If you want your online venture to be successful, you have to take care of your customers’ needs and ensure that their needs are met in the most efficient manner. In this context, you must try to find ways to know all about your target audience. Once you know them, you can better understand their requirements. To achieve your objectives, you may be persuaded to use paid software or other tools to track your customer behavior on your website. As you can anticipate, these activities can fuel your financial burden.
Needless to say, as a business owner, you might want to opt for some cost-effective ways to gather information about your customers. An easy and cost-effective way of doing this is to use cookies.
WordPress uses cookies to identify the users on your website. For the uninitiated, cookies are tiny pieces of information stored on a user’s browser, but they get stored only after their approval. Each cookie stores data about users for a predetermined time frame.
Using cookies in a WordPress site:
Using cookies in your WordPress site will help you keep a close watch on your website visitors, collect crucial information about them and learn about their behavior on your website. You can use the information to improve your users’ experience.
When users make a purchase on your website, they provide important details like their name, contact number and address to complete the process. Using cookies, the information can be stored so that they don’t have to fill in the same details every time they make a purchase from your website, thereby saving time.
Moreover, cookies can also be an effective for a web developer and site owner by helping them map users’ behavior which in turn can be used to provide better user experience. Cookies are easy to set up and use as they do not require too much coding knowledge.
Setting cookies in a WordPress site:
Whether a small WordPress site or a complex, you can set up the cookies by using the default WordPress function - setcookie().
For example:
In order to create a new cookie, named “sample_newvisitor” use following code:
function set_newuser_cookie() {
if ( !is_admin() && !isset($_COOKIE[sample_newvisitor'])) {
setcookie(' sample_newvisitor’, 1, time()+3600*24*100, COOKIEPATH, COOKIE_DOMAIN, false);
}
}
add_action( 'init', 'set_newuser_cookie');
If you want, you can also unset the cookie, if required.
These are basic functions of WordPress that you can use to enhance the performance of your website. Taking the help of a WordPress expert would be recommended to be able to better utilize the functionality.
TecMaestro is a team of development professionals offering custom WordPress development services. Based in Delhi-NCR, they have a global client-base which acknowledge their world-class and time bound services.
