MainWP Blog - 2020

Who is your target audience? That question alone can strike fear in the heart of many self-employed creators. I understand. The well-intentioned experts tell us we should have such things. “You need a target audience,” they tell us. “What is your niche?” someone says. Perhaps they use the phrase target market. There is no reason to get all stressed out. Today we are here to talk about it and how it applies to our WordPress design business. For ages now, Continue reading the post...

ShortPixel is a well-used plugin for image optimization on sites. The plugin includes a number of filters and constants. You can hide your ShortPixel API key from the plugin’s settings by defining the API key in a constant in the sites wp-config.php file. Replace out the APIKEY with your actual API key for ShortPixel. define('SHORTPIXEL_API_KEY', 'APIKEY'); define('SHORTPIXEL_HIDE_API_KEY', true); If you are using the ShortPixel plugin and service on sites which are hosted on FlyWheel then you might run into an Continue reading the post...

I wanted to touch base with the support projects we’ve been working on and testing throughout the year. We’ve worked as a team to tweak our support system, improving its ability to handle the larger number of users MainWP has gained this year. Many of the projects have been going on in the background as we ran through multiple A/B tests and workflows. Some have been released in plain sight like the new Knowledgebase and others like the MainWP Community Continue reading the post...

A differentiation strategy is a way to stand out from the noise and give people a reason to choose your business over others. You’d think companies would be all about that. Peep Laja Imagine, if you will, you enter a great big expo hall. The expo is for businesses and website designers. Those with the booths are website designers, and they are hoping business owners will stop by and consider them for their next website project. There are literally hundreds, Continue reading the post...

Being able to send reliable newsletters from your site is a complex issue to deal with. There are a number of plugins out there for sending out email newsletters from your site. One of the best options for being able to send email newsletters is the AcyMailing plugin. The AcyMailing plugin adds a clean UI into wp-admin after the plugins have been installed and activated. Go through the configuration settings in AcyMailing to setup the mail settings first. You can Continue reading the post...

Another month in the year 2020. To say it has been a tough year for us all is an understatement. Yet people are still launching new products and websites! This month, October 2020, we explore some of those launches in the latest roundup. Giddy up. DocketWP recent launches From the mind of Kyle Van Deusen of The Admin Bar comes DocketWP. DocketWP is a lightweight plugin that allows you to easily store and access your processes and to-do’s without leaving Continue reading the post...

There is a new marketing and CRM solution for WordPress called FluentCRM. FluentCRM has all of the features which you would inspect to be in SaaS CRM solutions. After you have installed and activated the FluentCRM plugin on your site it will walk you through the setup wizard. After you have completed through the setup wizard you can get started by importing your existing contacts or if needed to create new lists, tags, or use dynamic segments. It is straightforward Continue reading the post...

In the past couple of years, I have found myself watching, participating, and presenting in virtual summits. Sometimes I find them incredibly rewarding. For example, this past weekend, I watched some of Selena Soo’s Impacting Millions. I had the honor of listening to Ramit Sethi, John Lee Dumas, Selena herself, and Laura Belgray. I mean, I have never seen them in person, and this might be the best opportunity I have had to see them. Maybe one day, I will Continue reading the post...

Being able to easily run a visual compare when plugins have been updated on your site and then to make sure that nothing was broken visually can be a very complex process to deal with. But there is a solid service which deals with this called Diffy. Diffy also provides an easy to use WordPress plugin to be able to integrate it with your site. Visual testing allows you to confirm any updates did not break anything visually on your Continue reading the post...

Easily being able to send new posts to site users can be a pain to deal with depending on which service you are using to broadcast new posts to an email list or segment. But luckily there is a new plugin called Newsletter Glue which makes it very simple to publish and post and then have that post sent in a newsletter email to users in a list. Newsletter Glue supports a number of dedicated email newsletter services like Mailchimp, Continue reading the post...