2020 was a tough year for everyone. We were happy to end it on a high note that was marked by strong growth across all of our clients.
Might be interesting for you
Interested in a Free Website Health Check?
Get Your Free Analysis Now
In 2022, Publishers Take Back Control With Subscription Success
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.
Featured
The Most Secure CMS of 2022
Inside the Most Secure CMS of 2022
- Why RebelMouse Is More Secure Than WordPress
- WordPress Was Built for a Blogger in Their Pajamas. RebelMouse Is Built for High-Value Websites That Are Stable.
- Stability and Around-the-Clock Support
- Web Application Firewall
- Bug Bounty Program
- A Full List of What Makes RebelMouse the Most Secure CMS
- Publish on the Most Secure CMS on the Web
Why RebelMouse Is More Secure Than WordPress
We’ve spent years building the most secure CMS of 2022. Open-source CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal mean everyone has access to your code, and that means your website is completely vulnerable.
Think about it: There are millions of instances of WordPress in the world, and every security update and feature upgrade — no matter how big or small — has to be manually performed for each individual site to avoid outright breaking custom code, plugins, and more. This leaves open-source CMS options like WordPress constantly vulnerable to security threats. If you are running a real online business, easily exposed features like plugins are a 2005-era feature that now serve as a major weakness on your site. Security threats created by outdated plugins can put hundreds of thousands of sites at risk, like this breach in 2022 that threatened the safety of 600,000 sites.
WordPress Was Built for a Blogger in Their Pajamas. RebelMouse Is Built for High-Value Websites That Are Stable.
Every time a WordPress security breach is announced, the proper updates have to be made one by one. This is because the only way WordPress core developers can patch significant flaws within their software is to deploy fixes to users in the form of user-installed product updates.
This isn't an issue on RebelMouse. All of our updates are quickly deployed at once to every site we power. We often deploy multiple updates on a daily basis. While many WordPress users count on third-party hosting companies or in-house developers to stay on top of the platform’s updates, RebelMouse users can rest easy knowing that important updates are taken care of immediately.
RebelMouse isn’t a solution for cheap websites. We’re a solution for high-value websites that are high-performing and highly secure. It’s also why we’re able to power some of the fastest sites on the web with superior scores on Google’s Core Web Vitals. Click here to learn more.
Transparency is a priority. The sites in our network subscribe to a status portal that provides up-to-date details on platform performance with real-time updates.
Stability and Around-the-Clock Support
We only use modern and reliable approaches to host our infrastructure for maximum stability. We host our infrastructure in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud because AWS is the most trusted, secure, and reliable infrastructure in the world. We have great relationships with the folks at AWS and utilize the best of their services.
All of our production services are covered with AWS Auto Scaling groups, which means we can sleep at night without worrying that something may go wrong. Our services are self-healing 24/7 as well. And even our stateful services, like databases, are covered with reliable automatic failover and backup solutions.
Since the RebelMouse team spans dozens of countries, we offer 24/7 live support. This means that any vulnerabilities that pop up will never be left unattended. In fact, many updates and patches are deployed across our platform in seconds without any interruption to our site network at all.
Click here to learn more about RebelMouse’s infrastructure.
RebelMouse delivers 99.99% uptime with maximum performance, stability, and security.
Web Application Firewall
AWS's Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a firewall that helps protect your web applications (or APIs) against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives RebelMouse developers control over how traffic reaches our applications by enabling us to create security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injections or cross-site scripting (XSS), and rules that filter out specific traffic patterns we have defined. These rules are regularly updated when new issues emerge as well.
With AWS WAF, we're making sure that all of our sites are covered against some of the most common attacks, as defined by The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The project is an online community that creates freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.
Click here to learn more about WAF.
Bug Bounty Program
To strengthen our commitment to security, RebelMouse offers a bug bounty program. If you believe you've found a security issue on our site, or any of the sites we power, we may compensate you for your discovery. We look at all submitted reports, and if we agree that it's a valid finding, we'll pay $250 for each one.
Click here for more information about what qualifies as a security vulnerability and how to report a bug.
A Full List of What Makes RebelMouse the Most Secure CMS
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- RebelMouse uses the following services that are compliant with SOC 1, 2, and 3:
- API Gateway
- CloudFront
- CloudWatch
- DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
- EC2 Container Registry (ECR)
- Elastic Compute Cloud
- Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes
- Elastic File System
- ElastiCache
- Key Management Service
- Lambda
- Relational Database Service
- Route 53
- Simple Email Service
- Simple Notification Service
- Simple Queue Service
- Simple Storage Service
- RebelMouse uses the following AWS security, identity, and compliance services:
- Identity and Access Management
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) (for access control of users)
- Threat Detection and Continuous Monitoring
- AWS CloudTrail (for tracking users’ activity)
- AWS Trusted Advisor (for general audition)
- Infrastructure Protection
- VPC
- Private Networks
- Security Groups
- Firewall
- VPC
- Data Protection
- Compliance and Data Privacy
- AWS Artifact (for access to compliance reports)
- Identity and Access Management
Fastly
Fastly’s CDN is certified under the Swiss-US framework. We use the following Fastly services:
- DDOS Mitigation
- Edge Filtering
- Origin Cloaking
- Rapid Response
- TLS Encryption
Click here to learn more about our Fastly recovery plan.
Password Management
- We use 1Password to manage all logins across the company.
- Two-factor authentication through major third party applications, including Google.
Publish on the Most Secure CMS on the Web
A lot of publishers may think uncertainty in the digital space means it’s time to double down on in-house developers to create a site experience that stands out against the noise. But it's actually the opposite: It’s time to invest in an external team that creates and manages tech for you, so you can instead focus on creating content that resonates with new and existing audiences.
Our infrastructure summary may come across as Greek to you, but that’s all right. Let’s create something together that isn’t just powered by next-level strategies, but also innovative and stable technology. Your content will be both protected and optimized for long-term growth.
Request a proposal today and let’s start working together.
Related Articles Around the Web
Build on a Better Platform
Request a Proposal
Rebel Insights
INP and Core Web Vitals: What You Need to Know
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.
Build on a Better Platform
Request a Proposal
