Are you comparing WordPress vs Ghost and wondering which is best for you?

WordPress and Ghost are both popular blogging and website building platforms. However, both have pros and cons that you’ll want to compare before starting your new blog.  

In this article, we’ll compare WordPress and Ghost with their strengths and weaknesses, so you can decide which is the better platform for you. 

What to Look for in a Blogging Platform?

Before we compare WordPress vs Ghost, let’s highlight the main things you should be looking for when choosing a blogging platform for your next project. 

We’ll use these factors for our WordPress and Ghost comparison. You can click on any of the quick links below to jump straight to the relevant section.

Overview – An introduction to WordPress and GhostCosts – How much does it cost to start a blog?Ease of Use – How easy are they to learn and use for an absolute beginner?Design & Templates – What are your blog design and customization options?Ecommerce – Can you use it to sell things from your blog?SEO – Can you easily optimize your website for search engines and get traffic?Addons & Integrations – Can you extend the platform’s functionality with addons and third-party tools? Support – Can you get help quickly and easily when you need it?

Note: This is a comparison between Ghost and self-hosted WordPress.org. For more details, see the differences between self-hosted WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

Overview: WordPress vs. Ghost

Before we go into our in-depth comparison of the two popular blogging platforms, it’s important we cover the basics of what each platform is.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular website builder and content management system (CMS) in the world. It powers over 43% of sites on the internet and has been around for over 18 years. 

It can be used to create nearly any kind of website or blog, and it’s used by some of the most successful WordPress blogs in the world. 

To start a new WordPress blog, you need both a domain name and web hosting. There are plenty of great WordPress hosting companies that offer a 1-click WordPress installation and easy blog setup. 

What is Ghost?

Ghost launched in 2013 with the goal of creating a streamlined publishing platform for writers, publishers, and journalists.

It has over 3 million installs with an active monthly user base of over 10,000.

It’s a very clean and minimalist platform with fast loading speeds. Those looking to get started blogging as fast as possible can begin in a couple of minutes. 

Ghost is available as a hosted platform, or as software that you can install and host yourself. For our comparison, we’ll focus on the more popular hosted version of Ghost, since the self-hosted version is very complex to set up.

Costs: Ghost vs WordPress

For most users, the cost of building a blog will be the main factor in which platform you choose. 

If you’re just starting online, then you’ll probably want to keep your costs as low as possible, then invest more as you begin to make money blogging.

Let’s look at the costs of building a blog with Ghost and WordPress and the steps you can take to keep costs as low as possible. 

WordPress — Costs

The WordPress CMS software is free and open source. But, you need to purchase a domain name and hosting to have a website live on the internet. 

Usually, a domain name costs $14.99 per year, and website hosting starts at $7.99 per month when paid annually. This can be a pretty big investment when you’re just starting out.

Luckily, Bluehost has agreed to offer our readers a 69% discount on hosting, plus a free domain name, and SSL certificate. Basically, you can get started for as low as $2.75 per month.

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Bluehost is one of the best WordPress hosting providers and is an officially recommended host by WordPress.org.

WordPress also has a massive ecosystem of free plugins and themes you can get started with to help you keep your costs down.

There are over 59,000 free plugins available in the WordPress.org plugin repository alone and over 9,000 free themes to choose from.

If you purchase any premium WordPress themes, plugins, or third-party services and software, then this can increase the price of using WordPress.

You can build your blog with free plugins and themes to keep costs as low as possible. Most premium plugins and themes also have free versions with slightly less functionality. Then, as your website grows, you can begin to invest in premium themes or plugins as needed.

Another great thing about WordPress costs is that you have complete control over your site. You can modify the code or add as many users or members to your site as you want, for no additional fees.

For more details, see our guide on the cost of building a WordPress site. It gives you a detailed breakdown of different scenarios and the steps you can take to spend as little as possible. 

Ghost — Costs

With Ghost, you pay a monthly fee based on your audience size and the plan you choose. Currently, the cheapest plan you can get is the Starter plan for $11 per month when paid annually.

This plan supports one user, up to 500 members, and gives you access to the official Ghost themes for building your blog. A free domain name and hosting are included in your account when you sign up.

If you want to add another user to your team and get access to custom themes and integrations, then you’ll need the Creator plan for $33 per month when paid annually. There are also higher priced plans for larger teams who need support for 5+ users.

Ghost defines “members” as people who can sign up for your newsletter or buy paid subscriptions. If you have more than 500 members, it will multiply the cost of any plan. For example, the Creator plan becomes $65/month when you have 5,000 members.

You can take advantage of the 14-day free trial to fully test the platform to see if it’s right for you.

Winner — WordPress

WordPress gives you the same features as Ghost at lower costs. Plus, you can add even more features using free plugins. With WordPress, you can even create an email newsletter and online store without additional costs.

As your site grows, you can choose to invest more money into your blog, but when you’re just starting, it’s easy to keep costs as low as possible. 

Ease of Use: WordPress and Ghost

Most users starting a blog aren’t programmers or coders. They need an easy to use platform to quickly build a blog and publish content without having to learn how to code. 

Let’s see how WordPress and Ghost stack up.

WordPress – Ease of Use

Overall, WordPress is pretty easy to use, but there is a slight learning curve. Since it’s open source software, you need to install it yourself and manage updates and backups. 

If you’re just getting started, you’ll also want to spend time learning about WordPress terms, themes, plugins, and more. 

To quickly grow your skills, see our guide on how to learn WordPress for free in a week or less.

Once you’ve learned the core concepts, it’s pretty easy to customize your blog and start creating content. 

WordPress comes with an intuitive visual editor called the block editor. This is what you’ll use to create your posts and pages. It lets you easily create beautiful layouts without writing any code.

You can also build custom pages using a drag and drop page builder.

These page builders are available as plugins that you install on your site, and they allow you to drag and drop different elements onto your page and easily customize them.

WordPress also has a massive plugin library to help you do anything you want to do with your blog, without having to know any code.

Ghost – Ease of Use

Ghost lets users write and publish content easily. Since the entire goal of the platform is publishing and monetizing content, it’s very beginner friendly.

As soon as you log in to your account, you’ll be taken directly to your account dashboard. Here you can create posts and pages, customize your website, and manage your members.

The post dashboard is quite similar to the WordPress block editor.

You can add images, HTML, galleries, buttons, videos, and more. 

Ghost is made for writers and bloggers looking to publish and monetize quickly.

Winner — Tie

Both WordPress and Ghost have a point and click editor, customizable templates and layouts, and a similar page and post editor.

The Ghost platform is easier to use, but fewer customization options are available. It’s mostly a pure content publishing platform. 

Once you learn the core concepts of WordPress, customizing your site, publishing posts, and creating pages become easy. 

Design and Templates: Ghost and WordPress

As a beginner, you want an easy way to create a blog with a professional design.

Let’s look at how WordPress and Ghost handle design, customizations, and the whole website building process. 

WordPress — Design and Templates

As you saw above, WordPress gives you access to thousands of free themes you can use to create and customize your WordPress blog. Many of these are very feature-rich and mobile-friendly right out of the box.

You can get started with any theme you want to give your blog a professional design. You’re free to switch your WordPress theme at any time and are never stuck with your current design. 

Every theme can be customized with the built-in WordPress theme customizer. Some themes also handle customizations with their own theme options panel.

WordPress keeps the design of your site separate from the content. This not only helps to keep a consistent design, but it makes it easy to change WordPress themes in the future without losing your content.

Another option is to use a WordPress theme along with a page builder plugin like SeedProd to create custom pages and landing pages. 

Page builders also come with their own professionally designed templates you can completely customize with a beginner-friendly drag and drop builder. 

You can easily create coming soon pages, sales pages, landing pages, and more without writing any code. 

Ghost — Design and Templates

Compared to WordPress, the amount of design and customization options is limited. The platform comes with a theme repository similar to WordPress, but there are just over 20 free themes available.

If you have a larger budget, then you can purchase a premium theme, but there are still only around 100 of these to choose from. 

Customizing your theme is done within the settings panel. You can control the color scheme, fonts, icons, site logo, and more. 

Your settings menu is where you’ll also set up your website navigation menus, email opt in templates, and more. 

There’s also a built-in option within the platform to hire theme developers to create a completely custom design. 

Winner — WordPress

WordPress offers a greater theme selection and a nearly endless selection of plugins. No matter your niche, you’ll be able to find the perfect WordPress theme for your needs.

Plus, you have much more flexibility by separating content and functionality from the design. 

Users can completely customize every aspect of their theme and even use WordPress page builders to create custom pages without writing any code. 

Ecommerce: WordPress vs Ghost

Adding eCommerce functionality to your site lets you sell things online. You can sell subscriptions, products, courses, and more.

Let’s look at how Ghost and WordPress handle eCommerce. 

WordPress — Ecommerce

To add eCommerce functionality to WordPress, you’ll be using the free WooCommerce plugin. It’s the most popular eCommerce platform in the world used by millions of online stores, both big and small.

It lets you easily sell any kind of products you’d like, digital or physical.

WooCommerce comes with its own addons and plugins you can use to add new features to your online store. 

There are also hundreds of WooCommerce themes you can choose from to create a professional online store.

You can truly create any kind of eCommerce site you want, whether that’s selling online courses, paid newsletters, digital and physical products, adding content paywalls, and more. 

Plus, you can choose from a wide range of different payment gateways like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and more. 

Ghost — Ecommerce

Ghost does eCommerce a little bit differently. With Ghost, you won’t be creating an online store. Instead, you can sell memberships to access your content, similar to other platforms like Substack. 

When you’re writing a post, you can choose who will get access to your content. It can be publicly available, or gated for all members or paid members only.

Essentially, with Ghost, you’re putting content behind a paywall for your premium subscribers. 

This functionality is integrated into the platform, so managing members and creating paid newsletters is easy.

Winner — WordPress

WordPress offers a flexible platform to help you sell anything you want. You can use WooCommerce or another eCommerce plugin to get started. It supports more addons, payment options, and various types of products. 

You can sell premium content, digital and physical products, membership subscriptions, and much more. 

Ghost has built-in eCommerce functionality, and you can start selling as soon as you create an account. However, you’re limited to selling premium content and paid newsletters. 

SEO: WordPress and Ghost

If you want to rank high in the search engines and get more website traffic, then you’ll need to use a search engine friendly platform. 

Some platforms are better than others and make it easier to rank, while some actively make it more difficult.

Let’s see which platform is better for SEO, WordPress or Ghost. 

WordPress — SEO

Right of the box, WordPress is very search engine friendly. The core platform is built with SEO best practices in mind, so it’s easy to boost your website traffic and rankings.

There are all kinds of built-in settings for you to configure to help optimize your website.

For example, you can change your permalink settings and create SEO-friendly URLs, create categories to organize your content, add tags, edit your image alt text, and more. 

Beyond the default settings, you can maximize your WordPress SEO with the help of WordPress SEO plugins and tools. 

For example, you can use a plugin like All in One SEO (AIOSEO) to fully optimize your site without having to learn complex SEO terms or hire an expert.

With this plugin, you can add title tags and meta descriptions, choose a focus keyword, and get detailed page analytics with recommendations to optimize your blog posts. 

It will even automatically generate XML sitemaps, manage and create redirects, automatically apply the right schema, and more.

You can also control how your site appears on social media, connect to Google Search Console, and even add breadcrumbs to help your visitors more easily navigate your website. 

Ghost — SEO

Ghost has a handful of built-in features to help optimize your posts and pages for the search engines. You have complete control over your URLs and permalinks, page title, and meta description. 

There are also built-in settings to automatically create a website sitemap, assign canonical tags for your posts, and integrate your website with Google Search Console.

It also has a built-in feature to add multiple authors to post bylines. This is useful if you have a multi-author blog and want to highlight each author. 

However, since a lot of your website content will be protected and for members-only, this content won’t rank in the search engines. You’ll need to publish additional content for free to rank in the search results. 

Winner — WordPress

When it comes to optimizing your website for the search engines to increase your blog traffic, WordPress offers more options and flexibility. You can use WordPress SEO plugins to boost your rankings further and access more features.

Ghost has solid built-in SEO settings, but doesn’t quite get to the level of depth that WordPress offers.

Addons and Integrations: Ghost vs WordPress

No blogging platform will have everything you need right out of the box. Using addons and integrations helps you add more features and sync your site with third-party services. 

Let’s take a look at how Ghost and WordPress handle addons and integrations. 

WordPress — Addons and Integrations

You can truly unlock the power of WordPress by using WordPress plugins. Think of them like apps for your WordPress site.

To add new features and functionality, all you need to do is install and activate a plugin.

There are over 59,000 free WordPress plugins available from the WordPress plugin repository. Plus, thousands more premium plugins are available.

You can add nearly any feature you like to your blog, including contact forms, Google Analytics tracking, social media feeds, and more.

Plus, WordPress easily integrates with many other popular tools or services you need to grow your blog. 

This includes popular email marketing services, market research tools, live chat software, CRM software, business phone services, and much more.

Ghost — Addons and Integrations

Ghost doesn’t offer any additional addons to add more features to your site. All of the functionality is built right into the platform. 

However, they do have a variety of built-in integrations to link your website with third-party services, like Google Analytics, Stripe, Zapier, ConvertKit, and more. 

There are detailed instructions that show you how to add the integration to your blog.

Winner — WordPress

WordPress wins this category with thousands of different plugins and third-party services you can use to add whatever functionality you require to your blog. 

Support: WordPress or Ghost

Everyone needs help with their blog occasionally, whether it’s a question about building your site, adding a new feature, or troubleshooting an error. 

Let’s take a look at the different support options for Ghost and WordPress. 

WordPress — Support

WordPress has a large and helpful online community with all kinds of valuable free resources available. For example, you have the official WordPress support forums, tutorial and resource sites like WPBeginner, Facebook groups like WPBeginner Engage, and much more. 

Plus, most WordPress themes and plugins have their own dedicated support forums, either on WordPress.org or through their own websites.

To learn more, see our guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support and get it. 

Usually, you’ll be able to find answers to all of your WordPress related questions with a simple Google search.

You can also follow our WordPress tutorials for step by step instructions on how to extend the functionality of WordPress.

For more details, see our guide on how to make the most out of WPBeginner’s free resources.

If you need more help, then you can always hire a WordPress developer. Since WordPress is so popular, there are thousands of high-quality and affordable developers to help with your blog.

Ghost — Support

Ghost has an online help center with dozens of in-depth guides to help you get started with the platform.

It includes tutorials on editing your website, publishing content, setting up membership levels, connecting to social media, and more. 

Beyond that, you can reach out to their support team via email. Ghost also maintains an active resource section with useful articles on building, growing, and making more money from your website.

Winner — WordPress

WordPress is the largest website building platform in the world and has much more support options for its users.

WordPress support is available from plugin and theme developers, available in multiple languages, and there’s a lot of free support options too.

Ghost only offers a single support channel and a small library of how-to articles.

WordPress or Ghost – Which is Better?

Judging by the comparison criteria we set above, WordPress is a much better option for starting a new blog.

It offers more flexibility, design options and themes, eCommerce options, and more. Plus, it does all of this at a lower monthly price. You’re in complete control over how much you spend when building your new blog.

Ghost offers users a fast and simple blogging and monetization platform. However, it’s limited by its customization options, ways you can make money, and overall flexibility.

If you’re ready to get started with WordPress, see our complete step-by-step guide on how to create a WordPress website.

We hope this article helped you compare WordPress vs Ghost with their pros and cons. You may also want to see our guide on how to get an email domain, and our expert picks on the best payroll software for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post WordPress vs Ghost – Which Is the Better Blogging Platform? first appeared on WPBeginner.

Are you looking for a website builder for your WordPress site but not sure whether to choose Elementor, Divi, or SeedProd?

With the right website builder, you can easily customize your site and build landing pages that help increase conversions and grow your email list.

In this article, we’ll compare Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd and show you which is the best WordPress website builder.

Brief Overview of Our Contenders

Elementor, Divi, and SeedProd are among the best drag and drop page builders and theme builders for WordPress. They help you customize your site without editing code.

Elementor was launched in 2016 and is one of the most popular website-building platforms for WordPress. It has over 5 million active users spread across 180 different countries.

Divi is part of Elegant Themes and is a visual theme and page builder. Elegant Themes has been in the industry for over 14 years and they have over 806,000 customers worldwide.

SeedProd is a beginner-friendly WordPress theme builder and landing page plugin. Over 1 million professionals use SeedProd to create custom themes and page layouts in WordPress. It is also part of WPBeginner’s family of products.

That said, let’s compare these WordPress page builders to see which one is the best. We’ve broken down our comparison into the following sections:

Ease of UseCustomization FeaturesPerformanceIntegrationsCustomer SupportPricingElementor vs Divi vs SeedProd – Which One is the Best?

Note: For our comparison, we used the premium versions of all the plugins, so you get to see all of the features and integrations they have to offer.

Ease of Use – Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd

When it comes to choosing a website builder, it’s important to select a tool that’s beginner-friendly and designed for non-techy users.

It should allow you to completely customize your WordPress theme and landing pages easily, without needing to edit any code.

Let’s see how these 3 builders stack up for ease of use.

Elementor – Ease of Use

Elementor offers a drag and drop theme and landing page builder. It provides different elements in a menu on your left, so you can quickly drag and drop them onto your template.

You can also enable a responsive mode, which lets you switch from a desktop view to a tablet or mobile view. This helps in editing your theme for different devices.

The builder can be overwhelming for beginners at first. There are a lot of elements to choose from and clicking on any element on the template opens several more options for customization.

However, once you get the hang of it, Elementor’s website builder is easy to use.

The only downside we found was that there is no quick way to undo or redo the changes you made to the page, except for going through the revision history and reverting your changes. This can be frustrating and time-consuming when customizing landing pages or themes.

Divi – Ease of Use

Divi also offers a drag and drop builder to edit the Divi WordPress theme and change the layout of your landing pages without editing code.

What makes Divi’s builder different is that it lets you edit the WordPress website on the front end. It works by showing your design in real-time, so you can exactly see what each element looks like.

Unlike Elementor or SeedProd, you don’t get a menu containing different elements like text, images, videos, or buttons to add to the template.

Instead, Divi lets you select the layout of the section you want to add, and then allows you to choose the element you’d like to add.

It could take some time for new users and beginners to pick up the process for customizing their WordPress themes and landing pages, but it’s fairly straightforward and simple to use.

SeedProd – Ease of Use

SeedProd’s drag and drop website builder is very easy to use as well. It is a theme-agnostic plugin that lets you create your designs from scratch, without being limited by your theme’s design.

You can add different elements from the menu on your left by dragging and dropping them onto the template.

Using SeedProd’s theme builder, customizing the way your site looks is effortless. It’s made for non-techy users and ensures that anyone can customize their site without editing code.

You can also see the revision history and revert previous changes with a click of a button. There’s also a draft mode, which lets you edit a page privately without revealing it is under construction.

The builder is also quick and designed with speed in mind. It doesn’t bloat or slow down your website.

SeedProd also lets you add a coming soon page, maintenance mode, and 404 error landing pages with ease. This way, you can create buzz around your upcoming website or tell search engines that your site is currently under maintenance.

Winner – SeedProd

All 3 plugins offer a no-code drag and drop website builder for WordPress and are quite easy to use. Each website builder is made with beginners in mind and they make it super simple to create stunning website themes and landing pages.

However, SeedProd’s easy revision history makes it the winner in this category.

Customization Features – Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd

Another important factor to look for when selecting a website or landing page builder is the level of customization that’s possible.

It’s important to choose a tool that gives you full control over the appearance of your themes and pages.

Here’s a look at the customization features offered by Elementor, Divi, and SeedProd.

Elementor – Customization Features

Elementor offers over 300 designer-made templates. Simply pick a template, add your content, edit its style, and make it your own. Using Elementor, you can control every aspect of your site’s appearance.

It offers templates for a wide variety of categories. For example, you can choose a template for a blog, eCommerce store, travel, tourism site, fashion blog, non for profit organization, education, and more.

With Elementor, you get over 100 different widgets to add to your theme or landing page. These include basic widgets like heading and text, Pro widgets such as share buttons and countdown timers, and theme elements like post title, and WooCommerce widgets.

Other than that, Element also offers advanced customization features. For instance, you can add custom CSS to change the appearance and behavior of your site, add custom code, upload your own fonts and icons, and more.

Divi – Customization Features

Divi offers over 100 pre-made website themes and over 800 pre-made landing page layouts.

You can choose from a full website pack to design your WordPress website. The pack includes templates for different pages like a blog section, about us page, contact page, homepage, and more.

Besides that, Divi offers over 40 website elements for customizing your website theme and pages. For example, you can add sliders, call to action (CTA) buttons, forms, testimonials, galleries, and more.

You have full control over how each element looks. You can change the fonts, text color, border options, add hover styling, use filters and effects to enhance the appearance of any element, or use custom CSS to edit any element.

SeedProd – Customization Features

SeedProd offers over 20 different website theme templates and 150+ landing page templates. You can also choose from over 20 built-in color schemes or create your own from scratch.

Each website theme template is packaged with templates for multiple pages and sections, like the homepage, a single blog post, header, and footer.

However, what makes SeedProd different from Divi and Elementor is that it doesn’t rely on your WordPress theme for styling or functioning. It works independently from WordPress themes gives you complete control and freedom over the appearance and design of your theme.

There are also over 80 different blocks you can use to customize your WordPress themes and landing pages further. For instance, you can add a site logo, post navigation, headlines, text, or use advanced blocks like contact forms, optin forms, giveaways, icons, progress bar, and more.

Each block is further customizable, as you can change its alignment, color, edit font size, change heading levels (H1, H2, H3, and so on), add image alt text, edit image size, and more.

Other than that, SeedProd also offers WooCommerce blocks, so you can easily customize your WooCommerce store. It even integrates with Google Fonts to give more options to customize your website.

Winner – Tie

Whether your choose Elementor, Divi, or SeedProd, each WordPress website builder offers a great range of customization options. You get to choose from multiple themes and landing page templates.

Plus, you can select any element on the template and further edit its style, color, and appearance. They also allow advanced customization options through custom CSS and custom code snippets.

Performance – Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd

The performance of your WordPress site plays a vital role in getting more conversions and boosting search engine rankings.

A slow-loading website can lead to a poor user experience, which means people might leave your site before interacting with your landing pages. Similarly, Google now uses page speed as a ranking factor and ranks sites higher in search results that load quickly.

To test how Elementor, Divi, and SeedProd perform, we created a simple landing page with a headline, an image, and a button. Then to test the page speeds, we used Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

That said, we’ll focus on the mobile page speed scores, because Google now uses your site’s mobile version for indexing and ranking content.

Let’s see how each of these website builders performs.

Elementor – Performance

When we tested our landing page created using Elementor, the PageSpeed Insights tool showed an overall score of 90 for mobile. This is a great score and shows your site won’t slow down while using the builder.

Divi – Performance

The score obtained using Divi’s drag and drop builder was also excellent. A 91 score means your website loads quickly, and you don’t have to worry about page load times when using Divi.

SeedProd – Performance

SeedProd’s page speed tests were slightly better than both Elementor and Divi. With a score of 93 on mobile, you can expect fast performance and no delays in load time when using SeedProd to design your website and landing pages.

Winner – SeedProd

All 3 website builders performed well in our test, but SeedProd was slightly better than Divi and Elementor because it’s built with a speed-first mindset.

It helps you avoid bloated code which generally leads to faster speed and page load time.

Integrations – Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd

Integrating your WordPress landing page and theme builders with other WordPress plugins and third-party tools is important for adding more features and helping you to achieve your business goals.

For example, you can connect email marketing services to capture leads and build an email list, optimize your pages for search engines with SEO tools, or integrate social media networks.

Let’s see which tools and plugins are supported by Elementor, Divi, and SeedProd.

Elementor – Integrations

Elementor seamlessly integrates with different email marketing tools like AWeber, Drip, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, and ConvertKit. You can also connect customer relationship management (CRM) software such as HubSpot with Elementor.

Elementor also supports different WordPress plugins, including WooCommerce. You get different WooCommerce elements in the drag and drop builder as well.

One thing we noticed was that it’s not immediately clear how to connect our preferred email marketing service with Elementor.

To choose an integration with Elementor, you’ll first need to enter the API key for your preferred service in Elementor plugin settings.

Once that’s done, you can go to the drag and drop builder and add a signup form in your WordPress theme or landing page template. It’s only then you’ll be able to select your email service in the ‘Actions After Submit’ dropdown menu.

Besides that, it integrates with other eCommerce plugins like MemberPress and LearnDash.

Lastly, Elementor also integrates different social platforms like Facebook SDK, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Maps, SoundCloud, Slack, and more.

Divi – Integrations

Divi offers limited integration options compared to the other two WordPress websites and landing page builders.

It easily integrates with WooCommerce and offers different modules like add-to-cart buttons, cart notice, product ratings, and more. You can use these modules to create a WooCommerce store in WordPress.

Other than that, the tool lets you integrate Google Maps to show your location. It also works with the Wishlist Member plugin, Toolset plugin, and Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress. Sadly, it doesn’t integrate with third-party email marketing tools or CRMs.

SeedProd – Integrations

SeedProd also offers a wide range of integrations with premium third-party tools and WordPress plugins.

For instance, you can connect it with Drip, Constant Contact, and other email marketing tools to collect and manage email subscribers.

SeedProd seamlessly connects with WPForms and allows you to add any form to your website pages. Similarly, it also offers WooCommerce integration and lets you add WooCommerce blocks to your template.

Besides that, SeedProd integrates with Google Analytics and allows you to track website visitors. You can also connect it with Zapier and add Recaptcha to your landing pages.

What makes SeedProd different from Elementor and Divi is that it lets you connect email marketing services within the theme or landing page builder. There’s no need to exit the drag and drop builder to enter the API key and connect your email marketing service.

Winner – SeedProd

When it comes to integrations, it’s a close fight between Elementor and SeedProd. Both tools offer a lot of third-party tools and WordPress plugins for integration.

That said, SeedProd is our winner because the process of integrating email marketing services and third-party tools is much easier and faster than Elementor.

You don’t have to exit the theme or landing page builder to enter API keys. It shows different email marketing services under a separate tab inside the website builder, which removes the need to perform additional steps to integrate each service.

Customer Support – Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd

At times, you could get stuck or need help while using a WordPress website builder.

This is where having excellent customer support comes in handy. With the proper guidance and resources, you can resolve your issues and ensure the best results for your business.

Here’s how Elementor, Divi, and SeedProd stack up when offering support to users.

Elementor – Customer Support

Elementor offers multiple options for users who need help or need to contact customer support. They have a detailed and well-organized help center where you’ll find documentation on different topics.

For example, you can see steps for installation, how to create a new page, learn more about its features, how to use different widgets, and more.

Elementor also offers a guides and tutorials section where you’ll find multiple videos on different topics. You can even take courses and master using Elementor for various purposes, like building a portfolio or creating an online store.

If you’re an Elementor Pro user, then you get 24/7 premium support. Simply submit a support ticket, and a support representative will respond to your query.

Divi – Customer Support

Divi offers customer support through detailed documentation, including written steps and video tutorials. It also provides a community forum where you can interact with other users.

Another way Divi offers customer support is through support tickets and live chat. You can reach out to a customer support agent and resolve your problems through the live chat feature.

SeedProd – Customer Support

SeedProd offers customer support through a detailed knowledge base, where you’ll find tutorials and guides for getting started, learning more about different features, and troubleshooting various issues.

The plugin also offers support through a ticketing system. You can open a ticket, and a team of WordPress experts will help you out.

Since SeedProd is part of the WPBeginner family of products, you can join our WPBeginner Facebook Group for support. The group has over 83,000 members, and it’s a great place to ask for help.

Winner – Tie

All 3 WordPress website builders offer great customer support options. Elementor has lots of documentation, videos, courses, and more. Divi lets you chat with their support staff through live chat. While SeedProd offers detailed documentation, and premium ticket support.

Pricing Plans – Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd

Another important factor you should consider when selecting a WordPress website builder is its pricing. Let’s look at the pricing plans offered by Elementor, Divi, and SeedProd.

Elementor – Pricing Plans

With Elementor, you get 4 pricing plans starting from $49 per year with their Essential plan. However, if you need to use Elementor on more than 1 website, then you can choose their Expert plan for $199 per year.

There is also a Studio plan for $499 per year that lets you activate 100 websites and an Agency plan for $999 per year that offers 1000 website activations.

Elementor also offers a free version that you can use before subscribing to a premium plan.

Divi – Pricing Plans

Divi offers 2 pricing plans starting from $89 per year with their Yearly access plan. On the contrary, you can subscribe to their Lifetime access plan and pay a one-time fee of $249.

SeedProd – Pricing Plans

SeedProd lets you choose from 4 different pricing plans. The Basic plan starts from $31.60 per year, and the Plus plan costs $76.60 per year.

However, if you want to use the Theme builder, then you’ll need the Pro plan for $159.60 per year or the Elite plan for $239.60. With each plan, you get a 14-day money-back guarantee.

SeedProd also offers a Lite version which is 100% free to use. However, it has limited features and doesn’t include the WordPress theme builder.

Winner – SeedProd

SeedProd offers affordable pricing plans compared to Elementor and Divi. Plus, you get more features and integrations with SeedProd, making it excellent value for money.

Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd – Which One is the Best?

Elementor, Divi, and SeedProd are among the best WordPress website and landing builders in the market, so comparing them will always be close.

However, we believe that SeedProd is the best plugin for building custom WordPress themes and landing pages.

It’s super easy to use, offers an exceptional user experience, and gives your more control over the customization of your themes and pages. With SeedProd, you also get great integration options, responsive designs, and fast performance.

Often users ask us what about the default WordPress block editor, and how does it compare with these WordPress page builder plugins. There has been a lot of promising progress being made with front-site editing with the WordPress block editor, but it’s not yet powerful enough to compete with these popular page builders.

For more on this topic, see our guide on block editor vs page builders.

We hope this comparison between Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd helped you pick the best WordPress website builder. You may also want to see our guide on how to choose the best blogging platform and the best GoDaddy alternatives.

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 Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd (Compared) – Which is the Best? first appeared on WPBeginner.

Many of our users have asked us about the reasons we switched from Yoast SEO to All in One SEO for WordPress.

At WPBeginner, we decided to finally move to the All in One SEO for WordPress. It has improved our SEO workflow and given us the tools we needed to manage our website.

In this article, we’ll share our top reasons for switching to All in One SEO for WordPress and why we believe it is the best WordPress SEO toolkit on the market.

Why All in One SEO for WordPress?

If you are making a website, then installing an SEO plugin is one of the first things you should do in order to start getting traffic.

When we first started WPBeginner in 2009, we were using All in One SEO Pack because it was the original WordPress SEO plugin. After a couple of years, we switched to Yoast SEO because it was a newer plugin, and they had added new innovations.

Over the next several years, our website grew a lot. However, we felt that Yoast SEO stopped innovating and no longer had the features we needed. For instance, we needed better control over XML sitemaps, powerful schema.org tools, and more.

In 2020, our parent company Awesome Motive acquired the All in One SEO plugin.

The All in One SEO team did a fantastic job of completely overhauling the plugin, adding all the latest SEO features, and truly made it best in class. After numerous rounds of testing, we decided to make the move from Yoast SEO to AIOSEO in November 2021 because our team was convinced that AIOSEO had simply surpassed Yoast in terms of SEO features.

Since then, we have noticed a significant improvement in our editorial workflow and day-to-day SEO tasks.

That being said, here are the top reasons we switched from Yoast SEO to All in One SEO.

1. Better On-Page SEO Tools

On-page SEO is the term used for optimizing blog posts for SEO. This is one of the biggest day-to-day SEO tasks for most users as they add content to their websites.

All in One SEO offers the best on-page SEO experience with helpful features and tools at your fingertips.

You’ll see two prominent buttons in the top-right corner of your screen while writing content.

First, there is The Headline Analyzer tool, which gives a score for your post title with suggestions to improve it.

You can also try different headlines without changing the post tile and pick the best one. See our article on how to use the headline analyzer to write better SEO titles.

Under the General settings, you can add a focus keyphrase. This will give you an SEO score for your focus keyphrase with tips to improve it.

Plus, you can optimize your content for more than one focus keyphrase.

The snippet editor allows you to easily add SEO title, meta description, and focus keyphrases.

You’ll also see a live preview of how the page would look in search engines.

All in One SEO allows you to use dynamic tags in your SEO title and description. This way, you can automatically change the title and description.

For instance, you can use current month and year tags to always display the current year in the post title without editing them manually each year.

Best of all, the tags are searchable and you can easily add them from the drop-down menus, so you don’t need to know all the tags or look up any documentation.

The Social tab under SEO settings will show a preview of how your article would appear on Facebook and Twitter.

From here, you can set the title, description, and thumbnail that you want to use.

All in One SEO allows you to choose from a bunch of options for your social media thumbnails.

You can also just use the custom image option, and manually upload an image to use as a social media thumbnail for each article.

Need to redirect an article to a different post or page? No worries.

The Redirects feature lets you easily set up redirects for any post or page on your website without harming your site’s SEO.

Other on-page SEO tools include a Schema generator and Link Assistant. We will talk about them individually later in this article.

Overall, we believe that All in One SEO offers a much easier yet incredibly powerful on-page SEO experience than any other tool on the market.

2. Powerful XML Sitemaps

WordPress itself comes with built-in XML sitemaps and almost all other SEO plugins include some kind of XML sitemap functionality.

However, All in One SEO lets you take your XML sitemaps to the next level.

The plugin will automatically generate sitemaps for all your content types, including posts, pages, custom post types, products, and more.

You can easily exclude any post or page that you don’t want to include in your sitemaps.

Plus, you can also exclude any content types or taxonomies from your sitemaps.

Some users want to include their standalone landing pages to their sitemaps.

All in One SEO lets you include any page not generated by WordPress to your sitemaps.

The plugin also generates an RSS sitemap.

This includes the latest updates to your content and helps your newer content get indexed much more quickly.

If you run a news website, then you can generate a news sitemap to appear in the Google News carousel.

Additionally, you can generate a video sitemap. This helps your videos appear in Video search results.

This is the most extensive XML sitemap tool currently available to WordPress users, and it is still incredibly easy to use even for absolute beginners.

3. Most Comprehensive Schema Markup Support

Schema markup is a special type of HTML code that you can add to your WordPress website to tell search engines more about your content.

For instance, you can tell the search engines that a particular page is a blog post, a recipe, a FAQ, a news article, or a product page in your online store. Search engines can then use this data to display rich results.

All in One SEO comes with the most comprehensive support for schema markup for your WordPress website.

Starting with the Knowledge Graph data that helps search engines like Google get additional information about your website or business.

After that, you can set the default schema type to use for each post type.

You can also generate schema markup for individual posts or pages.

For instance, you can differentiate your regular articles from recipes, FAQs, online courses, and more.

If you run a local small business, then All in One SEO lets you easily add local SEO schema markup.

With local SEO markup, your site gets more exposure in local search results and Google Maps.

You can add multiple locations, display business hours, provide contact information, and more.

This extensive Schema.org support allows you to easily optimize your content for rich results in Google.

AIOSEO also lets you generate custom schema markup for recipes, videos, products, FAQ schema, and more. You can use their next-gen Schema templates to get rich snippets.

For power users, you can even write your own custom schema and save it as reusable templates, and it even has built-in schema validation.

4. Beginner-Friendly User Experience

Not all WordPress users are SEO experts, and even those with SEO expertise can benefit from a smooth user experience.

All in One SEO for WordPress makes SEO simpler for both beginner and advanced users.

It comes with a much cleaner and simpler onboarding experience than other SEO plugins, and a simple setup wizard walks you through the basic SEO setup.

It uses a modern user interface that is easy on the eyes and fast.

It saves you from unnecessary page loads when making changes to SEO settings.

The plugin also gets out of your way when you just want to write content or work on your website.

Once properly set up, beginner users can focus on creating content and growing their business instead of reviewing SEO settings.

At the same time, all the advanced features are easily accessible when you need them.

We believe this polished user experience makes a big difference when working on your website and performing day-to-day SEO tasks.

5. The Link Assistant Tool

Links play a crucial role in SEO. They not only help your users and search engines discover new content, but they also help search engine rankings.

However, tools that allow you to analyze your website’s internal and external links are usually very expensive.

All in One SEO brings that same functionality to your WordPress website.

The Link Assistant tool helps you analyze internal and external links added to each article.

The plugin will also make smart link suggestions. You can click on a post to review a suggestion and add the link without editing a post.

This comes in particularly handy for promoting newer articles by adding links to your older articles.

You can also click on the edit button and change the anchor text or surrounding text without editing the entire article.

We feel that the link assistant tool alone is a strong reason for switching to All in One SEO for WordPress.

6. Redirection Manager

Broken links cause 404 errors in WordPress, which may affect your site’s SEO.

All in One SEO comes with a powerful redirects manager tool that allows you to easily set up redirects on your website.

It keeps a log of 404 errors on your WordPress site so that you can easily find posts that may need to be redirected.

Also, if you change a post or page’s permalink, AIOSEO will immediately ask if you want to redirect the old URL to the new one.

Plus, if you ever plan to move your WordPress site to a new domain name, All in One SEO comes with a full site redirect that automatically redirects users to your new domain name.

7. Social Media Integration

Social media platforms play an important role in promoting your website beyond organic search traffic.

All in One SEO provides deep integrations to social media platforms with open graph metadata integration.

You can add links to all your social media profiles associated with your website and help search engines discover them.

Each author on your website can also add links to their individual social media profiles.

This allows search engines to discover social media accounts for authors on your website.

Finally, you can easily set open graph metadata and thumbnails for each article.

This allows you to override default settings and get more control over how each article appears when shared on social media.

8. Enhanced Image SEO for WordPress

Image search is an important source of traffic for many websites. All in One SEO allows you to easily optimize your images to get more search traffic.

Simply go to All in One SEO » Search Appearance and switch to the Image SEO tab.

From here, the plugin can automatically use the filename to generate an image title and alt tags.

You can also tell it to replace dashes and underscores with spaces and change letter casing.

With Image SEO, You can also disable WordPress attachment pages and redirect them to the original post or page where the image is embedded.

Lastly, you can optimize filenames by not stripping dashes, changing letter casing, and stripping common stop words.

9. Sitewide SEO Audit

For many beginners and small businesses, purchasing an expensive SEO tool for a site-wide SEO audit or competitor analysis is not a viable option.

All in One SEO comes with a built-in sitewide SEO audit and competitor analysis tool.

With an SEO audit, you can see an overall SEO health score for your website.

It will also give you a detailed report with practical suggestions to improve your SEO score.

You can also see how your competitors are doing and get an SEO score check for any website.

Bonus SEO Tools included with AIOSEO

Aside from the above reasons, AIOSEO also gives us dozens of other powerful SEO features that we simply didn’t have previously.

For example, they were the first ones to add IndexNow support in WordPress to speed up search indexing for Bing.

Recently, they added a powerful table of content block that not only helps improve user experience, but it also helps you get multiple links in your Google search results.

You can add a table of content block right inside your WordPress editor, and the best part is that AIOSEO automatically generates the markup while letting you fully customize the content (including hiding certain headings).

Also if you’re using headless WordPress site, then they also have a full REST API support to improve your SEO rankings.

How to Switch From Any WordPress SEO Plugin to All in One SEO?

Switching to All in One SEO for WordPress is quite simple.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the All in One SEO for WordPress plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: There is also a free version of All in One SEO that you can use. However, it may not have all the features we mentioned above.

Upon activation, you will be asked to run the setup wizard. During the setup, the plugin will automatically detect your other SEO plugin and will offer to import SEO data.

Simply check the box next to the old SEO plugin and click on the Import Data and Continue button.

All in One SEO will automatically import all your SEO data, including post titles, meta descriptions, keywords, and more.

You can also manually run the importer by visiting the All in One SEO » Tools page and switching to the Import/Export tab.

Simply select the SEO plugin you were using before and hit the Import button.

We hope this article helped explain the reasons why we switched from Yoast to All in One SEO for WordPress. You may also want to see our complete WordPress SEO guide for beginners or take a look at our detailed side-by-side comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO.

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 9 Reasons Why We Switched from Yoast to All in One SEO first appeared on WPBeginner.

Do you want to create a child page in WordPress?

WordPress pages can be standalone or hierarchical, which means the page has its own sub-pages known as child pages. For instance, you may want to create a Case Studies parent page and then create child pages for each of your separate case studies.

In this article, we will show how to organize your pages by creating a child page in WordPress.

What is a Child Page in WordPress?

WordPress comes with two default post types called posts and pages.

Posts are blog content, and are shown in reverse chronological order so the people who visit your WordPress blog will see the newest posts first.

Posts are normally organized with categories and tags, which is a great way to help visitors find related content.

Pages are one-off or standalone content that is not part of a blog. For example, many websites have an About Us and a Contact Us page. These pages can be hierarchical, which means you can organize them with parent and child pages.

Typically, business websites use pages to build a website without necessarily creating a blog. Businesses who want to add a blog to their content marketing strategy can still do so by simply creating a separate blog page, but this isn’t mandatory.

If you have too many pages, then it becomes difficult to organize them. This is where child pages come in.

You can create a parent page and then add child pages to better organize your navigation menus and your website as a whole. For example, the MonsterInsights website has a ‘Features’ parent page with a separate child page for each feature. This makes it easier for customers to find the feature they want to read about.

Many online stores also use child and parent pages to help visitors explore their eCommerce site and find products to buy.

Any child page can also have its own child pages. In this way, you can build relationships between your pages and create a logical structure that’s easier for visitors to navigate.

When pages are organized into parent and child categories, they also tend to be easier to manage in the WordPress admin area. This is particularly true as your WordPress website continues to grow.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily create a child page in WordPress.

How to Create a Child Page in WordPress?

To create a child page, you first need a parent page. You can use any page as a parent, or create a new page.

Once you have a parent page, you’re ready to add some child pages. Again, you can turn any existing page into a child, or create an entirely new page which will become your child page.

Then, simply open the child page for editing.

In the right-hand menu, click on the ‘Page’ tab. Then, find the ‘Page Attributes’ section and give it a click to expand.

If you look at the ‘Parent Page’ field then this is blank by default. This means the page is currently a parent page.

To turn this parent into a child page, simply open the ‘Parent’ dropdown. You can then select the page that you want to use as the parent page.

After that, go ahead and save your changes by clicking on the Update or Publish button.

To create more child pages, simply repeat the process described above.

To see all of your child pages, head over to Pages » All Pages. WordPress will show all of your child pages listed under their parent page with a — prefix.

In the following image, you can see that ‘Google Analytics dashboard’ and ‘WooCommerce Analytics’ are child pages of ‘MonsterInsight Features.’

After creating some child pages, you may want to add a list of child pages for a parent page to your WordPress website.

We hope this article helped you learn how to create a child page in WordPress. You may also want to see our complete guide on how to create a landing page in WordPress and the best drag and drop WordPress page builders.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Create a Child Page in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

Do you want to speed up WooCommerce performance for your online store?

A faster loading WooCommerce store improves user experience and helps you boost sales and conversions.

In this article, we’ll show you how to speed up WooCommerce performance with easy and practical tips.

Why Is WooCommerce Speed Important?

WooCommerce speed is important because it helps improve user experience on your online store.

Recent research has found that a 1-second drop in page speed causes a 7% loss in conversions and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

More than 73% of users switch to a competitor if they come across a slower website. Basically, a slow WooCommerce store causes lower conversions and decreased sales.

It also affects your WooCommerce SEO rankings. Page speed is one of the crucial factors that search engines like Google use to rank websites.

Optimizing WooCommerce for speed and performance can help you recover these losses and improve your overall conversions, sales, and customer satisfaction score.

That being said, let’s look at how to speed up WooCommerce with the following tips.

1. Upgrade Your WooCommerce Hosting

Choosing the right hosting provider is the first step in improving WooCommerce speed.

Hosting is where all your WooCommerce files are stored. If your hosting provider doesn’t have a good platform, then it degrades your customers’ WooCommerce performance.

Without good WooCommerce hosting, all other tips for improving speed and performance will not work.

If you are just getting started, then we recommend using SiteGround. They are a WooCommerce-recommended hosting provider and one of the top companies in the hosting market.

They are offering WPBeginner users a generous discount when you use our SiteGround coupon, and the hosting comes with powerful features for eCommerce such as Ultrafast PHP, Ecommerce caching, and more.

For those who are looking for alternative options, we recommend using WP Engine or Hostinger.

Need help moving your WooCommerce store?

Follow our step-by-step tutorial on how to move WordPress to a new host for detailed instructions.

2. Set up Caching for Your WooCommerce Store

WooCommerce runs on top of WordPress. It automatically generates pages when a user visits your website.

This means more people visiting your website will keep your hosting server busier for longer.

Caching helps you solve this issue.

Instead of generating pages on the fly, it serves your users a static copy it has stored.

This frees up your website server resources, making it faster and more responsive.

The best way to add caching to your WooCommerce store is by using WP Rocket. It is the best WooCommerce caching plugin on the market that is incredibly powerful yet totally beginner friendly.

Simply install and activate WP Rocket plugin.

Once installed, it will automatically generate cache and apply WooCommerce-related settings.

For more details, check out our tutorial on how to set up WP Rocket in WordPress.

3. Keep WooCommerce Updated

WooCommerce releases new versions frequently. These new versions not only fix bugs and introduce new features, but they also improve performance.

Make sure that your WooCommerce version is always up to date.

However, WooCommerce relies on WordPress and the whole ecosystem of your theme and plugins. Updating WooCommerce alone doesn’t mean that you are using the latest software for your online store.

You’ll also need to ensure that you are using the latest version of WordPress and have installed all plugins and theme updates.

It is always necessary to ensure that you have made a complete backup of your WooCommerce store before installing updates in the correct order.

4. Optimize Product Images in WooCommerce

For a WooCommerce store, you need product images to grow your business. However, images take longer to load and impact your page speed.

By optimizing your product images, you can reduce their filesize significantly without losing quality. This makes all your store pages, product categories, and product pages load faster.

Now, there are several ways to optimize images. The most reliable one is to optimize images before uploading them to your WooCommerce product.

Most image editing software like Adobe Photoshop allow you to export images for the web.

During the export dialog, you can choose an image file format (JPG, PNG, GIF) that gives you the smallest filesize.

Then you can reduce quality, colors, and other options to further decrease filesize.

Using your image editing tool to reduce filesize is the most efficient way to improve images on your WooCommerce store.

However, you can also use an image compression plugin to automatically adjust image filesize. This allows you to optimize product images that you have already uploaded to your website.

For more details, see our tutorial on optimizing images for the web.

5. Choose a Faster Loading WooCommerce Theme

When choosing themes for their WooCommerce stores, many beginners end up choosing the fanciest theme with a ton of bells and whistles.

We understand the reason behind that. Beginners feel that they should get a theme that has all the features they want to see in their store.

That’s not how themes are supposed to work.

WordPress themes are meant to control only the appearance of your website and WooCommerce store, not add features.

When choosing a theme, you should look for options like layout choices, color schemes, WooCommerce support, etc. For functionality, you should use plugins and extensions.

Choosing a theme with tons of plugin-like features can slow down your website. The theme would load a lot of extra code you are probably not even using.

To learn more, see our article on choosing the perfect theme for your website.

If you need quick theme recommendations, then we recommend Astra or simply use SeedProd to create a custom WooCommerce theme without any code (drag & drop builder).

Need more ideas? Check out our expert pick of the best WooCommerce themes to find a faster theme for your online store.

6. Replace Poorly Coded Plugins & Extensions

The best part about using WooCommerce is that you can access thousands of extensions and WordPress plugins.

As long as they are well-coded, you can install as many plugins as you need, and it won’t cause any noticeable performance impact.

However, some poorly coded WordPress plugins can slow down your website. These plugins typically run database-intensive queries or load unnecessary JavaScript and CSS.

You can use plugins like Query Monitor to see the number of queries run on each page load.

Query Monitor allows you to see the following activity:

Database queries triggered by a page on your WooCommerce storeHTTP requests made by scripts in your themes or pluginsHooks and actions triggered on a pageLanguage, user role checks, and template files used to display the pageYour hosting environment like PHP and MySQL versions, memory limits, and more.

For more details and step by step instructions, see our tutorial on how to add query monitor in WordPress.

If this doesn’t help, then you can simply test your website after deactivating all plugins.

If deactivating plugins suddenly improves WooCommerce performance, then you can activate them one by one to figure out which one is the culprit.

You can then reach out to that plugin’s support and let them know about the issue. Meanwhile, you can replace the plugin with an alternate option.

For essential features, take a look at our expert pick of the best WooCommerce plugins that every online store should install.

7. Use The Latest PHP Version

WooCommerce and WordPress are both written using PHP as the main programming language.

PHP is an open source programming language just like WordPress. It is regularly maintained by a very active community of developers who frequently release new versions.

For each new release, they spend a large amount of time and resources on improving PHP performance by making it faster.

However, WordPress hosting companies are often not as quick to switch to the latest PHP version. They often run several versions behind to ensure software compatibility.

You can see which PHP version is used by your website by visiting  Tools » Site Health page and switching to the Info tab.

At the time of writing this article, the latest PHP version is 8.0.22.

All top WordPress hosting providers easy tools to select which PHP version you want to use on your website.

For instance, on Bluehost, you can go to your hosting control panel and click on the Advanced tab in the left column.

Then, you need to click on the MultiPHP Manager app to choose your PHP version.

For more information on this topic, you may want to see our article on updating PHP version for your WordPress website.

8. Turn on a DNS Level Firewall

A DNS-level firewall protects your WooCommerce store against malicious activity. It blocks suspicious requests to your website even before they reach your server.

Hacking attempts, suspicious crawlers, and DDoS attacks can eat up your hosting resources and make your website slow.

A DNS firewall blocks them, which frees up your server resources to do other things.

We recommend using Sucuri. It is the best WordPress security plugin and website firewall.

It also comes with a super-fast CDN to serve your static content.

A CDN is a content delivery network that allows you to serve non-dynamic parts of your website through a global network of servers.

These networks are usually strategically located at different geographic points around the globe. This means your users will load the static files from a server closer to their own location.

For more details, see our guide on why do you need a CDN for your WordPress website.

9. Use an SMTP Service to Send WooCommerce Emails

Your WooCommerce store sends email notifications for account management, order confirmation, and administrative notices.

By default, WordPress uses the PHP mail() function to send emails. This function can be misused by spammers and many hosting companies deliberately limit or block it.

That’s why you need to use an SMTP server to send your WooCommerce emails.

SMTP is the standard protocol for sending emails.

Now your hosting company may provide free business email address that you can use to send emails via SMTP.

However, hosting companies typically host the mail server on the same computer as their web hosting server.

This means sending many emails at once can impact your website. Even when the email is processed, it may end up in spam.

To fix this problem, you’ll need to use an SMTP service provider.

We recommend using SendLayer, which is the best SMTP service provider on the market. They also have a free trial where you can send up to 200 emails.

Alternatives: SMTP.com and Sendinblue

Once you have signed up, you can use WP Mail SMTP to start sending emails via your SMTP service provider.

Having issues with WooCommerce emails? See this tutorial to fix WooCommerce not sending emails issue.

10. Upgrade Conversion Optimization Tools

Conversion optimization is the combination of techniques store owners use to nudge website visitors into making a purchase or signing up.

To do that, they use a bunch of tools to display popups, promote coupons, display targeted offers, and more.

The problem is that some of these tools are often not optimized for speed. They may load too many unnecessary files, prevent page rendering, not display correctly on mobile devices, and basically destroy user experience on your store.

We recommend using conversion optimization software that are fast, optimized for user experience, and work beautifully on mobile devices.

This is where OptinMonster comes in. It is the industry leader among conversion optimization software and allows you to convert website visitors into customers.

It comes with smart popups, slide in widgets, header and footer tools, countdown timers, and other tools to grow your business.

It also includes powerful targeting options that allow you to display your campaigns at the right time to the right users.

Most importantly, your OptinMonster campaigns are highly optimized for speed, performance, and user experience across all screen sizes.

For more tools and tips see our expert tips on recovering abandoned carts in WooCommerce.

11. Optimize WooCommerce Database

WooCommerce uses the same database as your WordPress installation. They both save a lot of data that becomes useless after a while. For instance, old revisions, transients, spam comments, and more will stay in your database for a long time.

Now, this means that your WordPress backup plugin will take longer to prepare a backup. It will also take more time if you have to download or upload it.

Luckily, there are excellent tools to optimize your WordPress database.

If you are using WP Rocket, then you can go to Settings » WP Rocket page and switch to the Database tab.

From here you can clean up your WordPress database. Simply select the unnecessary items you want to remove and click on the Save Changes and Optimize button.

Alternately, you can use WP-Optimize plugin. Simply install and activate the plugin and go to the plugin’s settings page by clicking on WP-Optimize in the admin sidebar.

Select the items you want to delete or optimize and then click on the ‘Run all selected optimizations’ button.

For more details, see our tutorial on how to optimize your WordPress database.

12. Optimize JavaScript and CSS Files

JavaScript and CSS files send individual HTTP requests and increase the time it takes for a page to load. Some of these files may block rendering which means the page will not be displayed until the browser has downloaded those files.

There are multiple ways you can optimize JavaScript and CSS file delivery. We have talked about using CDN and caching already.

More advanced users can minify or combine those files.

Minification removes white spaces from JavaScript and CSS files which reduces their download size.

Combining all your JavaScript and CSS files allows you to serve users all the JavaScript and CSS with one file.

You can do that using the WP Rocket plugin. Simply go to the File Optimization tab and turn on minify and combine options for CSS and JavaScript.

For alternate methods and more details, you may want to check out our tutorial on how to minify CSS and JavaScript in WordPress.

Note: Minifying and combining these files may result in unexpected issues n your website. If it causes issues, then you can simply turn it off.

We hope this article helped you improve WooCommerce speed and boost performance for your online store. You may also want to see our guide on how to track WooCommerce conversions or see these tips for improving your organic click rates in WooCommerce.

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The post How to Speed up WooCommerce Performance (12 Tips) first appeared on WPBeginner.