Monday, October 18, 2021

How to Share Your Blog Posts With Readers (4 Ways)

Are you looking for proven ways to share your blog posts with blog readers to grow your traffic?

Most people who read your blog won’t come back to see if you’ve published new posts. By sharing your new posts with readers, you can get them to come back to your website and potentially convert into customers.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can share new blog posts you’ve recently published with your readers.

How to share your blog posts with readers (4 ways)

Why Share Your Blog Posts with Readers?

Nearly 70% visitors leaving your website will never come back to visit again. As a website owner, you need to give them a reason to come back.

One of the best ways to do this is by sharing your new blog posts with them. If your blog posts are packed with value, then you’re helping your readers succeed by encouraging them to read your new content.

If you run an online store, then sharing your posts will deepen the relationship and turn subscribers into customers. Those running affiliate or review websites will get more views on their content, which means more clicks and commissions.

With that said, let’s take a look at a few different ways you can share your blog posts with your readers. Simply use the quick links below to go straight to the method you want to use to share your blog posts.

1. Share Your Blog Posts with Push Notification Subscribers

One of the easiest and most effective ways to share new blog posts with your readers is by using push notifications.

A push notification is a popup message that goes out to your subscribers across desktop and mobile devices.

These can be very effective because they show up instantly no matter where your visitors happen to be. You don’t have to wait until they check their email or social media accounts for them to see your notification.

Here’s an example of what a blog post notification can look like:

PushEngage blog post notification

The easiest way to add push notifications to your WordPress blog is by using PushEngage. It’s the best push notification software in the market used by over 10,000 businesses.

PushEngage

For more details on setting up and sending push notifications, see our guide on how to add web push notifications to your WordPress site.

After you activate and set up the plugin, push notifications for new blog posts will automatically be enabled on your site.

The moment you publish a new post, your notification will send out to all of your subscribers.

The push notification will include the title of your blog post and the featured image. Once they click the notification, they’ll be taken to the post on your website.

2. Share Your Blog Posts with Your Email List

Your email list is one of most valuable assets in your business and one of the best ways to stay in touch with your readers.

Email subscribers who have joined your list have already verified their identity and are very interested in what you have to offer, which makes them more likely to open your emails and return to your website.

Haven’t started to build your email list yet? The first thing you need to do is get a high quality email marketing service provider.

We recommend using Constant Contact since it’s one of the best email marketing services for small businesses.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers tools that make it easy to manage your email list, like simple tracking and reporting, unlimited emails, segmentation, an image library, and more.

For more details on setting up your email list and sending emails, see our guide on how to create an email newsletter the right way.

Once your email list is set up, you can start sharing your blog posts with your email list.

Constant Contact has all the tools you need to start sending your blog posts to readers, including an option to embed posts directly into your email.

Constant Contact send blog post

If you’re looking for creative ways to get more email subscribers, then consider adding a yes/no optin, using content upgrades, or getting started with coupon code popups on your website.

Looking for a Constant Contact alternative?

There are dozens of other email marketing services that you can use too including HubSpot, Sendinblue, and ConvertKit.

3. Share Your Blog Posts with Your Social Media Followers

Social media platforms are a great place to tap into a network of billions of people, build a following, and send traffic back to your site.

To build a loyal following, you need to engage with your users by interacting with them, posting updates, and sharing your content.

We regularly share our latest blog posts with our audience on Twitter and Facebook.

WPBeginner Facebook share example

However, the big issue with manually sharing your blog posts on social media is that posting can be very time consuming.

Luckily, you can automate your WordPress website so that the moment you publish a new post, it’ll automatically share to social media.

The easiest way to do this is by using Uncanny Automator. It’s the best WordPress automation plugin that lets you create automated workflows without writing any code.

Uncanny Automator

It connects with over 50 different plugins, tools, and applications, including popular social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

If you want to share your blog posts to Facebook, then see our guide on how to automatically post to Facebook from WordPress. For Twitter, see our guide on how to automatically tweet when you publish a new post in WordPress.

With your automations all set up, the moment you publish a new blog post, it’ll automatically share your blog posts with your social media followers.

4. Share Your Blog Posts with Your SMS Subscribers

Sending SMS messages can be a great way to share your new posts with your readers. Not only do text messages have a very high open rate, but people will check their text messages almost instantly.

The first thing you need to send SMS messages to your subscribers is an SMS marketing provider.

We recommend using Sendinblue since it’s one of the best email marketing providers that also allows you to send SMS messages.

Sendinblue

For more details, see our guide on how to send SMS messages to your WordPress users.

Once your account is set up, you can share your blog posts with your readers via SMS. You’ll have full control over the recipients, message, sending time, and more.

SMS message example

We hope this article helped you learn how to share your blog posts with readers. You may also want to see our comparison of the best domain name registrars, and our expert picks of the best AI chatbots software for your website.

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 Share Your Blog Posts With Readers (4 Ways) appeared first on WPBeginner.


October 18, 2021 at 02:05PM

Saturday, October 16, 2021

How to Organize or Reorder WordPress Pages with Drag & Drop

Do you want to organize your WordPress pages by simply dragging and dropping them where you want?

WordPress will arrange your blog posts and pages based on the published date or alphabetical order by default. However, with the right WordPress plugin, you can reorder your pages to organize them more logically.

In this article, we will show you how to reorder and organize WordPress pages with drag and drop.

Organize Pages with Drag and Drop in WordPress

Why Change the Order of WordPress Pages?

By default, WordPress will organize your pages alphabetically or use the publish date to show the recent page first.

If you have a lot of pages, it can be difficult to manage them and find the pages you need in your WordPress dashboard.

Luckily, you can use a simple plugin to rearrange the pages by simply dragging and dropping them where you want.

Let’s take a look at how you can organize your WordPress pages by using drag and drop.

Note: This guide will show you how to reorder your pages in your WordPress dashboard, so you can then use this order in custom WP_Query. If you’d like to reorder pages the easy way, then we recommend using our guide on creating navigation menus in WordPress.

Organize Your WordPress Pages Using a Plugin

First, you’ll need to install and activate the Simple Page Ordering plugin. If you need help, then please refer to our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once activated, there are no additional settings to use the plugin. Simply go to Pages » All Pages from your WordPress admin panel and start ordering your pages by dragging and dropping them.

Change page order in WordPress

You can now rearrange your WordPress pages and place them in any order you want.

How to Organize WordPress Pages Manually

Another way you can reorganize your WordPress pages is by changing the order in the page attributes section.

To start, simply edit any page. Once you’re in the WordPress block editor, navigate to the ‘Page Attributes’ box located in the menu on your right.

After that, you can enter the ‘Order’ value for your page. The lower the number, the higher it will appear in the list.

Change page attributes settings

The problem with this method is that you’ll have to manually change the order value on all other pages that you want to rearrange on your website.

This can be time-consuming and doesn’t offer the drag and drop option to organize your pages. That’s why using the Simple Page Ordering plugin is a better option.

If you’d like to reorder your blog posts as well, then see our guide on easy ways to re-order your blog posts.

We hope this article helped you learn about the Simple Page Ordering plugin and how to organize WordPress pages with drag and drop. You may also want to look at our guide on how to create a free business email address, or see our expert comparison of the best domain registrars.

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 Organize or Reorder WordPress Pages with Drag & Drop appeared first on WPBeginner.


October 16, 2021 at 04:00PM

Friday, October 15, 2021

7 Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins Compared (2021)

Are you looking for the best WordPress image compression plugin for your website?

Image compression plugins allow you to easily optimize images in WordPress for better speed and performance automatically.

In this article, we have compared the best image compression plugins for WordPress.

7 best WordPress image compression plugins compared

When Do You Need a WordPress Image Compression Plugin?

Images are larger in size than plain text which means they take longer to load and can slow down your website.

However you’ve probably heard the saying: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Images make your content more engaging and interactive.

To improve your WordPress website speed, you need to optimize your images for the web.

Since optimizing your images can make your site load faster, it will improve your WordPress SEO, and help you get more traffic.

The best way to do this is by using Photoshop or another image editing software before you upload the image to WordPress. This gives you a lot more control on the quality of images on your website.

However, not all users are comfortable working with an image editing program. For some people, optimizing every single image they upload sounds like a lot of work.

Luckily, there are several WordPress image compression plugins that can help you with that. These plugins optimize your images by automatically compressing them and using the smaller sized version on your website.

That being said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress image compression plugins, and how they stack up in terms of image optimization, performance, and quality.

1. EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer is the best WordPress image compression plugin. It is easy to use and can automatically optimize images you upload on the fly.

It can also compress and optimize your previously uploaded images in bulk.

Even though your images are being compressed, it’ll be very hard to tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed in terms of quality.

Plus, the entire process of compressing and optimizing is automated. This includes image scaling to fit the right size page and device, lazy loading, and even conversion into the next-gen WebP image format.

It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and stored outside your media library folders. This plugin support JPG, PNG, GIF, and even PDF optimization.

There is also a free version of the plugin available, which lets you perform image optimizations on your own server. This can be great for WordPress website owners concerned about privacy.

However, sites with a lot of images or sites that get a lot of traffic will want to opt for the paid plan, since it includes an image optimizing CDN, which will automatically compress and convert images as they are viewed.

Best of all, EWWW Image Optimizer is very affordable. Plans start at $7 per month and support unlimited images. If you have more than one site, then you’ll need a higher priced plan.

Included in your plan is a caching engine, CSS/JS optimization, and Google Font optimization to help your site load even faster.

2. Optimole

Optimole

Optimole is another excellent option for a WordPress image compression plugin.

Using this plugin requires a quick account creation and API key setup. After that, it’s straightforward to use and gives you complete control over your image optimization.

Optimole is powered by an image CDN, so your images will load quickly no matter where your visitors are coming from. With a CDN, your images are optimized in real-time and delivered to your website visitors in the perfect size.

You can view all of your optimized images in a single dashboard, making it easy to customize compression settings for individual images.

It lets you adjust things like the compression quality, large image resizing, lazy loading, and more.

There’s even a unique setting that will automatically watermark your images for you. This is great for photographers who are trying to protect their work.

Pricing is based on the number of visitors you have per month. The free plugin allows for up to 5,000 visitors per month. While the paid plans start at $19.08 per month when billed yearly and support up to 25,000 visitors per month.

3. ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is another great WordPress image compression plugin.

It’s packed with advanced features and gives you the ability to choose compression formats. It starts compressing images as soon you as activate plugin and stores your original images in a separate folder.

If you’re using the free plugin, then it requires you to get an API key by providing your email address.

The basic free account allows you to compress up to 100 images per month, and you will need to upgrade to their paid plans to increase this limit.

You can even simply convert PNG to JPEG and vice versa with the click of a button.

It’s also compatible with WooCommerce, NextGEN Gallery, and the WPML translation plugins.

If you’re using Cloudflare as your WordPress CDN, then you can integrate the service, so your images will be automatically updated with the new version.

ShortPixel is also very affordable. Plans are based on the number of images and start at $4.99 per month for up to 5,000 images per month.

4. reSmush.it

ReSmush.it

reSmush.it is another great choice for a WordPress image compression plugin. It allows you to automatically optimize images on upload as well as offer a bulk optimization option for older images.

You have full control over the image quality and compression with an easy to use slider.

It uses the reSmush API to optimize images and allows you to choose the optimization level for your uploads.

The downside is that it doesn’t have different compression levels. It also limits optimization to uploads lower than 5MB in size. You can exclude individual images from compression in case you need to add an image in full size.

5. Compress JPEG & PNG images

Compress JPEG & PNG images

Compress JPEG & PNG is created by the team behind TinyPNG, and you will need to create an account to use the plugin. You can only optimize 500 images each month with the free account.

It can automatically compress images upon upload, and you can also bulk optimize older images.

The plugin settings allow you to choose which image sizes you want to optimize. You can also set a maximum size for your original uploads. Images larger than that size will be automatically resized by the plugin.

You can also choose to save image data like time and date, copyright information, and GPS location on JPEG files.

6. WP Rocket

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin in the market. It’s very beginner friendly and will help to make your site blazing fast.

There are image optimization features within WP Rocket, like lazy loading, which will only load images when they are viewed.

They also developed a plugin called Imagify. This plugin lets you optimize all of your images with a single click. It will also resize your images on the fly and lets you restore your images to their original size.

You also have full control over your image optimization and compression settings. All of your images will be optimized to your preferences.

7. Jetpack

Jetpack

Jetpack is a powerful WordPress plugin suite that combines essential WordPress features into a single plugin. The primary focus is security, performance, and marketing.

The image optimization features fall under the performance category. To enable image compression, all you have to do is turn on a single setting. There are no additional settings for you to set up.

What it does is automatically optimize your image and serve images to your visitors using a CDN. This reduces your server load and provides faster image loading for your visitors.

To access the image optimization, you can use the free version of the plugin as well.

If you like the idea of Jetpack, but are looking for plugins to replace all of Jetpack’s features, then see our guide on the best alternatives to the WordPress Jetpack plugin.

Comparison Test Scores for Image Compression Plugins

Now that you know about the different WordPress image compression options, let’s take a look at how they compare against each other in terms of performance.

To measure this, we ran test by uploading the same image using each of these plugins.

Testing JPEG Image Compression

We used the following JPEG image for our tests, it is 118.3 KB in file size.

JPEG test image

We didn’t touch any of the plugin settings and tested the compression with out of the box settings. Here are our test results:

Plugin Compressed Size Saved (%) Method
EWWW Image Optimizer 64 KB 54.24% Lossless
Optimole 64 KB 54.24% Lossless
ShortPixel Image Optimizer 72 KB 39.30% Lossless
reSmush.it 78 KB 20.81% Lossless
Compress JPEG & PNG images 118.1 KB 2 % Lossy

Testing PNG Image Compression

Next we wanted to test a PNG image to see how our contenders optimize it.

We used the following PNG image for the test, and it is 99.4 KB in file size.

PNG test image

Here are our test results:

Plugin Compressed Size Saved (%) Method
EWWW Image Optimizer 97 KB 1.9% Lossless
Optimole 41 KB 64% Lossless
ShortPixel Image Optimizer 36 KB 56% Lossy
reSmush.it 36 KB 56% Lossless
Compress JPEG & PNG images 34.3 KB 54% Lossy

Which is The Best Image Compression Plugin for WordPress?

If you are looking for the best image compression plugin, then EWWW Image Optimizer is the best choice.

It offers high levels of compression that don’t sacrifice image quality, plus it’s equipped with an image CDN and other features that will optimize your website for speed.

Another great option for sites that get less traffic is Optimole. It operates entirely in the background and takes care of image optimization for you, plus it’s free up to 5,000 visitors per month.

If you’re looking for an affordable plugin that offers high levels of compression and image conversion, then ShortPixel is worth checking out.

We hope you found this comparison of best WordPress image compression plugins useful. You may also want to see our beginner’s guide to image SEO to optimize images for search engines, and our expert picks of the best email marketing services for 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 7 Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins Compared (2021) appeared first on WPBeginner.


October 15, 2021 at 04:30PM