For starters, crowdfunding is a way of funding a venture or a project by raising money from people in small amounts over the internet. This collected money is then used for the development or enhancement of the project. Crowdfunding sites are a bit different from other websites as they contain detailed information about the project and display the amount collected for each project.
Now, there are thousands of themes that are used to serve one purpose or another, however, the majority of the themes developed are generic and multipurpose while others are developed to serve a certain type of niche. Today we will be discussing such a theme that is developed to serve crowdfunding purposes.
Backer Crowdfunding is one of the best crowdfunding themes around and today, we are going to explore how we loaded a crowdfunding site in less than 1 second using a combination of the Backer Crowdfunding theme and Cloudways – a specialized managed cloud hosting platform for WordPress and WooCommerce.
Why Use Cloudways?
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform renowned for its performance and uninterrupted service. It is built on top of its stack which is equipped with powerful caching tools like Redis, Varnish, and Nginx that contribute to an exponential increase in speed and performance of your crowdfunding site.
There are plenty of reasons why you should choose Cloudways as your WordPress hosting partner for your crowdfunding websites. Let’s have a look at some of the most important ones below:
Team Collaboration
You can add team members to your account so that they can access servers and applications anywhere, anytime.
1-Click CDN Integration
Cloudways comes with its in house CDN that you can install on your application with just a click on a button.
Free Staging Areas
When you install a WordPress application on Cloudways, you get a free staging URL that you can use to conduct tests and experiments.
Free SSL Certificates
Cloudways has partnered up with Let’s Encrypt which will allow you to install free SSL certificates on your WordPress application.
Unlimited Applications
That’s right! With Cloudways, you can install an unlimited number of WordPress applications on your server without any extra charges.
Server Monitoring
You can keep track of your server resources through Cloudways’ server monitoring feature.
Server Scalability
With Cloudways you can scale your server resources anytime and that too in just a few clicks of a button.
Cloudways also takes care of all the complex server related tasks leaving crowdfunding site owners focused on raising funds and operations that are beneficial to their causes.
Sites hosted on cloud servers have better security and performance than shared hosting environments.
Now that we have understood what Cloudways is and how it works, let’s move to the theme installation process.
WordPress Installation
Before moving forward, I assume you have a Cloudways server with WordPress installed. Here is a step by step guide to install WordPress on Cloudways.
Sign in to the Cloudways Platform and go to your desired server. Click on Applications and Add a new WordPress application.
Once the application is created, Go to the Application dashboard and under Access Details, access the WordPress Admin.
Theme Installation
Backer Crowdfunding can be installed using both WordPress installer and FTP. Go to WordPress Dashboard → Themes → Add New. Click on Upload Theme from the top menu and upload the zipped theme folder. Once the theme is installed, activate it and install the required plugins.
Note: In case you encounter memory limitations; please increase the limit by going to Settings and Packages inside the server dashboard.
By default, the theme needs you to install plugins needed for styling, contact forms, WooCommerce, and crowdfunding functionalities.
Select all and install all the plugins you see on the list. It is important to install these plugins as they come in handy later in modifying the website.
Once installed, go back and activate them all.
We are all set with theme installation and configuration. Let’s begin exploring the theme by looking at various features it offers.
After activating the plugins you can see additional options are being added to the side menu. These options can be used to create contact forms, set up WooCommerce and add products. As crowdfunding is done to raise money for products and services; this feature can come in handy.
Installing Demo
Installing demo content to WordPress theme gives a starting point and also highlights the key features the theme has to offer. Adding a demo to Backer Crowdfunding Theme is very easy.
From the One Click Demo Install button present in the side menu, click on the Import Demo button to initiate the importing process.
It will take a few minutes to add all the demo content. Once the process is finished the site will be populated with dummy content and will look something like this:
WP Crowdfunding Pro
WP Crowdfunding is one of the best WordPress fundraising plugins with features like project submission form, project’s start, and end date, defining funding goal and reward system, etc. Pro version of this plugin comes free with Backer Crowdfunding Theme which gives the user the ability to integrate countless crowdfunding-related features.
Features like Crowdfunding Grid can be added using the page builder.
WPML and Google Fonts
Backer Crowdfunding has built-in support for WPML which gives your site the capability to run in multiple languages. WPML is a powerful WordPress tool and is useful when running a site in various regions worldwide. This plugin also lets the user add their own translations depending on the requirements.
Besides WPML, the theme also supports Google Fonts. Google Fonts let you choose from hundreds of fonts offered by Google that can enhance readability and user experience.
MailChimp and Contact Form 7 Support
In crowdfunding having a sophisticated contact method is necessary as people need to make contact in order to get their queries answered about the project. To accommodate this, the Backer Crowdfunding theme has built-in support for Contact Form 7 which is an amazing WordPress form plugin. Users can add these forms using shortcodes throughout their site.
MailChimp is an excellent service for email subscriptions and this theme has built-in support. You only have to create an account on MailChimp’s site and link your site through its API.
Theme Performance on Cloudways
Let’s give Backer Crowdfunding a test drive and see how well it performs on Cloudways.
- Server: Linode 1GB
- Caching Plugin: Breeze
Final Thoughts!
In the tutorial above, we launched the Backer Crowdfunding theme on Cloudways and explored how easy it is to set up a crowdfunding site on an optimized WooCommerce hosting provider. Cloudways made the initial WordPress setup easy and with its powerful stack the site loaded pretty fast with all its demo content.
The crowdfunding theme is equipped with all the resources one might need in developing a crowdfunding site. It is 100% responsive and has active map support along with expert support in case you encounter any issues.
