Episode 243: Web Hosting, WordPress and Pressable

Show Highlights

Rob Cairns talks to Jessica Frick about Web Hosting, WordPress and Pressable.

Show Highlights:

A general chat about Web Hosting.
The WordPress community.
What is a managed host.
Why Pressable?

Show Notes

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here.

In today’s podcast, I’m here with my friend Jessica Frick, who’s the Director of Operations at Pressable

How are you today, Jessica?

I’m great Rob.

Thanks for having me.

I was such a pleasure, and it was due to get somebody on from one of the key hosting companies.

So before we dive into hosting, I like to ask what’s your WordPress origin story and how did you get into WordPress?

It has been a minute.

So I mean I’ve been building websites since 96. You know front page, Geocities Angel Fire, those were fun and.

Yeah, they’re right.

And then Macromedia Dreamweaver came out and it was a game changer.

And so I was building things using that.

And when Blogger came out, I thought it was super interesting because, you know, when I was using Dreamweaver I was posting something that was like A blog, but like literally posting articles on the same page.

There was no like real concept of separate pages for these sorts of things, and so Blogger came out and it kind of blew my mind.

The thing is, it didn’t really give you much control beyond the individual post section.

Then Apple Iweb came out.

If you remember that and and you know Adobe purchased Dreamweaver and the license were less affordable and so when WordPress came out.

I do.

I was still busy, you know, doing my other stuff at 1st and around 2008. I built my first WordPress website andsetupmywordpress.com account in 2009 and I’ve been employed full time in WordPress.

Focused roles since 2011.

That’s really interesting.

So you we all remember all us old timers.

I’ll say the famous 5 minute word press install before hosting had automated one click installs where you had to.

Upload the files and you had to create the database, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I I remember when hosting was, you know, largely just calling somebody who owned a few computers.

Times times have changed and you know we were talking beforehand and you’ve been in a hosting space a while.

It really does.

How did you end?

Up in a hosting space.

I, uh, I lucked into it.

Uhm, so I left the role that I was working on fun fact.

My Twitter account is renewable.

My website is renewable com, and the reason that is that way is because I was working and the clean green renewable energy industry.

And that’s where I built my first WordPress website was for the the agency that I Co.

Found it.

And so Fast forward.

Uhm, I started doing my own little side business and I was making friends with people at copyblogger.

So Copyblogger was the parent company of studio Press.

They also built WordPress plugins. I don’t know if you remember Scribe. It was one of the OG’s for SEO.

I do actually.

Yeah, and then premise was one of the OG’s for payment gated content.

Premise eventually became kind of the backbone for the Rainmaker platform, but I don’t want to get into all that.

Uh, so.

They asked me they’re like so do you want to do a collab with us and I said no.

I want to work for you.

And I became their affiliate manager.

Pretty quickly it became clear that I could do a whole lot more than that, and so at the end of my term with them, I was the Executive Vice President of operations, and I oversaw also our hosting branch, which was called synthesis and.

And that was fun, uh?

Later on Studiopress came out with Studiopress hosting and it was basically synthesis.

Rebranded, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and so you know when WP engine bought studiopress, they also inherited all those hosting customers.

So you got a chance to meet.

I’m sure Brian Gardner over there at studio pro.

I will love Brian Gardner until the day I die.

Everything that you see on social media.

That’s how he really is.

He’s just the biggest sweetheart and he’s so smart.

Yeah it was funny I had I had Brian on this podcast and how that came about and I knew Brian fairly well is he was on the page Builders summit last year.

Nathan Wrigley summit.

And he left a conversation I’d really like to continue this summer.

So I reached out to him and said, OK, when, where, how and and books and.

And he is such.

Amazing with his time for what he does for this community.

I I have nothing good but amazing things to say about Brian and how gracious he is.

I mean.

Yeah, he’s he’s the real deal and he absolutely loves the WordPress community, not, you know, because it pays his bills, but because he loves the WordPress community and I think that shines through, which is how he pays his bills.

Yeah, well I I would agree with you and he’s you know for somebody who I I kind of look up to and says he’s done it all in my opinion and he’s so down to Earth.

And if you wanna know what he’s thinking, all you gotta do is ask.

’cause he’ll tell you exactly what he’s thinking.

There’s no.

Sugarcoating with right?

I think you know he went with the acquisition and worked with WP engine for a month or a year.

I think they made a very, very wise decision.

Hiring him back on and the role that he’s in today.

And you know, doing developer advocacy, it’s just.

It’s a perfect perfect spot for him.

He’s the right person for that.

Job, yeah, so you get that and.

So I thought.

We’d jump into hosting in general before we jump into the specifics about principle and.

The kind of conversation I like to have around hosting is.

I think people need to do their homework before they determine a host and stop looking at hosts based on price and start looking on hosts, especially if you’re running a business what you need.

Do you have a hot showrunner?

Well, my job before this was a director of product for Nexus and Liquidweb and I can tell you that there we knew that people would visit the site.

You know, five or six times before they would buy anything at pressable it’s you know about the same.

Uhm, you know we’ve we’ve come to see that it’s about 2 weeks and it doesn’t surprise me.

You know, changing hosts is like changing cell phone providers.

It sucks.

Nobody wants to do it.

But more importantly, you don’t want to get it wrong.

You know you don’t want to choose a different provider that costs less, and then you can’t make phone calls from inside your house and and same goes with hosting and I think there are a lot of hosts that are calling themselves managed WordPress hosting now and it’s very difficult to determine which one has the feature set that you’re actually looking for.

You know, I know a lot of people will say, well, that’s not really managed and you know, I.

I think it just depends on how you look at it, but I will say that some hosts have a significantly more sophisticated feature set than others, and so beyond price you absolutely need to make sure they can do what you want and that they’re focused on the things that are important to you.

Like you know, maybe you never need to talk to support, so you don’t care about a company.

That’s like really focused on their support.

Uhm, you need somebody that can spin up sites in half a second.

Yeah, you know, and so you you got to.

Choose it that way.

Yeah, it’s hard and I I know as somebody in the space and I’ve been in this space for over 10 years.

One of the things things I kind of look at is.

OK, what are you doing on the front end of your servers to protect your customers?

That for me being a security guy is always.

Important, yeah?

And then I look at.

Right?

So if I have a problem, are you gonna try not sell me every service under the face of the Earth ’cause I don’t go to support very often, but I can tell you without mentioning names.

There’s big name hosts out there that used to be really great with support.

Now you ask question or what they do?

Here’s an Fak you go read it well.

I wouldn’t be talking to support if I hadn’t read the documentation right, usually yeah.

And then there’s others that for me.

Kind of.

I do backups two ways for clients, so I do backups at a host level and I do backups as a site level 0 that’s it.

The other thing I don’t do is I don’t care who the host is.

I never recommend to my clients that they registered a domain with their hosting provider.

I don’t like my eggs in one basket in case something happens.

So for me, that’s a big issue.

I just went through this with a a client the other day where I moved his hosting.

I also moved his domain before that, ’cause they were all where I.

Didn’t like them.

And then I kind of look at it and say.

And this is a factor 2 is I say OK if I run into a problem, who do I know in the Community I can reach out to?

That if I’m not getting results from support that will have my back so this week and who can I reach out?

Yeah, I’ve done that too by the way, in times when support just doesn’t get it.

And I would think most of the big hosts.

And I mean the pressable’s, the Godaddy’s. The next is the WP engines, the big ones out, and there’s others all trying to fulfill that role.

I think the smart ones.

Are the ones that are getting roles like what you do, where you’re out there with people they’re getting developer advocacy roles so you know there’s a couple point people that if you’re having issues you can reach.

Out to and say help.

And I think that matters for the Community really do.

I completely agree, and you know, back to what you were saying about security, I would offer a recommendation.

You know for anybody, not just security buffs, but you know, ask about what security features and measures are taken at that host, and if they’re cagey about giving you detailed descriptions, maybe ask a few others.

Because security is all about trust and who you trust and who you put your trust in.

I mean.

So that’s kind of that, so let’s jump into the world of managed hosting.

Since you opened the door.

We heard we hear the term managed hosting all over the industry.

It’s to me it’s a marketing term because there’s no standard on what is considered a managed host and what is not.

So what do you consider a managed host?

That’s right.

So I consider a managed host, a host that offers more than just hosting your website with support available for a limited scope of questions, I managed host a truly managed WordPress host.

I would expect to see.

You know updates and security handled.

Uhm, I would expect them to be monitoring performance, ideally proactively, uhm, you know I was. I was reading a post from friends at Pagely talking about how you know 98% of the time they know before the customer does that a site is down.

Yeah, I saw that post.

Good post.

Yeah, absolutely.

And like props to them, but you know that’s what you get when you pay thousands of dollars a month.

You know you you get those kinds of you know levels of service depending on what you’re able to afford.

But you know definitely, performance monitoring, server maintenance.

Uhm, you should not have to deal with anything at the box level and and I would expect really strong support you you know, I think that some hosts are better than others in that area.

One of the things I love most about Pressable is our support is truly incredible.

You know our average.

First response time is 2 minutes.

And our satisfaction rating is 98%.

That is a big deal.

Yeah, we have very low churn numbers for that exact reason.

Uhm, but you know, it’s it’s all about how they differentiate.

That makes them best word managed WordPress host.

For whatever reason.

But if they don’t do those core things, that’s kind of where I’m you know, saying, ah, you might be a little liberal with that term managed.

Yeah, and then and there’s things you gotta watch out about.

There was a large hosting outside Of Montreal.

Uh, I think they were called Web hosting Canada.

And I don’t know if you know this story.

Last year they had.

Both there.

Host servers attacked.

And they had their backup server attacked.

Oh God, that’s a nightmare.

So they actually had clients they could not restore their websites in the end from their backups.

And I kind of look at that and say.

What did you do wrong like having and I come from an enterprise background, so in healthcare and you know, we were very judicious because of privacy laws and government laws and backups and patient data and all kinds of stuff.

Oh yeah.

And, and I’m like what did you do?

And and somehow they’re still in business and this happened.

Believe it or not, before that year referred to a large UK based host and before that it happened.

A large Australian based tools.

Where they had backup servers hacked?

So I think, yeah, that says a lot to what security they’re putting on their front end.

In my opinion.

Well and redundancy and you know.

There’s there’s obviously a lot of failure points when sites go down and you don’t have a way to.

Get them back.

’cause you you just can’t come back from that.

Shut it down.

Start over somewhere else.

It becomes a bit of an issue.

Yeah for sure.

And that’s why not then I don’t trust the host I’m with, I do or I wouldn’t be with them.

But that is why.

I do, I always encourage.

Clients to do some.

Host level backups and site level backups.

Yeah for sure.

It’s, uh, it’s

About not putting all your eggs in one basket in case something goes wrong.

I would just say you know you also need to be careful when you do that that you’re not causing performance issues.

If you have backups running in two different places, anywhere near the same time, or during you know peak traffic.

Just be smart about it, but I actually do the same thing on my own sites.

Not that I don’t know.

Pressable’s amazing and they’re going to have, you know, backups and redundancy, but it’s just you know, it’s one of those things that was ingrained in me and.

The 2000s and you don’t break stuff like that.

And and I and you mentioned.

Something really interesting you were talking about support and satisfaction rating and like.

Yeah, the reason why.

A lot of companies let support go.

The support is inexpensive cost in a market that’s already tough on price.

And and I think it’s hard to get.

It’s true.

You know, I was the the team leader for a large call Center for internal for healthcare.

And I’ll tell you supports the thankless job because.

Every customer you talk to all day long has a problem.

Most of your customers are not reaching out to say.

I appreciate you.

Thank you.

They’re they’re reaching out ’cause they’re already having issues before they even.

Talk to you.

Yeah, it’s true, but you know, on on the other hand, and I’ve seen this happen, hosts get bigger and bigger and that cost gets bigger and bigger and so they look for creative ways to address it.

And that’s usually when you start entering the tiered support where the first person you talk to may not fully have read.

Your question, they’re kind of just, you know, copy pasting from something or like you said they send you to a KB article.

And then if you write back again, you go to another tier and and that’s not a dig on anybody that does that.

It’s just you know, that’s how a lot of these companies operate at, you know, scale.

You you know pressable I again.

I’m coming back.

To two to our horn, but you know our supports full staff like full full time staff and everybody knows WordPress and that’s one of the benefits of being small but mighty.

You know, the bigger you get, the more resources you need.

Yeah, and you get that niche support that everybody knows WordPress because you’re on by automatic.

That’s a good thing.

There’s that too.

Yeah, it’s funny.

Uhm, in terms of pressable, are your servers located in North America or do you have a can you say, do you have a couple data centers?

Or how do you?

Oh yeah, so Pressable operates on the same platformaswordpress.com and WordPress B, it’s we call it atomic and we are located around the world.

And one of the really cool things about pressable is at no additional cost.

We offer automatic failover with Geo redundancy, so if something were to go wrong on your server, God forbid.

We would be able to flip you over to another data center.

That has the exact copy of your website.

That makes life a little more easy, especially if it’s a mission critical website that has.

To stay up.

Yeah for sure for sure.

When I found out they offer that at no additional cost.

I mean, I’ve seen what it costs to have high availability hosting and.

It is not cheap.

It’s just one of the ways that automatic really thought ahead, and you know went to where the puck is going, not to where it was.

Yeah, I’m I’m sure is.

Would it?

What other what?

Other features you said your churn rates really low, which is a good sign because we all know in the business the cost of acquisition of a new customer is more than.

Keeping an existing customer happy, which says a lot about your customer satisfaction.

What other features kind of distinguish pressable from some of the other big host Celta?

Right now I’m also managing pressable social media and so I get to see first what people are saying about us and we just had somebody come in today.

That said that they moved to possible and they said that we’re the most stable hosting provider they’ve ever seen.

They could even delete some optimization plugins they’d been using before.

Oh, that’s great.

It is, it is and like stuff like that is just a great testament.

Everybody is, you know, very excited to see stuff like that, but it’s true and we hear that a lot.

Uhm, you know a a lot of it is server level.

But then a lot of it is the experience that we create.

Again, I don’t want to knock anybody because you know.

Everybody is pretty good at something.

I agree.

So I I would rather just sort of focus on things that I absolutely love about Pressable and I would say you know, performance and support are probably our best.

Our pricing is pretty good too.

I’ll tell, I’ll tell you a story, I.

I looked at a website the other day and the client.

Prospective client was complaining about performance.

Do you know?

He had four caching plugins in his dashboard.

Oh gosh.

I no, I don’t.

I did wonder why he had a performance issue.

And then he and oh, this gets better. He had 38 plugins installed and he was only using 10.

We had.

Oh dear.

God yeah I know.

We had a woo commerce store a few weeks ago that came to us and they were experiencing performance issues and it’s a Woo commerce store and they had over 60 plugins.

And how many were they using?

Like half of them.

I know because they this is the problem.

When you have designers, devs and users who have all had been rights and think oh I’ll just add one more plug in, I’ll add one more plug in.

I’ll add one more plug in.

And then and then it’s all.

I’m not going to clean up.

Somebody will clean up.

Right?

It’s it’s that whole.

It’s that whole issue.

I think one of the worst ones ever.

So was I.

Had a a client.

Who insisted they get admin rights?

I said OK.

Sign a piece of paper saying that.

Whatever you do, you’re responsible for and it’s not pretty or care one.

And then he installed a plugin that kept hitting CPU cycles so bad to host that shut the website down.

And I won’t mention the host.

It was a big.

Host and they should have.

And the client never should have installed that plugin because that they had read the ratings.

They knew this plugin had problems.

But they didn’t want to pay for it.

This is why.

Yeah, This is why I think there’s such a great future for, you know, holistic site auditors that you know will come in and review your whole site because you’re.

You’re absolutely right.

You’ve got a website that’s been around for a few years, and you’ve got all these different contractors throwing stuff.

You know throwing band aids.

On bullet holes and.

You’re a few years in and you you can’t.

You don’t even know what you can turn off anymore.

It’s true, it’s so true.

UM, how’s your?

What’s your typical market at principle?

It’s like developers and designers.

Is it not?

Instead of individual businesses?

We have a lot of agencies, which is wonderful.

You know the The thing is our pricing at scale is.

Kind of unbeatable. We also offer a 100% uptime guarantee and agencies really like that.

But we have a lot of businesses and freelancers, you know I I would say it’s probably agencies, business owners and freelancers, which I would say you know designers and dev.

We we do have a lot of stores which is not surprising just because of our stability, but I would lump those under business owners.

Yeah, for ecommerce stability everything it’s true.

I took on a client.

Who was making?

$30,000 a day off this e-commerce site.

A day, yeah.

And his web hosting was instable because his developer convinced him he should put it on cheap hosting.

Oh no.

And you’re making $30,000 a day.

I just

Yeah, I just shake my head and stuff like that like that’s where you really gotta think about are you getting the best advice you should be getting and should you be going to somebody more stable and bigger and.

You know?

High traffic websites and you know, busy online stores absolutely need that performance and.

Stability at scale.

Because you know you, you make customers wait a minute to even hit your check out.

They’re going to start getting antsy and questioning their purchase.

Is it really worth me sitting here?

And who knows how long it’s been?

Take a moment I don’t have exact figures in front of me, but you know there have been studies that show the significant drop off that comes when you don’t have enough PHP resources to handle your cart.

Yep, so true and and abandoned carts is the number one problem in WooCommerce sites or ecommerce is.

100%.

Yeah, yeah, it’s a big issue.

Uhm, what’s your pricing or press?

Well, what is it?

Kind of run around?

Like fine.

We start at $19.00 for a single site.

OK.

And that’s that’s pretty reasonable.

It is it is, you know, and then it’s.

$25 for you know, a single site at a different scale.

45 for the starter plan and we go all the way up. We’ve got a customer that has.

Many, many hundreds and is about to reach 1000 sites with us because once you once you reach a certain scale, we really.

Offer some incredible deals because we want to grow with you and that’s one of the most wonderful things about atomic is, you know, we we don’t have to cap your plan at.

200 sites, and then you’ve got to stack another plan on top of it, and now you’ve got to log into all these.

Different plans to try to manage my end.

In there.net

Yeah, yeah, it’s a it’s.

It’s not fun.

And then you got to remember which plan had which client.

With Pressable it’s not that way like you can’t have more than one plan.

It’s all in there.

That makes it easy.

Sure does.

Is there?

Is there any other real, uhm, big selling point beyond what we’ve talked about?

I’ve mentioned some really good ones.

Yeah you have.

I think those are honestly the the biggest things that we have right now.

I can tell you that our road map has some really incredible differentiators coming up.

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m even talking about pressable and not mentioning we include Jetpack Pro.

So that’s a nice savings come, you know you don’t have to use all of jetpack.

I know some people you know, just think of jetpack the way that it was five years ago, and it’s grown a lot.

It has.

So you can just use the parts that you want and it’s all included at no cost.

Right?

I think those are honestly the biggest ones that are available now.

That that’s a big deal.

At this point, yeah, so I think that’s a that’s a big selling point.

That is.

I wanna go in another tangent with you for a second.

Yeah, but first thank you for asking me all those questions about Pressable.

Oh, you’re welcome.

Uhm, now that we’re into an interesting spot, more press.

With blocks and Gutenberg and you being at a host, what are you saying?

Are you saying, uhm?

Adoption of box?

Or are you still seeing the naysayers who say I’d rather stick with the page builder?

I don’t care.

I think it’s the same impossible as it is everywhere else.

I think once Word Press 6 drops and that full site editing you know continues to become the the dream state that we’ve been talking about for so long.

It’s going to be a no brainer to stick with that.

You know, I think the way that we’re seeing patterns evolve and even just, you know, intelligent.

I I don’t want to say Gutenberg, but Gutenberg ready themes and things like that, uhm, I personally believe that’s going to be where WordPress goes, but there’s always going to be people that love these builders, and so I don’t want to knock them either, you know.

Elementor continues to grow at a rapid rate.

You’ve got you know, Beaver builders.

Still hanging on.

Then kubli pro.

There’s so many more that I’m not thinking of right now, but you know, they’re all doing a great job in serving a purpose to which you know right now.

So we’re we’re looking at WordPress holistically and we’re seeing people say hey.

But what about those kids at Wix and Squarespace and?

And I think page builders are probably our best bet with those people.

Yeah, it’s it’s funny.

I’ve been all in with blocks, probably almost for eight or nine months.

So personally, I I think you have to.

Kind of look at what is your stack or your development stack and build it out and be consistent.

There is a learning curve, uhm, I moved to my agency site to box and and I did it on a live site.

Please don’t do that.

Oh gosh, Robert.

No, I did it over.

I did it over four or five.

Months, which was fun.

Never do it live.

If I had a reason to do it live, I had 180 blog posts and I and I was posting like couple podcasts a week and I didn’t want to keep two sites In Sync so I had no choice. So don’t do it though.

Oh God.

Yeah no, I hear you there well for people who aren’t you, it’s pretty risky.

Yeah it was I I had a plan so I just kind of pecked away at it for months and.

Worked really well.

Oh, that’s something we didn’t mention.

Monich hosts should include staging sites.

Yes, yes.

Staging sites are definitely where it’s at, you know.

We can look at Rob and awe, but don’t do what he did.

Don’t do it, I did.

And and most of the men chose thing I use.

Inside, so yeah, don’t.

Yeah, don’t try, don’t try this at home kid.

No, it was a.

It was a fun experiment, but I think that’s how it’s going.

And then the other topic I wanted to bring up at the risk of creating a little bit of controversy, but I think it’s.

Worth bringing up.

Joost released a report at the time of this record that said WordPress had dropped like .01 in market share or something. The first time we’ve ever dropped in the.

Last, how long?

And the Internet went berserk.

I don’t think.

.01%, or less than 1% is worth worrying about. In my personal opinion, I don’t think we’re headed for a downward trend.

That’s what was presented and everybody got concerned about the future.

Do you have any?

Thoughts on that?

Well, I had the good fortune of being included in a conversation.

Hosted by post status with you know Alex Denning and.

Uh, Joost himself and it was a really great conversation.

I think we all agree that this isn’t enough to get really riled up about.

Our host David mentioned it to we.

We really probably should look at data quality first and with Alexa going away I.

I shouldn’t say that too loud because devices in my house are going to be listening now.

You already did.

I know, I know, I know, like there’s there’s my security policy anyway.

But with that going away, we’re going to have to really fine tune our data collection in other ways, and I think there are smarter ways to do it. I don’t know that 2/10 of a percent.

Necessarily reflects what we’re really seeing. You know, it’s funny working for automatic. I feel like I should mention this, but Yoast brought up an important fact. They are counting all sites with a wordpress.com domain as one.

So WordPress com could have grown, you know 20% and you wouldn’t see it in these statistics.

It all depends on how the statistics are presented.

Exactly, do I think that we should, you know, kind of keep a side eye on these other players in the market?

Yeah, but the reality is and you know you.

And I talked about this a little bit before.

We can’t be everything to everyone.

And if you really want what Wix has to offer, go to Wix.

You know when you’re ready to scale beyond what Wix can offer, come rebuild your site on Web press.

And and then I would add one more thing, if you want transparency.

And the community.

WordPress is the.

Way to go, and the reason I say transparency is.

I don’t for a moment believe that Shopify, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace have don’t have security issues.

But you never read about them because they just fix them on the South side.

And as somebody security conscience, I don’t think being transparent is a good thing.

Not sorry, not being transparent is a good thing.

I think it’s a bad.

I think, and I don’t believe from home, they will say over secure.

Well that’s because you’re not putting anything out there because you can hide it.

And in the WordPress community we have trust in most of the big.

Uhm, plugin manufacturers and other big theme manufacturers, and I think that’s the issue is it’s.

A trust factor.

Yeah, and it’s also a matter of how much you want to be involved in your websites day-to-day, you know one of the benefits of being on a square space or a Wick so you don’t have to update your plugins.

As is true.

And you don’t have to worry about incompatibility issues causing you know exposure to malware or bad actors because Wix or Squarespace takes care of that for you.

Uhm, you know, but again.

You can only go so far with those kinds of websites and I think.

You know not not to speak ill of them, because honestly both of their experiences are pretty great if that’s what you want.

Yeah, and I think the other, and I think the other thing is too is.

And and I I’m a big fan of user tool that’s good for you.

Like I’m really in that camp.

But you know, I I hear it all the time with Woock clients.

Well, I looked at Shopify. It’s $29.00. A basic plan. I think that’s roughly what it runs at, but by the time I Add all the addons that I might as well pay a developer and build it out with Wolf.

In the long run.

It’s true, I don’t think Shopify is even classified as a publishing platform anymore.

Know but

It’s fintech.

Yeah it is.

They make their money off of all of your sales like.

It’s it’s a great business model for them.

Yeah, and it it’s funny because our friends at Yoast actually have Shopify integration.

But to get that integration you have to go to at least an $89.00 plan or.

It’s not one of the lower plants you actually have to go up, so I think what people gotta be really careful of when they’re looking at web solutions beyond WordPress is what are the hidden costs?

What am I not seeing?

And that’s and that’s a bit of an issue, right?

Absolutely, you’re absolutely right, and that’s that’s going to be the case with most of these external ones.

You know they they remind me of the page builders of the past.

You know where?

You were able to spin something up.

It’s all in one.

You don’t have to worry about the pieces, but.

You know in today’s world all of those add-ons come with a subscription.

Yep, they don’t.

But also after.

All software comes with the subscription to now so.

Well, yeah, we’re we’re seeing that in WordPress too.

You know, plugins may not always be available for free.

Yeah, we’ve had some controversy about that lately in the community too, unfortunately so.

Yeah, we should probably step away from that one.

Yeah, I don’t even wanna do.

Honestly, I don’t even want to go down that road.

So the the biggest thing to me though is we do have a pretty special community and you know.

And communities within the community.

So for example.

We’ve got the post status community, which you and I are both part of and where.

We met, we’ve got a a large LinkedIn group which I comanage I’d encourage anybody to get involved in some of those discussions.

There’s great communities on Twitter where conversations happen.

And to me you know when I look at what I’ve done and where I’ve been, that’s kind of what keeps me coming back is the community and the great people we have.

There’s one other place to you know kind of build community that I want to mention and it’s the making WordPress community.

Yes yes sorry yes.

Uh, a lot of people think a lot of people think that they can’t contribute to WordPress because they don’t know how to code, but there are so many different teams that you can join.

You know from.

Events and you know communications.

I’m personally in the hosting.

Unity, and that’s not to say like you go to the community and you know, ask your questions, but you get to know people and they know people.

And before you know it, you have people that can answer your questions for you.

And you’re giving back to word Press, which is, in my opinion, extremely important because I think we all kind of need to pay it forward.

You know, that’s five for the future is really important.

If we’re going to continue improving at the rate that we.

Need to yeah so.

True, I I would agree.

And by the way, contributing doesn’t mean.

You can join one of the Warren communities.

My friend Courtney Robertson is one of the learning leads like get involved in that get involved in helping somebody that’s giving back to get involved in spreading the word and and if you really want.

To see some fun.

Join one of the, uh, WordPress, uh core launches in make the in the WordPress slack community and and see what’s going on when we do a new release release.

Dates are kind of.

Yeah, well in the days leading up to it too.

And they’re always parties and and. And, you know, educate yourself. I mean, there’s a lot warmed up. WordPress.org is one of the best resources out there that everybody forgets about.

And it’s like why?

It’s incredible and it’s come so far thanks to people like Courtney.

Courtney, the puja. Even Nicki WP engine’s involved in doing.

It’s a full war now, you know.

So many incredible people.

And then there’s one other place to build community that we didn’t mention, and it’s something that you don’t see with these other solutions, and that’s all the word camps.

You know we we missed them during COVID, but they’re coming back now live, you know, we’ve got word camp EU coming up.

Word Camp USA is in September and then all of our local word camps are starting to come.

Back to and that’s the fastest way to you know.

Meet people, make friends, and build your community.

Yeah, it’s it’s so true.

Uhm, we haven’t had a word camp Toronto since.

The fall before the pandemic hit I’m dying for another one like we Chronos got a pretty vibrant WordPress community.

I don’t know where that’s gonna go.

I haven’t really talked to anybody but to see you there’s.

There’s some local ones in the US going on. There’s all kinds of meet up groups that are prospering on meetup.com.

I mean look.

At those, yeah, we’re pretty lucky at the.

End of the day I think.

And by the way, even.

For introverts who might be listening to this who haven’t really been to these events, I can promise you the community will always make room at their table for you.

Yeah, it’s so true.

That’s just how we roll.

Yeah I spent.

I was thinking back to the last Word Camp Toronto recently and I was talking to a colleague who presented.

And I think his presentation was the only one in two days or so I spent most of my time.

Catching up with people.

Chatting with people, figuring what people were doing.

I don’t think I’ve watched that many presentations.

Well, you know the hallway chats are just as important.

They are.

Jessica, thanks for joining me today.

If somebody wants to find out more about pressable or what you do, how’s the best way to get ahold of you or Pressable?

Oh please visit us at https://pressable.com/ and in the lower right hand corner of our website you will always see a button where you can open a chat to talk to.

US, and by the way, that’s available 24/7 365 days.

Thanks so much and you have yourself a wonderful day.

Thank you, it was so fun.

Talking to you always a pleasure.