How to Add New Users and Authors to Your WordPress Blog

Do you want to add new users and authors to your blog?

WordPress comes with a built-in user management system. This lets you add users with different roles and permission levels.

In this article, we will show you how to add new users and authors to your WordPress website.

Adding a New User or Author on Your WordPress Website

There are 3 ways to add new users to your WordPress website. You can add users manually, let users register themselves for free, or create a paid membership site where users pay to register.

Here’s what we’re going to cover in this article. Simply click on the quick links to jump straight to the section you need.

• Manually Adding a New User or Author to Your Website
• Understanding User Roles in WordPress
• Opening Your WordPress Site for Anyone to Register for Free
• Creating a Paid Membership Program for Your Site

Manually Adding a New User or Author to Your Website

If you want to add a small number of people to your website, then this is easy to do with WordPress’s built-in user management system.

This method is ideal for:

• Small businesses that have several different employees managing their website.
• Organizations such as churches and nonprofits that have volunteers updating their website.
• Blogs with multiple authors, such as a fashion blog that you are writing with some friends.
• Online stores that have several people managing inventory, shipping items, etc.

You simply need to go to the Users » Add New page in your WordPress admin area. Next, you just have to fill out the form to create a new user.

On the form, you first need to enter a username. The user can use this or their email address to login.

Tip: The WordPress username can’t be easily changed later, but all the other details can.

Next, enter the user’s email address. Double-check that you are using the correct email address. Users will need this in order to reset their passwords and receive email notifications.

After that, you can enter the first name, last name, and website URL. Since these are optional fields, you can also leave them blank. Users can edit their own profiles to complete these fields later.

In the next step, you will need to choose a password. We recommend using an online strong password generator for this purpose.

Tip: You can use the ‘Generate password’ button to automatically create a strong password.

Below the password field, you will see a checkbox to send the user an email. If you check this, the user will receive an email letting them know how to log in. This will also have a link, so they can set a different password if they want.

The last option on the page is to choose a WordPress user role from the dropdown list.

Each user role comes with a different set of capabilities. Subscriber is the least powerful role, and Administrator is the most powerful role. You need to choose a role depending on what tasks a user will be performing on your website.

You may already know what role you want to give your user. If so, select the role, then click the ‘Add New User’ button at the bottom of the screen.

If you’re unsure about the role, don’t worry. We have a detailed explanation of the roles in the next section of this article.

Tip: Some plugins create additional user roles. For instance, WooCommerce adds ‘Customer’ and ‘Shop Manager’ roles. All in One SEO adds the ‘SEO Manager’ and ‘SEO Editor’ roles. Simply check the plugin’s documentation to find out about any additional roles that you see in this list.

Understanding User Roles in WordPress

WordPress comes with these default user roles:

• Administrator
• Editor
• Author
• Contributor
• Subscriber

Tip: If you have a multisite installation of WordPress, there is also a ‘Super Admin’ role. These users can manage all the websites, whereas regular Administrators manage just one site.

Administrator

An administrator can perform all tasks on your WordPress site.

You should only assign this role to users who you fully trust. You should also feel confident about their technical skills.

With the administrator user role, a user can install plugins, change themes, delete content, and even delete other users. This includes other administrators.

You can learn more about the Administrator role here.

Editor

An editor can add, edit, publish, and delete their own WordPress posts. They can also do all of these actions for posts by all other users.

They cannot access website settings, plugins, themes, and other admin features.

This role is useful if you have an editor for your site who manages a team of authors and publishes content on a regular basis.

You can learn more about the Editor role here.

Author

Authors can add, edit, and publish their own posts. They can upload files, too.

They can’t edit or publish other people’s posts or access features like plugins, themes, settings, and tools.

You may want to use a plugin to restrict authors so they can only write in a specific category.

You could also let authors revise their published posts. Again, you will need to use a plugin to extend the Author user role.

You can learn more about the Author role here.

Contributor

A contributor can add and edit their own posts but cannot publish them.

However, they cannot edit other users’ posts or access features like plugins, themes, settings, and tools.

It’s important to note that contributors cannot upload media files, such as images. The easiest way to get around this is to get contributors to upload their post’s image(s) through a file upload form.

That way, the image(s) can be saved straight to the WordPress media library. This makes it easy for an editor or administrator to add them to the post.

You can learn more about the Contributor role here.

Subscriber

The subscriber role does not let users add or edit posts in any way.

With the default settings, subscribers can create a profile and save their details. This lets them enter them more quickly when leaving comments.

You can also use a membership plugin or LMS plugin to create members-only content that is available to subscribers. We will come onto that later in this article.

You can learn more about the Subscriber role here.

To find out more about all the different user roles in WordPress and how they relate to one another, check out our beginner’s guide to WordPress user roles and permissions.

Managing Users in WordPress

As an administrator, you can add and remove users from your WordPress site at any time. After you have added a user, you can edit their profile at any time and change any information including passwords.

Simply click on the Users tab in your WordPress admin to go to the user page. You can edit or delete a user at any time.

You can edit the user’s profile to change their password, change their role, and more. You can also bulk edit users to change their role, if you want to upgrade or downgrade several users’ role at the same time.

Users can also edit their own profile by going to Users » Profile in the WordPress dashboard. They can add a profile picture and change most of their details, but they cannot change their role.

Open Your WordPress Site for Anyone to Register for Free

What if you want to let users register on your site for free?

It would be a lot of work to add each user manually. Instead, you can let them create their own account.

First, you need to go to Settings » General in your WordPress admin and check the ‘Anyone can register’ box.

By default, new users will be given the Subscriber role. Go ahead and change this to any role you want using the dropdown.

Warning: We recommend only letting users register as Subscribers or Contributors. If you let users register as Authors, they could publish a post without approval. Never use Administrator as the default setting.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page to store your changes.

You also need to add a login form to your site. The best way to do this is with the WPForms plugin. Just follow our guide on how to allow user registration on your WordPress site for help with this.

Tip: You can also disable the WordPress admin bar for subscribers or other user roles.

Creating a Paid Membership Program on Your Website

Another way to add new users to your site is to create a paid membership program that users sign up for.

This allows you to sell members-only content, add premium content behind paywall, sell online courses, and more.

To do this, you need a WordPress membership plugin.

We recommend using MemberPress. It’s the best membership and course creation plugin with all the functionality and flexibility you need.

MemberPress lets you lock specific posts and pages on your site so that only registered, paying users can access them. Many sites offer premium content like this as a way to make money online.

With MemberPress, it’s easy to create different access levels. For instance, you might offer a Bronze, Silver, and Gold plan. Or, you could create separate courses for users to sign up for.

You also get access to powerful tools such as MemberPress’s reports to show you your average member lifetime value, how many members you have in total, and more.

MemberPress allows you to add drip content to create evergreen membership site, and you can even sell group memberships in WordPress.

For a step by step tutorial on setting up MemberPress on your site, check out our ultimate guide to creating a WordPress membership site.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add new users and authors to your WordPress website. You may also want to see our comparison of the best email marketing services and how to add push notifications, so you can connect with your users after they leave 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 Add New Users and Authors to Your WordPress Blog appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 26, 2021 at 04:27PM

How to Add a Blogroll in Your WordPress Site (without a Plugin)

Do you want to add a blogroll on your WordPress site?

Blogroll is a list of links to other blogs that you own, or blogs that you admire, follow, or even compete with. The blogroll has a long history in the blogging culture.

In this article, we will share how to easily add blogroll in WordPress. We’ll also talk about the history of blogroll, and how you can benefit from it today.

What is a Blogroll?

A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs related to your own blog. It could include links to your other blog sites, or the blogs you like, or any websites you want users to checkout.

In its early days, blogging was more personal and community-driven. Like-minded folks often linked to other blogs that they enjoyed. Here is how we used to show a blogroll on WPBeginner back in 2009.

The blogroll was a common feature in those days which is why most blogging platforms supported it by default. However, as blogging became more mainstream and popular, the blogroll feature became less common.

WordPress had a blogroll feature from the very beginning. It was first called Links, then renamed to Blogroll in WordPress 2.1.

It was again changed to Links in WordPress 2.5 and remained that way until WordPress 3.5. At that time, the WordPress team decided to remove the feature from core.

The feature was still available as a free plugin called Link Manager. However that plugin hasn’t been updated in years, and you no longer need it to add a blogroll in WordPress.

Tip: If you are interested in how WordPress has changed over time, then do checkout our in-depth article on the history of WordPress.

Why Add a Blogroll in WordPress

Blogroll provides your users with the opportunity to visit other blogs that you recommend.

Normally, these are blogs or website that you or your company owns. However, you can also add links to other blogs that you admire or want your users to check out.

This allows your users to discover other blogs that you own or take a look at other sites that you recommend.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add a blogroll in WordPress, manage links, and easily display it anywhere on your website.

Adding a Blogroll in WordPress

WordPress has an awesome menu management feature which was the reason the core team decided to remove the blogroll feature.

Normally, you would use navigation menus in WordPress to add links to your website’s navigation bar, footer links, or other places.

However, you can also use the same navigation menu to create and manage a blogroll in WordPress.

Simply go to Appearance » Menus page and click on the ‘Create a new menu’ link.

WordPress will now create a new blank menu for you and ask you to provide a name for it. You can name it Blogroll, so it is easy to identify when you are working on your website.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Create menu’ button to save it.

After that, click to expand the ‘Custom Links’ tab under the ‘Add menu items’ column on the left.

Here, you need to enter the URL of the blog or website, and then add the blog title under the ‘Link text’. After that click on the ‘Add to Menu’ button.

You’ll see an item appear under the right column and your blank Blogroll menu will now have an item in it.

Now you can repeat the process to add other links that you want to display in your blogroll. After you are finished don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Menu’ button to store your blogroll links.

Open Blogroll Links in New Window and Make Them Nofollow

Blogroll links are external links which means they take away users from your website and pass along SEO link juice as well.

Now if you own all the links in your blogroll, and you don’t mind users leaving one of your blogs to view the other one, then you don’t need to add these.

However, if you don’t own those external links, then you may want to open them in a new window and make them nofollow.

These additional options are hidden by default, but you can easily unhide them.

Simply click on the ‘Screen Options’ button at the top right corner of the screen. It will display a flydown menu where you need to check the box next to ‘Link Target’ and ‘Link Relationship (XFN)’ options.

After that, scroll down to the links you added earlier and then click on any link to expand it. You can now check the box next to the ‘Open link in a new tab’ option and then enter ‘nofollow’ under the ‘Link Relationship (XFN)’ field.

You can repeat the process for all the links that you want to nofollow or open in a new window. After that, don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Menu’ button to save your changes.

Displaying Blogroll on Your WordPress Site

Now that you have created the blogroll, you can go ahead and add it to your WordPress blog.

The most common place to display a blogroll is in your website’s sidebar.

Simply, go to the Appearance » Widgets page and add the ‘Navigation Menu’ widget to your sidebar.

After that, enter the title you want to display for blogroll and then select the menu you created earlier from the drop-down menu.

Don’t forget to click on the Save button to store your widget settings.

You can now visit your website to see your Blogroll displayed in sidebar. Here is how it looked on our test blog.

You can also show the blogroll in the footer area if your WordPress theme has a Footer widget area. You can check that by going to Appearance » Widgets page.

Simply add the Navigation Menu widget to the footer widget area and select the blogroll menu. Don’t forget to click on the Save button to store your changes.

You can now visit your website to see the blogroll links displayed in action.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add a blogroll in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to create an email newsletter to connect with visitors after they leave your website, and our comparison of the best push notification software to grow your traffic.

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 Add a Blogroll in Your WordPress Site (without a Plugin) appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 25, 2021 at 06:00PM

7 Best Webinar Software Platform for Small Businesses (Compared)

Are you looking for the best webinar software for your business?

There are many webinar platforms that allow you to run live webinars and automated evergreen webinars to connect with your users and grow your business.

In this article, we will share the best webinar software for small businesses, and compare their features so you can choose the best webinar platform to fit your needs.

What Kind of Webinar Software is Right for You?

There are many options for webinar platforms out there. Some that run live webinars. Some that do conference meetings, and some that run webinars as a live simulation (called automated webinars) which are often used for lead generation and sales funnels.

When choosing a webinar software, you need to make sure that the platform you are choosing allows you to do what you have in your mind.

A good webinar platform should have the following features:

• Great video quality and reliable webinar hosting service that doesn’t have delays or downtime
• Ability to do live webinars and automated webinars for lead generation
• Real-time chat features, so you can engage with your audience and answer questions
• Ability to have multiple presenters and hosts
• Ability for presenters to share screen and record webinar for future webinar replays
• Seamless integration with third-party email marketing services, marketing automation tools, and CRM software, so you can connect with users after the session
• Smart webinar registration pages and landing pages to boost registration and attendance
• Actionable webinar analytics that lets you see what’s working and what’s not, so you can fine-tune your webinar for maximum conversions

Aside from these webinar features, you want a webinar software that offers great support and fair pricing options.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the best webinar software for small businesses.

1. Livestorm

Livestorm is a popular webinar software that offers three types of webinars: live video webinars, on-demand webinars, and automated webinars.

They’re a fast growing webinar platform among marketers because they offer browser-based webinars. This means your users do not have to download any software to join. Frictionless joining is proven to increase webinar attendance rate.

Livestorm web conferencing works on all web browsers including Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.

It comes with all the powerful webinar features such as HD video, chat messaging during webinars, screensharing, live Q&As, audience polling functionality, automatic email reminders, ability to share documents, and more.

Livestorm aims to be a comprehensive video communication platform, so you can use the webinar for live events, product demos, customer training sessions, company communication, and even teach online courses.

You can invite teammates as moderators to help you host and better engage with your audience. Their webinar data insights allows you to analyze your performance, so you can improve your conversions.

It connects with over 1000+ marketing platforms using built-in integrations and Zapier, so you can send customer data where you need it to improve your workflow.

The best part is that their pricing is very affordable for small businesses.

Pricing: Free plan comes with up to 10 registrants and a 20 minute webinar. Pro plans start at $99 for up to 100 live attendees.

2. GoToWebinar

GoToWebinar is one of the original and most popular webinar software platforms on the planet. It is built by the same team behind the GoToMeeting video conferencing suite.

While it started out as a live webinar solution, they have evolved with the industry needs to add automated webinars with their Simulated Live feature that allows you to create and schedule pre-recorded webinars.

Being one of the original webinar platforms, they offer a wide-range of features such as live presentation, webinar templates, event management, custom registration, webinar polls & surveys, webinar recording, and more.

They have seamless integration with all the popular marketing automation tools like Mailchimp and CRM platforms like Salesforce since it’s used by both small businesses and Enterprise companies.

Their analytics reports are very detailed and lets you see who attended, how interested they were, what questions they asked, an so much more, so you can refine your webinar strategy to grow your business.

The best part about GoToWebinar is their video quality and reliability. If you’re looking to host online events or virtual conferences, then they’re a leading webinar platform for that.

Pricing: Starts from $59 per month for up to 100 participants. Their pricing scales with the number of attendees, but it’s very affordable even for large virtual events.

3. EasyWebinar

EasyWebinar is a popular webinar platform for marketers because it lets you do both live webinars as well as automated evergreen webinars.

Their live webinars allow you to have high quality video without any delays, real-time chat, multiple presenters, ability to record and archive, screen sharing, and more.

You can use their EasyCast feature to livestream simultaneously on multiple social media platforms like YouTube Live and Facebook Live at the same time.

Their automated webinars allow you to easily run evergreen webinars to reach a larger audience by optimizing for user’s local timezones. You can easily repurpose any of your live webinars and convert them into automated webinars to collect more leads and build a high-converting sales funnel.

You can use their customization options to make the webinar templates match your brand styles. Their registration embed option allows you to host a registration form on your own website, with landing page builders like SeedProd, Clickfunnels, Leadpages, and more.

They integrate with all the popular email marketing services, so you can engage with users by sending them offers, notifications before and after the webinar, and more.

Pricing: Starts at $78 per month with up to 100 live attendees. You can use their YouTube live integration to have unlimited live attendees on this plan.

4. Stealth Seminar

Stealth Seminar is known as the best automated webinar platform because it’s entirely focused on helping you maximize evergreen webinars and automate your sales funnel.

You can use Stealth Seminar to run pre-recorded webinars as if they were live to better leverage user timezones, avoid tech failures such as low internet bandwidth, and remove presentation nerves.

They also allow you to run live webinars as well with YouTube live, or even a hybrid webinar that lets you run pre-recorded webinar with live chat for engagement.

Stealth Seminar comes with customizable pre-made templates that are designed to help you convert more leads. This includes registration templates, smart CTAs, surveys & polls, and scarcity tools like countdown timers.

For small businesses, they do have the option to add faux attendees to make your webinar look more popular and build authority. It’s a grey hat marketing tactic that utilize the fake it till you make it strategy.

Their webinar analytics shows you registration opt-in, webinar attendees, webinar conversion rate, and total sales generated. You can even see engagement reports for specific call-to-actions.

Stealth Seminar allows you to add sales pixel tracking, Facebook and Google retargeting pixels, and split testing to fine tune your strategy further.

Pricing: Starts at $69.96 per month for 150 simultaneous attendees. Also includes worldwide SMS reminders up to 6000 a month.

5. Zoom

Zoom is the most trending video conference call company in the market right now for online meetings. What many don’t know however is that Zoom has also gotten into the video webinar market.

Known for their high video quality and reliable streaming, this move was a no brainer.

Now you can use Zoom to run interactive video webinar with screen sharing, Q&A chat, and the ability to like and up-vote questions.

Zoom also allows you to run polls, promote attendees to panelists, have whiteboarding and annotation tools, and more.

Aside from running live webinars, Zoom lets you record webinars and even add transcripts. You can also run practice sessions for pre-event panelists as well.

What’s unique about Zoom’s webinar platform is that it lets you have 100 panelists with over 49 viewable on screen at one time. This allows you to promote attendees to be panelists and join the conversation.

They also allow you to live stream simultaneously to unlimited audiences on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and other custom streaming services.

Zoom integrates with all the popular email marketing services and CRM platforms. For WordPress website owners, you can use WPForms and Automator Plugin to automatically register users for webinars in Zoom.

Their built-in analytics and marketing tools aren’t as powerful as some of the other webinar software in this list, but their reliability and video quality is superb.

Pricing: Starting at $40 per month for 100 attendees. But as it scales, it does get more expensive. For example 3000 attendees will cost you $990 per month on Zoom vs $499 on GoToWebinar.

6. Demio

Demio is a fast growing webinar software among marketers because it offers frictionless joining, so your users can join the webinar in the browser with one click without downloading any software.

You can use it to run live webinars with webcam video, screen sharing, and upload your presentation slides directly in Demio.

Their user-friendly platform allows you to engage with your audience using interactive polls with stats, launch offers and call-to-actions during the event, share handout gifts or bonus downloads, organize and answer user’s questions, chat with users through public or private chat, and even bring attendees to stage.

You can also download your live webinars and repurpose them into automated webinars to share recordings or use it in your automated sales funnel. You can also join the automated webinar and interact in the live chat to make it feel more real time.

Pricing: Starting at $49 per month for 50 attendees.

7. GetResponse Webinars

GetResponse is a popular email marketing service that has added a webinar feature to make it easy for users to centralize their marketing efforts.

You can use GetResponse webinars to run both live and on-demand webinars. You can have up to 1000 live attendees, share the stage with multiple presenters, and have unlimited webinars.

The best part is that you can automatically follow up with with your audience, run automated nurturing campaigns, and promote your special offers right from their marketing automation platform which is included in the price.

You have all the powerful webinar features such as polls & surveys, screen sharing, call-to-actions during the webinars, interactive whiteboards, and more.

GetResponse comes with built-in landing pages and sales funnels to help you further optimize your conversions. You can also use the OptinMonster popups integration to get more attendees and subscribers.

Pricing: $99 per month for 300 attendees, and it includes over 1000 email subscribers and all their marketing automation features.

Which is the Best Webinar Software (Expert Pick)?

After reviewing all the popular webinar platforms, we believe that GoToWebinar, LiveStorm, and EasyWebinar are the best webinar software in the market.

They offer all the powerful webinar features that you need with high-quality video streaming and affordable pricing plans.

Their conversion tool are optimized to align with your goals whether it is lead generation, sales, running demos, or anything else. These platforms adapt to your business needs to ensure that you get maximum results.

We hope this article helped you find the best webinar software platform for your business. You may also want to see our comparison of the best business phone services for small business and best push notification software to help you connect with visitors after they leave 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.

Disclaimer: To help our readers avoid choice paralysis, we only compared the best webinar software platforms in our expert opinion. This list doesn’t include other webinar services like WebinarJam, WebinarNinja, Bigmarker, Everwebinar, Clickmeeting, Google Hangouts, WebEx, Zoho Meeting, Adobe Connect, MyOwnConference, Bluejeans webinar tool, etc.

The post 7 Best Webinar Software Platform for Small Businesses (Compared) appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 23, 2021 at 04:00PM

40 Useful Tools to Manage and Grow Your WordPress Blog (Updated)

Readers often ask us what tools we use to manage and grow our WordPress blogs.

We have listed some of them in our WPBeginner Blueprint, but there are some more that we use on our different projects.

In this article, we’ll share our list of 40 useful blogging tools to manage and grow your blog.

Looking to Start a Blog?

Do you want to start your own WordPress blog? We know that it can be a daunting thought, especially if you’re not a techy expert. But you’re not alone.

At WPBeginner, we have helped over 370,000+ users start a blog. And you can too!

Simply work through our comprehensive step by step guide on how to start a WordPress blog. You don’t need any technical knowledge. We explain everything in plain English.

Once your blog is set up, go ahead and check out these powerful tools that will help you grow your blog.

1. All in One SEO

All in One SEO is the best SEO plugin for WordPress. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps you bring more free traffic to your website from search engines.

With All in One SEO, you get an instant score for all your posts, pages, and website. This helps you see how you’re doing and it gives you a checklist of exactly how to improve your SEO.

Its built-in tools let you easily create XML sitemap, markup your pages for rich schema, optimize for local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, and more.

2. SeedProd

SeedProd is the best landing page builder for WordPress.

By default, WordPress allows you to showcase blog posts on your website’s homepage. SeedProd helps you quickly create on-demand landing pages for every occasion. Whether you want to launch a product, run a seasonal sale, capture new leads, or grow your email list.

It comes with pre-built templates that you can quickly customize using an intuitive drag and drop interface. This allows you to create stunningly professional pages without writing any code.

SeedProd works with any WordPress theme and it comes with special blocks like countdowns and call to action buttons, optin forms, and more. It also integrates with all top email marketing services, WooCommerce, and other essential WordPress plugins.

3. MonsterInsights (Google Analytics)

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily install Google Analytics on your site and see where your users are coming from and what they do on your site.

MonsterInsights shows you the data you need right within your WordPress admin area. Over 2 million sites use it to see important stats about their website traffic.

You can create special reports in MonsterInsights to see things like which categories or authors are most popular on your blog. You can also track affiliate link clicks, see real-time traffic stats, and make Google Analytics compliant with GDPR.

4. ThirstyAffiliates

ThirstyAffiliates lets you easily manage affiliate links, which can become a time-consuming task. Many website owners use affiliate marketing to monetize their blogs as it’s easy to get started with.

ThirstyAffiliates is an affiliate link manager that allows you to easily add affiliate links, cloak links with pretty URLs, and auto-insert links for keywords. For more details, check out our guide on how to add affiliate links in WordPress with ThirstyAffiliates.

Alternative: Pretty Links

5. Shared Counts

Shared Counts is a useful social media plugin for WordPress. It lets you show the number of times your posts have been shared on social media. This is a useful form of social proof.

Shared Counts gives you multiple button styles, and you can choose where to show the buttons (before or after the content or manually). You can also enable Shared Counts for custom post types.

6. SEMRush

SEMRush helps you find competitive search data, so your blog can rank high for the right keywords. You can get insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, as well as link building.

Using all these tools from SEMRush can dramatically increase your website traffic. This means you will get more leads and more customers.

Alternative: Ahrefs

7. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best WordPress lead generation tool. It allows you to add beautiful optin forms to your WordPress site and helps you get more subscribers. You can use it to create popups, slide-ins, floating bars, coupon wheels, and more.

OptinMonster comes with page level targeting, split testing, analytics, and Exit-Intent® technology which allows you to display a lightbox popup when a user is about to leave your website.

See how to build your email list in WordPress with OptinMonster.

8. WPForms

WPForms is the most beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag and drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other types of online forms with just a few clicks.

We use WPForms on WPBeginner and all of our other sites. There’s a free WPForms Lite version available for those who are looking for a simple solution.

The full version of WPForms lets you create surveys and polls, payment forms, file upload forms, user registration forms, conversational forms, and much more.

9. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the best email service providers. It allows you to build your email list, design emails, and send them to your users.

It is very beginner-friendly and at the same time powerful enough for experienced users.

Alternatives: Sendinblue, ConvertKit, and Drip

10. MemberPress

MemberPress is the best membership site plugin for WordPress. It lets you lock content on your site so that members can only access it by paying either a one-off fee or a subscription.

You can create different levels of membership with MemberPress, with each level having different access permissions. You can even use MemberPress to run an online course.

11. PushEngage

PushEngage is a powerful push notification plugin for WordPress. It helps you to get more website traffic, boost user engagement, and ultimately make more money.

With push notifications, you can quickly and easily send out alerts to your site’s users. For instance, you could let them know that you’re running a sale. Here on WPBeginner, we find that push notifications get a higher click rate, engagement, and opt-in rate compared with our email newsletter.

12. RafflePress

RafflePress is the best giveaway and raffle plugin for WordPress. It lets you grow your traffic, engagement, email list, and social media following by running a fun giveaway on your site.

By using RafflePress, you can incentivize actions like visiting your social media profiles, sharing posts, watching videos, and much more. Each time a user takes one of the actions you specify, they will get an entry into your prize draw.

13. Canva

Canva allows you to create beautiful graphic designs, edit images, and create posters, with a simple and intuitive drag and drop interface.

It is extremely easy to use to create things like featured images for your blog. Even beginners can create professional-looking graphics with Canva.

Alternative: Visage

14. Buffer

Buffer provides a better way to share your content across social media. It allows you to schedule and share your content across Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin from a single dashboard. You could plan your whole day’s tweets and status updates in one go.

See our guide on how to schedule WordPress posts for social media with BufferApp.

15. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon has a set of social media feed plugins that let you easily bring your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube updates onto your website. This is a great way to keep your site fresh with new content.

Using Smash Balloon’s plugins lets you embed your actual social media posts on your site so users can interact with them. You can even create an Instagram shoppable feed to boost your eCommerce sales.

16. Grammarly

Grammarly is a powerful AI (artificial intelligence) editor for your website posts and pages. You can copy and paste content into the Grammarly website app. However, the easiest way to use Grammarly is to install the Grammarly Chrome extension.

As well as pointing out spelling mistakes, Grammarly will let you know about grammatical errors and stylistic mistakes. The basic version is free, but you may prefer the pro version for help with tone, formality level, and word choices.

17. Headline Analyzer by MonsterInsights

The MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer lets you optimize the headline for your blog post or landing page. It will give you a score out of 100 along with specific suggestions for improving your headline.

The headline analyzer also includes several helpful lists, such as the list of Power Words and Emotion Words. These can help you make your headlines extra compelling.

18. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is a powerful forms plugin for experienced WordPress users. It offers advanced functionality like the ability to create calculators on your site to help you gather more leads.

For instance, you could create a BMI calculator on a health or fitness site. If you run a real estate website, you could use Formidable Forms to make a mortgage calculator.

19. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin. It lets you easily create a full backup of your site, which you can then store in the cloud or on your own computer.

You can even set up scheduled backups, so your site will be backed up on a regular basis without you needing to do anything. The premium version of UpdraftPlus supports multisite installations of WordPress, lets you clone your website, and more.

Alternatives: BackupBuddy, Jetpack

20. Sucuri

Sucuri is a website monitoring and security service. It provides real time alerts for any suspicious activity on your website. It prevents malware from infecting your site. If your site is already infected, Sucuri can detect and remove malware.

Take a look at how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.

Alternative: CloudFlare.

21. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the best caching plugin for WordPress. It speeds up your site by storing copies of your website pages. These can be quickly shown to people who visit your site.

There are lots of useful features in WP Rocket, such as built-in lazy loading of images. This helps speed up your site even further, which is better for users and for your Google ranking.

Alternative: WP Super Cache

22. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is a clever automation plugin that lets WordPress plugins and even different WordPress sites ‘talk’ to one another. For instance, you could use it to sell products on one site but create user accounts on another.

It works like Zapier, but for WordPress. Uncanny Automator is a fantastic way to automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time to handle.

23. Insert Headers and Footers

Insert Headers and Footers is a simple but very useful plugin. It lets you add code to the header, footer, and body sections for your site.

This is something you will often need to do when verifying your site with third-party tools. Many people use Insert Headers and Footers to add their Google Analytics code. However, we recommend using MonsterInsights for this instead as it gives you extra tracking features.

24. ChatBot

ChatBot lets you create an automated chatbot on your website. This means users can get instant answers to their questions at any time, 24/7. It’s a much cheaper option than hiring extra support team members.

ChatBot is powered by AI (artificial intelligence). It integrates with your WordPress site and with live chat software so that the conversation can be easily transferred to a live person if needed.

25. LiveChat

LiveChat is the best live chat software on the market. It works seamlessly with your WordPress site. Your support team members can access the live chat through apps on their computer, tablet, or mobile device.

We use LiveChat on our eCommerce website. It’s very fast, works on all devices, and offers a great user experience. Make sure you use our LiveChat coupon to get 30% off your first payment.

26. Tailwind

Tailwind is a social media automation tool for Pinterest and Instagram. It lets you schedule 10 pins with a single click.

You also get Tailwind’s analytic tools to help you figure out what’s working best. That way, you can schedule your content for times when you will get more engagement.

27. Better Click to Tweet

Better Click to Tweet is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert ‘click to tweet’ buttons into your posts and pages. This means readers can quickly and easily tweet a key quote from your content.

It’s a free plugin that comes with a special Gutenberg block, making it very easy to use. Alternatively, you can use a shortcode to put the ‘click to tweet’ button into your posts.

28. Feedly

Feedly is a modern news/RSS feed reader. It allows you to view and read content from all your favorite sites in one place.

Feedly is available on the web, as a browser extension, and as a mobile app on Android and iOS devices.

29. Shutterstock

Shutterstock is a huge stock photography library that lets you buy high-quality images to use on your website. It’s cheaper per image if you get a monthly subscription.

We use Shutterstock’s images here on WPBeginner. They have a wide range of vector graphics, photos, and much more.

30. Google Workspace (G Suite)

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is Google’s set of connected tools. It includes Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and more.

Many companies use Google Workspace as a key part of their systems. It’s suitable for even small companies as it’s priced per user.

Alternative: Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)

31. Asana

Asana is a project and task management tool that helps teams to organize their workflow. You can use it to create lists of tasks, see your tasks on a calendar, assign tasks to others, and much more.

The basic version of Asana is free and can be used by up to 15 teammates. This is a good option for individuals or small startups.

Alternative: Trello

32. Camtasia

Camtasia is screen recording software available for Windows and Mac. It’s extremely useful for sites where you need to walk users through a process step by step.

With Camtasia, you can easily edit your videos, add graphics, animations, arrows, sounds, subtitles, and more.

Alternatives: Screenflow, CamStudio

33. LastPass

LastPass is a password manager that stores all your passwords in a single secure vault. This means you can easily avoid the temptation to use insecure passwords, or to use the same password for multiple sites.

After installing LastPass, you can use it to autogenerate strong passwords and save them in just one click. Check out our guide on securely managing passwords for more details.

Alternatives: 1Password, Dashlane

34. Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool that lets you see what topics are popular on Google. You can compare different keywords to see the interest in them over time.

The ‘Trending Searches’ option gives you a real-time view of what people are most commonly searching for. This lets you create content that’s likely to get traffic. You can filter Google Trends by country, too.

35. Quora

Quora is a huge questions and answers website, and is a form of social network. Anyone can post a question and anyone can answer it.

You can drive traffic to your website by looking for relevant questions on Quora to answer. This helps you position yourself as an expert. Plus, if you see a question coming up frequently, that could make a good topic for a blog post.

36. Twitter Search

Twitter Search is a useful way to find out the latest news, reactions, and what’s on people’s minds.

You can use Twitter search to find content ideas. You could also see what users are talking about topics related to your website topic and then reach out to those users to engage them.

37. Google Search Console

Google Search Console was previously known as Google Webmaster Tools. It allows website owners to check how Google sees their website. You can see the most commonly used queries where your site appears.

It offers a comprehensive set of tools that show reports on duplicate titles, crawl errors, search queries, indexed content, and more. Take a look at our guide on adding your WordPress site to Google Search Console for help getting started.

38. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo helps you analyze what content performs best for any topic or even for your competitors. You can find key influencers to promote your content, monitor your brand mentions, and so much more.

This tool is a must have for all serious bloggers. You can search for topics by region, language, time period, and more.

39. TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is a free browser extension and mobile app that helps you run your YouTube channel. It has lots of useful features, like a keyword explorer so you can come up with the perfect titles and tags for your videos.

You can use TubeBuddy to speed up your publishing process and run A/B tests, too.

40. Nextiva

Nextiva is the best business phone service on the market. You can use it for customer calls and conference calls, as it has excellent audio quality.

With Nextiva, you get lots of useful extras like a free local or toll-free number, call forwarding, custom greetings, text messages, online faxes, and much more.

We hope these tools help you manage and grow your WordPress blog. You might also like our article on how to start an online store.

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 40 Useful Tools to Manage and Grow Your WordPress Blog (Updated) appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 22, 2021 at 04:08PM