Category: WordPress Hosting

StudioPress Acquired by WP Engine

I’m pleased to announce the acquisition of StudioPress, our WordPress design and hosting division, by WP Engine. With this move, the world’s most popular WordPress design framework — Genesis — will now be paired with the world’s leading managed WordPress hosting platform. Thank You to Brian Gardner and the StudioPress Team As 2018 began, it Read More…
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Digital Commerce Academy Opens to New Students Next Week

Just a heads up that our Digital Commerce Academy (DCA) — the resource that gives you real-world instruction on how to build a digital business — will be opening to new students next week for a limited time. Whether you want to launch a side hustle, take your small business to the next level, or Read More…
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5 Steps to Website Security You Can Trust

Website security has never been more critical. Hackers, ransomware, and denial of service attacks are all concerns for modern business websites. Nothing will erode your audience’s trust in you faster than visiting your website and getting a security warning, or having Google flash a “You can’t trust this site” message in your search results. Even Read More…
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Better Content, Better Websites, and a Little Inspiration

On Monday, Brian Clark kicked off a new series of quick copy tips. These are short, powerful techniques that can make your copy more persuasive and get you to your goals faster.
This time, Brian taught us about the Proclamation Lead — a way to cut through the clutter and start your content with a bang. If you’re struggling to make your content stand out, or you just want a potent way to get your message across, give it a try …
On Tuesday, we welcomed our colleague Chris Garrett back to the blog. He wrote about 10 rather sad business website mistakes he recently saw over and over again while he conducted some site critiques — and solutions that will make things better.
And on Wednesday, I asked our editorial team to share their favorite quotes about writing. If you need a little dose of inspiration, there’s a lot to choose from there.
On the Copyblogger FM podcast, I talked about when to go negative with your content — and when to keep things sunny and light. Positive and negative messages both have their place in a smart content marketing strategy, if you deploy them at the right times.
That’s it for this week — have a great weekend, and we’ll see you Monday.
— Sonia Simone
Chief Content Officer, Rainmaker Digital

Catch up on this week’s content

Capture and Hold Audience Attention with a Bold Proclamation
by Brian Clark

10 Often Overlooked Website Mistakes that May Harm Your Business
by Chris

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10 Often Overlooked Website Mistakes that May Harm Your Business

At a local WordCamp recently, I critiqued websites from a group of volunteers during a site clinic session.
While I noticed a number of common mistakes — like extra-loud, auto-play videos and other distractions — one of the weird things that stood out was how many real, substantial businesses had problematic web hosting and domain strategies.
With those in mind, I wanted to make sure you aren’t making the same mistakes. Let’s go through some of the worst offenses, shall we?
Mistake #1: Spending more money on business cards than your web host
It boggles my mind that a company with a great physical-world reputation would risk that goodwill by using a subpar web host.
In other words, if your coffee budget is 10 times higher than your hosting budget, you’re probably not getting a premium service.
Also, if your hosting company brags about having millions of customers, they might not be too upset if your site goes down — but the hit to your bottom line will be substantial.
Mistake #2: Choosing a domain nobody can spell or remember
You said “awesome-and-amazing-dot-com?” Was it “theawesome,” “the-awesome,” or just “awesome?”
Sure, many people are going to discover your site through links or search. But having a memorable (and easy-to-spell) domain does help you attract and retain visitors.
You can’t bank on them bookmarking your site during their first visit.
Mistake #3: Building your business website on a platform you don’t own
Digital sharecropping is even worse than a bad domain.
With this mistake,

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6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs

In the world of SEO, user experience on websites has always been a factor, as has the time it takes for a site to load.
However, with the use of mobile devices surpassing desktop use (in most consumer-facing industries) and the wide adoption of broadband, people expect sites to load instantly.
Long gone are the days of waiting 10 seconds for a site to load.
If a page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, users will instantly hit the back button and move on to the next result.
Accordingly, Google officially started paying attention to site speed and declared its importance as a factor in rankings.
In order to keep up with Google’s site-ranking measures, WordPress blog users need to know exactly what they can do to improve their own site speed.
Remember when Google rolled out AMP (accelerated mobile pages)?
They now serve up publisher content in a simplified Google hosted experience that renders superfast. I like AMP from a user perspective because I know that AMP content will load incredibly fast on my mobile device, but as a publisher:
I’d rather speed up my blog and attract traffic directly to my site than have users stay on Google.
If you use StudioPress Sites or the Rainmaker Platform, your site will already load quickly. However, adding ad scripts, featured images, tracking codes, 301 redirects, etc. will slow down the loading of a site and increase demand on your server/hosting company.
Here are six simple

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Introducing the New StudioPress Blog

Well, it’s been a while since you’ve seen my byline around here at Copyblogger, but that’s for a few good reasons — I’ve had my head down and been working hard over at StudioPress (specifically, the all-new StudioPress Sites you’ve been hearing about).
If you’re interested in checking it out, you’ll see that the StudioPress site looks quite different from how it has in the recent past, and that’s because we’ve been making the experience over there the best we possibly can for our customers.
That, and we’ve been building the next generation of StudioPress.
Here’s what we’ve been up to …
Introducing the brand-new, shiny StudioPress blog
A few weeks ago, we launched a new blog at StudioPress!
If you take a look at the address bar, you’ll see we’re using the .blog extension. You might be wondering why we chose to go that route, rather than just continue the blog on the main StudioPress.com site.
Our friends over at Automattic started serving up .blog domains late last year, and we jumped at the opportunity to secure this domain, along with a few other branded domains that made sense for our company.
I personally thought it would be a fun way to try something new but still keep a cohesive look between our main site and the blog. We are considering this an experiment.
On the StudioPress blog we’ll be publishing fresh content, including what’s new at StudioPress, announcements about theme releases, expert advice from our friends in the community, episodes

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Introducing StudioPress Sites: WordPress Made Easy … Without Sacrificing Power or Flexibility

From 2010 through 2015, we at Rainmaker Digital built at a furious pace. Most of that effort was directed at development of the Rainmaker Platform.
During that entire time, StudioPress.com worked tirelessly in the background to bankroll our bootstrapped effort to create a full marketing automation platform without outside investors.
And it worked.
That said, we were always aware of the debt we owed to the StudioPress line of business, and more importantly, the community that had grown around the Genesis Framework. Which is to say, we always planned to come back to it and give it the love it deserved.
The idea for StudioPress Sites dates back to 2014. I wanted to do a “Squarespace for WordPress” that had the ease of an all-in-one website builder combined with the flexible power of WordPress.
In the spring of 2016, Tony Clark decided to run with the project. It began by having candid conversations with our StudioPress customers, and prominent people in the WordPress community.
These conversations revealed that not only did people agree with the need for this solution …
… they demanded it.
An innovative hybrid solution
Delivering another website builder wouldn’t be that tough (we knew how to do it thanks to Rainmaker). But that was only half the equation, which made it a bit trickier.
How do you incorporate the best aspects of a website builder like Squarespace or Wix, without locking people into an inflexible box that doesn’t benefit from the best parts of WordPress?
In other words, we needed

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