Today, in this article, we are sharing our recent experience of developing and launching a coupon and affiliate website for one of our clients. The website is MyFavDeals.org, which we have completed successfully using WordPress.
WordPress is a great and easy to use CMS to build any kind of promising website. If you are also in the needs of designing a coupon site for you, this case study may help you to plan the general workflow of your project. Let’s start.
1) Challenges of the Project:
The success of an affiliate website is laid on how you are displaying the affiliate products along with the product information, images as well as editor or customer reviews. Similarly, for a coupon website, you have to show the offers and discount coupons very attractively. So, in time of planning the project, the most critical part is to choose the proper theme that can fulfill most of our needs out of the box. This can surely help to simplify the final execution.
The next challenge is to find out the plugins that can complement our requirement well. If we can fulfill most of our requirement from our selected theme and plugins, our work is almost done. All other small elements can be customized by using some custom codes and hooks.
And the final challenge is to select the proper web hosting that can run our website smooth and fast. You have to choose the hosting as per your project requirement. The importance lays on selecting the most cost-effective hosting that can run your website smoothly without compromising on anything.
2) Implementation of the Theme:
We have gone through almost all related theme available on the free WordPress theme repository as well as on the premium theme repositories like Theme Forest and Template Monster. Finally, we have read one recommendation by WPBeginner that help us to choose the theme Clipper as our main theme for this project. We have also found an excellent child theme of Clipper that suits most of our requirement. The name of the child them is Flatter. The combination of the Flatter (i.e. the child theme) along with the Clipper (i.e. the main theme) gives us the most suitable workaround for this project.
3) Implementation of the General Plugins:
These are the general plugins we have used to make the backbone of our website stronger. These plugins are not directly related to coupon or affiliate site. But these help us to make our WordPress installation secured; SEO optimized; user-friendly and future proof. Let’s have a look at the plugins:
- Yoast SEO: The best SEO plugin for WordPress that we use on almost every website.
- Wordfence Security: A great security plugin comes with Firewall, Malware scanning, blocking, live traffic monitoring, login security & much
- WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam: An excellent plugin to prevent your website from spammers.
- Clef Two-Factor Authentication: This is basically a two-factor authentication plugin that helps us to implement a very easy sign-on/off with our mobile phone. It also has a very strong authentication technique which is very secure to use.
- Hotspots Analytics: This is an advanced analytics plugin to measure the heat maps and the user activity on our website.
- WP Shortcode: It comes with more than 24 easy to use shortcodes like buttons, alerts, videos and much
- Table Generator & Table Maker: We have used these two plugins to generate good looking and responsive comparison tables.
4) Implementation of the Essential Plugins:
Now the following plugins are the most essential plugins that help us to implement the requirement of this project. All these plugins are coming crucial to us to implement some important features like displaying the coupon codes, showing product review, implementing the product rating features, etc. Have a look:
- Coupon Code Revealer Plus: This is a great plugin to display coupons codes. Initially, the coupons will be hidden from the visitors. Once the visitors click on any coupons, then it will reveal the code to them.
- WP Review Pro: We choose this particular plugin for making the product reviews more attractive. It also supports Google rich snippets to display the reviews in a more appealing way in the Google search result page.
- kk Star Ratings: This is a free plugin that helps us to implement a user/visitor rating system along with each product. This plugin is a great option to increase the user interactivity on our website.
5) Selecting the right Hosting:
Finally, the most tricky parts come, choosing the right hosting. After going through the size of the project files, the initial size of the database, the extensibility of the database, the number of loading scripts, files, and images on the websites, we have decided to go with the WordPress shared hosting provided by A2 Hosting. We have found A2 Hosting is the right and the most cost-effective option for this project. After making our website live, we have no retreat on our decision. We also have a detailed review of A2 Hosting on our site. For further reference, you can check it anytime.
Conclusion:
Finally, we must say that the journey behind the project was excellent. We gained lots of new experiences regarding a coupon website. Well, at last, all our efforts got praised with lots of appreciation and with an excellent review from our client. If our experiences help you to make a similar journey as good as ours, then it will be going to be another achievement for us.
Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 15+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".