How to Make a WordPress Site Look Professional

Your WordPress site’s look can make a huge impact on the success of your site. If your site doesn’t look professional, the visitors who lands on your site would not like to stay on your site for long and they will determine the quality of your content with the first impression they have on your site.

So, it’s really important for you to make sure that your site looks very professional. How you design your site, the loading time, the layout, the color combination is a few small things but they can make a huge impact on overall quality of your site.

If you are new to WordPress and don’t have much idea about how to make your WordPress site look professional, this article will help you to understand the things you can do to make your site look beautiful so that you can create an engaging site.

Before we start, I would suggest you that you should always go for a premium WordPress theme instead of a free theme, not only because of the look of the design but you get priority and premium support which is really important especially if you are a newbie user.

We are writing about the best WordPress themes and plugin regularly here at SourceWP to make it easier for you to understand the kind of options you have to create a quality and successful site. Don’t forget to go through the following articles, they will introduce you to some quality WordPress products.

Choose a Quality Theme

As already mentioned, you must select your theme very carefully. In fact, the WordPress themes make this platform so attractive to the new user because any user can install a great design and within minutes they can make the site look stunning.

We have been writing about different niche themes and reviewing themes regularly, a few of the WordPress themes which we promote regularly are…

Divi Theme 

Divi is one of the most popular WordPress themes available right now, it comes with a huge number of features and options that will help you to create any kind of website you want to create.

Divi is powered by the amazing Divi Builder plugin which is a really easy to use drag and drop website builder that comes with a huge list of different modules that can be used to create your pages with a variety of different layout and features in it.

Creating a custom design was never so easy, with Divi you will be able to create any kind of layout with the most appropriate modules within a couple of minutes. Also, the best part is that you can save the custom layouts you create in the Divi library for future use.

Divi offers you a huge number of different header styles with the navigation and logo placement at different sections to make your site look completely unique. In fact, not only the header but every section of the theme offers you different layout options.

• DEMO
• DOWNLOAD

MyThemeShop

I have been using MyThemeShop themes for my sites for a long time now. They offer great looking modern designs which are highly customizable to make them look perfect as per your requirement. Another best part is the loading time of their themes, all of their themes are well optimized for great performance and they are SEO friendly.

MyThemeShop themes come of advanced theme options panel where you can customize all the requirements of your site and change them easily wherever you want. They come with unlimited color options, unlimited sidebars, unlimited background options, Google Fonts, Font Icons, ultra responsive layout and a lot more.

• DEMO
• DOWNLOAD

Genesis Framework

Genesis is one of the leading WordPress theme frameworks and one of the most widely used one as well. Genesis is created on a very strong foundation with tight security and SEO friendly code. The user base of Genesis is huge and the simplicity of the platform stand out.

Genesis is a child theme based framework that means you will need a child theme and the framework to work properly

• DEMO
• DOWNLOAD

Color Combination

The color scheme of your site can make a huge impact on the brand image of your business. Should should make sure that the color scheme of your site match the image of your business and always maintain the same color even if you change the layout of the site.

Nowadays, almost all the quality premium themes offer flexible color options and you can decide the color combination for each and every section of the design. If you use the Divi theme or any there from MyThemeSho, they offer you unlimited color options, so it’s extremely easy for anyone to change the color scheme of their site using the theme options panel.

Minimal Layout

Almost all the premium themes offer you an option to customize the design these days, you make sure that you keep a minimal layout for your site where your users can find everything easily. Also, it is a proven fact that the minimal designs work much better than a complicated design with tons of content on the same page.

You have to make sure that your content gets the maximum highlight and it is well optimized for better readability.

Easy Navigation

A clean header section and a really easy to use navigation menu make it a lot easier for the users to browse through your site. 

Your Logo

The logo of your site is probably the most important aspect of making your site professional. many brands spend thousands of dollars to create a quality logo that carries the image of their brand. I’m not asking you to spend thousands on your logo, but you should definitely give a lot of importance to the logo.

If your logo doesn’t look professional, no matter how well you design your site it will always fall short. You can find quality logo designers on sites like 99designs or Fiverr, where you can get your logo done for a very limited price.

Professional Footer

The footer section of your site is very important, you need to make sure that the footer of your site looks clean and contains all the important links for your site. Generally, the footer section is used to show the important pages and categories of a site and the copyright statement of the brand.

If we talk about creating a great footer, you can display the important pages, about, content, advertisement page link. You can display the social media links for your site, you can even have an email subscription box. It’s always great to get creative with the footer section as far as possible.

Great Homepage

The homepage of your site is the most important page of the site, so you need to make sure that your homepage is clutter free and clean as far as possible yet displays all the important details which you want your users to know.

When we talk about the homepage of a blog, it generally displays the latest posts on the blog. However, you can easily create a great landing page with plugins like Divi Builder and set that as the static homepage for your site.

To set a static page as the homepage for your site, go to Settings > Reading select the page which you want to be the homepage of your site and select the page where you want to have the blog section and save changes.

Font Choices

Font of your site is another very important aspect because some fonts can make a great site ugly. So, make sure that you select the font very carefully, the font should be easy to read and it should look professional.

The best part is that most of the premium theme come with huge font choices these days and if your theme doesn’t offer you the font choices, we have written a post about the best Google Font plugins which you can use for your site.

Conclusion

If you follow all the above-mentioned parameters nicely, it will definitely make a huge different as far as the look and feel of your site is concerned. Though there are a number of other aspects which can be instrumental in making your site look professional.

ConvertPlug Review: How-to Guide, An Email Opt-in Builder

ConvertPlug is a user-friendly, easy-to-use WordPress plugin that helps webmasters transform traffic into leads. Websites often get lots of traffic from different sources. But, holding them back and compelling them to act is a big challenge. This is where ConvertPlug focuses on.

ConvertPlug is developed by the team that created the Ultimate add-ons for Visual Composer, the highest selling product in 2014 in CodeCanyon. This proves that the team is up with something promising this time too!

Why do you Need ConvertPlug?

ConvertPlug is built for webmasters owning any website irrespective of the field and industry. It helps one to:

• Build Email lists
• Showcase targeted offers
• Hold back Abandoning visitors
• Generate Social Followers
• Share recent Updates
• Offer Special Deals
• Redirect traffic
• Promote Videos

All this to simply convert a simple website into a Lead generation Powerhouse!

A Walkthrough of the Plugin

ConvertPlug is best suited for those who are looking for an easy-to-use plugin, which does not demand a lot of efforts, and yet delivers the desired results.

Working with ConvertPlug is like a child’s play. It offers a number of modules to work on. The latest version has the modal pop-ups, the slide-in pop-ups and info-bars. These modules can be modified and placed in a location the webmaster desires to see it in. All the modules contribute well in lead generation through various campaigns similar to those mentioned above.

Building a Campaign

The plugin comes with an inbuilt Lead capture tool, called Connects. Connects can be considered as the heart of ConvertPlug. It is through this that the leads are stored and managed. Connects has a default Campaign called First and allows webmasters to integrate with external email marketing software like MailChimp, HubSpot, MyEmma, Active Campaign, iContact, ConvertKit, Sendy, CleverReach and many more.

Connects, therefore, makes it easier to store leads and manage them within the default campaign or the ones created by integrating with external email marketing software.

Designing a Module

Once the campaign is ready, ConvertPlug can be used to create and design attractive modules that contribute to the success of a campaign. Webmasters can select any module and design it according to the campaign needs.

With a large number of well-designed ready-made templates, the plugin has made it easier for people to save on time and go live in minutes! Although the templates are all ready, one may not need much time to modify it using the real time live editor that provides options to customize every minute element of a module with a live preview that shows how it looks.

Setting up Triggers

Once the Module looks good and is ready to attract, it’s time to make it work! Displaying a beautiful Module with great content isn’t really enough. ConvertPlug focuses on displaying the right module with the right message, at the right time, before the right audiences. This is where one needs triggers.

The plugin offers a variety of Triggers like:

• Exit Intent – When the user is about to leave the webpage
• After Few Seconds – When the user has been present on a webpage for a specific time period.
• After Scroll – When the user has scrolled a specified length (percentage) of a webpage.
• Inactivity – When the user has been inactive for a specified time period.
• After Content – When the user has just finished reading a blog post or some piece of content

Apart from these automatic triggers, webmasters also have the freedom to launch modules through manual settings. This can be done through:

• A CSS Class – Use a CSS Class to launch it through an element on a page.
• A Shortcode – The simplest and easiest way to launch a module when the user clicks on a text, an image or any other element on a page.
• Display Inline – A short code that allows one to display a module within or after a post or anywhere on a webpage.

One can also control the times a module will be repeated, through the Repeat Control tab that enables Cookies, target specific pages on a website or display the module on the entire website, or even target visitors by identifying the device they are using, the domain they have logged in through and the first time or signed in users.

Managing the Leads

After making sure that the module looks good and is all set to increase conversions, it is now time to manage leads and store them in the respective Campaign. One can do so through the Submissions tab seen in the Editor. Through this one can select the campaign the leads will be stored in and work on the message or action to be taken after a successful submission or a failure.

View the Performance

What can be better than tracking the performance live? ConvertPlug comes with an inbuilt Analytics that tracks the performance of every element that goes live. One can view the performance on basis of the impressions, conversion and the conversion rates of different modules, set of modules or an entire campaign.

Keep what Works Best

The concept of A/B Testing is widely used to check what works best with the targeted audiences. With the ability to change every minute detail on the modules, and track their performance, ConvertPlug also supports A/B testing to let webmasters come up to an informative decision of what works best.

The plugin also supports multi-variant testing and trigger testing, again to know what works best. An amazing feature that reveals what the audiences respond well to.

With these simple steps of creating action-oriented opt-in forms or modal pop-ups for a website, there is nothing more a website owner will be looking out for. The simplicity in design and the interface one needs to work with makes it count among the “must have” plugins for a WordPress website.

You can test every word mentioned above, through the test drive available here:

Knowledgeable Support

Working with something can be made easier with the help and guidance of the ones who develop it. The support team assures a guaranteed solution for every issue one may come up with. They have tutorial documents, videos and knowledgeable people who make working with the plugin easier and fun. With ConvertPlug, you no longer should fear of being lost.

To sum up with, ConvertPlug is an impressive plugin that is affordable and requires fewer efforts and yet delivers the desired results. Several people have started using ConvertPlug to reap rich benefits. Why lose out on impressive lead conversion rates when you just need to get started with this excellent plugin? Act now to join the league of capturing leads and increasing sales!

Pricing

With all the advanced features that can be implemented quite quickly and easily without the need for technical knowledge, ConvertPlug is worth every penny you pay for it. Priced at just $21 on the Envato marketplace, the plugin is a great boon for websites searching for an affordable alternative for lead generation.

• DOWNLOAD

How the Jupiter Theme Helped a Business Skyrocket Their Sales!

Whether your business is in a revenue rut or you’re browsing which platform to use to create a website for your new enterprise, you’ll be interested to hear how the Jupiter business WordPress theme created by Artbees Themes transformed the vitality and customer base of one business, tripling its revenues in just one business quarter!

Join our conversation with Mucahit Gayiran, founder of Mockup Zone, to find out the biggest problems he faced with other themes and how after just months with the Jupiter, his business got the jump start it needed to make it one of the leading Mockup designing companies in the market.

Thanks Mucahit for agreeing to share what seems to have been a bit of a tumultuous start to creating a website for your company. First, just to get acquainted with your business can you tell us a bit about what your team does?

Sure. Our company creates affordable and high quality mockup files to help designers specifically to showcase their professional work. We also work with brands that need creative works though about two years ago we decided to start selling more of our work online which is when our website e-Commerce saga began so to speak.

Yes, it’s a bit daunting to figure out which website-building solutions work best for you. Speaking of website solutions, you mentioned before we sat down that you had some bad experiences with previous themes before starting to use the Jupiter so shall we start with the good news or the bad news first?

Hmm, let’s get the bad memories out of the way first and leave the good part for later. For starters, I should be fair and say that the theme we were using wasn’t a complete disaster.

It did have a lot of great features and even had pre-made templates available for us to use, but what we soon quickly discovered was that the options to customize those templates were very limited. Looking back now, I cannot stress enough the importance of being able to customize even pre-made templates!

Part of creating a brand is having unique colors, fonts, images, and designs literally branded into the mind of new customers so that yours is the first name that comes to mind when they’re thinking ‘who can help me with this?’ Pre-made templates that don’t have any wiggle room in terms of design end up leaving you with a generic-looking site that will make any newcomers glaze over immediately.

Right, aesthetics are definitely vital to an eye-catching site. With your old theme, did you face any issues with customer engagement once they got onto your site?

Yes, definitely. We were experiencing a high bounce rate, losing visitors to our site almost immediately as well as a low conversion rate, where the visitors who did end up browsing our site never actually followed through on making any purchases.

When evaluating our heat maps to get an idea of our user interaction on our site, we saw low engagement. This we concluded must have been due to poor usability, which in fact we had noted while initially designing our site.

The theme we were using didn’t allow us to change a lot of the formatting and in these cases when you’ve already committed to using a set theme, you just convince yourself that the modifications you wanted to make won’t make such a big difference for visitors to your site.

Though as every entrepreneur knows, in most cases your intuition needs to be the guiding light to your overall design. We recognized immediately that we needed to change platforms to a theme that would essentially allow us to knock down walls, rearrange and, in some cases, throw out the furniture as we saw fit for our new website home.

So after this realization, what specifically led you to end up picking the Jupiter for your WordPress theme?

Well, after much research, we knew we were going to continue using WordPress and once we dug a bit deeper into the reviews, the Jupiter emerged as the clear victor. I found that the Jupiter business WordPress theme ranked as having the fastest Google PageSpeed score and was also SEO-optimised. On top of that, we knew immediately that the

On top of that, we knew immediately that the flexibility included features and support found in the Jupiter were exactly what we needed to remedy the problems we were facing before and would allow us to create a site that would engage our visitors, highlight our products and make the sale!

Jupiter uses Visual Composer, a plugin that makes it super easy to use which was a big relief for our team since any one of us could navigate its tools without spending too much time reading instructions. Also, it was easy to convert the existing content we had on our old website onto our new one and it was a pleasant surprise to know that any pages we created could then be viewed by customers on any device, whether it was a PC or

Also, it was easy to convert the existing content we had on our old website onto our new one and it was a pleasant surprise to know that any pages we created could then be viewed by customers on any device, whether it was a PC or cellphone.

So the suspense is killing us—did the Jupiter have any real effect on your sales and overall revenue?

Well, we almost couldn’t believe it ourselves but within the first quarter of debuting our Jupiter-themed website, we almost tripled our revenues and customer conversion rates! The thing is, also included in the Jupiter is another plugin called

The thing is, also included in the Jupiter is another plugin called WooCommerce which is an integrated eCommerce system that allowed us to design sleek product lines that showcased our mockups and also highlight sales, discounts or package deals.

Within the first quarter of debuting our Jupiter-themed website, we almost tripled our revenues and customer conversion rates!

Our heat map results changed drastically showing us that the one-page navigation option offered by Jupiter, in addition to tons of shortcodes to pick from, changed the visitor experience of our site. Once they got to our site, they were drawn to our products and obviously had a clear idea of how to navigate our site. I had read in one of the

I had read in one of the Artbees blogs that to increase visitor engagement, a combination of colors, high-quality images, special effects, sliders, carousels, and clear pricing would not only catch the eye of the customer but also present all of the relevant information in a clear manner.

I took their advice–admittedly also with some help from the Artbees Support Team—and apparently it paid off! Essentially the Jupiter business WordPress theme allowed us to tailor-make our first impression to potential customers and the numbers don’t lie—it was a success!

Wow, tripled your sales! That’s incredible and congratulations! Now as a veteran Jupiter user and top-performing online business owner, could you share some of the best tips that come to mind for other entrepreneurs to keep in mind while developing their own Jupiter-themed site?

Sure! Hmm, well I’m going to hijack some of the tips I read from the Artbees blogs–hah, I guess that’d be my first tip–read the blogs! Using the advice provided for us in those blogs and applying them to my own site, I can easily vouch for them. Some very important things to consider including in your site are:

• An eye-catching landing page, preferably a one-page navigation template (and there’s so many you can pick from with the Jupiter)
• Product lines that you can get with WooCommerce.
• You should also definitely add testimonials from your previous customers and animations whether you use sliders, carousels or special effects.
• Including pictures of your team with brief bios about them; this gives your customer an impression of your culture and will make their user experience much more personalized and intimate
• Social media posts accessible from your site will also allow potential customers to directly access and share your goods much more easily. They’re also a big vote of confidence that tells potential customers that you already have a well-established and trusted product.
• A call to action! Whether it’s a big button or tab you have displayed, make it easy for the customer to take action in either contributing to your page or making a purchase! That’s the point after all!

After you starting working with the Jupiter, were there any other features you didn’t expect would also be included?

Oh yes, it seemed that once we purchased the Jupiter business WordPress theme, it was the gift that kept on giving. On top of everything I already mentioned, in the case that we did run into any problems, we found out that Artbees has a great and fast-responding Support team that will personally walk you through any issues you have. Not only that but while we were on Skype, they even took the time to suggest ways we could improve our page to make it more eye-catching—we were blown away!

Not only that but while we were on Skype, they even took the time to suggest ways we could improve our page to make it more eye-catching—we were blown away!

There were even some instances when our team had too much on our plates to be able to tinker with our site that we were able to hire our own Artbees Care experts at a decent rate to help polish up our pages or create whole pages from scratch.

Additionally, we found that we were able to access an incredible network of users, a community really, of individuals across a wide range of business and creative backgrounds that were actively engaged in discussion.

Additionally, we found that we were able to access an incredible network of users, a community really, of individuals across a wide range of business and creative backgrounds that were actively engaged in discussion.

This was a deep well of knowledge and advice from other people just like us who were trying to cultivate their own enterprise. I also didn’t expect for Artbees to have an active blog with contributions from their very own team members in different ways to maximize your use of WordPress themes and even how to scale and market your business effectively.

It’s been really motivating for me to read the ideas and commentary of others and have “ah-hah!” moments on how I can apply the same principles to my own business.

Well Mucahit, it was already clear that you and your team had put a lot of work into growing your business. What I’m especially happy to hear about the Jupiter is that it was able to take all of that hard work and consolidate it into a concrete platform for you to share your products with others.

Yes, our whole team is really just so pleased with the final result and also still delighted at how quickly we were able to put it all together!

• DEMO
• DOWNLOAD

10 Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins

Images are very important part of any website because they can attract more users to your site. However, unnecessarily large image file sizes can impact your site negatively by increasing the loading time of your site to a huge extent.

A good quality image can attract tons of traffic to your site, so you should always take the images seriously while writing your blog post.

Images can also send you traffic through the image search option in Google, all you need to do is to optimize your images with proper alt tag and title tag.

Many newbie bloggers use extra large images without understanding the proper file size required by the particular theme they use. It’s really important to understand the WordPress theme you use for your site and the image sizes which is used by that theme so that you can insert correct image dimension.

You can use WordPress thumbnail manager plugins to optimize the featured images of your site to make it perfect to your need.

In this post, we have collected some of the best image optimization plugins that will help you to optimize the images in your blog post to make your site quick.

Top Image Optimization Plugins for WordPress

WP Smush.it

A very popular image optimization plugin for WordPress, WP Smush.it can optimize your JPEG, GIF and PNG images individually or in bulk as per your requirement.

It’s a very easy plugin to get started with, if you install this plugin in an existing site, all you need to do is to activate the plugin go to Settings > Media and optimize all your existing images. And as far the new images are concerned, you don’t have to do anything because they will be optimized automatically as you upload a theme.

The free version of this plugin lets you compress images up to 1MB in size, and the pro version of the plugin can help you to optimize images up to 5MB in size.

• DOWNLOAD

Optimus I am using this plugin currently, and it’s quite effective. This plugin can optimize the images up to 70% which will save a lot of bandwidth for you and make your site quick. As you upload the images on your site, the plugin sends those to the Optimus server simultaneously and send you the optimized version. And the best part is that it will never alter the quality of images. The plugin will automatically process the images as they are uploaded, and you have the option to stop the automatic optimization if you wish to.


 

• DOWNLOAD

Monarch Social Sharing 

 This is one of the leading social sharing plugins for WordPress though this plugin will not optimize your images differently but it will help you to bring in a lot of traffic to your site by making it really easy for your users to share the images. This plugin offers you a huge number of features as far as the social functionalities are concerned, you get a number of different designs as far as the buttons are concerned and a number of different placement options so that you can maximize the conversion. The plugin is easy to use and comes with a very powerful admin dashboard where you can manage everything related to the plugin. The detailed statistics offered by the plugin will always keep aware of the conversion so that you can make necessary changes if you want to.


 

• DOWNLOAD

EWWW Image Optimizer 

 EWWW Image Optimizer is another very effective WordPress image optimization plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog. You can also optimize the images which you have already uploaded in a similar way like WP Smush.it. This plugin will never deteriorate the quality of your site but it will speed up your site by optimizing the images to maximum possible extent.

 

• DOWNLOAD

CW Image Optimizer 

 Like the other two plugins mentioned above, CW Image Optimizer also can optimize the images in a WordPress site automatically and losslessly. It can also optimize the images which were uploaded in the past. CW Image Optimizer plugin is based on the WP Smush.it plugin. But unlike the WP Smush.it plugin, your image files will get stored on your own server and not a third party.

 

• DOWNLOAD

Hammy 

 Hammy is an intelligent plugin that will create many smaller sized version of the images from your content and when a user visits your site it will present them the most appropriate image. This plugin will help you to offer a great experience for your users specially who visits your site through the small screen devices.

 

• DOWNLOAD

PB Responsive Images 

 PB Responsive Images plugin will help you to create perfectly sized images which are required by your WordPress theme. The default configuration provides the necessary image sizes for the Twenty Eleven theme for reference which you will have to update as per the requirement of your theme.

 

• DOWNLOAD

SEO Friendly Images 

 SEO Friendly Images is another great plugin to optimize your images for a search engine like Google. This WordPress SEO plugin will automatically update all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes which are really important for SEO purposes. The ALT attribute is an important part of any image because that will help users to find images related to the keyword in search results.

 

• DOWNLOAD

ShortPixel Image Optimizer 

 ShortPixel is an image compression tool that will help you to improve the loading speed of your site by optimizing your images without affecting the quality of the images. This plugin optimizes images automatically using both lossy and lossless compression. After registration for the tool, you will get the API key which you can use for multiple websites, and the best part if that it stores the original copy of the image which makes it really easy to restore when you require it.

 

• DOWNLOAD

Responsive Images by Pixtulate

 Another very useful image optimization plugin that will scale, crops and optimizes responsive images on demand using Pixtulate’s servers. The images are served through worldwide free CDN making fast image delivery for your site to provide a great experience for your users.

 

• DOWNLOAD

Compress JPEG & PNG images 

 This is the official WordPress plugin TinyPNG which will help you to compress JPEG and PNG images and speed up your site. This plugin automatically optimizes your images by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.

 

• DOWNLOAD

BJ Lazy Load

 Lazy loading is a technology which loads your text content instantly and loads the images as the user scroll down the page. It replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iFrames with a placeholder and loads the original image when the user view the particular content piece.


 

• DOWNLOAD

Conclusion

It’s extremely important to optimize the images on your site because images can slow down your site to a huge extent and the image optimization plugins mentioned in this post will help you to optimize your images automatically and speed up your site.