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This week on the WP-Tonic podcast, our guest had to reschedule because she was sick, so Jonathan Denwood and Kim Shivler spoke about Membership Websites. In the past, the two broke down requirements for planning and implementing a WordPress Learning Management System. In this episode, they applies the same format to discuss requirements for planning and implementing a WordPress Membership Website. The discussion covered several popular WordPress membership plugins including MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro pointing out the features of the different plugins and focused on the importance of proper planning to make sure you select the right plugin for your requirements. Would you also please add the following before the transcript portion of the blog post: Clarification During the show, Kim warned about issues with moving from one membership plugin to another, and said you can’t migrate subscriptions. To clarify, there are times when migration is possible for users and subscriptions between plugins depending on the plugins and the specific subscription configurations. In the cases she sited, this was not possible.

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have a live round-table show where we discuss some of the most interesting articles and posts that deal with WordPress and the internet in general which, we have found during the week. The show is normally around hour in length plus we have a regular panel “see the list of our regular panel below, of great WordPress experts that try and join us every week. You can watch the show live every week on our Facebook Page WP-Tonic Show https://www.facebook.com/wptonic   This Weeks Main Discussion Stories 1 - Stack Overflow Survey Respondents Still Rank WordPress Among the Most Dreadful Platforms https://wptavern.com/stack-overflow-survey-respondents-still-rank-wordpress-among-the-most-dreadful-platforms 2 - It’s time to address the elephant in the room: Influencers don’t really influence anything or anyone! https://medium.com/21st-century-marketing/its-time-to-address-the-elephant-in-the-room-influencers-don-t-really-influence-anything-or-ee036b4abbb 3 - How To Prevent Common WordPress Theme Mistakes https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/03/prevent-common-wordpress-theme-mistakes/ 4 - How to Diagnose Decline in Rankings (Craziest SEO Issue We’ve Seen) https://kinsta.com/blog/decline-seo-rankings/ 5 - Thrive Ultimatum Review: Scarcity Marketing At It’s Best, Or Is It? https://www.wpsuperstars.net/thrive-ultimatum-review/

Patrick Rauland is obsessed with eCommerce. He's built sites for clients, he was on the WooThemes support team, he was on the WooCommerce development team, and then he was Product Manager for WooCommerce and lead three releases. Now he creates online courses for LinkedIn Learning & writes books telling people how they can rock the world with eCommerce & WooCommerce

This week, co-host Kim Shivler filled in for Jonathan Denwood to lead the discussion with the round table. She was joined by Sallie Goestch, John Locke, Chris Badgett, and Mendel Kurland.    The group discussed some recent WordPress news much of it concerning Gutenberg.   Story 1 - How Will Gutenberg Affect the Enterprise https://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress-gutenberg-enterprise/   Story 2 - Getting Ready for Gutenberg - from the WordPress Theme Review Team https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2018/03/07/getting-ready-for-gutenberg/   Story 3 - 4500 Plugins Need Your Help in Testing for Gutenberg https://wptavern.com/4500-plugins-need-your-help-in-determining-gutenberg-compatibility   Top Takeaways this Week:   Mendel wants us to position Gutenberg as a positive advancement with our customers. Many of this team agree that a large reason for the pushback and negativity about Gutenberg has been caused by a lack of communication about the project. One key to working with Enterprise Customers is that they are risk averse. They aren’t necessarily wrapped up in the technology. They just want to make sure it works.  One thing noted about Enterprise Customers is that they tend to have in-house teams or budgets to manage implementations and testing of software updates. There are 4500 top plugins that need help with testing. Though this is a small fraction of what’s in the repository, these are the most popular. The team agreed that those who contribute are normally not the same as those complaining. While it’s a great idea to crowdsource this type of testing, they did point out that there is a significant barrier of entry to those who are not technical.

Dagmar Gatell is an internationally respected SEO consultant, Inbound Marketing consultant, coach and strategist. She is uniquely able and qualified to uncover profitable niche markets in places most entrepreneurs never consider. Dagmar uses her knowledge, expertise and instinct to create cutting-edge, targeted solutions to help you attract the right customers, convert leads and grow your business. Her SEO expertise is especially appreciated by her clients when creating demand and lead generating websites and online social presence. https://dagmargatell.com/

This week Matt Medeiros, Chris Badgett, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood and co-host Kim Shivler to discuss the latest WordPress news.   Episode 272’s sponsor is IntelligenceWP (intelligencewp.com). Are you ready to get more real user information from your Google Analytics data? Configure IntelligenceWP and start getting a better view of your site visitors.     The regulars welcomed special guest Matt Medeiros from The Matt Report (mattreport.com) for what turned out to be a lively WordPress discussion. Learn more about Matt at CraftedbyMatt.com   Stories included:    Freelance WordPress Development: How to Make a Career of It   https://wpshout.com/freelance-wordpress-developer/       WordPress Localization - 5 essentials to consider when translating your website https://www.collectiveray.com/wp/tutorials/wordpress-localization-translation     My Last Day at Moz. My First Day at SparkToro. https://sparktoro.com/blog/last-day-moz-first-day-sparktoro/     Bezos is coming: Mapping Amazon's growing reach https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bezos-is-coming-mapping-amazons-growing-reach   Aside from highlighting parts of these stories, the team spent quite a bit of time discussing WP-Engine’s significant price increase over the past week.   This led to an overall discussion of web hosting and the wars between different hosts. The quality difference between specialty WordPress hosting and lower priced shared hosting products. It was agreed that low-priced services (less than $30 a month) will only work for so long. As your business grows and website traffic grows, you need to budget for premium hosting that frequently costs $100 or more monthly.   Requirements for premium, managed, WordPress hosting are particularly important for large ecommerce stores, membership sites, and learning management platforms.

We Interview Jason Rodriguez of Litmus who recently published a great article about AMP for Email . We discuss why Google is pushing this technology so strongly. Then we go on to talking about Jason roll with Litmus connected to him building a real community inside a powerful forum that has thousands of users. We also discuss the future of email and the latest best practices connected to using email to build your online business. https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/271-wp-tonic-show-special-guest-jason-rodriguez-litmus https://www.rodriguezcommaj.com https://litmus.com

This week on the WP-Tonic Roundtable show, John Locke, Chris Badgett and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 270. The covered several articles covering online topics from pondering if websites are dead to evaluating tips for making your website faster. This show’s sponsor is IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) as WordPress plugin designed to give you more insight into your Google Analytics statistics. Story 1 The sudden death of the website https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/the-sudden-death-of-the-website/ The author of this story proposes that websites are quickly moving to become a thing of the past and predicts that the first major brand will shut down its website in 2018. The team pointed out that while online marketing is growing and changing, they don’t see the death of websites as imminent. They agreed that conversational marketing, having real conversations with your customers which the author touts, is a powerful marketing/sales tool and it will continue to grow, however, that doesn’t mean that websites are dead. As Chris pointed out, even if you have an online business and are doing sales online, learning the basics of classic sales techniques can serve you well. Story 2 On AMP for Email https://www.rodriguezcommaj.com/blog/on-amp-for-email The team sees many members in the web community who are skeptical of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and distrusting Google’s intentions. The author brings those concerns to the email aspects of AMP as opposed to the mobile web page structure the team has discussed before. Story 3 - How to Show Your Web Design Clients You Care about Their ROI https://calderaforms.com/2018/02/show-web-design-clients-care-roi/ Everyone agreed that the ROI (Return on Investment) of their website is what’s important to customers. Sometimes in development, there is a lot of focus on tools, but remember the tools are a means to an end. Customers are paying you to get them that ROI. In this article, Caldera is defining ROI as getting qualified leads. That’s what the client cares about not that the site wins design awards. Positioning yourself as a developer or agency who cares about a customers return, understands the need for conversions, and helps customers understand this ROI using Google Analytics may be used as a competitive advantage. Story 4 Reconsider Blogging on Medium if You’re Worried about SEO One of the author’s main concerns was that Medium uses no follow links. Generally with SEO, you want to have follow links as opposed to no follow links. The team viewed this differently. While follow links are desired for page rank, they see Medium as another channel for building your brand like YouTube and another place to find potential customers. This goes beyond the specific value of Google Page Rankings. It’s about finding new readers and gaining traffic. If someone finds you on Medium, clicks through to your site, joins your mailing list, and maybe becomes a customer, there is value in that link. Story 5 - Historical yearly trends in the usage of content management systems for websites https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y For many who are part of the web development community, this report might be startling. While most in the WordPress community know that WordPress powers over 29% of the Internet, they may not realize that over 50% of websites are still not using any CMS (Content Management System). The team agreed that based on these numbers that Content Management Systems are still not part of the mainstream. One thing they found interesting was that Wix only powers approximately .5% of websites. Based on the YouTube advertising by some of their proponents you would think they held a larger piece of the pie. The main takeaway was that there is still room for a lot of growth and many changes. Story 6 - 13 Performance-Boosting Site Speed Tips for WordPress https://torquemag.io/2018/02/13-performance-boosting-site-speed-tips-wordpress/ While the team has covered this in the past, Jonathan pointed out that it’s always a topic of interest with his clients. It was felt that the article had some good information, and they added two other big points that they find important. While the article mentioned selecting responsive themes, the team covered the importance of well written themes that load fast. A favorite of both Chris and Adam is the Astra theme (https://wordpress.org/themes/astra/). They also agreed that selecting the proper web host is critical. Slow servers at the web host along with outdated PHP and other server configurations can negatively impact your site performance. Kinsta hosting is a web host that focuses on performance and security for WordPress websites. They are also the sponsors of the WP-Tonic Wednesday show, and the WP-Tonic website runs on Kinsta hosting.

We Discuss LearnIing In a New Century With Jeff Cobb Jeff has commercially published two books – Leading the Learning Revolution and Shift Ed – and self-published a third – 10 Ways to Be a Better Learner. he has blogged for more than a decade on multiple sites, including Mission to Learn, Tagoras, and Learning Revolution. You can find more here: https://www.learningrevolution.net/ http://www.jeffthomascobb.com/

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have an round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners and WordPress junkies and discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress related articles/stories of the week. You can watch the show live every Friday at 8:30am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page. https://www.facebook.com/wptonic/