Rebel Insights

Why Premium Creative Agencies and CTOs Choose to Develop on RebelMouse vs. WordPress and Drupal

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The Intersection of Design and Development: Where Your Clients Thrive

We started RebelMouse seven years ago knowing that there was a fundamental design flaw in the world of traditional CMSs: Every instance, on every platform, had to be updated independently. It's similar to an era when users had to manage their own Microsoft Exchange Server for email. The costs of managing, maintaining, and iterating on a CMS to keep it awesome and world class is typically a $10 million-a-year endeavor. But even then, these cost-prohibitive CMSs are still behind the times.


RebelMouse has solved this problem in a way that combines a creative expression layer on top of an iterative, highly secure, and scalable platform that is developer friendly. We enable content marketing and media teams to be lean and efficient so they can focus all of their time and energy on driving success. It's why we're the best CMS platform you could choose to help move your company forward in 2019.

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RebelMouse: Cloud-Based and Always Iterating

In 2019, publishers need a high-performance site that produces sustainable reach and consistent revenue for publishers. Users need a straightforward content experience that travels easily across channels and platforms, including site, search, and social.

Our platform is the sweet spot in between those two needs. Needs that drive agencies made up of experienced WordPress and Drupal developers to create the best and highest-performing sites possible. But with RebelMouse, you get a cloud-based, API-driven, extensible, scalable, and secure environment that gives development agencies, CTOs, and technical teams a huge advantage in what they can deliver to their clients and teams.

Trying to manipulate big-box CMS platforms into something completely new and aesthetically pleasing requires design overhauls, numerous plugins, and frequent troubleshooting. On top of all this, every WordPress instance is totally distributed. This means that every single upgrade has to be applied individually to each instance — leaving 80+ million versions of WordPress outdated at any given time if left unattended.

This antiquated administrative process requires heavy, ongoing site management to keep these behemoths stable and updated. It's why there are entire agencies dedicated toward only managing and monitoring them. It could cost as much as $10+ million a year to keep a WordPress, Drupal, or custom CMS modern. And even then, these sites would still fall drastically behind what RebelMouse offers.

But it doesn't have to be this way. At RebelMouse, we blur the roles of designers, developers, and strategists to create a publishing experience that is built to support content creators, optimized for distribution and speed, and monitored and protected around the clock — all at a reasonable cost.

​Stay Ahead of the Algorithms

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Media powerhouses like Google and Facebook are constantly changing and updating their algorithms. While these shifts may not always be as explosive as the friends-and-family update of January 2018 that devastated some publishers, even the smallest of tweaks can impact content strategy. It can be tough to keep up with these updates on top of creating quality content capable of sustaining reach across social.

Thanks to the massive scale of our platform, RebelMouse has access to deep data that often sheds light on the evolving algorithms of Facebook and Google. The dupoly generates more than 400 million page views and billions of impressions, and our insights allow us to see how that data shifts as the algorithms change. We then take this data and use it to fuel helpful platform updates and strategic recommendations for our clients.

For example, Facebook and Google both implemented heavy penalties for full-screen light boxes and pop-ups. Many media sites and brands didn't understand this update when it first went live and assumed it meant that they could no longer succeed on Facebook, accepting massive declines in organic traffic. At RebelMouse, we were able to quickly help clients understand the update when the algorithm changed so they could update their promotions accordingly, primarily by moving full-screen takeovers to second and third clicks so they are out of the view of Facebook and Google's crawl. It was also at that time that we discovered Instant Articles with a video in the lead media position has a massive advantage over other articles, so we updated our platform quickly to make it easy for editors to take advantage of this feature.

RebelMouse updates its platform weekly to keep up with the algorithms. As other publishers miss opportunities and windows for growth, content fueled by RebelMouse has already adapted.

If you're working for an agency, or your site is currently powered by one, here's more about the kind of experience you'll get by making the switch to RebelMouse.

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The Perks of Custom Tech at a Fraction of the Cost

As you'd expect, we have a team of developers and designers ready to create a website from scratch that can meet any client's needs. But for agencies, our role as custom site builders expands and contracts as much as needed. We work with the languages of the open web, and help agency developers and freelancers acclimate to our platform quickly, allowing them to let their creative talent shine with full support from us.

No Developer Operations (DevOps) or System Operations (SysOps) Required

  • We are massively scalable, redundant, and secure. We have multiple CDN contracts, and have every New Relic and monitoring scaling tool plugged in to ensure that your site experiences massive, scalable performance for far less than custom builds.
  • Our infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud. Our 24/7 support team can help you track any errors that occur to help provide as much visibility as possible into every potential issue.

Multivariate (A/B) Testing Tools With Dynamic, On-the-Fly Staging Environments

  • Each new product update and feature release is deployed to a small percentage of traffic, and then A/B tested for performance impact.
  • Our testing includes how each version affects page speed and user experience. We then take these results and see how they correlate with conversion to goals — such as new shares, subscriptions, and purchases.
  • It's extremely fast to make changes to staged layouts, and easy to compare their performance to your or your clients' key KPIs.
  • RebelMouse testing tools are not a JavaScript plugin that rewrites script from the server. Our solution is full-stack and extremely powerful.

RebelMouse Design Is Flexible and Performance Focused

If you're an agency or freelancer operating as your own agency, our content and design suites offer ample flexibility to create enterprise-level experiences for your clients.

  • You have full control over logos, fonts, and color palettes out of the box, and you can completely customize these aspects and more to your liking with advanced HTML/CSS tools and flexible control over JavaScript.

RebelMouse Is a Creative Platform

Often times, agency developers may not be up to speed on the latest winning content strategies. By switching to RebelMouse, you don't just get full product support. You also gain access to a creative agency that's able to guide your site's strategies around content optimization, and drive success across all platforms.

  • Use a premium editorial suite with intuitive, sleek content organization capabilities that require just a few clicks from content creators.
  • The only limits are your imagination. Our team can build any custom features, or creators can leverage the premium suite already available, including contests, e-commerce options, collaborative networks, dynamic ads, and pixel-perfect placements. Between our design tools and APIs, there is virtually no limit to what content creators can do without special requests.

Proprietary Editorial Tools to Propel Your Content Ahead

Wouldn't you like to give your editorial team their dream tools?

  • Real-Time Insights: Adjust content strategy as needed with native stats like page views and time on site, visible right from within our Entry Editor.
  • Organic SEO: Leverage proprietary technology to see how an article's topic is already performing on Google's page one. Then, take that data and use it to set up every article for success in the search rankings.
  • Social: Make the most out of distribution through a proprietary, built-in influencer database that lets you define and reach out to your content's organic audience.

new media cms

Agencies — treat your clients to a new kind of sustainable growth this year, and join our growing league of successful media properties. Request a proposal today to see what it'll take to include our platform in your portfolio of game-changing solutions.

If you're not an agency or freelancer currently working on premium sites, but you are interested in a site replatform, contact us today and let's create something viral together.

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Our Core Features

Our platform is a complete digital publishing toolbox that's built for modern-day content creators, and includes game-changing features such as our:

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Why RebelMouse?

Unprecedented Scale

RebelMouse sites reach more than 120M people a month, with an always-modern solution that combines cutting-edge technology with decades of media savvy. And due to our massive scale, 1 in 3 Americans have visited a website powered by RebelMouse.

120M+ Users
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17+ Avg. Minutes per User
6+ Avg. Pages per User

Today's Top Websites Use RebelMouse

Thanks to the tremendous scale of our network, we are able to analyze a wealth of traffic data that informs our strategies and allows us to be a true strategic partner instead of just a vendor.

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We’re here to help you weigh and understand every tech and strategic decision that affects your digital presence. Spend less time managing everything yourself, and more time focused on creating the quality content your users deserve.

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A Team Built Like No Other

RebelMouse employs a unique, diverse, and decentralized team that consists of 70+ digital traffic experts across more than 25 different countries. We have no central office, and we cover every time zone to ensure that we’re able to deliver amazing results and enterprise-grade support around the clock.

Our team is well-versed in all things product, content, traffic, and revenue, and we strategically deploy ourselves to help with each element across all of our clients. We thrive on solving the complex.

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