ClickFunnels WordPress Integration — A Complete Guide

Are you looking for the most useful guide on integrating ClickFunnels and WordPress? 

We will provide you with all of the information needed to utilize both platforms to their utmost potential. There is another question to answer before examining the use of these two website builders — do you need an online presence, and why? 

Anyone selling any service or product knows the value of a broad customer base. Retail sales and marketing can only increase revenue up to a certain point, however. The limitations in logistics create a glass ceiling in profits that you can't surpass easily. 

That’s where online marketing comes in. The advent of the World Wide Web has unlocked the potential for expansion in almost any kind of niche. Having a website designed to pitch your products means being able to reach more people than ever before. 

Digital marketing has become an unavoidable part of any kind of advertising effort. This is particularly true for the selling and reselling of digital products, where more traditional media would appear woefully outdated for marketing purposes. 

In 2020, just having a website won't cut it — just like renting out commercial space for a retail store isn't enough to get you a large number of customers. A sales website needs to be perfectly optimized to convert leads to paying customers in a significant volume. 

WordPress 101 — Content Management Systems

Making a professional-looking website is not simple if you do it manually. There is a lot of prerequisite web programming knowledge to obtain, as well as logistical details to handle, such as buying the perfect domain name and choosing the right hosting provider. 

That’s why there are content management systems akin to WordPress. Their primary purpose is to make the process of constructing a website simpler than it would be through just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript alone. 

WordPress reigns supreme even among the most popular CMS platforms. According to the Hosting Tribunal, more than a third of all websites in the world run on WordPress. It’s become ubiquitous with web design and web programming, and even the most experienced web programmers use it for professional purposes. The main question here is — what makes it such a popular option when it comes to website development? And how does it work?

Image source: artdriver

WordPress Basics

WordPress has a couple of primary advantages that put it leaps and bounds ahead of competitors like Wix or Weebly: 

1. Huge community

2. Easy installation and setup 

3. Intuitive interface

4. A wide array of plugins and themes

It's not difficult to surmise why WordPress is the platform of choice for many entrepreneurs and web developers alike. The former can create an essential website without worrying too much about technicalities and with minimal coding. The latter can diversify their work through a wide variety of themes and increase the functionality of their websites through widgets and plugins. 

How Does It Work?

Professional digital marketers use all kinds of tools to maximize the efficiency of their work. From email marketing software to SEO tools, all of this is needed to make sure your client makes the most sales possible. It should be noted that none of this is worth anything without quality content — which makes CMS like WordPress invaluable to the process. 

A content management system does precisely what it sounds like — it gives you a platform for easy publishing and management of all kinds of content. Audio, video, all sorts of images, text — these are all elements that need to be presented in the best way possible. Doing so without WordPress would require intricate familiarity with PHP, HTML, and other web programming languages for interactive elements.

There is still a degree of knowledge required if you want to fiddle around with WordPress themes in more detail and customize them to your liking, but the essence is simple enough for everyone. 

WordPress Elements 

We will quickly go over the primary three building blocks of the WordPress experience: 

• Dashboard

• Themes

• Plugins

The WordPress dashboard is where the magic happens. This is where you manage the frontend of your sales website, through a variety of menus and settings. WordPress has functionalities and options for the construction of any kind of website — from online shops to content blogs. 

One of the most significant advantages of WordPress is its sheer number of themes. These are premade website environments that eliminate most of the design work — all that's left is to fill them with the right content. WordPress is excellent at seamless transitions between themes. You can switch to a brand new theme without losing any of your content — it will just be rearranged to suit the updated layout. 

The third pillar of WordPress is its plugins. These are code blocks that provide your WordPress website with additional functionalities. They range from user analytics to e-commerce capabilities, with pretty much every function you can imagine in between. It should be noted that there are two versions of WordPress:

WordPress and Your Business

The question on the mind of any entrepreneur is — how much value does WordPress bring to my endeavor? 

WordPress can be immensely useful when setting up your business website. That’s the first prerequisite to selling anything online, be it services, digital products, or physical items. Seasoned marketers will tell you, however, that this process is rarely that simple.

Every business that's not a monopoly faces competition. And you can be sure that your competitors will be using the Internet for their sales pitch as well. Once business adversaries are brought into the equation, how can you make sure that your website provides more paying customers than theirs?

This is where WordPress can be lacking for small and midsize businesses without substantial marketing budgets. Everyone has their own sales process, entailing a specific design and functionality of their website. Changing the premade WordPress themes to suit the specifics of your business can mean a lot of work that you’re probably not cut out for. 

WordPress was built to simplify website construction, but it was not explicitly made for online marketing. That's why funnel builders like ClickFunnels exist. 

Online Sales Funnels 

Online marketing is data-driven more than most laypersons would give it credit. Most pop-culture depictions of any kind of marketing only show the creative side of the work — which is still extremely important. It's just as crucial to realize that successful online marketing means tracking a wide array of user metrics on your website. 

With competition being as numerous as it tends to be online, each sales website must be carefully curated and fine-tuned to generate the most leads and then convert them into sales. Online marketers don’t use guesswork to determine how the sales pitch is going to look. There are marketing models that serve as guidelines — such as sales funnels. 

All leads and prospects are poured into the full part of this proverbial funnel and some come out of the other end as paying customers. Many of them are eliminated from the process along the way, even a majority. These are people who take a look at your website or receive your emails and decide that they don't want to buy anything.

A typical sales funnel comprises of the following parts:

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Intent

• Evaluation

• Purchase

At each junction, people who do not show enough interest in your product or service are eliminated from the funnel. 

When this marketing theory is put into practice online, it means creating a series of specifically-designed pages that make up the perfect sales website. Each of these pages corresponds to a part of your funnel:

1. Landing Pages — designed to provide website visitors with the best first impression of your product and brand

2. Offer Pages — created to give potential customers a more concrete offer for what you’re selling

3. Upsell Pages — made to pitch additional bonus features or products to customers who have already decided to buy something

The specifics can vary to an extreme degree, depending on your business and your product. That's why the underlying premade themes found in WordPress may require extensive editing before becoming suitable for your sales pitch. 

ClickFunnels and WordPress

Image source: askwp

ClickFunnels is a platform designed to rectify the difficulties marketers and businesses have with WordPress. It is a more focused software option for those who only wanted to use WordPress to create sales websites for specific products. 

The vast number of features ClickFunnels contains can be confusing to non-marketers. At its core, however, this is a platform for building sales funnel websites. The most important element found in ClickFunnels is a drag and drop editor for sales pages — even more straightforward than the page editor found in WordPress. You don’t have to learn a single PHP parameter or function to customize your sales funnel in ClickFunnels. 

Many people believe that ClickFunnels and WordPress are two alternatives to achieving the same goal. These two are compatible with one another, and many business owners and marketers use them in tandem. 

ClickFunnels WordPress Integration — When to Do It? 

Before going into the technical details of ClickFunnels’ integration with WordPress, there’s a simple question to answer — why would you want to do this in the first place?

Both of these platforms have their advantages and drawbacks when it comes to creating sales pages for your products. Using them together means getting the best of both worlds.

Let's say you wanted to create a string of pages acting as a sales funnel for a particular product. In that case, ClickFunnels is the next best choice. What happens when you want to expand your offer to other products as well, though? Or open an entire online store? Sales funnels don't scale up well to multiple products, as these most often require a dedicated sales pitch of their own.

If you’re a marketer selling lead generation software, you probably don’t want this to be your only source of revenue. Pairing this offer with white label financial products or something similarly compatible would be a good idea. This would mean uniting different sales funnels into one online environment — but how? 

The best option would be to integrate the funnel created in ClickFunnels into a more prominent sales website, one that could contain multiple funnels or a storefront for all of your products. Creating such a website using the ClickFunnels platform would be clunky and unintuitive — that's not what it was designed for. 

That’s where WordPress is a far better option, allowing for more customization and websites with more diverse functionalities. The funnels you’ve created in ClickFunnels don’t have to be thrown away — you can transfer them to your WordPress website seamlessly. 

How to Integrate ClickFunnels with WordPress?

WordPress and ClickFunnels are intentionally compatible. If you have a WordPress website and you want to import pages created in ClickFunnels, you can do this without losing any content. The only thing you’ll need is the ClickFunnels plugin for WordPress. The process for installing it has only a couple of simple steps:

1. Go to your WordPress dashboard. Once in the admin panel, navigate to the Plugins section. Choose the “Add New” option.

2. Use the search bar to find the ClickFunnels plugin.

3. Choose the “Install” option for the official plugin.

This is all it takes to install the ClickFunnels plugin successfully, but it’s still not fully operational. You need to add the ClickFunnels API to WordPress before you can use the plugin. 

Image source: salesfunnelrevealed

ClickFunnels WordPress API

ClickFunnels and WordPress have different developers. Both are SaaS platforms, but with wildly different programming ecosystems. They can interact and exchange content — like ClickFunnels sales pages — but that requires additional setup. 

You need to provide WordPress with an API (Application Programming Interface) key from ClickFunnels, that will instruct it on how to structure data received from ClickFunnels. You can do this by following these instructions:

• Navigate to the ClickFunnels plugin menu in WordPress and go to the settings

• Tick the option enabling an API connection

• Leave WordPress and go to your ClickFunnels account

• Find the account settings

• Expand the “WordPress API” section

• Find the API key and copy it

• Return to WordPress and enter the key into the “Authentication Key” option.

• Save your changes

• Use the “Compatibility Check” option to see if all the features for the plugin are enabled

• Enter the general WordPress settings and check if you have a new ClickFunnels section there

How to Migrate Sales Funnel from ClickFunnels to WordPress

You have managed to connect WordPress and ClickFunnels, but how do you share content between the two in practice? 

Once your ClickFunnels plugin is enabled in WordPress, there will be a ClickFunnels section in your dashboard. If you want to add pages from your funnels to a WordPress website, use the “Add New” option there. 

There is also a “Pages” section where you can edit the pages you’ve imported into WordPress previously.

Which WordPress Membership Plugin Integrates with ClickFunnels?

The beauty of WordPress is in its vast number of plugins that provide additional functionalities. ClickFunnels has its share of options in terms of third-party integration, but it doesn’t come close to the number of plugins WordPress has.

WordPress can expand on every part of your ClickFunnels experience. We’ve already mentioned the importance of upsell pages in any sales funnel. Most marketers who provide their services online also offer bonus content to their clients. Sometimes this is done in the form of white label marketing software under their brand, exclusively available to high-value clientele.

This type of paywalled content requires the creation of membership websites. While ClickFunnels has its capabilities for this, there are WordPress plugins that give you additional options. Once you import a membership site created in ClickFunnels into WordPress, you can use the MemberPress plugin for more advanced tweaks. 

Integrating all of these platforms to work on one piece of content requires another utility: Zapier.

Conclusion

ClickFunnels and WordPress aren’t competing content management systems. Marketers get the most out of both when integrating two platforms to create the most professional sales funnels. There are also additional plugins for WordPress that expand upon basic ClickFunnels features.