Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2015 WordPress Deals – Big Savings

It’s that time of the year again, where we share the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals on your favorite WordPress products. This is the best time to buy WordPress plugins, themes, and hosting because all providers usually offer their best deal of the year. To help you locate those deals, we have hand-picked some of the best WordPress Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals for 2015.

These offers are for LIMITED TIME only. We’ve indicated the expiration date next to each offer.

Also make sure you bookmark this page because we will be updating it throughout the week as we find new deals.

Get 35% OFF OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best plugin for growing your email list. It is created by Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner. We use it on our site and have seen as high as 600% increase in our subscriber growth.

There are tons of other case studies like Yoast doubling his signups and adding 10,000 subscribers in a month and more.

OptinMonster allows you to create beautiful popups, slide-in forms, floating bars, full screen welcome gates, and several other high-converting optin forms. It comes with great features like built-in analytics, A/B testing, exit-intent, smart user and page targeting, and much more.

Use the coupon code: BF2015 to get 35% OFF OptinMonster.

Get 35% Off OptinMonster

This deal is good till December 1, 2015.

Get 35% OFF Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is the best responsive WordPress gallery plugin in the market. Unlike, other gallery plugins which slow down your website, Envira is blazing fast and highly optimized for speed. It is packed with features like Albums, Lightbox, drag and drop builder, gallery templates, full screen slideshows, WooCommerce integration, watermarking, and much more.

Use the coupon code: BF2015 to get 35% OFF on all Envira Gallery plans.

Get 35% Off Envira Gallery

This deal is good till December 1, 2015.

Get 35% OFF Soliloquy

Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider plugin in the market. It is super-easy to use and packed with great features like carousel, fullscreen sliders, featured content, Instagram, ready to use themes, and much more.

Use the coupon code: BF2015 to get 35% OFF on all Soliloquy plans.

Get 35% Off Soliloquy

This deal is good till December 1, 2015.

Get Over 50% OFF BlueHost

Bluehost is one of the official WordPress hosting providers. This Black Friday they will be offering amazing discount deals throughout the week.

Get BlueHost Now

This deal is valid from November 27th till December 1, 2015.

Note: Their best deal will be on CyberMonday, where the price goes down even further, and you can get hosting for $2.95 / month.

Get 70% OFF Siteground

Siteground is one of the leading WordPress hosting providers. They are offering discount deals upto 70% OFF during black friday and cyber monday deals.

This deal is good from November 27 till November 30, 2015.

Get 70% OFF Siteground

Note: We use Siteground to host our popular List25 site (see case study).

Get 25% OFF Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is the best WordPress page builder plugin in the market. It’s 100% drag-and-drop and makes it really easy for you to customize your site.

Unlike other plugins, it is actually quite fast and easy for beginners to use. In our opinion, it is by far the best option in the market.

This holidays, they’re offering a 25% discount.

Use the coupon code: HAPPYHOLIDAYS

Get 25% OFF BeaverBuilder

Get HostGator for $2.99

HostGator is one of the most popular web hosting company, and they are the one that we use to host WPBeginner. Our founder, Syed Balkhi, has been a HostGator customer since 2007.

They’re offering WPBeginner users an exclusive hosting deal starting at $2.99 / month.

Use the coupon code: wpbeginner

Get the best HostGator deal in the market

Get Upto 50% OFF iThemes and BackupBuddy

Our friends over at iThemes are offering 40% off everything on their site. They’re the folks behind BackupBuddy, the best WordPress backup plugin among several other top plugins and themes.

Use the coupon code: JINGLEWP40

Get 40% OFF iThemes Now

Note: If you’re buying their full toolkit which includes everything iThemes make, then you can get 50% off using the coupon code: SAVEBIG50

This offer expires on November 30th, 2015.

Get 30% OFF WPEngine

WPEngine is one of the best managed WordPress hosting service provider. They are offering a 30% discount for initial payments on shared plans.

Use the coupon code: WPECW30

Get 30% OFF WPEngine

Get 25% OFF MaxCDN

MaxCDN is the industry leader in content delivery network. We use MaxCDN to improve performance of all our websites including WPBeginner (See why you need a CDN Infographic ).

Get MaxCDN Now

Get 40% OFF CSS Hero

CSS Hero allows you to customize any WordPress theme. See our CSS Hero review and how it makes WordPress design customization easy.

Use Coupon Code: WPBeginner

Get 40% OFF CSS Hero Now

Get 25% OFF Gravity Forms

Gravity forms is the best form management solution in WordPress. You can use it to generate leads, accept payments, accept guest posts, and much more. They have a special 25% off discount for WPBeginner users.

Use coupon code: wpbeginner

Get Gravity Forms Now

40% OFF Themify

Themify, a premium WordPress theme company and friends of WPBeginner are offering 40% OFF on all their themes. They are also offering a $100 discount on their life time club memberships. Users can also signup for their iPad giveaway.

Use coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY

Get Themify Now

This deal is good for November 27 to November 30 2015.

Get 40% OFF Headway Themes

Headway Themes is a premium WordPress theme shop. This season they are offering a 40% discount on all their themes.

Use coupon code: headway40

Get 40% Off Headway Themes Now

This deal is good from November 26 until November 30 2015.

Get 30% OFF AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP is one of the best affiliate tracking and management plugin for WordPress. They are offering a 30% discount during cyber weekend.

Use coupon code: BFCM2015

Get AffiliateWP Now

This deal is good from November 27 to November 30 2015.

Get 25% OFF CSSIgniter

CSSIgniter is a premium WordPress theme shop that allows you to get access to all of their themes for just $49 per year.

They’re offering a 25% discount this Black Friday bringing their already low prices even lower.

Use the coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY

Get 25% OFF CSSIgniter Now

Note: This offer expires on Nov 30th, 2015.

Get 30% OFF Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is one of the best eCommerce platform for WordPress. They are offering a special 30% discount on all purchases during cyber weekend.

Use coupon code: BFCM2015

Get Easy Digital Downloads

This deal is good from November 27 to November 30 2015.

Get 40% OFF SlideDeck

SlideDeck is another popular WordPress slider plugin that’s offering a 40% discount on all plans.

Use the coupon code: SDBF40

Get 40% off SlideDeck

Get 35% OFF ThemeIsle

ThemeIsle, a fast growing WordPress theme provider is offering 35% off all their products for Black Friday.

Use the coupon code: TIBF2015

Get 35% OFF ThemeIsle

Get 50% OFF ThemeFurnace

ThemeFurnace, a WordPress theme shop ran by our friend Oliver Dale is offering 50% off on all their WordPress themes.

Use the coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY

Get 50% off ThemeFurance

Note: this offer expires on December 1st.

Get 40% OFF S2Member

S2Member is one of the most popular WordPress membership plugin. For this black friday, they’re offering 40% off their paid version.

Use the coupon code: BLACK40-A:2655

Get 40% OFF S2Member Now

Note: this offer expires on November 30th.

Get 20% OFF WP Migrate DB Pro

WP Migrate DB Pro is one of the most loved tools by the WordPress developer community because it takes the pain out of moving WordPress databases.

This black friday, they’re offering 20% off discount on the plugin.

No Code is Necessary.

Get 20% OFF WP Migrate DB Pro

Note: Offer expires on November 30th.

Get 50% OFF SEMrush

SEMrush is the best online competitive analysis tool in the market. They are offering an exclusive 50% discount to WPBeginner users.

No code is necessary.

Get 50% OFF SEMrush

Note: Offer expires on November 30th.

Get 50% OFF EventEspresso

EventEspresso provides an easy way to manage events from your WordPress site. They are offering a whopping 50% discount.

No code is necessary

Get 50% OFF EventEspresso

Note: Offer expires on December 1st.

Get 50% OFF aThemes

aThemes is a premium WordPress theme shop. This season they have announced an amazing 50% discount on all their themes.

Use the coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY15

Get 50% OFF aThemes

Note: Offer expires on November 30th.

Get 30% OFF WeDevs

WeDevs is a premium WordPress plugin and theme shop. They are offering a 30% discount on all products except extensions.

Use this coupon code: Thanks30

Get 30% Off WeDevs

Note: Offer expires on November 30th.

******* END Of DEALS *******

That’s all for now. We will be adding more deals and updating this page throughout the week. Aside from these, we also have tons of other deals and discounts for WPBeginner readers.

Hopefully, you can take advantage of some of these limited time deals. Have a happy thanksgiving.

P.S. If you’re a WordPress company offering discount or know of one that is having a deal, then please let us know, so we can update this article.

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 Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2015 WordPress Deals – Big Savings appeared first on WPBeginner.

What are the busiest times for stores on Black Friday?

If you want to avoid the crowds on Black Friday, avoid shopping between 2pm and 4pm. At least, thats what Google's location data says.

Paid search and PPC: a super accessible beginner’s guide

This will hopefully touch on all the various elements you might hear uttered in the same breath as paid search, taking in such puzzling acronyms as PPC, CPM, CPC and SERP.

How to Auto-Schedule Your WordPress Blog Posts

By default WordPress allows you to schedule your posts to be published later. But we’ve often seen people forgetting to schedule their posts. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a to automatically schedule WordPress posts? In this article, we will show you how to auto-schedule social sharing for your WordPress posts.

Why Auto-Schedule WordPress Posts?

Most bloggers schedule posts to be published at a fixed time. However, sometimes you may forget to schedule them.

One way to deal with this situation is to use an editorial calendar that shows you when you have posts scheduled to be published.

We use Edit Flow on our websites to manage our editorial workflow.

But wouldn’t it be great if you could just setup an automatic system that can schedule blog posts for you? Think of a feature like Buffer or HootSuite auto-schedule for your social media.

Publish to schedule is a WordPress plugin that can automatically schedule your posts.

Let’s see how you can set it up and configure it.

Setting up Publish to Schedule

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Publish to Schedule plugin. Upon activation, simply go to Settings » Publish to Schedule to configure plugin settings.

First you need to choose the number of posts to publish on each day. Enter 0 for the days when you don’t want to publish any posts.

After that you need to choose the time interval. By default this schedule is set to 24 hours, but you can change it based on your needs.

The plugin will automatically do the scheduling. You can see when your post will be scheduled to appear, or you can choose not to see it. Select all information or just do the magic under the information section.

Don’t forget to click on the save all changes button to store your settings.

Writing Posts with Publish to Schedule Plugin

Create a new WordPress post or edit an existing draft. You will notice some changes under the publish metabox.

The most obvious different is the replacement of publish button with Pub. to Schedule button.

If you selected to show information in the plugin settings, then you will see when your post will be scheduled as you press the publish to schedule button.

Remember, you can always override this schedule by defining your own schedule like you would normally do.

That’s all, we hope this article helped you auto-schedule your WordPress blog posts. You may also want to see our tips on mastering the WordPress visual editor.

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 Auto-Schedule Your WordPress Blog Posts appeared first on WPBeginner.

3rd Party Facebook Publishing Tools Aren’t Penalized: Debunking An Age Old Social Media Myth

If you search for information on how Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm treats posts from 3rd party publishing apps, you’ll find plenty of content suggesting that reach and engagement will be lower through 3rd party posting.

As a subject very close to our hearts here at Buffer, we wanted to dive in and share our own thoughts and experiences in this area.

The TL;DR version, is that posts from 3rd tools are not penalized and will perform just as well as posts shared natively to Facebook.

If you’d like to dig a little deeper, I’d love to share our research and reasoning with you here.

Let’s go!

3 key reasons why Facebook 3rd party tools aren’t penalized

1. Our own (anecdotal) 3rd party posting test

As the idea for this post arose, we decided to run a quick experiment of our own to see whether posting from a 3rd party app (Buffer) or posting natively would have any affect of the reach and engagement our posts received on Facebook.

(Granted, a two-week study of one page doesn’t prove anything concretely and simply provides some anecdotal evidence).

Posting natively to Facebook

From November 15th-21st we scheduled every post natively through Facebook’s own scheduling tool.

The average post in this week reached 1,357 people (3.2% of our audience). And an average of 66 engagements (Post clicks, Likes, Comments & Shares).

Here’s the data from Facebook Insights:

Posting using Buffer

The average post in this week reached 1,595 people (3.8% of our audience). And an average of 70 engagements (Post clicks, Likes, Comments & Shares).

Here’s the data from Facebook Insights*:

*During this week we launched Buffer’s Social Media Calendar — due to the high engagement we see with a new launch (and paid boost) we excluded this post for the dataset used.

What this tells us

From this experiment it seems that posting using a 3rd party or natively won’t affect your reach or engagement on Facebook.

The week we posted with Buffer was a little higher on average but there could be a multitude of reasons at play here.

2. Facebook’s official statement (3rd party posts are not penalized)

A lot of the stigma around this subject probably comes form the fact that 3rd party posts used to be penalized on Facebook.

However, this is no longer the case. Back in 2011, Facebook’s Matt Trainer explained:

“…we recently made a fix that added more signals to detect good quality posting behavior. This should improve the situation with the distribution of posts coming from third-party apps in the News Feed.”

Facebook have also removed attribution from 3rd party posts, so a Facebook user now cannot tell whether a post has been shared natively or via a 3rd party.

At the time of announcing this Facebook again stated that it does not penalize Pages that make posts from 3rd party publishing tools, but said it was unclear whether mention of where a post is coming from had an effect on how users responded to it.

With the post attribution removed a few years back, it now feels clear that Facebook indeed do not penalize brands who post through 3rd party tools.

3. Most of the data on this subject is misread (and what to focus on instead)

Most studies we’ve read on this subject take a set of brands and measure performance of posts made by Pages that used a specific 3rd party tool, to the performance of posts made by those same Pages that did not use a 3rd party tool.

That’s a very rational approach, but some of the things these studies don’t account for is the types of brands using each 3rd party app:

For example, comparing data from a brand that uses an enterprise level piece of software like Adobe Social or Spredfast vs a brand who use PostPlanner or Hootsuite feels a little skewed to us.

Let me explain a little here…

What should we focus on with these studies?

Some 3rd party posting tools are deemed to get more reach than others, but really it could be any number of factors that mean brands using Buffer or Hootsuite or Adobe social, get more reach than other tools.

For example, many of the enterprise level brands that use products like Adobe Social will have large, highly engaged audiences — as well as strategic and creative teams behind their social content.

This means they’re likely to receive higher engagement than your average Facebook Page, whether they post natively, through Adobe Social, PostPlanner, Hootsuite or any other 3rd party tool.

In order for these studies to get more accurate findings from their results, we feel it’d be better to measure the same brands and way of posting across various tools (e.g. one brand using Buffer, Adobe Social, Hootsuite, etc).

Though our gut feeling is that this approach wouldn’t show any significant variations in reach or engagement no matter which tool is used to post.

Facebook knows what we like

We have that gut feeling because Facebook’s timeline prioritizes content from the pages and people we regularly engage with.

For example, I ‘Like’ The Next Web’s Page on Facebook. And because I regularly engage with their content, Facebook deems that I have an affinity with that page and ensures I see more content from them.

So whether a post is sent from a 3rd party or natively it’s still likely to show up in the timelines of more Facebook users as more people regularly engage with their brand and like to see their content (this helps to explain why we saw very little difference in our brief native posts vs Buffered posts experiment).

By penalizing 3rd party posts, Facebook would essentially make their timeline less engaging for their users.

Bonus: pay close attention to the content

Any drops in engagement or reach seen via 3rd party posting, could also be attributed to the type of content shared.

As Buzzsumo, who studied over 500 million Facebook posts, cautioned, is the same care put into the posts shared natively versus those shared through third party tools? It could be that 3rd party posting may simply cause users to create less engaging, and timely posts. Thus resulting in less engagement.

If you’re using a 3rd party tool – or even Facebook’s own scheduling feature – try to be mindful of your audience and ensure the content doesn’t come across as ‘automated’.

If you’re sharing a timely post about something real-time, it’s not a good bet to schedule it 12 hours later when the story is old.

Over to you

Over 2 million people use Buffer (including 2,500+ large businesses and agencies) and no customer has shown us data alluding to less reach or engagement on Facebook due to 3rd party posting.

Have you ever noticed a difference in reach or engagement for your posts shared via Buffer (or any other 3rd party tool) vs posting natively?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and the data used in studies below. Excited to jump in and join you in the comments.

The post 3rd Party Facebook Publishing Tools Aren’t Penalized: Debunking An Age Old Social Media Myth appeared first on Social.

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How to Boost User Engagement with Swifty Bar for WordPress

How can I boost my user engagement is a question we’ve been getting a lot lately. We have written several articles about it such as using point system and post reactions. In this article, we will show you how to boost user engagement with a Swifty Bar for WordPress.

What is Swifty Bar and How it Boosts User Engagement?

Swifty Bar is a WordPress plugin that adds a sticky footer at the bottom of your posts. This footer bar shows the post category, author, and links to share the post on social media.

It also shows the estimated time to read a post with a progress bar which moves forward as user scrolls down a post.

Most social sharing buttons hide when users scroll down to read an article. Link to comments, author, and categories are also not visible during scrolling of an article.

This is why users leave your page without engaging with the content in any way.

There are plugins that can add sticky floating social bar to the top of your WordPress posts. However Swifty bar takes it to the next level because it also provides category and author information.

It is fully responsive and looks great on mobile devices.

Setting up Swifty Bar

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Swifty Bar plugin. Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Swifty Bar page to configure the plugin settings.

The first option on the settings page is to disable bar. Make sure that it is unchecked. This option is here only for debugging purposes.

The most important option is to select “Show on which post types”. Make sure that you select posts otherwise the bar will not appear on your site. If you are using other custom post types then those will appear here as well.

Rest of the options are all self-explanatory. The default options would work for most websites, but you can change them if you need.

Swifty bar comes with 7 built in color schemes to choose from. You need to choose a color scheme that compliments your WordPress theme’s color scheme.

You can also disable features of Swifty Bar from the Enable/Disable Swifty Bar Modules section. Simply check the box next to a module, and it will be disabled. This is particularly useful if you don’t want to show a particular social network in your Swift Bar.

Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings. You can now visit any post on your website to see the Swifty Bar in action.

We hope this article helped you boost user engagement with Swifty Bar for WordPress. You may also want to see our list of 7 must have social media plugins and tools for bloggers.

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 Boost User Engagement with Swifty Bar for WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.