How to create Effective Landing Pages for your EDD WordPress Stores

For a long time, landing pages have been a success. A landing page often brings in the right traffic, whether a new product is launched or a particular service or product.

Unfortunately, a landing page is sometimes mistaken for a website’s homepage. This can happen to someone who is totally inexperienced or new to the design industry or who does not have adequate knowledge how to do it.

Despite being the final step towards your advertisement campaign, your WordPress landing page should always be on your priorities. But it can often be a challenge to create a landing page that converts.

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is the page on your website that a visitor comes to after clicking an ad, seeing a social media posts or others. Inexperienced marketers frequently direct to their homepage all of their PPC traffic, but this can be a major mistake. For providing a premium experience for visitors and driving conversions with a targeted message that suits the needs of each customer, specific landing pages tailored to different offers are important.

Landing pages can also be a foundation of successful online marketing. Your deal may be perfect and be tailored for your PPC ads, but your company is bound to struggle without a good landing page. Your layout of your WordPress landing page must be flawless.

So what makes the landing page a perfect one? How do you make cool landing pages that boast conversion rates? To make it happen, we will walk you through what you need to do.

10 Tips in Creating Effective Landing Pages

Here are the best tips of how to create landing page for your websites:

Clean and Organized Design

Your page design’s look, sound, and overall layout will have an immense impact on the success of your landing page that drives conversions.The main purpose of your landing page should be to make it as easy as possible for a visitor to convert, so it is important that all aspects of your page work towards the goal of conversion, whether it is filling out a form, buying a product, subscribing to a mailing list, and others.

An efficient design of the landing page allows use of color, layout, design and and eye-catching images intelligently. Some button colors, such as red or green, are said to improve landing page conversions, but above all, make sure that your button color and your background contrast strongly. To ensure a successful landing page, you can test several different button attributes. Test color, placement, and size to discover the most efficient landing page layout.

Trust Signals

Strong landing pages use confidence signals abundantly, which can mean that their offer a trustworthy brand to visitors. Trust signals can take a variety of different types such as testimonials, product reviews, customer endorsements and others. This can also be achieved with interaction counters, which drive through likes and shares from different social networking sites for a more subtle type of endorsement.

Make Your Page Mobile Friendly

Do you know how long it takes to load your landing page on mobile devices? Fredrik Lindberg, Bannerflow Product Manager,’ says that optimizing the campaign from mobile to desktop is important and is something everybody should do. To ensure conversion across platforms, scale your landing pages for all devices.

According to Google, after 3 seconds, 53 percent of visitors to a mobile site leave if the page fails to load. Even more shocking, it takes over 70 percent of online landing pages over 7 seconds to load above the fold. When nobody sticks around to see them, stunning landing pages are useless.

High-Quality Content

Don’t be cheap with your content to offer your visitors instead provide rich, useful content as long as it’s essential. Nice, trusting content encourages faith and trust. You don’t want to smother visitors with details unnecessary details.

Remove Page Distractions

The goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to convert, having as little and as few barriers. It should always be obvious about the next move. Depending on what your target conversion is this technique varies. If it’s form submissions, create something enticing to fill-out. Make a button if it’s a download that begs to be pressed.

Call-To-Action Buttons

Your call-to-action is normally the second biggest chance to increase the conversion rate. Keep it short, use of 5-7 words is highly effective. Use value verbs and when possible, instead of verbs that indicate what the prospect has to do such as Send.

Encourage Social Sharing

The most powerful way to market your website is by social media.Once you get the opportunity, invite individuals to share your offer. They’d definitely want to tell people about it if they enjoy it.

You can use features such as social sharing icons right on your page or link text saying to share this contents with your friends.

Easy To Understand Contents

It’s important that your visitors can easily understand what is it that you’re offering. It’s estimated that you have about 8 seconds to persuade users to stay on your website, so value proposition needs to be fast and convincing. Make it easy to search while creating a landing page by highlighting your primary point in the headline by using sub headings and bullet points for added info. Use fonts and colors to show the hierarchy of details.

Contain Relevant, Quality Images

Eye-catching and appropriate photos makes a more appealing website and a better overall user experience. Consider incorporating visual hints to show what the visitor should do next. You can go with arrows on the obvious option, or try something more creative, such as making the focal point of the page a bright CTA.

Optimize for SEO

Have search engines find your landing page by optimizing it for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Increase the probability of your landing page appearing prominently on the results page of a search engine (SERP) by using suitable keywords in the URL, headlines and in the text of the page.

Why Category and Tag Pages are suitable to serve as Landing Pages?

When we speak about “landing pages,” we typically mean a page explicitly designed to receive and convert traffic and optimize it. We need a landing page, therefore, because it will help improve the conversion rates of your website and reduce the cost of receiving a lead or sale.

One of your most strong landing pages can certainly be your download category and tag pages. These pages already have your items on their own, so you just need to customize and make the most of these pages directly in order to get a sale. The issue now is that Google typically does not find these pages because it is not designed for SEO as there is not enough space to add even more text and images.

So, right now, our aim is to ensure that your landing pages for download categories and tags are SEO optimized to drive a large amount of traffic and thus rank in the leading search engines. With the use of this plugin and its efficient shortcodes, we will certainly achieve that.

EDD Landing Pages for Categories and Tags Plugin

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) web stores come with custom category and tag pages which offers very limited editing possibilities which forgive a lot of SEO potential. There is no meaningful text editor available to add more content to pages such as images, texts styles and formatting and others which are needed to become further optimized for SEO purposes. It also limits you to only add text above the downloads listed on those pages.

To best optimize your category and tag landing pages for SEO, there needs to be an extensive text field (content) added below the downloads listed on the custom download category and tag pages, and this plugin would be of excellent help for you.

EDD Landing Pages for Categories and Tags enhances text fields and adds button and dropdown filters on your download category and tag pages to turn them into better landing pages. The plugin allows you to upload one image per download category and tag. Several shortcodes are included in the plugin which can be used to create directory lists, simple lists, and carousels of your download categories and tags to be placed on any page of your website. Enhances the user experience and site navigation for your visitors.

Acquiring this plugin will definitely help you optimize your pages for SEO, by allowing you to create text and information-rich category and tag pages which will definitely give your web store a better chance to rank high in the leading search engines such as Google or Bing.

Conclusion

The above methods may actually take some time and effort, but we guarantee that they are absolutely worthwhile to do. Give it a shot and you will see how simply you can optimize and improve your landings page that surely can increase your sales conversion rates.

Also, trying out the EDD Landing Pages for Categories and Tags will definitely help you optimize your Download Category and Tag pages for SEO, by allowing you to create text and information-rich category and tag pages which will definitely give your web store a better chance to rank high in the leading search engines such as Google or Bing.

Making sure that your WordPress landing pages convert as well as rank for SEO is a recipe for true success. Now, you already know some very important steps to make your landing page better and effective.

Top 9 Abandoned Cart Recovery Solutions for Easy Digital Downloads Stores

Abandoned Cart on eCommerce happens when customers add products to their online shopping cart, then abandon or leave your site before the transaction is completed. A lot of this happens in every online store. Baymard Institute puts at 69 percent the average abandonment rate for eCommerce carts.

The rate of abandoned carts on mobile devices is even higher. Data from Brilliance shows a prevalence of 73% on desktops, 80.7% on laptops, and a staggering 85.6% on cell phones.

Just three out of ten shopping carts will actually produce an order, even though how hardworking retailers work to get customers to their site and guide them during the purchase journey. That’s a considerable amount of revenue lost, especially if the sale ends up going to your competitor.

Why is Abandoned Cart Recovery Important?

For all retail marketers, cart abandonment is a growing problem as it is the most frequent and most inevitable scenario in the operation of an online store. Here are some key points why you should focus on your Abandoned Carts recovery:

It is easier to target warm leads than cold leads. Bringing a customer into the sales funnel is better than trying to find a new customer to sell to. Online shops will start driving lost customers back to their website by remarketing wisely. Remarketing for websites is a largely untapped sales source, which also concedes to the idea that they will not return after a customer has left. Recognizing the need to directly communicate with consumers will improve online recovery dramatically. 

In your sales and marketing funnel, it is also one of the greatest leaks, thereby increasing the bounce rate. Be able to boost your store’s profits by following up the customer and encouraging them to finish their purchase. 

Emails about cart abandonment are a cost-effective option to raise sales. Such emails encourage you to inspire consumers to return to the website and complete their purchase. The emails may simply remind them of the products, provide them with other appropriate items or inspire them to empower price-sensitive clients. This way, you will keep your clients and reduce the expense of attracting new clients. 

9 Best Abandoned Cart Recovery Solutions for Easy Digital Downloads WordPress stores

There are many available Abandoned cart plugins all over the internet that can help you with your recovery process. Now, here are our top picks of Abandoned Cart Recovery Solutions for Easy Digital Downloads stores:

EDD Mailchimp Abandoned Cart WordPress Plugin

This plugin was created, specially designed to recover abandoned carts for Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) stores by using Mailchimp. EDD Mailchimp Abandoned Cart allows you to trigger abandoned carts emails in MailChimp by motivating customers to follow through on their intended purchases with personal, time-limited discount codes in MailChimp. 

Also, this plugin calculates several key performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of your abandoned cart process and also allows you to view the contents of each abandoned cart. You can learn more features of this plugin by visiting the product page.

Plugin Key Features

  • Performance Statistics of your Abandoned Cart Process
  • Detailed list of all abandoned carts and contents
  • Issue time-limited Discount Codes
  • Send email automation series via Mailchimp

This plugin is very good in helping you to track and recover abandoned carts. It provides a clear and easy to follow Documentation to help you out in setting your Abandoned Cart Emails right on Mailchimp.

Jilt for Easy Digital Downloads

Jilt has excellent integrations for WooCommerce, Shopify, and Easy Digital Downloads. Just install their free plugin and you’re good to go. Further down, we will delve into more of the installation and configuration. It tracks incoming clients once your store is linked to Jilt. It then begins an automated email campaign to try to grab them back for those who start purchasing a product on your site but end up leaving. 

Plugin Key Features

  • High Powered Performance
  • Proven Cart Regeneration Powered Technology
  • Great for any number of products
  • Dynamic Discounts

Jilt will list all items in your recovery emails in an abandoned cart, making sure consumers know what was in the cart, and allowing them to complete transactions quickly with a few clicks.

Jilt transfers this monitoring and storage from your site since abandoned carts produce plenty of data to monitor, meaning that your site continues to load easily. Now you have abandoned cart data you need to maximize recoveries and conversions. 

Retainful – Abandoned Cart Recovery Plugin

Retainful, an abandoned cart recovery plugin, helps you to reduce the number of abandoned carts. It also helps you generate sales in your eCommerce store with multiple email marketing campaigns. It has become the popular and best lead capture tool. Moreover, it delivers a series of abandoned cart reminders to the customers that probably increases your conversion rate. 

Retainful’s Key Features

Here are some of the wonderful features that help you to know more about Retainful. 

  • Capture abandoned cart email addresses
  • Drag and drop editor with easy customization
  • Track your email campaign’s performance easily
  • Progressive analytical dashboard
  • Flexible shortcode usage for email personalization
  • Email collection popup
  • Drip/Sequential recovery emails
  • Coupon usage restrictions
  • Auto-apply coupons

Retainful, one of the most prominent WordPress abandoned cart recovery plugins, has become a handy plugin to recover your lost sales. You can implement one among the myriads of email templates to come up with an attractive email with an increased engagement rate and open rate.

Recapture for Easy Digital Downloads

Since 2015, Recapture has been around and has earned millions of dollars for shops just like yours. Principally for Shopify, it is an abandoned cart recovery and email marketing software. Via abandoned cart emails, check alerts, winbacks and more, this app lets you reclaim missing customer revenue in your shop. 

Plugin Key Features

  • Live Shopping Cart Views
  • Intuitive drag-and-drop email editor.
  • Easy for non-tech folks to create and send email campaigns
  • Simple pricing that won’t break your budget
  • Built for ecommerce from the ground up

Recapture.io is very easy to use for Magento 1 and 2 with simple email marketing and abandoned cart recovery. Start recovering missed revenue from your customers quickly and painlessly with an easy to use, popular 5-minute setup.You don’t need to have a coding knowledge at all! You should get today’s Recapture up and running. Why keep waiting any longer? Right now, begin recovering abandoned revenue! 

Cartlift

Cart Lift is perfect for your WooCommerce or Easy Digital download-based store in setting up and running a good abandoned cart recovery campaign. You can now recover about 20 percent of your abandoned cart customers with Cart Lift with very less effort.

Plugin Key Features

  • Set strategic intervals for greater outcomes to hit prospects
  • Use proven email templates to make prospects complete purchases
  • Get the campaign ‘s unique reports and revenue benefit recovery
  • Supports WooCommerce & EDD
  • Webhook option for integration with external marketing automation software. 

You can easily create compelling email campaigns using Cart Lift to instantly reach clients who have abandoned shopping carts on your web.This is to win them back to complete transactions and boost your profits. With automated email promotions, recover over 20 percent of your abandoned cart clients. Enjoy raising your ROI immediately. 

Cart recovery for WordPress

A free abandoned cart recovery and monitoring in your WordPress store is the Cart Recovery Plugin for WordPress. As soon as your customers enter checkout, this plugin helps you to monitor customer names and addresses, track carts for logged in users, added and track abandoned carts, view stats in your WordPress dashboard, and customize your recovery email. 

Plugin Key Features

  • Tracks the names and emails of clients as soon as they are entered at checkout
  • Track logged-in consumer carts as soon as things are added
  • Emails for automatic cart recovery & cart re-population
  • Includes easy to use WordPress stats
  • WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro compatibility 

It also has automatic emails for cart recovery & cart re-population within WordPress with easy to use stats. Moreover, it’s very compatible with WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro. 

CartHook for Easy Digital Downloads

One of the fastest and reliable way to  recover abandoned carts for your EDD site is CartHook for Easy Digital Downloads. The plugin makes it very easy to integrate Easy Digital Downloads and CartHook web app, requiring you to completely integrate only using a copy / paste of your CartHook ID in seconds. 

Plugin Key Features

  • Create funnels of post-purchase caused by what your customers buy at the checkout.
  • Modify templates beautifully crafted
  • Track every funnel ‘s outcomes and offer to understand the effect on your AOV and revenue.
  • Live support from individuals who care for your performance in a sensitive way. 

Be able to capture every visitor’s email address on the checkout page as soon as it is typed in the email area. If the transaction is not completed, an automated email campaign designed to return the user to your site to finish the purchase will be activated.

This plugin will help you recover 15 % to 20% of your abandoned carts instantly, resulting in more sales immediately. Enter thousands of Shopify stores with CartHook to build post-purchase offerings. 

EDD Abandoned Cart by Frosty Media

I’m sure you are trying to strike a balance between web visitors and sales when selling digital goods. A small bridge between the two could be Easy Digital Downloads Abandoned Cart extension 

The Abandoned Cart goes in the back end when a visitor has products in the cart and enters the checkout page. The plugin stores the email address in the database to be used later when the user enters their email address. The email address is deleted from the Abandoned Cart database if the checkout phase is finished. 

The emails are automatically collected, but you have to individually email each user before an auto-cron is constructed in a future update. If your host allows PHP mail or wp mail, WordPress can handle the email, which is still as simple as hovering over the user and clicking on the email user. 

EDD Better Checkout Cart

This plugin has a different approach to your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress webstores to battle off abandoned carts. EDD has one major problem: the checkout / cart CTR (Click Through Rate) is not as good as it should be. This was achieved by eliminating useless call-to-action and other obstacles. To get the enhancement, this plugin is your way. 

With a five on a 5-star rating, this plugin with its awesome service and great support has satisfied all those who have downloaded it. If you are using a WordPress version that is above 4.3, then you can download it now and start using it immediately.

Conclusion: You need to implement Abandoned Cart Recovery as there is Money on the Table

It’s really necessary to incorporate an Abandoned Cart Recovery operation. In your sales and marketing pipeline, this is one of the main leaks, thereby increasing the bounce rate. Processes of cart abandonment recovery such as this are a cost-effective method for sales improvement. Bringing a customer into the sales funnel is better than trying to find a new customer to sell to. 

It is complicated and has no single solution to the cart abandonment problem. Several causes lead shoppers every day to leave their favorite things in shopping carts. The reasons why customers prefer to leave their carts and what changes they can make to solve those challenges are crucial for retailers to consider. 

It’s difficult to eradicate cart abandonment completely, however. This is where a good abandoned cart plugin comes into play. A personalized, well-thought out marketing strategy can help bring shoppers back to the store and recapture lost sales. You will maximize customer service with this data by demonstrating you care for the customer and seeking a personal solution for them. You can also improve future customer experience by tackling this issue to prevent future cart abandonment from that reason.

Why using a WordPress Freelance Marketplace Plugin?

What is a Freelance Marketplace?

Freelance Marketplace is like a meeting ground where qualified and skilled freelancers from anywhere in the world can find work and get paid. It is an online platform where businesses can find and hire individual contractors to do some work remotely. They act as an intermediary providing a safe and convenient way to contract remote experts for one-time projects.

Freelance Services Marketplace like Upwork, offering a convenient, reliable, and easy way to access global freelance talent, has become very popular among digital businesses. These websites offer access to hundreds of millions of freelancers who are experts in hundreds of different categories. You can literally find a solution to any kind of idea you have; there is always a Freelancer waiting to be hired. 

Remember, anyone hiring a freelancer from a Freelancer Marketplace should still take into consideration a full profile audit and further investigation of character. This ensures that the person you are going to be working with can definitely do the job. You may even want to try out a couple of hires at first and see how they perform and then settle for who you thought was the most promising of all. Be smart about hiring people to work at your company.

Why use WordPress?

WordPress has become more than just great content management tools. Various plugins offer endless possibilities to enlarge their applications for website creation. Creativity with WordPress never ceases to amaze entrepreneurs and business owners, hence, creating a freelancer marketplace platform is totally a thing you can do in WordPress. 

Here are some reasons why you use WordPress for your Freelancer Marketplace:

WordPress is free software – This means you are free to download, install, use and modify it to match your needs. You can use it to create any kind of website. While the WordPress software itself is free, you need a domain name and web hosting to install it.

Most popular CMS – According to W3techs, WordPress controls 58.55 percent of the CMS market share and currently owns a quarter of all websites. It generates thousands of job opportunities around the world, and there are millions of websites making money using WordPress. This means that many people are already familiar with WordPress including developers, virtual assistants and marketing personnel which you will need to recruit. 

Breakdown of websites with a clearly identifiable CMS, according to W3Tech’s survey of the top 1 million domains.

Lower setup and maintenance costs – According to DeviousMedia, WordPress incurs lower setup, customization, and maintenance costs in comparison to other Open Source CMS systems like Drupal and Joomla. Many users are already familiar with the WordPress CMS, which will require less staff training when building a new site.

Easy to learn and use – In addition, WordPress is incredibly easy to learn, which is one of the many reasons for its extreme popularity. You would need some basic search skills, the ability to follow instructions and the capacity to self-learn by using various free online courses and videos throughout the internet. A basic WordPress site requires little more than a few mouse clicks to set up and requires no coding or web design skills to use for day-to-day maintenance. Many skilled WordPress users started from scratch. In fact, most WordPress users don’t know how to write code or design websites.

Highly customizable and flexible – WordPress meets the demands of its mass of users with a flexible framework. This allows designers and developers to create and modify various layouts and applications. Coupled with user-generated extensions, websites are no longer limited by enterprise extensions. Also, various WordPress Plugins are a great way to expand upon your website’s basic functionality. Best of all, they are incredibly easy to install, and mostly there are free plugins available.

Very SEO friendly – The main reason why to opt for WordPress is that as a great content management tool, it can also be easily optimized for SEO purposes and be of essential help to attract traffic. By design, WordPress is very SEO friendly out of the box. You can also use WordPress SEO plugins to further optimize your website.

Better monetize your Freelancer Marketplace – An interesting aspect is that new Freelance Plugins for WordPress are quite integrated with other digital product market place solutions such as Easy Digital Downloads. This means that it doesn’t only allow you to build a platform for customers and freelancers, but you can also sell digital products at the same time by using all the other functionalities of Easy Digital Downloads. This strategy will allow you to better monetize your digital product marketplace and earn more revenue by selling digital products and offering freelancing services at the same time.

Variety of Freelance Marketplace Plugins to choose from – Also, if you opt to start your own Freelance Services Marketplace, there are a variety of freelancer plugin for WordPress you can choose from.

WordPress can be used in many different ways from simple websites to eCommerce marketplaces and anything in between. From starting a blog, making an online store, selling digital products, building a membership website, selling online courses and many more eCommerce business ideas you can think of. Here is one article “How to start your Digital Downloads eCommerce WordPress Website” that could be of interest to you.

Freelancer Marketplace Plugin for WordPress

The Freelancer Marketplace Plugin will help you build a freelancer marketplace using WordPress and by benefiting from Easy Digital Downloads eco-system. This WordPress Freelancer Plugin will be your starting point in creating your dream freelancer marketplace using the ultimate freelancer marketplace solution.

Our plugin offers a comprehensive collection of settings and configurations to give you much control over your own freelancer marketplace. This ultimate freelancer plugin for WordPress can offer a valuable starting point in creating your own freelance services marketplace for WordPress websites.

Here are a few of the Key Features of this plugin:

Better Monetize your website

Since this plugin is fully integrated with Easy Digital Downloads, a great feature of this is that it doesn’t only allow you to build a platform for customers and freelancers, but you can also sell digital products at the same time by using all the other functionalities of Easy Digital Downloads. Especially for niche websites, this allows creating two income streams, selling freelancer services and digital products.

This strategy will allow you to better monetize your digital product marketplace and earn more revenue by selling digital products and offering freelancing services at the same time.

Easy Onboarding Process

This plugin has multiple features that help both Customer and Freelancer for an easy and smooth onboarding process. They are as follows:

  • Hire Freelancers on the Freelancer List
  • Hire Me button when visiting a Freelancer profile
  • Invite button to specifically choose a Freelancer to work on your project

Comprehensive plugin customization and settings

What’s best about this Freelancer Marketplace Plugin is that it gives users, especially the site administrators, a lot of customization and settings to totally configure your marketplace in any way you want. You are not limited with few and simple settings, instead, it will give you configurations that have never been used on other freelancer plugins out there, thus creating a very powerful and unique Freelancer Marketplace.

Complete email workflows

With this plugin, site administrators have the capacity to customize tons of automated emails to be sent to every party, including the admins, every time a certain action or process is made. All these email templates are filled with default text which the admins can still edit and customize. Also, there are lots of email tags you can use to modify these email templates.

Plugin Feature Comparison

Here we take two of this plugin’s competitor in terms of giving a total Freelancer Marketplace experience on your WordPress websites. Here is the comparison as follows:

Freelancer Marketplace

WPFreelance

FreelanceEngine
Submit Projects Yes Yes Yes
Submit Bids Yes Yes Yes
Milestones Yes Yes Yes
Admin - List of Projects Yes Yes Yes
Admin - List of Bids Yes Yes Yes
Plugin Translation Possible Yes Yes Yes
Admin - List of Freelancers Yes Yes Yes
Submit Ratings Yes Yes Yes
Chat Feature Yes Yes Yes
Charge Fee from Buyer Yes Yes Yes
Charge Fee from Freelancer Yes Yes Yes
Reopen Projects once they are completed Yes Yes Yes
Skills - Admin can create new skills Yes Yes Yes
Direct Hire at Freelancer Profile Yes

No

 Yes
Invite Freelancers to bid Yes

No

 Yes
Opening Disputes Yes

No

No
Social Login Yes

No

 Yes
Admin - Customizable Email Templates Yes

No

 Yes
Manual / Auto Approval Yes

No

 Yes
Document repository Yes Yes

No
Can optimize for SEO Yes

No

 Yes
Admin - List of Disputes Yes

No

No
Show/Hide Freelancer Names Yes

No

No
Double Role for a Single User Yes

No

No
Skills - Users can create new skills Yes

No

No
Generate Payout File Yes

No

No
Customize User Registration Forms Yes

No

No
Easy Digital Downloads Compatibility Yes

No

No
Scalability Two income streams - selling freelancer services and digital products Only sell freelancer services Only sell freelancer services
Payment Gateways Multiple PayPal and Stripe Integrated PayPal, 2Checkout, Stripe Integrated

Conclusion: The Ultimate Freelancer Marketplace Solution

We previously talked about WordPress having the largest CMS market share in the world. So if you’re looking for a highly customizable, easy-to-learn, easy-to-use, dynamic open-source CMS, then you’ll want to use WordPress. It definitely makes it easy to build, design, and customize a website exactly what you and your visitors need it to be.

Starting your own Freelancer Marketplace with WordPress would never be easy without the right tools and software, to begin with. That is why we introduced you to check out the Freelancer Marketplace Plugin for WordPress.

This Freelancer Marketplace plugin will help you build a freelancer marketplace for WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads. Our plugin offers a comprehensive collection of settings and configurations to give you total control over your own freelancer marketplace, allowing you to configure it any way you what. This will be your starting point in creating your dream freelancer marketplace using the ultimate freelancer marketplace solution.

You can also try checking this article out Why creating a Freelancer Marketplace with WordPress? to learn more information about this.

7 Basic WordPress Website Security Elements

You may not think your site has anything worth being hacked, but wordpress websites are compromised all the time. This is especially worrysome for eCommerce Websites such as Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce stores. Hacking is regularly performed by automated scripts written to scour the internet in an attempt to exploit known website security issues in software. You’ve worked hard on your wordpress website (and your brand) – so it’s important to take the time to protect it with this wordpress website security checklist.

Here are the Best Security for WordPress websites:

1) Install security plugins such as WordFence

If you’re operating an open-source CMS website, you can enhance your website security with wordpress security plugins that actively prevent website hacking attempts. Each of the main CMS options has security plugins available, many of them for free. The Wordfence Security plugin is the most popular wordpress security plugin with over 2 million active installs and that is really impressive considering how many great security plugins exist.

2) Backup your website

The reason you want a backup of your website is that if you experience a hack or things go wrong during a software update, you’ll have easy access to a clean version of your website. Although it may sound overly technical to do, it’s actually quite easy. Many hosts provide simple ways to create backups within their customer control panels and even if they don’t, there are several backup plugins made specifically for WordPress that are easy to use.

3) Always update software to their latest version

It is incredibly important to update your site as soon as a new plugin or CMS version is available. Those updates might just contain security enhancements or patch a vulnerability. Most website attacks are automated. Bots are constantly scanning every site they can for any exploitation opportunities. It is no longer good enough to update once a month or even once a week because bots are very likely to find a vulnerability before you patch it.

4) Create sophisticated passwords

It’s tempting to go with a password you know will always be easy for you to remember, but we have to do better than that – a lot better than that to prevent login attempts from hackers and other outsiders. Make the effort to figure out a truly secure password. Make it long. Use a mix of special characters, numbers, and letters. And steer clear of potentially easy-to-guess keywords like your birthday or kid’s name. If a hacker somehow gains access to other information about you, they’ll know to guess those first.

5) Use reCaptcha

This is a good tool for fighting spam in WordPress. It can prevent spammers from posting unwanted comments on your WordPress blog. It is difficult for bots to read the image, and therefore prevents automated spam bots from posting on your blog. As spammers become more sophisticated, they can launch massive spam attacks with little effort. Instead of turning off the comments, you can add CAPTCHA to the comment form to practically eliminate spam.

6) Use HTTPS and SSL Certificates

HTTPS is a protocol used to provide security over the Internet. HTTPS guarantees  that users are talking to the server they expect, and that nobody else can intercept or change the content they’re seeing in transit. An SSL certificate is important because it secures the transfer of information – such as credit cards, personal data, and contact information – between your website and the server. While an SSL certificate has always been essential for ecommerce websites, having one has recently become important for all websites.

7) Regularly do a Security Audit

Run a security scan or audit of your website. Check your website for known malware, blacklisting status, website errors and out-of-date software. Using a service that does all that daily monitoring for you will minimize any potential downtime. After you have completed a thorough website security audit once, you still need to check up some items regularly. We recommend doing an ongoing audit as part of maintaining a good website security posture. Unique pieces of malware were up 36% last year, so you need to schedule monthly or even weekly scans.

Conclusion: Improve your EDD WordPress website security

Securing your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress website and learning how to protect against hackers is a big part of keeping your site healthy and safe in the long run! Don’t procrastinate taking these important steps. We only listed a few of the basic wordpress website security strategies you can implement on your EDD WordPress webstores. I’m sure there are lots of other things we can do out there to enhance the security of our web stores.

Please comment below and share with us other tools and strategies you can recommend to consider to strengthen the security of your EDD stores.