EDITS.WS

Tag: Wordpress.com

  • Developers Raise Concerns About WordPress.com Plugin Listings Outranking WordPress.org on Google Search

    WordPress core developer John Blackbourn sparked a heated discussion yesterday when he posted an image of his WordPress User Switching plugin ranking higher for the WordPress.com listing than the page on WordPress.org.

    Blackbourn later apologized for the inflammatory wording of the original post, but maintains that .com plugin listings being displayed higher in search results is not healthy for the open source project.

    “This was a frustrated 2AM tweet so I could have worded it better, but the point still stands,” he said. “The plugin pages on dotcom are little more than marketing landing pages for the dotcom service and they’re strongly competing with the canonical dotorg pages. That’s not healthy.”

    Several others commented about having similar experiences when searching for plugins, finding that the WordPress.com often ranks higher, although many others still see WordPress.org pages ranked highest.

    Blackbourn said his chief concern “is the process that introduced the directory clone on .com either disregarded its potential impact on .org in favor of inbounds or never considered it in the first place – both very concerning given the ranking power of .com.”

    The tweet highlighted the frustration some members of the open source community feel due to the perennial branding confusion between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Nothing short of renaming WordPress.com will eliminate the longstanding confusion, but this is unlikely as Automattic benefits from tightly coupling its products to WordPress’ name recognition.

    “Duplicate content confuses the human + search engines,” SEO consultant Rebecca Gill said. “Search engines won’t like it, nor will humans trying to find solutions to their problems. There is already enough confusion w/ .org + .com for non-tech folks. This amplifies it. Noindex .com content or canonical it to .org.”

    Participants in the discussion maintain that the duplication of the open source project’s plugin directory “creates ambiguity and confusion” but WordPress co-creator and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg contends it also gives plugin authors greater distribution.

    “It’s providing distribution to the plugin authors, literally millions and millions of installs,” Mullenweg said. He elaborated on how the cloned plugin directory is integrated with Calypso, WordPress.com’s admin interface:

    .com has its own plugin directory which includes the .org one, it provides more installs and distribution to the plugin authors, which helps their usage and for commercial ones gets them more sales. The plugins are not altered. .com takes no cut for the distribution.

    When participants in the discussion suggested that other hosts doing the same thing would create a wild west situation for plugin rankings, Mullenweg said he would not mind if the plugins were “duplicated and distributed by every host and site on the planet,” as they are all licensed under the GPL.

    Outrage against distributing WordPress.org plugins in this fashion was not universal in the discussion. A few commenters support this strategy and see it as beneficial for the long-term health of the open source project.

    “I’m all for it to be honest,” WordPress developer Cristian Raiber said. “Anyone could scrape those pages but not everyone gives back to WordPress and makes sure it’s here to stay for the next decades. Controversial, I know. But I prefer we build together instead of alone.

    “I fail to see how this is not an advantage to anyone who hosts their plugins (for FREE) on w[dot]org ?” Raiber continued in a separate response. “Is it about being outranked in Google’s SERPs for brand kws? Why has this generated so much outcry when the intent is clearly beneficial?

    “This FINALLY solves a friction point for potential buyers. Streamlined plugin installation and usage vs ‘here’s a list of 55 steps you have to take to install my plugin.’ Users want options, different uses cases and all. I want wp.com to make money so they keep growing this product.”

    XWP Director of Engineering Francesco Marano suggested that WordPress.com has benefitted from the branding and reputation of .org, which is built by volunteers. She also proposed that Automattic “has the resources to do a whole rebranding which would ultimately benefit both projects.”

    Mullenweg responded to these comments, defending WordPress.com’s efforts in fending off early WordPress competitors and cited Automattic’s preeminence in contributing back to core, despite taking in less revenue than some larger companies making money from the software:

    Since its foundation, .org has benefitted from the branding and reputation of having a robust SaaS version available from .com, including a free version, something basically no other host does. Over 200M people have used it, and countless started on .com and then migrated to another host. The shared branding made it very difficult for services like Typepad to compete. You want to see what WP would look like without it? Go to Joomla.

    .com has also been the source of countless performance improvements, we deploy pre-release versions of core to millions of sites to find bugs and do testing, making WP releases way more stable for regular users and hosts. No company contributes more, even though many make more from WP than .com’s revenue. It would have been way easier to fork the software, not merge MU. Most hosts (and many community members) bad-mouth .com while not contributing a fraction back to core. Hosts spend tens of millions a year on ads against .com. I get attacked constantly.

    In 2010, when the WordPress Foundation was created, Automattic transferred the WordPress trademarks to the Foundation, after having been the temporary custodian of the trademarks until that time. As part of the transfer, the Foundation granted Mullenweg use of the WordPress trademark for WordPress.com.

    This trademark was deliberately secured, and the company does not appear to be open to renaming the platform. This doesn’t mean WordPress.com can’t do anything to mitigate the confusion that scraping the WordPress.org plugin directory creates. Participants in the discussion suggested that WordPress.com forego indexing the pages they created for plugins that developers submitted to the open source project.

    “You can control SEO by telling search engines to not index those pages of open source software developed for .org on the .com domain,” WordPress plugin developer Marco Almeida said.

    “I have 20 free plugins on the repository and I don’t see how my plugins will benefit if we open this pandora box and normalize cloning these pages and diluting the WordPress.org importance on search engines.”

    Developers who are just now discovering their WordPress.org plugins cloned to WordPress.com listings are also wanting to know how many of their installs come from WordPress.com so they can better understand their user bases. Mullenweg suggested developers who want a different listing for WordPress.com users can sign up for the .com marketplace.

    Tensions remained high as the heated discussion continued throughout the day and into the evening with criticism flowing across X (Twitter), Post Status Slack, and other social channels, as many developers learned for the first time that their plugin listings have been cloned on WordPress.com. As long as a commercial entity shares the open source project’s branding, these types of clashes and friction will continue popping up.

    “Personally, I can’t help but empathize with plugin authors that chose to support OSS and find the directory cloned in a commercial service, albeit free, with no access to stats,” Francesca Marano said. “As I mentioned before, the main issue is the confusion around the two projects.”

  • WordPress.com Launches 100-Year Domain and Hosting Plan for $38K

    WordPress.com is now selling a 100-year plan, one of the longest available in the industry, for a one-time payment of $38,000. It includes managed WordPress hosting (whatever that looks like in 100 years), multiple backups across geographically distributed data centers, submission to the Internet Archive if the site is public, 24/7 dedicated support, and a domain that doesn’t need to be renewed by the customer for a century.

    ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, limits domain registration to a maximum of 10 years. Auto-renewing after this time requires the customer to renew on time and keep their payment method updated. A 100-year plan removes these uncertainties but still hinges on the registrar staying in business into the next century.

    Customers who buy into the plan will need to have superior confidence in WordPress.com, coupled with the belief that domain names will still be important to the fundamental architecture of the web decades from now.

    Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg commented on the difficulties in pricing the 100-year plan during his presentation at WordCamp US 2023, while simultaneously discouraging WordPress product owners from offering lifetime licenses. The distinction here is that the 100-year plan has a finite length of time, even if its future support seems unfathomable at the moment.

    “It also got me thinking about lifetime licenses, which I think we should stop doing in the WordPress world,” Mullenweg said.

    “If you’ve ever worked with an accountant or an acquirer they don’t like when you have those because it’s essentially an open ended commitment, including often with support. How do you recognize that revenue? Offer a 20 year plan or something. I think when you’re saying ‘lifetime,’ it sort of cheapens the word. If we’re really thinking long-term, what promises we’re making to our customers, I think we should re-examine those practices.”

    Mullenweg also said he was inspired by the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit established to foster long term thinking. The organization’s first project is the “Clock of the Long Now,” a mechanical monument designed to keep accurate time for the next 10,000 years:

    It is still being assembled deep inside a mountain in west Texas. The Clock provides a rare invitation to think and engineer at the timescale of civilization. It offers an enduring symbol of our personal connection to the distant future.

    The Long Now website

    WordPress.com is building something parallel to this in the digital world, enabling people to create their own virtual, lasting monuments and preserve their homes on the web.

    Embedded in the new offering is also a poignant reminder that WordPress.com is a domain registrar, as the company recently made a bid to capture Google Domain customers ahead of their domains being sold off to Squarespace. Even if the new 100-year hosting plan is too expensive for 99.9% of prospective customers, it gives the impression that the company is capable of hosting entrusted domains for the long term.

    Nobody, not even WordPress.com, knows what that will look like in 50 years, but it’s an ambitious, thought-provoking offering. What resources will a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) point to 50 years from now? Or will URLs be discarded into the scrap pile of obsolete building blocks as soon as there’s a better, more efficient way to identify web addresses? What does longevity look like in the digital world?

  • WordPress.com Makes a Bid for Google Domains Customers, Offering 1 Million Free Transfers

    WordPress.com is making a strong bid for Google Domains customers after the the product was sold to Squarespace in a deal reportedly worthy $180 million. Shortly after the sale was announced, WordPress.com pitched Google Domains customers, reminding the public that the company is also a domain registrar, but the call to action didn’t include much incentive to switch.

    This week WordPress.com is putting the heat on with a new offer to pay transfer fees and an additional year of registration for the first million domains moved from Google Domains. WordPress.com is also guaranteeing Google Domains customers the same pricing or lower for 400+ top-level domains.

    “This will also apply to existing WordPress.com customers across most domains, meaning that in many cases we’re lowering your prices.” Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said in the announcement this week.

    “This isn’t a temporary thing. We’re committed to keeping domain prices low, and will only raise them if our wholesale costs go up (we’ll run our domains business like Costco).”

    Squarespace has committed to honor the renewal prices previously set by Google Domains existing customers for 12 months but will set its own prices after this time.

    In an interview with The Verge, Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena said his company is already using a lot of the same infrastructure Google is using in their Cloud DNS product, having resold Google Workspace for almost a decade. Squarespace currently employs 1,750 people with revenue under a billion dollars this year. Acquiring Google Domains gives the company the opportunity to cross-sell website packages to its incoming domain customers. There are approximately 10 million domains up for grabs in the transfer of customers.

    Casalena said that being a reseller of Google Workspace was a major factor in Google’s decision to offer the domains to Squarespace, in addition to having the infrastructure to manage the business. This partially explains what was an otherwise bewildering deal that came as a surprise to the industry:

    First off — once in a lifetime opportunity for us. Incredibly grateful that we were selected as the stewards of that business. We weren’t asking them, like, ‘Hey, planning on shutting down domains or anything?’ It wasn’t exactly outbound. I think they made the decision that it’s not a business that they were going to be in. And they contacted a couple of legitimate parties who could potentially even take on a business of that size because, again, it’s not the code or the employees are moving — it’s basically the domains themselves and the hosting services and the registrations, that sort of thing. So that really narrows it down to the number of companies that could even support that.

    Then the other thing that was a big factor is we’ve been a huge fan and big reseller of Google Workspace for nearly a decade now, which was very important to them, and we’re incredibly sophisticated in selling Domains, selling Google Workspace, servicing it, and managing that for millions of people. So we were able to find a transaction that worked for us. 

    Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg reacted to the deal on Twitter this week, saying that he was disappointed Google didn’t make it a more competitive process.

    “This might cost a ton of money but I was bummed we didn’t even get a crack at this, my guess is Cloudflare, Godaddy, and Bluehost didn’t either—why Google didn’t make this a competitive process?” Mulleweng said. “Concerning to have so many domains going to a proprietary CMS.”

    WordPress.com has been slowly inching towards becoming a one-stop shop for users’ website needs. The company recently made its monetization features available for free, making the platform more attractive to creators who are just starting out online. Based on the reaction to Mullenweg’s tweet, it seems many people are still not aware that they can buy their domains from a registrar and host their websites elsewhere. If you are just hearing about WordPress.com’s domains, it’s natural to think they are only for WordPress sites, so the company has some work to do in making prospective customers aware.

    Users can be hesitant to move to a new registrar when they don’t fully understand the process and don’t want to negatively impact their online presence. In the case of Google Domains customers, they are moving to a new registrar after the sale closes later this year, whether they like it or not. WordPress.com’s deal is a compelling offer if they can better position their domains as an independent service.

  • WordPress.com Makes Monetization Features Available for Free

    WordPress.com has been known to experiment with its pricing from time to time, and the platform announced another major change today. Users on the Free plan are now able to use monetization features without upgrading.

    In the past, WordPress.com users who wanted to earn money on their websites by collecting donations, creating a newsletter, or selling items or subscriptions, had to be on one of the paid plans. These monetization features are now available to all users on all tiers.

    The fee structure varies, based on the user’s plan. Transaction fees are the highest for Free users at 10%, but it gives creators the opportunity to see if they can make money without it costing anything upfront. Commerce plan users ($70/month or $45/month billed annually) don’t pay any transaction fees. Stripe also collects 2.9% + US$0.30 for each payment made to a Stripe account in the US.

    WordPress.com Plan Payment Fees
    WordPress.com Commerce 0%
    WordPress.com Business 2%
    WordPress.com Premium 4%
    WordPress.com Personal 8%
    WordPress.com Free 10%

    Self-hosted WordPress users already have many free plugin options to monetize theirs sites but with that comes the requirement of knowing how to maintain and update their own sites. WordPress.com’s offering is targeted at creators who just want to get started making money online. The company is inching closer to being a one-stop shop for websites, especially as it makes a play for former Google Domains customers who are looking for somewhere to host domains after theirs were sold to Squarespace.

    It’s important to note that creating a full-featured online store is still restricted to Business and Commerce plans. Using Pay with PayPal to accept credit and debit card payments via PayPal is also only available via an upgraded plan.

    WordPress.com’s pricing page has not yet been updated to reflect monetization features as being free – i.e. the Personal plan still lists paid subscribers and premium content gating as an upgrade. It’s possible the team hasn’t edited that page yet or this may be another pricing experiment.

    Expanding the availability of monetization features is likely to be received as a positive change, since users are not losing any features that were previously free. Instead, they have the opportunity to see if they can monetize and then adjust their plans based on their comfort level with the transaction fees extracted.

  • Automattic Launches Blaze Ad Network for Jetpack and WordPress.com Sites

    Automattic is bringing Tumblr’s Blaze ad tool to WordPress sites with its launch today on WordPress.com and Jetpack. Blaze made its debut in April 2022, to the delight of Tumblr users who will gladly shell out cash to get people to look at their cat or promote a game they made. It’s an affordable way to attract new followers or just send out something funny into the universe, starting at $5/day.

    WordPress.com users can now to go to wordpress.com/advertising, select a site, and promote content with Blaze. Jetpack users have access to the ad network inside the WordPress.com dashboard.

    After selecting a post, users are taken to the design wizard where they can add an image, title, a snippet, and a destination URL. The URL can be the post or page or it can direct visitors to the main website.

    When Blaze first launched on Tumblr there was no way to target the promoted content – it just displayed to random users. Now there are a few more options. When promoting content from WordPress.com or a Jetpack-enabled site, users can narrow the audience by device: mobile, desktop, or all devices, select from a few main geographic areas (continents) or serve it everywhere. There is also a dropdown with topics of interest, but they are fairly general, e.g. Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Business, Education.

    After selecting the audience, users can set the budget for the campaign, starting at $5 with a max daily budget of $50. With a minimum of $5/day for a week users can expect an estimated 5,900 – 8,000 impressions. For $25/day, users can expect 29,700 – 40,200, and up to 59,500 – 80,500 for $50/day. Site owners can monitor the success of their ads in the Campaigns tab.

    Content sponsored by Blaze will be promoted across WordPress.com sites and Tumblr pages, an audience that accounts for an estimated 13.5 billion impressions per month.

    Blazing has become somewhat of an art in the short time it has been available on Tumblr. It will be interesting to see how ads originating from WordPress.com and Jetpack go over with the Tumblr audience.

    https://www.tumblr.com/madmadammims/700822694806044672

    Creating advertising content that works across the disparate audiences between WordPress and Tumblr-powered pages may be a challenge for some site owners. Tumblr users can only target audiences by location for blazed posts. It’s possible that WordPress’ additional targeting options can help funnel the ads to sites where they will be most well-received, but the announcement says ads will be promoted across WordPress.com and Tumblr.

    Blaze campaigns require approval to be in compliance with Automattic’s Advertising Policy before being published. They are currently moderated in approximately 30 minutes but this may change in the future as more users try out Blaze.

    Automattic is treading new ground in creating its own ad network that any user across Tumblr and WordPress can tap into. It’s a strategic move to extend access to the world of WordPress, given that it’s such a large audience, and it will be interesting to see how the company improves the targeting options to meet the challenges of serving both audiences.

  • WordPress.com Launches Newsletter Product

    WordPress.com has launched a newsletter product just in time to capture those escaping Gumroad’s price increase and editors displaced by Revue shutting down. Newsletters, which were already booming as a communication tool in recent years, have become more critical than ever, as the uncertainty around Twitter has people scrambling to find reliable ways to stay connected.

    WordPress.com (and Jetpack users) have had the ability to send published posts to email subscribers for years. This isn’t usually marketed as a newsletter (as you can see below) but functions in the same way.

    WordPress.com Newsletter is a new streamlined product for scheduling and publishing newsletters using WordPress. It uses the same underlying infrastructure as subscribing to sites via email, offering users unlimited email subscribers. During setup, newsletter creators can import up to 100 subscribers from other newsletter services by uploading a CSV file.

    A theme designed for newsletters is put in place with additional newsletter-focused block patterns for the Subscribe box. Users can take advantage of the Site Editor to further customize the site’s background, site icon, and accent colors. This type of website showcases the versatility of the block editor, as newsletter creators can quickly design their own unique websites, without editing any code.

    With all the activity in the newsletter product space lately, I had to give myself a tour of WordPress.com’s new product to see how it stacks up to creating campaigns with other dedicated email services. In the first part of the setup process, users will upload a logo, specify a site name and description, and select a color.

    The next section displays pricing options with a plain link at the top for the free plan. Paid plans are ad-free and allow users to send unlimited emails. In the future, the premium plan will allow users to monetize their newsletters in various ways, such as selling subscriptions or collecting donations.

    After selecting a plan and free or paid domain name, users have the opportunity to upload up to 100 emails from other newsletter services. I selected the free plan, so that number may be unlimited with the paid plans. The site setup is fairly quick, as it puts the default theme in place, and users are encouraged to start writing. It’s a simple flow entirely geared towards publishing newsletters. Depending on the readiness of the post, newsletter authors can have their first issue landing in subscribers’ inboxes in minutes.

    The default newsletter site theme doesn’t come with additional style variations but users can easily edit the templates to expand, reduce, or further customize what is shown on the frontend.

    The default theme is very minimalist but looks nice out of the box on both desktop and mobile. The subscribe form is front and center and recent posts, or newsletter “issues,” show up underneath with a featured image.

    If you are familiar with WordPress, using the block editor is likely far easier than any newsletter campaign editor out there, as these tend to be clunky and limited in options. Publishing directly from WordPress.com also eliminates the need to copy the content over into a newsletter service and reformat it for email, a problem that services like Newsletter Glue have set out to solve for self-hosted WordPress sites.

    if you are a subscriber of IndieWeb principles, one of the most important considerations in launching a newsletter is that you own your own data and have the opportunity to practice POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). WordPress.com’s new offering makes it effortless to follow this workflow for newsletter publishing.

    One bonus feature, which is lacking with major newsletter service providers, is that subscribers can reply to the email to leave a comment on the published post, furthering the public conversation around each issue of the newsletter.

    Although WordPress.com has experience sending millions of emails at scale, the newsletter product’s pricing and sales copy doesn’t mention anything about deliverability rates. This is a major selling point for people coming from other services which haven’t performed as well on deliverability. There is also no comparison chart showing the limitations of the free account, which may be an important consideration for those who are just testing the waters.

    For those who are not hosting their sites at WordPress.com, there are a myriad of diverse plugins for self-hosted WordPress that can make newsletter publishing a seamless process. It requires knowing which ones to install, setup, and configure. For non-technical publishers, WordPress.com’s newsletter product is the most approachable entry point to WordPress-based newsletter publishing that exists on the market right now. If the company can add the monetization features fast enough, this product has the potential to become a major contender among newsletter services jostling to capture the creator economy.