219: Start - Blogging Misconceptions, How to Choose a Host, and Why WordPress

Hey. Hey, lovely listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Alexa and we are just so thrilled that you decided to tune in today in this new kind of format that we're experimenting with. We've covered a lot of different topics, monetization, last week, content, processes, social optimizing, and more. And today we're taking it back to basics and focusing on starting. If you have an idea, whether that just be for a blog, for a series on your blog, for a new piece of content, or anything else you're wanting to start, and you just need a little push to actually start publishing and promoting, this episode is for you. First, you'll hear from Bjork as he talks about some misconceptions about starting a food blog. You may already have some ideas about how your blog may or may not progress, and this section will be helpful in navigating some of the questions you have as you work to start and grow your blog. Next, Andrew. He's our site speed expert at Foodlogger Pro and he's talking all about hosting. So maybe you're looking for your first host, or maybe you're looking to upgrade your hosting situation. Either way, this section will help you evaluate your hosting options to help you make the best choice. And last, Raquel, our incredible WP Tasty lead who is here to talk to you about WordPress. Why do we recommend it over something like Squarespace or Weebly for food bloggers? Why are plugins important? She'll answer all of these questions and more. So if you're just needing a little nudge to start your idea, we hope this episode will point you in the right direction. Excited to dive in? Let's hear from Bjork.

So today we are talking all about starting and one of the important things to know when you start your site, one of the things that you really need to think about are some of the misconceptions that you might be coming into the process with. And some of us have this idea of what this new venture will be like, whether it's building a blog specifically or building a business. And I thought we should spend some time addressing three of those misconceptions that we see as very common mistakes or misconceptions or incorrect ways. In my opinion that people might be viewing the starting phase of launching their blog and building a business. So let's talk through each one of those. I'll give you a little preview and then we'll dive in and talk more specifically about each one. Number one, you need to have everything figured out and a ton of content before you press launch. Number two, it'll automatically be a money maker. And number three, there are too many blogs out there. I won't have any space. And I missed the blogging boat. It has already set sail and I am still a landlubber, waving and wishing longingly to be out at sea. That's actually not the complete title for what it is, but that's the visual that I imagine a lot of people having. So let's go back and talk about each one of those. Number one, you need to have everything figured out and a ton of content before you press publish, before you launch, before you release your site to the world. This is a really common misconception. It's something that we see come up all of the time on Food Blogger Pro as people are asking questions on the forum, especially when they're in this starting stage. And the idea that most people have, the thought that most people have is, hey, I'm getting started. And I want to make sure that when those people come, that they have content to look at, that they can explore my site, that they're not going to be let down by the fact that there's only one or two pieces of content and then they'll leave and then they'll never come back. But the reality is that in those early stages, the most important thing isn't for you to have this fully built out site. The most important thing for you is to figure out what it looks like to get into the rhythm of publishing content. So you're really in those early stages, not trying to figure out necessarily how to get people to stick around, although that's great when you're starting. The thing that you want to figure out is yourself. You want to figure out how do you play this game of content creation and do that on a consistent basis. And it's important to shift that focus in those early stages, much like you would shift that focus when you are figuring out how to consistently work out in those early stages. You're not trying to figure out how you increase your mile time by 15 seconds. What you're trying to figure out is how do I fit this into my routine? How do I show up every day and chalk 30 minutes out of my day, cut out a little section to dedicate to the process of working out. And that same idea needs to be applied to you and content creation. So when you're in the early stages, you don't have to have a ton of content. You don't have to have this huge queue that you've built up that you're going to work through. Although that might be nice. And for some people, mentally, they might like the idea of having a month or two of content scheduled out and then always working to keep a month or two so they don't feel the pressure of needing to publish and create and publish right away. But what you can release, the burden that you can release in those early stages is the burden of needing to have a complete site that has tons of content right when you are in the early stages, right when you are starting. Because what you're trying to figure out isn't how do I get people to stick around? Or how do I how much content do I need in order to press launch or to press publish on my new site? What you're trying to figure out is how do I become a content creator? And just like working out, it's figuring out how do I become somebody who is consistent with working out, how do I fit that into my routine and have that just become a norm? That's what you're trying to figure out when you're starting. So you don't need a bunch of stuff on your site. You don't need everything filled out. You don't need every page complete. There are still pages on Pinch of Yum that we're like, ah, we need to update those, or those should be tweaked or improved. There's always going to be that. And one of the things that you will learn and people that have been doing this for years can relate to this is in some way everything is always broken. And you got to get used to that because things are always going to be broken. Things could always be improved. And so that has to be a space that you're comfortable with. And the best way to get comfortable with it is just to start. So if it were me, my recommendation would be to maybe have a post, maybe have two posts. If you are really conservative and want to be, have a. Have a decent queue, you can build up a few different posts. But as quickly as possible, put your site out into the world and get into the rhythm of consistent content creation. Because if you are interested in building a following online, you're going to learn whatever it is that you do. YouTube, social media, a podcast, blog posts, whatever it is that you do, you have to figure out how to feed the beast. And the beast is the Internet. And what you are feeding it is your content. And as soon as you can figure out what that looks like, the better. And the best way to figure that out is to get started and to learn and adjust and tweak along the way. So if you are about to get started, if you're in the early stages, I would encourage you to, as quickly as possible, launch your site, press, publish, and get into the content creation rhythms that will be the norm for years and years to come. So that's, number one, uh, the idea that you needed a ton of content before you press publish, that is a misconception, Something that's not true. And I would encourage you to, if you believe that, to spend some time wrestling with that and try and debunk that so you can jump into the actual work of building a blog and building a site. Number two, it'll automatically be a money maker. Now, one of the things that I think is so important and so true is that if you are one of the things. So I'll say this, I'll back up a little bit. One of the things that I often see is people who love the idea more than they love the thing. And from a distance, the idea is, hey, I have a website, and that means that I can work from anywhere. And that website, if it gets popular enough, makes money, and so I can work from anywhere. I can create money from this, and I can be flexible with my schedule. I can go to lunch with a friend, whereas normally I couldn't. And the idea of this thing is pretty romantic. The idea is pretty attractive. And there are 100%. There are elements of building a business, especially a business online, that are really attractive. But if the thing that you are attracted to is the benefit as opposed to the work, that allows you to have the benefits. So I'll say that again, if the thing that you are attracted to is the benefits as opposed to the work that allows you to have the benefits, then you're going to be in a really tough spot because you are going to be grinding not only for the early stages when you're starting, but also after, as you've built a thing, and that changes a little bit down the line. Maybe you have a little bit more freedom. The grind feels a little bit different once there's enough coal in the engine of the train that maybe you can step off for a week and it continues to move on its own because you've been shoveling it in for years. But if you are attracted to the benefits as opposed to the work, what you're going to realize is that you spend the majority of your time doing the work and the value and the emotional income that you get from the work, if that is a Zero for you. If you don't get anything from that, if you're not attracted to that, then it's not going to be worth the benefits that come on the side like flexibility or the ability to have a location independent job where you can travel. You know, a website travels with you, all you need is your computer. These are all things that are attractive. The idea of those is awesome, but those are just benefits. You really need to make sure that the thing that you spend the most time doing is something that you actually love. And that is the work that goes into building a blog, building a website, building a following. So if that's not you and you've realized the thing that you are attracted to is just the idea and not the work, I would encourage you to step back and to look at other scenarios where you could love the work as well as the benefits that come from the work. And that's where there's going to be alignment. Because the majority of the time that you're spending in a day is going to be working on the thing. And the greatest way to have an awesome day is to enjoy your work as opposed to the benefits that come from it. And one of those things is the ability for that thing to make money. That's awesome. It's an important, super important piece of having a family, having a career, saving for retirement, all of these things are important to do. And career is important just for the tactical things that it allows you to do, like put food on the table, to pay for your kids, college, to pay for your home, mortgage, rent, whatever it is. So it allows you to live and then it allows you to have some freedoms if you build a business that is successful. But, but again, that piece, that's a benefit, that's not the main thing. So one of the misconceptions that's really common is this idea of, hey, I'm going to build this thing and the majority of my time is going to be leaning into the benefits of the thing. In actuality, the majority of your time is continuing to do the work. So take some time, think through that. Are you attracted to the idea or are you attracted to the work? And knowing that in doing the work there might be some of those benefits that come down the line, but don't be attracted to the benefits, be attracted to the work. And again, the benefits could be, hey, it's going to make money, it's going to allow freedom, it's going to allow flexibility. The work is writing, it is photography in this niche, it is recipe development, it is responding to comments. It's engaging with people. It's learning, continually learning about tech and SEO and social media trends. That's the work. And there needs to be some level of interest and some draw to that. And hopefully some of the benefits, like creating an income come along with it. So that's number two, the misconception of the automatic or easy benefits in being attracted to those making money. Flexibility, location, independence. So that was number two. Number three, there are too many blogs out there and I won't have space. I missed the ship. It is sailing away. I am waving goodbye as the sad trombone plays in the background. And what I have to say about this is there's a. There's a really awesome, influential, important to read article by a author and thought leader, which is such a terrible term, but I just used it, so we'll roll with it. But his name is Kevin Kelly and he talks a lot about tech. And we've mentioned this a few different times. And there's a lot of different ways that you can look at this and there's ways that you can poke holes in this. But the general concept is one that I really like and one that I really appreciate. And the concept is this idea of 1000 true fans. And what Kevin Kelly says in this article that he published and this concept that he talks about is, it's important not to think about how do I find a million people, right? A million is a number where we often talk about that. And maybe you get a million page views. Oh, that would be awesome if I got a million page views or even 100,000. What if I got 100,000 followers on social media or 100,000 page views? Or what if I, you know, made $100,000 in a year? We have these really big numbers and as it relates to followers and engagement. But what we need to do is we need to scale that back and instead of thinking about huge numbers, we need to think about how can I create something? How can I build something that serves a small group of. And Kevin Kelly talks about 1,000 people, 1,000 true fans. How do I build something that serves this really specific group of people really well? And an example of that would actually be this podcast. So this podcast, Food Blogger Pro, as a membership site, the content that we create, the team that we have that serve this community, we don't think about how do we reach a million people because the. That's not our audience. You are one of less than 10,000 people that we are serving on a consistent basis. But we've done it consistently We've been really specific in owning this niche of people who create recipe content online and figuring out ways that we can serve this group of people. And so as you think about the thing that you're building, as you maybe wrestle with this idea, this misconception of there's too many blogs out there that everybody's on social media, I can't build a thing. I would encourage you not to think about massive scale, at least not to start. But think about your 1000 true fans. What are you creating and who are the people that you are creating that for? And how are you able to build a thing that really helps those 1000 true fans? Now, this applies to music, it applies to business, it applies to blogs, it applies to social media. There's lots of different ways that you can use it, but in our case, we're thinking about content creation. So what this requires you to do in some instances is kind of scale back the thing you're focusing on, the thing that you are creating in the niche. We talk about that a lot, the niche that you are looking to go into now. It's important to say it doesn't mean you have to do that forever. Food Blogger Pro. It's like, okay, it's pretty specifically named. That's probably the niche we're going to stay in. But you can start with something smaller and grow outside of that. And you see that with massively successful businesses. An example being Amazon, right? So Amazon started really in a really specific niche. And they said, we're going to create books and a bookstore, and we're going to try and get every book in the world available for people to purchase. And so their true fans, the people they were serving were book nerds. They were people who wanted access to books. They wanted this, you know, they wanted to go to a place where essentially any book that they wanted, they could find it, even if it was only three versions of that book that were in print or accessible. So really fringe books were available as well. And as you know, Amazon expanded way beyond that into lots of different areas and continues to grow into this behemoth of a company. So it's not necessarily something that you have to do forever, but when you're starting out, it really helps to be specific, not only for you, to allow you to focus and to know who it is you're serving, but also to get traction in those early stages, because that's one of the hardest things, is to get traction. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a really clearly defined niche. And so people can come, they know right away, hey, is this for me or is it not for me? And it's really helpful to be specific in who it is that you're serving and to think about not a million fans, but who are those 1000 true fans. So those are three misconceptions that I think are important to talk through, important to bring up and to recap. One that we see that's really common is this idea that when people are starting in the early stages, they think, I need to have all of this content ready and available for people to consume who are coming to my blog because it's the first time and I don't want to miss the chance to keep those people around. But instead, I would say it's more important to press, publish, to put your site out into the world and then build it as you go. Number two, common misconception is people think it's going to be an automatic win from the benefits that they get from it. The idea that you can make money, the idea that you can create an income early on, right off the bat. But instead what you find is it has to be the work that you're attracted to. It can't be the benefits that you're attracted to. And number three, misconception, the idea that there are too many blogs out there. People say, I've missed the ship, it's already passed. But if you think specifically about who the people are that you're going to serve and get really specific, not in building a following, but in serving a specific group of people, what you'll find is those people are out there and they will follow you if you do a good job of serving those people. So those are the three misconceptions. Shifting gears, we are doing an AMA podcast, which we are very excited about. Props to Alexa, who does so much to make this podcast happen. She came up with this idea and we're really excited about it. So it's going to be kind of a live AMA session where we're going to record it and also broadcast it live, and we would love for you to be a part of it. You can submit your question ahead of time if you would be interested. And you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and it will be an open Ask Me Anything, which means anything. You could ask about personal routines that we have. You could ask about specifics for business. You could ask about Pinch of Yum. You could ask about WP Tasty and the plugins that we have there. You could ask what my favorite drink is from Caribou Coffee. Any of those things are questions that you could ask on the upcoming AMA podcast. And again, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com to submit your question there, and we would love to feature you and to have your question show up on that podcast. All right, next up, we're going to talk to Andrew, who is a expert on Food Blogger Pro. And he has deep, deep understanding of tech and also food and recipe sites. And that's why we consider him to be an expert and why we're so excited not only to have him weighing in on the forum for Food Blogger Pro members, but also showing up on the podcast. Andrew's going to be talking about a really important tech decision that you'll need to make when you're starting your blog. So let's go ahead and welcome Andrew on. Andrew, welcome back to the podcast.

Glad to be back.

Yeah, we're going to be chatting a little bit about hosting, which we kind of prefaced way back in episode 213. We were talking about site speed and we talked about how important hosting is. But now we're actually going to dive deep on that. So let's start by going high level. We're going to start up at the top. Explain what hosting is and why bloggers need a host. Sure.

So hosting seems like this mysterious thing because you never really see it. It's often some data center somewhere. But a web host is really just a computer sitting in a room or a rack somewhere, very similar to your desktop computer or your laptop computer. The only difference really is it's running different software. It might be tuned slightly differently to be a better web host than a multitasking machine, but it's just a box sitting in a room that's connected to the Internet. What it's designed to do is basically return web pages and various Internet content. When a browser says, hey, can I have nerdpress.net, that host says, sure, I've got nerdpress.net and sends back all of the information so that my browser can build that page.

Got it. And one of the things that we need to be aware of and we need to make sure that we're really being intentional with is making sure the things that are sent back and forth, that those are really fast. And that's what we talked about in episode 213, making sure that the images are light, making sure that you do caching and things like that. But there's other things that are important piece of the puzzle as it relates to an effective Fast website. So what are the different components of a quality host and how you know if somebody you're using is a good host? What are the things that you look for and test?

I've got five questions I ask, so I guess we could just work through them. My first one is, is the hosting reliable? Not only does it have to be fast, like you mentioned, right, Your site needs to be online and always running. Right. People are always using the Internet and even at 2 in the morning, somebody is trying to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. So there's different qualities of hosts in terms of uptime. A lot of them will give you a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Well, I think if you're at 99.9%, I think that means your site could be down for 14 minutes a day. You can't give too much credence in that. What you really want to do is find out from other users is their hosting reliable. There may be also micro outages, and this is where it's kind of tricky to tell. I encourage people to have uptime monitoring. You could use like uptime robot or status cake. There's these tools that will basically check your site every minute to make sure it's always online, because if it's down a couple minutes in the middle of the night, you wouldn't know otherwise.

Right.

And so, you know, a couple outages, you know, every, every host is going to have a problem at some point. So it's a question of if there's a pattern of problems. You know, if, you know, even Amazon and Cloudflare go down once in a while, mistakes happen. It's technology and it's tricky. But I've been on hosts where once a month there was an outage for over half an hour, and it was like every three to four weeks we had that outage and I finally got sick of it and changed hosts because they weren't reliable. So, you know, it has to be reliable. That's the key.

Great, so that's number one. And is there a place where you can find that out? Like, do hosts reveal that or is it in research or is it in using a host and then keeping them accountable and saying, hey, if you're actually going to be down, I'm going to switch, kind of as the scenario was in your case?

Yeah, I think I don't have a website to send you to to accurately review all hosts. It's really tricky out there because every hosting company has an affiliate program, so every review you read online will be biased. So even if every host has an affiliate program, it's kind of maybe equally biased, but it's just, it's kind of the wild west out there. So you can scour review sites to see and you will see some patterns emerge. The other is to ask other people in your niche. Ask in the Food Blogger Pro forums, hey, is this a good host? And as a community, you can get a collective experience and you're going to get people saying, I was on this host and it kept going down and I changed to this host and it's been great. One story is an anecdote, so that doesn't mean it's consistent. But when you get 5, 10, 20 people saying, hey, these hosts are great, that's when it's time to believe them.

Got it. So first question, is it reliable? What's the second question?

Is it fast? And I know we touched on this in the previous episode, but fast is really, really important. Not all computer processors are the same speed. You could have an old slow laptop that you're working on or a super fast brand new one and it's going to do stuff faster. It's not like all servers sitting in those data centers are identical. The hardware makes a difference. The software, what's called the software stack that they're running, makes a difference. How well optimized they're, they're set up. If they're a WordPress managed host, they may tune their servers better for WordPress. If they're just a general shared host that has to be able to run any sort of web program, not just WordPress, it's not going to be as optimized for WordPress, so it's going to be maybe a little slower.

Sure.

So I don't want to get too far into the hosting the speed part, but one of the simplest ways to tell if the hosting's fast is to look at what's called the time to first byte. And that's how long it takes the server to generate that HTML page and send it back to the browser. There is on page speed optimization. That's how long it takes the browser to render everything. The hosting doesn't really impact that. It's that initial response where it's got to be faster.

A quick story for a pinch of yam. Actually, our story of hosting. I think people are always interested in hearing who uses what and we haven't changed a lot. And I would actually be interested in hearing your thoughts on kind of changing and evolving hosts. I know you've talked about that in past episodes, but we started out with bluehost, which is a shared hosting company, which means that there's a lot of sites on one computer and there are issues that come along with that. And we experienced some kind of drag on that. And they also didn't have options to upgrade at that point. So we said, okay, where do we go if we want to go to the next level? So we jumped to a hosting company called Media Temple and they had this thing at the time called vps, which is a virtual private server, which that's kind of changing a little bit. We were there for a really long time and then we said, hey, we want to get to what you had mentioned, which was managed hosting, which comes at a premium, but it's a company where they take care of the management of the server, which you'd assume across the board that everybody would be doing that. But there are some situations where they essentially give you the hosting and they say, hey, you're going to kind of have to keep an eye on this. We'll keep the computers on, we'll keep it running, we'll keep the servers up, but there are other things that you need to manage. And we said, ugh, like that, that seems like a lot to us. So we went to a managed solution with WP engine, which WP meaning WordPress. And like you said, it's, it's fine tuned for WordPress, it's built for WordPress, so that's where we are right now. I'd be interested to hear you talk a little bit about what are your thoughts on switching hosts? Is that an issue that you're going to run into if you notice that they're not reliable or fast, should you switch and what happens then if you do well?

So if somebody does it right, switching hosts doesn't cause a problem. So there is a, you know, if you're going to try to do it yourself, there's a steep learning curve. I've moved a lot of sites and I've got, you know, a 25 or 50 point checklist that I go in the right order to make sure there's no downtime and no information is lost and all of these things. Some hosts will do the migration for free for you. Some hosts are better at doing a free migration than others. But in general, if the migration is done properly, there's no downtime. There's no issue with SEO. Google used to consider the IP address of the host. That's not really a factor anymore. They used to look at some of your neighbors and that's not going to be a problem because they know there are shared hosts and dedicated IP addresses, which is just the, the numeric address of your domain that doesn't matter. So you can change hosts all you want. And even if you're on a pretty good host right now, you're probably going to need to change it up in at least three to five years because the technology changes. What happens is hosts tend not to update their software all that much, because once they've got a few thousand sites running on a certain software, if they upgrade to a newer version, that may break a lot of stuff at once. Often what you'll need to do is change servers or hosts. You may want to stay with the same hosting company, but you might be like, hey guys, it's time for me to get on a newer, newer setup. And they can actually do the migration for you to a new server and get you the newer, newer software, newer hardware.

Awesome.

So expect to change hosting every three to five years, even if you're in a good hosting situation kind of like.

You would a computer. Like a lot of times people say every five years, or depending on how much you use your computer, every three to five years you're upgrading your computer. You can kind of think of it the same way as you would with a host.

Yep. With hosting, every hosting account is going to have finite resources. So whether you're on a shared host or a virtual private server, or your own dedicated server, where it's literally your own computer in the rack, there's a finite set of resources. You've only got so much memory, so much processor. The question is, what happens when you hit those ceilings? Not all shared hosting is bad. It really depends on how they manage it. Bluehost, their model is, hey, it's $3. We're going to throw you on a server with 5,000 other websites. What they do is they actually cap your resources pretty severely through software. They say, okay, your site's using too many resources and we're going to throttle you. And so what happens with Bluehost and other shared hosts? Hostgator, some of GoDaddy services, a lot of the cheaper hosting, they actually take your site down when it's getting the most traffic. So it's the worst possible time for them to throttle you. Now, it might be not traffic, it might be some plugin is using too many resources, but they will throttle there. So you want to make sure that you're on a host that will help you diagnose and troubleshoot that as well. So if it's really traffic based, then you know, you need to scale up and have more resources. Or if it's a plugin that's causing a problem, you know you need to fix the problem.

We one of the things that we've changed within Food Blogger Pro is we recommend SiteGround as a shared host, more affordable and hosting company. Is there a recommendation that you'd have for hosting and then we can go back to that list of questions that we were going through after this?

Sure. I have a few different hosts. It depends on all these criteria and each person's needs. SiteGround is fine as a shared host. We've talked about this before where it's like they're okay, they're basically doing the same thing bluehost is. They just give you better resources. Not a lot. I still see a lot of sites being throttled on SiteGround but their servers are faster in general. So if you're just starting out, SiteGround is a pretty good place to. And if you have the right caching in place like we talked about before, that can really help a lot. So they've got some WordPress optimized stuff and the price is pretty low. So SiteGround is not a bad place to start. I don't think a site will ever reach its full potential on siteground. You just can outgrow it at some point. My favorite host of the moment actually is if it's time to say names.

Yes, please do.

Big Scoots. They've gained a lot of popularity in the food blog space lately. We started working with them, I think in December or January. We've had a lot of clients move over there. They're a little bit more expensive. I think their plans start at $35 a month. So they're sort of. They're in the managed WordPress space like you were talking about. And so their base price is roughly comparable, I think, to WP Engine with a few bucks. Although as your traffic goes up, their pricing isn't nearly as expensive as WP Engine, so it's much more cost effective with higher traffic. But Big Scoots, they'll do a free migration, so they'll move you under their setup. Their servers are crazy fast and their other features are really good. And I'm looking at my list of questions, wondering if we should go back to those for a second because.

Let's do that. Yeah. And the transition back to that can be. My guess is that they checked all of the boxes for these questions. So they're reliable, they're fast. Number three, what would your customer Service. Got it. And you found that to be true?

I found that to be true. I was just emailing with them this morning. So they're a small company, they're based in the servers I think are in Chicago and the tech team is in Chicago. Scott, their CEO I think is in England. So I'll email them, I'll usually have a response back within two or three minutes and it's usually okay, it's done. I don't know how they do this stuff so fast. It's crazy. So it's like Justin, Jay and Xavier I think are the three guys on the team. Right. And so it's very personal, very personable and they're not the warm fuzzy type. They're very efficient. They're like done, smiley face and that's it.

Right.

But that's all you need.

Yep.

But they are helpful. I've seen them dig into problems that are really weird. They're helping me diagnose another site where they set up a second staging server recently for us because we're trying troubleshoot some weird glitchy thing. So I see them going above and beyond. They also do a lot of speed optimization as part of that. And then we'll work with you to help improve things so they're not afraid to dig in and really help. When you have a question, the, you know, with the larger hosts like Bluehost, GoDaddy, whatever their customer service might be, okay, but it's mass market. You know, you're going to be on chat with somebody, you wait 20 minutes and you know, they might be able to help you if it's something on the hosting end, but if it's something on the WordPress end, they're going to be like, talk to your developer and that's it.

Sure. Yep, got it. So obviously an important thing, customer support, when the issues do come up, and like you had said before, a host can be reliable, but any host is going to have issues. It's just a matter of then do they make themselves available to help with you, help you with those. So reliable, fast, good customer support. What's number four?

Reputation.

So.

I had a friend who had a site with a small hosting company based in Vegas. She trusted them to do backups. She didn't really worry about it. They had all these great for a couple of years, right. Her site just ran one day, they vanished, totally gone, up in smoke. Nothing took her site down because they were gone. There was no contact information, like their website was gone. They were literally just evaporated. Her site was Gone. And she had no backups. Total nightmare. That's obviously the worst case scenario. Right. That doesn't happen often, but is the host really interested in preserving their reputation? That means they're going to try to maintain a high level of customer service. Food bloggers talk, right? Everybody talks. I mean, it's not just at Food Blogger Pro. There's all the Facebook groups and everybody talks. And so there's always this shifting tide of like, well, if this company is starting to be slow, everybody knows it. And so if you have a company that's concerned with maintaining a good reputation, you know they're going to stay, working really hard to maintain that. That ties into the customer service. Right. Often with hosting companies that start out small and awesome, it's because the founders are doing the tech support and then they grow and they have to take on more tech people and the quality can drift downwards. And a couple years later, suddenly it's not really as great as it used to be. And so you want to. It's hard. You have to find a company that's really interested in. In staying small. I had a conversation with Scott from BigScoots. We talked for a couple hours on the phone. Super nice guy. We totally hit it off. And I asked him, I'm like, are you guys planning on selling anytime soon? And he was like, absolutely not. We're in this for the long haul. We want to stick around. We love having a hosting company. This is it. Ten years from now, they might sell. And he didn't make many promises, but his mentality was, we're here to build a great company, not here to, like, make a quick buck.

Yep.

And that was really important to me.

Cool. So number four, reputation. And then number five, the last and.

Final question, price to me, you know, I put this last because ultimately it's, I think, the least important. Unless you're on an extreme. You know, I. I had one client who was on WP Engine and she was paying $1,400 a month for hosting. We moved her to another host called Cloudways, which I still like. We can talk about Cloudways a little bit. We moved her to Cloudways and her hosting cost dropped to $80 a month.

That's a significant savings per year.

More than paid for my services.

Right.

Still save her a ton of money. And her site was faster. WP Engine is really good at a lot of things. Speed, I don't think is one of them. They're okay. They're not the fastest host out there by any means. I think for the amount you're paying, you should be getting a much faster host. That's my personal experience. But they're good at other stuff, so you may decide, well, they're fast enough. I like their customer service. You know, they do have the reputation and they're definitely reliable. You know, I think they get high marks on that reliability factor. Right?

Yep.

So some of it depends on, on your budget, your price sensitivity and where you want to put your money when you're investing in your site. You know, I think nobody wants to overpay, obviously.

Right.

But you do get what you pay for to a point. So as long as you're within that range. That's one of the reasons I like big scoots. I think for the amount of, for the performance and for the customer service and the reliability, you're getting a great host at that price point. Yeah, it's not cheap. I have clients paying them 250 bucks a month. But good customer support is not cheap, especially, let's be honest, American based support. We've got Americans where English is their first language, who, you know, we know they're in Chicago. Like I can track down Justin if I have to. So there's that accountability factor too. And you know, Americans cost more than going offshore and. Yep.

Yeah. So Big scoots. And then you had mentioned, just real quickly, do you want to explain what Cloudways is and maybe how that's different than managed host?

Yep. So Cloudways is kind of a unique hosting company. I started working with them probably four years ago now. I still really like them. My hosts are, are on there. What Cloudways does is they add their own management layer on top of other hosting companies. So there are I think four or five different hosts. So they'll look at like adding their management on top of Linode or DigitalOcean or Amazon Web Services where. So technically they don't own the hardware in the boxes that are doing the web hosting web server part, but they kind of subcontract it out so you can say, hey, I want my host to be hosted on Linode and Linode has servers in Dallas. So you say, hey, spin me up a website in the Dallas data center. And then Cloudways gives you this really nice website where they'll install WordPress, they'll install all that software stack to make it run nice, and then we'll give you a nice interface for managing it. And what I found is it's a really good setup and it's sort of a fresher, newer version of cPanel. CPanel is the setup that a lot of shared hosts use, Bluehost, for example. CPanel isn't bad, but it's been around for 15 years and it's confusing and it works. But it's like all this legacy. You need to know how to use cPanel. And I find Cloudways interface is much more user friendly. Cloudways has 24. 7 chat support. What I found is they're responsive. Generally English is not their first language and sometimes I feel like they're typing my answers into Google Translate and then answering and putting their answers back into Google Translate. And so sometimes what comes back is really hard to decipher.

Sure.

And so we found their hosting is great. They're reliable. Like everything about them is great if you're kind of a technical person. But we were spending a lot of time sort of bridging that customer service gap for our clients where it's like, well, we're not really supposed to be doing hosting, but we're helping you because Cloudways support isn't really getting you what you need. Sure. And I still recommend them as a host, but it depends on the client. Like if we've got a more tech savvy client who's interested in kind of rolling up their sleeves, interested in learning about it, Cloudways is great. But if you're like freaked out even by this conversation, they're not going to be the one for you. And bigscoots is going to do a lot more handholding and just take care of it for you.

Sure. Which is that question number three, that customer support being an important piece of the puzzle. Right.

On the flip side, Cloudways is a lot cheaper. You're not paying for that customer support and they pass that savings on to you. So you can get a server starting at about $12 a month.

There's.

And that's going to be good for like up to 400,000 page views a month. If it's. If it's set up and optimized with a good caching plugin so you can get a lot of traffic out of 12 bucks a month. And when it goes up, it's not a huge jump. You know, WP engine, when you pass their first threshold, it's a big jump and then it goes. It's kind of exponential and Cloudways doesn't kind of take advantage the same way. So it's a really good place to start. So some people might go from siteground to Cloudways to Big Scoots if they're kind of baby stepping up. One of the big advantages Though with bigscoots is they'll do the migration for free. Cloudways will also do the migration for free. But I've seen them botch a couple little details. They forgot to add some redirects and stuff. So I personally don't trust their migration service. They're not bad guys, but they're not as detail oriented, I'd say. Sure.

So obviously there's a lot of stuff involved in this in really important considerations and we talked about, you know, these checklists that you have for making the migration over and the. Obviously I've been through it multiple times. So you know what you're doing and that's because you have your company, NerdPress, and for those that aren't interested in rolling up their sleeves and diving in, but they know that they want to take the Hosting Stuff Seriously, NerdPress is a great place to go to not only help make that kind of tidy things up, but then also to continue working with you on an ongoing basis. So as we wrap up this section, I would be interested to hear you talk a little bit about what NerdPress is and how people can connect with you over there.

Sure. So we add a. We do support and maintenance for WordPress, so we don't do the hosting. Happy to make recommendations. You know, I'm clearly opinionated. Happy to make recommendations for people on where to host, but we bridge the gap of someone who just wants to take pictures and focus on their content and the host. There's three areas of a site. You've got the front end, which is design and aesthetics, which we don't really focus on. Then there's a back end of hosting, which we don't really focus on. If it was a Venn diagram, we'd be the middle circle, where it's more like we're working in a WordPress dashboard to make sure your plugins are running well. We've got backups, we're doing security scans. There's some overlap with some hosts, but we sort of can be a trusted expert to help fill in any of those gaps. And some people call us their webmaster. That's not quite accurate and I feel like we're in the 90s when they say that. But in a sense we are because we're their go to person when they have a question of like, hey, what plugin should I use for this? And your host may not answer that. And a random Facebook group, you're going to get a whole bunch of different opinions of people who have lived experience. Right. So we work with hundreds of food blogs and so you can access our expertise then of seeing patterns across multiple sites and what best practices are. We have three different tiers of plans, so hopefully one for every budget. So if you go to nerdpress.net and click on Get WordPress Help, you can check out our offerings and you can always email us@supportnerdpress.net and choose any questions. And I'll have a different.

Awesome. Raquel, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me on Bjork.

Yeah, we're going to nerd out a little bit because we're going to be talking about tech, all things tech, and specifically WordPress. And you have spent a little bit of time in WordPress just a little bit. Just a little bit from lots of different angles. So for those that maybe haven't listened to a past podcast episode that we've done together, can you tell them a little bit about what your role is? Both doing some of the development for Pinch of Yum for Food Blogger Pro, and then also you spend a lot of time with WP tasty, which is. WP stands for WordPress. So it's like you're getting all these different angles of being able to dive in and look at WordPress. So for those who aren't familiar with what you do, give them a little overview, a little elevator pitch of Raquel and the work that she does.

Yeah, so I think the bulk of my work is wptasty and I'm. And what WP Tasty is is it's a little boutique e commerce site and we sell plugins for WordPress and I manage the creation of those plugins. I'm not doing most of the development for the plugins. We have another developer who does that. But I kind of lead the direction of those plugins and a lot of that involves looking deep into WordPress and what can we do? What should we do? So very familiar with WordPress in that regard. I also have run my own blogs and websites using WordPress. I think it's a fantastic platform. And then another part of my job is doing development for the Pinch of Yum site, which is a WordPress site. And then also for Food Blogger Pro and WP Tasty, the websites themselves. So I've. I've done a lot of WordPress.

Yeah, for sure. So not. Not only are we using WordPress and we actually, for those that follow along closely with the podcast, know that we went through this big process of migrating Food Blogger Pro from a content management system called Expression engine over to WordPress. Our goal is like hey, we love Word WordPress. We think it's an incredible tool. We want to have as many of the. As much as possible, we want to be running on that. So Pinch of Yum has ever since we switched over from Tumblr way back in the day, WP Tasty as a site, the way that it runs the when we publish content runs on WordPress. And like you said, Food Blogger Pro, we recently did the migration for that and then kind of the inception part of it is we are creating tools with WPT for other people who are running on WordPress. So we're big believers in WordPress. And my question to you is why? Like, what is the reason why WordPress is so great? And not only why do we use it, but why do we recommend other bloggers to use it? What is it about it that is so great?

In my opinion, what is great about WordPress is the community around it. From a technology and code standpoint, it's probably not the best out there, it's certainly not the fastest out there, but you can have some sort of platform that's extremely fast and extremely technologically advanced. But if no one's using it, then you have to do everything yourself. And for most people who are running websites, they don't have development teams behind them. They don't have the ability to create. For instance, like say you want an Instagram widget on your site that shows your recent Instagram posts. The vast majority of people do not have the tools and skills to build that kind of thing. So what's nice about WordPress is it powers over 30% of the Internet. It's huge. It's absolutely huge. And that means there's a huge community and there are guaranteed other people out there who have the same wants and desires that you do for your website. And there are a lot of people who do have the skills to create those things. And WordPress, at its core, if you'll pardon the pun, is open source tech joke.

I love that nerding out on the tech joke.

WordPress is open source and free. And so much of the tools that are created for WordPress are also open source and free. And so it's this really awesome community. You can find what you need, you can do what you need to do. It's well supported. It, you know, if you're having a problem, then someone else is also having that problem. It's likely answered somewhere on the Internet. It's just having that huge ecosystem is such a big benefit of using WordPress, and that was a problem. We ran into with Expression Engine. Expression Engine was. They had a great team behind it. It was a great cms, but it didn't have the community that we needed in order to not necessarily easily support Food Blogger Pro, but easier than it was. So moving to WordPress has really opened up a world of possibilities for us.

Yeah, it's interesting when you were talking about that, I'm not a car person, but I feel like every once in a while I'll use a car analogy on this, on, on. On the podcast. And I know aj, your husband. No, he's like the ultimate car person. So if any of these car analogies are off, just please don't share. I know AJ is a huge Food Blogger Pro podcast guest listener, but you can tell not to listen. But I feel like the analogy is kind of like, you know, a Honda Civic or a really awesome Rolls Royce, and it's like, okay, Rolls Royce, like, that's going to be this level of a car where maybe it's more luxury, maybe it's faster. There are versions of that that exist on the web, but if you have a Honda Civic, like, you can pretty much take it anywhere and you can get it fixed or if the hood, you can replace it.

So, yeah, I have a friend, he bought a Porsche Cayenne, and originally it was like 120k. He bought it used for 16k. I mean, someone who bought that car originally lost $104,000 on it and, you know, it blew a head gasket or something. Also, I'm not a car expert, so someone who's listening who is a car expert is gonna say that I'm saying something wrong. But he ended up spending like $15,000 to fix the car, and he did all the work himself. And so it probably would have been like $30,000, you know, but if something like that had happened to your standard Honda Civic, like you're saying, it would have been super cheap and easy, but because it was a Porsche and a little more rare and you know, that's exactly right, it's so much harder to get the work done that you need to do because it's not everywhere. So that's actually a great analogy. All that to say was, your analogy was very good.

You can find the right parts that you need. You can find people to work on it. All of those things are one of the reasons why WordPress is so great and it's actively maintained. So if there are issues that come up, you know, that hopefully relatively quickly, those will be addressed. So one of the things that's often confusing about WordPress is you had mentioned it being open source, which means that, you know, this code is available for anybody to use and they can use it for free. But there's two different versions of WordPress and. Or maybe that's not the right way to describe it. There's two different ways that you can use it. There's WordPress.com and then there's the WordPress.org version. And those are different. They work differently for bloggers. Can you explain the difference between those and which ones do we use and generally recommend?

Yeah. So at the very base level, they're both running the same code. They're both running WordPress. When you use WordPress.com, you're buying a subscription. And the WordPress.com organization, which is automatic, is the name of the company they are. What you're paying for is hosting, number one. So basically your website has to live somewhere. So you, you're paying them to host your website on a server and serve it up when someone enters the domain into their web browser. And then you're also paying for support for the hosting, but also for general WordPress problems. Part of what they do at Automattic also is they kind of put some controls around what you can do. So for instance, you can only download some plugins. You have to have a certain plan if you want to upload your own premium plugins. There are certain things that they add on top of WordPress Core, and that's all bundled together in WordPress.com. if you're using WordPress.org, what that is is it's just the core code for WordPress. And then you choose your own host where you want to host it, and then you have a lot more freedom with what you can do with it, because it's not in the WordPress.com ecosystem. There's no one putting the controls around what you can do. Some hosts do have blacklists and stuff for certain plugins that they don't want you using, but they're generally a lot more flexible than if you were to go with WordPress.com so basically they're all running the same WordPress, but WordPress.com has a bunch of different things on top of it. Whereas WordPress.org is a lot more open. And so we use WordPress.org because we want to choose the host that we're using. And it's also more free in terms of running advertisements using the plugins that you want. And we want that freedom for our websites, so that's why we use our own hosted WordPress.org Got it.

It's interesting to think about it. Some people might think, hey, that's really awesome WordPress.com because there's these additional things. Everybody, everything is baked in, the hosting is taken care of. I don't need to do a lot of the work, which is 100% true. But like you said, you lose some, some of the flexibility. There's, there's things that you can't do, there's plugins you maybe can't install or. I don't know how this currently works, but I know at a certain point they had restrictions on advertising that you could run. So there's a lot of restrictions that came along with it. But the benefit, hey, it works really well and you don't have to do a lot of the maintenance, but then you're restricted on the implementation side of things. And there's a friend that I have kind of a mentor that I meet with occasionally and he was thinking of starting a blog and I thought through it and he asked me like, how should I go about doing this? I said, Well, I think WordPress.com is going to be the best solution for you because his goal is essentially to put publish content and for people to read it. And he doesn't want to learn about hosting, he doesn't want to have any type of, you know, plugin management or anything like that. And all that he wants to do is publish content and have people read it. But if somebody came to me and said, hey, I want to start a blog and I want to maybe monetize it, create ads, I want to have tons of flexibility with what I implement, the plugins that I use, like you said, then we'd steer them towards WordPress.org because of that, that flexibility in how you can handle that. And with that you need to find a host, but that's going to give you the flexibility that you need that you had talked about. So one of the things that you had mentioned, Raquel, is that with doing your own self hosted WordPress installation, you can, you can add in any of the plugins that you want. And I know for a lot of people who have been using WordPress for a long time, they're like, oh yeah, plugins, we know what that is. But for those who are, who aren't familiar, can you talk about what a plugin is and why it's beneficial to have the flexibility to install the plugins you want?

Yeah. So plugins are little bits of software that extend the functionality beyond what WordPress Core offers. And if we're going with the car analogy, it's kind of like a GPS system in your car. So the whole car functions without the GPS system. But if you want navigation instructions while you're driving, then that head unit can be like a plugin again, if you'll pardon the pun.

You could plug it in, love it.

You can plug it in and get your, you know, that extended functionality for your car. And WordPress plugins are just exactly that. WordPress Core provides a core set of functionalities that you can build a website, fully functional website with WordPress core with no extra plugins. But plugins allow you to do extra things, such as a recipe plugin for instance, allows you to publish recipes and create the schema markup for that. Or some sort of Instagram widget plugin allows you to, to show Instagram posts in your sidebar or footer or wherever you want. So there are infinite different types of plugins, but that's just the, the general gist of them. They give you extra functionality.

Yeah, it's actually exactly how I describe WP Tasty when people ask about what it is. So just recently one of my parents friends wrote like, hey, what is, can you tell us what it is, what you do? And it's like, oh, pinch of yum. Like we describe it kind of as like a recipe magazine online food blogger Pro. We talk about people who publish recipe content online. It's a community for them. WP Tasty is a little bit hard to describe for people who aren't familiar with the web. But how I describe it is I say it's kind of like aftermarket parts for your car, except for websites. And I say, I use that exact same analogy where I say it's kind of like if you wanted to, you know, swap out your muffler or if you wanted to get tinted windows, like you get a stock Honda Civic and then that's WordPress Core, but the very base model, there's a high probability that there are things that you'd want to add on and change and tweak to make it your own and to make it fit for your what you want. And a WordPress site is the same where you get a stock version of it, but you're going to want to tweak it to exactly how, how you're going to use that installation of WordPress and whether that be free plugins or premium plugins, you're going to add these things on or themes and you're going to kind of Customize it and change it to fit exactly what you want. So one of the questions that I have for you is for people who are starting, that's the theme of this podcast. There's lots of different options and places that they can choose to go to get those aftermarket parts. Wptasty as an example, is a premium only plugin site. Where else can people go to get plugins to get themes? And why is wptasty premium only? You can talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. So the WordPress plugin repository is probably the first place you'll go when you're looking for a plugin and you just kind of type in what you're looking for and search, look through the search results and see if there's something that matches, which chances are there is. And so that's usually the first place people will look. Everything on the WordPress plugin repository is free. You can't put a premium plugin on there. So if you find something on there that you want to use, then you can use it for free with, you know, you don't have to pay any money, you don't have to jump through any hoops or anything. Which is really nice that people, you know, put those plugins out there and they're willing, sometimes willing to support them for free. And then there are things called premium plugins and you won't find those on the WordPress plugin repository because they're not free. They come at a premium. Usually depending on the plugin, somewhere between 10 to $300 a year would be a general range. And the reason that those plugins exist is because people dedicate a lot of time to creating this software and they need to make a living and they need to support their families. That is how people are able to create really good software for WordPress US, but also, you know, be able to make a living. So those aren't free. And the benefit of using a premium plugin is usually support and extra features. And sometimes free plugins will have good support, but oftentimes free plugins that have good support, they also have premium versions of those plugins that are available that have extended functionality and better support. And usually they use the free plugins as a kind of segue to get people into the product and then upgrade them to the premium version. So something like Yoast SEO does that. They have their premium plugin that supports their business, but they also offer the free one that, you know, most people use. So, so yeah, that's the difference between premium and, and free plugins.

Yeah. It's, it's interesting how important good support is. That's one of the things that we've learned and it is it. If you have something that is free, it's really hard to dedicate a level of support that you'd want to, at least for us, the level of support that we would want, which is why we have this kind of segmented. It's only. We don't have any of the plugins for WP tasty on the WordPress repository. We only have them on wptasty.com but that's not to say that you know when you're first getting started that you can't experiment and see like, okay, can I, can I figure out what I need to get up and running in the most affordable version possible? And if you have a budget, my encouragement to you would be to figure out ways to invest in your blog, in your website. And the great thing about a website is that it's really an affordable business to start. It's not super expensive, especially when you compare it against something that would be a traditional brick and mortar retail business. Like, that's really expensive. I know you have a history of working at a bike shop and it's like, man, start a bike shop. There's a lot of money that goes into that.

There is a lot of money to inventory your bike.

Check. And with a business that is a website, there's a lot of hustle, there's a lot of time, there's a lot of energy. But I would encourage you to dedicate a budget to do things right, to invest in it, but take some time, maybe in the early stages to see if you like it, maybe to you're trying just publishing some content to get into a rhythm, say, hey, is this something that I actually like and actually enjoy and that doesn't cost anything in those early stages. So let's say, Raquel, somebody's interested in learning a little bit more about WordPress. I know for you it's been really fun to see your transition as you've really dug into this and been intentional about learning and have become a really skilled developer and have these insights around WordPress. And so you've gone through that process. What would that be like for somebody else that wants to learn a little bit more about it? They want to do WordPress pun jokes on a podcast, like, how do they get started learning about WordPress in the same way that you did?

Oh, man, start building websites, really just come up with some sort of website that you want to build and go from There, that's honestly how I got to where I am. There are some courses online. I love courses, online courses and I think they're great. But there's no learning quite like just doing it. So yeah, if you think you're interested in WordPress development, if you have a website already, tinker around with it. I mean, I started with, I found, I somehow found my site style sheet and then, you know, figured out how to change some colors here and there and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever and just start tinkering and learning and, and yeah, just go with it. I don't really have any much better advice.

It's great. And that's so often what you hear with anybody that talks about anything development related, programming, development, whatever you want to call it. So much of it is just doing it. You can take courses, you can take classes, but if you're not actually putting your hands on the keyboard and jumping in and tweaking and changing and experimenting, then it's going to be really hard to learn. So I think that's great advice.

Yeah. And that's Another benefit of WordPress is that like I said, there's someone out there who has had that problem before who's wanted to solve that problem. And Googling will get you a long ways with doing anything for WordPress.

That's great. Raquel, if people want to connect with you, if they want to reach out, if they want to follow along with what you're doing on any of the sites. WPTasty, for instance, what's the best way to do that?

Yeah, you can email me@raquelptasty.com and I can answer any questions there or my personal website is raquelmsmith.com Love it.

Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast and sharing a little bit about WordPress.

Yeah, thanks Bjork.

Sam.