBeginner blog, the WPBeginner Engage Facebook Group was launched in April 2019. It currently has over 89,000 members and is the largest WordPress group on Facebook.
February 2020: All in One SEO Acquired by Awesome Motive
In January, Awesome Motive acquired All in One SEO (AIOSEO), the original WordPress SEO plugin that was being used by over 2 million websites at the time.
The plugin was released in 2007 by Michael Torbert and allows you to easily optimize your WordPress blog for search engines and social media platforms.
Later that year, PushEngage a leading web push notification software was acquired by Awesome Motive to help more bloggers use push notification to notify their users about new blog posts.
Web push notifications have become one of the most effective way to notify blog subscribers about new content, and it’s used by large news sites and publishers.
July 2021: SearchWP Acquired by Awesome Motive
Awesome Motive made another acquisition in July 2021: SearchWP, the leading search engine plugin for WordPress. It was originally developed in 2013 by Jon Christopher.
Effective site search is important to bloggers. It allows their users to find what they’re looking for, resulting in more sales and page views.
By 2022, 43% of the web was built on WordPress. There were 572 million blogs globally, and over 31 million bloggers in the US alone. For more statistics like this, see our list of blogging statistics, trends, and data.
July 2023: End of Life for Google Analytics UA
Google Analytics 4 is the latest version of Google’s analytics platform. It has many changes, like a new reporting system and metrics. The way GA4 collects and processes data is also different from the previous version known as Universal Analytics (UA).
Google will sunset the old Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. It’s important to switch your blog over to the new version before then.
We hope this article helped you learn about the history of blogging. If you have additional blogging history facts, please let us know by leaving a comment below.
Are you wondering how to pick the best theme for your WordPress website?
When starting a blog, choosing the right theme is crucial for your success. During the process, you will likely have to decide between free WordPress themes vs premium WordPress themes.
In this article, we will cover how to choose the best premium WordPress theme for your site.
Free WordPress Theme vs Premium WordPress Theme
One of the main reasons why a lot of users choose a premium WordPress theme over a free one is that you get guaranteed support.
Free WordPress themes are often built as a passion project, so you are not guaranteed to get support or updates. These themes can become outdated with new WordPress releases or don’t work with different plugins.
On the other hand, when you pay for a premium WordPress theme, you get good documentation, access to support, and regular updates. Some theme shops even go beyond and offer video tutorials, demo content, and even a free blog setup service.
Aside from that, premium themes make your WordPress website more unique because free themes are being used by everyone.
Having said that, here’s what you need to look for when selecting a premium WordPress theme.
When you select a theme, you will probably be using it on your website for quite some time. This allows users can become accustomed to it and easily consume content.
That’s why you need to choose a theme that is aesthetically pleasing and can be used for a long time without requiring any significant changes.
There are certain elements of design that all good designers use to create beautiful websites. These include:
Good Color Combination
Awesome Typography
Clean Layout
Beautiful Images
Together these elements create a beautiful harmony and consistency that appeals to your users. It not only looks great, but it also helps you achieve your business goals.
Most premium themes come with unlimited color choices and built-in tools to select fonts. You need to make sure that your premium WordPress theme uses better typography out of the box.
For example, Astra offers lomanyustomization options, even in the free version. You can edit different elements like colors, fonts, buttons, and more. Plus, there are options to change the header and footer layout and edit the appearance of your blogs and sidebar.
Don’t just look at the homepage. Go deeper into the theme demo and explore other sections. For example, if you are building a portfolio site, then check the theme’s demo for the portfolio. If you will be adding testimonials, then check out how testimonials look in the theme demo.
Make sure that there are plenty of page templates and layouts to use. Examine the homepage, single pages, posts, and blog sections to ensure they all maintain the same design consistency and appeal.
2. Features vs Presentation
The main difference between WordPress themes and plugins is that themes handle the presentation part of your website, and plugins handle the functionality.
However, the premium WordPress theme market is highly competitive, and sometimes theme developers cannot resist the temptation to add more plugin-like functionality to their themes.
Why is this considered bad practice?
When a WordPress theme crosses over into the plugin territory, it becomes difficult to switch themes. For example, if a WordPress theme is using a custom post type, then switching to another theme would make those custom post types disappear from the admin menu.
Shortcodes defined by a theme would also stop functioning, which also makes switching a difficult and time-consuming process.
On the other hand, there are WordPress themes that behave exactly like a plugin. Offering functionality needed to create very specific niche websites, like real estate themes or hotel themes.
Some of these themes are really useful, but if you use those themes, then you need to understand that it will be difficult to switch themes later because other themes may not have similar functionality.
3. Security and Performance
Many WordPress beginners don’t pay much attention to speed and good coding practices when choosing a premium theme.
In the race to win new customers, theme developers can integrate unsafe and quick solutions that can compromise your site’s security. The insane amount of features can cost you speed and performance issues.
Now the problem is that most beginner-level users do not have the skills to study code. How do you know that the code behind a premium theme is of good quality?
First, you need to buy your premium themes from trusted and well-reputed WordPress theme shops. Some of the theme shops that we trust and recommend are:
Secondly, look around for reviews and customer testimonials. See who else is using themes developed by that particular theme shop or developer. Are there any big websites or blogs using their themes?
Check out the testimonials page on the theme shop or search for their reviews on Google. You can also view the ratings of any theme on WordPress.org website and look at the reviews.
4. Compatibility Check
Before you start browsing for a premium theme, take a few moments to write down all the features you are looking for. For example:
Many premium themes come with built-in templates and support for popular eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
If a theme you are looking for is not available in your language, then ask the theme developer to see if a translation is in progress.
Some users may want to use veparticularlugins to create niche websites like job boards and question-answer websites. Feel free to ask the theme developers if their theme would work with a specific plugin.
You need to make sure that you are investing your money in the right place.
5. Opt for a Custom Theme
A good premium WordPress theme would help you easily build high-quality websites. However, there are still many things you might want to customize, but it is not possible.
This is where creating a custom WordPress theme can help you out. It provides a lot of freedom and flexibility over the layout and design of your website. That said, the cost of creating a custom theme may vary based on the level of features and customization options you want.
