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digital-success · 6 years ago

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5 Of The Most Successful WordPress Businesses.

That's why some people have a hard time taking Word Press seriously as a line of business.

After all, how you can go to make money with something that anyone can use for free?

If that's you or your company, you'll first need to note that Word Press not only controls the websites of some of the world's most famous brands, individuals, and businesses but now powers more than 25% of the entire Internet.

Indeed, Word Press-related products and services have become a serious marketplace. How bad is that? Try to make a multi-million dollar serious. In order to dispel concerns about Word Press as a business sector and to highlight the types of opportunities out there, this article will shed light on some of the most influential and successful Word Press companies and ventures to date.

We're going to look at who they are, their business models and, if available, the revenues they're buying. The goal is to show you what the platform can do and encourage you to do the same. Get ready to blow your mind.

Successful WordPress Business Selling Products

Every single company mentioned below generates almost entirely revenue from WordPress products or services.

Some of them have other irons in the fire, but the platform still represents the core of their business. While the list is not in any particular order, some ranking is unavoidable, as you will see from the company taking first place.

Automattic :

Founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, Automattic is one of the world's most known WordPress brands and industry leaders. Okay, for good reason.

First and foremost, Automatic is the parent company of WordPress.com. But that's not all of it. Plugins and products such as Jetpack, Akismet, Gravatar, WooCommerce and other businesses that they have acquired over time also belong to Automa.

For a better impression, just take a look at their homepage:

The company is also one of the largest contributors to WordPress.org, bbPress, and BuddyPress.

Although the exact revenue figures are not available, Automattic received $160 million in funding in 2014, putting its (provisional) valuation at $1.16 billion. Those figures are particularly impressive if you keep in mind that they run a blogging platform that sees 15.8 billion page views per month.

No organization is even similar to Automattic in terms of size, sales, experience, and power.

Envato :

Australia-based Envato runs the ThemeForest and CodeCanyon marketplaces as well as the Tuts+ tutorial and course network. Our properties are the second most popular locations for WordPress themes and plugins. In fact, ThemeForest was the 88th most trafficked website in the world in 2014 (according to Alexa.com).

Although Envato still deals with items outside of WordPress, most of them are real.

Elegant Theme :

Elegant Themes is a company with eight years of experience in the field of premium theme and plugin industry. Many of their products, such as the Divi theme, have become household names in the WordPress universe.

Exposure to more than 80 themes and plugins has a price tag of $69-$89 for an annual subscription or a one-time fee of $249 for lifetime exposure. Of over 300,000 daily clients, I'm going to let you do that.

Founded by Syed Balkhi, a well-known figure in the industry, Awesome Motive is the parent company behind WPBeginner, the largest free web site for WordPress tutorials.

In addition, their portfolio includes the ThemeLab theme segment as well as services such as Soliloquy, Envira Gallery and OptinMonster.

CopyBlogger :

What began as a (WordPress-powered) copywriting and blogging blog has now become a media empire.

CopyBlogger owns StudioPress, which makes the popular Genesis Framework and also offers WordPress hosting via Synthesis. In 2014, the corporation had almost $10 million in revenue. This number is likely to have increased following Rainmaker's launch of the Building Co Forum last year.

WP Engine :

Founded in Austin, Texas in 2010, WP Engine has become one of WordPress ' most popular managed hosting solutions. With more than 300 employees, their focus is on safety, state-of-the-art technology and scalability.

Big-name clients like SoundCloud, AMD, Buffer, and Foursquare trust the company that is set to become the market leader in managed WordPress hosting.

At the beginning of last year, WP Engine raised another $23 million in funding, putting its valuation at $120 million. Besides their hosting business, WP Engine is also behind Torque — a publication you are currently reading.

Yoast :

This started as the online presence of CEO Joost de Valk is now one of the most recognized names in WordPress. I'm thinking about Team Yoast, of course. Their fame is largely due to their flagship Yoast SEO plugin, which is not only one of the most popular SEO solutions for WordPress, but also one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time.

(Read the comprehensive Yoast SEO guide here)

Yoast also offers a number of other plugins used by millions of people, as well as site reviews, ebooks, and consulting services for major clients all over the world. All that besides running one of the world's leading WordPress SEO blogs, of course.

While their finances are not exactly public, Yoast's ordering revenues are more than $2 million, with growth rates of 80 to 100 percent over the last five years.

#successstories #yoast wpengine

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experdent-web-services · 4 years ago

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A Step-by-Step SEO Guide for Dentists in 2021

This article is a really simple step-by-step guide for dentists from Experdent. Let's begin

What is Dental SEO Dental SEO is the optimization of your website so that it is easy for you to be found by patients online when they search for dental treatment or any service that you offer. In other words, SEO for dentists is to make their dental office rank higher in Google or Bing or Yahoo search results. Do people go to page-2 of Google? Yes, people do go to page-2 of Google. However, this is quite seldom. Over 70% of searchers will click on something that falls in the first five results on a Google page. And almost 90% will click on something on page-1. The rest may likely refine their search and search again rather than go to page-2.

Is SEO Digital Marketing? SEO is the digital equivalent of traditional inbound marketing. Let us explain: While many activities qualify as digital marketing, SEO is the foundation for all digital marketing processes. Conversely, a weak SEO can result in massive marketing expenditure to get results online. SEO builds cred for you with search engines. Think of it as a virtuous loop. The better the SEO for a website, the higher it will rank in search results. The higher it ranks in search results, the more people will click on it. The more people click on a consequence, this tells Google/Bing or any other search engine that yours is a quality website, and therefore the search engines push up the rank of your website even further. A high-ranking site on Google search, therefore, becomes a magnet for visitors. More visitors will lead to more conversions in any marketing funnel, i.e., more people becoming dental office patients.

Does SEO improve the visitor experience on your website? The foundation of SEO is in Technical SEO. Let's unpack that: SEO work for any quality SEO services business starts with a detailed website audit. This audit looks to fix these key elements that go into user experience: - Site Speed - Performance on Mobile - Intuitive navigation - Presence of Metadata including alt tags for images - Presence of appropriate keywords on pages - Submission of sitemaps to search engines In addition, SEO looks for compelling content and quality images and video to create an engaging experience for the visitor to a website. Through this process, technical SEO helps improve user experience while improving the website for search engines to crawl.

Is SEO advertising? The output of SEO is greater visibility for your content for the people who are searching for that content Let's say you live in downtown Toronto and you have a toothache. You will likely open up your computer or your smartphone and search something like this: - Family Dentist in downtown Toronto or - Dentist for a toothache or - Best dentist in Toronto or if its evening or the weekend - Dentist in Toronto open today If your website is optimized for SEO and contains this information (preferably in the schema), then your visitors may see your website featured on page-1 of Google. Thus, SEO is advertising by another means. Content that ranks is the best advertising because research has repeatedly shown that people will click on an organic link that appears more authentic. Research by Wordstream.com shows that "Clicks on paid search listings beat out organic clicks by nearly a 2:1 margin for keywords with high commercial intent in the US. In other words, 64.6% of people click on Google Ads when they are looking to buy an item online!" And here is the kicker - When you run an ad campaign, you get results only while the campaign is running and you are paying for clicks on your ad. In the case of SEO, however, you continue to get results for a long time. Yes, if you don't continuously optimize your website for SEO, your Search Rankings will eventually begin to drop. Why is that, you ask? Simply because your neighbours and competitors will not have stopped, they will continue improving and scaling their websites, and as a consequence, Google will keep pulling other websites over yours.

On-Page optimization Getting Google to like your website and show it on page-1 of its search results means that you need to bring quality to your pages and make them valuable and delightful for your visitors. Remember that the best websites are built for real visitors and not for search engines. The key elements that SEO helps you improve on-page are: - The quality of content on its page and its layout and organization for easy flow. The presence of images and video. - Headlines, subheadings are identified by Headline tags. For example, a page should ideally only have one headline tagged with an H1 tag. Sub headlines can go to H2 or H3 tags. Sub-sub headlines can go to H4, H5, and even H6 tags. - Metadata and descriptions that encourage clickthrough. This is the data that search engines showcase your pages within search results. - The amount of content on the page. Although the jury is still out on the length of an ideal article for Google to show it on page-1, research shows somewhere between 1000 and 1500 words. This does not mean that a page with 5000 words will consistently rank higher than a page with 1000 words. However, it does mean that when choosing between 2 pages that are otherwise identical in quality of content, Google will likely choose to showcase the page with more content in a higher position. - The number of pages on your website (remember, more is not always better). - The freshness of your content etc.

Off-Page optimization The links that other sites on the internet provide your website are essentially treated like votes. The larger the number of websites linking to your website or providing you with backlinks, the larger the number of votes for your website. This quantity of links helps Google decide where to rank your website. That said, all backlinks are not born equal. For example, a link from a higher ranking website carries more value than a brand new one-page website. Some backlinks can be toxic and be damaging for your website's rank on Google. (More on toxic backlinks and how to get rid of those in a future article). The list for how off-page links create value for you can be bullet-pointed as follows: - Citations or directory listings - In context, backlinks from articles or guest blogs - is the link reciprocal - this practice has the potential to reduce the value of the link received - The nature of the website that the link comes from: i.e., is the website in a related space? A link from a gambling website for a dentist is not likely to count as useful. - Keywords in anchor text could indicate that the link has been sourced or purchased. The best links have anchor text that is just the URL of your website or "read more" or "click here," etc.

Technical SEO We have mentioned earlier that Technical SEO is the foundation of SEO for a website. The critical elements of the work done under technical SEO are - Identification and removal of Crawl errors. - Check if your website is secure - check for HTTPS status - Check if XML sitemaps exist & if they have been submitted to major search engines - Check and improve Site Load time - Check whether the site is mobile friendly and upgrade as needed - Check and optimize robots.txt files - Check for keyword cannibalization and edit as needed - Check and improve site metadata, including image alt tags - Check for broken links and eliminate them or apply a 301 redirect that passes full link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page.

Yoast, a company that provides an extremely popular SEO plugin for Wordpress websites, in addition talks about the need for technical SEO to ensure that there is no duplicate content, nor are there any dead links in the website.

As a dentist, how do I build a high-quality website myself While we would recommend that you hire an experienced web developer to help develop or update your dental website, you could build a workable website quite easily as a DIY project There are many website development tools available, and you could choose between them for your DIY project. Three major platforms that you could use are: - WordPress - Squarespace - Wix WordPress will need the most significant amount of expertise, while both Squarespace and Wix use drag and drop functionality for you to build something quickly. There is an argument between SEOs about whether or not SEO is easier to do on WordPress versus Wix or Squarespace. However, what is clear is that WordPress enjoys a much larger ecosystem which gives you access to better tools and developers than does any other website builder. According to Search Engine Journal "WordPress content management system is used by 39.5% of all sites on the web."

Choose a reliable & high-quality hosting company If you go with Wix or Squarespace, the hosting is with the website builder's platform. If you build with WordPress or any other website builder platform, you will need to choose a high-quality, fast, and secure hosting service. Some of the major hosting services that you could consider are: - Amazon Web Services - Bluehost - Godaddy - WPengine - Siteground - Hostgator etc. There are quite literally hundreds of hosting companies for you to choose from. Choose a hosting service that has close to 100% uptime, which has enough bandwidth for your clients to visit without the speed of your website going down. Over and above that, the hosting service should have robust security and offer you a service of backups so that if your website gets damaged or hacked, they can put back the site in a matter of minutes.

How do you do keyword research? As a dentist, you have a scarcity of time. Still, given that you have decided to build a DIY website, you need to ensure that you do keyword research so that Google recognizes your content to contain the answers your future patients or clients are searching for. Some of the tools that you could use for keyword research are: - Google Keyword planner - this is a free tool - Semrush/Ahrefs/Moz - these are paid tools but will help you in getting a solid grounding of keywords

Submit your site to Google Once your website is ready, make sure to create your presence and submit it to the search engine with the following tools: - Google My Business - Google Maps - Bing Places - Yahoo Small business - Unfortunately, this tends to work only in the US unless you subscribe to some listing services.

Google Tools to monitor your website performance These tools will help you gauge the performance of your website traffic and help you find points of strengths and weaknesses on your website - Google Search Console - Google Analytics - Google Page Speed Insights

List yourself on review sites. While the best website for reviews that self selects itself is your Google my business (GMB) page. You would also find reviews very helpful from the following websites. - Facebook - Yelp - RateMyMD - Healthgrades

List your practice in online directories. A presence in online directories is a crucial aspect of SEO for any business. You should list your dental practice in as many relevant directories as possible. There is a wide variety of directories available, and you should choose well. Your choices will be along the lines of: - Local yellow pages or equivalent - Directories for your town or province - Directories for Dentists or healthcare providers - Directories of local chambers of commerce or industry organizations

Is your Dental SEO strategy working? Once you have done all this work, you will need to ask how you find out if your dental strategy is working? To get this answer, you will need to check for some of the following: - Website traffic - this is the first and foremost indicator of performance - Ranking keywords - What is the page and rank of each of the keywords you believe to be vital. And, of course, how do these keyword ranks change over time. - Reviews - the number of reviews and the grade you get on your reviews is outside SEO in a technical sense. However, reviews create a very favourable feedback loop for search engines. Generally speaking, a large number of reviews will push a website up in ranking.

How do you find how you rank without subscribing to expensive SEO tools? If you check your keywords using your computer, the computer will respond based on your search history, thereby potentially fooling you into thinking that your rank has improved. Instead, there is a simple trick to finding how you rank for your target keywords. First, open an "incognito" session in a browser such as Chrome and then search for your keyword. If you don't find it on page-1, go to page-2 continue until you find it. Of course, if you don't rank even on page-10, then functionally, you don't rank for that keyword.

How can Experdent help? While you can most definitely do all of the work that we have enumerated here, you could choose to get expert help to create powerful SEO for your website. At Experdent, our focus is SEO for dentists, and that is just what we do. So, get in touch, send us an email, or call us to set up a time to chat very quickly. At Experdent Web Services, we put these very ideas into practice. We are results-driven, dentist-focused, and experts in SEO for dental offices in North America. So, if you are a dental office looking for SEO or need advice on your digital strategy, call us for a free 30-minute consult.

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seotipsandtricks-me · 6 years ago

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Choosing the best WordPress hosting for your site is critical. And the most important thing you need to consider is… How fast it is! Why? Because if your website loads slowly, you will suffer from- Lower search engine rankings Higher bounce rates Lower page view numbers Lower conversion rates And last but not least… A SLOW WEBSITE = LOWER PROFITS! Your websites speed is critical to the bottom line of your business. And all of that starts by making sure you choose the best WordPress hosting for you. PRO TIP: With WordPress hosting- “best” does not mean “most expensive” Keep reading and you’ll understand exactly what I mean… Because the tests below will help you save $,080 this year. Which Is The Best WordPress Hosting? Choosing the best WordPress hosting is easy. You want to make sure that the host you choose- Is super fast on the front and back end Loads your website quickly globally Takes security seriously (automatic backups & SSL) Offers great support Provides value for money The problem is, that is much easier said than done. So to find out who really offers the best WordPress hosting… I setup 8 test blogs across 7 popular managed WordPress hosting providers. And then I ran tests across each of those 8 blogs- Speed of loading from different locations around the world Ability to cope with a plugin-heavy WP blog Ability to handle a heavy simultaneous traffic load How each hosts hardware benchmarks Support speed & quality Value for money (very surprising result!) Note: I chose the cheapest plan with multiple sites. Cheaper plans are available. Kinsta – Who are the current host of this blog Cost: websites, $0 monthly, $00 annually CDN: Yes – KeyCDN included WPX Hosting – The previous host of this blog before Kinsta Cost: websites, $.99 monthly, $9.99 annually CDN: Yes – WPX Cloud included WP Engine – My host before WPX Hosting (it wasn’t great) Cost: websites, $ monthly, $0 annually CDN: Yes – MaxCDN>Stackpath included SiteGround – Specifically their managed WordPress hosting option Cost: unlimited website, normally $9.9 monthly, $9.0 annually CDN: No – Free CloudFlare recommended Hostgator – The managed WordPress Hosting package Cost: websites, $7.9 monthly, $.0 annually CDN: No – Free CloudFlare recommended Liquid Web – Again, their managed WordPress hosting offering Cost: 0 websites, $99 monthly, $,88 annually CDN: No – Free CloudFlare recommended Amazon EC – Not a managed WordPress host, but a DIY wildcard alternative Cost: Unlimited websites, $.99 monthly, $79.88 annually CDN: No – Free CloudFlare recommended So with WPEngine & LiquidWeb being the most expensive of all of them by a long way. You would expect them to be the clear winners… Right? WRONG! Not even close. How I Tested WordPress Hosting Speed I setup a total of 8 test sites across each of the 7 hosts. Hosts that included a CDN as part of their package had sites installed on them (WPXHosting, Kinsta & WP Engine). Hosts that ask you to use a free CDN like CloudFlare had sites installed on them (Siteground, Hostgator, Amazon EC & LiquidWeb). All of the sites are hosted in the USA. Then I created different types of blog on host and cloned that across each host using this plugin– Blog Type Heavy Cronus Theme photos ,000 words Blog Type Heavy Cronus Theme 0 plugins No text/images Blog Type Blog Type Plus Free CloudFlare CDN And to help make things a little easier for you… You can see the live versions of all of test blogs below- Siteground Blog Type (image heavy) Blog Type (plugin heavy) Blog Type (type + Cloudflare) HostGator Blog Type (image heavy) Blog Type (plugin heavy) Blog Type (type + Cloudflare) LiquidWeb Blog Type (image heavy) Blog Type (plugin heavy) Blog Type (type + Cloudflare) Amazon EC Blog Type (image heavy) Blog Type (plugin heavy) Blog Type (type + Cloudflare) WPX Hosting Blog Type (image heavy) Blog Type (plugin heavy) Kinsta Blog Type (image heavy) Blog Type (plugin heavy) WP Engine Blog Type (image heavy) Blog Type (plugin heavy) Feel free to click through to any of them and run your own tests! But if you’re too lazy to do that… Here are the results of my tests- Test – Image Heavy Site Loading Speed In this test: I took the Blog Type (image heavy) install for each host and ran it through GTMetrix twice. Often a sites content is cached on the hosting server and CDN. So I ran passes of GTMetrix to make sure all caches were primed. Then I tested each site from 7 global locations and averaged out the results. This is what it looks like- USACanadaUKAustraliaChinaBrazilIndia Tested From Dallas, USA. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) TTFB(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting . seconds ms View Result Kinsta . seconds 00 ms View Result SiteGround . seconds ms View Result WP Engine . seconds ms View Result Liquid Web .8 seconds ms View Result HostGator . seconds 9 ms View Result Amazon EC . seconds 900 ms View Result Tested From Vancouver, Canada. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) TTFB(lower is better) Test Result Kinsta . seconds 8 ms View Result WPX Hosting . seconds 89 ms View Result HostGator .7 seconds ms View Result SiteGround .8 seconds ms View Result WP Engine . seconds 9 ms View Result LiquidWeb . seconds ms View Result Amazon EC .8 seconds 900 ms View Result Tested From London, United Kingdom. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) TTFB(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting 0. seconds 7 ms View Result SiteGround . seconds 9 ms View Result WP Engine .7 seconds 8 ms View Result Kinsta .0 seconds ms View Result Liquid Web . seconds ms View Result Amazon EC . seconds 800 ms View Result HostGator .0 seconds 7 ms View Result Tested From Sydney, Australia. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) TTFB(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting 0.8 seconds ms View Result Kinsta . seconds 00 ms View Result SiteGround .7 seconds 800 ms View Result WP Engine . seconds 800 ms View Result Liquid Web . seconds 900 ms View Result HostGator .0 seconds 00 ms View Result Amazon EC .0 seconds 00 ms View Result Tested From Hong Kong, China. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) TTFB(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting . seconds 700 ms View Result Kinsta . seconds 00 ms View Result SiteGround . seconds 900 ms View Result WP Engine . seconds 900 ms View Result HostGator .8 seconds 8 ms View Result Liquid Web .0 seconds 000 ms View Result Amazon EC 9.0 seconds 800 ms View Result Tested From Sao Paulo, Brazil. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) TTFB(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting .7 seconds 0 ms View Result WP Engine . seconds 700 ms View Result Kinsta . seconds 00 ms View Result SiteGround . seconds 000 ms View Result Liquid Web .7 seconds 00 ms View Result HostGator . seconds 00 ms View Result Amazon EC .7 seconds 800 ms View Result Tested From Mumbai, India. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) TTFB(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting 0.9 seconds 0 ms View Result SiteGround . seconds 00 ms View Result Kinsta .7 seconds 00 ms View Result WP Engine .8 seconds 000 ms View Result Liquid Web . seconds 00 ms View Result Amazon EC . seconds 00 ms View Result HostGator . seconds 00 ms View Result Click Here To See The Test Data Hide The Test Data Test Conclusions The clear winner here is WPX Hosting. But it’s fair to say that all of the hosts performed within acceptable levels in Canada and North America (except for Amazon EC). It’s only when you start taking a global look at things do you see dramatic differences in the load times. But having globally fast loading times is critical in the modern economy. Test – Plugin Heavy Site Loading Speed A plugin heavy site can cause huge problems when it comes to load times. And it’s easy to get carried away! This blog has active plugins at the time of writing- And plugins can have such a big impact on load time… WP Engine maintains a list of plugins that are banned on their platform. So for the Blog Type (plugin heavy) installs, I installed 0 popular plugins with no other content whatsoever. Thrive Architect Yoast SEO Smushit Contact Form 7 All In One Schema WooCommerce TinyMCE Advanced Really Simple SSL MailChimp for WordPress Insert Headers and Footers Redirection WP Statistics AMP for WordPress Google Analyticator WP Sitemap Page Login LockDown WP-Polls WP Google Fonts Cookie Notice for GDPR Social Media Share Buttons & Icons Quiz & Survey Master PDF Embedder WP Project Manager ManageWP Worker Code Snippets Tablepress PrettyLinks bbPress WordPress Download Manager Business Directory Plugin Click Here To See All 0 Plugins Hide The Plugin List This test is different because we are testing the computing power of the host, rather than the speed of delivering static image files. Then I tested each plugin heavy install from 7 global locations & averaged out the results- USACanadaUKAustraliaChinaBrazilIndia Tested From Dallas, USA. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) Test Result WP Engine . seconds View Result Amazon EC . seconds View Result WPX Hosting .0 seconds View Result Kinsta . seconds View Result HostGator . seconds View Result SiteGround . seconds View Result Liquid Web . seconds View Result Tested From Vancouver, Canada. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting . seconds View Result WP Engine .7 seconds View Result SiteGround .7 seconds View Result LiquidWeb .7 seconds View Result Kinsta .8 seconds View Result HostGator .8 seconds View Result Amazon EC .8 seconds View Result Tested From London, United Kingdom. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting . seconds View Result WP Engine . seconds View Result Kinsta . seconds View Result Liquid Web . seconds View Result Amazon EC .8 seconds View Result SiteGround .0 seconds View Result HostGator . seconds View Result Tested From Sydney, Australia. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting . seconds View Result WP Engine . seconds View Result SiteGround .7 seconds View Result Liquid Web . seconds View Result Kinsta .7 seconds View Result Amazon EC .7 seconds View Result HostGator . seconds View Result Tested From Hong Kong, China. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting .0 seconds View Result Kinsta .8 seconds View Result SiteGround .9 seconds View Result WP Engine . seconds View Result HostGator . seconds View Result Liquid Web .9 seconds View Result Amazon EC .8 seconds View Result Tested From Sao Paulo, Brazil. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) Test Result WP Engine . seconds View Result SiteGround .0 seconds View Result Kinsta .9 seconds View Result WPX Hosting .0 seconds View Result Amazon EC . seconds View Result Liquid Web .8 seconds View Result HostGator . seconds View Result Tested From Mumbai, India. Host Page Load Time(lower is better) Test Result WPX Hosting . seconds View Result SiteGround .9 seconds View Result WP Engine .0 seconds View Result Kinsta .0 seconds View Result Amazon EC . seconds View Result Liquid Web . seconds View Result HostGator . seconds View Result Click Here To See The Test Data Hide The Test Data Test Conclusions Like the first test, WPX Hosting is the winner here. Although it is a marginal win over WP Engine. It’s worth bearing in mind that the tested page had absolutely zero content. And the slower hosts seem to have started choking with the higher number of requests. Test – WordPress Performance Tester Benchmarks The WordPress Performance Tester plugin is specifically designed to stress test WordPress hosting servers. It does that by running a number of tests- Math – 00,000 math function tests String Manipulation – 00,000 string manipulation tests Loops – ,000,000 loop iterations Conditionals – ,000,000 conditional logic checks MySql – basic mysql functions and ,000,000 ENCODE() iterations $wpdb – 0 insert, select, update and delete operations And then outputs performance metrics- Execution Time – how long it took to do all of those tests (lower is better) Queries Per Second – how many queries per second processed (higher is better) I ran each of the Blog Type (image heavy) installs for each host through the plugin. And these were the results… Host Execution Time(lower is better) Queries Per Second(higher is better) Test Result WPX Hosting 0.70 ,8 View Result SiteGround 0.7 ,0 View Result Kinsta 0.89 , View Result Liquid Web 0.98 ,0 View Result Amazon EC .00 View Result WP Engine . 9 View Result HostGator 9. 08 View Result Click Here To See The Test Data Hide The Test Data Test Conclusion As you can see x of the more budget friendly hosts WPX Hosting & Siteground performed incredibly well here. But interestingly: The more expensive hosts like Kinsta, LiquidWeb and WP Engine failed to perform. That is the exact opposite of what I would expect to happen… You would think those extra $$$ translate into better hosting hardware and setups! But the data is telling a different story. Test – Load Impact Next I wanted to know: How would each host perform under stress from 00 simultaneous visitors? However I had a huge problem: Most hosts automatically block tests like this because it reseambles a DDOS attack. But it was critical that I conducted anonymous testing because I didn’t want the hosts to know I was testing them. So I created a new page on each Blog Type (image heavy) install with ,000 words- WPX Hosting – https://hostingtest.space/load-impact/ WP Engine – https://hostingtest.space/load-impact/ Kinsta – https://hostingtest.space/load-impact/ SiteGround – https://hostingtest7.space/load-impact/ Hostgator – https://hostingtest0.space/load-impact/ Amazon – https://hostingtest.space/load-impact/ Liquid Web – https://hostingtest.space/load-impact/ Then I set Load Impact to work by sending 00 simulated visitors to load each page on each host. This is how it played out- Host Maximum Page Load Time(lower is better) Maximum Requests Handled(higher is better) Test Result WPX Hosting 0.7 seconds ,70 View Result Liquid Web . seconds 99 View Result WP Engine .7 seconds ,0 View Result Amazon EC 0. seconds 0 View Result Click Here To See The Test Data Hide The Test Data Test Conclusion From the tests I was able to complete- WPX Hosting was the hands down winner here – it wasn’t even close. And although WPEngine, Amazon and LiquidWeb were slower… They did not collapse under the testing and remained online. As for the other hosts I had problems testing with- Kinsta – LoadImpact was reporting a problem with overloaded Amazon VPS’s SiteGround – Either the hosting failed or they automatically blocked LoadImpact HostGator – Fell down during testing , the site went offline with a 0 error And while I would have loved to get a result for them… It would have brought attention to my testing & I wanted to test anonymously. Perhaps in the future I will be able to run this test again for the missing hosts. Test – Hosting Support Speed of your website is one thing. But speed (and quality) of support is another. And given that the tested hosts are self proclaimed “WordPress Experts”… I wanted to put that to the test. So I opened an identical support ticket with each host to see- How long it took to respond If they would fix the problem for me Here is the support ticket I sent to each host- Hi Support, I am not a very technical person and need help with the setup of this redirect on my site hosted with you thanks: hostingtest.space – all pages except hostingtest.space/wp-admin to redirect to hostingtest.space Thanks in advance. Matt It’s not a super easy problem to fix… But it’s not super difficult either. Any WordPress expert should be able to tackle it. In my opinion the easiest way to solve this problem is with a .htaccess edit like this- RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(/wp-admin|.wp-login.php.) [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http:/hostingtest.space//$ [R=0,L] But: There is always more than one way to skin a cat! Test Conclusion As expected – the test results varied wildly here. Some hosts took full control and deployed a solution on my behalf… Where as others… didn’t. Here is how they performed- WPEngineSitegroundLiquidwebHostgatorWPXHostingKinstaAmazon WP Engine There was minute delay on live chat support initially- And ultimately… They said it wasn’t possible to do- Eric Roiz: This unfortunately wouldn’t be something that can work with a WordPress setup. With the way that WordPress loads out it’s content that wouldn’t be able to work Matthew Woodward: Can it be done in the htaccess file? Eric Roiz: No, it’s not a matter or being able to redirect or not, but rather that the way the sites individually load their content, that wouldn’t be able to work Matthew Woodward: OK Eric, I appreciate you trying. Thanks and have a good day there. It wasn’t that the WP Engine Support Agent didn’t necessarily want to do it for me. But he certainly didn’t know how to do it. Siteground Live chat response was pretty fast! But the support team wasn’t willing to apply the change for me and wanted me to read an article and use their tool myself: Martin T.: Sure, we do have a tool just for that and an article dedicated to it as well: https://www.siteground.com/kb/how_do_i_redirect_one_domain_to_another_domain_name/ Matthew Woodward: I always screw up things like this and would greatly appreciate you doing it for me thanks. Martin T.: I would be able to assist you if you’re facing any difficulties, but don’t worry it’s really easy and you can’t really mess anything up :) Matthew Woodward: I always find a way! Matthew Woodward: And it will take me along time to go through the article and understand the exact steps. Martin T.: It’s ok Martin T.: Believe me it’s really easy and you can’t mess anything up as the redirects can always be removed :) Matthew Woodward: I guess it’s not your policy to do stuff like that. It’s OK I understand. Martin T.: As customer support representative we’re here to help whenever you’re facing any difficulties, of course, I would love to assist you with any difficulties that might come up when trying to manage your account with us :) Matthew Woodward: Sure Martin, I appreciate that and have a good day there. Bye for now. I did take comfort in the fact that if I applied the changes myself and messed them up, that the SiteGround support team would help me out if I did mess it up. Liquid Web Accessing live chat was very fast and the support agency was willing to help. Although he stated that it wasn’t their normal policy- “that is out of the scope of our support. normally that would fall under your responsibility. but as a courtesy i can attempt that. just keep in mind that we don’t normally do this.” And as Liquid Web are one of the more expensive hosts, I was pleased to see them take control of requests like this. Hostgator Hostgators live chat response was very fast. However: Their solution failed when tested and the subsequent workaround seemed much more complex- While it was overly complex, they did demonstrate that why were willing to take control of requests rather than palming them off on support documents. WPX Hosting WPX Hosting were the most impressive of the bunch. Not only did they answer almost immediately but they also completed the request for me in about 0 minutes- Luchezar: I have set the redirection as requested, can you please test on your end and see if it’s working? Please clear your browser’s cache. Just press CTRL + F or use Incognito Mode (CTRL + SHIFT + N) for Chrome and (CTRL + SHIFT + P) for Firefox. For reference, please check this article: https://wpxhosting.c…er-cache-chrome-firefox-edge-/ Matthew: Sure, one moment. Yes that works. Thank you and have a good day there. Bye for now. You can’t ask for a better customer experience than that! Kinsta Kinsta (my current host) have always offered great, responsive support that takes control of issues. They responded quickly to the live chat, but it seemed this issue stumped them – even though I have challenged them with much more complex issues in the past. The Kinsta agent spent a very long time ( hours+) trying to fix it but couldn’t get it working fully- But they were committed to the resolution and prepared to invest significant time to help. Amazon Amazon is not a managed service like the other hosts here and is strictly do it yourself I know from past experience that you have to submit a ticket/email and they reply within hours typically. However, if their hardware is working- they expect the user to do everything in terms of configuration and software so their service wasn’t relevant for this test. Click Here To See The Support Requests Hide The Support Requests Kinsta, LiquidWeb & WPXHosting solved the problem successfully. And out of those - It was WPXhosting that solved the problem the quickest and with minimum fuss. However: WPEngine & SiteGround seriously fell short here Their “WordPress experts” were not able to solve the problem. Test – The Free CloudFlare CDN x of the hosts I tested did not include any kind of CDN- SiteGround LiquidWeb HostGator Amazon EC And it is common advice for hosting companies to recommend you setup the free version of the CloudFlare CDN. Supposedly this will help increase site speed. But is that really true? To find out I cloned the Blog Type (image heavy) install to a new domain on each host and then activated the free CloudFlare CDN- Siteground No CDN Free CloudFlare CDN HostGator No CDN Free CloudFlare CDN Amazon EC No CDN Free CloudFlare CDN LiquidWeb No CDN Free CloudFlare CDN Then I tested each of these installs with GTMetrix from 7 different global locations. And the results were very interesting… WordPress Hosting Features Compared So far we have focused purely on speed, reliabiliy and support. But what about other hosting features… As you can see: There really isn’t that much difference between them on the face of it… Except for price! It’s only with the nitty gritty testing that you see huge differences in quality of service. The Worst Things About Each Host Regardless of which host you look at, each of them have their own cons. The best wordpress hosting for me, isn’t necessarily the best WordPress hosting for you. For example: WPX Hosting is clearly the fastest, but if you need phone support… They aren’t right for you. So here is what I didn’t like about each of the managed WordPress hosting options- WP Engine They are the most expensive +$0/month for UK hosting No email support – additional costs with Google Apps etc Long banned plugins list Majority owned by GoDaddy’s owner Poor ratings & very bad experience WPX Hosting No phone support No Git support Servers are only available in USA and UK Back end control panel could be easier to use Hostgator Terrible trust score No CDN on base plan No free SSLs, only paid No staging area Long list of banned plugins Automatic backups are a paid upgrade Terrible loading speed from non-US locations (see above tests) Liquid Web Very expensive Not exactly the quickest based on my testing No CDN on base plan (but free Cloudflare CDN worked best of tested hosts here) No free email, costs $0 monthly extra + $-$ per email address No discounts for annual subscription Kinsta No phone support Expensive for multiple websites No email support – additional costs with Google Apps etc List of banned plugins No live chat for pre-sales questions No free migration on the base plan SiteGround Pricing virtually triples in year No staging area on base plan After first month, no monthly payment option No real CDN on base plan (free Cloudflare doesn’t count) Amazon Not really a WordPress host You need to configure everything Very technical, requires command line No CDN No automatic backups Support is for their hardware only No cost saving reason to choose Amazon over dedicated WP hosts Wrapping It Up While it is usually true that

#1Image #2Plugin #3CloudFlare #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6

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sheilalmartinia · 6 years ago

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Why is WordPress Free? What are the Costs? What is the Catch?

One of the most often asked question by our users is “Do I have to pay to use WordPress?”. We tell them that WordPress is a free and open source software, which is usually followed by, “Why is WordPress Free?”.

In this article, we will discuss why is WordPress free, what’s the cost of running a WordPress site, and what’s the catch?

WordPress is an open source software. It is free in the sense of freedom not in the sense of free beer. You may ask what is the difference between these two?

Open source software comes with the freedom for you to use, modify, build upon, and redistribute the software in any way you like without paying any fees.

However, there might be costs involved in other areas. We will discuss the cost of using the open source WordPress software later in this article.

Why Don’t They Sell WordPress as a Software?

We often get asked, why don’t people and companies behind WordPress sell it? If WordPress is as good as everyone says, then they would obviously make a lot more money by selling it.

This statement would make sense, if a single company or an individual owned WordPress.

WordPress is an open source community project where tens of thousands of talented people have made contributions to make it into a great software that it is today.

There is a core team of developers that lead the project development, but anyone can contribute patches, fix bugs, make features, suggest features, etc.

Furthermore, project leaders change from one version to another. If you get deeply involved in the community, then you can become a core contributor to WordPress as well.

The Philosophy behind Open Source Software

The philosophy behind Open Source software movement is that software are not like other tangible products. Once a software is created, it can be copied many times with little cost.

Let’s take the example of a toy factory. Each toy manufactured has different parts and each part has a cost. The manufacturing cost of these parts can be calculated by the factory to decide a reasonable profit margin for the product.

On the other hand, the cost of creating software and making copies of it is not the same. Some groups believe that with each copy sold, the profit margin of the software becomes more unfair.

To understand more about open source software ideals, check out GNU’s Philosophy.

How Do People Make Money with WordPress?

The two main profitable parts of any open source software are products and services based on the same open source software.

People often confuse WordPress with WordPress.com, but they’re actually two different things. WordPress (often referred to self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.org) is a free blogging platform and website builder.

Matt Mullenweg, co-founding developer of WordPress, launched a company called Automattic which provides “restricted” free blog hosting service at WordPress.com, and you can pay / upgrade to unlock features and remove ads.

However, to get the full power of WordPress on WordPress.com platform, you’ll need to sign up with their WordPress VIP service. This costs over $5000 per month for hosting + $5000 set up fee.

Automattic has raised a total of $317.3M in funding over 7 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 1, 2015 from a Venture round. (Source)

Other developers have also gone ahead to build successful multi-million dollar businesses around WordPress by creating commercial plugins, commercial themes, and even offering WordPress hosting.

Some examples of successful multi-million dollar WordPress companies are:

WPEngine – a managed WordPress hosting company that has raised over $290 million dollars and now also own StudioPress commercial themes.

Awesome Motive – led by Syed Balkhi is another multi-million dollar company based around WordPress. The company manages WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms, MonsterInsights, SeedProd, and other popular WordPress plugins.

Yoast – is the company behind the popular WordPress SEO plugin that’s used by over 5 million websites.

ElegantThemes – multi-million dollar theme company behind the popular drag & drop page builder: Divi and several other plugins.

Related: See our list of 20 top WordPress companies.

Good WordPress developers and consultants also make a comfortable full-time income by building custom websites, applications, and plugins around WordPress for their clients. A lot of them are making over six-figures in annual earnings by themselves.

Is WordPress Copyright Free?

No, WordPress is not copyright free. It is licensed in a way that allows everyone to use it, but each contribution made to the software is copyrighted.

It is released under GPL, so you are free to use, modify, and redistribute the code. You will have the copyright to modifications you make to the software, not the entire code.

GPL requires that any derivative work you release or distribute should be licensed under GPL as well. You may have the copyright to do anything you like, your derivative work automatically inherits the GPL license, so others are free to use, modify, and redistribute your code in any way they choose.

Does this mean that all premium WordPress Themes and Plugins are Licensed GPL?

According to an official blog post on WordPress.org, themes are GPL too. Images, CSS and Javascript used inside themes and plugins can be excluded, but all PHP and HTML parts of themes and plugins extensively use WordPress functionality thus they are a derivative work therefore are licensed under GPL.

While some folks do not agree with that, most trusted WordPress businesses follow and abide by the community guidelines.

The Content Published with WordPress also inherits GPL?

No, you are entitled to license your content any way you like. Unless the content you are publishing is actually a derivative work of WordPress or any other GPL licensed work.

For example, if you are sharing your articles, photos, or any other artwork on your blog, then you own full copyrights of it.

However, if you are writing a blog post showing people how to use a WordPress function with examples, then that particular blog post could be licensed differently. The code used in examples is actually derivative work and automatically inherits the GPL license.

The WordPress Trademark

The code of WordPress as a software is released under GPL but the words WordPress, WordCamp, and the WordPress logo are registered trademarks owned by the WordPress Foundation.

To distinguish between a site or resource that is official or community run, the foundation asks folks to not use “WordPress” in their domain name.

This is the reason why our site is called WPBeginner instead of WordPressBeginner. Any website, training course, or resource that you see has WordPress in their domain name is probably being run by someone who doesn’t know enough about WordPress. This means you probably shouldn’t pay them any of your money

Most legit businesses built around WordPress are aware of the trademark policies, and they respect the rules.

Cost of using WordPress

WordPress as a software is free for you to download and use. However, to use WordPress on the web, you will need WordPress Hosting.

You can use WordPress.com to create a free blog, but be aware that there are some differences. See our comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org for more details.

The cost of using WordPress is relatively minimal and hold true for running any other type of website as well. The only real cost is web hosting ($7.99 per month) and domain name ($14 / year).

However WPBeginner users can get a free domain name and 60% off web hosting from Bluehost which means you can start a website for as low as $2.75 per month. Bluehost is an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

Related: How to Start a WordPress Blog (Ultimate Guide)

Additional costs could be commercial WordPress themes also known as premium WordPress themes. However, you are not required to use those because there are over 6000+ free WordPress themes that you can use.

People often use commercial plugins, but you are not required to use those as well because there are over 54,000+ free WordPress plugins available.

We have created a detailed guide on how much does it really cost to build a WordPress website with instructions on how to start a website on a budget and save money.

We hope that this article answered your questions about WordPress licensing, the costs of running a WordPress site, and the business around WordPress. You may also want to see our list of easy to start online business ideas that actually make money.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Why is WordPress Free? What are the Costs? What is the Catch? appeared first on WPBeginner.

from WPBeginner https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/why-is-wordpress-free-what-are-the-costs-what-is-the-catch/

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siliconwebx · 6 years ago