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4 Signs You Should Re-Platform Your Site

Content management systems (CMS) are kind of like the War and Peace of tech. It's a lot of intricate coding, design, and insider baseball that can be tough to fully grasp in one sitting.

If you're a new media company or brand that's just starting out and trying to find a publishing solution that will enhance your day-to-day — rather than slow down the creative — it can be tough to figure out which will give you the least heartache during the launch process. If you already have a CMS in place, then there's probably a greater chance that the platform you're currently using is leaving you frustrated. But even if you've grown weary from your everyday tools, it still can seem even more daunting to re-platform your site entirely.

So we'll be honest: A lot of people who go through CMS re-platforms or entire content migrations end up with a few battle wounds. It's not for the faint of heart. You've got to manage a lot of details to make sure everything gets done correctly and everything goes seamlessly. But people tend to make the switch unequipped with the right information and know-how to make sure the re-platform will actually ensure growth.

At RebelMouse, we've been doing this for years. We ensure our clients that with our guidance, their site can be quickly and efficiently re-platformed to experience immediate audience + revenue growth.

4 Signs You Should Re-Platform Your Site

The content world has changed completely in the past five years. Normal blogging software like WordPress is out of date, insecure, and actively blocking your company from winning the content game. Here are some top signs that you need to re-platform your site:

1. Editors Complain + Feel Disadvantaged

They have become so completely frustrated with bugs that they don't ask for improvements anymore. Result? Your content suffers.

2. It's Slow

Your site loads slowly or is unstable. Facebook simply throttles traffic to slow or unstable sites without mercy.

3. You Don't Have the Right Social Integrations

You don't have an awesome Instant Articles integration, you are behind on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), you have marketing stats that are declining, and you use a platform that doesn't intelligently schedule to social or track data to enable your content and traffic teams to make better decisions. Or, you don't have any of this.

4. No A/B Testing Has Taken Place

You don't A/B test content when you publish — you launch and pray it was a good decision.

Once you realize your site needs to be re-platformed, it's important to make sure you follow the right steps to re-platform and have the right team members by your side.

Ask Your Head of Digital Why You Aren't on RebelMouse

We work with media companies and brands of all sizes. Our client list and case studies are OMG. We clean up websites and modernize product to accelerate your business into the age of social. There's more money on the table than you may realize in getting this perfectly right. Please reach out. You can email us at strategy@rebelmouse.com or fill out the form below.

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Monetizing users' engagement and page views is pivotal to most digital businesses, and our Particle Assembler has been an invaluable tool in helping RebelMouse clients to insert native ads seamlessly into their content. Now we've taken this functionality one step further by introducing support for ads between slides in Assembler's slideshow layout.

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Inside RebelMouse’s Quality Assurance Operations

How We've Perfected Stress-Free Publishing

At RebelMouse, we like to refer to our enterprise publishing platform as "lean tech." Most publishers have a natural inclination to start doubling down on teams of developers who try to build unique experiences to help stand out above the noise. But they should actually be doing the opposite: Lean tech is the preferred way to cut through content saturation. By allowing RebelMouse to obsess over your product, content producers, editors, managers, and everyone in between can focus on creating quality content and taking advantage of opportunities to leverage distributive publishing strategies that create real revenue growth.

One of the major reasons we're able to maintain a lean tech environment is thanks to our approach to quality assurance (QA). We make updates to our platform daily to ensure our clients always have access to the most robust, high-performing, and secure version of our platform. Behind the scenes, this means having a solid QA structure that's efficient, creates less bugs, and catches the ones that do pop up before they go live. It's a system of checks and balances that's hard and costly to replicate on a custom CMS. Here's a glimpse into how it works.

Our Tech Stack Toolbox

  • Cucumber
  • Java
  • Junit
  • Maven
  • Selenium WebDriver
  • TeamCity
  • Zalenium (Selenium Grid)

Our Checks and Balances Workflow

Automated Regression Testing Cycle

The Lifecycle of a Product Update

When an update is first made to RebelMouse, TeamCity immediately triggers the start of automated tests to review integrity.

TeamCity Build

TeamCity Agent

The tests run in parallel on TeamCity's Build Agent. Next, Zalenium creates docker containers with browsers that matches the count of parallel threads. An Allure report is then generated from the test results, which shows the state of the application after the update.

Allure Report Pass

If a test doesn't complete successfully, the testing framework receives a video with a failed test and attaches it to the Allure report.

Allure Report Issue

Based on the report analysis, a QA specialist will create a "bug" ticket in our product management software to address the issue if needed. Then, information about the bug is immediately sent to the project manager and we begin the process of correcting the problem.

The media powerhouses we power can publish with confidence knowing that any product issues that arise are met with a tried-and-true process to fix the problem with little-to-no disturbance to their workflow. If you have any questions about this process, please email support@rebelmouse.com.

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The Difference Between Subdomains and Subfolders

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder.

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder. This is a choice your team will have to make as you replatform and optimize your content, so it's important to understand the distinction between the two.

Subdomains

A subdomain is a subdivision of an existing domain: For example, apis.rebelmouse.com (subdomain of rebelmouse.com) and hub.united.com (subdomain of united.com) are both examples of subdomain structures. Launching a subdomain on RebelMouse is simple and straightforward for your tech team, and usually doesn't entail much extra work.

Subfolders

Creating a subfolder is a bit different. A subfolder is a URL structure such as FSAStore.com/learn. It's easier to think of subfolders as subsections of your site. This work generally takes about 10 service hours for our team to configure for you.

To launch a new property using a subfolder setup, RebelMouse provides you with technical strategy, direction, and advice on how to configure it properly. For search engine optimization purposes (SEO), using subfolders is the most optimal setup, but the SEO improvement can be minor. As long as the content on the main domain and subdomain interlink, there's not much to worry about if you need to use a subdomain setup. We accomplish the correct connections between both through JSON and feed integrations.

If you have any questions about the difference between subdomains and subfolders, email support@rebelmouse.com.

Related Posts vs. Posts in Assembler

Here's the difference between Related Posts and Posts in Assembler.

By using Related Posts and Posts in Assembler, you can help your audience stay engaged with your site's content and generate more traffic. Both of these features can be added to any post through Entry Editor.

When creating or editing a post, you can add a Related Posts section to the bottom of it that consists of a selection of existing posts on your site that you choose to surface. Only the main image and content headline are pulled, along with a link to the original post. This is similar to the Around the Web section that also shows up at the end of your post when you enable it from the SEO tab of Entry Editor.

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