Daily ArchivesSeptember 9, 2021

Last month, we published The Ultimate Guide to Prepping Your Magento Store for Around-the-Clock Holiday Sales in partnership with Groove. The ebook is a comprehensive guide to getting your Magento eCommerce store in shape for the holiday season. If you haven’t already started to prepare, time is running out to give your customers the best possible experience, not to mention maximizing revenue over the busiest shopping period of the year.

But better late than never, so I want to share some more optimization tips drawn from the Ultimate Guide to make sure that your customers don’t have to sit twiddling their thumbs before they can make a purchase.

In our previous Holiday Season preparation guide article, we focused on how you can use data to improve performance. Today I want to examine some of the techniques for improving Magento front-end performance.

Find The Bottlenecks

As the saying goes, premature optimization is the root of all evil. All of the advice I’m about to give is valid, but every eCommerce store is different. There’s no point wasting time on optimizations that don’t make a practical difference to your store’s performance.

There are several free tools to help identify targets for optimization. I recommend Pingdom Tools and Google Pagespeed Insights. Each provides useful information you can use to target optimizations where they’ll do the most good.

Reduce HTTP Requests

Every HTTP request takes time as data packets travel from the shopper’s browser to your server and back again. Reducing the number of round trips can substantially decrease latency problems.

If your store loads large numbers of CSS and JavaScript files, latency can quickly add up. One way to cut down on round-trip times is to concatenate and minify these assets.

Concatenation is joining all the files together into one big file. Minification is removing all the whitespace, comments, and other pieces of information the browser doesn’t care about.

Hopefully, your Magento theme developer has done this for you, but you can also use the built-in Merge JavaScript and Merge CSS options in the Developer menu.

Don’t Go Nuts With Trackers

Adtech, trackers, and other JavaScript snippets that call out to external servers can have a huge impact on performance. I know you need to track what users are doing to improve their experience, but don’t go overboard.

Think carefully about the negative performance implications of adding too many JavaScript snippets to pages.

Defer JavaScript Loading

JavaScript often blocks page rendering, which is why sometimes pages load a little bit of content and then stop for several seconds while they load and execute JavaScript.

Ideally, your store should initially only load the assets — including JS and CSS — it needs to display the content. Everything else should load after the content.

Optimize Images

Images often constitute the largest proportion of a page’s weight. That’s especially true on eCommerce stores, where large compelling images can make all the difference to a sale.

On eCommerce product pages, I’d encourage you to use as many images as you think are necessary. However, those images should be optimized to consume as little bandwidth as possible. You can use a tool like ImageOptim to optimize before uploading, or use an extension like Image Optimizer to optimize them in place (although be aware, this can take a substantial chunk of your server’s resources if you have lots of product images).

Consider AMP

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project is a way to do an end-run around the whole optimization process and deploy parallel pages that offer great performance on mobile.

Originally AMP was designed for news sites, but it’s seen considerable uptake with eCommerce stores too. Personally, I’d argue that the best approach is to optimize a store’s pages so they offer great performance whatever the platform, but eCommerce merchants should definitely be aware of AMP as an option.

If you haven’t already read it, be sure to take a look at The Ultimate Guide to Prepping Your Magento Store for Around-the-Clock Holiday Sales for more inspiration as we draw closer to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Instant messaging has taken off in a big way over the last couple of years. The market is dominated by chat platforms from the big social network giants like Facebook, and by startups like WeChat, but no one has had more success in the business world than Slack. Slack is a group-chat platform focused mainly on providing a place for co-workers to communicate, but it’s also a popular support channel. WordPress’ development community has its own Slack team.

Slack offers more than just straightforward chat. It has apps and integrations for many platforms and services, including WordPress. Integrating a WordPress site with a Slack team is a great way to manage WordPress workflows and to build a community around a website.

If your business uses both Slack and WordPress, there are several ways you can tie them together using WordPress plugins.

Slack Notifications

Unsurprisingly, Slack Notifications is a plugin that will send WordPress notifications to a Slack channel. There is a range of notifications WordPress users can choose to have sent to their channels, including update notifications for WordPress Core and for plugins, notifications that posts have been published, which is particularly useful for announcing new content to your community, and others, such as new user registrations and admin logins.

Slack Lazy Invitations

To join a Slack team, a user has to be invited. The Slack Lazy Invitations plugin allows a business to embed a widget into a WordPress page which will automatically handle invitations. Automatic invitations are a must if your intention is to build a Slack-based community around your brand, or if you intend to use Slack for customer support.

WP Slack Sync

WP Slack Sync offers much deeper integration than the other plugins we’ve discussed here. It allows WordPress users to embed their Slack channels into WordPress pages with a widget. Users can sign-in to Slack from the WordPress site, and the plugin will also handle automatic invitations.

WP Slack Sync is not a free plugin, but if your company makes heavy use of Slack and WordPress, the integration may well be worth paying for.

Slack, WordPress, and IFTTT

IFTTT is a web service for tying together APIs, including the WordPress and Slack API. For a simple integration like sending notifications to Slack when a blog post is published, using IFTTT is a great alternative to installing a plugin.

Slack doesn’t have anywhere near the user base of Facebook Messenger and other instant chat giants, but its focus on group chat and its integration with other services makes it perfectly suited to building communities around business and publishing sites.

It’s no secret that that advertising on the web doesn’t generate the returns it used to. The online advertising industry is growing, which is good for Google and Facebook, but the revenue per ad is shrinking, which is bad for publishers. Over the last year, the use of ad-blockers on mobile and desktop has increased, further reducing the effectiveness of the traditional banner ad.

Publishers are turning in droves to alternative advertising strategies, most prominently native advertising. Native advertising is the paid placement of promotional content that mimics the appearance and position of editorial content. An advertiser pays a publisher to write or publish an article that contains content that promotes or is otherwise beneficial to the advertiser within the normal flow of the publisher’s editorial content.

Native advertising can be an effective and transparent way to increase site revenue, but there are obvious hazards. If a publisher declines to clearly signal which content is editorial and which a paid-for placement, they breach their readers’ trust. The reader expects editorial content to be motivated by something other than a direct exchange of cash from an advertiser. In fact, if a publisher isn’t up-front about native advertising, it’s possible for them to run afoul of the law.

The FTC and Native Advertising

The FTC is responsible for ensuring that advertising is not deceptive. Consumers will behave differently towards advertising content and editorial content, and they have a right to be able to make their own mind up about the reliability of paid-for content placements.

The FTC provides clear guidelines about what is permissible and what is not.

• From the FTC’s perspective, the watchword is transparency. An advertisement or promotional message shouldn’t suggest or imply to consumers that it’s anything other than an ad.
• Some native ads may be so clearly commercial in nature that they are unlikely to mislead consumers even without a specific disclosure. In other instances, a disclosure may be necessary to ensure that consumers understand that the content is advertising.
  If a disclosure is necessary to prevent deception, the disclosure must be clear and prominent.
• In a nutshell, if content has been paid for, it must be made clear to users. The easiest way to do that is with an element prominently included on the page that indicates the content is paid-for or sponsored.

Google And Native Advertising

Google makes the same distinction between editorial content and paid content the FTC does, with some differences. Google wants to avoid sending its users to native advertising content that doesn’t make its paid-for nature clear.

There are two main points to bear in mind here. Firstly, native advertising content should be clearly distinguished from editorial content. And secondly, links within native advertising content should include the nofollow tag.

The second of these concerns Google’s rules about paid links. Google uses the quantity and quality of incoming links — along with many other signals — to determine where a site will appear in the search results. Google doesn’t want that signal distorted by paid-for links: it wants the links to be given freely for editorial reasons.

A nofollowed link looks like this:

Link to sponsor site

If you don’t nofollow paid-for links within native advertising, there’s a strong likelihood that your site will be penalized.

Many publishers — and especially bloggers — completely ignore these rules. Of course, they are free to do so, but it’s risky to take on both the FTC and Google. The result may well be harmful to the publisher’s business.

Over the years, we’ve written about several plugins that help publishers manage content creation and publishing workflows for teams of writers and editors, including the excellent CoSchedule and Editorial Calendar. WordPress is great at managing content, but for publishing workflows with many different pieces of content flowing from ideation to creation and publication via multiple team members, it helps to have a dedicated tool.

Kanban is a new entry to this field that takes a somewhat different approach to the traditional editorial calendar. Kanban, which is developed by Corey Maass, is loosely based on the Kanban technique, a management technique invented by the Japanese automobile industry in the 1950s that encourages just-in-time supply replenishment and process optimization. Kanban was adopted by the software industry, which uses it to manage and visualize development workflows.

Kanban proper is a complex management strategy, but for our purposes it’s a tool for content teams to visualize and manage workflows and projects. Within Kanban, this is done using Kanban cards. Workflows are visualized as a series of columns — or swimlanes, if you prefer — that match stages of the content production workflow.

Let’s say you have an Ideas column, a Write column, an Edit column, and a Publish column. Content ideas are entered into the first column, and when a writer is ready to make a start, she moves it into the Write column, at which point it’s assigned to her and she estimates how long it will take her to complete. When she’s done, she moves it into the Edit column, at which point an editor picks it up, edits it, and moves it to the Publish column.

The benefit of using this system is that everyone can see which work is available for them, and each piece of work flows through the system in a logical order.

Corey Maass has written an article that looks at building content creation workflows on Kanban in more detail.

Kanban is a great way to organize content publishing workflows in WordPress, if its methods suit the way your organization works. It lacks some of the power and precision of tools like CoSchedule, but I can see how, for some organizations, that’s a good thing. Editorial calendars foreground information in a different way, and it can often be difficult to see a comprehensive overview of the status of work moving through the process. Kanban is designed to make that sort of workflow visualization and management much easier; a task it accomplishes with aplomb.

The ability to include starter content has long been on the wish list of theme developers, and it looks like that wish will come true with the upcoming release of WordPress 4.7. A new commit to the development branch of WordPress enables theme developers to include starter content that’s visible in the theme customizer and can be applied to a new site quickly and easily.

Many new WordPress users install WordPress on their web hosting account and go looking for a theme. When they find a theme they like, on the WordPress Theme Repository or a premium theme marketplace, they buy it, install it, and find that the results are nothing like they had imagined.

Theme developers naturally want to show off their work in the best light. They stock demo themes with carefully arranged widgets, filler text, and beautiful images. None of that is included when a theme is first installed, which causes consternation for users because they expect to be able to buy a theme and immediately have a site that looks just as good as the demonstration.

This isn’t a hard technical challenge: the demo content could easily be included alongside the theme files. However, WordPress has historically disallowed starter content. One reason is that themes are often bought for sites that already have content, and throwing in a load of extraneous content is not what the site owner wants.

Developers have found ways around the proscription. The documentation for many themes includes instructions on how to download and install the demo content, but that’s not ideal for new users. Theme developer’s support queues are full of complaints from users who think they’ve been swindled because their WordPress site doesn’t resemble the demo site.

The proposed implementation of theme starter content solves a number of these problems. Firstly, it can only be used with new sites. Sites that have existing content will not be able to use the starter content. Secondly, the starter content is staged in the theme customizer. It doesn’t go live on the site unless the user chooses to publish it.

This isn’t quite everything theme developers might have hoped for. What constitutes a new site is fairly narrow and plenty of users will have published at least a test article before trying to install a theme. If they’ve saved a post or page, modified a widget, or saved customizer state before installing the theme, the starter content won’t be available.

Nevertheless, it’s great that the WordPress team are focusing on the experience of new users. Far too many WordPress sites are abandoned in the very early stages because users don’t have a clear understanding of what they can expect from a theme’s initial appearance and grow frustrated that they can’t get from theme installation to the appearance of the demo site without a lot of work.

WordPress is a phenomenon. It’s by far the most used content management system on the web, with many millions of sites taking advantage of the WordPress application and the ecosystem that has grown around it over more than decade. The sheer size and diversity of the WordPress world opens up opportunities for experienced WordPress users and developers. Tens of thousands of people make a living servicing WordPress users.

In this article, I’d like to take a look at a few of the ways people have built a career on WordPress. Of course, many business and individual WordPress users make money from their sites, but I’d like to look at career opportunities for people who want to provide services to those users.

Web Hosting

You’re reading this post on the blog of a company that offers WordPress services. Hostdedi is a hosting company that, among other things, specializes in providing high-performance WordPress hosting. It’s entirely possible to become a WordPress host, but providing the level of service, performance, and security that we do requires a substantial investment.

Many WordPress professionals, however, leverage the benefits of our platform to provide reseller hosting. If you offer WordPress professional services, it’s a good idea to choose a hosting company like Hostdedi that will handle many of the technical details of hosting for you.

Support

There are WordPress users of all levels of ability, from the expert to the beginner. Most of these users require support in some form. At the non-expert end of the spectrum, users need WordPress installing, configuring, and securing — and will probably need help throughout the life of their site. Even those who are technically capable of managing a WordPress site often prefer to outsource the work to an expert.

There are many opportunities to support WordPress users both on a small scale and a large scale, and, contrary to what many WordPress professionals will tell you, you don’t have to be a developer with a deep understanding of PHP. Lots of people just want a WordPress site installed on decent hosting, configured with the right plugins and theme, and maintained regularly.

That said, if you want to flourish as a WordPress professional, I’d advise you to invest time into learning how WordPress works, the language it’s written in, and the technical foundation that will allow you to provide higher-value services.

Development

Learning the technology that underlies WordPress increases the scope of your career opportunities. WordPress developers are in demand, and a skilled and experienced WordPress developer can expect to earn a good living.

Premium Plugins And Themes

Many WordPress developers choose to make a living creating premium plugins and themes, which they sell through marketplaces or directly. The barrier to entry for theme development in particular is quite low, and there’s a huge amount of competition, but many developers flourish in this space.

Some of the most successful WordPress developers who have taken this route include Pippin Williamson of Pippin’s Plugins and Joost de Valk of Yoast.

Bespoke Plugins And Themes

Perhaps a more stable opportunity is theme development (and occasionally plugin development) for specific organizations. Once a developer, designer, or agency has established a reputation, the returns on this type of work can be quite rewarding.

Custom Client Work

WordPress development goes beyond plugins and themes. Many organizations require modifications to WordPress itself (although that’s almost never a good idea) or the development of custom front/backends to support the specific needs of their business.

The WordPress ecosystem offer many opportunities for WordPress professionals of all types.

I spend most of my working day writing blog posts, press releases, and other content — much of which is eventually published on a WordPress blog (like this one). I’ve experimented with any number of text editors — Byword, IA Writer, Editorial, 1Writer, Drafts, and even Vim and Emacs — but none has stuck like Ulysses.

Ulysses is an elegant Markdown(ish) text editor chock-full of thoughtful features that make it a pleasure to plan and write content with. I’m particularly fond of Ulysses because of its uncompromised iPad app. The Mac app — the original — is fantastic, and the iOS version is almost as complete. Aside from a few minor features, everything possible in the Mac app is possible on the iPad and iPhone — all with excellent sync so content is available on every devices.

Among Ulysses’ major strengths are its powerful export options. I can export content in HTML, PDF, DOCX, and several other formats, all with configurable formatting. But until now Ulysses has been missing one crucial feature — the ability to export and publish to WordPress. In the past, I’ve had to export HTML from Ulysses and paste that into WordPress, before manually entering titles, excerpts, categories, tags, and so on — something that’s tolerable on the Mac, but not much fun on an iPad.

With the release of Ulysses 2.6, that’s changed. And I’m happy to say that Ulysses’ WordPress publishing workflow is one of the most graceful I’ve used in any application.

The publishing workflow works with Ulysses’ existing interface and features. To take a simple example, the title of a post is taken from the top-level title of the text. Tags and categories are easily handled within Ulysses. If you want to specify a custom excerpt, you can embed a note within the text of the post and Ulysses will auto-populate the field in WordPress.

When you export to WordPress, you can choose publication status, publication dates, and post formats. If you want to preview before publishing to WordPress, you can integrate custom CSS from your site with Ulysses preview system, which will give you a good idea of what your post will look like when it’s live. And you can tell Ulysses what to do after you’ve published, including opening the post editing page in WordPress or viewing the post.

If you’re a WordPress user who prefers to write outside of the WordPress text editor, and you work within the Apple ecosystem — no Windows or Android versions unfortunately — Ulysses is definitely worth taking a look at.

Together with poor management and lack of planning, not knowing how to market and sell a product can make your business flop.

Marketing is an integral part of the success puzzle. Therefore, you need to learn how to bring a product to the market to grow your business.

If you don’t know how to do that, don’t worry. We’re going to list surefire ways to market a product online to help you reach more customers.

Read on to find out why you need to market your products, plus marketing tips to help your marketing efforts.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Product Marketing and How It Boosts Your Online Presence

How To Market a Product

Final Thoughts: How To Market a Product To Boost Ecommerce Sales

Product Marketing and How It Boosts Your Online Presence

Product Marketing is promoting a product to customers intending to have them buy it. Unlike conventional marketing that focuses on a brand, product marketing promotes individual products.

In this case, it makes more sense when someone searching for a laptop, for instance, finds the laptop first instead of finding your store.

Product marketing involves targeting specific products to boost awareness, drive demand, and increase conversions.

Benefits of Marketing Your Product

Product marketing is a great way to generate leads. Besides that, there are other ways marketing products benefit your online business.

• It offers an opportunity to help new customers build trust and confidence in your products.

• It informs your customers of the products or services you’re offering.

• It provides your target market with insight into your new products (beyond their pricing).

• It helps your product to remain relevant not only to your target demographic but in the market.

• It gives you a competitive advantage.

• It improves sales and results in more revenue.

• It increases your product’s market share, meaning your merchandise stands out above similar products.

How To Market a Product

Taking these methods into account is crucial when learning how to market a product. After all, it can determine whether your business succeeds or fails.

Here are some tried and true marketing strategies on how to effectively market a product.

1. Know Your Product’s Target Audience

Asking yourself who your target customer is should be the first thing you do when creating a product marketing plan for your business.

That way, you’ll know who your ideal customer is, as well as the challenges and needs they have to ensure your product resonates with their expectations.

Having a clear idea of your customer base also helps tailor your messaging, have a clear vision during the product development phase, and brainstorm marketing ideas.

The critical point here is, your product must solve a problem — it should meet a need.

2. Spread the Word on Social Media

Social media is a great marketing channel.

Through social media marketing, you can advertise your product to your followers and reach a new audience.

For that reason, you should create business pages on various social media platforms.

That way, you get to present your products across different social media channels and answer questions or solve customer problems.

Remember, to have a successful social media marketing campaign, your content must stand out enough to attract new and potential customers alike.

Create captivating headlines and follow through with relevant content. Whenever possible, use eye-catching, high-quality graphics to capture the attention of your web visitors and gain their interest.

3. Engage With Influencers

In a market largely driven by social media, influencer marketing can be heaven-sent for brand awareness.

You can choose to include brand influencers in your advertising campaigns to demonstrate the product on social platforms.

Involve others to provide you in-depth written reviews for your products or services. Influential people can reach and influence audiences to use your products, especially during a new product launch.

4. Start an Affiliate Program

An affiliate marketing program is a great way to use other people for marketing your products. You can hire an online merchant or blogger to advertise your products.

In this type of marketing, influencers will cover your products and advertise them to their fans for a commission.

For instance, Ebay’s Partner Network is a program that pays marketers for driving traffic and leading people to buy from their ecommerce store. Referrals may also be a great strategy to have others do the marketing for you.

5. Offer Free Product Samples and Contests

Product giveaways and contests are excellent ways for retailers to market their products and services. It is an opportunity to reach new customers who get a chance to test your products without spending or committing.

When you get the products in their hands, they’re more likely to buy when they finish the sample, especially if they liked it. They might talk about it in their social circles and social media, which is great word-of-mouth marketing.

6. Have an Email List

Email marketing is a low-cost way to market your brand, especially if you’re starting a small business. You can do this by collecting email addresses from your web visitors and sending promotional emails.

Your audience should find the content relevant and valuable. Otherwise, your email might end up in the trash. That is a waste of effort and time on your side.

Share the latest news and trends in your industry to keep them engaged and up to date. Include visuals as a way to capture their interest further.

7. Include Customer Loyalty Programs

Ecommerce loyalty programs focus on rewarding customers who are loyal to your business. These programs are often a combination of exclusive discounts, coupons, and free products.

Although the primary purpose of these programs is customer retention, loyalty programs will also attract new customers.

Implementing a customer loyalty program will systematically push your customer up the sales funnel.

8. Post Products Reviews From Happy Customers

Any user-generated content or general customer posts on your website are super useful and can influence customers’ decisions. That includes comments, product images, videos, and reviews.

If any of your products are widespread and customers are happy about it, take that as an opportunity to market the product.

You don’t have to teach customers how to market a product. All you have to do is ask them to leave reviews and testimonials on products they have used and would recommend to others.

Encourage them to leave reviews through reminders, pop-ups, or via email after they receive the product.

9. Provide Free Webinars for Products

Hosting virtual events to demonstrate how your products work instills confidence in those who want to try out or have a deep interest in your products. Through social media, you can hold live events for a large audience.

Facebook Live is one of the platforms you can use to impress dedicated fans on your page. You might need to invest in high-quality video and audio for successful live streaming sessions.

Remember to inform your followers about your social media events in advance so they can prepare.

Final Thoughts: How To Market a Product To Boost Ecommerce Sales

Through these practical marketing tips, you can start learning how to market a product.

Although it might appear challenging for the first time, marketing is one of the growth hacking strategies you can use to reach prospective customers and make more money.

So, go ahead and implement those marketing tactics you feel can work for your online business or startup. Just make sure you have a reliable online store to reap the benefits.

If that’s proving difficult, check out fully managed WooCommerce hosting by Hostdedi. It’s optimized for the ecommerce experience and comes with:

• Built-in advanced caching for ultra-fast loading and site speed

• Cart abandonment technology

• Premium themes & plugins built in

• Always-on security monitoring

• Support from WooCommerce experts 24/7/365

Check it out or get started with a free trial today.

Related Resources

As Jeff Chandler points out on WP Tavern, the next major WordPress release won’t blow anyone’s socks off. It adds useful features that improve the lives of WordPress users and developers in small ways. I, for one, am pleased with in-line link checking — it’ll save me several minutes of manual checking every time I publish an article. But there are no real headline features. Nothing that will fundamentally change the core WordPress experience.

Does it matter that last few releases of WordPress lack the “wow factor” as Chandler puts it? Personally, I don’t think so. It may well be a problem for pundits and writers in the WordPress space: we’re always hungry for new material. But the millions of people who use WordPress every day are quite happy that WordPress doesn’t undergo radical changes with each release.

WordPress Is Mature

WordPress has a clearly defined job to do, and it does it well. It’s been doing it well for years. Could WordPress be improved? Of course, but 25% of the top million sites on the web didn’t choose WordPress because they want novelty. They want stability, performance, ease-of-use, and the power to publish on the open web without being beholden to platforms with inscrutable motivations.

Over 13 years, WordPress has become an incredible piece of software. Over the next decade it will continue to develop, both for users and developers, but change for change’s sake isn’t a good way to run a software project that hundreds of millions of people interact with daily.

Incremental Development

Around the time I read Chandler’s article, I also read an excellent Fast Company feature that focuses on Apple’s slow pace of product development.

“First, breakthrough moments are unpredictable outcomes of ongoing, incremental innovation; second, that ongoing, behind-the-scenes innovation brings significant benefits, even if it fails to create singular disruptions; and, third, that new technologies only connect broadly when a mainstream audience is ready and has a compelling need.”

With every release of WordPress, the interface and the experience of publishers and developers gets a little better. At three releases a year, incremental improvements rapidly add up. Take a look at WordPress today and three years ago. Lots of incremental changes have radically improved the WordPress experience without causing major disruption.

Laying The Foundations

The WordPress JSON REST API is an innovation packed with “wow factor”. It has the potential to radically change the tools and applications developers can create for working with WordPress. Development for the API has been gradual, taking place over many months as a Feature Plugin before any of its functionality was implemented in WordPress Core.

To the average WordPress user, the REST API makes no obvious difference at all. It’s not a “wow” feature from that perspective. But it’s going to change the WordPress ecosystem in ways that will directly benefit users — the Calypso interface is just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s Plenty Of Wow In The Plugin Ecosystem

WordPress Core should be stable — most of the functionality that people need in addition to core features is already available in the massive plugin ecosystem. It doesn’t make sense for the WordPress Core team to duplicate the efforts of plugin developers in most cases, and where it does make sense — as with two-factor authentication — the Core team will gradually integrate that functionality.

A platform with as many users as WordPress needs to be very careful about what it changes. Stability and a commitment to getting it right are more important than feature-packed releases that give people like me something to talk about.

WordPress shortcodes, which are part of WordPress Core and many plugins, can be a source of confusion for new WordPress users.

Shortcodes look like this:

Let’s take a look at the problems shortcodes solve and how they’re used.

The average WordPress page is a mixture of text and images entered into the content management system’s editor. But many also offer extra functionality like forms, media embeds, maps, and other dynamic content. Shortcodes allow WordPress users to add new dynamic content to posts and pages safely without requiring them to know how to code.

Under the hood, WordPress is written in a programming language called PHP. When a WordPress page is requested by a web browser, WordPress executes a series of PHP scripts which build a web page in the languages that web browsers understand — HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

This is what gives WordPress its power: because the pages are built when they are loaded, the content can be dynamically changed for every page-load depending on a multitude of factors, such as when the page is loaded or which user is logged-in.

Adding HTML to a page is simple — you type it into the editor. So, if a WordPress site owner wants to add dynamic content that relies on PHP to their pages, the obvious solution is to insert some PHP code into the page itself. If they don’t need PHP, they might choose to embed some JavaScript instead.

But, as you probably already know, giving users the ability to add PHP or JavaScript code to a WordPress page is a very bad idea.

Firstly, it creates a massive security vulnerability; this is how cross-site scripting attacks are born. Secondly, there’s every chance that arbitrary code will stop the page, or the whole site, from working properly. And thirdly, most WordPress users can’t code, so there needs to be an easier way for them to add dynamic content.

Allowing users to add new features to WordPress pages is essential, but allowing them to add their own code is irresponsible. Shortcodes are the solution to this dilemma. A shortcode is essentially a macro: a snippet of text that is expanded into a larger code snippet.

Let’s say you wanted to embed a video using the default video shortcode.

https://videopress.com/v/scFdjVo6

Shortcodes start and end with square brackets. The first bracket is followed by the name of the shortcode, which is followed by a series of attributes of the form attribute=”string”.

When WordPress builds the page, it comes across the shortcode and expands it into the code that, when executed, outputs the necessary HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for creating a video embed.

Adding new shortcodes to WordPress isn’t all that difficult if you have some knowledge of PHP. Each shortcode is defined in the site’s PHP code using the Shortcode API. Theme and plugin developers use this API to add functionality so that users can inject dynamic content within pages.