How to Create Custom Permalinks in WordPress

Do you want to create custom permalinks in WordPress for posts, pages, and other post types?

Recently one of our readers asked if it was possible to create their own custom permalinks aka page URL structure in WordPress.

In this article, we will show you how to create custom permalinks in WordPress without affecting your SEO.

Since this is a comprehensive tutorial on creating custom permalinks in WordPress, we have created an easy to navigate table of content:

• What is a Custom a Permalink?
• How to Change the WordPress Permalink Structure
• How to Change the Category and Tag URL Prefix in WordPress
• How to Change Individual WordPress Post or Page URL
• How to Change WordPress Category or Tag URL
• How to Change Author Page URL in WordPress
• How to Create Completely Custom Permalinks in WordPress
• How to Setup Permalink Redirects and Avoid 404 Errors

What is a Custom Permalink in WordPress?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs of your individual blog posts, pages, and other archive pages on your WordPress site. Custom permalink is basically a URL structure applied to a specific page in WordPress without affecting the rest of your URL structure.

WordPress comes with an SEO Friendly URL structure which allows you to use an easy to understand URL structure for both humans and search engines.

For example: https://ift.tt/359PKv8

This is much better than URLs from the old days: https://ift.tt/2KCTldh

WordPress provides website owners with multiple options to choose from. You can view them by visiting Settings » Permalinks page.

Aside from changing the main permalink structure, WordPress also offers ways to customize the individual URLs of posts, pages, categories, tags, and other areas of your website.

You can also use WordPress plugins to create completely custom permalinks for specific sections of your website that overrides the default WordPress settings.

Let’s take a look at all the options one by one. We’ll start with the default built-in options that come with your WordPress website.

How to Change the WordPress Permalink Structure

If you want to change the whole URL generation scheme for your website, then go to Settings » Permalinks page.

Simply select a URL structure for your individual posts. You can also use the tags shown on the screen to create a custom structure for your WordPress URLs.

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

We recommend using a URL structure that includes the post name in the URL. This makes your URLs more SEO friendly and meaningful.

Note: You should change to a SEO friendly permalinks for all new WordPress blogs and websites. However, if you have an existing website that’s already getting traffic from search engines, then changing permalinks can affect your SEO rankings.

How to Change the Category and Tag URL Prefix in WordPress

By default, WordPress uses /category/ as the base for your category URLs and /tag/ for the tags pages. For example:

https://ift.tt/2rSvxeP
https://ift.tt/2XtQEzS

You can change these base prefixes from the Settings » Permalinks page to anything that you like. For example,

https://ift.tt/2KF8RWa (for category pages)
https://ift.tt/37k09WX (for tag pages)

How to Change Individual WordPress Post or Page URL

Once you have the permalink structure setup, WordPress uses that as a template for all links on your site. However, you do have the option to modify the URL slug aka keywords inside the URL structure for individual posts, pages, and custom post types.

You can customize the slug part of the URL from the post edit screen inside the WordPress content editor.

Simply edit the post, page, or custom post type and click on the title field. You’ll notice the Permalink field appears on top of it.

Go ahead and click on the Edit button next to it, and then change the URL slug to a custom permalink. Once you are done, click on the Save button to store the new permalink.

You can use this method for all post types including WooCommerce products, MemberPress courses, etc.

How to Change WordPress Category or Tag URL

In the earlier step, we showed you how to modify the category and tag base prefix in WordPress. In this step, we will show you how to change the URL keywords for an individual category or tag.

Simply go to Posts » Categories page and click on the Edit link below the category you want to customize.

WordPress will now load the category details. From here, you can change the category slug to customize its permalink.

Similarly, you can edit an individual tag by visiting Posts » Tags page.

You can also edit any custom taxonomies using the same method.

How to Change Author Page URL in WordPress

WordPress automatically adds the ‘/author/’ base to URLs leading to author archive pages. For example:

https://ift.tt/340oCyA

The problem is that WordPress does not come with an option to change the author URL base or the slug.

Luckily, as the saying goes, there is a plugin that can help.

Simply install and activate the Edit Author Slug. For details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to Users » All Users page. Next, click on the ‘Edit’ link below a username.

On the next page, scroll down to the Edit Author Slug section, and you will be able to choose an author slug or add your own. Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

If you want to change the author permalink base, then simply head over to the Settings » Edit Author Slug page. Here you will see an option to change the author base and even choose different author bases for users with different user roles.

For more details, see our guide on how to change author URL slug and base in WordPress.

How to Create Completely Custom Permalinks in WordPress

All the above methods allows you to customize WordPress permalinks to a certain extent. However, they cannot help you create completely custom permalinks.

That’s because WordPress by default doesn’t offer this functionality.

Luckily, there’s a plugin that can help. If you want to override the default WordPress URL structure for specific sections on your site, then follow the steps here.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Custom Permalinks plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to edit the post where you want to create a custom permalink. Instead of editing the permalink field at the top, you’ll find the option to create a custom permalink below the editor.

Similarly, you can also create custom permalinks for categories. Go to Posts » Categories page and click on the edit link below the category that you want to change.

On the category details page, you’ll find the option to create a custom permalink for that particular category. You can even create a URL without the category base prefix.

You can manage and disable all your custom permalinks by clicking on the ‘Custom Permalinks’ menu in the admin sidebar.

Simply select the custom permalinks you want to delete and then click on the Bulk Actions menu to select ‘Delete permalinks’ option.

After that click on the ‘Apply’ button and the plugin will remove those custom permalinks. The deleted permalink will be replaced by your default WordPress permalink scheme.

How to Setup Permalink Redirects and Avoid 404 Errors

WordPress automatically handles changes made to post and page URLs. However, it may not set up redirects for your custom author permalinks or completely customized permalinks.

In that case, you’ll need to set up proper redirects to avoid 404 errors on your website.

First, you need to install and activate the Redirection plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Tools » Redirection page to set up redirects. You need to add the old link in the ‘Source URL’ field and the new URL in the ‘Target URL’ field.

After that click on the ‘Add redirect’ button to save your changes. For more details, see our beginner’s guide to setting up redirects in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to create custom permalinks in WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress SEO guide to get more search traffic to 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 Create Custom Permalinks in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

November 19, 2019 at 04:00PM

How to Clear Your DNS Cache (Mac, Windows, Chrome)

Have you even been asked to clear your DNS cache? It is a troubleshooting tip that helps you get to the latest version of a website, particularly after DNS changes.

DNS information tells your browser where to find a website. Your computer keeps this information in its cache to quickly point browsers in the right direction.

In this article, we’ll show you how to clear your DNS cache on Mac, Windows, and Chrome. This will allow you to easily refresh DNS records stored on your device and help you troubleshoot website issues.

Here is a quick overview of what we’ll cover in this guide:

• What is DNS cache
• How to clear DNS cache in Windows
• How to clear DNS cache in Mac
• How to clear DNS cache in Chrome
• How to check for DNS updates

What is DNS Cache?

DNS cache is like an address book saved on your computer with the domain name server (DNS) information of each website you visit.

DNS or Domain Name Server is a technology that tells your computer the IP address associated with a domain name. To learn more, see our guide on how domain names work.

Saving the DNS information in a local DNS cache helps your browser quickly find a website.

Once you enter a website address in your browser, it will look for DNS information in the local cache first. If it finds the directions, then it uses the DNS cache to visit the website.

On the other hand, if the information is not in the local DNS cache, then the browser will get it from other DNS servers across the internet.

This ensures that every time you visit any website, your browser takes the shortest route to get the DNS information it needs to locate the website on the internet.

However, this may sometime cause trouble. For example, when you are moving a WordPress site to a new domain name or when you are moving WordPress to a new host.

DNS information may not get updated quickly on your computer, and you may end up visiting the old website or see a not found error. It will eventually get updated, but why wait when you can clear DNS cache right away.

Let’s take a look at how to clear DNS cache across various platforms.

How to Clear DNS Cache in Windows

If you are using a windows computer, then here is how you would clear DNS cache on your device.

First, you need to click on the start button and select the CMD (command prompt) tool.

This will launch a command prompt window. Inside it you need to enter the following text:

ipconfig /flushdns

Click on the enter button to execute the command and Windows will flush the DNS cache.

That’s all, you can now resume visiting your website to fetch the updated DNS information.

How to Clear DNS Cache on macOS

If you are on a Mac computer, then follow the steps below to clear your DNS cache.

First, you need to launch the Terminal app. You can find it in the Launchpad under the ‘Other’ folder. You can also launch it by opening Finder and going to Applications » Utilities folder.

This will launch the terminal window where you need to enter the following command.

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

You’ll be asked to enter your macOS account password. It is the same password you use to log into your computer.

After that, your computer will flush the DNS cache. You can now visit the website to get the latest DNS information.

Clear DNS Cache in Chrome

Google Chrome also keeps a DNS cache of its own, and it is separate from the DNS cache stored by your operating system.

If you use Google Chrome as your main browser, then you’ll need to clear Chrome’s DNS cache as well.

First, you need to enter the following address in your browser’s address bar and press enter on your keyboard.

chrome://net-internals/#dns

This will load Chrome’s net internal settings page. From here you need to click on the ‘Clear host cache’ button, and Chrome will clear up its DNS cache.

Now keep in mind that DNS cache is separate from the browser cache.

Your browser saves a lot of website data in a temporary cache to quickly load pages on subsequent visits.

If you are having trouble viewing a page that you updated but can’t see your changes, then you would want to clear the browser cache.

We have a step by step guide on how to clear browser cache on all major browsers that you can follow.

How to Check for DNS Updates

When you are moving your WordPress website to a host or transferring your domain registration to a new domain registrar, you’ll have to change your DNS settings and point them to the new location.

Once you apply these changes under your domain settings, it takes a while for changes to propagate across the internet. This could take anywhere between a few hours to a couple of days.

During this time, your domain will sometime point to the old location and sometimes it will point to the new location. This depends on your geographic location and which DNS servers your browser asks for directions.

You can check how these DNS changes are propagated around the world using online tools like DNS Checker.

Simply enter your domain name, and it will fetch DNS from different geographic locations spread around the world.

If all locations indicate the same IP address with a green checkmark, then this means the DNS changes you made are now updated all over the internet.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily clear your DNS cache on different devices. You may also want to see our guide on how to clear your WordPress cache for beginners.

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 Clear Your DNS Cache (Mac, Windows, Chrome) appeared first on WPBeginner.

November 18, 2019 at 04:54PM

24 Best WordPress Restaurant Themes (2019)

Are you looking for the best WordPress restaurant themes?

Restaurant websites have specific requirements to showcase their menu, photos, location, business hours, and other useful information.

A WordPress restaurant theme should cover these requirements so that you can focus on growing your business.

In this article, we have hand-picked some of the best WordPress themes for restaurants that you can use. All these themes are mobile-responsive and highly optimized for performance.

Building a Restaurant Website with WordPress

WordPress is the most flexible and easy to use platform to build your restaurant website. It gives you access to dozens of payment platforms, third-party addons, thousands of templates, and plugins. See our article on why you should use WordPress for more details.

There are two kinds of WordPress websites. WordPress.com, which is a hosted solution, and WordPress.org, which is a self-hosted platform. You will need self-hosted WordPress.org, which is more powerful and flexible. For more details, you should check out our guide on the difference between WordPress.com vs self-hosted WordPress.org site.

To start your restaurant website, you will need a WordPress hosting account and a domain name.

Think of a website hosting account as your website’s home where all your files will live. Similarly, the domain name is your website’s address that users will type in their browsers to visit it (e.g. wpbeginner.com).

We recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and also one of the official WordPress hosting partners.

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Next you will need to install WordPress. For complete step by step instructions, you can follow our guide on how to make a website.

After the installation, you can pick a theme from our expert selection below and then follow instructions in our guide on how to install a WordPress theme.

Now let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress restaurant themes. This list includes both free and paid WordPress themes, and all of them are mobile responsive.

1. Italian Restaurant by Astra Theme

Italian Restaurant is a modern and stylish WordPress restaurant theme by Astra. It comes with parallax scrolling and fullscreen header background with the navigation menu.

To install the Italian Restaurant theme, you’ll need to download Astra WordPress Theme and then use their Starter Sites plugin to import the Italian Restaurant template.

The theme includes a reservation system for your customers to book a table online. It has custom page templates for the restaurant menu and blog page.

2. Divi Restaurant

Divi Restaurant is a beautiful WordPress landing page for a restaurant website. It offers a black and white background that makes your images and content stand out.

The homepage sections allow you to display testimonials, restaurant menu, hours of operation, and more. It is highly optimized for speed and performance.

3. Cafe Pro

Cafe Pro is a WordPress restaurant theme built on top of the powerful Genesis framework by StudioPress. It comes with a rock solid foundation and great set of features to make a website for your restaurant.

The theme homepage layout can be easily customized using the four widgetized areas. You get a theme options panel and custom widgets that allow you to display contact info, address, business hours, etc. on your website.

StudioPress is now part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all other 35+ StudioPress themes when you sign up for a WP Engine hosting account.

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4. Ultra Restaurant

Ultra Restaurant is an elegant WordPress restaurant template by Themify Ultra. It allows you to add a fullscreen custom background image to attract the visitors in the first impression.

With this theme, you get a sticky navigation menu, a fullscreen layout, colorful menu photos, Google Maps integration, and an online reservation system. It is flexible and beginner-friendly in use.

5. OceanWP

OceanWP is a free multi-purpose WordPress theme. It comes with hundreds of demo sites including a template to build a restaurant website quickly.

The theme works great with drag and drop page builders for easy customization. It is eCommerce friendly and accepts online reservations for your restaurant.

6. Winery by Astra Theme

Winery is a nice-looking Astra WordPress theme. It is well suited for restaurants, wine stores, vineyards, wineries, and bars. It has a sticky background image and parallax scrolling.

To install the Winery theme, you’ll need to download the Astra WordPress theme and then use their Starter Sites plugin to import this layout.

Other notable features include crisp typography, attractive buttons, custom page templates, and a full-width layout. It allows easy integration with your social networks.

7. Hestia Pro

Hestia Pro is another multi-purpose WordPress theme. It ships with several ready-made templates and layouts including a theme for the coffee shop, restaurant, or any food-related business.

It supports WooCommerce and page builder plugins out of the box. Hestia Pro is translation ready and can be used to create a multilingual website as well.

8. Carbone

Carbone is a stylish WordPress restaurant theme. It has a video background on the homepage to get users’ attention. It allows you to create a landing page for your restaurant menu and add all food items with images beautifully.

The theme is perfect to make a website for your restaurant, cafe, or coffee shop. You can also use this theme to start a food blog and make money.

9. Neve

Neve is a modern WordPress one-page theme. It is packed with multiple pre-built starter demos including a beautiful template for your restaurant website. The theme is highly flexible and supports page builders for customization.

In the restaurant template, you can create an image gallery and add eye-catching photos to attract your visitors. The homepage has sections to add the daily menu, location map, and user ratings.

10. Salt and Pepper

Salt and Pepper is a new-fashioned WordPress restaurant theme. It is ideal for food and recipe blogs, cafes, restaurants, and bars. The theme has a custom logo, a navigation menu, and social media icons in the header section.

With the Instagram widget, you can add your eye-catching food photos in the sidebar or footer widget area. It is a page builder friendly theme to customize colors, fonts, and media files quickly.

11. Rosa 2

Rosa 2 is a beautifully designed WordPress theme for restaurants. It comes with immersive parallax background effects and a modern homepage layout which looks great on all devices and screen sizes.

It also includes an easy to use restaurant menu management with online ordering and reservation system. It comes with multiple styles and color schemes that can be easily applied using theme customizer.

12. BBQ Restaurant by Astra Theme

BBQ Restaurant is another Astra theme template built specifically for restaurants, steakhouses, grill houses, and food recipe websites. It comes with beautiful homepage sections to display restaurant menu, user reviews, etc.

To install the BBQ Restaurant theme, you’ll need to download the Astra WordPress theme and then use their Starter Sites plugin to import this layout.

With this theme, you can use the WordPress live customizer and page builders to make changes on your restaurant website easily.

13. Zelle Pro

Zelle Pro is a premium multi-purpose WordPress theme that can be used to create any website. It has a beautiful one-page layout with parallax scrolling and interactive homepage elements.

The theme is perfect for making a restaurant website with faster performance. It has unlimited color choices, custom backgrounds, and support for WooCommerce.

14. Delicio

Delicio is a premium WordPress theme for restaurants. It comes with menu, location sections, and more. It is compatible with restaurant reservation plugin allowing you to accept online reservations on your website.

The theme features a sizeable fullscreen header, call to action buttons, customization panel, and drag and drop page builder with live preview.

15. Seasons

Seasons is an elegantly designed WordPress theme for restaurants, bars, cafes, and other food-related websites. It has a widgetized restaurant menu page which is easy to set up and update without writing any code.

Apart from that, it comes with all the features you expect from a premium WordPress theme. Some of these features are a unique slider, secure theme options, quick setup, custom headers, and layout styling.

16. Mise En Place

Mise En Place is a beautiful WordPress theme for restaurants. It comes with a menu management system, page builder, and WooCommerce support.

Among other features, it supports large header images, custom widgets, shortcodes, Google Fonts integration, and live theme customizer.

17. Igloo

Igloo is a modern WordPress restaurant theme with large featured images, beautiful typography, and powerful features. It comes with a built-in restaurant menu management system, reservations, custom widgets, sliders, galleries, and testimonials.

It has an easy to use theme options panel, and it supports the most popular WordPress page builders for customization.

18. Downtown

Downtown is a multi-purpose WordPress restaurant theme that can also be used for food blogging, restaurant reviews, bars, and cafes.

It comes with homepage sections for Google Maps, contact form, services, testimonials, staff profiles, and events calendar. The theme supports WooCommerce to create an online food delivery website.

19. Restaurantz

Restaurantz is a free WordPress restaurant theme. It has a beautiful layout with a large slider and call to action button on the homepage. It utilizes theme customizer for all theme options.

It supports the powerful free page builder by SiteOrigin. You can use the free third-party plugins to add a restaurant menu page.

20. Bakes and Cakes

Bakes and Cakes is a beautifully designed WordPress theme. It is free and suitable for stylish restaurants and cafes. It comes with testimonial section, product section, about section, team section, and call to action buttons.

The theme is compatible with popular free restaurant menu plugins. It supports WooCommerce and WPML out of the box.

21. Petit

Petit is a bright-colored WordPress restaurant theme. It comes with beautiful layouts for recipe pages and custom shortcodes for a food-related website.

It has a featured content slider, custom widgets, multiple color choices, and more. The theme is perfect for creating multilingual websites.

22. Moonrise

Moonrise is a gorgeous WordPress restaurant theme. It features large header backgrounds, slideshows, shortcodes, and multiple customizable sections.

It comes with built-in support for the food menu, services, slideshow, contact widget, and contact blocks. Moonrise theme is easy to customize, and translation ready out of the box.

23. Umami

Umami is a stylish restaurant theme for WordPress. It features a unique fullscreen layout with a prominent call to action button. Each post and page can have its own unique background.

The theme also comes with an easy to use restaurant menu management system. You can add menu items with images that open in a lightbox beautifully.

24. Food and Drinks by Astra Theme

Food and Drinks is a minimal WordPress blog theme by Astra. It is perfect for restaurants, food critiques, food bloggers, foodies, and food photographers. The theme also offers a magazine-style layout with a custom header section.

To install the Food and Drinks theme, you will need to download Astra WordPress Theme and then use their Starter Site templates.

Other notable features include social media integration, blog archives, featured post section, and long footer.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress restaurant themes. You may also want to see our guide on how to run a giveaway / contest in WordPress to offer deals on your restaurant 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 24 Best WordPress Restaurant Themes (2019) appeared first on WPBeginner.

November 15, 2019 at 02:51PM

How to Create a Photo Contest in WordPress (Step by Step)

Do you want to run a photo contest in WordPress? Photo contests are a great way to build user engagement and quickly get lots of new visitors to your website.

Photo contests require users to submit a photo to join the contest or giveaway. Active user participation makes them highly engaging and quite fun.

You can run photo contests on almost any kind of website including business websites, online stores, WordPress blog, etc.

In this article, we’ll show you step by step instructions to easily create a photo contest in WordPress.

Step 1. Install and Activate RafflePress

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the RafflePress plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

You’ll need at least their Pro plan to access the image submit feature.

RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway / contest plugin on the market. It allows you to easily run viral contests on your website, so you can increase your traffic, email subscribers, and social media followers.

It comes with built-in social actions and integrates with all top email marketing platforms.

Note: RafflePress plugin was built our team, so we can use it on WPBeginner. Due to popular request, we have released it as a plugin for everyone.

Once you have activated RafflePress, the plugin will add a new menu item labeled RafflePress to your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking on it will take you to the plugin’s settings.

First, you’ll need to enter your plugin license key. You can find this information under your account on the RafflePress website.

Simply enter the license key and click the ‘Verify license’ button. RafflePress will verify and store your licensing information.

After that, you can move on to create your photo contest.

Step 2. Create Your First Contest

After setting up the plugin, you need to visit RafflePress » Add New page to create your first contest.

RafflePress will launch its contest builder interface. First, you need to enter a title for this campaign and then select a template.

The templates are pre-made campaigns based on your business goals. You can start with a template and customize it to match your needs. You can also choose the classic template to start with a basic campaign.

We’ll go ahead and select the Classic Template.

On the next screen, click on the prize title to enter your prize details and image.

After that, you need to select the contest duration under the Start and End time. You can select the date, time, and timezone for your contest duration.

So far so good.

Now, let’s add some actions. These are the things you want users to do in order to join your contest giveaway.

Switch to the ‘Actions’ tab and you will see a list of actions that you can add to your contest.

For a photo contest giveaway, you would want to add ‘Submit an image’ action.

Simply click to add the action to your contest. RafflePress will now show you action settings in the left column.

You can provide a title for the action and select the number of entries users will be rewarded for completing it.

You can also make an entry mandatory and even allow users to submit daily entries. Below that, you can provide additional instructions on how users can participate.

Now let’s add some more actions to your contest. This will enable you to stay in touch with those users and build a following.

RafflePress allows you to add social media actions like visit Facebook page, send a tweet, follow on Instagram, and more.

You can also connect your email marketing service to grow your email list.

Step 3. Design Your Photo Contest

RafflePress gives you easy to use design tools to customize the appearance of your photo contest widget.

Simply switch to the Design tab, and you will see options to choose a layout, button color, and fonts for your campaign.

If you plan to run the photo contest as a standalone landing page vs embedding it in a blog post, page, or a sidebar widget, then you can also choose the page background color.

RafflePress allows you to add your giveaway to any WordPress post or page. You can also create a custom landing page for your photo contest by using any of the top WordPress page builders and adding your giveaway contest widget there. (more on this later).

Step 4. Configure Contest Settings

After tweaking the design options, switch to the ‘Settings’ tab under the builder to review other settings.

They are all very self-explanatory, but we’ll go through them one by one.

First, you’ll review the general settings. If you wanted to create a standalone photo contest page, then you can do that here. Provide a name for your campaign page under the Page Permalink option without any spaces.

You can also show and hide the number of entries, contest winners, and the powered by link.

Next, switch to the ‘Giveaway Rules’ tab. This is where you’ll list the rules for joining the giveaway. You can start by clicking on the ‘Generate Rules’ button to automatically generate rules using a sample template.

After that, switch to the email verification. From here you can tun email verification on and off. Turning this on would make it compulsory for users to confirm their email address.

If you want to add Google Analytics or other tracking codes like Facebook pixel, then switch to the ‘Success Tracking’ tab. Here you can add those codes and track users for on-site and off-site retargeting.

Next comes the Success Redirect tab. This is where you can tell RafflePress to redirect users to a specific page after they have joined the contest.

Finally, you can turn the social login feature On/Off from the social logins tab.

That’s all you have completed the photo contest setup. Don’t forget to click on the Save button to store your campaign.

Step 5. Add Photo Contest Widget to Your Website

RafflePress offers multiple ways to add your contest campaign anywhere on your website.

You can simply edit a post or page or create a new one, and then add the RafflePress block to the Gutenberg editor.

After that, you need to select the giveaway contest you created earlier. RafflePress block will now load a preview of your giveaway widget inside the WordPress content editor.

You can also add your giveaway by using the shortcode. This comes in handy when you want to display the contest in a sidebar widget, add it to your page builder layout, or use it in the Classic Editor.

Simply edit your giveaway and switch to the ‘Publish’ tab in the builder interface. From here, click on the shortcode option and RafflePress will show the shortcode you can use.

Copy the shortcode and edit the post or page where you want to display the giveaway. Simply paste the shortcode inside the post editor and you are done.

If you want to display it in a sidebar widget, then go to Appearance » Widgets page and add a Text widget to your sidebar.

After that, simply paste the shortcode inside the widget settings and click the save button.

You can now visit your website to see the photo contest widget in the sidebar.

Step 6. Publicize Your Photo Contest Giveaway

For a successful photo contest, you’ll need to plan ahead. Start promoting the event beforehand through social media, a blog post, and your email newsletter.

You can also add a countdown timer banner to create FOMO effect and build anticipation.

We recommend adding the contest widget to your sidebar because it allows users to see it before the contest begins.

Step 7. Announcing The Photo Contest Winners

Once you have added the photo contest giveaway to your website, it would automatically go live at the date and time you choose.

After that, you can go to RafflePress » Giveaways and click on the Image Entries link below your photo contest campaign.

You’ll now see all the images submitted to the contest. You can pick the winners or let RafflePress choose a winner randomly.

Again go back to the RafflePress » Giveaways page and click on the Need Winners link next to your giveaway.

RafflePress will now randomly select a winner for your giveaway.

You can now notify the winner via email and let them know how to claim their prize.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily create a photo contest in WordPress. You may also want to see our other practical tips to quickly get more traffic to your WordPress blog.

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 a Photo Contest in WordPress (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

November 14, 2019 at 06:40PM