Building a membership website is an exciting way to generate recurring revenue while providing premium value to your users. But it takes the right tools and strategy to create one successfully.
In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore how the WordPress plugin SureMembers can empower you to easily build a fully functional membership site.
Whether you're a blogger looking to monetize content or a coach running an online course, SureMembers has everything you need to create members-only areas, accept payments, manage users, and ultimately build a thriving membership business.
Since Google has officially made page speed and user experience as a ranking factor in search engine results page (SERP), having a fast loading site is very crucial as part of your SEO tactics. If you want to rank higher than your competitors on Google search, it is time to pay attention to your site's pagespeed!
Aside from the SEO purpose, pagespeed can also affect user engagement and conversion. No one wants to see a slow site. Reports show that slow load time can reduce conversion and increase bounce rates. In other words, if your site is slow then your visitors and customers are more likely to exit your site and move on to your competitors' sites.
If your site can not get a 90+ Pagespeed score, check out our flagship themes, Ultra and Shoppe. As seen in our demos and our customer showcase sites, there are a lot of fast loading sites built with Themify. Also see our pagespeed showcase round 1, round 2, round 3, and round 4. (more…)
Since the release of Themify v5, we have received an overwhelming amount of positive feedbacks about the pagespeed and performance improvements. We've helped many users achieve a 90+ pagespeed score on their sites, which they weren't able to with other themes. In this post, we will present a pagespeed comparison of Themify Ultra versus Divi, Elementor, Avada, Beaver, Astra, OceanWP, all of which are extremely popular themes and page builders in the WordPress market. We are presenting an unbiased comparison using the builtin features from each theme, without any third party cache or minify plugins. The pagespeed test was audited using Google Pagespeed Insights and we've recorded the whole process, which you can watch below. When it comes to pagespeed, we are thrilled to show how Themify outperforms other themes and builders.
We would like to update you on the Pagespeed framework that was announced a few months ago. There has been a long delay because Google Pagespeed Insights changed their metrics when we were close to completion. So we ended up re-coding a lot of stuff to comply with the new metrics. Before, Google just evaluated the page size, HTTP requests, scripts, code practices, etc., but now they also audit user experience as part of the pagespeed score. They implemented some new metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to determine how user friendly your page is rendered on user's screen. For example, if you have a large element (whether it is a text, image, video, map, or slider) that takes a long time to load, it will trigger a long LCP. Or if you have an element that causes layout shift during page render (eg. inline popup, ad, social embeds, etc.), it will trigger the CLS issue. The long loading LCP and CLS will result in lower pagespeed score. For more information, read Google's Web Vitals.
The new changes have made it harder to score 95+ on Google Pagespeed Insights for everyone (including our new framework). If you refer to our previous post, the demos used to score 97 to 99 but are now down to 90 to 92 due to the new changes. The good news is we've tackled the new metrics pretty well. Most demos (even with heavy content) can still score 90 and up. In this post, we will share the Ultra and Shoppe beta version and show a few pagespeed comparisions between the old vs new version.
In our last tutorial we recorded a video on how to create a dynamic property site with Builder Pro and Pods plugin. To demonstrate that Builder Pro is compatible with all major custom post type plugins, we are writing another tutorial on creating a movie review site with Builder Pro and the Post Type Builder (PTB) plugin (view final demo). Builder Pro has full integration with PTB. That means whatever post types and custom fields you create with PTB, you can use Builder Pro to create the templates for them. In this tutorial, we will cover every step on creating custom post type, custom fields, taxonomies, and custom templates. You will learn how to create a complete custom movie review site from scratch with dynamic content.
One of the major concerns about using multi-purpose themes is the page speed. Most multi-purpose themes are packed with many features and they usually include many scripts which take longer to load than the simpler themes. Site loading speed not only affects your visitors' browsing experience, but it can also impact your site search engine placement as Google ranks higher for fast loading and mobile-friendly sites. All Themify themes have been mobile friendly for many years. The upcoming Themify mission is to make all of our themes score 95+ on Google Pagespeed without using any third party plugins.
Mission Pagespeed: Making The Fastest Multi-purpose Theme
Over the past 2 months, we've been working quietly on the Pagespeed Mission to improve the page speed of all Themify themes and the Builder. Today we are happy to announce that we've made good progress. It is a big mission as we have to change the whole theme and framework structure in order to achieve it. All themes need to be re-coded as well to work with the new framework. Our goal is to make Ultra and Shoppe the fastest multi-purpose themes that includes a drag & drop layout Builder. (more…)
