A day before yesterday, I was casually reading few WordPress related blogs on the web, and somehow I landed up on Woorkup.com, in case if you don’t know it’s a blog for all things WordPress. The very first post I read, was about a coupon plugin for WordPress, called as WP Coupons. After, I finished reading the post, I immediately decided to take my hands on this new coupon plugin for WordPress, in fact I couldn’t resist myself from asking a copy of the plugin from the plugin author, Brian Jackson. And I must say Brian, was kind enough to provide me a WP Coupons review copy.
Before I begin this WP Coupons review, I thought to test the plugin on my staging platform, but instead I decided to review the plugin right on this site, Blogosense.com. After all, I wanted to see the plugin in action and see how it actually performs in the real scenario. I do a healthy amount of affiliate marketing on this blog, and want to know how it boosts my CTRs and conversions.
The WP Coupons Review
Origin of the plugin
The WP Coupons plugin is created by two brothers, Brett & Brian Jackson at Woorkup, they originally created the plugin solely for their own usage. But, as they’ve mentioned in the launch post, they’ve been asked by various users of their site, who spotted these coupons and deals around Brian’s site. So they went ahead, polished the code, stylized the plugin and tested their plugin with hundreds of themes to make sure their plugin is compatible with almost all WordPress themes out there.
And indeed, after testing the plugin, there’s nothing you need to configure, it ships with ready to go settings. All you’ll need to do is just add the coupons and deals on your WordPress sites, nothing more, nothing less.
Installing the WP Coupons plugin
Once you purchase the plugin, It’s fairly an easy process to install the plugin, just navigate to your account at WPCoupons.io, and click on “View Details and Downloads” and download the plugin.
Now upload the plugin to your WordPress site, install and activate it.
Upon activation of the plugin, you’ll notice that the plugin adds a Custom Post Type, named as “Coupons” to your WordPress site, and on the other hand to access the plugin’s setting page, you’ve to navigate to the WordPress Dashboard > Settings > WP Coupons, as shown in the image below. .
So, before we actually create some new Coupons or deals, I want you to take the tour of the WP Coupons settings. The settings page of the plugin comes with a wide-set of options, neatly placed within a set of 5 different tabs. The display options, style options, extras, license, support, and the last tab is just a link to your “Coupon Archive page”, which is generated by the plugin.
Display Options
One thing I really liked about this plugin is that the developers had worked hard on making sure that the plugin should be compatible with all themes without any conflict, and even if such situation arises where you’re using some troublesome theme, then you can make things backward compatible by using shortcode.
In such situation, all you need to do is simply disable the plugin’s coupon archive template, and instead use your existing theme’s page to create the coupon archive page by placing the WP-Coupon shortcode.
[shortcode][
wp_coupons][/shortcode]]
Similarly, if your theme conflicts with the single coupon posts, then just disable the single coupon template and the plugin will use your theme’s default post template to display single coupon posts.
Further, if you want to change the Archive URL of your Coupons page to be something other than “Coupons, then just write the desired slug, and push the save button.
You can also change the default call to action text from “Get This Deal” to “Something more effective.”
Additionally, you can control the width of the coupon archive page and single coupon page. While, the default post limit to display the coupon posts per page for the coupon archive is also adjustable.
Style Options
Under the style settings page, there is an option to customize the look and feel of your coupons, though the default color scheme of the plugin is pretty elegant but, if you want to match the styling of the coupons with your current theme, then do it from this section.
Personally, I feel like as soon as, the plugin will grow its user base, there will be a situation like nearly every user will have the same styling, so in order to tackle such situation, the developers should create some new feature like “themes or layouts,” which will allow users to select the varied themes and layouts from the back-end and differentiate their coupon designs.
Extras
Truly to the name, the extra options page lets you configure extra features such as “Force Direct links” which forces the coupon button links to directly go to the destination URL instead on the single coupon page. If developer in you, wants to play with the CSS styling of the plugin, then it’s suggested to use the plugin’s built-in custom CSS feature.
Since, the Coupon Archive page, doesn’t contain any extra content other than the list of coupons, it would be better to use the Before Archive and After Archive content feature, and add some valuable and unique information to that page. This will not only help the users on using the published coupon deals, but it’ll also help you in achieving better SEO score for the search engines.
Lastly, the License tab is provided to activate your plugin license, while the Support tab directs you to the plugin’s URL for support.
Coupons – Custom Post Type
As, I’ve already introduced you about this Coupon CPT added by the plugin, let’s take a quick overview of the single coupon back-end admin area.
The back-end of the single coupon page has minimal fields to fill, you need to write the coupon title or deal, and a brief description of the deal.
In the WP Coupon details metabox, you need to fill the offer, or discount value, the coupon code, offer landing URL, a quick description of the coupon in minimum words, and there’s an option to individually enable direct link, so that when the call to action button will be clicked it will directly go to the offer page, instead of single coupon page.
In case, if you need to display an individual coupon inside the post, you can use the coupon shortcodes.
There’s also a custom taxonomy added with the plugin, as “Types,” which you can use to classify your coupon deals.
[coupon id=”13844″]
Here’s the sample coupon generated with the plugin. and It looks fairly elegant.
In order, to make the appearance of Coupon Archive page content richer, I created a full list of current deals running on various WordPress related plugins, theme, hosting etc and with the help of this WP Coupons plugin I was able to create a nice full-fledged coupon section on my site. Be sure to check them out, you might actually save your money, if you’re looking to buy any WordPress hosting, CDN, themes and plugins.
The plugin very beautifully generated a nice, balanced layout of Coupon Archive page, and I did nothing to make it look that good. For once, I felt like the Coupon Archive page was already a part of my blog, The plugin also adds paginated navigation to the Coupon archive page.
WP Coupons Widget
Besides of Coupon Archive page, there’s an option to display the coupons using a widget in your WordPress sidebar.
It randomly shows any of your listed Coupons, there’s no option to display coupons from specific category or increase or decrease the total number of coupons to show.
Though, there’s an option to display specific coupon in this widget. From your WordPress Posts back-end you’ll find a new metabox as shown above, and you can select the desired Coupon to display in the widget to match your post content.
But, again in my case I can’t use this functionality since, my theme Divi by Elegantthemes, has the feature to hide the sidebar and most of the time I use full-width option to display my posts, and it shows no sidebar. This way I can’t showcase individual coupons on my posts.
To overcome such issues, I would suggest to add a functionality to display coupons after the posts area, and it can be controlled from the back-end metabox of individual posts.
For a reference purpose, I had grabbed a screenshot from the WPKube, they beautifully showcase coupons, in similar fashion.
Mobile friendly
It’s a compulsion for a front-end plugin to be mobile friendly in this modern world of smartphones and WP Coupons truly fulfills the need of the hour by being fully responsive.
Performance of WP Coupons
While writing this WP Coupons review, I was very excited to come over this performance section, as according to my experience with WordPress plugins so far be it paid or free, addition of any WordPress plugin to your WordPress site is a major sacrifice to the performance of your WordPress site.
However, with WP Coupons I felt the case is totally different, it barely tries to impact the performance of your site, now the question is how does this front-end oriented plugin manages to load this faster? the answer is no JavaScript usage. Yes! you read it right, the WP Coupons plugin requires no JavaScript usage, as of now.
It only loads a small css stylesheet on the front-end and sizes just 2.3 kB.
My blog previously used to load under 1 seconds and after the installation of WP Coupons, my site still loads under 1 seconds. Overall, in the performance department the WP Coupons plugin, deserves no less than a 5 star rating.
WP Coupons Pricing
Let me quickly, tell you about the pricing of the new coupon plugin, it comes in three types of license, the first one is for personal usage will cost you $34.95, so if you’re running a single affiliate site, simply opt the for the personal license, in case if you’re planning to use the plugin on up to three sites, you should go with the 3 Site – Business license.
However, if you’re willing to use WP Coupons on any number of WordPress sites, then without a doubt sign up with Unlimited sites license, as it comes without any restrictions on usage on, as many sites you want.
[coupon id=”13844″]
Here’s a sweet 25% OFF deal for you (created using the WP Coupons plugin)
Conclusion
To be very frank, since the inception of this blog, I always wanted to have a coupon or deal section on this site, and being a WordPress blogger I receive a lot of mails from various WordPress developers and service providers with offers for their respective products. Earlier it wasn’t possible, but now after setting up WP Coupons plugin on my site I can showcase any number of coupons on Blogosense.com, without dealing with single line of code.
However, after writing this WP Coupons review I felt that surely WP Coupons is a powerful coupon plugin but, it has a long way to go, I found it’ll be more useful for the users if it has an option to configure a default featured image for all coupons, in case if there’s no feature image available for specific coupon. Whereas, widgets provided by the plugin are right now in very basic stage, they need to be empowered with more display options. Similarly, an option to display coupons beneath the posts would be a great way to showcase more related coupons on the individual posts.
So yes, without a doubt I am going to buy this plugin, are you looking to buy WP Coupons? let me know your views and queries in the comments below.
[button link=”https://blogosense.com/go/wpcoupon/” type=”big” color=”green” newwindow=”yes”]Buy WP Coupons now[/button]
FAQs
WP Coupons is SEO friendly?
Indeed, WP Coupons uses native WordPress architecture such as Custom Post Types and taxonomies to create and publish your coupons, hence it’s 100% seo-friendly. You can use any popular SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO to optimize your coupon pages for search engines.
WP Coupons is translation ready?
As of now plugin is not, but as according to the feature request page, they’re working to make WP Coupons translation ready.
Can I display individual coupons inside the post/pages ?
Yes, of course you can use the shortcodes inside the posts to display, any of the coupons.
Can I create deals instead of coupons?
Absolutely, you can use the coupons as deals, just leave the coupon code field empty.
Is there any money back guarantee?
WP Coupons comes with 30 day money back guarantee, so you’re saved.
What about support?
You can use the extensive knowledge base available with loads of information about installation, troubleshooting the plugin and more. Additionally, you can raise a support ticket if you need one-on-one help.
WP Coupons Review
Summary
WP Coupons is fast, feature rich, offers great compatibility, comes ready to use and without a doubt, a must have plugin in the arsenal of every affiliate marketer