The Leokoo.com Weekly Curated Newsletter

Intro

Site Performance, Hosting and Invoicing Software (plus a deal that's ending today)

And we're on issue 6! Christmas is coming soon and 2021 brings new hope as 2020 as been a disaster for some friends and clients. How has your 2020 been? Plus, what did you buy during Black Friday Cyber Monday?

Do join us on the WPStarters Facebook Group to discuss.

In this issue, we look at a couple more articles on improving site performance, including an insightful one from WooCart on WooCommerce stores. Hari Shanker's video is interesting as well.

Beaver Builder brings us a great round up on the best invoicing software for businesses, freelancers and digital agency owners for those of us who are affected by Wave's latest announcement.

But more than that, check out the Deskera deal, which is ending today. Deskera enables you to do more than just invoicing and can be your all-in-one tool to manage accounting, sales and payroll. We stacked a couple of codes for the business.

Finally, if you run a digital agency or plan to, Templately is a great tool that will help accelerate your workflow.

News

Block-Based Bosco, Second Full-Site Editing Theme Lands in the WordPress Directory – WordPress Tavern

Full Site Editing (FSE) with Gutenberg is here with Bosco. (yes, it is the second FSE theme on the WordPress directory).

While FSE based themes with Gutenberg is going to be large in the future, it will take some time as WordPress Tavern mentioned.

The Yoast and Elementor partnership: building easy and SEO-friendly websites together - Yoast

If you use Elementor and Yoast, rejoice cause two of the top five most popular plugins in WordPress has finally done some deep integration on the page builder level.

This means, you can get related keyphrases, internal linking suggestions and more, while crafting your pages on Elementor. This will result in better SEO results and shorter workflows.

We use a combination on Rank Math Pro (on personal sites) and SEOPress Pro (on clients' sites), which is already integrated with Elementor, but do check this out if you're on Yoast.

Recommended Articles

Website Launch Checklist: 25 Must-Dos Before Going Live

Building websites can be a stressful time, with a bunch of things to handle including ensuring pixel perfect layouts and typography, setting up of various plugins and if you have some custom development done, making sure it works before launching.

Because of that, it is easy to miss out on the smaller items. And trust me, we have seen our fair share of cases while taking over sites from other vendors.

The launch checklist by Elementor is helpful, do check it out

Speed up WooCommerce: lessons learned from 100+ migrations - WooCart

Speeding up WooCommerce sites is tough, especially with the presence of many slow and bloated ThemeForest templates that most online store owners end up with.

We like this article as it gives us practical advice on speeding up clients' sites. It touches on the basic (use a fast page builder), and the more technical (async your JavaScript files).

And while we don't agree with their hosting choice (yes, we're on GridPane Developer ourselves and place all our clients there), if you run a WooCommerce store, this is a good read.

Hari Shanker: Improving site performance – WordPress.tv

Yes, another one on site performance as Google's Core Web Vitals loom as a major ranking signal. This is from WordPress.tv, and will get you and your team starting on the right foot.

Reviews & Comparisons

Cloudways vs Runcloud: An Honest Review • WPShout

Cloud VPS is all the rage nowadays, and rightly so. With enhanced loading speeds, better SEO results and a more secure site, you will want to move your sites to a VPS server once you have the budget. Believe me, the difference is noticable.

But which VPS service do you subscribe to? Colin brings us a detailed comparison between Cloudways and Runcloud, two major platforms with a lot of similarities but a bunch of differences too. Read on for more.

The Best Invoicing Software for Freelancers

This is a timely article as Wave has stopped accepting new accounts outside of US and Canada. While support is ongoing for current users, perhaps it is better to look for a new invoicing software soon.

Do check out the Deskera deal, which is ending today, on AppSumo. It can do invoicing and so much more.

p/s: Plutio is listed! Glad I have a lifetime license from back then.

Profitable Tools & Resources

Deskera Lifetime Deal Ends Today

One of the most established brands to grace AppSumo, Deskera comes with $100M+ in funding and might prove pivotal to your business. If you are looking for an all-in-one tool to manage your invoices, payroll and leads, you must not miss Deskera.

While Deskera might not be very user friendly to service providers, they're revamping the tool to help cater to digital agencies and freelancers as well. Also, you might be able to get a free code as a reward for being an early adopter by buying the code off AppSumo and leaving a review before the deal ends.

Templately: 800+ Elementor Templates & Cloud Collaboration for WordPress [LIFETIME Offer]

If you work a lot with Elementor or Gutenberg, finding great templates can be a pain. What more storing your carefully crafted designs for future use?

If that's you, Templately is a godsend. With the ability to save and collaborate with teammates over your designs, you get to save yourself precious workflow time.

Personally, I think Templately is brilliant as it takes ideas from Page Builder Cloud, and makes it better by giving designers two things they need, templates and a cloud storage facility. Furthermore, Templately raised the bar with their workspaces, which keeps everything steamlined. A definite yes from us.