Awantego

Wordpress

by

What is a WordPress Theme?

The way your website looks is crucial. Everything needs to look good together, needs to work together properly, and needs to be easy for potential customers to read through. It’s important to have a basic style that’s consistent through all of your pages so your customers recognize they’re on your website and know where to find the information they need. This is where a WordPress Theme comes in handy.

what you need to know about wp themes

What is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress theme is basically the view of your website. It’s a collection of templates and stylesheets that create the overall look of your website, ensuring every page looks the same to your customers. Themes can include different design elements, basic layouts, and other features. Some themes are designed to work well for just about anyone while others are geared towards a certain topic. Most themes can be modified to suit your individual needs but can be used as-is when you’re first getting started.

What to Consider When Choosing a WordPress Theme

 

When you’re choosing a theme for your website, make sure you look through your options and find one that’s going to work well for you. Beyond just thinking about how the theme looks, consider the following points anytime you’re shopping for a new theme.

  • Type of Website – Some themes are designed for specific purposes. For instance, some are designed just for photography bloggers. If you don’t have a photography blog, the theme isn’t designed for your business and might not work as well as other themes for your business.
  • Functions of Theme – Make sure the theme has everything your website might need, whether that’s certain functions already built in or the ability to use plugins.
  • Security of Theme – Always make sure you get a theme from a reputable source. Check reviews to see if others have had a good experience. Make sure the theme is updated frequently as well since this can include security patches to help keep your website secure.
  • Responsiveness – Today’s consumers use their smartphone when they’re shopping. Make sure any theme you choose is going to be responsive so your customers can visit your website on any device they want.

Most Popular WordPress Theme Marketplaces

 

WordPress Themes can be free or paid. When you’re ready to start shopping for a theme, you’ll want to visit one of the top marketplaces. This helps you ensure you’re getting a theme from a trustworthy source. Some of the top marketplaces today include the following.

  • Themeforest – Themeforest offers some of the top selling WordPress themes. Most themes are offered with a 6-month license and you can see the reviews, rating, and more before you decide to purchase the theme. All themes from this marketplace are thoroughly reviewed and tested before being available for purchase.
  • WordPress.org – WordPress has its own theme marketplace for free themes you can use. They do not offer some of the features paid themes might use, but all of them must adhere to the WordPress guidelines and follow official best practices to be available in this marketplace. Each theme goes through a review process before they can be offered.
  • Elegant Themes – One of the oldest marketplaces for WordPress themes, this marketplace offers premium themes they develop on their own. They have an easy to understand pricing model and their themes are designed for speed, performance, and compatibility.

Most Popular WordPress Themes Today

If you’re ready to start using a theme for your WordPress website, there are a few themes you’ll want to check out first. The following are some of the top themes available right now.

  • Divi – This is a theme that includes a drag-and-drop website builder that can be used to create just about any layout. Custom layouts can easily be saved so they can be reused. Available from Elegant Themes, this is one of the most popular WordPress themes available.
  • TheGem – Another multi-purpose theme, this includes more than 50 concepts to choose from as well as many different styles, demos and more to use. The entire theme was designed to meet very high standards, so it works well for a variety of different websites.
  • Avada – This theme has been a top selling theme for a number of years. It includes advanced options and allows you to create designs without having to know any code. It also includes many pre-built layouts, advanced header options, optimization for SEO, and more.

WordPress themes make your website look professional, help make sure every page looks the same and allows your customers to know what to expect from your website. Check out the top theme marketplaces or the top themes listed here to start using a WordPress theme today.

by

The Fastest WordPress Themes and Why You Want One

While having a website that looks great and functions well is important, the speed of the website can be crucial. The speed of a website refers to how quickly the website can load. The difference between a fast website and a slow website can be a fraction of a second or a few seconds. Increasing the website’s speed should be a factor when you’re deciding on a theme to use.

Why Does Site Speed Matter?

Website speed matters for a couple of different reasons. It matters to the search engines, and a slower speed might not rank as highly as a faster speed, and to potential customers that are visiting the website. Both of these are important to consider when looking into the importance of making the website load much faster.

Search engines use website crawlers to check out all available websites and use an algorithm to determine how highly each website will rank. The website crawlers have a lot of websites to view, so they can’t spend a lot of time on each website. When a website loads slower, the website crawler doesn’t see as much of the website before moving on, which means some or a lot of the optimization for the website doesn’t really matter.

Even once the website is ranked and as it ranks higher, a website that loads slowly can have an impact on whether visitors stay on the website or go somewhere else. Most visitors are not going to want to wait very long for a website to load. If they can get the information faster somewhere else, they’re more likely to go somewhere else to find what they need.

How to Check a Site’s Loading Speed

Checking your website’s loading speed is crucial. You’ll want to know what it is now and check to make sure changing themes or trying other techniques to speed up the loading time are actually working to make your website load faster. Right now, there are many different tools available to help you determine the speed of your website. Google offers one tool, called PageSpeed Insights, that can measure your website’s performance on mobile devices and desktops. Use this to check the current speed of your website as well as to check the speed of your website once you try a new theme.

Top Themes for Fast Speeds

If your website isn’t loading as fast as you might prefer, consider looking for a new theme to use. Many themes today are designed to load as fast as possible. Even though you’ll customize the theme to fit your website, it’s still going to load faster, which can help you optimize your website to rank higher and ensure customers don’t click to check out another website because yours is taking too long to load. Some of the themes you may want to look into include Jevelin, CheerUp, SEO WP, H-Code and Paperio.

Jevelin

Jevelin was designed as a modern and easy-to-use theme that enables you to create the website you want. It offers many different possibilities and can be completely customized to match your branding specifications. It was designed as a way to easily customize a theme that looks professionally done and offers everything you need to create the website you want. This theme does not require any coding knowledge and can be used for any industry or for any subject. Each page can also be customized and there are customizations available for everything down to the icons on the website.

CheerUp

CheerUp is a theme designed to work well for magazines but can be used for just about any type of website. It’s possible to create a magazine in minutes with this theme and website owners can customize the website to meet their needs. There are hundreds of admin options to make customizing the website possible and to ensure you can create the perfect website. It also includes a WooCommerce plugin so you can create an online shop on the website. CheerUp includes social media links to make it easier for your visitors to share your content.

SEO WP

This theme was designed for digital marketing agencies and similar businesses. The theme is fully responsive and includes scalable vector graphics file format support. SEO WP also offers many different customization options and enables you to instantly view any changes you make. It includes a number of premium WordPress theme plugins you can also use when building or managing your website. This WordPress theme is known for being one of the fastest themes as it’s fully optimized with speed in mind and has high scores on multiple speed tests.

H-Code

This theme includes a fully-functional website building toolkit along with plugins, templates, and more. It includes 16 different layouts, each fully customizable, and enables slideshows for the website. It’s designed to look professional but be as flexible as possible so you can build the website you want. H-Code was designed to be as light as possible, which means it loads as fast as possible. It’s also designed to be responsive, so it’s possible to create a website that’s easily and quickly viewable on just about any device.

Paperio

Designed to be used by just about anyone, Paperio is perfect for bloggers, business owners, and more. The theme was designed to make creating a shop online as easy as possible and it includes SEO enhancements to help increase website traffic quickly. It’s also optimized to load as fast as possible in any situation so your visitors never have to wait to view your website. One of the ways it does this is through smart image loading, which enables content to load faster without a loss in quality.

While you’re looking for a theme to use for your website, keep the load speed in mind. This can make a difference in how high your website ranks and how long visitors stay on your website. Check out the themes here to find a fast-loading WordPress theme you’re going to love using.

by

WordPress Security Update 4.8.2. Released

By the end of 19. September 2017 WordPress.org just released a maintenance and security update. With the latest update WordPress now shows version 4.8.2. as its latest release.

The update includes a fix to $wpdb->prepare() to help protect against SQLi injection attacks. WordPress core is not vulnerable to SQLi injection attacks directly, but certain plugins and themes may be vulnerable depending on how they use the $wpdb->prepare() function in their code. This fix alone is reason to update immediately to 4.8.2. Read more about it: WordPress Security Update 4.8.2 – Update Immediately

The following security and sql related issues were fixed with version 4.8.2.:

  1. $wpdb->prepare() can create unexpected and unsafe queries leading to potential SQL injection (SQLi). WordPress core is not directly vulnerable to this issue, but we’ve added hardening to prevent plugins and themes from accidentally causing a vulnerability. Reported by Slavco.
  2. A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in the oEmbed discovery. Reported by xknown of the WordPress Security Team.
  3. A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in the visual editor. Reported by Rodolfo Assis (@brutelogic) of Sucuri Security.
  4. A path traversal vulnerability was discovered in the file unzipping code. Reported by Alex Chapman (noxrnet).
  5. A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in the plugin editor. Reported by 陈瑞琦 (Chen Ruiqi).
  6. An open redirect was discovered on the user and term edit screens. Reported by Yasin Soliman (ysx).
  7. A path traversal vulnerability was discovered in the customizer. Reported by Weston Ruter of the WordPress Security Team.
  8. A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in template names. Reported by Luka (sikic).
  9. A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in the link modal. Reported by Anas Roubi (qasuar).

You may read more on the latest software release on the wordpress website.

About WordPress: WordPress is the most popular content management system fot both bloggers and website owners worldwide.

Customers of hosted wordpress or managed wordpress installations do not have to take any action. The engineers and technicians of awantego.com’s websites have either already updated wordpress or a just about to update your wordpress website to the latest release (Version 4.8.2)

by

Preview: Elementor Visual Editor for WordPress

Elementor editor pane
Elementor editor pane

If you are doing WordPress for a while you may have seen Visual Composer and some other Visual Editors that replace WordPress‘ classic editor for post and pages. Some of the major WordPress Themes come with their own backend editor like Enfold or “The Arc” which was announces as a Visual Composer Killer. All the aforementioned editor replacements are paid premium plugins and usually have a flaw: they slow down the performance of your WordPress site.

Although they all add value for you as a website owner and speed up the time needed to design a beautiful site – they all harm your sites performance in the long run.

It was not surprising that I was quite interested when I heart of a new visual editor for WordPress – which is both faster and free(!): Elementor – the new kid on the block has been on the WordPress market for 1 year or so and has reached 600.000 downloads at WordPress org within a 12 months timeframe. Not bad.

So I gave it a try on my personal playground at http://www.wordpress-expert.info

The plugin installation files of Elementor consist of approx. 5 MB.Compared to js_composer this is just ¼ th of visual composers 20 Meg needed. After activating Elementor you might want to configure the settings of Elementor first. Like Visual Composer you can define where (post, pages, custom post types) you want to use Elementor and which user roles are allowed to use the Elementor Editor.

A new pages is created and designed as you would do it with Visual Composer: Click Page -> Add new. Set the underlying page template to fit your screen-design (with or without a sidebar)  and choose “Elementor” as the editor of choice.

What hit me right away was the performance of Elementor: Within very few seconds the canvas of Elementor came up and was ready to work with. Wow. This gous in line with the user rating of 4.9 (out of 5) on WordPress.org. Amazing.

On the left hand side approx. 25% of your canvas screen is reserved for the design elements of Elementor visual editor. The editor pane looks well organized and literally needs no manual (there is a help button in the center bottom area). Almost every function and all necessary elements can be found with 1 or 2 clicks.

Two small menus on the top left and right will open the settings of Elementor (left) and the design elements (top right) to be used on the canvas. Great stuff. Still impressed.

Elementor Visual Editor comes with 60 pre-defined Temapltes for your pages
Elementor Visual Editor comes with 60 pre-defined Temapltes for your pages

Elementor comes with a set of 60 pre-defined and ready to be used page templates. Each of them can be imported by a simple click. You might then customize a pre-defined layout which comes close to your design ideas. Not bad.

Bonus: You can save any layout you are working on as one of your personal templates within Elementor– and re-use it later on for more pages to come. Very handy.

Elementor Full Screen Canvas
Elementor Full Screen Canvas

The real work with Elementor doesn’t really feel like work. The cool thing about it: With the editing pane one the left and the preview on the right there’s no more need to toggle between editing and preview mode. It simply is the same. In addition Elementor Visual Editor comes with three viewing options for the page or post: One as it will be seen on desktop computers which is used for designing and is the default view, one view with 768 px is for tablet and a last one with 360 pixels emulates a smartphone. It looks a bit like the preview arrangement in Google Chrome.

Integrated Preview for Tablets and Smartphones
Integrated Preview for Tablets and Smartphones

For designers this is extremely powerful as they can preview their results on all three devices in just one place. Really good job – guys. And I am still pretty much impressed.

After playing around with the Elementor designer for half an hour I could not find a flaw or error nor a bug. During that time I had created three test pages with Elementor. A first template imported from Elementor, a simple page just with small design elements and a last page with larger jpg images in it.

As usual I headed over to Pingdom and tested their speed after my caching plugin had the static page in its internal cache. All 3 pages loaded around a 0,7 to 1,0 seconds while being 1,0 to 1,6 MB in size. Again – pretty good job.

Elementor Speed: Around 0,7 to 1,0 sec loading time for 1,6 MB sized page
Elementor Speed: Around 0,7 to 1,0 sec loading time for 1,6 MB sized page

Elementor as a visual editor seems to be capable not just to replace Visual Composer due to its speed and amazing design concept. I assume there will be some enhancements over time too.

The best thing about Elementor sill is: It’s free and Opensource. Wow.

But I’ll probably be happy to pay 49 US-$ sooner or later (97 for 3 sites, 199 for unlimited number of websites) for Elementor Pro (https://elementor.com/pro/ ) to those amazing coders who brought Elementor to the WordPress Community.

Did I mention that Elementor has the potential to replace most visual editors for WordPress on the market? Stay tuned as we’ll publish more posts and reviews about Elementor here.

Did you already use Elementor? What are your experiences with this new plugin for WordPress? Leave a comment below.

by

Latest Plugins to enhance your WooCommerce Shop

It’s really amazing how many new plugins appear on premium marketplace like codecanyon every day. Here are the latest plugins to enhance your woocommerce based online shop. The first plugin of todays picks is meant for clothing shops or online tailors. “Tailor Online” as the name implies allows shop owner to let their clients modify and kond of design they offer:

Tailor Online – WooCommerce Plugin for Online Custom Tailoring by CodeZel

https://codecanyon.net/item/tailor-online-woocommerce-plugin-for-online-custom-tailoring/19812760Tailor Online – WooCommerce Plugin for Online Custom Tailoring by CodeZel Tailor Online is a paid WooCommerce plugin for online custom tailoring. It is enriched with great features including unlimited customizers, online design and submission, email notifications, measurement submission for each order and a lot more.

This plugin introduces an easy to use and affordable online dress designing feature for modern online bespoke tailoring websites. Using the plugin the retailer can add options for various design styles for each customizer and users can design and customize their clothes by selecting different design patterns as they get the freedom to choose every component that goes into tailoring your outfit. Tailor Online is a rela premium plugin as it sells for 450 US-$ – no typo it’s a real application.

If you have lots of images and pretty fotos in your shop you might want to give your visitors a chance to share these pictures on social media and other networks. Smarty4y allows you to place social sharing icons on 9 different locations of any foto or image – which is great for shop owners with lots of fotos:

Smart4y Share Image – Responsive WordPress Plugin by smart4yplugins

https://codecanyon.net/item/smart4y-share-image-responsive-wordpress-plugin/19814697Smart4y Share Image – Responsive WordPress Plugin by smart4yplugins A flexible and responsive sharing plugin, written in pure Javascript. Share images or part of page with other people. Advantages: fully responsive, sharing of the content in 15 most popular social networks, sharing of images or any HTML content. Demo on smart4y-plugins.com.

 

You most likely love emojis like we do. Have you ever wanted to add emojis like voting buttons underneath a product or blog post?

Strafish Post Rating for WordPress by AN2-studio | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/strafish-post-rating-for-wordpress/19815306Strafish Post Rating for WordPress by AN2-studio | CodeCanyon Starfish allows you to place 5 tiny emojis at the end of your product or blog post. Visitors can vote from the angry on the left to the absolutelly happy emoji on the right. The plugin ensures that every voter can only rate your product once. A nice and simple plugin for more user engagement on your woocommerce store. The starfish (though with a typo on codecanyon) sells for just 7 US-$.

 

 

If you are using a DIVI based theme, you might wanna have a look at “WooCommerce Product Builder” for WordPress Shops:

WooCommerce Product Builder For Divi by devabdelfatah | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-product-builder-for-divi/19756725WooCommerce Product Builder For Divi by devabdelfatah | CodeCanyon WooCommerce Product Builder plugin is the must have WordPress plugin for every store owner who uses Divi or Extra theme and WooCommerce to power his store online. It allows shop owners to design and customize products the quick and easy way. Check out their demo at https://www.divikingdom.com/woocommerce-product-builder-divi#demos

 

 

The next newly released plugin allows you to minimize your time needed for webshop administration:

Woocommerce Sales & Discounts by xliner78 | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-sales-discounts/19803521Woocommerce Sales & Discounts by xliner78 | CodeCanyon Here is what you can do with it: Set the Discount Percentage in the first field. Pick A Category you want or select All to add sale prices to all of your products. – and you’re done. By default on products already on sale (if you have some in your shop), will not be added as a sale price. If you want to replace also the existing sale price you can check the “Update Products on Sale”. The plugin is priced at 29 US-$.

 

 

Need to customize the emails sent out to your newly acquired customers?

WooCommerce Email Customizer by eWebChoppers | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-email-customizer/19778652WooCommerce Email Customizer by eWebChoppers | CodeCanyon WooCommerce Email Customizer plugin gives any woocommerce shop-owner the ability to beautify their WooCommerce default email templates by adding custom header and footer to email templates. You can easily customize the WooCommerce emails by changing the colors of email templates, text, header & footer format, add custom links, add social links. Very neat if you are not familiar with HTML-styling and just want to have nice looking emails in no time. A preview section is also available within the plugin to view the email template for all WooCommerce emails. The plugins sells for 19 US-$ on Codecanyon

 

Last but not least: Terms and consditions – doesn’t sound tooooo interesting. If you’d like to display your TOS (terms and considtions)

Woocommerce TOS Iframe by scopes | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-tos-iframe/19774563Woocommerce TOS Iframe by scopes | CodeCanyon Pop Ups are cool for displaying terms and conditions but not as much as using a scroll-able Iframe. That way you are sure buyers actually see the terms and conditions. Display your terms and conditions right on your checkout page below the checkout fields and close to the place order button ! The plugins “enhances” your TOS to appear a bit more stylish and let’s you integrate these mandatory items with ease. The plugin even allows you to localize your terms and conditions. The plugin sells for 19 $ on codecanyon.

 

Do you miss a newly released plugin for WooCommerce? Leave us a comment below and let us know.

by

Best author bio box plugins for wordpress

An author bio box is an important part of a WordPress based website . You can give any author a “face” by showing a foto of him (or her). The author bio box usually gives a brief introduction about the author/writer/blogger and should make it as easy as possible to connect to the author (i.e. email / twitter / facebook) . To quickly connect with any visitor the standard bio box deployed by WordPress is not enough for most website owners. Fortunately there are many free plugins to extend or replace the functionality of the author bio box.

What a good author bio box plugin for your wordpress website should provide:

  • Easy way to update central information for the authors / writer on the wordpress blog
  • The authors image should be either pulled from gravatar or manually uploaded
  • Ideally the bio box provides more posts from the same author
  • The bio box plugin should have more than – let’s say: 1000 downloads on wordpress.org ?
  • An average rating of 4 or better (applies to wordpress.org and themeforest / codecanyon)

Free author bio plugins for wordpress

WP Author Box Lite — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-author-box-lite/WP Author Box Lite — WordPress Plugins Give identity to your blog posts, pages and custom post types! Author Box Lite creates responsive profile and latest posts box to increase reader engagement. This also automatically add google+ profile authorship. Design your wordpress author box to match your theme by simple selecting colors via color picker. All elements are adjustable

Here is how it looked like when I activated.

What I really liked about WP Author Box Lite is that it covered all my requirements like Gravatar Image and related posts from the same author. Although the plugin deserves a better preview image on wordpress.org – I give my thumbs up. Please note that there is also a premium plugin version of WP Author box on Codecanyon which give you even more options to tweek its design.

Starbox – the Author Box for Humans — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/starbox/Starbox – the Author Box for Humans — WordPress Plugins Humans look at beauty more than anything else (as you most probably already know, men and women alike). That’s why you’ll get an Author Box that’s gorgeous to look at and it makes your readers click all the way through to see more about the Authors.
Now, if you have just yourself as an Author on your site, or a super-star team of Authors, you’ll love Starbox. You can choose from the professionaly built themes and landscaping. If you are the super-star type, or want to boost social proof, place your Author Box on top of the page, so that your Human readers will know that they’re reading stuff that a real awesome person has written.

We have used the Starbox Author Bio plugin at one of our main websites (astiga.com) as we published content from many authors. This is how it looks like

Starbox - author bio box plugin
Starbox – author bio box plugin

WP Author Bio  is a bio box plugin that allows you to modify almost any aspect of the boxes design you like. The downside of this flexibility: it looked awful on my blog at first. I had to tune and tweek several settings of the plugin to fit it into my blogs design.

WP Author Bio — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/sexy-author-bio/WP Author Bio — WordPress Plugins The author bio box is responsive and includes five sexy social icon sets to choose from, with support for all the following social networks: Behance, Blogger, Delicious, DeviantArt, Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, RSS, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, Yahoo! & YouTube.

As long as you don’t mind taking your time to change the design and the setttings of the plugin and if you are looking for a feature-heavy plugin then WP Author Bio is for you.

The next author bio box plugin that was recommended to me so I don’t wanna go over it – although I was a little disappointed about it:

Guerrilla’s Author Box — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/guerrillas-author-box/Guerrilla’s Author Box — WordPress Plugins This is a plugin that adds an author box to the end of your posts, showing off the authors name, description, website link and gravatar powered avatar.

Guerillas Author Box does little more than pulling your image from gravatar and display the links to your social profiles – that’s it.

One last free plugin that looked nice and shiny on wordpress.org is “simple author box”. Unfortunately it did not work at all in my blog.

Simple Author Box — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-author-box/Simple Author Box — WordPress Plugins Simple Author Box adds a responsive author box at the end of your posts, showing the author name, author gravatar and author description. It also adds over 30 social profile fields on WordPress user profile screen, allowing to display the author social icons.

 

 

 

Just in case you are running a blog with multiple authors or a larger magazine-like site, you might use “co-authors plus” from wordpress.org. It allows you to add multiple authors to one post – in case you want to give credits to several writers/bloggers/authors for one post:

Co-Authors Plus — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/co-authors-plus/Co-Authors Plus — WordPress Plugins Assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types via a search-as-you-type input box. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s archive page and in their feed. Co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is core behavior). Add writers as bylines without creating WordPress user accounts. Simply create a guest author profile for the writer and assign the byline as you normally would.

 

Premium / Paid author bio plugins

WP – Author Box by phpbits | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/wp-author-box/6815678WP – Author Box by phpbits | CodeCanyon A very useful WordPress profile plugin that can be easily customised to match your current and favourite themes. Increase user engagement by adding unlimited custom tabs with custom content, recent post types entries and even contact form supports. Your ultimate WordPress Author Box plugin that also comes with custom widgets that you can user perfectly on any of your sidebars and footer widgets.

 

One of the best selling author bio plugins on CodeCanyon is “fanciest Author Box” from ThematoSoup. It’s sold for 18 US-$.

Fanciest Author Box by ThematoSoup | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/fanciest-author-box/2504522Fanciest Author Box by ThematoSoup | CodeCanyon This premium author bio plugin is very easy to use and customize. Right after installation the author bio is, by default, enabled on all your posts, pages and custom post types. You can disable the author box where you don’t want it or implement it manually using. Fanciest Author Box allows readers to learn about authors and connect with them on all major social networks.
It has an outstanding rating of 4,45 (of 5 ) stars on Codecanyon.

 

The fancy Author Box Plugin allows you to tweek literally every aspect of your bio box. Just in case you are not satisfied with the free plugins above – just give it a try.

Conclusion:

There are a lot of free plugins on wordpress.org that allow you to change the look and feel of your auhtors bio box. If you want to go with a premium bio plugin you might go with “fanciest author box” which is sold more than 3.500 times on Codecanyon or the premium version of WP Author Box which also sells at Envato.

After I changed the wordpress theme of my personal blog at wordpress-expert.info to the genesis framework I had to look for a author box plugin myself. After Itesting  more that 10 of them I choose to go with WP Author Box Lite (the free version) as it gave me the ease of use and simplicity while providing the maximum features (gravatar image, social media icons and related post).

Which author bio box plugin do you use in your blog? Leave a comment below and let use know.