WordPress is great until it isn’t. We started in this business by building our own CMS, e-commerce, and email marketing service. We learned that we could not keep up with the constant innovation fueled by millions of dollars of venture capital and tens of thousands of open source developers. When we made the switch to WordPress we expected plugins to work. We expected the plugins to work together. Guess what? They don’t. Most plugin developers never load test their apps. They build a zippy calendar with tons of features. As soon as 10 readers view the page at the same time the website slows to a crawl. Most plugin developers view themselves as the center of the universe when it comes to design. They often do not play nice with a site theme. Finally plugin developers issue update without warning. WordPress sites will go down at any time because of a plugin developer issuing a poorly tested plugin update. We have had many publishers come to us where a local contractor slapped together a beautiful website that just did not work or was so slow that nobody read it. We have selected, tested, and secured a suite of plugins and created some of our own to solve all of these problems.
Site Speed
This was the first problem we solved with WordPress. WP is engineered to be flexible. You can add custom fields and custom posts. To support this WP uses a data structure that facilitates change not one that facilitates performance. Standard WordPress with all the site to query the data base for a list of stories every time a page is viewed. Even when the content has not changed for hours. This is premediated stupidity. We have solved this problem by implementing a technique called caching. This stores parts of page and database queries in memory and delivers them quickly. This sits below WordPress and will work with any plugin. This is not something your average webmaster can do. We also utilize the Amazon Content Distribution Network. Parts of your pages are stored in memory in your city to quickly display images and videos. This is a must for performance of media heavy designs.
Optimized SEO
We optimize sites for SEO. Over the years we have participated in over 30 SEO audits. SEO consultants are some of the best carpetbaggers in the world. At the end of the day there are 5 things that must be done to get the best SEO. Most of them can be automated and built into the CMS. We let the technology optimize your site rather than spending hours of editorial time trying to serve imaginary Google rules.
How do you know your SEO works? We have engineered a way to measure it. We track every reader that comes to the site via SEO. We record this when the reader opts into an e-newsletter. We record it when the reader subscribes. We record it when the reader clicks on an ad. We can tell you have many new opt ins come from Google searches. How many sales originate with SEO. We can also do this with social media. Ever wonder how much good the editorial hours you invest in Facebook? Who is benefitting your brand or Facebook? We can tell you.
Custom Plugins and Integrations
We make WordPress do what we want by developing our own custom plugins that facilitate integration. What does that mean? A good example is integration with a traditional print fulfillment system. There are great plugins that manage memberships and subscriptions for WordPress. They offer gating by content groups. They integrate with e-commerce to allow you to craft and test subscription offers. They report on sales and renewals. The problem is that your business runs on Omeda, SFG, PCD, QuickFill, ABC, 123 … there are hundreds of them! The overhead in running two fulfillment systems would kill you. That is why we integrate. We set up the website so that your fulfillment system is the master of subscriptions and memberships. Yet we use the best parts of WordPress to accept orders. We communicate in real time with the fulfillment systems that allow it. For the rest we get label files.
Another great example is integration with the email marketing service. Wouldn’t it be great if expiration data was in your email system so you could do renewal emails? Set up renewal drip campaigns or automations. We can help.
