Exhausted working within the confines of WordPress? See what the RebelMouse platform can do for you. http://rbl.ms/2aydqTl
Might be interesting for you
Content Strategy
In 2022, Publishers Take Back Control With Subscription Success
Jun 15, 2022
Users are ready to pay for content that delivers
The Rise of the Mature User
It's been a long and winding path, but in 2022 the subscription model continues its upward trajectory as a top revenue strategy for publishers of all sizes. The tug of war between platforms and publishers reached its peak in the last few years of the previous decade, leaving users desperate for a modern user experience that's clear of any clutter from the duopoly that is Google and Facebook. This is why intelligent paywall models are a top choice for users looking to consume content right from the source. When done correctly, the strategy can work for any type of media. The New York Times, a frequent showpiece example of the power of paywalls, is constantly reporting record-busting subscription numbers, with 7.6 million digital subscriptions in 2021.
And it all makes perfect sense. The subscription model eliminates the middleman — such as the platforms — so readers get the experience and content they want, and publishers get the cash they need.
RebelMouse's Subscription Features
As a creative agency powered by modern technology, we know how to build a subscription experience that's designed for both the modern user who wants an optimized site experience and the modern publisher who relies on paywall revenue to survive.
RebelMouse's subscription features are customizable and easily support:
- Free Trials: Create one-day, weekly, or monthly subscription plans.
- Coupon Codes: Use promotional codes to give access to strategic partners and complement B2B deals.
- B2B Subscriptions: Use email matching to sell access to companies.
- Testing Powered by Data: We have a sophisticated suite of A/B testing tools — complete with Google Analytics integrations — that give you the ability to test what works, what doesn't, and how to better cater to your readers' needs.
RebelMouse's Paywall API is available to developers to make it easy to manage subscriptions. Access to paid content is managed via subscriptions attached to email qualifiers. Click here for more information on our Paywall API.
The Success of Our Subscription Model
Sites powered by RebelMouse are experiencing enormous success thanks to our subscription strategies, including the Italian newspaper La Verità. While publishers on other platforms typically see a decrease in audience when they implement a paywall, in their time leveraging RebelMouse’s paywall strategy, La Verità has experienced continued, unprecedented growth. They are now one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've enjoyed significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
La Verità's superior site performance using RebelMouse's paywall tools.
Is a Subscription Model Right for You?
In the past, there was a stigma around paywalls that signaled they were only sustainable for large publishers with massive audiences already in place. But with today's users maturing, subscription models are more attainable for a variety of emerging media properties and legacy names alike.
It's important to strike the right balance between free content, subscriber revenue, and ad strategy. This is a lot to juggle for publishers who are already maxed out trying to create quality content worth reading.
At RebelMouse, we can help you determine if a subscription model will benefit you, and then build a custom, easy-to-use paywall system that works for your site. If you're not publishing on RebelMouse, we also operate as a world-class creative agency that can help you navigate the subscription business and any other content strategy you may be building toward. Either way, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
Keep reading...
Show less
Rebel Insights
RebelMouse Q1 2021 Platform Updates
Mar 29, 2022
Speed, performance, and Core Web Vitals enhancements
Click here to read our Q2 2021 platform performance updates!
At RebelMouse, we pour our souls into making sure that our platform is always the most modern, high-performance CMS on the market. In fact, we invested over $100,000 worth of hours into our platform in Q1 2021 alone. This has resulted in updates and performance enhancements that publishers would have to pay for on their own to make happen on any other platform, such as WordPress. We're proud to be at a level of scale where we can invest this way into our platform, and we will continue to invest at this rate every quarter moving forward just as we have in the past.
Here are the major updates that we've added to the platform in Q1.
Google Chrome Web Vitals and Google Analytics Tracking Installed
We've installed and configured an ultra-lightweight open source project from Google that allows you to track Core Web Vitals data directly in Google Analytics. This is so important because the only other place this data is tracked is only available on a monthly summary level. Now we can analyze changes to the platform and any property in Google Analytics and get daily reports.
You can now run your own reports if you have access to the Google Analytics account connected to your property.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Visualization and Debugging Feature
CLS is very tricky to understand because the data Google collects goes way beyond the first page load. This creates a lot of confusion in the industry because Google's PageSpeed Insights tool only tracks the first page load experience and misreports the CLS penalties that will be collected by Core Web Vitals through the Chrome browsing experience.
Understanding these penalties is vital to fixing them and going all green on Core Web Vitals. So we've implemented a way to expose this on any RebelMouse-powered site by adding the following query parameter to any URL:
?debug=cls (e.g., site.com/slug?debug=cls)
By using our debugger, you can see your CLS penalties in real time, and the code highlights the offending element(s) so that it becomes immediately obvious what needs to be fixed to get a green score on CLS.
Faster Loading of Third-Party JavaScript Calls
We've figured out a new way to load critical third-party calls, such as ads, much faster, and without resulting in any penalties on performance scores. There is a new option in the JavaScript element in Layout & Design Tool that's called "Post LCP," and we highly recommend using it for any JavaScript that you need on your page.
CLS Improvements
With the knowledge that Google is rolling out new algorithm changes in 2021 that will place much higher value on metrics such as CLS, we've made several updates in anticipation of the changes.
- Sticky Element With Zero CLS Penalty
- We have a Sticky element in Layout & Design Tool that lets you do smart sticky footers, headers, or sidebars as users scroll. These were previously causing some CLS penalties, so we pushed out a platform-wide update that included smart CSS transitions. This has resulted in zero CLS penalties.
- We have a Sticky element in Layout & Design Tool that lets you do smart sticky footers, headers, or sidebars as users scroll. These were previously causing some CLS penalties, so we pushed out a platform-wide update that included smart CSS transitions. This has resulted in zero CLS penalties.
- Upgrade for Read More/Keep Reading Feature
- We've figured out a way to have zero CLS penalties when a user clicks the "Keep Reading" button on a post.
- We've figured out a way to have zero CLS penalties when a user clicks the "Keep Reading" button on a post.
- Upgrade for Sticky Leaderboard/Header Ad Units
- Many sites use logic that loads the leaderboard ad sticky for 3–6 seconds before letting users scroll past it. This is excellent for revenue and for page speed, but it was causing CLS penalties. We figured out a platform-wide fix that results in zero CLS penalties for these units. We also met with Google's performance team on this, and the latest version of Chrome Canary has shown that our solution is working.
- Many sites use logic that loads the leaderboard ad sticky for 3–6 seconds before letting users scroll past it. This is excellent for revenue and for page speed, but it was causing CLS penalties. We figured out a platform-wide fix that results in zero CLS penalties for these units. We also met with Google's performance team on this, and the latest version of Chrome Canary has shown that our solution is working.
- Ads Refresh Feature With Zero CLS Penalties
- For most media sites, refreshing a sticky ad unit every 30 seconds is a vital part of revenue. We discovered this behavior was creating CLS penalties, so we figured out a way to fix it so that the feature can work without resulting in any CLS penalties.
- For most media sites, refreshing a sticky ad unit every 30 seconds is a vital part of revenue. We discovered this behavior was creating CLS penalties, so we figured out a way to fix it so that the feature can work without resulting in any CLS penalties.
- Upgrade to Fonts Element for Zero CLS and LCP Penalties With Custom Fonts
- Lazy-loading fonts is vital for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores and page speed. But we found that this frequently results in a CLS penalty since the page will shift a bit when the right font is loaded in. We upgraded to multiple weight options in the Font element of Layout & Design Tool so that you can lazy load a font and have zero LCP and zero CLS penalties. This will take some work to implement per site in order to take full advantage of the zero penalty opportunity.
Please contact your account manager or support@rebelmouse.com if you'd like us to help implement this feature.
- Lazy-loading fonts is vital for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores and page speed. But we found that this frequently results in a CLS penalty since the page will shift a bit when the right font is loaded in. We upgraded to multiple weight options in the Font element of Layout & Design Tool so that you can lazy load a font and have zero LCP and zero CLS penalties. This will take some work to implement per site in order to take full advantage of the zero penalty opportunity.
- Slideshow Upgrade for Zero CLS Penalties as You Flip Through Slides
- We found that slideshows created in Entry Editor using Particle Assembler were creating CLS penalties. So we found a way to fix this so that you can use slideshows and have zero CLS penalties.
Redis Upgrade
We've upgraded Redis to the latest version, which has significantly improved back-end performance, as well as helped us stay compliant with the highest standards of security.
Platform Team Updates
DevOps
- This group focuses on developing platform infrastructure.
- We've added two senior hires to this team to focus on building out new features, as well as improve all of the platform functionality that RebelMouse users already enjoy today.
QA
- This group focuses on testing platform infrastructure.
- We've added four experienced hires to this team to help scale QA and find things that need improvement in development, build, and staging environments before they ever hit production.
We hope that you're as excited about these upgrades as we are, and we can't wait to show you all of the things that we plan to accomplish in Q2 2021!
They're here! Click here to read our Q2 2021 platform performance updates.
Related Articles Around the Web
Keep reading...
Show less
Interested in a Free Website Health Check?Check Your
Website's Health
Get Your Free Analysis NowWebsite's Health
Rebel Insights
INP and Core Web Vitals: What You Need to Know
May 21, 2022
In this article:
Why INP Is More Challenging Than FID
Get Ahead of the Rest of the Web
It’s been more than two years since Google let the world know that its Core Web Vitals metrics are the new benchmark for measuring a site's performance in its search results. Developers have since felt the impact of how their publishing platforms stack up against the new standard. Important decisions around the architecture of your site can now make or break your site's performance in the eyes of Google.
Now, the definition of what makes up Core Web Vitals could change. A new responsiveness metric called Interaction to Next Paint (INP) may replace First Input Delay (FID). During Google’s I/O conference in May 2022, it was announced that the INP metric was still in its experimental phase. You can watch the announcement here:
The state of responsiveness on the web. youtu.be
If Google does decide to swap out FID for INP, sites that get all green scores on Core Web Vitals are going to fail INP unless they perform development work to adjust for the new measurement.
The good news is that there’s still time to make sure that your site is ready for this major shift. Let’s break down what INP is, and how you can make sure that your site is optimized for it. First, we will briefly define what currently makes up Google’s Core Web Vitals.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Google’s benchmarks for Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that Google uses to determine a site's overall usability. While these data points will evolve over time, the current version consists of three specific metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website's LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page. Google wants LCP to happen within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): A website’s FID quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. You want your FID score to be low to prove the usability of your site. According to Google, pages should haven an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A website’s CLS determines how often your users experience unexpected layout shifts or changes on a page. To ensure visual stability, you want your CLS score to be low. Google recommends that pages maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1.
What Is INP?
An example of what good and poor responsiveness looks like for users. From Google.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) takes an overall measurement of how quickly a website responds to interactions by a user. Think of an interaction as anything that a user can do on a website, whether it’s tapping an element on a touch screen or pressing a key on a keyboard.
According to Google, a site’s INP score represents a page's overall interaction latency by selecting one of the single longest interactions that occur when a user visits a page. For pages with less than 50 interactions in total, INP is the interaction with the worst latency. For pages with many interactions, INP is most often the 98th percentile of interaction latency.
Here’s a look at how Google determines what’s a good or bad INP score:
How INP is measured. From Google.
Click here to read more about INP and how exactly Google measures your site’s interactions.
Why INP Is More Challenging Than FID
As mentioned above, FID quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages, but it only measures the first interaction. According to Google, INP takes a more well-rounded measurement of a site’s responsiveness by covering a site’s entire spectrum of interactions, from the time a page first begins to load until the user leaves a page. This comprehensive measurement makes INP a more reliable indicator of a site’s overall responsiveness than FID.
The holistic nature of INP makes it more challenging to solve than FID, because your code has to be implemented in a way that protects responsiveness for the user during their entire journey, not just on first load. Since many interactions are done through JavaScript, it means your site has to be loaded carefully for optimized performance.
This is particularly difficult on mobile. We took a look at a handful of sites across the industry and within our site network, and found that on mobile INP scores are 35.5% worse than FID on average. When reviewing desktop performance across the same dataset, there was only a 14.1% drop on average.
How to Improve Your INP Score
RebelMouse has prioritized page performance not just as a selling point of our platform, but as a company pillar. It’s why we outperform competitors on Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics. To do this correctly, it takes a lot of optimization to perfect every moment of your site’s load time. We’ve done this through a simplified version of code that still allows for ads, videos, and third-party applications to load quickly.
Our track record of high performance means that we are ready for Google’s potential switch to INP over FID. Here are just a few action items already in the works.
INP Debugger
Similar to our CLS debugger, we are implementing an INP debugger so that we can easily find culprits that affect INP scores on sites in our network. This means we’ll be able to address issues quickly and implement associated updates to every site we power all at once.
Front-End Solution
Additionally, we are executing a next-generation, front-end solution that progressively loads third-party applications like JavaScript. This intelligent way to load websites will protect the responsiveness of our sites to ensure that every RebelMouse client consistently scores high on INP and every other one of Google’s performance benchmarks.
Get Ahead of the Rest of the Web
A recent audit from Ahrefs found that only 33% of sites are meeting the Core Web Vitals threshold. That number is bound to drop if INP gets implemented as a new metric.
If you’re unsure about how your site is performing against Google’s standards, request a free website health check from us today. You can also request a proposal to see if making the switch to a high-performance platform is right for you.
Keep reading...
Show less
Rebel Insights
Sign Up for RebelMouse’s Free Website Health Check
May 19, 2022
Most publishers are bogged down with day-to-day content strategy and creation, which usually means their technology suffers. That translates into poor search rankings, traffic dips, and loss of revenue.
Even so, the idea of replatforming to a new CMS, migrating your data, and overhauling your site’s architecture can sometimes feel more daunting than simply fixing the issues your website currently faces. But the stumbling block here is that most publishers aren’t even sure what the exact problems are with their current site.
That’s why RebelMouse offers a free website health check. This comprehensive audit will help you make a data-backed decision on what the best and most cost-effective next steps are to brighten your site’s future. Here’s what our health check includes:
1. Core Web Vitals Evaluation: Google has established that its Core Web Vitals are the new benchmark for measuring a site's performance, and they are now a high-level ranking signal for search on both desktop and mobile. This means that while page speed may have started out as a luxury for savvy webmasters and lucky readers, it's now a make-or-break component that deeply impacts a site's longevity in a highly competitive space.
Our Core Web Vitals Evaluation will let you know where your site stands on these critical metrics, in addition to other performance indicators that are likely impacting your site’s bottom line.
2. SEO Performance Check: How exactly Google determines search ranking largely remains a mystery for publishers, but what we do know is that the search engine continuously rolls out updates to its algorithms. And while sometimes these updates are small and nearly unnoticeable, other times they result in massive changes around the way Google crawls content, often disrupting the rankings of webpages all across the globe.
Our SEO Performance Check will provide you with a well-rounded assessment of how well your site is optimized for the current search environment. We’ll be able to identify pain points and recommendations around how you can tweak your strategy to get better traffic from search.
The way your website performs from a technical standpoint is vital to generating more traffic and revenue. Sign up below to receive your free website health check from RebelMouse. You will receive your results within two business days.
Related Articles Around the Web
Keep reading...
Show less
Build on a Better PlatformReady to See More?
Request a Proposal