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When Page Builder Sandwich was launched in 2016, we were using Easy Digital Downloads. In 2017, we moved to Freemius. Here’s why we switched: What is EDD and why did we choose it?
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is a popular self-hosted eCommerce / WooCommerce alternative for WordPress. Out of the box, you can’t really sell a WordPress product using EDD, but its Software Licensing extension makes it perfect for selling plugins. The extension handled the creation and verification of license keys, too.
EDD also worked well because it allowed customers to purchase our product directly from the website, while also giving them their own account page where they can log in and view their purchase history.
Since it worked well, and since we’re a big fan of Pippin Williamson, this was Sandwich’s first option.
How does it work compared to Freemius, and when did we switch?
In 2016, Vova Feldman, lead developer and co-creator of Freemius, emailed us a rundown of Freemius, explaining that it’s more than an eCommerce solution — It provides other features like analytics and insights solution, a marketing automation tool, and built-in support tool so customers could

Through the years of doing support for our WordPress plugins we received numerous requests for little features or customizations that our clients wanted. All of our products make use WordPress actions and filters, so for many of the available functionalities, you can change the outcome or modify it to your liking using a hook. While searching for and using hooks isn’t a problem for users with developer experience, our customer base is large and has different qualifications.
There’s always the option to keep on adding extra options and settings in the plugin, but because we want to keep our plugins clean and simple, we decided against cluttering the interface.
Solving the issue
Most of these customization requests were handled through snippets of custom code that we sent to our users who were requesting them.
This approach was not ideal, because not everyone would be able to benefit from them, so we wanted to make them available to more users. Thus, the Developer Knowledge Base area of our documentation was born.
This page helped our users a lot, but manually adding the code to your website and modifying parameters or messages from a function wasn’t exactly natural

No one likes spending more money than necessary – it’s a human thing. Even one of the richest people in the world, Warren Buffet, still searches out discounts on the cars he buys (ok, maybe that’s an extreme example – you get the idea). Because people are always on the lookout for ways to cut costs, some WordPress users are tempted to turn to nulled WordPress plugins and themes instead of paying for the official premium version.
In this post, we’re going to tell you why using nulled WordPress plugins and themes is a bad idea…even if it’s not necessarily breaking any laws.
Nulled WordPress Plugins and Themes Aren’t Necessarily Illegal
Let’s start with the elephant in the room…
It’s unlikely that the FBI kicks down your door if you use nulled WordPress plugins or themes. That’s because, in contrast to the other content that people usually “pirate” (e.g. music, movies), nulled WordPress plugins and themes are often not breaking the law.
The reason here has to do with the GPL (General Public License). Without making this a lesson on copyright, you just need to know that part of what the GPL license allows

Cookies were first invented in 1994 by a computer programmer named Lou Montulli. Without them, the web would be quite a different place. Whether your logging into the back-end of your WordPress site or closing an annoying popup window, you use and interact with cookies every day (even if you don’t realize it). By now, you’ve probably guessed that when we refer to cookies, we mean the cookies used to store important visitor information on a website, not the yummy chocolate chip kind.

In this month’s showcase, I’m excited to feature a website created using Elementor’s Woocommerce builder. Another unique selection of ours is a recipe website that utilizes Elementor’s integration with ACF. It’s fantastic to see how quickly our community members embrace new capabilities and features that we release, and implement them successfully in their projects. We certainly hope it will inspire other users to build more advanced sites with Elementor.
So, here we go.
Let’s WP is a new blog dedicated to helping the WordPress community with valuable information. In this blog, WordPress specialists share methods and best practices to make web development more accessible.
The vivid color palette, combined with a simple blog layout, produces a friendly and inviting blog. Their use of Custom Post Fields in the blog posts enables them to share more helpful information with the readers; improves the overall user experience.
The Institute of Aesthetics is a beauty and wellness spa, as well as a training center for facial aesthetic treatments, based in Scottsdale Arizona. The designer’s use of light soothing colors, in addition to the choice of an

John Locke is a SEO consultant from Sacramento, CA. He helps manufacturing businesses rank higher through his web agency, Lockedown Design & SEO. If your website is built on WordPress, you have probably used the Yoast SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO is the number one SEO helper plugin for WordPress, (and they also have a module for Drupal). Here’s how it works.
For each page or article you edit, you set a focus keyword phrase. Yoast SEO gives you an overall score for Readability and SEO.
Green dots mean “good”, orange dots mean “OK”, red dots mean “needs improvement”.
You also get a breakdown of individual areas that fall under the red, orange, and green dots. (There will be a screenshot further down of what this looks like in the back end.)
So here’s the question that I hear most often from other Yoast users:
“I have green dots in Yoast. So why am I not ranking higher in Google?”
I understand why there’s confusion. Isn’t Yoast supposed to help you rank higher?
It can, but with an asterisk.
SEO is a black box inside a moving target, and there is no transparent formula to ranking number one in Google.
But I’m here

AMP for WordPress Plugin to Introduce User-Friendly Theme Support Settings in Upcoming 1.0 Release Google’s open-source project AMP (as in Accelerated Mobile Pages) will get significant improvements in the upcoming release. This should be great news because the official WordPress plugin is used on more than 300,000 websites. The new features AMP for WordPress aims to introduce are extended theme support and a more user-friendly settings approach. This re-orientation is essential since, in the first stages, the tool was primarily built for developers, and hence required non-intuitive actions from regulars users.
In the forthcoming version, users can enable native AMP or Paired mode on the settings page; moreover, the beta release adds granular controls for selecting supported templates. And these are not the only changes in the plugin’s functionality.
The 3-year-old tool aims to improve your website’s mobile performance and is used on 25 million domains worldwide (beyond WordPress). We’re using it on this very blog too.

The WordPress Plugin Directory has over 56K plugins, many of them have entire eco-systems built around them with solid business models. Up until now you could not simply link to the plugin page or add additional visual presentation, but nothing more. But now you can easily “oEmbed” plugin URLs to present a visual representation of the plugin. How It made possible?
WordPress 4.4 (Clifford), released in December 2015, added the oEmbed functionality to all WordPress content. This feature makes all WordPress posts and pages embeddable by simply pasting URLs into the WordPress editor, making WordPress auto-display the preview of the pasted URL. Behind the scenes, each site can customize its embedded output, by adding the new embed.php file into the active theme’s folder.
When the WordPress Plugin Directory was upgraded to version 3, the bbPress-based system was dropped in favor of the upgraded WordPress system, built with Post Types and all the other builtin-features available in core, including the oEmbed functionality.
By the end on July 2018, the plugin repository added oEmbed support to plugin pages using custom embed.php file allowing everybody to auto embed plugin

Hey guys! It’s another great day because it’s the day of tech comics! I just love the smell of tech comics in the morning, which is perhaps why I find myself waiting all month for tech comics day to roll around! But enough of me and my quirks; today, our tech comic grab bag of banter includes problems with language / weaponized clients, a map to the pitfalls of product development, a sympathy card for anyone who ever lost a function during the rush to update, and a guide to the emotions of product development.
If you like these chuckles then you’ll be happy to hear that we release a fresh batch of comics every month. Check out our archive whenever you need a boost during the day.
Once again, the lion’s share of the praise goes to our illustrator João Santos, who works with us on the ideas and the illustrations every month.
So, I think that’s just about enough from me! Let’s browse through October 2018’s tech comics. I have a favorite already, but drop us a comment and let us know which one tickled your fancy the most.
October 2018 Comics with CodeinWP: Screen-Shots, Map of Product Development, Stages of Product Creation, Deprecated Functions

This blog post is mainly to draw attention to the brewing problem with using Font Awesome v5 in your WordPress Plugin or Theme. What is Font Awesome?
It’s a little CSS (or JS in v5) file that you can add to your site to be able to use lots and lots of fancy icons on your site.
What’s the problem?
There are really two problems;
1. The first (less serious) problem is a common problem with JS/CSS libraries and WordPress and can affect FA v4 not just FA v5, that is the fact that two developers might add the script and use different names so the same file gets added to the website twice. The fix to this is relatively simple and is resolved by the two devs using the same name to add the file, we use and we suggest “font-awesome”.
2. The main brewing problem with using Font Awesome in WP these days is that FA v5 introduced a new way to use it, in FA v4 it was always just a CSS file but now it can be used either as a CSS file or as a JS file. This is fine for “Joe Blogs” with his html website but once you are using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress which has plugins built by many many devs you have the situation that both the CSS and the JS

eCommerce shows no signs of slowing its growth. At least not anytime soon. According to data from Statista and eMarketer, eCommerce in the US will approach $521 billion in 2018, and more than $750 billion by 2021—and that’s just in the United States. It’s that kind of growth in eCommerce that puts the same question into the heads of every store owner—will our store be ready for the holidays?
When asking this question, there are three parts to think about—the website itself, your payment processor, and the tools/processes you use for shipping products.
Will our website handle the holiday traffic surge?
Will our payment processor be able to handle our holiday traffic?
Will our fulfillment processes buckle under the increased holiday traffic?
Today we’re going to dig into the first question and make sure you’re doing everything you can to make sure that your online store is ready for a large jump in traffic and transactions.
The Name of the Game is Performance
There are a lot of different statistics that help us understand customers who visit online stores.
When pages within the store take longer than 2 seconds to load, session lengths can drop

Translating WordPress forms is now easier than ever. Using TranslatePress you can create bilingual or multilingual WordPress forms. You’ll be able to translate WordPress forms (all form fields and messages) directly from the front-end, with just a few clicks.
In this tutorial we’ll focus on how to create multilingual WordPress forms of any type.
Whether it’s a simple contact form, user registration form, job application form or survey form, you can follow the simple steps below to translate it.
Why Translate WordPress Forms
If your business is aiming to reach an international audience, then building a multilingual website is the way to go. This of course implies you need to translate WordPress forms of different types.
By translating your forms, you have the potential to:
reach a wider, international audience
increase your form’s conversion rate
boost your revenue, if you’re collecting payments or donations via an order form
Below we’ll show you how to setup and translate a form in as many languages as you want. This way you’ll keep all your collected data (form submissions) in one place.
How to Translate WordPress Forms
First we’ll go

Starting an ecommerce business is an exciting, chaotic time. You have so many things to consider: should you use a hosted platform or manage your store with a plugin? What are the strategies you need to skyrocket your sales? But no question is more daunting than this one: How should you accept payments?
After you do your homework, there will be two pretty clear contenders for your merchant buck: Stripe and PayPal. Offering comparable features, choosing between the two feels like picking between apples… and yet more apples. Which is where this article comes in.
Today, we’re going to compare and contrast these two payment gateways and get down to the bottom of the Stripe vs. PayPal debate.
Here’s the itinerary:
What Do Stripe and PayPal Do?
Both Stripe (founded 2011) and PayPal (founded 1998) are payment gateways, acting as the go-between for merchants and the appropriate credit card networks/financial institutions to authorize and accept payments.
The intricacies of these relationships can get pretty convoluted. A simple way to look at a payment gateway is as an envoy that routes information between merchants and banks.
Here’s a visual breakdown of where payment

It’s high time you shouldn’t overlook Google+ because its demands are soaring high and stands beneficial in your social media marketing efforts as an ideal addition. Google+ enhances brand visibility on Google search results, thus providing better lead over other distinct social media platforms. When focusing on SEO strategy, many more brands are clinging to Google+. Though adding followers are an integral part, but brands are into taking out that superfluous SEO link juice from Google+.
As the number of visitors increases because they get engaged with you via Google+, thus the prospective traffic channels to multiply vigorously. If the engagement is with Google+, then it signifies a new set of methods and excellent practices. Here are the 10 best ways to drive more traffic to your website through Google+, that are discussed below.
1. Optimize your Web Page Info: You should firstly edit your Google+ web page information so that it matches with Google’s directory. You should add Meta title (tag-line) and description with related links (intro) in the ‘About’ tab on the web page with 1-2 keywords.
2. Include Google+ Buttons to Your Website: In order to progress

Please explain about the Advanced Custom Fields plugin without using jargon. ACF, or advanced custom fields, is a WordPress plugin that allows you to tailor, customize, and design to your liking any kind of edit page in the back end of WordPress. Primarily it’s for adding different fields to a post, but it’s bigger than that now and you can actually add fields to users, widgets, and other kinds of data objects within WordPress.
Can you share a bit about yourself, like how it got started, how you came up with it?
My story of developing ACF has got pretty humble roots in that I built ACF because I simply needed it for the work I was doing at the time, which, back then, I was doing freelance work, freelance web design, web development. We were using WordPress, or I was using WordPress at the time, which I found out about through the client that I was working for. They already had a WordPress website, and I was gonna do some updates for them. They’d designed, or they’d had designed, this new section of their website that I think it listed out in tiles quite a few different products that they had, but they weren’t using an eCommerce plugin at the time. I don’t

A brand-new way to create content is coming to WordPress. The much-ballyhooed Gutenberg editor is set to appear in version 5.0. However, it’s already available in plugin form and boasts 300,000+ users. There has been no shortage of debate and controversy regarding this new editor. Therefore, it’s important to know what Gutenberg is and is not. This will help you make the best decisions with respect to how it fits in with your existing website.
One of biggest issues for designers is how Gutenberg will affect page builders. On the surface, there does appear to be some shared functionality between them. Does that mean the page builder tools we’re using today will become obsolete? Should we toss them aside for Gutenberg?
Gutenberg’s Approach to Content
Before we can determine the fate of page builders, let’s take a look at how Gutenberg works. We’ll introduce you to its new approach and show you its strengths.
Using Gutenberg is a much different experience than the “Classic” editor (which will continue to be available as a plugin). It eschews the single content field of its predecessor. Instead, the focus is on “blocks” of content.

If you have spent a lot of time browsing the WordPress free themes directory, you should know that there are several free WordPress themes available for your website. There are thousands of free WordPress themes available and the directory grows by another 20-30 themes every month. Interestingly, most of these free themes are as elegant and stylish as their premium counterparts. After knowing this, you may raise the question- Why should I spend good money for premium WordPress themes when I get them for free? Well, we can give a multitude of reasons why you should go for a premium theme for your website. But, here we give just seven noteworthy reasons.
But, before that, let us define the premium WordPress theme.
What is meant by premium WordPress theme?
Simply put, premium themes for WordPress are professionally designed to meet the specific requirements of users who are willing to pay in lieu of superior product. For the WordPress platform, if the theme is not free, it falls under the premium category. Professional web designers build themes with better functionality and put them for sale with a ‘Premium’ tagline. If you are serious about both appearance and performance

For months, I’ve been getting one question above all: “When is Gutenberg coming out?” Well, it seems we have at least 2 tentative dates for WordPress 5.0 now. And it could be as early as November 19th. The Core WordPress team had the WordPress 5.0 kickoff meeting today, and among other things, they discussed a merge date. What does that mean?
Gutenberg Could be Here in November
WordPress 5.0 has been in development for some time, and when it’s ready, it will be “merged” into the current version of WordPress. The merge date is when the new version of WordPress goes live.
Before that, there are 2 potential releases: a Beta, and at least one Release Candidate (RC). The Beta is like the first draft of the software. It’s pretty much complete, but it needs to work before we submit it for publishing. The RC is a version of WordPress that has been deemed ready for merge, after fixed from the Beta period. This will go through some rigorous testing to make sure there are no major outstanding issues. There could be several RCs, depending on how much more work WordPress needs.
The first proposed date for Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is October 30th. The proposed

Although Blogger is a good starting point for your blog, if you are serious about your web project development, you’d better leave Blogspot and move forward to WordPress, undoubtedly #1 CMS platform in the web-world. Many users choose Blogger as a home for their blogs just because this platform is free and all who have a Gmail account, on default become an owner of a Blogspot-powered website. But free rarely means good. In case you want your blog to be a fully-functional, eye-catchy and interesting place to spend time on, you’d have to pay “a cent” for its expansion in order to get “a dollar” as a reward.
In this post, you will learn how to import Blogger to WordPress with minimum efforts made and with putting no harm to your website.
Enjoy!
The first step on your Blogger to WordPress journey is signing up to CMS2CMS automated migration service. For this provide your name, email, choose a password and that’s it. You can also log in via Facebook or Google+ account if you have one.
After that, you have to indicate the website you are going to migrate FROM. Obviously, in this case, it will be Blogspot. Choose Blogger from the list of the provided

Choosing the right CMS is a significant step in managing the process of further website performance. It’s never easy; every platform has its pros and cons. Consistently, after spending time handling the content management system, which doesn’t give the full list of opportunities, the dilemma of the CMS shift appears. As the website is growing bigger, the question of the future platform becomes a priority to keep it developed up-to-date. The reasons for transferring the website from Joomla to WordPress can be various. Let’s shortly overview why WordPress is so popular and what is the secret of its success in comparing to other platforms, including Joomla:
an amazing website functionality. The ease of website management is delightful not only for the beginners but even pros;
a diversity of the plugins and themes. It empowers the platform possibilities and gives the WordPress an endless opportunity of customization;
an incredible SEO-optimization. A platform is stuffed by different search engine capabilities like on-page SEO, permalinks, title tags, headings, etc. As it was mentioned, the assorted specialized plugins will make your website ranks fly up;
the platform updates.

Back in 2016, I wrote a blog post about using Laravel Homestead as my local environment. At the time, my only real options were Vagrant or MAMP as an Apple user. Since then, the number of options has increased slightly to include Local by Flywheel, a more significant push to using your computer, and a set of packages like nginx and dsnmasq to run a local environment from a directory on the fly. At the time, Homestead was my local development environment of choice because it was easy to install, quickly configurable, and lightweight—something I appreciated using an older MacBook Air as my daily driver at the time. However, the more robust my sites became, and the more websites I collected on my local, the slower Homestead appeared to run almost certainly because it relies on VirtualBox or a virtual system to run your instance, which caused me to look elsewhere. I avoided MAMP or Vagrant and similar software because they were too resource heavy for my late 2011 setup for many of the same reasons.
Alternative Options
Flywheel offers a solution (at the time called Pressmatic; Flywheel acquired the company in late 2016), which provides individually configurable docker instances in

Let’s be completely honest; most affiliate systems on the market are downright horrible. Either they’re confusing beyond belief, clunky and slow, or they look like they were designed back in the 90’s. Or worse, a mixture of all of the above. Some might have half of the tools you need but then are missing other essential features that your affiliate marketers want.

In the past few months, I’ve stumbled across multiple online discussions among WordPress plugin and theme developers on how hard it is to win Stripe/Credit-Card Disputes. So much so, that many developers gave up on dealing with them entirely, as they feel it isn’t worth their time. We were in the same boat when we just started Freemius, averaging at about a 4% success rate. Over the years, we managed to develop various and unique techniques that helped us increase our Credit Card Disputes winning success rate by 740% (from 4% to 29.6%), and almost without losing any PayPal Dispute and recovering most of the Chargeback. Over the years, we managed to develop various unique techniques that helped us increase our Credit Card Disputes wins rate by 740%.Tweet
Since I couldn’t find a benchmark for the Avg. success rate of winning CC Disputes (Credit Card Disputes) in the WordPress ecosystem, I conducted a poll on Selling WordPress Products (a great Facebook group for WordPress product people selling plugins, themes, and SaaS), to gauge the market. Here are the results:
Reference: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sellingwpproducts/permalink/1222125077927552/
I got 34 responses