You bought a new hosting. Great! Now, you are ready for the online adventure using WordPress. For starters, using WordPress themes(paid or free) work well as they offer good customization. However, they are not customizable to the core and this is where page builders come in.

In this article, we will review Elementor page builder from Pojo which is a free and open source.

Building a website from scratch requires a lot of work including time and money. Generally, it goes like this. You hire a developer for the work and then he delivers in iterations the final website. Even though customizing your site from the scratch is a good thing. However, it is possible for businesses just starting their online presence.

Elementor page builder gives them the ability to do just that -- all free! You can edit your homepage, contact us page, blog pages, and align according to your business philosophy.

Elementor - Page Builder for WordPress Review

Elementor is a great page builder due to its fluid live editing experience. It enables anyone to design their WordPress site without any coding knowledge. All you need to do use the drag and drop feature and build your site accordingly.

Elementor is a great starting point for anyone who has a limited budget. It’s popular and has already been downloaded more than a million times! You can also get started by download it from their official page.

Elementor Features

So what makes Elementor amazing? Let’s discuss the main features below.

1. Pre-made templates: A blank canvas can be a hard place to get started. That’s why Elementor comes with pre-made page templates so that you can customize it according to your requirement. Right now, it offers more than 35+ templates. Furthermore, you can create templates from the ground up and save them for future use. 

2. Responsive and SEO optimized:  All the pages created using Elementor are responsive and SEO optimized. This is very important for a modern website as being responsive, and SEO optimized are must have for any business out there. Not only it improves user experience but also helps gain Google rankings.
3. Widgets: Elementor comes with a lot of widgets including content locks, text, videos, buttons, dividers, etc. These widgets are amazing when it comes to building pages using drag and drop functionality. Want to add a video? Just use the video widget.

   
   

4. User Interface: Setting up and working with Elementor is a breeze. It is simple, intuitive and powerful at the same time. Even new users will find it easy to use. For those who are having a hard time understanding how it works, there is plenty of good documentation available online.

Pricing

It’s free! Yup.

You can download it from their official website or WordPress repository.

However, there is a PRO version available as well. The PRO version offers more features than the free version. For example, you get Pro widgets such as portfolio, price table, flip box, etc.

The PRO version is available in three packages. You can get personal, business and an unlimited version for $49, $99 and $199 respectively.

Conclusion

Elementor is one of the best free drag and drop plugin in the market. The fact that it is free makes it even better. With it, you need zero coding skills. Support for responsive design makes it compatible with all the modern WordPress themes.

Another aspect that makes Elementor worth is its fast and fluid user experience. The plugin can also be useful for developers who are looking to customize some aspect of their page and don’t want to fiddle with the site's code. Overall, the plugin is highly recommended for anyone who wants to design their page using drag and drop plugin.

You should also look at the PRO version if you are impressed with the free version.

Worried where to get managed WordPress hosting? Check out our managed WordPress hosting packages. You can also get started using our shared hosting services which completely supports WordPress.

This brings us to the end of the review. What do you think about it? Comment below and let us know.

All of us use content delivery networks (CDNs) in one way or another without ever realizing it. These are content distribution systems that help deliver web content and web pages to users according to their geographical locations, as well as the content delivery server and the webpage details.

CDNs serve a crucial role in delivering website content in extremely fast speeds to maximize global reach, especially of content that have extremely high traffic numbers. Using a CDN has important applications for ensuring smooth and effective delivery of content to your customer base.

This post is a guide to all you need to know about CDNs and the ways in which it can offer you great use.

How CDN Works

CDN are being utilized by a variety of industries and for a number of purposes including e-commerce, mobile, healthcare, higher education, advertising, media and entertainment, and its secret lies partly in the way it works. CDNs help reduce the gap between the server of a website and its visitors. It does this by storing the content in various geographical locations in the form of points of presence in its cache and delivers it to various places simultaneously. This allows all the users to view the content from their respective locations without the problem of too much traffic.

For example, if someone in Australia wants to access your US-hosted website, it will be done through the local Australian CDN instead of the content being passed to all the way to US and back. This makes CDNs very effective for delivering content quickly and accurately to multiple users at once.

Benefits of Using CDN

Although CDNs are useful on a large scale, it also has several uses for your business. Firstly, CDN can offer you greater scalability that is not possible with even the most effective web hosting services. It may be that the web hosting service provided by Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. With a CDN, you can achieve higher global reach along with lower packet loss and network latency.

Secondly, CDNs serve as useful distributed data centers that are easily accessible to users from a certain locality. This makes connection and distribution of content a lot faster, especially if you wish to use your e-commerce website to sell products and services to customers from different countries.

Furthermore, CDNs come integrated with usage analytics and reporting tools that can help boost visibility and transparency of your content management operations. A CDN can inform you how customers perceived your videos and text content and use it to improve your marketing strategies.

Lastly, CDNs are extremely cost-effective. They can provide a substantial boost to performance by distributing high loads at incredibly low or no rates. With it, you can save a significant amount of bandwidth and minimize your current web hosting package costs.

In short, CDNs play a crucial role in distributing content to multiple users from different geographical locations quickly and efficiently. They are used by a number of organizations and also serve a number of advantages for business use.

We provide CDN and security by Cloudflare in all our plans. Cloudflare has one of the most reliable global networks and FastWebHost customers can easily use its benefits along with their hosting account.  All our plans include a free Cloudflare CDN and easy access to all other speed and security features provided by Cloudflare.  With FastWebHost you can manage your Cloudflare settings right in your hosting panel, thanks to our special integration of the service.

This is the second part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at FastWebHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

How to Grow your Blog Readership

In part 1 of this series (link) we’ve covered how to build your blog, and how to create pages and posts. Today we’ll show you how you can get more people to start reading those posts and pages on a regular basis.

There are 2 general ways to grow your readership - the organic or natural approach where people find your blog, and the paid approach where you pay someone to help them find your blog. We’ll go over both.

The Natural Way

Search Traffic

Quick! You need to learn to fold a shirt the fastest way. What do you do? You googled it didn’t you? Some of you also searched for it on youtube, but most of you googled it.

Search is the core of the internet. Anytime someone wants to learn something new, it starts with a search. So if you’d like to be known for something, you need to make sure you’re showing up in searches.

We call this optimizing for SEO, and we’ve got a lot of resources on this here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/cat/search-engine-optimization/

Word of Mouth

The other natural ways for people to find out about you is if someone told them about it. That’s the social aspect of blogging, or word of mouth.

So how do you get more word of mouth traffic? Get on social media. People are already on social media, and they will see it. Your current readers and followers will see the update on their news feeds and click to come to your blog. Some will share the post with their own personal networks.

To get shares you have to do more than just post the link in a status update though. Each platform is different, so you’ll need to optimize your post for each.

For example, we’ve found the most effective way to share on Facebook is with a commentary or a related thought that brings people in and makes them want to learn more. On Pinterest a more descriptive image and tags are far more important.

Be Interesting

Now in order for people to share your content and show it to their friends it has to be one thing above all else: I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-I-N-G

There are 3 ways to achieve that in a blog.

Exciting Titles and Feature Images

The title is the first thing people see and yes we do judge a blog post by it’s title. A boring title means no one will click it to read the whole thing, while an exciting title will. The same applies to your feature image - the one that shows up in your archives and your social media shares.

Here’s a great example:

See that? Great title and great image. The number of social shares in the corner is an added boost.

The title is the last thing you should write. Finish the entire post, then come back to write a title. Think about how you can make it more engaging so the readers are compelled to click.

Be Useful

Interesting content gets shared more often, but the most shares come from practically useful content.

It makes sense. The latest celebrity gossip is fun and all, but if you’re going to take the effort to share something it’s likely to be something that others in your network will find useful.

So how do you become more useful?

1. Give people an exact solution to a problem, not 50 different things they might try
2. Give detailed actionable steps they can follow, and stay away from theoretical stuff (unless theory is the point of your blog)
3. Provide lots of examples and case studies to prove your points
4. Show exact numbers wherever possible. Lose 20 pounds in 60 days, not lose weight fast.

Exciting People

Again, people are reading your blog because they care about what you think. Now some people don’t care about what you think, but what if someone they cared about did? Or what if you were writing about someone they cared about.

Here are some ways to get exciting people on your blog.

1. Interview someone important in your field, which is what Mixergy does for small businesses
2. Guest blog on a different bloggers site, such as George Minton’s article on Photododo
3. Analyze something someone famous said or did

When Elon Musk said he was reading Twelve Against the Gods, it sold out on amazon within a day, and prices of used books jumped up from $.99 to $99.99. Clearly, we care about what important people think. This presents a great opportunity for you to get in on the action and drive traffic to your blog.

Exciting perspectives

Everyone’s already written everything about the latest iPhone, and the latest Elon Musk book. Adding your voice to the noise is just that - noise.

If you’d like to stand out you need to say something no one else is saying. Take a unique stand on an issue, or voice your opinions differently.

Have a unique way of saying things. For example Oliver Emberton likes illustrating his points, while Mark Manson enjoys swearing at them, and David Wong mostly makes fun of them.

The important thing is to have a solid stand on a topic that people care about, and expressing it with style and force.

The Paid Way

The Paid way of getting traffic is easy. Post to social media and boost your posts. Add to a content aggregator and pay them to spread it around.

The trouble is, you might get some readers this way, but you won’t keep them for very long. And if you can’t hang on to them then what’s the point?

That’s why you need to start getting readers the natural way, and only use the paid way to amplify your reach.

Back to Work

And now you know how to write better blog posts and get more regular readers. Now it’s time to get back to writing again.

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Next up on the How to Succeed with Blogging series: How to make money from your blog.

This is the first part of a series of guides on how to succeed with blogging. This guide was written by the team at FastWebHost.com who have helped thousands of blogs setup and achieve success over the last 10 years.

Why Start a Blog

If you’re reading this then it’s safe to assume that you have an end goal - a reason why you want to start your blog.

Identity: Domain and hosting

Some of you love to write and love it just as much if people could read your writing. Some of you have heard tales of people raking in millions with their blogs and want to try your hand at the game. Some of you need to establish yourself as a thought leader, to help your other brands grow.

We wrote this guide with the goal of helping all of you.

What is Success

Before we begin, we’d like to go over what a successful blog looks like. For the purpose of this guide we’re defining success as one or more of the following measurable results:

• A lot of readers with positive sentiment
• A lot of subscribers who read your work regularly
• A lot of people who follow your advice or recommendations (such as clicking your links)

For this guide, we won’t be treating facebook likes and youtube subscribers as success. That, grasshopper, is a guide for another time.

Now let’s get started.

How To Make A Blog

Here’s a checklist:

1. Pick a platform
2. Get your name and space on the internet
3. Design your blog
4. Configure your functions
5. Write, shoot, record
6. Repeat

Structure: Blogging Platforms

There are plenty of platforms you can start blogging on - medium, tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger… the list goes on. We won’t debate the pros and cons of every one of them here. Instead we’ll just show you this:

The long and short of it is 72 million people, more than half of all bloggers use Wordpress because:

• It’s free, including a huge number of addons you’ll need (more on this later)
• It’s really easy
• It’s secure
• It’s highly customizable

So that’s what your blog is built with. Now we look at where.

Identity: Domain and hosting

You need to self host. Forget all about free blogging platforms. You need to OWN your own blogging space.

Just imagine if Huffington Post ($14,000,000 in revenue per month) started as huffingtonpost.freeblogs.com instead of huffingtonpost.com.

No, you need your own name (domain) and your own space (hosting). Start by picking out a hosting package from http://fastwebhost.com/web-hosting.html, and you can get the domain at the same time. Most domains go for $2 to $15 per year, while hosting starts at $1/month.

Alright, now we design your blog

Design: Themes and Customization

First install Wordpress. The easiest way is with the Softalicious installer. Here’s a detailed, step by step guide on how to use it :https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/Wordpress-softaculous-installation/ 

Alright, you’ve got Wordpress. Now we need to design it.

Once installed, you’ll get an email with an that shares an admin url (typically www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin) and login information.  Start by logging in. You’ll see a dashboard or admin panel that looks something like this:

The core design of your website is based on the “theme” it’s running. So to change your design you change the theme. Here’s how: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/install-Wordpress-themes/ 

Visit your blog once you’ve installed and activated your theme and you’ll see the new design in place.

You can further customize it to match your needs. Start by uploading your logo or setting your blog’s name from the customize tab under appearance. You can also find a large number of settings in the customize tab including widgets and menu items. We’ve gone over a few here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/customize-Wordpress-themes/ 

Functionality: Plugins

In some cases you might need more functionality, like a calendar of live events or a way for people to sign up to your RSS. The easiest solution is to install a “plugin”, a program that adds this functionality to your site. You can learn more about how to do this here: https://www.fastwebhost.com/tutorials/knowledge-base/install-Wordpress-plugins/ 

Content: Posts and pages

Pages are static “one-off” content such as your about page, privacy policy, etc. Posts are where you publish most of your content. They’re the entries for your blog. They are also different in a few functional ways

• Posts are timely, they get archived in a chronological order. Pages are timeless, they get archived in whatever order you specify.
• Posts can be categorized by subject areas. Pages are hierarchical.
• Posts are included in RSS feed; Pages are not.
• Pages can have different structures and templates; all posts have the same structure

Now let’s show you how to add and edit these posts and pages.

• Create a WordPress Post
• Add images, videos or other multimedia to WordPress Posts
• Categorize posts 
• Display posts from a single (or more) category on a particular page
• Manage comments on your blog

And Again

That’s it. Now you have a blog, on your own domain name, and know how to create content. Now you start publishing.

Next up on the How to Succeed with Blogging series: How to Grow Your Blog’s Readership.