Hundreds of these solutions fall into one very important category for businesses and the marketers who help make them successful: content management systems (CMSs).

If you’re not yet working with a CMS, or haven’t found one that makes life easier and business better, this is the guide for you.

Here, we’ll dive deep into:

• The ins and outs of content management systems
• Why businesses should invest in CMS
• The best CMS features to shop for
• Top content management systems on the market
• How to get started with a CMS

Introduction to Content Management Systems

Content management system software typically gives business users an approachable interface where they can create, publish, manage, and store content — without having to touch a line of code — according to their content marketing strategy.

For content creation, most modern CMS platforms provide a WYSIWYG editor (pronounced wiz-ee-wig), which stands for “what you see is what you get.”

WYSIWYG editors enable folks who work with content to create and format posts and pages without using code. They also display content very close to how it will look once it’s live on the website. This is a vast improvement over the pre-CMS days, when content was hosted via static HTML files that had to be uploaded to the server every time a change was needed.

CMSs typically consist of two core elements:

• Content Management Application (CMA): The part content administrators interact with (like the WYSIWYG editor) to add and manage content.
• Content Delivery Application (CDA): The back-end functionality that stores and displays content to website visitors.

Modern CMSs enable multiple people to work on the same content project, at the same time, with helpful collaboration settings and override preventions. In addition, content is kept secure and compliant thanks to built-in CMS attributes, and real-time content updating helps keep your team abreast of updates and improvements.

One significant thing to note is the several different types of CMS software. While they’re all similar in their general functionality, each has different features and target audiences.

Web Content Management System (WCMS)

WCMSs are built to make it easy to create and maintain content and graphics on websites — taking things like various browser capabilities, screen sizes, and website-specific compliance and regulation issues into account.

When someone mentions CMS, WCMS is what they’re most often referring to. In this article, unless otherwise specified, we’ll also be talking about web-focused CMS tools.

A WCMS is ideal for a brand that primarily focuses on its website as its primary marketing channel.

Component Content Management System (CCMS)

A CCMS is a solution that manages content in components such as singular words, paragraphs, graphic elements (photos, video, etc.), and so on. These components are labeled with unique metadata so that they can be stored in an organized manner, found in a search, and easily reassembled and reused across different publications and web pages.

Since CCMS platforms make content recycling so easy, they’re most helpful for teams with high content creation needs but more limited resources — such as within small businesses.

Headless Content Management System

A Headless CMS disconnects how digital content is presented, known as the front-end or presentation layer, from how content is managed, known as the back-end or management layer. This makes it easy for content managers and marketers to format and deploy content to different digital channels.

Headless CMS is ideal for businesses with robust omnichannel content strategies.

Content Delivery Platform (CDP)

A CDP is actually a content hub versus a CMS. However, since they’re often used alongside CMSs, they’re absolutely worth including here. A CDP gathers different kinds of content from various sources and stores it all in a single location. Businesses can connect to CDPs via an application programming interface (API) to deliver content to custom or out-of-the-box CMS platforms.

CDPs are a great fit for organizations with a lot of different content from many different sources, which all need to be shared across several internal and external platforms. Big content distributors, such as media companies and enterprises, can get a lot of use out of CDPs.

Key CMS Features

While a CMS platform is undoubtedly the core of an effective marketing website, thanks to the power and functionality of modern solutions, a CMS can also be core to your entire online presence. You can use it to build everything from a personal blog or portfolio to a fully-fledged online store, membership site, online course, and beyond.

To simplify things, think of creating a website like building a house. The CMS is akin to the essentials, such as the foundation, walls, plumbing, and electric. It ensures that the basics are in place so you can focus on furnishing it, decorating the interior, and making it habitable. In other words, populating your site with content, changing its appearance, and making it easy to interact with.

While every CMS is different, here are some essential features and functionality we recommend prioritizing when choosing your website solution:

• Ease of Use: A big selling point for CMS is its ease of use. As a marketer, you shouldn’t need to understand coding to build an engaging digital experience via a CMS platform.
• Extensibility and Flexibility: With the CMS providing the basics, you should be able to build on the flexible foundation through add-ons that deploy dynamic, unique functionality. Your CMS should enable you to extend core features by installing plugins or introducing your own custom code.
• Powerful Content Handling: Today, content is more than just the written word. You also need images, videos, forms, and document management to make your content engaging. Your CMS should support all of these types of content.
• Content Management Workflows: Easy editing, fast styling, quick content updates, version control and backup, scheduling, searching, storage, and more — a practically unimaginable variety of content management features and flows should live at the center of your CMS.
• Drag-and-Drop Design: Most modern CMSs make it easy to use your mouse to drag design components into place for real-time content design.
• Permission Control: It’s crucial for security and consistency that you can assign user roles to ensure everybody can access the content and functionality necessary to do their jobs (and no more).
• Support: Whether it’s in the form of documentation or a real-life support team, it’s always ideal to work with a CMS that doesn’t leave you out on your own if something goes wrong.
• Scalability: Most sites grow over time, both in how much content they include and how many visitors they receive. As such, you want a CMS that’s built to be scalable along with your site’s needs.
• Open API: An open API makes it possible to pull content from your CMS to reuse it on external websites, mobile apps, social media sites, etc., as well as internal platforms like enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, etc.
• Templates: Choose a CMS platform with several premade templates that can be easily applied to change the look and behavior of your site.
• Search Engine Optimization: An SEO-friendly CMS will feature customizable page titles, meta descriptions, smart URLs and navigation, alt text, redirects, and quick page load time to help your ranking on Google and other search engines.

4 Top Content Management Systems for Creating Websites

Let’s explore today’s go-to CMS solutions for creating a website and managing content flawlessly.

WordPress

WordPress needs very little introduction.

WordPress started as a continuation of the b2 platform, which was developed primarily with bloggers in mind. However, over the past twenty years, the platform has completely evolved into a full-fledged CMS.

WordPress is the most popular CMS option, holding the majority of CMS market share and powering websites for brands like Facebook and Sony.

So, how and why has it become so popular? One significant reason is that WordPress has remained a community-run and open-source CMS. In fact, being open, user-friendly for beginners, and extensible have stayed key factors ever since the project launched in 2003.

In short, WordPress requires next to no prior experience in creating websites. Anyone can install it, build a site, and add content and new features within minutes. The vast number of available plugins and themes to easily change your WordPress site’s appearance also makes it a particularly enticing option. For an extensive list of reasons to go with this solution, don’t miss our guide to why to use WordPress.

Despite the enormous popularity of WordPress, it naturally has a few downsides.

For example, while the core platform itself is secure, it’s a frequent target for bots and attackers. Poorly coded plugins and themes can also introduce security vulnerabilities if you’re not careful.

All in all, WordPress is a solid choice, especially for less-technical, content-focused users. It’s a simple solution for marketers that also offers a lot of power under the hood for developers wishing to get involved with the technical aspects and increase functionality.

WordPress is free to download. (Though if you want a custom domain name, you will have to pay up or consider the self-hosted WordPress.org — learn more about the differences here.)

For a fast and secure website experience for your team and customers alike, DreamHost’s WordPress web hosting service is optimized specifically for businesses running on WordPress.

CMS Hub

From the prolific inbound marketing, sales, and customer service platform HubSpot comes CMS Hub.

CMS Hub boasts all the features you’d expect from any fully-featured content management system: drag-and-drop content editing, staging, blogging and collaboration tools, file management, etc. While it’s easy to use for marketers, developers can take advantage of serverless functions and pre-built themes, and IT gets the benefit of HubSpot’s 24/7 security team.

In addition, CMS Hub users can integrate the rest of HubSpot’s stable of features, from marketing automation, email marketing, CRM, lead forms, chat, reporting, and more— no integrations with third-party solutions required.

This HubSpot CMS is best for companies already using the platform — or those that could make use of all the accompanying marketing, content, sales, and support tools it provides.

Pricing ranges from free to $1,200 a month for enterprise solutions, and hosting and flexible themes are included.

Joomla!

The name Joomla! comes from the Swahili term for “all together,” which references the platform’s open-source community. In contrast to WordPress, Joomla! is a slightly more developer-focused CMS, though it still features a user-friendly interface.

Joomla! has cultivated a vast user community that regularly creates extensions and themes to help bolster the platform’s core functionality. This makes it a good choice if you think WordPress isn’t offering the level of control you require.

The platform’s flexibility also makes Joomla! an excellent choice for more complex websites, such as e-commerce sites, social media networks, and online communities. Naturally (and as we touched on), Joomla! also enables you to download themes and extensions to your site.

Considering the additional complexity of the CMS, it might not be the best option if you have little experience or resources to handle website development.

The learning curve may be steeper with Joomla! if you’ve primarily used a more end-user-focused CMS in the past. However, developers may find it affords them more freedom and flexibility than WordPress’ out of the box configuration.

Joomla! is also completely free to download and use, with no paid plans. While fewer hosts support Joomla! out of the box than WordPress, there are still many who tweak their servers to support the CMS.

Drupal

If Joomla! is a step up in terms of complexity from WordPress, Drupal represents another leap.

Initially released in 2001, Drupal is the most technically advanced CMS on this list, which makes it an ideal choice for businesses with development resources that want complete control over their sites — and need less technical guidance.

As you can probably imagine, Drupal is best suited for advanced and ambitious websites. It’s an extremely versatile platform that lets web development pros create almost any type of site. It’s also arguably the most powerful CMS available and practically guarantees both strong security and fast loading times out of the box.

Because of this, Drupal is a great choice for enterprises with a development team on hand, a need for consistently high speeds and reliability, and the budget to match. It’s also commonly used by governments and universities. The platform also offers extensibility in the form of modules and themes.

Like the previous offerings, Drupal is entirely free to use and based on open-source technology. It will require some tinkering to install and learn the ropes, but getting the level of complexity and freedom the CMS offers can be worth it.

How to Spin Up a CMS Website

The high-level process of creating your own website using a content management system will look a little something like this:

1. Choose your CMS based on which best delivers on your needs, based on the above suggestions and feature shopping list.2. Select a web hosting provider to deliver your website’s content and files to the internet. Cloud-based hosting is worth considering if security, speed, performance, and uptime are priorities for your business.
2. Get your domain name and registrar set up. Be sure to check if your hosting provider will help or even give you a free domain name as part of your package.
3. Install your Content Management System — most platforms provide instructions on how to do this manually. Beware that manual installation will require working with code. Often, your hosting provider can also help with installation.
4. Get the CMS set up to your liking by adding fellow teammates, adjusting build-in settings, and adding plugins to extend functionality.
5. Start creating and publishing content!

It’s Time to Get Started With a CMS

The days of having to work with code just to update any little piece of content on your website or launch new marketing campaigns are long gone, thanks to the rise of the CMS.

Today, these user-focused platforms enable marketing and business teams to create and publish content much easier while extending their website’s capabilities to suit their unique content requirements.

Choose your DreamHost hosting plan today to take advantage of easy installation, reliable uptime, award-winning support, and a knowledgeable community when spinning up your modern content management system of choice.

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You hand-coded the CSS for every element. And we liked it that way. 

Ahem. Okay. Disengaging curmudgeon mode.

CSS has come a long way since the days of raw HTML pages, and one of the most important developments is the creation and proliferation of CSS frameworks. These tools make it light years easier for developers and designers to build and launch new projects, both big and small.

They also have a huge impact on users and the way we experience the web. Frameworks create a shared language for UI and UX on websites and web applications, making nearly every site easier to understand, navigate, and use.

Today, about 1 in every 4 websites on the internet is built using a CSS framework.

In this article, we’ll explore 16 of the most popular frameworks and how they’re used by everyone from the enterprise to indie hackers.

What is a CSS Framework?

A CSS framework is a pre-prepared library of code to help implement fast and consistent website styling and layouts. Frameworks include pre-written, reusable code for common design elements and components that can be easily applied to base HTML to create familiar and consistent user interfaces or website designs.

CSS frameworks are used by front-end developers to quickly deploy things like responsive grids, styled forms, buttons, or other important UI elements on web pages and apps.

Benefits of Using a CSS Framework

Okay, but why bother using a framework?

Couldn’t you just build all of this stuff yourself? Well, yeah. But that’s kind of the point. Frameworks are the inevitable outcome of a world where designers and developers write the same basic CSS over and over again for each website or app.

Why not just write it once and use it everywhere? That’s why they exist.

Speed Up Development Time

The simplest answer as to why people use frameworks: Speed. Frameworks come out of the box with plenty of elements and styles you would otherwise need to build from scratch when developing a website.

So why recreate the wheel?

Many developers and web designers also use frameworks as a tool for rapidly prototyping new websites or apps before building a custom design system.

Consistent Style and Design

The other key benefit of using a CSS framework is that all of your styles, UI elements, buttons, and more will look consistent out of the box. You won’t have to spend hours (or days or weeks or years) tweaking individual styles to ensure they all have the same padding, spacing, and font sizes.

Since the framework has already been meticulously crafted, all the tedious work is done.

As an added benefit, the most popular CSS frameworks are widely used, helping the website look and feel familiar to users. That’s clutch from a UX standpoint.

Last but not least, consider accessibility. Most popular frameworks are built for a wide range of devices and screen sizes, making them more accessible to a broader range of users.

Facilitate Responsive Design

Let’s be honest: Building a perfectly responsive layout is a pain.

There are so many variables and factors to consider. Then extrapolate from there to all the millions of devices, and your perfect grid system quickly becomes a mess.

Once again, modern CSS frameworks have you covered. They’ve done the hard work (and math) to build a pixel-perfect responsive design system. All you have to do is apply the correct CSS classes.

Improve Collaboration and Maintainability

Raise your hand if you like maintaining someone else’s code, creating docs, and deciphering someone else’s comments.

That’s a big no.

Since most frameworks come with an extensive documentation library and a community of users, you get the benefit of a common codebase and extremely well-documented information on exactly how to use said system.

Plus, most of them are open-source projects. That means you can freely use, adapt, and even (in some cases) redistribute your own version if that’s your thing.

Key Features of a Modern CSS Framework

CSS frameworks run a pretty broad gamut, but most of them have some key features in common.

Predefined Grid Systems and Layouts

Grids make the web go….not ‘round? They make the web into perfectly-proportionate boxes. That’s what they do.

Most CSS frameworks have a built-in grid system that helps create a flexible and fluid layout for the website. The system usually offers lots of customization that makes it easily adaptable to different screen sizes, resolutions, and page structures.

Responsive Media Queries

The other nice thing that most frameworks handle out of the box is media queries to automatically adjust styles based on device characteristics.

These systems can be complex and tedious to develop from scratch, but they’re a critical part of the modern web to ensure content scales and displays properly on various devices

Pre-built UI Components and Templates

Most CSS frameworks come with a library of pre-built, pre-styled UI components. Things like buttons, forms, tables, toggles, and more – all ready to use by just applying a simple class.

This makes it faster to build interfaces and pages, plus it creates a foundation for a consistent look and familiar UI throughout the website (and across the web).

Typography and Theme Customization Options

Many of the frameworks shared here come with built-in customizing and theming options. This makes it super simple to apply things like your brand colors, preferred fonts, and other personal touches that transform the look and feel to match your brand’s style.

16 Popular CSS Frameworks

1. Bootstrap

Bootstrap began as a side project built and shared by developers at Twitter. Now it’s the most widely-used CSS framework for responsive, mobile-first web design. Millions of people use Bootstrap to craft clean, consistent, and familiar web layouts.

Key features:

• Responsive grid system
• Pre-built UI components
• Customizable and extensible themes
• Extensive documentation

Many companies, including Twitter (obviously), Spotify, and Udacity, have used the Bootstrap framework in part or fully on their websites.

Why People Love Bootstrap

The reasons to love Bootstrap are the reasons to love frameworks– it’s simple, clean, and easy to use.

There’s a huge community of experts with experience building with Bootstrap to answer almost any question you can imagine.

And, although it sometimes gets a reputation for being vanilla, Bootstrap is pretty dang customizable if you want to go beyond what comes out of the box.

What People Don’t Like About Bootstrap

By far, the biggest knock on Bootstrap is that all of the sites using it look the same.

“They’re boring,” some will cry.

But that’s generally just the result of people using it exactly how it comes without taking much time to experiment or customize.

One other thing to be aware of is that the framework is quite bulky overall. The file size may be bigger than you’d expect for a simple website. That’s probably part of the reason why the State of CSS Survey found that satisfaction with Bootstrap is split about 50/50.

2. Tailwind CSS

Tailwind is perhaps as much a movement as it is a framework.

The creator, Adam Wathan, wrote something of a manifesto about the thinking behind Tailwind. And essentially, the idea is that CSS shouldn’t be descriptive and semantic (e.g., “.header” class), but instead should be functional (e.g., “.center-flex-3”).

He calls it a utility-first CSS framework.

And this approach seems to work for many people. Tailwind ranks highest in satisfaction on the State of CSS survey at about 80%.

Key features:

• Utility classes for easy styling
• Responsive design capabilities
• Customizable configuration
• Component-friendly approach

Many well-known tech companies like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Shopify, Wealthfront, and Loom use Tailwind CSS.

Why People Love Tailwind

Since Tailwind is utility-first, it has nearly endless flexibility.

There aren’t really prebuilt layouts in the same way as, say, Bootstrap. Instead, you can combine and layer classes to position your HTML elements in a nearly infinite number of layouts and CSS grids.

The main thing people like about this approach is that they can style their divs without referring to the documentation. Since the utility classes are intuitively named (for the most part), you can quickly apply styles without constantly flipping between the CSS library and the markup.

What People Don’t Like About Tailwind

In a nutshell: People don’t like change, right?

Tailwind breaks some well-worn traditions for CSS frameworks and even web development more broadly.

There are many arguments for why this approach to CSS code is suboptimal. The “separation of concerns” is the underlying principle behind how CSS (and most other code) is written. Tailwind puts that concept, well, on its tail.

Bonus: Daisy UI

If Tailwind’s utility framework isn’t your cup of tea, there is a great library called Daisy UI, written by Pouya Saadeghi, a plugin that builds on-top of Tailwind CSS giving you a set of classes that feels more reminiscent of Bootstrap.

Daisy UI provides class names for common UI components like buttons, cards, toggles, and more, allowing developers to focus on more critical aspects of their project instead of styling basic elements​​. It is built on top of Tailwind CSS, and hence everything can be customized using utility classes​.

One of the significant benefits of using Daisy UI is that it significantly reduces the number of class names you need to write, by approximately 80%, and can make your HTML size about 70% smaller​​. Furthermore, it adds a set of customizable color names to Tailwind CSS, providing developers with the flexibility to create Dark Mode and other themes without adding new class names​.

3. Bulma

Bulma is a lightweight CSS framework based on Flexbox.

The syntax of this framework is plain-language, meaning it relies heavily on descriptive utility classes or modifiers like “.button” and “.is-large”.

Key features:

• Flexbox-based grid system
• Modular architecture
• Sass-powered for easy customization
• Minimalistic code and design

Examples of well-known websites using Bulma: CSS Ninja and Signal.

Why People Love Bulma

Bulma can feel a bit like the Lego set of CSS frameworks. It’s extremely simple and easy to understand which makes it great for beginners or folks who just want a quick solution.

By applying a few logically-named classes, you can build out modules, apply CSS animations, and create more advanced styling. There are no JavaScript dependencies, so you can use it in combination with pretty much any JavaScript framework.

What People Don’t Like About Bulma

The simplicity of Bulma can be a double-edged sword.

While it’s great as a tutorial or introduction to CSS frameworks, more advanced developers would likely complain that it lacks the sophistication or extensibility of more robust options.

4. Foundation

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Bulma, we have Foundation.

Foundation makes no qualms about being advanced and, as such, fairly complex compared to some of the other choices. It’s a responsive front-end framework designed for mobile-first development and used for both sites and emails, and it’s used by approximately 500,000 websites worldwide.

Key features:

• Responsive grid system
• Comprehensive set of UI components
• Customizable Sass variables
• Integration with popular front-end tools and libraries

Why People Love Foundation

Foundation is kind of the O.G.

It’s been around since before the Willennium millennium, which means many developers are well-versed in Foundation and familiar with its syntax and conventions.

It’s also a mature product. It has tons of features, extensive documentation, and resources.

Plus, it’s considered one of the best frameworks for accessibility.

What People Don’t Like About Foundation

Like most mature products, Foundation can feel a bit bulky compared to modern, lightweight frameworks.

It’s accrued a lot of requested features and customization options that make the codebase and file sizes a bit heavier. Plus, because conventions have shifted, the learning curve is a bit steep for a beginner used to something like Tailwind or Bootstrap.

5. Semantic UI

“Everything arbitrary is mutable.”

That’s the dogma of Semantic UI.

At its core, this framework is built to help build and scale familiar-feeling interfaces for websites and web applications.

Key features:

• Intuitive and human-readable class names
• Wide range of UI components and layouts
• Customizable themes and styles
• Integration with popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks like Angular

Many sites and companies use Semantic UI, including Accenture and Snapchat.

Why People Love Semantic UI

Semantic UI has an easy-to-understand syntax that makes it easy to build out from its vast collection of UI components, including buttons, modals, cards, toggles, text fields, and more.

But perhaps the most popular wizardry is the theming and customization.

Semantic includes a theming library with over 3,000 customizable variables and then inherited across all of your UI components.

What People Don’t Like About Semantic UI

Since Semantic is so UI-focused and so extensive, it may contain a lot of code that goes unused in your project. This means that some folks will find it overly bulky for simpler projects compared to more contained frameworks.

6. Materialize

Materialize CSS framework is based on Google’s Material Design principles.

It emphasizes bold visual design and UX-focused animation (motion).

Materialize is pretty popular, with over 38,000 stars on GitHub.

Key features:

• Material-design-inspired components and styles
• Responsive grid system
• Sass-powered customization
• Built-in JavaScript plugins

Materialize is used by a broad range of sites, but most sites in their showcase are small businesses and personal projects.

Why People Love Materialize

Materialize is a simple, few-frills solution for setting up a clean and usable website. They don’t really offer the moon, but that’s one of the reasons people like it.

What People Don’t Like About Materialize

As is always the case, simplicity also means limitations. Materialize is not as robust or extensible as other frameworks, and relies on JavaScript for specific motions.

7. UIkit (UI Kit)

Another modular framework focused on website and web app interfaces, UIkit is slightly less popular than Semantic UI, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

UIkit is a UI-focused framework used by many sites and web apps, including Crunchyroll, Moqups, and Rover.

Key features:

• Modular architecture with selective imports (huge!)
• Responsive grid system
• Sass variables and mixins for customization
• Extensive UI component library

Why People Love UIkit

UIkit is perhaps a bit smaller in market share, but it’s also smaller in footprint, file size, and complexity.

Without losing much in the way of functionality, UIkit offers an extremely lightweight and comprehensive UI component library. It’s highly customizable with simple setup – using either the provided build process or using your own (with Less).

What People Don’t Like About UIkit

Probably the biggest drawback to UIkit is that it’s a bit more under-the-radar than some of the bigger and more popular frameworks.

But, you know, that makes it cool, right?

On a serious note: There’s a smaller community of users, which may make it more challenging to find answers to questions or find tutorials on specific implementations.

8. Ant Design

Ant Design is a bit more than a CSS framework; It’s a design system with a set of high-quality React components for building rich, interactive user interfaces.

Built and released by Ant Group (parent company of Alibaba), Ant Design is similar to design systems released by US tech companies like Alphabet and X (née Google and Twitter).

Key features:

• Comprehensive set of UI components
• Consistent design language and style
• Customizable themes and appearance
• Extensive documentation and community support

Examples of well-known websites using Ant Design (unsurprisingly): Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu

Why People Love Ant Design

Ant Design is an extremely robust collection of resources for designers and developers. Going beyond just the CSS framework, there’s an entire system (nay, language) that can be applied directly to your own projects.

There’s a huge community, and the design system has been tried, tested, and proven across businesses and projects, generating billions of dollars in revenue.

Think of it like a franchise model for your web project.

What People Don’t Like About Ant Design

As you perhaps guessed, with extensive functionality comes extensive file size.

The entire Ant Design system (un-minified) weighs in at about 100MB.

The other limitation is that Ant Design is pretty purpose-built for React projects. If you’re using another JavaScript library, it might be difficult to adapt the components.

9. Primer

The CSS framework behind GitHub’s design and UI components, Primer is a super popular framework choice for developers and developer-first websites and apps.

It’s purpose-built and feels familiar to anyone who’s spent time rooting around the repos.

Key features:

• Modular architecture with selective imports
• Responsive grid system
• Sass-powered customization
• Built-in accessibility features

Why People Love Primer

Primer is like a great piece of infrastructure; It’s understated and simple, but does the job really well. Plus, knowing that the team behind GitHub created (and maintains) the library is a big boost to the longevity and reliability of the project.

What People Don’t Like About Primer

As you may have guessed, GitHub’s design aesthetic isn’t the right choice for every project.

So the main complaint is that Primer isn’t as universal as other frameworks, and isn’t an ideal choice for projects or websites not built for developers. It also has a limited UI component set that makes sense in the GitHub ecosystem.

10. Tachyons

“Fast-loading, highly-readable, and 100% responsive interfaces” is the promise of the Tachyons framework.

Built to use minimal CSS, Tachyons is ideally suited for standing up a quick homepage, personal portfolio, or project site.

Key features:

• Atomic CSS architecture with utility classes
• Responsive design capabilities
• Minimal setup and configuration
• Small file size for fast loading

Why People Love Tachyons

People love Tachyons because it’s a quick and simple framework. It’s lightweight and fast-loading, which makes it ideal for small projects, personal sites, and other simple use cases.

It’s like the Honda Civic (base model!) of frameworks.

You know what you’re getting. It works. And it’s reliable.

What People Don’t Like About Tachyons

It would take quite a bit of work to use Tachyons for a more complicated or visually-complex project, meaning it won’t be the first choice for anyone looking for more than a simple, grid-powered page or two.

11. Pure (Pure CSS)

Yahoo!

That’s a name you don’t hear all the time. (Unless you’re on Jeopardy answering a question about alternatives to Google, maybe.)

But their CSS framework, Pure CSS, has become quite popular for hackers and hustlers alike. With 23k stars and 2.5k forks on GitHub, it’s definitely one of the most popular choices on this list.

Key features:

• Small and lightweight
• Responsive grids
• Built on Normalize.css
• Out-of-the-box form handling

Why People Love Pure

PureCSS is a favorite powerup for custom CSS or as an addition to other frameworks. It’s ultra-lightweight and offers many useful components that can easily bolt onto existing systems.

This makes it simple to add grids, forms, buttons, tables, and more to your current stack.

What People Don’t Like About Pure

Pure works best as an add-on rather than a standalone framework. It doesn’t have a comprehensive library like other solutions and doesn’t offer theming or other features that make it easy to customize the look and feel of the project with a few quick edits.

12. Material Design Lite

Speaking of Google, in addition to Materialize, they’ve also open-sourced their Material Design Lite framework. As the name suggests, it’s a lighter, simpler version of the Material Design-inspired framework.

It uses less JavaScript and is built to be more accessible on a broader range of devices and browsers.

You can see Material Design Lite (MDL) on full display by visiting sites like Google Wallet, Google for Work, Google’s developer site, and more.

Key features:

• Material Design philosophy and UI components
• Large number of components out of the box, such as buttons, cards, sliders, spinners, and more
• No external dependencies
• Theming options

Why People Love MDL

MDL comes with an ultra-functional set of components for apps, forms, and more.

Since it’s built on Material Design principles, usability and accessibility are front and center in the designs and the components.

What People Don’t Like About MDL

MDL is technically depreciated at this stage, so the system won’t receive any updates or support.

Beyond that, the whole aesthetic can feel a bit limiting. It feels very much like it was created for Google products, for better or worse.

13. Spectre.css

Spectre is another great option for getting up and running quickly. This lightweight, minimalist framework gives you many of the building blocks you need to go from zero to launch with a good-looking site and familiar UI components.

Key features:

• Small (~10KB gzipped) filesize
• Flexbox-based grid
• Built-in utility classes

Why People Love Spectre

Spectre is ideal for a simple, minimal, and clean aesthetic. The focus here is on pure usability and efficiency — You won’t get a lot of extra bells or whistles, but it’ll do the job.

What People Don’t Like About Spectre

If you’re looking for a sprawling framework with advanced theming options, a thriving community, and tons of documentation, this probably isn’t the pick for you.

Spectre is a little more under the radar. It’s a capable tool for the job but doesn’t have anywhere near the kind of popularity and adoption as Foundation or Bootstrap.

14. Milligram

Another lesser-known framework, Milligram is extremely small and lightweight. Even more so than the other small frameworks we’ve covered.

It’s the ultimate option for minimalist design and a quick, straightforward solution for standing up a project.

Key features:

• Minimalist design
• Very small (~2kb gzip)
• Flexbox grid system

Why People Love Milligram

Milligram is potentially the lightest, simplest CSS framework you can use to build a project right out of the box. It has many of the most important features of other frameworks but with an astonishingly small footprint.

The conventions and classes also make it pretty easy to learn on the fly.

What People Don’t Like About Milligram

Milligram suffers from the same drawbacks as other lesser-known systems on the list. Lower overall popularity means that there’s less community support. Even so, the documentation is on par with much larger frameworks, and the simplicity may reduce the need for any additional help.

15. Water.css

Water is a classless CSS system that you just drop into a static site. It’s not a system in the way that the other frameworks are designed. Instead, it applies the styles directly to the HTML elements on the page, giving you a quick design system without the need (or ability) to build more complex layouts.

Key features:

• No classes
• Extremely lightweight
• Two themes out-of-the-box: light and dark mode.
• Fully responsive

Why People Love Water

Water is great for a quick CSS solution, a boilerplate of styles, or a simple mockup.

It does what it says on the tin, making it a great, ultra-fast, no-fuss solution.

What People Don’t Like About Water

Water’s simply not going to work for any complex website or app project. It doesn’t have grids, it lacks many components that you’d need for larger projects, and ultimately prioritizes simplicity (to the extreme) at the expense of customization or extensibility.

16. Vanilla

Vanilla Framework or Vanilla CSS (not to be confused with the colloquial term vanilla CSS, referring to base-level or traditional CSS) is a framework created and used by Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu.

Key features:

• Scalable architecture suitable for large web projects
• Modular systems
• Built on Sass

Why People Love Vanilla

Although less popular than the big frameworks like Bootstrap, Vanilla has the backing, resources, documentation, and even support of an enterprise-level product.

There’s an extremely detailed analysis related to accessibility and meticulously detailed notes on compatibility with different browsers (down to the specific version) and screens.

The components and styling are simple and universal, too.

What People Don’t Like About Vanilla

The project might indeed be a bit vanilla for some tastes. That is to say, the design aesthetic is largely neutral and functional without much flare.

Choose the Best CSS Framework for Your Project

Now that we’ve shared 16 awesome options, how do you choose the right one?

As always, there is no right or wrong answer here, but there are some key questions that you might use to narrow down your options.

Project Requirements and Goals

The best place to start is by understanding the type of project you’re building. If you’re creating a simple website for a small project or personal use, then a lightweight and simple system like Water or Milligram.

But if you need something more robust, you might opt for Foundation or Bootstrap.

Learning Curve and Ease of Use

Next, consider the system’s complexity versus your or your team’s capabilities. Are you experts at diving into new CSS frameworks? Or is this your first time using something that’s not home-baked?

Understanding how to use a CSS framework takes a bit of learning in-and-of itself. If you’ve never worked with a framework, you’d probably be better off choosing a simple starting option. Then, once you have the hang of the meta, you can dive into learning more complex systems.

Customizability and Flexibility

Are you building something that needs to adhere tightly to existing brand or design guidelines?

Then you’ll want to choose an option that has built-in theming and customization to make it easy to match the necessary styles and design systems.

If you’re more adaptable, you can choose a system with a distinct style but lacks some of the flexibility of the more robust systems.

Community Support and Resources

Having a community of folks using the framework can make all the difference. Look for community forums, Discord servers, or subreddits to see how many people are helping other users and how active the community is for each framework.

Performance and File Size

Be sure to consider the file size and performance of the frameworks you evaluate.

While your website’s performance is influenced by many factors (like your web hosting), the CSS can also greatly impact your pages, file sizes, and loading speed.

Keep Building

Hopefully this list of CSS frameworks gave you an idea of where to start on your next project.

Whether you’re building the next Facebook or a personal website to showcase your rock collection, we love helping creatives and entrepreneurs build a beautiful internet.

Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to get the latest how-to guides, trends, and tips on building and growing your website and business.

The post 16 Popular CSS Frameworks That Will Help You Save Time (With Style) appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

In 2019, Google introduced Google Analytics 4 as an alternative to Universal Analytics. Users were free to choose between using standard analytics properties or jumping to the new version. Now, Google plans to sunset Universal Analytics in just a few weeks — requiring all users to transition to Google Analytics 4.

If you use Google Analytics and haven’t made the move yet, you’ll need to understand what Analytics 4 offers and how it’s different from Universal Analytics. Time is running out to acquaint yourself with the service and make the change before Universal Analytics ceases to function — so start today, with this guide.

In this article, we’re going to talk about what Google Analytics 4 does differently from its predecessors. We’ll also show you how to transition your account to Google Analytics 4 and discuss some tutorials and tips to help you get the most out of the platform. Let’s get to it!

What Is GA4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google Analytics. It is designed to help businesses and website owners understand their online audience, track user behavior, and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. GA4 introduces several new features and improvements over the previous version, Universal Analytics (UA).

Getting To Know GA4

There are a few key areas where GA4 is very different from its predecessor.

For a long time, analytics has focused on helping you measure desktop web metrics, with mobile analytics data being almost an afterthought. Google Analytics 4 changes that approach by helping you unify multiple types of properties into singular user journeys:

With Google Analytics 4, you can see measurements for your websites and web and mobile apps. You can also gain insights from machine learning algorithms into how to optimize those properties.

Another key aspect of Google Analytics 4 is that it doesn’t rely solely on cookies. It offers an increased emphasis on user privacy.

“Universal Analytics was built for a generation of online measurement that was anchored in the desktop web, independent sessions and more easily observable data from cookies. This measurement methodology is quickly becoming obsolete.”

– Russell Ketchum, Director of Product Management for Google Analytics

Arguably, one of the main drivers behind the shift in how Google Analytics collects data comes from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR has had a massive impact on how websites and platforms can legally collect and store user data.

Cookies have come under fire in recent years due to increased privacy concerns, meaning many companies are looking into alternative data collection streams.

With Google Analytics 4, measurements no longer rely on sessions. The platform is capable of recognizing and measuring multiple types of human interaction “events”, including:

• Pageviews
• Scrolls
• Outbound clicks
• In-site searches
• Video engagement metrics
• File downloads

With previous versions of Google Analytics, measuring several metrics involved manually setting up complex events. Now, the platform can automatically tag the events for you, which gives you access to more data from the get-go.

Finally, Google Analytics 4 brings better funnel reports to the table, including cross-platform analysis. You can use the platform to identify key steps in the customer journey and see where users enter and drop out. The service also enables you to understand what users are doing in-between steps in the funnel:

But why are all these changes happening? Why can’t users just keep their Universal Analytics properties that they already know?

Universal Analytics Will Sunset On July 1

For almost a decade, Universal Analytics has been the standard for measuring performance and engagement for websites. It has also been a vital tool for determining the success of keyword strategies.

However, the platform was designed for an era where we mostly interacted with sites through desktop computers. Although Universal Analytics can also measure mobile and app data, it doesn’t offer a unified experience for properties across multiple channels.

“People expect to interact with businesses when and how they like, such as browsing a brand’s website to research a product and then purchasing it later using the brand’s app. Getting insight into these cross-platform journeys is critical for businesses to predict customer needs and provide great experiences—but it can be very challenging.”

– Russell Ketchum, Director of Product Management for Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 was designed to help remedy that problem and improve privacy standards in collecting measurements. Since its introduction in 2019, it has existed alongside Universal Analytics so that users could choose between both experiences:

Now Google plans to retire Universal Analytics, starting on July 1, 2023. Existing analytics properties will stop collecting data on that date. If you’re using Universal Analytics 360, you get a few extra months of data collection, with the service retiring on October 1, 2023:

That means that if you still need to move from Universal Analytics to GA4, the time is now. Before we talk about how to do that, let’s go over the changes to the service.

What Are The Differences Between Universal Analytics And GA4?

In short, there are a lot of changes, new features, and new tips and tricks to learn. If you’re a UA pro but are unsure what to expect with GA4, here’s what’s changed.

GA4 Has A Whole New Dashboard

The most obvious change (that even first-time and new users are likely to notice right off the bat) is that GA4 has a whole new dashboard. It’s a bit more streamlined than UA was — there are fewer reports on the main page, and you have a new menu bar on the left where you can navigate to Home, Reports, Explore, Advertising, Configure, and Library.

GA4 Uses An Event-Driven Data Model

Another big change is GA4’s event-based data model, which allows for more flexible and detailed tracking of user interactions on websites and apps. Events are actions taken by users, such as pageviews, clicks, video plays, form submissions, and more. This model provides a more comprehensive view of user engagement across different platforms.

Event tracking means lots of new metrics — like attribution, demographics, and more. And while you can still view session-level reporting, events allow you to break everything down by interaction, giving you more detailed and in-depth reports.

GA4 Offers Enhanced Cross-Platform Tracking

GA4 combines website and app data into a single property, allowing businesses to track user interactions across multiple platforms and devices. This unified view helps understand user behavior throughout their entire journey, from web to app or vice versa.

This means being able to track the user experience throughout the entire lifecycle — from acquisition to engagement, monetization, and retention — across multiple platforms. That’s a game-changer.

GA4 Is All About User-Centric Measurement

One of the most exciting changes in GA4’s event-driven model is the ability to track engagement metrics, like engaged sessions, engagement rates, and engagement time.

This represents one of the ways GA4 reflects how thinking about web and app metrics has evolved: GA4 emphasizes individual users more than sessions. It introduces a new metric called “User Engagement,” which measures users’ engagement level based on their interactions and conversions. This approach enables a deeper understanding of user behavior and the ability to personalize experiences based on individual preferences.

GA4 Embraces The Potential of AI

GA4 incorporates advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide more than just snapshots of your past data — it can now provide predictive insights. Moreover, insights are automated, making them easy for even beginners to access and use.

GA4 also offers predictive metrics and audience discovery to help businesses identify valuable segments and optimize their marketing strategies. For example, you can generate a report that shows churn probability and revenue predictions, which can fully optimize your retargeting efforts.

GA4 Has New (And Better) Privacy Standards

GA4 addresses privacy concerns by providing more granular data control options. It is designed to align with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). GA4 supports data deletion, user-centric data controls, and provides options to handle user consent preferences.

GA4 Gives Marketers More Power And Control

And finally, one of the most exciting changes: GA4 is made for digital marketers.

This is a significant departure — UA was not a marketer’s tool, even though it quickly became a standard part of every marketer’s tech stack. GA4 comes packed with powerful features custom-made for marketers — like integration with Google Data Studio and custom segments based on trigger events. For example, you can create segments on all conversion events from a specific time period or location, allowing you to build a much deeper understanding of your users and their behavior.

How To Move From Universal Analytics To Google Analytics 4

Although we’re talking about transitioning from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, you can use both services simultaneously (for now.) That means you can still collect data using cookies until Universal Analytics retires in 2023. At the same time, you can begin collecting data from events with Analytics 4.

Step 1: Create A Google Analytics 4 Property

Firstly, you’ll want to ensure you’re not already using Google Analytics 4. If you set up a property after October 14, 2020, it’s likely already using Google Analytics 4. To verify this, access your Google Analytics account and look at your list of properties.

Properties using Universal Analytics will have a UA prefix in their analytics IDs. Properties using Google Analytics 4 will display G4A designations:

To get started, select a property using Universal Analytics and access its ADMIN settings. Select the option that says G4A Setup Assistant under the property’s name.

Now click on the Get Started button under the message that says, I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property:

After clicking on that button, Google Analytics will show you a brief rundown of the setup steps. The platform will set up a new property for you without deleting your Universal Analytics configurations. It’ll copy data from the Universal Analytics property and enable “enhanced measurements” immediately, which means you can start measuring complex events from the get-go:

Click on Create property to get the process started. You’ll return to the GA4 Setup Assistant tab, indicating the property is ready.

Step 2: Configure Your Google Analytics 4 Property

Now click on See your G4A property to configure its settings:

To get started using Google Analytics 4 correctly, you’ll need to configure one or more data streams.

When you open a new Google Analytics 4 property, the platform will send you to the Setup Assistant page. Here, look for the section that says Collection and select the Tag installation option:

The Tag Installation option lets you configure “data streams”. Each Google Analytics property can have streams of information from websites and apps. Typically, you’ll have one stream for the web and one each for iOS and Android devices if you utilize apps:

When you select the Add stream option, the platform will ask you what type of stream you want to set up. If you’re adding a web property, Google Analytics will ask for its URL, the site’s name, and which measurements you want to track:

To confirm that you own the website, Google Analytics will ask you to add a tag to it. You can complete this step by adding a JavaScript tag manually or by https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager:

Once you verify ownership of the property, Google Analytics will start collecting data from it. Like with Universal Analytics, you’ll be able to track all of that information from the dashboard.

Once you start setting up custom insights, you’ll get an idea of how big the difference between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 is:

If you want to experiment with Google Analytics 4 before setting up a new property, there’s an official demo account that you can use. Additionally, keep in mind that you can switch between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 properties by selecting either option from your list of properties.

Getting Up To Speed On GA4

Once your GA4 properties are up and running, you can start exploring the new platform! Here are some good places to start as you familiarize yourself with GA4’s changes and new features.

Get To Know Your New Dashboard

When you open your GA4 dashboard for the first time, you’ll likely notice that the reports and visualizations you’re used to seeing aren’t where they used to be.

The middle of the dashboard offers a snapshot of your property. You’ll find a Recently Viewed section below, with all the reports you’ve accessed most recently. Below that is the Insights section, which shows some of the AI-driven insights Google thinks are most relevant to you and your properties.

On the left-hand side of the screen is a navigation menu, which you’ll use to access all the other areas of GA4.

Test Out The Powerful New Search Bar

If you’re brand new to GA4, a great place to start is the search bar. Google has revamped it, and it has an especially powerful, useful new feature: You can type a question in plain English, and the results will direct you toward the report, insight, or other page where you can find the information you’re looking for.

Here are some search bar queries you can try out to get the hang of the new search:

• What landing pages on my website are currently experiencing the most traffic?
• What is the overall bounce rate for my website?
• What is the conversion rate for my most popular product?
• What are the top traffic sources to my website?
• What is the average session duration for my website?

Check Out The Reports Dashboard

From the left-hand menu on your dashboard, click the second icon from the top (the one that looks like a graph). This will take you to your reports dashboard.

For longtime UA users, this dashboard will likely feel the most familiar. This is where you’ll find snapshots of all kinds of GA4 reports, including real-time site data.

Every report dashboard will look a little different because Google will choose the default reports it thinks are most relevant to each site, but GA4 allows you to customize reports on your dashboard – you can see all the data that matters most to you (at a glance!). Click the six dots to drag and reorder your snapshots, the X to remove cards, and the + to add new cards.

Get To Know Explorations

Explorations combine the features of GA4’s custom reports with its AI capabilities, and allow you to create extremely detailed, granular reports and visualizations from scratch.

Or, for more beginning users, there’s the template gallery. It contains a dozen pre-built reports exploring some of the most useful metrics GA4 offers:

• Free form
• Funnel exploration
• Path exploration
• Segment overlap
• User explorer
• Cohort exploration
• User lifetime
• Acquisition
• Conversion
• User behavior
• Ecommerce
• Gaming

Explorations templates are a great place to start when you set up GA4 for the first time. Play around with different segments, dimensions, and events to see how they change your reports and visualizations. You’ll get the hang of GA4 in no time!

Common Issues With Google Analytics 4

Although transitioning to Google Analytics 4 is simple, users report some common issues when first using the “new” platform. Let’s talk about some of those issues and how to tackle them!

Configuring Google Analytics 4 Takes Time

GA4 definitely has a learning curve. While it automatically sets up tracking for several types of events when you configure it for your website, the platform really shines when and if you take the time to set up custom events and reports.

If you don’t configure Google Analytics to track custom events, you’re missing out on what is perhaps the most powerful feature the platform offers. With custom events, you can collect data on the measurements that matter the most to you, all without adding custom code to your site.

Moving Your Historical Data To GA4 Is Tricky

After UA sunsets, users will have temporary viewer access, so they won’t immediately lose all their historical data. Can you migrate that data into GA4 to pick up where you left off? Unfortunately, not really.

While GA4 offers some solutions for importing and migrating data, the two versions have different data collection models, so not all data from UA will have a direct equivalent in GA4. It’s something we’re hoping Google will eventually address, but for now, historical data in GA4 is limited.

Reports In Google Analytics Are Limited

Out of the box, reports in Google Analytics 4 are somewhat limited. For the platform to provide you with deeper insights into your customers’ behavior, you need to configure it to track the specific events you want and show that data in the way you need.

Google Analytics 4 makes this process relatively straightforward, depending on what type of events you want to track. However, even after setting up custom reports, accurate numbers may take a while to show up on your dashboard, because Analytics 4 uses machine learning to improve how it reports information.

There Are Differences In Reports Between Universal Analytics And Google Analytics 4

One of the most common complaints among new Google Analytics 4 users is that the numbers you see in the dashboard might not match your Universal Analytics property. This difference in data is because both services collect and count data differently. Where Universal Analytics relies on cookies and sessions, Analytics 4 tracks events.

For now, you can rely on metrics from both services to inform your decisions. However, you’ll need to get used to the Analytics 4 approach as we near the retirement date for Universal Analytics.

Google Analytics 4 Doesn’t Track Bounce Rate

There is a lot of discussion about whether the way bounce rate is currently measured makes sense or not. Google Analytics 4 does away with bounce rate entirely. Instead, it measures “engagement”:

Engagement reports use a broad range of metrics to provide a comprehensive overview of how users first perceive your website. If you want to continue measuring bounce rate, you can use Universal Analytics while it’s still active.

Frequently Asked Questions About GA4

What Is Google Analytics 4?

GA4 is Google’s latest analytics platform, providing businesses with advanced analytics capabilities, cross-platform tracking, user-centric measurement, and machine learning insights to understand user behavior and optimize marketing strategies.

What’s The Difference Between Universal Analytics And GA4?

Universal Analytics (UA) is the previous version of Google Analytics that primarily focuses on session-based tracking, while Google Analytics 4 (GA4) introduces an event-driven data model, cross-platform tracking, user-centric measurement, and enhanced machine learning capabilities for more comprehensive and personalized analytics.

Can You Use Both Universal Analytics And GA4?

Until July 1, you can use both, but Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics for most users on that date. This means, from then on, new data will only be collected in GA4.

Should I Switch To GA4?

Yes. As of July 1, UA will begin the process of shutting down. GA4 represents the direction of Google Analytics and offers a more robust and advanced set of features. By transitioning to GA4, you can take advantage of the latest tracking capabilities, gain deeper insights into user behavior, and stay ahead in the evolving landscape of analytics and marketing.

How Does GA4 Work With Google Ads?

GA4 works seamlessly with Google Ads to provide comprehensive insights and optimization opportunities. By linking GA4 with Google Ads, advertisers can directly access data-driven metrics and audience insights in the Google Ads interface. This integration allows for better measurement and attribution of campaigns, as GA4 tracks user interactions and conversions across multiple touchpoints.

How Does Google Tag Manager (GTM) Work?

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a powerful tool that simplifies the process of implementing and managing tracking tags on websites and apps. GTM allows you to deploy and update various tracking codes, including GA4 tracking codes, without directly modifying your website’s or app’s source code.

How Can I Learn More About Using GA4?

• Google Analytics Help Center: The official Google Analytics Help Center provides comprehensive documentation, guides, and tutorials on various topics related to GA4. It covers everything from implementation and configuration to reporting and analysis.
• Google Analytics Academy: Google offers online courses through its Analytics Academy platform. These courses cover different aspects of GA4, including implementation, data analysis, and advanced topics. The courses are self-paced and free of charge, providing a structured learning experience.
• Google Analytics YouTube Channel: The Google Analytics YouTube channel features videos and tutorials on GA4. It covers a wide range of topics, including best practices, tips and tricks, and updates on new features.

What The Future Holds For Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics, it’s essential to start getting acquainted with Google Analytics 4 — time to migrate to the new version is quickly running out.

In the coming weeks, Universal Analytics will cease to collect data. You should have a GA4 property set up and configured by the time that happens. The best time to start is now — so follow the steps above and make sure your data doesn’t get left behind.

Need Help Getting Analytics Up and Running?

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The post How to Make the Switch from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

For designers and other creatives, an online portfolio helps serve as a record of your work, where you can see your progress over time and show off past projects to potential clients and employers. It also helps you establish credibility, build your personal brand, network with others in your field, and demonstrate your skills.

But as we all know, self-promotion is never easy. That’s where this guide comes in. If you need some inspiration for your personal portfolio, keep on scrolling. Below, we have 26 design portfolio examples — from the best of the best — to help you get the ball rolling on your own. Learn from these greats and get ready to show off your best work.

What Is a Design Portfolio?

A design portfolio is a collection of your work as a designer, showcasing your skills, experience, and creativity. It is typically a digital collection of images, videos, or other media that displays your design work in a professional and polished manner.

Why Do You Need a Design Portfolio?

As a designer, a portfolio is essential because it serves as a visual representation of your skills and experience to potential clients, employers, or collaborators. It allows you to showcase your design work and demonstrate your ability to solve design problems, work within constraints, and deliver effective design solutions.

Here are a few reasons why you need a design portfolio:

• To showcase your skills: A design portfolio is a great way to showcase your design skills and expertise to potential clients, employers, or collaborators. By presenting your work in a professional and polished manner, you can demonstrate your design abilities and communicate your value as a designer.
• To differentiate yourself: In a competitive design field, having a portfolio that stands out can help you differentiate yourself from other designers. By showcasing your unique style, approach, or perspective, you can demonstrate your creativity and show that you bring something special to the table.
• To build your brand: A design portfolio is also an opportunity to build and develop your personal brand. By presenting your work in a consistent and cohesive manner, you can establish your identity as a designer and create a lasting impression on potential clients, employers, or collaborators.
• To attract new clients or employers: A design portfolio can help you attract new potential employers and clients by demonstrating your ability to deliver effective design solutions. In addition, by showcasing your past successes and highlighting your design process, you can build trust with potential clients, employers, or collaborators and increase your chances of being hired.

26 Design Portfolio Examples You’ll Want to See

Ready to build your own portfolio? Before you get started, check out these portfolio websites and examples — some of the trendiest, most creative, most innovative portfolios on the web — to inspire you.

1. Bruno Simon

Bruno Simon, a creative developer based in Paris, has one of the most unique portfolio sites you’re going to see anywhere. After entering the portfolio, you can use your keyboard to drive a small car around a virtual world, parking it at Simon’s past projects to view them in more detail.

In 2020, Simon’s incredibly creative portfolio won Site of the Year at awwwards. This format isn’t one that would work for every designer — but if you can pull off an eye-catching, standout design like this, it’s a great way to make your portfolio stand out from the crowd.

2. Sophie Brittain

Sophie Brittain, a product designer based in New York, went a much simpler route with her online portfolio. After a fun, colorful loading page, Sophie’s portfolio looks similar: Lots of color (amid plenty of white space to make it pop) and a simple, scrollable homepage that highlights a few of her best projects. It’s designed with minimal flash, but is still effective and memorable.

3. Jessica Hernandez

Jessica Hernandez is a UX researcher and school counselor who lives in the Bay Area. Her portfolio is a bit different because of her unique work experience, but it’s still absolutely bursting with personality.

Jessica uses emojis and illustrations to let her love of color and design show through in every part of her portfolio. She even includes an interactive section where visitors can “meet” her dog, Neo, and help pick up his virtual toys.

The result is a portfolio that shows Jessica is creative and fun-loving—and if that’s the vibe you need for your project, you’ll certainly want to hire her.

4. Diana Tatarenko

Diana Tatarenko is a visual designer specializing in UX and UI design. Her portfolio has an eye-catching design, filled with clean lines and unique fonts. But what really sets it apart is how Diana presents her previous work to prospective new clients and employers.

Instead of just displaying her designs on a project page, Diana invites her portfolio viewers to get to know her process. For each project, she explains the problem her client needed to solve—and how she helped address it with design. It’s a unique approach that’s sure to help prospective new clients build confidence in her work—before they even meet her.

5. Studio Feixen

Studio Feixen is a Switzerland-based design studio with a massive amount of work to show off. The studio maximizes its portfolio with different-sized screenshots and graphics that display a ton of their past work—and the images all fit together like a puzzle, making them look cohesive even though they’re all different sizes. It speaks to the studio’s design abilities, helping build confidence in their work.

6. Christina Kosik

Canadian designer and webflow developer Christina Kosik uses her portfolio to ensure the most important part shines: Her work.

With a simple, minimalist design, Christina makes sure her featured projects stand out — and she makes the unconventional choice to put her work at the top of the landing page, and introduce herself after you’ve scrolled past her work experience.

7. Run Wild Design

Chris at Run Wild Design wears a lot of hats: UX/UI designer, illustrator, brand developer, and art director, just to name a few. But what Run Wild did well in their portfolio is showcase all of that different experience and expertise without making the site feel cluttered or too long.

Combine that with the creative video background on the landing page, and you have a web design that speaks to Run Wild’s branding capabilities — their page is a study in brand cohesion, showing that this is an agency you can trust to build and develop your project or company’s brand.

8. RoAndCo

New York City-based design studio RoAndCo was founded by creative director Roanne Adams. The portfolio site really captures Roanne’s editorial experience with its visually pleasing grid layout, split-screen graphics, full-screen videos, and other eye-catching design elements.

What sets RoAndCo’s portfolio apart is how beautiful it is on both a large desktop screen and on mobile. Responsive design can be tricky when you have so many visual elements, but this portfolio shows how it’s done.

9. Brenna Hamilton

Creative director Brenna Hamilton has a lot of past work to show off on her portfolio, but she uses a sleek, elegant layout to make sure she can fit it all in without making the page seem cluttered or overwhelming.

One of the things that helps Brenna stand out from the crowd is how she backs up the impact of her work. She has an entire page of her portfolio dedicated to case studies of her past clients, showing not only the work she did, but the real-world results it helped deliver.

10. Timothy Maurer

As a UX designer and low-code developer, Timothy Maurer describes his work as: “clarity, simplicity, focus, and curiosity.”

It shows in his portfolio, where he uses a simple layout that creates a long, flowing feed of all his past projects. He has years of experience to put on display, and the simplicity of this portfolio helps him demonstrate the true breadth of what he’s accomplished for past clients — without making the portfolio feel overwhelming.

11. Saloni Joshi

Saloni Joshi is a designer with experience in UX who currently works at Google — but her portfolio spans her career with past projects for companies like Sam’s Club and Dynamic Signal.

Saloni uses a simple, interactive layout that allows visitors to scroll through her work, seeing screenshots and graphics representing the finished project. But clicking on a project takes you to a detail page with a comprehensive case study, where Saloni explains the challenges and process for each piece of work she shares on her site.

12. Robin Mastromarino

Robin Mastromarino, an interface designer based in Paris, uses some truly unique and memorable website design for a portfolio that stands out from the crowd — and stays on your mind.

Robin’s portfolio uses horizontal scrolling, with animations that make it look like each project is on a wheel, rolling into a full-screen view. The resulting user experience is whimsical, but still highly effective — you get hit with all the color and boldness of Robin’s designs, within an example of the kind of interface you can get if you hire him.

13. Andre Givenchy

Andre Givenchy is the founder of Segern, a design agency that’s worked with brands like Everyday Unicorns, Bambu Care, and Gander. Andre’s portfolio is straightforward, but there are some key elements that set him apart from the sea of portfolios on the web. He has a keen understanding of social proof — and how important it can be in driving business decisions in the digital age — so his site is bursting with social proof of the impact of his work: examples, reviews, and testimonials to help highlight how many clients he’s done great work for.

14. Dalya Green

Dalya Green is a multidisciplinary designer based in Jerusalem, and her simple-yet-creative and effective portfolio is only one page, yet still packs a serious punch.

Loaded with color and eye-catching typography, Dalya’s portfolio gets right into what matters: Her work. But while her portfolio puts her experience front and center, she still infuses her personality (and gives visitors the chance to get to know her on a more personal level) with a button you can press for pop-up fun facts about her, like how she starts each morning by watering her balcony garden.

15. Active Theory

Active Theory, an LA-based creative digital agency, uses its portfolio as a masterclass in balancing your personal brand with the need to cleanly showcase your work.

From the moment you enter Active Theory’s site, it becomes an immersive experience designed to set a mood: dark, grungy, and a little bit cyberpunk. The experience is made even more arresting by mouse-activated screen glitches and other animations.

But when you navigate to Active Theory’s collection of work, the page becomes a lot more simple, with full-page videos guaranteeing that now, you immerse yourself in the agency’s experience and designs. It ensures every visitor focuses fully on what this agency can do, and it’s incredibly effective.

16. Dan Machado

At first glance, Dan Machado’s portfolio looks simple and minimalist. But when you mouse over his list of work, the page explodes with visuals to offer a sneak peek of each project.

Once you click on a project, you’re taken to a detail page where Dan uses a combination of imagery and compelling copywriting to tell each project’s story — he doesn’t just show his work but also his process and impact.

17. Lital Karni

Lital Karni, a UI and UX designer based in Tel Aviv, has a portfolio that looks pretty simple at first glance. But she uses a number of clever design tricks to draw visitors in and constantly reinforce her own personal brand.

First, there’s the way that each project on display has a custom-colored background, designed to make each part of her experience pop.

As visitors scroll through Lital’s portfolio, they might notice the one thing that stays static on the page: Her unique logo design, which allows you to click from anywhere and go back to the “About” section at the top of the page. It keeps Lital as the designer front and center, even as you look through her work.

18. Velvet Spectrum

Velvet Spectrum is a professional moniker for Australian digital artist Luke Choice. With his online portfolio, Luke lets his work speak for itself, displayed in a grid that mixes static images, 3-D graphics, and animations to demonstrate the wide range of talents and skills on display.

Everything on Luke’s portfolio site is bursting with color, immersing visitors in his unique design style without a lot of words — because they simply aren’t needed here.

19. Greg Christian

New York City-based designer Greg Christian has built his portfolio to be like a (very modern, extremely cool) take on a resume. He starts by listing his past roles, experiences, and locations, then transitions to a showcase of some of his projects. The entire portfolio lives on a single page, making it easy for visitors to scroll through and get acquainted with his work.

20. Jung Hoe

UI/UX designer Jung Hoe keeps his portfolio simple, with one scrollable page that introduces who he is and then jumps right into the important part: His work. What sets his portfolio apart, though, is the toggle switch that allows visitors to see his professional portfolio — or a portfolio of work he’s done for fun.

That small feature allows visitors to really get a sense for who Jung is and what he cares about, injecting a ton of personality into his portfolio while simultaneously making it more effective.

21. Locomotive

Montreal-based digital-first creative agency Locomotive specializes in creating digital experiences, and didn’t waste the chance to demonstrate that with their own portfolio of work. Their site is highly engaging and interactive, drawing visitors in more and more as they keep exploring.

One of the most striking things about Locomotive’s portfolio site is how they use playful, entertaining animations to add more visual interest. Of course, that’s a gamble — those kinds of touches can seem gimmicky or become distracting. But Locomotive shows that when high-quality animated flourishes are used correctly, they make all the site’s little details pop.

22. Kerem Suer

Kerem Suer, an interdisciplinary designer based in San Francisco, puts himself front and center in his portfolio — after all, potential clients aren’t just hiring his work, they’re hiring him.

He adds personality to his “About” page with quotes from his speaking engagements, as well as snippets and feeds from his social media profiles. And to go above and beyond for prospective clients, he adds some helpful touches to his contact page: his availability for hire, and his average response time.

23. Sophie Westfall

If you want trendy, modern UX/UI design, you’ll want to hire Sophie Westfall after viewing her portfolio. With its simple, clean lines, creative design, and use of the most current design trends, Sophie’s portfolio is all about her style, which is young, bold, and modern.

24. Studio Thomas

Studio Thomas also has a portfolio that’s all about the vibes. This London-based Agency, founded by a pair of Thomases, Thomas Austin and Thomas Coombes, claims to be all about “Design for Bold Brands.”

Of course, their portfolio backs that up. With bold color blocking, striking animation, and full-screen images for each project included in their work history, Studio Thomas has worked to build their personal branding into every detail of their portfolio. The final product is a website that’s eye-catching, memorable, and visually stunning.

25. Alex Beige

Alex Beige is a freelancer based in New York City. Their web developer portfolio is one to check out if you need ideas for blending functionality and user experience with personality and fun.

Alex includes all the information a prospective client might want to know: His experience and skills, featured website projects (with an image of each one), his process, what it’s like to work with him, and how to get in touch. In addition, it’s all done in a way that showcases Alex’s lighthearted style — like how his process is laid out in cloud graphics that you can click and drag to rearrange all over the page.

Alex’s care for the customer experience also shows in his custom contact form, which includes helpful fields to choose which of his specialties you’re interested in, and your budget for your project, so it’ll be easier for you both to determine if working together will be a good fit.

26. Pierrick Calvez

If the purpose of a design portfolio is self-promotion, China-based illustrator Pierrick Calvez has it down to a science.

His straightforward portfolio displays his works as framed works of art on a digital gallery wall, a visually striking way for visitors to take his art in.

But what’s even more clever is how Pierrick’s portfolio doubles as an e-commerce store. If one of his works is available for sale, visitors can make a purchase from the page with just a few clicks. His portfolio is a great way to spread the word about his art and make some sales in the process.

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But databases need storage and connectivity, which is where app hosting comes in.

App hosting is the secret sauce that powers your app from behind the scenes, allowing you to store important data and functionality in the form of versatile databases that can be called upon by a user’s device, be it Android or iOS.

If this is your first time deploying an app for web or mobile, this might seem a tad complicated. But fret not!

This guide will tell you everything you need to know about app hosting so you can prepare for your startup’s big launch without server downtime or security incidents weighing you down.

Sound good? Let’s get started!

What Is App Hosting?

Mobile apps generally consist of two parts: The client-side (frontend) and the server-side (backend). The client-side is the user interface that runs on the user’s device, while the server-side manages the data, logic, and communication between the app and various services.

App hosting refers to the process of providing the necessary infrastructure and services to deploy, run, and manage an application’s server-side components. These components typically handle tasks such as data storage, user authentication, server-side processing, and more.

5 App Hosting Options to Consider

The server-side components of an app require a reliable environment to operate — mobile application hosting services provide this environment. Depending on the needs of the application and the needs of the developers, application hosting can involve various types of infrastructure, such as:

1. Traditional Hosting

With “traditional” hosting or dedicated server hosting, your application’s server-side components are hosted on physical servers, often managed by a hosting provider. The provider is responsible for maintaining the hardware, providing network connectivity, and ensuring uptime.

You could also host your app with a server you own and maintain. (If you don’t mind a hot server running in your bedroom 24/7.)

Advantages of Traditional Hosting

Consider traditional hosting like buying a gigantic pickup truck. It’s a high-performance machine. You’ll get full control over the server setup and configuration. You’ll generally get more CPU power and memory.

It’s certainly the best option if you need high scalability, high performance, and total control over the system and security.

But, if you’re looking for a daily driver, it may be a bit overkill.

Disadvantages of Traditional Hosting

If we could all spring for our own dedicated server, we’d probably do it.

The obvious limitation is pricing. Although prices vary by provider, renting (or buying) a dedicated server is pretty much always the most expensive option.

You’ll also need to know and understand a bit more about hosting and server configuration to get the most out of a traditional hosting setup.

2. Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

VPS hosting involves dividing a physical server into multiple virtual servers, each with its own operating system and resources.

This allows multiple applications to be hosted on a single physical server while maintaining isolation between them. VPS hosting provides more control and customization options than traditional hosting but still requires server management and maintenance.

To take our analogy from above, this is more like sharing a pickup truck.

Advantages of VPS

VPS is often considered a middle ground; You get a high level of customization and a decent level of performance.

This also makes it much more affordable than buying or renting an entire server, but for good reason.

Disadvantages of VPS

VPS hosting will always be limited by your share of the resources on the server. The way VPS hosting works is that the CPU power and memory is split across multiple sites or web applications.

You’re generally guaranteed a certain amount of resources, but you could experience real-time performance issues if, let’s say, your site goes viral or there’s a significant spike in traffic or users.

3. Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting services, such as DreamHost’s DreamObjects, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, provide virtualized infrastructure and managed services to host and run applications.

Cloud hosting offers flexibility, scalability, and reliability, allowing developers to easily deploy and manage their applications without worrying about underlying hardware and networking.

Resources can be provisioned or released as needed, and costs are typically based on usage.

Cloud hosting (or cloud computing) is sort of the inverse of VPS. Rather than a single server being divided up into multiple instances, a cloud hosting setup will pull resources from multiple servers to provide the computing power you need to handle your current traffic or users.

Advantages of Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is, essentially, infinitely scalable.

In theory, there are no limitations to the resources you can pull for a specific project. This makes it ideal for site or mobile app hosting which might see big swings in traffic and users.

Pricing is also pay-as-you-go based on resources, meaning you only pay for what you use.

Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting

The downside of hosting a mobile app with a pay-for-what-you-use model is that if you get way more traffic or users than expected, your bill could also be higher than you expect.

4. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

PaaS providers, such as Heroku or Google App Engine, offer a complete development and hosting environment, including the infrastructure, runtime, and necessary tools.

It’s sort of like leasing a pickup truck, but you can only drive it on certain roads. You don’t have to worry about maintenance or upkeep, but you’re also relying on the company to provide you with everything you need to get up and running with your app. Plus, you’re locked into using the tools and systems offered by the provider.

Advantages of PaaS

PaaS makes it super simple to start, build, and deploy a mobile app. With the right provider, you can be up and running in a matter of hours. You won’t need to tinker with servers or install a bunch of applications.

Most PaaS offerings are also pay-as-you-go.

Disadvantages of PaaS

Since you’re leasing the pickup truck and can only drive it on certain roads, PaaS has some limitations depending on your chosen provider.

For instance, they may or may not offer support for popular services like Docker or Kubernetes.

Certain software development kits (SDKs) may or may not be available.

Now, if you can find the right provider that aligns with your preferred tool stack, you can use PaaS as a SaaS solution for mobile app development, deployment, and hosting.

5. Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS)

MBaaS platforms, like Firebase or Parse (now open-source), are specialized app hosting services specifically designed for mobile applications. They provide pre-built backend components, APIs, and tools to streamline mobile app development and hosting.

Think of services like user authentication or push notifications. MBaaS offers these out of the box.

It’s like a dongle for your laptop connected to a bunch of microservices you can tap into with a few clicks.

This means you have complete control over the front-end, and then you plug in the dongle to connect to back-end services. Bringing it back to the pickup truck metaphor, this would be like leasing a truck, but you can only drive it to certain destinations.

Advantages of MBaaS

Like PaaS, MBaaS is popular as a quick and simple solution that gets you up and running without much (or any) fuss.

It’s ideal for folks who aren’t super deep into backend coding and setup, and who don’t want to deal with managing relational databases and wiring up microservices.

It’s kind of like a template for app development.

That doesn’t make it a bad choice for more advanced users, but it can be limiting.

Disadvantages of MBaaS

While many of the larger MBaaS providers have a lot of flexibility and tons of extensions or services, you’re still limited to what they offer.

That limits the amount of customization you can do and the amount of control you have over the environment and app performance, and generally relies heavily on the provider to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Choosing the Right Hosting Infrastructure

So before we look at specific providers, it’s important to identify the infrastructure that’s right for you. Looking at the options above, there are some key considerations.

Scalability

Is your mobile app going to be as big as Flappy Bird? (Flappy Bird? Anyone?)

Then you’ll need an option that allows for scalable performance.

If you know, for sure, that you’ll be getting a lot of traffic and need a lot of resources, then dedicated or VPS hosting is probably best for you.

If you’re not 100% sure how much traffic you’re going to receive or you know it will fluctuate, then you’ll probably want a pay-for-what-you-use option: Cloud hosting, PaaS, or MBaaS.

Performance

Are you running state-of-the-art, resource-intensive tech that’s going to eat up tons of computing power? Better go with a dedicated server for your quantum computing mobile app. (Okay, I know. Quantum-computer-powered mobile app hosting isn’t a thing. Yet.)

If you’re running an average application, then any of the other hosting options will probably suffice.

DevOps & Frameworks

Here’s the big question: How did/will you build the world’s hottest new mobile app?

Chances are, you have specific ideas about the languages, frameworks, microservices, and overall architecture you will use.

Consider finding a PaaS or MBaaS that aligns with that stack.

If you can’t find the right provider, you’ll need to get a bit more custom and look at cloud, VPS, or getting a “dedi” (that’s slang for dedicated server).

If you don’t have any allegiance to particular tool stacks and you’re willing to learn whatever it takes to get your app up and running, then PaaS or MBaaS are probably the best options.

Choosing an App Hosting Provider

Every app has its own requirements in terms of performance, scalability, security, and functionality. While there’s no shortage of options to meet these requirements, the abundance of hosting providers does not make it easy to pick the right one from the bunch.

The section above may have helped you narrow down which hosting option is right for you, but now there are a bunch of different providers offering that specific solution.

Let’s say you’ve landed on cloud hosting, but there are 20 different vendors that offer some flavor of cloud computing products.

How do you choose?

Unless you want to sign up for a trial with every single one of them to see which one works out best (hey, we’ve all been there), you’ll want to research a few key factors to help you narrow it down.

Here’s a primer on the factors you need to consider to choose the right hosting solution for your app:

Performance and Reliability

Perhaps the most crucial feature of any hosting product is its performance (in reality and not just on paper) and its reliability when users are trying to access your app.

Do some digging. Look for information on the location and number of data centers that the provider has, see which CDNs they connect with, and read real user reviews to get a sense of how often there are issues with uptime or latency.

Look for providers that offer service level agreements (SLAs) with uptime guarantees and clear procedures for handling outages and downtime.

Security

Assess the provider’s security measures, such as data encryption, user authentication, access controls, and regular security updates. Ensure the provider complies with relevant data protection regulations and industry standards for your specific use case.

Look for certifications like ISO27001, SOC1/2/3, or other seals of approval.

You may also want to do a bit of digging to see if this particular host has experienced past security issues and how they handle legal or government requests.

Cost

Understand their pricing model (e.g., pay-as-you-go, fixed monthly fees, or tiered plans) and evaluate whether it aligns with your budget and expected usage patterns.

But take that one level deeper and make sure that you calculate how your costs might tally up based on your real-world requirements. Since hosting pricing can sometimes be complex, you’ll want to carefully consider how the fees might add up before deciding which is most affordable.

Support

Consider the level of support and maintenance offered by the provider. Look for providers with comprehensive documentation, responsive customer support, and proactive monitoring to address potential issues before they impact your app.

Ease-of-Use

Evaluate the provider’s user interface, management tools, and automation options to ensure they are easy to use. This can streamline your app deployment and maintenance processes.

Reviews

Messaging on the website is one thing, but hearing from real customers will tell you what to expect.

Check reviews, case studies, and testimonials from other developers and businesses using the provider. This can give you insights into the provider’s strengths and weaknesses and help you make a more informed decision.

How to Implement App Hosting

Due to the inherently technical nature of app development, it can be a bit more complex to configure a hosting environment so that it’s able to support the server-side components of a mobile or web app. So here’s a quick overview of the process to help you get started:

1. Choose a hosting provider: Based on your application’s requirements, scalability needs, cost, and other factors, select the appropriate app hosting provider and type (e.g., traditional hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, PaaS, or MBaaS).
2. Sign up for an account: Register for an account with your chosen hosting provider, and select the appropriate plan or resource allocation based on your needs.
3. Set up the hosting environment: Depending on the provider and hosting type, you may need to configure the server environment, install an operating system, set up a web server (e.g., Apache, Nginx), and install necessary runtime environments and frameworks (e.g., Node.js, Python, Ruby on Rails).
4. Deploy your application’s server-side components: Upload your application’s backend code and files to the hosting environment using the provider’s recommended deployment method (e.g., Git, FTP, or provider-specific tools). This includes server-side scripts, database files, and any required dependencies.
5. Configure the database: If your application uses a database, create and configure the database instance (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) according to your application’s requirements. You may also need to import your database schema and initial data.
6. Set up domain and security certificate: If you have a custom domain for your application, configure the DNS settings to point to your hosting provider’s servers. Additionally, install and configure an SSL certificate to enable secure HTTPS connections.
7. Configure security features and access controls: Implement and configure security measures such as user authentication, data encryption, and access controls to protect your application and its data.
8. Test your deployment: Ensure that your application is running correctly on the hosting environment by testing its functionality and performance. Address any issues or bugs that arise during testing.
9. Monitor and optimize: Once your application is live, continuously monitor its performance and resource usage. Identify bottlenecks and optimize your hosting environment as needed (e.g., by adding resources, implementing caching, or using a content delivery network).
10. Plan for scaling and disaster recovery: Develop strategies for handling increased demand and ensuring application availability, including redundancy, failover mechanisms, regular backups, and disaster recovery plans.

Evaluate Before You Invest

If you invest in a solid hosting environment from the start, you can enhance your app’s performance, reliability, scalability, and security, leading to happier and more satisfied users. However, with the amount of options out there in the wild, it’s important to carefully consider your app’s requirements and establish evaluation criteria that help you choose the right platform for your hosting.

At Dreamhost, we’re all about web hosting with purpose. We believe that with the right tools and support system, every developer can bring their dreams to life.

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The post Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Hosting an App for the First Time appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

Well, actually, almost no-one makes calls nowadays. If the plaster cracks or there’s some decorating to do, most people simply search online for a handyman or tradesperson.

In other words, maintaining a great website is incredibly important if you offer home improvement and repair services. In fact, the design of your homepage can be the difference between being booked out, and struggling to find work.

To help you build a compelling online presence, here’s a roundup of the best WordPress themes for your handyman website.

Best WordPress Themes for Handyman Services

One key benefit of powering your business website with WordPress is that you have thousands of great themes to choose from. The tricky part is finding the right design for your brand.

This handpicked list contains various themes, from highly specialized designs to multi-purpose options. But every single entry offers the kind of functionality you need for promoting a trade business, with a head-turning design to match!

1) Terri: Best Theme Designed for Tradespeople

Designed explicitly for handymen, decorators, plumbers, and other tradespeople, Terri provides a solid start to our roundup.

This responsive and Retina-ready theme includes a slick homepage slider, containing a form for inquiries from potential customers. The one-click demo helps you get set up in minutes, and you can customize the color and fonts of the design.

We also like that this theme works with Yoast SEO, meaning you can easily optimize your content for search engines.

Key Features:

• Frontpage slider with built-in inquiry form
• Works with Google Fonts, Contact Form 7, and Yoast SEO
• Responsive design and one-click demo template

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

2) RenoWise: Best Theme for Multiple Trades 

With nine different pre-built templates for different trades, RenoWise is a versatile theme that can work for various service websites.

The collection of templates covers painting, flooring, renovation, carpentry, and more. Each version comes with relevant imagery, and the layout of each template is honed for that particular trade.

The other great thing about this theme is the built-in features, like a cost calculator for estimates, and an element that shows homes before and after you have completed your work.

Key Features:

• Fast to load and SEO-friendly
• Nine templates for different trades
• Unique features incl. cost calculator and before/after image slider

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

3) Constructor: Best Drag-and-Drop Theme for Handyman Websites

Although Constructor comes with pre-made designs for tradespeople, this theme stands out because you can create something unique.

The content builder feature allows you to design individual pages using drag-and-drop controls. You have a variety of modules to choose from, including client testimonials and example projects. On top of this, Constructor lets you select your own color scheme and typography via the WordPress Customizer.

This theme also offers up loads of layouts, shortcodes, social media integrations, and scrolling effects. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the fastest theme here, but it’s definitely one of the most powerful.

Key Features:

• Drag-and-drop content builder with customer review modules
• Color and font options via WordPress Customizer
• Pre-built templates for trade businesses

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

4) ProRange: Best Theme for Home Decorators

With attractive colors and a clean layout, ProRange should appeal to homeowners looking for a handyman with some finesse. This theme is aimed at home decorators, and it actually feels a bit like a paint catalog.

Of course, this is only the default setup. ProRange provides over 750 customization options, so you can make it your own. You can move things around using the WPBakery Page Builder, as well.

Other integrations include Contact Form 7, MailChimp, and WooCommerce — basically everything you need for promoting your company.

Key Features:

• Modern take on web design
• Over 750 customization options
• Works with WPBakery Page Builder, Contact Form 7, MailChimp, WooCommerce, and more

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

5) BlueCollar: Best Theme for Multiple Home Services

Highly rated by Envato customers, BlueCollar is a no-nonsense theme that is well suited to small businesses.

The overall design is clean and professional, with clickable sections for your various services. Using the WPBakery Page Builder, you can also add sections for testimonials, your team, FAQs, your previous work, and your blog. You have the option to choose your color scheme, too.

But other than that, BlueCollar keeps things simple and user friendly. The underlying code is pretty clean, and you can disable any post types you don’t need.

Key Features:

• Clean, professional design
• Multiple post types incl. people, FAQs, galleries, and services
• Drag-and-drop editing via WPBakery Page Builder

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

6) Renovate: Most Powerful Theme for Home Repair Websites

It would be fair to say that Renovate is a theme that is packed with functionality. It comes with a variety of great page builder templates, several premium plugins, and a design that is optimized for sales.

This theme is pleasing on an aesthetic level, as well. All of the default modules are clean and uncluttered, with roomy tables for pricing estimates and colorful tabs that store longer descriptions.

Plus, you can set up your own online store for accessories and service packages.

Key Features:

• Page builder, slider, and cost calculator plugins included
• 20+ page builder templates
• Unlimited custom menus and sidebars

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

7) ProHauz: Best Theme for Home Improvement Services

With six full-site templates for home improvement and maintenance services, ProHauz is a theme that you can use straight out of the box.

The pre-made designs are packed with visual interest, and you have plenty of space to insert your own images and promote your own products. In fact, you can make a pretty compelling one-page website with this theme.

If you want to create something with more depth, you have multiple headers and layouts to play with, and more than 20 elements.

Key Features:

• 6 full-site templates for home improvement services
• Highly visual design with images, icons, and parallax scrolling
• Over 20 individual elements available

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

8) Constructo: Best Theme for Building Service Websites

Even though Constucto is more aimed at construction firms, this theme can definitely work for other services and trades.

It comes with 11 pre-made demos, each with a large hero image or slider to catch the attention of potential clients. In the admin area, you will find a rich selection of customization options, and you can transform any page using Visual Composer plugin.

We particularly like the fact that this theme is 100% responsive. If someone stumbles upon your professional website on their phone, they should be able to navigate easily.

Key Features:

• 11 pre-made demos for different services
• Works with Visual Composer plugin and WooCommerce
• Design is 100% responsive and easy to customize

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

9) Plumbing: Best Theme for Handyman Plumbers

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Plumbing is one of the cleanest themes on this list. It practically sparkles like white bathroom tiles.

Just as importantly, this dazzling theme comes with three pristine site templates, an assortment of page designs, and some really useful lead generation features.

For example, this theme allows you to set up online bookings, build your own pricing tables, and fill out ready-made testimonial blocks. It works with Elementor and WooCommerce, as well.

Key Features:

• Clean, white design with three demo templates
• Online booking system, ecommerce options, testimonials
• Works with Elementor, MailChimp, and WooCommerce

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

10) MrFix: Most Versatile Theme for Home Repair Services

With 60 pre-built elements and a striking default color scheme, MrFix delivers a generous helping of professional polish.

This particular theme is designed for appliance repair businesses, but it can work for a variety of services. The package includes three homepage designs, each with a strong call-to-action. You can drag and drop modules into any order, and change the colors as you see fit.

In the admin area, MrFix helps you with SEO. The theme has been optimized for search, and it has built-in fields for your meta description, site title, and more.

Key Features:

• 3 homepage layouts and 60 pre-built elements
• Strong call to action in default designs
• Good SEO features

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

11) Boldman: Best Theme Builder Template for Tradespeople

Want to try your hand at website design? Boldman is a theme for tradespeople that works with both Elementor and WPBakery — two popular drag-and-drop page builders.

In fact, this highly rated theme enhances these plugins with over 70 custom elements, and builders for both headers and footers. You also have plenty of layouts to choose from.

If all that customization sounds like hard work, Boldman provides an easier option. With over 100 full-site templates and 25 page demos, it’s easy to see why this theme is popular with business owners.

Key Features:

• Extended support for Elementor and WPBakery page builders
• Over 70 custom elements and 100 full-site templates
• Support for WooCommerce online stores

Pricing: $66 one-time purchase

12) Renovation: Best Page Builder Theme for Construction

If you’re definitely going to use a page builder, you might want to consider using the Renovation theme. It was designed specifically for use with Elementor and WPBakery.

This theme gives you seven different homepage layouts to work with, along with three different blog layouts and 14 page templates. Each design can be rearranged using your chosen page builder, and you can build your own headers and footers.

The default look here is slick, if a little uninspiring. But it’s easy enough to change things up using the various theme options.

Key Features:

• Designed for Elementor and WPBakery page builders
• 7 homepage designs and 3 blog layouts
• Support for WooCommerce, Google Fonts, and Contact Form 7

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

13) Construction: Best Full-Screen Theme for Trade Websites

While the Construction theme offers a variety of more standard layouts, the main attraction here is the full-screen homepage.

This design allows you to display a large image related to your work, supplemented with blocks that contain key links. It’s a super-engaging template that should deliver plenty of leads.

Aside from this particular layout, you have multiple homepage designs, page templates, headers, and footers to experiment with. And as a bonus, this theme even comes with a couple of useful SEO plugins.

Key Features:

• Full screen homepage layout and other options
• Works with Elementor and WPBakery
• Fast to load, and SEO plugins included

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

14) ElectroServ: Best Theme for Electrical Services

If your trade is electrical services, ElectroServ would make a good choice for your professional website. It would actually work well for almost any trade.

As with many other themes on this list, you get page builder features, loads of pre-made templates, and plenty of customization options. The design is simple but effective, and ElectroServ works with third-party plugins like MailChimp and Visual Composer.

We also like how easily you can set up online bookings with this theme, and create good-looking forms.

Key Features:

• Page builder features and pre-made templates
• Works with MailChimp, Visual Composer, and Contact Form 7
• Easily set up online booking and contact forms

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

15) SturdyFix: Best Ready-Made Theme for Handyman Websites

While SturdyFix does work with the Elementor page builder, the real advantage of this theme comes from the ready-made templates.

All of the designs are modern and clean, with premium stock images included. This means you can publish your new site with minimal editing.

Of course, you can still adjust the colors and fonts if you want. SturdyFix also provides an extensive menu of widgets and shortcodes, including a testimonials list and a box for listing your service areas.

Key Features:

• Full-site templates with images included
• Extensive shortcodes and widgets
• Compatible with Elementor

Pricing: $79 one-time purchase

16) Yellow Hats: Best Theme for Construction Business Websites

Yellow Hats is primarily aimed at the construction industry. It comes with 35 full-site demos, each with an appealing full-width slider and prominent CTAs.

These layouts are designed using a huge array of reusable UI elements, which you can place anywhere using the Visual Composer page builder. More than 350 of these modules are available, each with its own settings.

Yellow Hats also offers loads of different menu options, several blog layouts, 15 slider presets, and plenty of theme options.

Key Features:

• 35 full-site demos and 350 UI elements
• Works with Visual Composer and WooCommerce
• Multiple homepage, menu, and blog layouts

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

17) Fixtor: Best Modern Theme for Handyman Services

There is nothing particularly flashy about Fixtor — and that’s precisely why we like it.

This theme applies the principles of modern web design in a package that is perfect for sole traders and small home maintenance firms. The five different homepage templates are clean and efficient, with your business phone number displayed prominently or a link to your contact page.

Another nice feature is the visual layout on the services page. Using small squares in a grid, you can easily show off your talents and add some details.

Key Features:

• Clean, modern design with compelling layouts and white space
• Works with Elementor, MailChimp, and WooCommerce
• Search optimization and social media integrations

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

18) Sway: Best Multipurpose Theme for Tradespeople 

You don’t necessarily need a specialized template to make a great website. Sway is a general small business theme that you can adapt to your trade, and it will look fantastic.

This theme comes with over 300 template blocks and 50 content elements, which you can piece together using the WPBakery page builder. The default styling is impeccable, and extensive theme options allow you to make any number of changes.

With 18 portfolio layouts and four project templates, Sway also helps you to showcase your previous work.

Key Features:

• Page builder with 300 elements and 50 content blocks
• Numerous blog, portfolio, and online store templates
• 45 full-site designs

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

19) Handyman: Best Responsive Theme for Repair Service Websites

Pretty desktop themes are great, but more than half of people now search on mobile devices. The Handyman theme will put you in prime position to catch those potential clients.

Based on Visual Composer code, the layout of this theme adapts beautifully to smaller screens, with swipe controls and mobile-friendly sliders.

The search optimization of this theme is another strength, and you get a nice selection of custom widgets to spice up footers and sidebars.

Key Features:

• Responsive design with strong mobile optimization
• SEO and ecommerce features
• Various homepage layouts, built with Visual Composer

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

20) HomeCare: Best One-Click Handyman Website Theme

If you want to create a site without putting in hours of effort, HomeCare is worth your attention.

Based on Elementor and a collection of other plugins, this theme allows you to install a clean, responsive template with a couple of clicks. You get multiple ready-made pages to choose from, and you can even use the stock images from the default design.

In terms of functionality, you can build your email list with MailChimp and set up shop with Ecwid.

Key Features:

• Ready to publish in a couple of clicks
• Easy to adapt using Elementor
• SEO friendly and responsive

Pricing: $67 one-time purchase

Best Free Themes for Handyman Service Websites

Don’t fancy paying for a premium theme? You’re in luck. The following five themes are all completely free, and they offer many of the same features as the premium themes above.

21) Chique Construction: Best Free Handyman Theme with Slider

If you compare Chique Construction with many premium themes on this list, you probably won’t notice much difference.

A child theme of the Chique theme, this freebie has a stylish image slider at the top of the homepage, and sections for testimonials and portfolio projects. It’s also responsive, and you get a decent selection of theme options.

Key Features:

• Great homepage slider
• Testimonial and portfolio content types
• Responsive design with theme options

22) Building Construction Architecture: Free Bootstrap Theme for Handyman Websites

It might not have the catchiest name, but Building Construction Architecture is a solid free choice for any trade business.

Based on Bizberg, this child theme uses the Bootstrap framework to adapt to different devices and browsers. The base design is pretty straightforward and modern, and support for Elementor means you can make it your own.

Key Features:

• Responsive design based on the Bootstrap framework
• SEO friendly
• Works with Elementor

23) Construction Kit: Best Free Page Builder Theme for Tradespeople

At first glance, Construction Kit seems like a very simple theme. But because it works with a long list of page builders, anyone can turn it into something special.

You can use this theme with Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, KingComposer, and other similar apps. The responsive design works well on mobile devices, and WooCommerce support means you can set up your own online store.

Key Features:

• Works with most page builder plugins
• SEO friendly and responsive
• Supports WooCommerce

24) Blocksy: Best Free Lightweight Theme for Handyman Websites

This all-purpose theme is free, incredibly fast, and optimized for page builders.

You don’t necessarily need to use a drag-and-drop editor to get the most out of Blocksy. The basic design is super clean, and you can import various starter sites with the one-click installation.

If you’re happy to be more involved with the design process, you can work with Gutenberg, Brizy, Elementor, or Beaver Builder.

Key Features:

• Very impressive speed
• One-click starter sites available
• Works with Brizy, Elementor, and Beaver Builder

25) Construction Landing Page: Free Handyman Theme for Inquiries

Many free themes skip the features that make WordPress useful for business. Not so with Construction Landing Page.

This speedy, responsive theme slaps an inquiry form at the top of your homepage, meaning potential clients don’t have to navigate to make contact.

Visitors who want more information can visit your services and client sections, and you can build a stylish little portfolio with this theme. It has great user reviews, too.

Key Features:

• Fast and responsive design
• Call-to-action on default homepage
• Portfolio, services, and client sections

How to Build a Great Handyman Website

Of course, choosing a theme is only part of the process of setting up your site. Here’s a quick guide to building the best handyman website the world has ever seen:

• Grab a memorable domain — Register a domain that matches the name of your business. Alternatively, choose something short, snappy, and memorable.
• Find a reliable hosting provider — Dreamhost offers hosting with a 100% uptime guarantee, and some of our packages come with WordPress pre-installed.
• Optimize your site — From theme options to the site title, it’s worth taking some time to get your new WordPress website set up correctly.
• Choose your pages — You don’t need a million pages to have a great website. But for a handyman or trade business, we would recommend having services and contact pages, as a minimum.
• Decorate your site with high-quality images — It’s easy to ruin a beautiful theme with bad photos. On the flip side, adding high-quality images to your website can really grab the attention of visitors.
• Take advantage of plugins — Check out the WordPress plugin directory for instant upgrades to security, performance, SEO, and much more.
• Highlight your results — In writing and pictures, make sure to talk about what you have achieved for previous customers. You can mention years of experience, but people mainly want to know about results.

Complete each of the steps mentioned above, and you should be near to publishing your handyman or trade website. The whole process shouldn’t take you longer than a few hours; our guide to WordPress will help you with the details.

If you get stuck, remember that DreamHost is here to simplify this process for you. From WordPress hosting and custom web design to SEO and website management, our team of in-house experts can help you build the ultimate online brand.

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The post 25 WordPress Themes Perfect for Your Handyman Website appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

While there may be some challenges involved in migrating from Universal Analytics to GA4, the benefits make it all worth it. Google knows we could all use a hand in these early days, which is why they’ve provided some pre-built templates to help you create detailed analytics reports in no time at all.

The GA4 Explorations Template Gallery is jam-packed with useful tools for marketers, data scientists, digital agencies, business owners, and even brand new GA4 users. Ready to dig deep into your analytics? Here’s everything you need to know about Explorations and the Template Gallery.

What Are Explorations in GA4?

Previously called the “analysis hub,” GA4 Explorations (or the “Explore” section) is a feature in Google Analytics 4 that allows users to create ad-hoc reports and analyze their data in a more flexible and intuitive way. It is a powerful tool for data exploration and can help you uncover insights not readily apparent in pre-built reports or dashboards.

How Do Explorations Work?

Here are the basics for how to use Explorations in GA4:

• Accessing the Exploration feature: To start using the Exploration feature, you need to navigate to the “Exploration” tab in the GA4 interface. From there, you can select the data source (e.g., your website or app) and choose the metrics and dimensions you want to analyze.
• Building an Exploration: Once you have selected your data source and metrics, you can drag and drop dimensions into the “Explore” panel to build your Exploration. You can add multiple dimensions and metrics to your Exploration and rearrange them to create a custom report.
• Customizing your report: GA4 Explorations allow for a lot of customization. For example, you can adjust the time frame of the data, apply filters to your report, and create segments based on specific criteria. You can also visualize your data in a variety of ways, such as tables, line charts, and pie charts.
• Sharing and saving your Exploration: Once you have built an Exploration, you can save it for future use or share it with other members of your team. You can also export your report as a CSV file or a Google Sheet.

Explorations also come with an option that helps you save a ton of time: The Template Gallery. Here you can find Exploration report templates that you can set up in just minutes — and with just a few clicks.

What Are GA4 Exploration Templates?

Exploration templates in GA4 are pre-built reports that allow users to quickly explore and analyze their data without needing to build custom reports from scratch. These templates can be accessed from the “Exploration” tab in the GA4 interface and cover a variety of common business questions and metrics.

How Do You Access Exploration Templates?

On the left-hand side of your GA4 homepage, click “Explore” in the menu. This takes you to a page with all your exploration reports, including any templates or explorations you have ongoing or have used previously.

On the right-hand side, near the top of the page, you’ll see a link for the “Template gallery.” Click it to go to the main gallery page and browse available templates.

GA4 Explorations Templates (and How to Use Them)

The template gallery is currently divided into three sections: Techniques, use cases, and industries. Below, we’ll look at the pre-built templates that are available in each section, with a brief overview of how you can use each one.

Techniques

Blank

The first option on the Template Gallery is to create a blank Exploration. This option is for building your own template from scratch- a truly powerful tool — but not necessarily recommended for beginners.

The sky’s the limit for the reporting templates you can build (and that could be a whole blog post on its own). But since we’re focusing on using templates to save time, we’re going to skip this one for now. Feel free to come back to this option once you’ve experimented with Explorations and are ready to build your own custom report templates from scratch.

Free Form

Free Form is very similar to the Blank template option, but with more of a focus on creating custom charts and tables. It allows you to create unique data visualizations by customizing your rows and columns. Like the Blank template, this one is better used once you have some GA4 Explorations experience under your belt.

Funnel Exploration

Funnel Exploration is one of the most valuable templates, and can help you identify important insights about your customer journey. This template allows you to visualize and analyze the steps in a user journey, from initial acquisition to conversion. The Funnel Exploration template is designed to help you identify bottlenecks in the conversion process, understand all the steps in your funnel, and, perhaps most importantly, see where people are falling out of your desired funnel.

This template supports up to 10 steps in your funnel, which you can select in the first tab. Once you build your funnel, you can then analyze each step in the process, using different segments, filters, and visualization options to get more granular insights.

Based on your analysis, you can identify areas of the funnel where users are dropping off or experiencing friction, and take steps to optimize those steps. For example, you may need to improve the user experience on a particular page, or adjust your messaging or targeting to better align with user needs.

Overall, the Funnel Exploration template in the GA4 Exploration Template Gallery is a powerful tool for analyzing user behavior and optimizing your conversion process. By visualizing the steps in your funnel and identifying areas of opportunity, you can make data-driven decisions that help you improve your marketing ROI and drive business growth.

Path Exploration

The Path Exploration template is similar to Funnel Exploration. It allows you to visualize and analyze the paths users take on your website or app. The Path Exploration template is designed to help you understand the most common user journeys and identify areas of opportunity for improving the user experience.

Once you have selected your starting event, you can drag and drop additional events or pageviews into the “Explore” panel to create the path you want to analyze. You can add up to 10 steps to your path, and can include any event or pageview in your data.

Once you have built your path, you can analyze the performance of each step in the journey. The Path Exploration template provides a range of visualization options, including tables, bar charts, and line charts, to help you understand how users are moving through the path. You can also apply filters and segments to your report for more detailed insights.

This template helps you see users not through specific funnels, but through their organic behaviors. That results in a whole new set of insights you can use to optimize your site or app.

Segment Overlap

The Segment Overlap template allows you to compare the behavior of different user segments on your website or app. The Segment Overlap template is designed to help you understand how different segments interact with your content and identify areas of opportunity for improving engagement and conversions.

In this template, after you select the segments you want to view, you can compare their behavior across a range of metrics, like session duration, bounce rate, and conversion rate.

By comparing different segments, you can analyze the results to identify areas of opportunity for improving engagement and conversions. The overlap and differences between segments can help you make data-driven decisions as you better understand your audience.

User Explorer

The User Explorer template uses user data (based on the type of reporting identity you have set in Google Analytics) to help you analyze the behavior of individual users on your website or app. The User Explorer template is designed to help you understand the journey that each user takes.

This template is great for looking at demographic data, or you can do a deep dive into behaviors for an individual user (while still maintaining user anonymity), uncovering insights about patterns in their behaviors on your site. You can analyze their behavior across a range of metrics, including pageviews, events, and conversions.

Cohort Exploration

The Cohort Explorer template is a pre-built report that allows you to analyze the behavior of different user cohorts. A cohort is a group of users who share a common characteristic, qualities, or behaviors, such as the month they first visited your website or app. That makes this template similar to the User Explorer template, but less granular.

One of the most powerful features of this template is how it allows you to follow one cohort over time. This is a great way to track how your marketing efforts and site optimization are performing; for example, tracking a cohort that represents a certain target audience can help you determine how well you’re reaching that target audience through your marketing efforts.

User Lifetime

The User Lifetime template is also similar to the User Explorer template, only now you’re looking at individual users over their entire customer life cycle. This is a great way to analyze the lifetime value of your customers or users — the User Lifetime template is designed to help you understand the behavior of high-value users and identify areas of opportunity for increasing revenue and driving business growth.

It’s also valuable for designing remarketing campaigns, identifying points where customers tend to churn, and finding patterns in customers who don’t churn.

Use Cases

Acquisition

We all know acquisition is one of the most important parts of site and app analytics, so GA4 includes a template for it. The Acquisition template allows you to analyze how users are finding and interacting with your website or app. The report focuses on the different channels and campaigns that are driving traffic to your site or app, and the behavior of users who arrive through those channels.

Start by selecting a time range that you want to examine. Then, you can analyze the traffic sources that drove users to your site or app during that time. The Acquisition template provides data on the performance of each channel, such as organic search, social media, and paid advertising, as well as the campaigns that are driving traffic.

The template also allows you to analyze the behavior of users who arrive through each traffic source. You can analyze metrics such as bounce rate, session duration, and conversion rate to understand how users are engaging with your site or app.

Based on your analysis, you can identify areas of opportunity for improving conversions. For example, you may discover that users who arrive through organic search have a higher conversion rate than users who arrive through paid advertising. You can then take steps to optimize your paid advertising campaigns to better target high-value users.

Conversion

Before you can use the Conversion template, you need to set up some conversions. In GA4, you can mark any event as a conversion — For example, making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. Just go to the Events page, create a new event or modify an existing one, and toggle the conversion switch.

The Conversion template then analyzes the performance of your website or app in terms of conversions. It provides data on the number of conversions, conversion rate, and revenue generated by each conversion. You can also analyze the performance of different conversion goals.

The Conversion template also allows you to analyze the behavior of users who convert on your site or app. You can analyze user metrics like session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate to understand how these users engage with your site or app.

User Behavior

If you loved the landing page report in Universal Analytics, the User Behavior template is for you. It’s not exactly the same as the landing page report, but it’s the closest to it in the pre-made templates, allowing you to follow specific users through the different stages of the user journey based on their landing page. You can track them through acquisition, engagement, and retention — the report helps you visualize and understand how users are moving through these different stages.

The User Behavior template provides data on the number of users at each stage of the journey, and you can also analyze the behavior of users at each stage, such as the channels that are driving acquisition, the content that is driving engagement, and the features that are driving retention.

Based on your analysis, you can identify areas of opportunity for improving engagement and retention. For example, you may discover that users who engage with certain types of content are more likely to become long-term users. You can then take steps to create more of this type of content and optimize your site or app to encourage engagement and retention.

Industries

Ecommerce

If you use Google Analytics to track and analyze any ecommerce platforms, you’ll want to check out the Ecommerce template. This will likely look familiar to you, since it’s based on ecommerce reports that were available in Universal Analytics.

The Ecommerce template focuses on the key metrics and dimensions related to ecommerce transactions and helps you understand how users are interacting with your products. It provides data on the number of transactions, revenue, and average order value. You can also analyze metrics such as product revenue, product quantity, and product refunds, as well as analyze the behavior of users who make transactions on your site or app.

Gaming

If your site or app includes games, you’ll likely use the gaming template. This allows you to analyze how your games are performing, the behavior of your players, and metrics such as game progression, levels completed, and game mode preferences — all useful ways to understand how users engage with your game.

The Gaming template also allows you to analyze specific in-game events, such as item purchases, level-ups, and achievements. You can track the frequency of these events and the revenue generated from them.

Using the GA4 Explorations Template Gallery

No matter which template you choose, it will have a similar layout with three available tabs: Variables, Tab Settings, and Output.

The “technique” for the report will depend on the template you choose, affecting the options available in each tab. But in general,

• Variables is where you customize your segments, dimensions, and metrics. Segments can be user-based, event-based, or session-based. Click the “+” to see all your segment options. Below that, dimensions allow you to further customize the data you want to explore.
• Once you’ve set up your variables, you can drag them into the necessary section of Tab Settings to apply them to your output. You can also use Tab Settings to adjust what is displayed in your output and how it’s laid out.
• Finally, the Output tab shows your Exploration in action. As you customize settings in the first two tabs, the results shown in the third tab change in real-time, so you can make your reports exactly how you want them.

If this all seems complicated, don’t worry — the template you choose will come with default Variables and Tab Settings. Of course, you can customize your outputs more as you experiment with the templates, but using them with their default settings also give you a ton of powerful insights.

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Remember in 1998’s You’ve Got Mail when Meg Ryan‘s character waits impatiently for her dial-up internet to connect before typing an email to her virtual pen pal on a simple dialog box?

Although email and email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, that doesn’t make it outdated. Au contraire!

While dial-up and AOL instant messaging may have been left in the past, email hasn’t. Website owners and businesses, large and small, continue to find huge success with this marketing channel and strategies that include email newsletters, new product announcements, marketing automation sequences, and special offers.

In fact, 89% of marketers say that email is their primary channel for lead generation. Unlike screen names or Myspace pages, website owners still use email to build customer relationships and augment sales.

Marketers consistently rank email as the single-most-effective tactic for driving brand awareness, new customer acquisition, generating conversions, and increasing customer loyalty and retention. They’ve branded it, fittingly, “the workhorse”. And email’s effectiveness proves your marketing budget should include more money allotted to getting into the inbox.

More than half of consumers say they enjoy receiving emails from brands.

But understand this: You don’t have to be a big-shot marketer to create and send email campaigns. Even beginners can use emails to generate slam-dunk sales or build a loyal blog following.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing includes any marketing or communication sent to customers, prospects, or contacts via email. Transactional emails, email newsletters, promotional emails, CRM-driven campaigns, and more are all examples of email marketing.

An email marketing strategy can be established to achieve all kinds of business goals, including driving sales and revenue or improving retention and reducing customer churn.

Email marketing is often credited as one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for both B2B and B2C businesses.

Email Marketing Basics: Setup

If you’re like 58% of adults, after waking up and resisting the urge to hit the snooze button, you’re rolling over groggily to grab your phone. Within seconds, you’re scanning your email inbox before your eyelids even fully open.

And now, with the increased usage of everything mobile, people are “always on” in terms of their inboxes: whether on commutes, in the bathroom (germy, but true), or in almost every social situation, they’re one micro-click away from checking their email.

Email marketing capitalizes on habits like this in a major way.

At its most basic, email marketing involves acquiring potential customers’ email addresses to share content with them and build business-to-customer relationships. And there’s a reason that this strategy is tried-and-true. For every dollar spent, email marketing averages an ROI of $38.

The numbers don’t lie: 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a direct result of an email marketing message.

Still not convinced that you need an email marketing strategy? Consider these stats:

• You are six times more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet. Bonus: you get more than 140 characters to do it.
• 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed (they’re probably watching cat videos).
• Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter and achieves 174% more conversions.
• More people use email than social platforms.
• Email is a direct line of communication with website visitors that have explicitly said they want to hear from you!
• Some social media platforms cater to specific age groups and not others (hello, Snapchat). Biting your nails over catering to millennials, baby boomers, or Gen Xers, respectively? Email marketing crosses age groups in terms of effectiveness; email is the preferred means of business communication across all age groups.
• Once you have their email address, you can continue to market to your subscribers for mere pennies (unless they unsubscribe).

Let’s jump right into how you can get started with email marketing.

Start with a Website

If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably got a snazzy website up and running. If not, follow this guide to building a WordPress website in five minutes and then rejoin us. (Don’t worry. We’ll wait.)

While you technically don’t need a website to engage in email marketing, it makes sense for most businesses. It’s usually where customers and potential customers find your business, and it’s an obvious place to start collecting emails and growing your list.

All setup? OK, now it’s time to market your content and products to loyal followers.

Set Up an Email Service Provider (ESP)

You could gather a list of email addresses, keep them in a spreadsheet, and send out messages manually, but that sounds like a lot of work. If you’re hoping to grow and maintain a substantial email list, you’ll need a dedicated tool to help you manage it.

There are a lot of email marketing services out there, each offering an array of features and functionality to help you build your email list, send your messages, and track your results. You’ll want to look for an option that offers:

• All the features you’ll need, such as a customizable email list, message templates, and targeting options.
• Plenty of scalability, so the service can grow along with your campaigns.
• Workflow and automation options to handle some of the tasks involved in email marketing for you.
• Analytics tracking, which will enable you to get a clear picture of the success of your email marketing campaign.

If you don’t already have an email marketing tool in mind (or don’t know where to start looking), here are a few of our favorite options.

GetResponse

GetResponse is an all-in-one email marketing software that works well for a wide variety of industries and niches. It focuses on helping you create professional and compelling emails and making your email list as easy to manage as possible. If you’re looking for a very hands-off solution that automates much of the work for you, this is a solid tool to check out.

You’ll also get access to a few additional features, such as landing pages and webinars.

Key Features:

• Enables you to create emails using a simple but flexible interface.
• Offers autoresponders and other email automation functionality.
• Makes it easy to segment and target emails based on specific audience characteristics.
• Lets you perform A/B testing and track your email performance.

Pricing:

GetResponse offers four plans starting at $19 per month.

How to Integrate GetResponse with Your WordPress Site:

As with many popular email marketing platforms, GetResponse offers you the option to integrate its features with WordPress. It does so through a dedicated plugin: GetResponse Integration. This tool enables you to create an opt-in form and add it to your site. Subscriptions collected this way will be automatically incorporated into your email list. Plus, you can customize your form using the List Builder Wizard.

Quick note: At the time of writing this, the official GetResponse WordPress plugin is currently off the market because of a security issue. But there are other third-party plugins that should work in much the same way. See: Fast GetResponse.

To get access to these features, you’ll need to download, install, and activate the plugin on your site. This will add a new widget option that enables you to create a subscription form which can be added to your sidebar or footer area. You can then customize your form and its settings as you see fit.

AWeber

If you want to begin with an email marketing service that is simple to use and beginner-friendly, you can’t go wrong with AWeber. It prides itself on offering features that are easy to implement and by providing reliable support to help you get started. Plus, it has just about everything you’ll need to build and manage your list.

Key Features:

• Enables you to create emails using a drag-and-drop builder, HTML, or a simple text editor.
• Makes it easy to set up a series of automated emails.
• Offers expert support via phone, chat, and email.
• Provides handy integration with various platforms, including WordPress.

Pricing:

With AWeber, you can start with a free plan and then choose from two scaled plans starting at $15 per month or get a customized quote for large subscriber counts.

How to Integrate AWeber with Your WordPress Site:

When adding AWeber to WordPress, you have a couple of options. For example, you can use the official AWeber Web Form Plugin to drag and drop forms directly onto your site. This is a simple method, although some users have reportedly had difficulty getting this plugin to work properly (as you can see from the user reviews on the WordPress.org plugin page).

For a more reliable option, you can use JavaScript code to include an AWeber form just about anywhere you want on your site. Simply find the JavaScript snippet for the form you’d like to use and paste it into the text editor on one of your WordPress posts or pages. It’s that easy!

MailChimp

As with the previous two services, MailChimp offers plenty of features to help you create emails, automate the sending process, and manage your list. However, this particular email marketing service stands out thanks to its analytics options. With the tools MailChimp provides, you’ll find it easy to judge how well your current campaigns perform, and make targeted improvements designed to bring about better results.

Key Features:

• Offers a campaign builder to assist you in building an entire email campaign workflow.
• Includes automation functionality that takes care of several rote tasks for you.
• Integrates easily with various e-commerce platforms and social media.
• Provides analytics reports that show you how well your emails are performing.

Pricing:

MailChimp offers four plans — A free (though limited in terms of functionality) tier, a “Essentials” plan starting at $13 per month, and a “Standard” plan that costs $20 per month. They also have a “Premium” plan that runs $350/mo.

How to Integrate MailChimp with Your WordPress Site:

The simplest way to use MailChimp in combination with WordPress is to use the handy plugin. MailChimp for WordPress is an official tool offering a number of handy features. For example, it will connect your WordPress site to your MailChimp account, enable you to create sign-up forms and automatically incorporate the resulting information into your email list, and more.

To get started, download and install the free plugin on your site. After activating the plugin, you’ll need to connect it to your MailChimp account using your API key and tweak any settings you’d like. Then you’ll be ready to start customizing your form and publish it to your site!

Some Other Email Marketing Platforms

Just for fun, here are a few other options you might consider:

• HubSpot – Known for its comprehensive marketing and sales platform, HubSpot does email marketing pretty well, but it could be overkill for someone just starting out.
• Constant Contact – A budget-friendly, well-respected option.

Create an Opt-In Form

Successful email marketing works like visiting someone’s house; You have to be invited first.

Email marketing begins when a potential or current customer gives you permission to send them emails.

This may seem obvious, but you need to provide your website visitors with a way to sign up for your email list. A dedicated form is a perfect way to do just that. You can design it to include whatever information you’d like, link to it in prominent locations on your site, and let it do its job without any further input on your end.

When building your email list signup form, we recommend keeping it as simple as possible.

The more information you request and fields you include, the less likely visitors will be to complete it. Just ask for the necessary details, such as name and email address. Oh, and don’t forget to tell your audience what they can expect in return for signing up (more on this in the next step).

Plenty of quality form-building plugins can help simplify this process, such as WPForms and Ninja Forms. Both of these plugins include drag-and-drop builders that make creating your form simple.

You can customize standard fields and add your own, tweak your form’s style and appearance, and make certain fields optional and others required. Or you can redirect users to a particular message or page once they enter their information.

Display Multiple Calls to Action (CTAs)

A call to action is any element on your site that encourages visitors to take a desired next step.

In this case, that step will be signing up as an email subscriber. You can add CTAs in the form of buttons, navigational links, or simple lines of text. What matters is that to be effective, your CTAs should be prominently placed and well-designed.

It’s probably best to include a link to your signup form in multiple locations across your website.

Smart placements include your homepage, headers/ footers, sidebars, menus, and at the end of every blog post or article.

Wherever you put them, make sure your CTAs are prominent and include something to provoke your audience’s curiosity and interest (such as a statement about the benefits they’ll receive by subscribing).

How you create these CTAs and add them to your site will depend on your setup. You don’t necessarily need additional tools since you can likely use your theme’s native features (or engage in some coding if you have the know-how). For more options, however, you can download one or more dedicated plugins to help with this task.

WordPress Calls to Action, for example, is a comprehensive option enabling you to create many types of CTAs based on an existing library of styles or your own custom designs. You can also track their results to improve performance.

MaxButtons will help you create and customize attention-grabbing CTA buttons to use anywhere on your site.

Use Pop-Ups to Draw Attention

Prominent placement, bold colors, and well-chosen fonts are excellent ways to ensure your CTAs have a high conversion rate.

For even better results, you can also employ pop-ups.

This feature grabs visitors’ attention and directs them to your email list signup form.

There are many types of pop-ups available to help inform people of your email list. Some are designed to show up immediately when a user visits your webpage, others appear after a specific amount of time or when the user scrolls to a certain point on the page, and still more show up only when visitors seem like they’re about to leave your site. All of these moments are excellent opportunities to display a quick message directing people to your signup form.

But use sparingly. Too many pop-ups can (understandably) irritate people.

Tools such as OptinMonster and Popup Maker enable you to create customized pop-ups quickly and easily.

Provide an Excellent User Experience

Finally, your entire website serves as an advertisement for your email list.

Eye-catching, intriguing CTAs won’t help you if the rest of your site is boring, unprofessional, or difficult to use. Spending some time ensuring that your site’s design and functionality are up to date is essential for providing a solid user experience. So is creating quality content that your audience finds valuable.

Along with design and functionality, your site’s performance is also crucial. Slow or unresponsive pages can easily frustrate visitors and drive them away. There are plenty of ways to improve your site’s speed, but it all begins with your web host. A quality WordPress hosting plan can ensure that your site is lightning-fast and benefits from maximum uptime. With fully managed WordPress hosting like DreamPress, you can turn your attention to email marketing and other vital tasks and let us take care of the rest.

Just as there is with crafting your email content itself, there’s an art to creating a winning opt-in message. This includes incorporating appealing visuals, having a persuasive description that offers subscribers an additional benefit, and presenting a compelling subscribe button (among other things).

Email Marketing Strategy

Now that we’ve covered the basic ingredients, we need to define why we’re doing email marketing, aka, our email marketing strategy.

Setting Email Marketing Goals and Metrics

First, it’s smart to set some goals and make a plan for what you want to accomplish through your email marketing efforts.

Start by defining what goals you have, for example:

• Drive more traffic
• Increase sales
• Improve customer loyalty

Any of these are relevant goals for an email marketing strategy.

But how do you know if you’ve run a successful email marketing campaign? What should you look for?

That’s where metrics come into play.

Here is a quick-guide glossary of metrics you should keep an eye on in coordination with your overall marketing plan.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate (both hard and soft) indicates the percentage of total emails that were undeliverable. It’s measured by the total number of bounced emails divided by the number of emails sent. Sometimes this is a server issue, but sometimes it’s a spam issue.

Unsubscribe Rate

The rate at which people remove themselves from your email list is a good correction tool. It can help you know which emails were causing subscribers to ditch your list and correct those issues in future communications.

Open Rate

The percentage of email subscribers who open a given email. This can sometimes be misleading, as an “open” counts as a subscriber who receives the images embedded in a particular message. That being said, it can clue you into what subject lines are most effective, which days your emails are being opened, and the average percentage of your email list responding to your messages.

Click-through Rate

The number of times a link in your message is clicked. This is important for understanding if your subscribers are acting on your invitations to buy, visit, or give feedback.

Action Over Time

A timeline of engagement with your emails; this stat can assist you in planning when is the best time to send campaigns.

Spam Score

Not all email marketing service providers will provide this number, but it’s worth thinking about if you can get your hands on it. Before you hit send, it can indicate the likelihood of your message getting slammed by spam filters. A Spam Complaint metric can also be used to correct past errors that caused your subscribers to designate certain message as spam.

Based on these numbers, you can adjust your content format.

It might also be important to keep track of email client data so you can see how successfully or unsuccessfully messages might appear on different client types. Also, encourage your subscribers to give you feedback so you can learn and improve your communications the next time.

Lastly, here are some tools that can help you keep track (if your service provider doesn’t already) and benchmarks that help you see how you stack up in your industry.

Email Segmentation

Emails that are more targeted will help you get the right content to the people who will be most interested in reading it, resulting in higher click-through rates and conversions (not to mention a decrease in the number of those hitting the “unsubscribe” button or sending your mail to spam).

By segmenting, you can vary the content, like sending your newsletter or promotional content to the most receptive audience. This is also important if you have multiple goals for your overall email marketing strategy. It doesn’t make sense to measure customer retention from emails sent only to people who have never bought from you.

So, what kinds of groups can you segment subscribers into? Here are a few examples:

• Location: Having an upcoming event or pop-up sale? Notify subscribers who are local to the area.
• New Subscribers: Welcome the newbies and let them know how glad you are to have them as a part of your following.
• Items Remaining in Shopping Cart: Give those hesitant or forgetful shoppers a call to action. Remind subscribers with yet-to-be-purchased products in their online carts to complete their checkout.
• Preferences: Segment your emails based on certain types of emails. Some subscribers may only want notifications about upcoming sales or discounts; others may want news of every just-launched blog post.
• Open Rate: Call it a “frequent-reader” perk: lavish your engaged subscribers with unique content or premiums.
• Survey or Quiz Results: Group customers based on how they respond to your prompts for feedback.
• Demographics: Specific information about your contacts and who they are.

The goal of list segmentation is personalization; each subscriber receives content relevant to them and will, therefore, interact with the content more. Picture it: fewer spam designations, more engagement, more successful email campaigns, etc.

Sequences and Automation

Along with segmentation is sequencing, a tactic in where a series of emails are generated based on set intervals or subscriber behavior-triggered automations.

Email sequences help you automate (less work for you) and get the right messages to your subscribers when it’s most effective. Sequences may include emails targeted at reactivating disengaged subscribers, encouraging them to attend a local event, or following up on a recent purchase. You can also craft a welcome sequence for new members, helping them learn more about your business.

And it works.

After one year of using automation, 32% of businesses reported increased revenue.

Emails Types & Examples (14 Effective Emails to Try)

Once we have a strategy in mind and the basic building blocks in place, it’s time to dream.

Dream big.

One of the best things about email marketing is the endless opportunity for creativity and testing. Your only limit is your imagination (or the amount of coffee and inspirational quotes you’ve read this morning).

Here are 14 examples of different types of emails you may want to include in your strategy.

1. Newsletter

Newsletters are perhaps the most common type of email sent out by large and small businesses. That’s because even in the age of 140-character missives, email newsletters still remain an effective way to engage with your subscribers.

Newsletters can showcase your brand personality, provide valuable content for your followers, and help you contribute positively to your industry.

Email newsletters come in a variety of types that you’ve probably seen, like roundups of recent posts, curated guides, information about upcoming events, or useful bonus content.

2. Receipt Emails

It’s now common for customers to receive confirmation receipts after purchases. These transactional emails typically include tracking details and contact information, as well as a confirmation of payment: “You purchased X product for Y price.” They can be simple but should include the necessary information so as to serve as a proper record of the expense.

3. Win-back Emails

Breaking up (with your customers) is hard to do. It’s a sad reality, but losing a few purchasers is simply a part of the website-owning game, so don’t take it too personally.

(Of course, you can still break out the Ben & Jerry’s if you want to.)

Some subscribers who have purchased in the past may have lost interest over time, or they were just purchasing something as a one-time gift.

Whatever the reason, win-back emails give you the opportunity to usher lost customers back into the fold.

Incentivize the lapsed customers to return and engage by offering personal discounts or additional bonuses and, then, after the initial “Miss You” message, follow up.

Encourage them to update their email preferences or add you to their contact list.

4. Renewal Emails

You and your customers have a good thing going. So encourage them to keep returning by renewing their subscription, membership, or product/service package. Alert them that it’s time to renew (they’ll appreciate the reminder!)

Because the information is time sensitive, keep the email simple, straightforward, and clear.

Give your customers a reason to renew and a front-and-center call to action.

5. Upgrade Invites

As customers’ subscriptions or free trials end, invite them to upgrade by enticing them with additional features offered on a premium plan.

Make it personal to each customer by indicating how much time is left on their particular subscription and point out which new features might specifically benefit them. Explain what they’ll gain by upgrading (and what they’ll miss out on if they don’t). Include details on pricing and a clear call to action. You should always make it obvious what you want users to do.

6. Abandoned Cart Emails

There are a lot of reasons that customers might not complete a purchase: time constraints, price, complicated checkout processes, and myriad other reasons. In fact, the average rate of cart abandonment is 69% for online shopping.

Oof.

Luckily, you don’t have to wave goodbye to those sales forever; sending abandoned cart emails is an effective means of bringing customers back and earning their sales. Email notifications about abandoned carts have a 40.5% open rate.

Additionally, online shoppers who received more than one abandoned shopping cart email are 2.4 times more likely to complete their purchase than those who receive only one follow-up email. That’s good news for you!

Target excels at the abandoned cart email game, cleverly inviting almost-shoppers back to the site to complete purchases.

Some tips for an enticing abandoned cart email:

• Embrace sentiment: If customers feel like they are missing out on something, they’re more likely to act.
• Personalize: Make customers feel special.
• Specify: Remind customers what items they’ve left in their carts.
• Incentivize: Consider offering a discount upon completing the purchase or tempt them with other related items.
• Keep it fresh: Time your emails within a few hours of the customer’s exit from your site so that near-purchase is still top of mind.

7. Sale Notices & Coupons

Sales emails are a major way shoppers find deals. Whether a flash sale, a holiday-fueled promotion, or a just-because discount, a well-crafted sales email can draw big attention (and big sales).

Sale emails should be straightforward and clearly identify what you’re offering (and early on).

Keep it short and simple, incorporate appealing graphics, and create a sense of urgency with the language you use.

8. Announcement Emails

Big news: Your company is about to send an awesome email.

Buzz about a new product or service, updated inventory, or upcoming events helps encourage continued engagement with your brand. Provide a call to action that helps subscribers return to your site or interact in some way.

9. Re-engagement Emails

Sometimes all people need is a gentle, well-designed reminder that they should re-engage with your brand. With re-engagement emails, you are targeting subscribers who are still customers but haven’t opened or clicked an email in a certain amount of time (depending on your industry, of course).

The goal? Get them back in the loop.

10. Welcome Emails

When your site visitors commit and subscribe to your email list, you’ll want to nurture that relationship immediately.  Welcome messages are the first email they’ll receive from you (remember: first impressions) and are a way to capitalize quickly on your new readership and stand out as a brand. Make them count!

Always remember to include a promise (e.g., what will you offer them?), accessible contact information, a powerful and clear call to action, and added extras like discounts or incentives.

You can also use your confirmation email as a dual-purpose welcome message to entice subscribers to immediately engage.

11. Birthday Emails

As a business or website owner, you want to nurture (and possibly improve) relationships with your customers and subscribers by making them feel recognized. You also want to increase your sales numbers. Birthday emails do both. Plus, they are extremely effective. Birthday emails see a 481% higher transaction rate than promotional emails, 342% higher revenue, and 179% higher unique click rates. Pass the party hat, please!

Sure, you can’t hand-deliver a birthday cake or bouquet of flowers to each customer, but you can connect with them by sending personalized celebration messages. Use a simple opt-in form on your site to collect subscribers’ birthdays. Then, each year, send a unique message that invites them to shop and interact with your brand in honor of their big day. It pays to segment, so start utilizing the customer information you have to create such lists.

How to set your birthday messages apart?

• Send It Early: Chances are, your subscribers are getting a lot of promotional emails on their birthday, so get a head start and help them celebrate the whole week (or the whole month!) They notice and appreciate your eagerness to celebrate them.
• Make it Pretty: DSW’s graphically-exciting birthday email features a prominent discount code encouraging subscribers to shop (it’s their birthday, after all).
• Send a Reminder: After you send a birthday email, follow it up with a reminder message to utilize their discount codes or promotions before time runs out. A prompt, plus a sense of urgency, will encourage them to interact with you.
• Include First-Name Personalization: It’s true: knowing a first name matters. Email subject lines that use the subscriber’s first name earn 17% higher unique open rates than those without.

12. Anniversary Emails

In addition to birthdays, there’s another reason to celebrate your customers: their anniversary with you. Celebrating the numbers of years they’ve been your customer is a way to build and strengthen relationships with them.

Plus, commemorating these milestones is an opportunity to send targeted emails that don’t require much legwork; you simply need the email signup date. With your celebratory message, offer incentives that reward your customers for their loyalty.

13. Hygiene Emails

Over time, things may change for your subscribers, like email addresses, interests, or even budgets. Now and again, you’ll want to prune your list in response to these changes, so that you can increase the success of your email campaigns and the amount of engagement you’re receiving from your customers. Tidy up with hygiene emails (emails designed to get readers to add you to their contact list) to develop a clean subscriber list.

14. Shipping Confirmation Email

As with receipt emails, shipping emails supply essential information relating to customers’ purchases. In this case, that means a notification that purchases are on their way to the customer. These virtual updates should be simple to convey the information clearly. Provide a tracking number so users can follow their goods in real time.

Writing & Designing Great Emails

It’s time to decide the type of content you want to send out. A good tip is to analyze your email reports and website analytics to see what content performed best. Here are some email communication best practices that will earn you more opens, more engagement, and more satisfied subscribers.

Be a Stickler for Good Grammar

This isn’t seventh-grade English class, but it’s important to put in the work to make sure your content is error-free and professional. You want your subscribers to trust you and keep returning to read. Get a second pair of eyes and use an editing checklist to help you spot mistakes. Nothing turns off a subscriber more than a misplaced comma or spelling error. Can you say “amateur”?

Write Like a Friend

While you still need to be professional, it’s also important to write conversationally and not like a robot. Add personal touches that help show your personality and approachability. Also, use the word “you.” Turns out, it’s pretty convincing.

Learn From the Pros

There are a lot of companies out there who are doing email marketing well. Here are a few. Learn from the best and adapt your content to adhere to winning principles and make your emails fun to read!

Make it Visually Appealing

If your subscribers wanted to slog through dense copy, they’d read a textbook. Remember, they’re “snacking,” so avoid clutter and make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for with text breakups, visual cues, and a clean design.

Don’t feel like you have to start from scratch! Remember, email templates are your friend.

Related: 10 Web Design Lessons You Can Learn From StarWars.com

Invite Readers to Take Action

Just like a good story needs a good ending, don’t leave your email with a blah finish. Give a clear call-to-action prompt that engages your subscriber to do more. I mean, that’s why you’re sending the email in the first place, right?

Take Your Subject Line Seriously

Subscribers decide whether your emails are worth their time and attention in 0 to 3 seconds. One, two, done. Another scary fact: 70% of emails get flagged as spam based solely on the subject line! So make it enticing and relevant. Again, learn from the pros.

Some important things to keep in mind when writing subject lines:

• Personalize, personalize, personalize. The more your messages seem tailored to each subscriber, the more likely they’ll keep reading  (and buying.)
• Rise above clickbait. Readers will quickly ditch if promises are left unfulfilled.
• Keep it short and sweet.
• Take it easy on punctuation and caps, OKAY?!?!?!
• Offer hints at what’s inside. Discount, you say? I’m enticed. Bonus points if you can make the reader feel part of an exclusive club or create a sense of urgency to act.
• Follow an enticing sub-headline with a complementary preheader. If the two play well together, you’ll have committed subscribers that anxiously await your messages.

Think Mobile

You’re already aware that your website needs to be geared toward mobile users. The same goes for your emails.

But why?

Many consumers now read email exclusively on mobiles and are pretty picky about how your messages look on their devices. More than 80% of people reported that they will delete an email if it looks wonky on their phones. Yikes.

The point is to make sure you optimize your emails for mobile.

Growing Your Email List (7 Proven Strategies)

Your email marketing campaigns are only as strong as your email list. Let’s cover some beneficial ways to get more leads and grow your base of subscribers.

1. Add an Opt-In Form to Your Website

We’ve already mentioned the power of the opt-in form.

Consider this a reminder email.

An opt-in form is a simple element that prompts website visitors to sign-up to receive emails from your business. Usually, an email address is the only personal information requested. This is an easy way to convert readers to subscribers fast, and it’s at the top of our list because it requires minimal effort on your end.

2. Host a Giveaway

There’s nothing like a giveaway to get people excited. People will always love free stuff, so it’s a great way to incentivize readers and followers to sign-up for your email list. If you’re lucky, most won’t even think twice about offering up their email address. When done well, you can see massive growth in your email list in a very short time.

You can offer up your own products, but you don’t necessarily have to if this would cause undue stress on your product pipeline. Another option is to conduct a sponsored event with one or even multiple brands:

For example, a farm-to-table restaurant may partner with brands or supermarkets that offer organic goods. A small jewelry business might pair with a high-end sunglasses company.

Of course, be mindful of your partnerships. They must make sense for your business and offer quality products. Accepting a sponsorship deal with a subpar or irrelevant product might be off-putting to your audience.

While you should always be cautious, giveaways can be a gold mine. They are an especially useful opportunity for anyone who already has a strong social media presence:

If you’re not sure how to run an online giveaway, you can use a free WordPress plugin like RafflePress.

This solution offers an intuitive giveaway builder that lets you start by choosing a template for your giveaway. Then, you can take advantage of promotional and marketing tools to maximize the number of participants.

3. Offer Lead Magnets or Content Upgrades

Content upgrades are a type of ‘freebie’ you can offer. Ebooks, workbooks, printables, exclusive coupons. Any kind of offer to entice someone to provide an email will do.

After all, we all like to get something in exchange for another message in our inbox.

These content bonuses should be exclusive. The only way to get them should be by signing up for your email list.

As with any other strategy you use, it’s best to opt for something that’s relevant to your brand. For example, a food influencer with a cookbook might offer a recipe box functionality, but also a free recipe download upon sign up.

Don’t forget that you can always combine the strategies on this list to increase their effectiveness. As in the example above, you may consider offering your site’s visitors an opt-in form upon entry, but also dangle a freebie in the navigation bar. The more opportunities visitors have to sign up, the more likely they are to do so.

4. Organize a Webinar

A webinar is a workshop, seminar, or presentation that you conduct online using video conferencing software. Most of us have attended one at some point, but if you haven’t, you can still host one without much difficulty.

For most, a webinar means moving your content to a different medium. It’s cheap and easy, but production may take a good amount of time:

This method is well suited to bloggers and influencers who have already monetized their ideas, but any expertise you have to offer will do. If you’re wondering how to host a webinar, you should start by choosing a topic. Then, be sure to nail down the logistical details, spend plenty of time preparing, and of course, promote your webinar.

This is a great way to get lots of new email addresses, but you want to be thorough so that all your hard work doesn’t go to waste. Remember to make the most of the opportunity. If you host your webinar on a popular social media platform such as Instagram or YouTube, you can boost your engagement as well.

Additionally, a webinar can provide you with social credibility. Since the time commitment from viewers is significant, this is not only a great way to get emails, but it may potentially lead to long-lasting and loyal customers.

5. Create an Email Course

An email course is similar to a traditional online class, but it arrives in your inbox. Typically, an email course is automated and has a short time frame of a few days or a few weeks. It should be easily digestible for participants:

Email courses are usually self-paced, but individual classes arrive on a set schedule. They don’t require any follow-up or feedback from the instructor. So you don’t have to worry about grading your students. This is also a great way to repurpose old content.

For example, if you already have a thorough how-to guide on your blog, you can simply expand on that and make it a three-day email course. If you’re using an email marketing service, many of them will already have this process streamlined for you.

6. Give a Welcome Discount

Another way to get people on your email list is by offering a generous one-time discount. This can be especially effective because it also incentivizes users to buy your product right away:

This can be a more costly strategy than the other options on this list. However, if your budget allows for it, you can be sure that many customers will find this offer difficult to resist.

Typically, an online store will offer somewhere between 10 and 25 percent off of an initial purchase when you sign up for its email list. When you use an eCommerce solution such as WooCommerce, creating discount codes is a breeze.

7. Start an Email Newsletter

If you haven’t already, it’s time to start going steady.

In the past few years, email newsletters have become wildly popular. They are emerging as a new form of media consumption, but also as a new form of marketing. When you’re producing a quality newsletter, you’re sure to get more email addresses for your list.

Many newsletters are some combination of quality long-form content blended with product promotion via recommendations and favorites lists. They can also be combined well with affiliate marketing.

The beauty of the email newsletter is that anyone can do it, from the biggest corporations to the humblest solopreneurs. The only catch is that it’s a long-term obligation. Newsletters typically go out weekly or monthly, so you want to commit to a regular schedule.

Most of the popular email marketing services can offer you step-by-step guidance on creating a newsletter. However, before you embark on this journey, you should make sure you have a clear goal — and always prioritize quality over quantity.

Email Deliverability

A significant part of your email marketing success (increased conversions and a growing readership) is understanding and avoiding the spam folder.

So what is spam exactly? Well, in short, it’s unsolicited messages (meaning, no consent was given to receive them) sent in bulk. While sometimes amusing to read, spam is ultimately annoying to consumers, and no business wants their carefully crafted copy relegated to the black hole abyss of email spam holes.

It’s true: Consumers are deleting fewer promotional emails without looking than in years past.

But with this, there’s good news and bad news.

• The good: As people are sending fewer email communications to the trash (or spam) bin, it’s a sign that perhaps email marketers are refining their craft so that email messages are more useful to consumers.
• The bad: Spam filters are better and more aggressive than ever before, so it’s important to ensure that your emails don’t lead to a negative brand association.

So let’s consider a few (OK, several) roadblocks that can stall you from reaching your consumers’ inboxes.

How Spam Filters Work

An important key is understanding how the filters work in the first place. While there are many triggers, here are some things they look for:

• Relationship with subscriber
• Reputation of IP address and sender domain (read more on this here)
• Quality of email subject line, teaser, and content
• Quality and safety of included links
• Presence or absence of images
• Inclusion of text version of the email

Additionally, spam filters monitor subscriber behavior to improve their filtering formulas, tracking actions like the opening of emails, time spent reading the email, enabling of images, spam flagging, folders applied to email by the subscriber, forwarding of emails, etc.

And because these behaviors vary from subscriber to subscriber, a unique “email spam score” is given to each email sent to every individual subscriber. It sounds complicated, but there are things you can do to significantly improve your chances that your message will arrive successfully to your subscriber.

Spam filters are smart. Some other instant red flags: over-the-top font colors (consumers don’t like this either), font color tags that aren’t formatted correctly, misspellings, overstuffing keywords, and risky word choices (best to avoid “free,” “prize,” “promo,” “no obligation,” and “buy”).

In addition, be conservative with punctuation and capitalization. Aside from the resulting red flag, it’s just . . . ANNOYING!!!!!

(See? We told you.)

Lastly, don’t play dirty. Attempting to outsmart spam filters (like inserting random characters and numbers into your content or subject lines or concealing text in an image) or tricking your subscribers by starting the subject line with “Re:” or “Fwd:” to suggest an ongoing communication with you just eats away at your credibility.

Instead, put your efforts into building a quality email list and sending out content that customers want to see pop up in their inboxes.

There are a few other things you can do to help improve your deliverability and build a sustainable email marketing strategy.

Build Your Own In-House Email List

The permission-based approach is best. Make sure that the recipients of your messages have provided explicit consent to receive your communications through a sign-up or opt-in form.

Encourage them to add your email to their address book.

Resist the temptation to purchase an email list or scrape sites for addresses. This is often your message’s one-way ticket to the spam folder. Build your list ethically.

Related: Build an Email List With Your WordPress Website in 3 Simple Steps

Make Unsubscribing Easy

No one wants a dwindling email list, but the reality is this: 50% of consumers branded a company’s email as spam because they couldn’t easily and quickly figure out how to unsubscribe from the messages.

You’d rather have an unsubscribe than risk your emails being blocked for everyone.

Make it easy for your subscribers to part ways; it’ll save you the spam label and leave you with the most invested subscribers. Plus, it’s the law!

Use a Reliable Email Service Provider (ESP)

In addition to checking your domain name for denylisting, you should use a reputable ESP and consider getting third-party accreditation, which can help deliverability.

Email Laws & Regulations (10 Critical Compliance Tips)

More than just staying clear of boring or unrelated content, you need to be aware of the rules surrounding email marketing and how your content could potentially violate established spam laws. With most email providers, you must verify that you are abiding by the law.

CAN-SPAM Act applies to “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.” Simply put, all emails must comply.

Each email in violation can incur a fee of upwards of $40,000! Gulp.

And that’s just one such regulation. With GDPR now in effect and similar regulations aimed at improving consumer protection and privacy online, you want to ensure you’ve crossed all your Ts.

Here are some notable practices to avoid to make sure you stay compliant.

1. Don’t Deceive or Mislead

Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” routing info (the domain name and email address), and subject line must all accurately reflect the correct information, including the business the message is originating from and the content of the message.

Be truthful and clear.

2. Identify Ad Content

You must communicate clearly and visibly that your message is an advertisement.

3. Give Your Location

In your email, you must include the physical address of your business (whether that be a street address, P.O. box, or private mailbox you’ve registered under Postal Service regulations).

4. Tell Subscribers How to Opt-Out

It’s not just a good idea to have an easy unsubscribe method. Letting your subscribers know, clearly and conspicuously, how to opt out of future messages is the law. You must give subscribers the choice to stop emails, and you must explain how (by using a clear, contrasting font to distinguish it on your email, by giving a reply-to address or providing another internet-based way).

Additionally, make certain that your own spam filter does not block opt-out requests from subscribers. Another element of the law is honoring these requests swiftly (within 10 business days) and not requiring additional demands from the subscriber like fees, personal information, or other actions besides visiting a single page or sending a reply email.

You cannot transfer or sell the former subscriber’s email address.

5. Understand Your Personal Obligation

Chances are that if you’re reading this, you’re working on improving (or starting) your business’s email marketing strategy. But, on the off chance that you’re merely reading this for fun (totally understandable) and you’ve hired someone else to manage your email marketing, understand that you still possess the legal responsibility to comply with the law.

Even if it’s just your product promoted in the email messages, you could be held legally responsible for violations. You can read more details here.

6. Keep Your Email List Updated

It’s important to stay connected with your subscribers and keep your email list as up-to-date as possible, as email addresses change often. Hey, that young professional doesn’t want to use their “starwarslover6785@aol.com” address forever. A stale list can lead to too many hard bounces (emails rejected for permanent reasons like invalid or inoperable email addresses) and raise your spam score.

7. Think Timing

Sure, your subscribers might not like a lengthy email every day, but sending out a rare email every few months could hurt, too. When your messages do show up, your readers might not recognize the “From:” designation and send you straight to spam or delete your message quickly, damaging your stats and credibility.

8. Consider Size

If your email content is too large, it could result in a soft bounce, a temporary delivery issue that signifies that your content got as far as your subscriber’s mail server but was then bounced back. Reasons for soft bounces may also include full inboxes or an offline server. The email provider you use should attempt to resend your email over a period of days, but be on the lookout for repeat bounces and remove them from your list. (Read more about bounce rates in the Metrics section below).

9. Be Wary of Inserts

Videos, embedded forms, and attachments aren’t smart things to include in your email messages. Forms and videos often aren’t supported for security and compatibility reasons. Plus, there’s mobile to think about (more than that later). If you have an additional PDF or worksheet you want to share, upload it to your site and provide a link in the email you send out.

10. Test Before You Send

Lastly, it’s smart to use a service like IsNotSpam.com or to test your email for possible spam triggers.

You can also use a service like NeverBounce to check your email list and remove any dead emails before they bounce.

And, for the record, we’re web hosting experts, not digital attorneys. In other words, chat with a legit attorney if you really want to get into the minutiae of spam law. (In other words, this is not legal advice!)

The Last Word

Take a breath. Email overload, we get it. You can always bookmark this guide and refer back to it when you’re ready to take the next step in improving your communications with subscribers.

And in case you scrolled all the way down here looking for the TL;DR, we’ve got you covered.

Here are the key takeaways for starting your own email marketing program.

• Test, Test, Test: Whether it’s spot spelling mistakes or checking for possible spam triggers, test your emails before sending them. It’s an investment worth the extra few minutes.
• Keep Your Email List Healthy: A fresh list will help you avoid a lot of issues, including spam and legal concerns, not to mention depressing analytics. Consider running a re-engagement campaign every six months or so to maintain your list.
• Be Consistent: Not only in the type of content you share but the frequency in which you send it. Your subscribers will come to know and trust you and anticipate your messages.
• Focus on Quality: Spend time on both the writing and design of your emails. These elements will not only increase your stats but help build solid relationships with subscribers.
• Add a Call-to-Action Button: Make that CTA easy to find and use. You want to turn those readers into customers!
• Make It Personal: Send segmented messages to get the most relevant content to each subscriber. Personalized email subject lines are more likely to be opened.

Now, back to that inbox.

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The post Email Marketing: The A-Z Guide to Growth, Engagement, & Conversion appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

For any writer trying to build an audience or attract professional clients, a good author website is essential.

Many writers choose to create their digital presence with WordPress. It’s easy to use and optimized for publishing, after all.

If you decide to follow this path, you will need to select a design. But with thousands of WordPress themes aimed at authors and journalists, the options can feel overwhelming.

To help you narrow down the options, we have searched high and low for the best themes for writers. Here are our top picks!

Best Themes for Authors and Novelists

To start our roundup, let’s keep it literary. The following themes are all good choices if you want to promote your author brand and sell your latest books in style.

1) Astra: Best Author Theme for Customization

Optimized for the WordPress Site Editor and third-party page builders, Astra provides a complete no-code design package.

The base theme is very clean and readable, and Pro users can choose their own fonts and colors. If you’re looking to save time, Astra Pro includes a library of 180 full-site templates.

Another key feature of Astra is performance. With a load time of half a second, you won’t keep your readers waiting.

Key Features:

• Lots of customization options
• Works with most popular site builders
• Lightweight theme with strong performance

Price: Free, Astra Pro from $47/year or $227 lifetime license

2) BookWise: Best Theme Template for Selling Books

BookWise isn’t strictly a standalone theme — it’s actually one of the default setups for the Thrive Theme builder. Much like Astra, this gives you the option to build out your own design or choose something from a vast template library.

The difference here is that the blocks and templates are aimed at authors, so you can create sections for reviews, characters, purchase links, and more.

This template’s focus is mainly on selling books. It lets you easily promote author events, and set up your own online store.

Key features:

• Drag-and-drop customization
• Template library with designs aimed at authors
• Events and e-commerce features baked in

Pricing: $99 as part of the Thrive Theme Builder

3) MyBook: Best Theme for Promoting Your Latest Release

This theme has a homepage design that really helps show off your latest title. It also includes an author bio section, and an area for placing your affiliate ecommerce links (e.g. Amazon, Bookshop).

If you prefer to sell your book via your own site, MyBook is compatible with WooCommerce. In addition, a built-in email newsletter feature makes it easy to keep in touch with your audience, and reusable content blocks allow you to build custom portfolio pages.

Key Features:

• Front page design that displays a book cover
• WooCommerce support for selling direct
• Newsletter integrations for building your email list

Price: $49 one-time purchase

4) Book: Best Author Theme for Promoting eBooks

Made for selling digital titles, Book is a premium theme that provides a visually appealing landing page design.

The default layout is made for promoting ebook titles, but you can use the built-in theme builder to create your design. This theme comes with FontAwesome and Google Fonts ready to use, as well.

You can find many more customization options behind the scenes. Given all these options, we appreciate the incredibly thorough documentation that comes with this theme.

Key features:

• Theme builder and customization options
• Strong landing page design with call-to-action
• Native support for Google Fonts, FontAwesome, MailChimp, and Twitter

Pricing:  $59 one-time purchase

5) Read WP: Best Author Theme for Readability

With an excellent choice of fonts and plenty of negative space, this premium theme is perfect for any of the minimalists among us.

If you find yourself wanting to change things up though, Read WP provides access to 600 Google Fonts and three different layouts. Professional writers will appreciate the portfolio feature, and the design is fully responsive — so it looks the part on all devices.

Key Features:

• Elegant typography that highlights your writing
• Three different blog layouts
• Dedicated portfolio section

Price: $49 one-time purchase

6) Book Author: Best Theme for Self Publishers

There’s something about the Book Author theme that feels very Penguin Classics. Perhaps it’s the bold scheme, or the particular way in which at which the books are displayed.

Nevertheless, this theme is certainly aimed at self-publishing authors — particularly folks with multiple titles or a book series. The design is crisp, with six possible layouts, an advanced homepage slider, and the ability to create an online catalog. Plus, you can sell digital downloads of your various works.

Key features:

• Multiple layouts
• Huge array of cataloging and ecommerce options
• Easy to customize with colors and fonts

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

7) Gindur: Best Theme for Online Novels

And now, for something a little different.

Gindur features medieval inspired typography, but the design is cutting-edge — Built for publishing stories, this theme is both responsive and Retina-ready. It’s snappy as all get out, too.

Most aspects of Gindur are customizable, so you can easily swap out that ornate blackletter font if you’d like. Meanwhile, built-in SEO optimization could help give you a head start on other writers in your genre.

Key features:

• Set up for online publishing
• Responsive, Retina-ready, and fast to load
• SEO optimization

Pricing: $39 one-time purchase

8) Book Landing Page: Best Free Theme for Authors

If you only want a simple one-page website to promote your writing, the free version of Book Landing Page might cover your needs.

The design of this theme lets you show off a single title alongside a big old buy button. Further down the page, you have seven sections to play with, including a tabbed box for preview snippets. It feels best suited to non-fiction titles, but you could use it for any type of book.

While it’s not the most visually distinctive template on this list, you really can’t complain for the low low price of $0.

Key features:

• Seven home page sections
• Social media integration and search optimization
• Ready for translation

Pricing: Free, with Premium upgrade available for $59

9) Novela: Best Author Theme for Readers

This innovative theme allows you to create immersive previews of your ebooks, complete with page-turning animations.

The default landing page is pretty striking, too, with a big background image and parallax scrolling effects. Just as importantly, you have sections for your author bio, and for introducing your characters.

On the business side, Novela allows you to set up and sell digital downloads. In fact, the whole theme is really optimized for ebook sales.

Key Features:

• Unique book-like preview mode
• Optimized for digital downloads
• Visually striking design with loads of customization options

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

10) Leona: The Most Powerful Theme for Authors

Featuring a dazzling assortment of shortcodes and widgets, Leona is perhaps the most powerful author focused theme in this list.

That’s not the only thing we like — this theme offers WooCommerce and MailChimp integrations, social media widgets, Google Fonts support, and a preview mode similar to the one in Novela.

Just as importantly, the design of Leona is crisp, contemporary, and completely responsive.

Key features:

• Loads of shortcodes and widgets built in
• Integrates with MailChimp, WooCommerce, and Twitter
• Modern design and excellent documentation

Pricing: $64 one-time purchase

11) Bookory: Best Online Book Store Theme

If you’re trying to create more of an online store than just another author site, consider using Bookory.

This theme allows you to choose from five handsome front page designs, each carefully honed for ecommerce. You also get five product page layouts to choose from, and dedicated templates for your author page.

Bookory lets you get even more creative via the Elementor theme builder. That said, you might want to stick with the default options, as this theme has a good PageSpeed score out of the box.

Key Features:

• Slick, responsive ecommerce store design
• Multiple front page and product page templates
• Works with WooCommerce and Elementor

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

12) Auteur: Best Blogging Theme for Authors

Blogging can be a good way to promote your next book and encourage interactions with readers. But not all blogging themes are suited to selling books.

Auteur bridges this gap with 10 stylish blogging layouts and three commerce designs. It also has everything you would expect from a dedicated author theme, such as email signup forms, individual book pages, and author bio sections.

If you want to go off-piste, Auteur lets you build layouts via the WPBakery Plugin. This makes it a little more complex to use than some other themes — and somewhat less performant if you go too wild with the page builder — but it is still very flexible.

Key Features:

• Layouts for books, blogging, and ecommerce
• Block-based theme building options
• Integrations with WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, and MailChimp

Pricing: $60 one-time purchase

13) ChapterOne: Best Page Builder Theme for Authors

For authors who want to build a website that stands out from the crowd, ChapterOne could be a good purchase.

Although this theme is really aimed at publishers, there is plenty to interest individual writers. The front page gives you ample opportunities to show off your new book and older titles. You can also set up shop with support for digital editions and even audiobooks.

Flexibility is another strength of ChapterOne, with over 800 Google Fonts, multiple blog layouts and header types, and plenty of useful shortcodes.

Key Features:

• Several homepage designs, each optimized for promoting books
• Contemporary design that can be customized
• Powerful ecommerce templates including various media types

Pricing: $79 one-time purchase

14) Brooklyn: Best One-Click Theme for Authors

Although Brooklyn offers a bewildering array of customization options, this theme makes it easy to set up an author site.

This is due to the 52 ready-made site templates that come free with the theme. In the library, you will find some great options for building your site, and you can install each design with just a click.

If you want to make adjustments, Brooklyn gives you 60 blocks to play with and over 100 customization panels to explore. It even has an advanced slider maker.

It all might be a bit overwhelming for first-time WordPress users, but power users will love it.

Key Features:

• 52 ready-made site templates
• Block-based page builder with 60 elements
• Over 2,500 individual customization options

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

15) Bridge: Author Theme With the Most Features

Designed for creatives, Bridge is another theme that packs in a phenomenal number of features. And as with Brooklyn, you have plenty of ready-made demo sites to choose from.

If you prefer to build something yourself, this theme works with two page builders. With over 200 individual elements at your disposal, you should be able to cook up something special.

This all comes in addition to e-commerce features, full integration with your social media profiles, interactive tours, powerful search, and much more.

Key Features:

• Works with two page builders, includes 200 elements
• 610 one-click demo sites
• Ecommerce, social media, and search features

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

Best Themes for Bloggers and Journalists

Of course, not every writer wants to be a New York Times bestselling author.

If you’re more interested in blogging, journaling, or journalism, the following themes should be a good fit for your online presence.

16) Typology: Best Minimalist Theme for Writers

If you really want your words to shine, Typology could be the theme for you.

The design is much more stripped back in comparison to some other themes on this list, but there is still plenty of visual impact, thanks to bold color choices.

You can change those colors if you want, and the theme provides plenty of control over ​​typography. Plus, you can’t forget the impressive performance.

Key features:

• Minimalist yet bold design with focus on written content
• Well suited to blogs, with ad units included
• Strong performance and SEO optimization

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

17) Maktub: Best Magazine-Style Theme

At the other end of the web design spectrum, you will find Maktub. This colorful theme delivers content with some visual punch, although the focus is still on typography.

This is also a theme built for speed. It has a perfect PageSpeed score of 100, and MakTub is optimized for AMP. This functionality could be very valuable if you’re trying to attract new readers.

On top of this lightweight frame, you can add 11 custom widgets and customize various parts of the theme — with only one plugin required.

Key Features:

• Bold color scheme and strong typography
• Good performance
• AMP optimization

Pricing: $35 one-time purchase

18) Gutentype: Most Versatile Theme for Bloggers

Designed to work with the native WordPress site editor and Elementor website builder, this shapeshifting theme lets you choose from 18 different premade page layouts.

While not explicitly designed for writers, Gutentype still delivers your written content in style. The design is clean, with plenty of white space and excellent optimization for mobile devices.

Aside from the layouts, this theme allows you to get creative with custom post types, social media integrations, dozens of shortcodes, and seven widget areas.

Key Features:

• 18 different page layouts
• Clean, modern website design
• Works with WooCommerce, Elementor, and WordPress’ site editor

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

19) Starter: Best Minimal Theme for Bloggers

One of the key selling points of the Starter theme is that it contains only 55 files.

Unsurprisingly, this means you have fewer preset layouts to choose from, but both of the available options are very easy on the eyes, and the theme delivers good performance thanks to clean code.

Even with the small size of this theme, you still get five post types, customizable colors and fonts, and a blog template that is highly readable.

Key Features:

• Lightweight theme with clean code
• Very modern, minimal design with focus on readability
• Three post layouts (left, right, without sidebar)

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

20) Gema: Best Minimalist Theme for Personal Blogs

Opening a site made with Gema is like flicking through the pages of a glossy magazine. It’s a style of elegant fonts, white space, and large images.

We particularly like the header area of this theme. The name of your site is writ large, and the vertical menu is inset so that it blends in nicely with your latest posts.

In addition, Gema has features that will impress website visitors in other ways. Along with the usual color and font options, you can create drop caps and introduce a light hover effect wherever it feels right.

Key Features:

• Distinctive, minimalist front page design
• Interesting effects and typography
• Responsive, search optimized, good performance

Pricing: €115 (~$128) one-time purchase or €75/year (~$83)

21) Jason: Best Theme for Independent Journalists

A different theme from the same stable, Jason would work well for anyone who is trying to build a personal brand in journalism.

The design here is halfway between a simple blog and a digital magazine, with space devoted to images and nice touches of color throughout.

We particularly like the built-in logo generator, which lets you experiment with different typography to create something unique. Jason also has a good archive section, which means readers can find posts on any topic without the help of a search engine.

Key Features:

• Lively design with large images and a sidebar
• Customizable colors and fonts, and built-in logo builder
• Works nicely with WordPress’ site editor

Pricing: €115 (~$128) one-time purchase or €75/year (~$83)

22) Tove: Best Free Theme for Bloggers

This pretty little theme from Swedish designer, Anders Noren, is completely free and packed with personality.

Although originally designed for café and restaurant websites, you can easily adapt Tove for blogging. The default design is playful yet clean, with easy-to-read fonts and over 40 preset block patterns.

Because many of these elements include buttons, you could link to an external purchase page or another author platform.

Key Features:

• Playful, colorful design
• Over 40 block patterns
• Lightweight at under 200 kilobytes

Pricing: Free

Best Themes for Professional Writers

If you’re the type of author who prefers to work for other people, you might need a slightly different type of website.

In this final section, we’re going to focus on themes that should work for professional copywriters, ghostwriters, and content marketers.

23) Corner: Best Portfolio Theme for Writers

A key part of securing work as a writer is impressing potential clients with your body of work. Corner has a dedicated portfolio section for this purpose, with various layout options to choose from.

There is nothing very flashy about this theme. The look is clean, refined, and polished. But with Elementor integration and plenty of customization options, you can easily make it your own.

Key Features:

• Clean, professional design
• Portfolio feature with several layouts
• Block editor support plus Elementor and Google Fonts

Pricing: $49/year

24) Sydney Pro: Best Professional Theme for Writers

Everything about Sydney Pro has been finely tuned with creative professionals in mind. This freemium theme lets you choose from a variety of layouts, headers, and footers, each promoting your brand in a different way.

The design here is razor sharp and stripped back, although there are splashes of color for key elements. Sydney Pro also lets you create a compelling blog, utilize pre-made sections, and build multiple sidebars.

Plus, it works with tools like HubSpot, Tutor LMS, WooCommerce, and Toolset.

Key Features:

• Refined, professional design with pre-built sections
• Multiple homepage, blog, and sidebar layouts
• Works with a range of third-party platforms

Pricing: Free version available, Pro from $69/year

25) Neve: Most Flexible Theme for Professional Writers

Used by a wide range of business owners, Neve is fast and flexible.

You can choose from over 100 default layouts, all of which deliver good performance. Alternatively, you can use a theme builder of your choice. Neve works with Beaver Builder, Elementor, Visual Composer, and many more.

What’s more, Neve adds features to these third-party plugins — so you get an extended version of Elementor and WooCommerce with this theme. It’s pretty nifty if you want to make something unique.

Key Features:

• Fast, lightweight theme with 100 preset designs
• Works with Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, and more
• Extends popular plugins like WooCommerce

Pricing: Free version with limited features; Pro version is €69/year (~$77)

How to Build a Great Author Website

Each of the themes mentioned above can provide a great starting point for building your author website.

But if you want to maximize the impact of your new site, there are a few tasks you should complete before you launch. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

1. Register a unique domain name — Use your name, your brand, or even your tagline; just make sure it’s something memorable.
2. Choose a reliable host — At DreamHost, we offer 100% Uptime Guarantee to ensure that your readers can always access your author site.
3. Optimize the design for readability — Don’t worry about dazzling design; make sure readers can enjoy your work.
4. Include a call to action on your homepage — Don’t be shy about selling your book; make sure to put at least one buy button on your homepage.
5. Add social proof — Sharing testimonials is a proven way to persuade potential customers.
6. Create a blog — Most of the best author websites include a blog, and publishing regular posts can be an effective book marketing strategy.
7. Ask people to opt-in — Start building your email list so you can share news with readers, like a new book release or guest podcast appearance.
8. Let your readers get in touch — Fans of your work might want to send their appreciation or ask questions, so make sure to include appropriate contact information or even a standalone contact page.

We hope this guide has given you some ideas for your website and the confidence to start building your brand. Just remember: if you get stuck, we have a team of expert web designers ready to help!

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DreamPress Plus and Pro users get access to Jetpack Professional (and 200+ premium themes) at no added cost!

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One such change that has majorly impacted website and application owners, managers, and marketers is how user behavior is monitored and reported.

UA’s “canned” reports (we say that lovingly) are all but gone. In their place is a powerful and fully-customizable editor for creating nearly endless user data reports.

But, as Spider-Man kinda-sorta said, with great power comes a great amount of learning.

So in this installment of our guides to getting the most out of GA4, we’re going to cover all things in GA4 Explorations.

Dive in to learn what the heck that means, take a guided tour of all the core pieces you need to know, and come out on the other side with your very first exploration.

What Are GA4 Explorations?

If you’ve had a chance to poke around in Google Analytics recently, you probably know GA4 still has what it calls “Standard reports,” which enable property owners to report on users, acquisition, engagement, monetization, and more.

But we’re not here to talk about those today.

What we’re going to cover in this guide is something completely new and unique: GA4 Explorations.

Explorations are powerful charts that can be quickly built from the ground up and customized to view detailed visitor data (web and app) and uncover helpful insights about consumer behavior.

A note for the record before we move on, Google Analytics didn’t shake things up just for fun — Reporting (and many other capabilities) had to shift as Google Analytics’ data model changed to focus on events versus factors like sessions and pageviews that UA relied on. If you’re curious about this new data model, learn more from our guide to GA4 events.

Why is it Important to Master GA4 Explorations?

The fundamental benefit of Explorations in GA4 is flexibility.

While the predetermined reports provided by UA certainly can be customized, explorations are on a whole different level regarding personalization.

Along with several helpful graph templates to get you started, exploration fields make it easy to compare custom audience segments, cross-reference any data, analyze behavior over an entire user lifetime, uncover and study unknown user journeys, and almost anything else you can imagine.

GA4 Explorations doesn’t just stand out when dissecting data — it’s also extremely helpful at visualizing and making all that data interactive so you can actually understand what it’s showing you.

Another awesome feature of GA4 Explorations is its speed. Configure robust reports ad hoc, add and change filters, and share or export exploration reports with the click of a button and watch your charts update instantly.

In addition to all these benefits, the fact is that explorations are the new way to dive into data if you’re using Google Analytics. So if you’re going to continue to use the platform to understand and report on your web and application users — mastery is no longer a maybe; it’s a must.

With that in mind, let’s get to know the ins and outs of GA4 Explorations.

The Key Elements of GA4 Explorations

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of moving parts within GA4 Explorations. In this section, we’ll step through the main components you need to be familiar with to navigate the feature.

We highly recommend opening up your GA4 panel and following along to make this feature walkthrough as helpful as possible.

Explorations Main Page

First, if you’re not already using GA4, here’s how to update from Universal Analytics to GA4.

Once you’re signed into the latest instance of Google Analytics, choose the account and property or app for which you want to create an exploration. Do this using the dropdown menu in the upper left corner of the screen by the Analytics logo (on desktop).

In the sidebar menu, select Explore — and you’re in!

This is where you’ll choose to start with either a blank template or a “technique” for your exploration. (Click on “template gallery” to view templates built for specific use cases — such as acquisition — and industries — such as ecommerce and gaming.)

Techniques are types of visualizations. At the time of this writing, these are the techniques GA4 offers:

Free-Form Exploration

Free-form is almost like starting an exploration from scratch, but a little less daunting. Begin with a crosstab layout for displaying your data, then layer in other visualization elements of your choice such as geo maps, scatter plots, line charts, bar charts, and more.

Cohort Exploration

Look at segments of users that share common attributes to gain a deeper understanding of their behaviors and patterns with a cohort exploration.

Funnel Exploration

Funnel exploration is especially helpful for visualizing the steps users take to complete specific conversions. By knowing this, you can better predict and focus on the key actions that lead to money-making conversions.

Segment Overlap

Segment overlap is self explanatory — this exploration displays what various segments (up to three as of now) have in common. Use this to discover new, highly-specific audiences.

User Explorer

With user explorer, you can look at groups of users as well as individuals — such as low spenders or high spenders — to understand what makes them tick and how you can replicate them.

Path Exploration

Use path exploration to create a detailed tree graph that visualizes how users move through your website or app.

User Lifetime

The user lifetime exploration can uncover individual user behavior and value during their time as your customer. Similar to user explorer, this exploration provides hints at what kinds of sources, campaigns, demographics, and behaviors may result in high lifetime value.

Once you’ve selected your template or technique, you’ll land inside the exploration editor, which Google calls the “canvas.”

Canvas

Within the canvas, you’ll notice a larger area on the right side of the screen that will display your data within your chosen technique. You can use multiple different techniques inside a single exploration. Just open a new tab toward the top of your canvas to create a new one (ten tabs is the limit as of now).

On the left side of the screen are two columns — Variables and Tab Settings — where all your configuration will be done.

Variables

The left-most column is where your variables live. As of now, every exploration has these three main variable sections:

Segments are subsets of data such as users from a specific country, recently active users, users who haven’t made a purchase, users who have made a purchase, and so on. There are tons of ways to slice the data here. Google Analytics provides segment suggestions, but you can create your own or use their predictive functionality to build audiences based on the behavior it’s observed in your website or app.

Dimensions are attributes associated with data points like events, products, users, etc. For example, the dimensions of a product may be product name, product category, product price, product SKU, etc. Explorations has over 100 predefined dimensions, and customization is possible.

Metrics are variables for measuring. So metrics include things like number of active users, number of first-time purchases, number of checkouts, etc. Google provides over 100 options, and you can create your own as well.

For all of these variables, use the plus button to pop open a menu to view and save/import predetermined and custom variables. You can apply up to 20 dimensions and 20 metrics to each exploration.

To create custom dimensions and metrics, visit the Admin gear icon at the bottom left of your screen, make sure you’re in your desired account and property, and select “Custom definitions.”

One more thing you can do in this column is give your exploration a name and set a date range.

Any segments, metrics, or dimensions you want to see in your exploration, across tabs, have to be documented here in Variables. Variables is like the input section for all the analytics data your exploration will use.

Tab Settings

Now let’s shift our attention to the next column: Tab Settings.

While variables outline the segments, metrics, and dimensions of data you want to see in your exploration, Tab Settings is what displays that data according to the technique. Tab Settings gives data shape and context by applying rows, columns, filters, comparisons, and various other configurations. In other words, Tab Settings is where you tweak what your exploration actually looks like.

The Tab Settings that enable you to customize your exploration vary widely by technique.

For example, with a free-form report, you can configure your exploration chart’s rows and columns using your chosen dimensions. With the path technique, you will configure nodes instead (nodes are data points along the path). And with the funnel technique, your settings will include choosing the next action from your dimensions.

To apply variables to your Tab Settings, drag and drop them into the dotted box or click on the box for a dropdown menu of options.

The dropdown menu at the top that enables you to choose your technique is constant across the Tab Settings for every technique.

To provide the details on how exactly to configure every single Tab Setting for every type of GA4 technique currently available, we’ll provide these quick links to Google’s guide to each:

• Free-form exploration
• Cohort exploration
• Funnel exploration
• Segment overlap 
• User explorer
• Path exploration
• User lifetime

Walkthrough: Create Your First GA4 Exploration (Segment Overlap)

The segment overlap technique is pretty unique as it enables you to pinpoint hyper-specific segments within your existing audience that you can then go on to explore further, draw insights from, and target with your marketing efforts.

So, let’s go through the full process of creating and sharing a GA4 exploration based on the segment overlap technique:

1. You know the drill at this point — sign in to Google Analytics, navigate to the GA4 property or app where you want to create this exploration, choose the Explore tab in the left sidebar, and hit the Explorations landing page.

2. Select the segment overlap template to open the canvas.

3. In the Variables column, give this exploration a name and select the date range from which you want to pull data.

4. Still in Variables, use the plus buttons to add the segments, dimensions, and metrics that define the data by which you want to slice and dice your exploration.

5. In the Tab Settings column under Segment Comparisons, you can pull in up to three segments to compare.

6. Fill out Breakdowns with dimensions, which are attributes that give further context to your segments, like country, device type, etc. These will make up your rows.

7. Pick the starting row for your table and the number of rows to display.

8. In the Values section, choose your metrics, which are qualitative measurements like number of ad clicks, number of sessions, etc. These will guide your columns.

9. If you want to refine your results even further, add dimensions or metrics to the Filters section. This field enables you to get hyper-specific on what kind of device, which countries, etc. you can view your exploration by.

10. You should see a chart and table taking shape in your canvas. The graph you will end up with is interactive! Hover over different segments and overlapping sections to learn more about niches within your broader audience. The table below your new diagram shows the data upon which the graph is built.

This example from Google shows what it might look like if you created a segment overlap exploration to see where new users, mobile traffic, and converters user segments converge:

11. If desired, you can now export and/or share your exploration. In the upper right corner of your canvas is what looks like a download button. This will give you options to export your data in a variety of ways.

You’ll also see a humanoid icon that enables sharing. This button shares the exploration with all other users who are already part of this Google Analytics property. Shared explorations are read-only. Folks who receive your share will have to go to their primary Explorations page (step 1 above), find the exploration you’ve shared (it’s just below the templates), and use the dotted menu to duplicate the exploration. This will create a new version, which they can use and edit in any way they please.

Explorations in GA4 are worlds more thorough than the Universal Analytics reports many of us have become very used to. And while that means great things for your depth of understanding around your audience and your digital properties, it’s obviously going to take a good chunk of time and work to get set up and get used to.

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