Kayla I. Shown-Dean's Blog, page 31

Write and Publish Your Newsletter on WordPress.com

Newsletters have become one of the most powerful and popular ways to reach audiences directly with your content. What you might not know is that WordPress.com has built-in features to send new posts out as an email newsletter – automatically. We’re proud to power tens of millions of emails from WordPress.com sites every day, keeping readers up to date with the latest stories from their favorite creators. 

We’re introducing WordPress.com Newsletter – with its own dedicated theme – to make it even easier to get up and running without going through the full website-building process. Newsletter gives you a place to write and build an audience, with the flexibility of WordPress under the hood to grow in many different directions.

The simplicity of a newsletter. The power of WordPress.

One of the things that sets Newsletter apart is having the power and tools of WordPress.com to hand when it comes to personalizing and growing your newsletter. 

With WordPress.com Newsletter you can:

Add unlimited email subscribersImport subscribers from other platformsLaunch with a beautiful, ready-made theme or customize every detail with a myriad of Block Patterns Stylize your newsletter with a background image, site icon, and accent color Schedule email publishingMonetize your site (stay tuned for more paid subscription features)Use a free .blog subdomain or connect a custom domain with one of our paid plansPublish on the go with Post by Email – making writing a newsletter as simple as sending an email Connect directly with your audience.

Whether you’re publishing brilliantly-crafted essays, updates for friends and family, or running a flash sale for your store, having a direct connection with your audience can make all the difference. 

Newsletters have become an incredibly popular way to reach your followers through their email inboxes. Email newsletter engagement is that much higher than on social channels, with a much better shot of your readers clicking through to your site.

Start a Newsletter from scratch.

If you’re thinking about starting from scratch, we’ve added a streamlined flow to create your own beautiful newsletter site in minutes. 

Choose an accent color, add a logo, pencil in a quick description, give your newsletter a name, and you’re ready to start writing your first post.

Get Started Add a Newsletter to your existing site.

If you already have a WordPress.com website, it’s pretty simple to let your audience subscribe to it as a newsletter. 

Add a Subscribe Block or one of our Newsletter Subscription Patterns to your site, and you’re done. Readers who subscribe by adding their email address will be notified whenever you publish new posts. If you need a little more help getting set up, check out our support guide to get started. 

And if you’d rather make a fresh newsletter – separate from your existing site – you can get started here. 

Help shape what comes next.

Just as WordPress.com continues to evolve, we’re also progressing the WordPress.com Newsletter experience. We’ll continue to roll out additional features to help you connect with your readers through newsletters. Give WordPress.com Newsletter a try and let us know what you think! 

Get Started

Maximize Your Site’s Performance by Choosing Your Primary Data Center

Do you want even more control over how your site is hosted? We’re excited to add a new feature to our hosting toolbox: you can now choose your primary data center when enabling hosting features on your WordPress.com Business site.

While all sites on WordPress.com benefit from high-frequency CPUs, automatic data center failover, and worry-free burst scaling, selecting your primary data center gives you the ability to keep your content closer to your audience. 

Choose Your Primary Data Center

By default, all WordPress.com sites are added to the optimal data center. If your audience is primarily in a specific region, you can maximize performance by picking the data center in that region.

To select a primary data center, click on “Choose a data center instead” when visiting Settings > Hosting Configuration and activating hosting features. Once you do so, you’ll be able to select your preferred primary data center.

WordPress.com has four primary data centers to choose from — with more on the way: US West, US Central, US East, EU West. We also operate over 20 secondary data centers across six continents. Our platform automatically stores and serves your content from the closest server to your users. By selecting a primary data center, you can shorten the distance your content has to travel.  

Our Data Center Secret Sauce

Many hosting providers resell existing solutions built for hosting a variety of web applications. We built our hosting for WordPress, and running our own data centers is the “secret sauce” that makes our sites so fast.

The key ingredients to our secret sauce: 

High-Frequency CPUs. We use high-frequency CPUs to process WordPress and WooCommerce-specific queries at incredible speeds. Other hosts use lower performance CPUs and charge extra for better CPUs, if they’re even available.  Automatic Data Center Failover. In addition to backups, every WordPress.com site is replicated in real-time to a second data center in a different region. Under the hood, we use ZFS to provide snapshots and also block-based replication. This unique, geo-redundant architecture helps ensure your site operates with maximum uptime.Worry-Free Burst Scaling. WordPress.com runs an in-house PHP build that integrates with our resource management tools and monitoring. It even allows for configurations to be changed dynamically on a per-request basis. Any WordPress.com site can instantly scale to over 100 PHP workers if the need arises.

Custom data centers are just one of the many reasons why WordPress.com is the best managed WordPress hosting on the planet.

Host Your Next Site on WordPress.com

Building on our multi-site management and SSH access, the primary data center picker is yet another reason to host on WordPress.com. Our goal is to make WordPress.com an enjoyable, indispensable part of your workflow.

What other features would you like to see available? How could we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Feel free to leave a comment or contact our friendly support.

State of the Word 2022

It’s almost time for State of the Word 2022! Join us for this live stream event on December 15th at 1pm ET.

State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and the future of open source. Expect this and more in this year’s edition.

This year’s event will take place in person in New York City and live-streamed via various WordPress.org social media platforms. 

Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2022, the latest WordPress releases, Site Editor advancements, and a return to in-person events around the globe, among other topics.

How to Watch Live

What: State of the Word 2022

When: December 15, 2022, 1–2:30 P.M. EST (18–19:30 UTC)

How: The live stream will be embedded in this post at the time of the event and will also be available through the WordPress YouTube channel. Additionally, there are a number of locally organized watch parties happening around the world if you’d like to watch it in the company of other WordPressers.

Don’t worry, we’ll post the recorded event early next week if you aren’t able to catch it live.

A Redesigned Reader Experience

If you’ve recently visited the WordPress.com Reader, you may have noticed some aesthetic improvements. Today we’re giving you a quick visual tour of those changes and inviting you to check out our new and improved Reader if it’s been a while. Let’s jump in!

Streamlined Consistency

Each of the individual cards within the reader have been redesigned to better highlight the content you’re sharing with your audience. Images and videos have been enlarged, padding and margins have been improved, and the general layout has been adjusted across all content types to provide a consistent reading experience.

Updated Layouts

A number of the layouts within the WordPress.com reader have been streamlined on desktop and mobile web to make browsing and discovering new content easier.

Grid Aligned

You might not notice this at first glance, but a consistent grid has been applied to the entire layout to make it easier for your eyes to scan content and scroll through your entire feed.

First of Many Improvements

This is the first of many improvements that we hope to make to the reader over the next year. If you have additional feedback on improvements we might make, please share them in the comments below and stay tuned for additional updates.

Take me to the Reader!

Welcome Back, Bloganuary!

As 2022 comes to a close, we at WordPress.com are preparing to ring in the new year. As we get ready to say goodbye to 2022, we’re thinking about how quickly time has flown by this past year. 

Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics in February, the James Webb Space Telescope started transmitting jaw-droppingly beautiful photos back to us on Earth, and the incredibly powerful Site Editor launched for WordPress sites!

With 2023 just around the corner, so too comes Bloganuary! Bloganuary is a writing challenge for everyone, whether you’re new to blogging, rediscovering your love of blogging, or blogging is your livelihood — we want all of you to join us.

Bloganuary is a month-long blogging challenge in January, where you’ll receive a daily writing prompt to inspire you to publish a post on your blog. You can respond to the prompts in any way you like: a story, a picture, a poem, a drawing, a recipe, or even a song. Anything goes!

By being a part of Bloganuary, you’ll join a global network of bloggers creating and/or strengthening solid writing habits. You’ll get to know fellow participants on the Bloganuary community site, where you can share tips, learn from each other, find a new audience for your blog, and make new blogging friends.

To show others what you’ll be up to in January and encourage them to join in the Bloganuary fun, here’s a badge you can add to your blog (right-click and save/download to your computer):

Join the Bloganuary challenge, stay motivated, and start the new year off on the write track!

Sign me up

Learn more

If you’d prefer to journal privately instead of blog publicly, check out the Day One app.

Give the Gift of WordPress.com!

For a holiday gift that’s absolutely brimming with possibility, look no further than our brand new feature which allows any reader to gift a WordPress.com subscription renewal to their favorite website.  

As a website owner, this is a way to allow your most ardent fans to show their gratitude for all the hard work you’ve put into your passion project over the years. 

As a reader, this is a way to show a bit of thanks to your favorite creators — be they bloggers, artists, small business owners, or even your pesky-but-loveable little brother who’s finally trying to give his site some attention. 

This feature will be displayed as a black banner across the top of the site, from which readers will be able to click “Gift” and then be taken right to a checkout page. 

Easy as that!

As of today, we’ve rolled out this feature to a small number of sites, but that number will be growing every day as we continue to test and iterate. For now, gifting is available on sites that are within 54 days of their annual subscription expiration date or within 5 days of their monthly expiration date. Soon, however, it will be available much more widely.

How to activate the gifting banner   

You can activate this new feature in about 15 seconds: 

From your admin dashboard, navigate to General Settings (Settings → General)Scroll down, just a bit, to the “Accept a gift subscription” section Click the toggle to accept gifts Click “Save settings”   

After you’ve activated the banner, be sure to spread the word by writing a post about how your readers can help you out in a brand new way!  

A few more important details

Gifting applies to whichever plan the website is currently on. For example: a subscription gift for a site on a 1-year plan will be for the entire amount of a 1-year plan renewal; a gift to a site on a monthly plan will be in the amount of 1 month on their current plan tier. (Note that gifts are made in the site owner’s currency.) 

Once a gift is paid for, both the website owner and the person who gave the gift will receive an email confirmation. 

You can find even more nuts and bolts here. 

Activate gifting

We Heard You Wanted to Add SSH Keys

In September 2022, we released SSH for Business and eCommerce sites. SSH (secure shell protocol) allows you to access your site from the command line and use tools such as WP-CLI to manage your site, plugins, users, and more.

Our users loved the feature — but they wanted more. So we’re pleased to announce that we’ve added the ability to add SSH keys to your account to make it even easier to connect to your site. Read on to get started.

How to Setup and Use Your SSH KeyCopy your public SSH key to your clipboard.From your WordPress.com dashboard, go to My Profile.On the My Profile page, click on Security.Click on the SSH Key option available in the Security Checklist.Paste your SSH Key to the Public SSH Key field.Click on the Save SSH Key button.Select the site you wish to connect from the My Sites option.From your dashboard, go to Settings → Hosting Configuration.Under the SSH Access section, use the SSH Keys field to select the desired key.Click on the Attach SSH Key to Site button.

Once your SSH key is attached to the site, you can use it when authenticating over SSH.

Detailed instructions on how to add an SSH key to your account are available now in WordPress.com Support.

Build Your Next Site on WordPress.com

Adding SSH keys is yet another way of integrating WordPress.com with your preferred workflow, whether you’re just starting out or are an experienced command-line superstar.

What else would you like to see in your terminal? How can we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Leave us a note or submit your ideas using our short feature request form!

Black Friday: All of Our Deals in One Spot

You’re already familiar with WordPress.com, but did you know we’re part of a larger family of amazing products? Automattic provides a range of online solutions, from ecommerce shops to course-creation software to audience survey tools, and much, much more. No matter what’s on your website wishlist this year, we’ve got you covered.   

After all, the best Black Friday deal isn’t a disposable gadget or a trendy clothing item; it’s something that will help you grow, and will grow along with you. Your website isn’t just a website — it’s the foundation for everything you hope to achieve.

Below you’ll find all the deals we’re offering across our online ecosystem.     

WordPress.com: 40% off 2-year plans 

Best-in-class WordPress hosting. Unparalleled support. All the SEO, security, and design features you need, built right in. For a limited time, get 40% off any new 2-year plan — just use the code blackfriday2022 at checkout to take advantage of this discount. (Be sure you’ve selected the “Two year” option from the dropdown menu on the checkout page.)

Get 40% off WordPress.com! Built By WordPress.com: Free 1-year plan

Whether you want to build an online store or completely redesign your website, Built By WordPress.com is here for you. Click on the link below to tell us more about your project or business. Don’t forget to mention “Black Friday 2022” to get the first year on our Business plan for free! 

Let us build your site! Built By WordPress.com Express: 30% off 

No need to stress the details: Our WordPress experts can build your site for you from the ground up. Take 30% off a website build and get your site launched in 4 business days or less. Use the code blackfriday22 at checkout.

Get 30% off! Domains: Up to 90% off popular extensions 

Want a new domain? Enjoy incredible savings of 50% to 90% off for the first year. We have many great extensions to choose from, all priced at $5 USD or below for Black Friday. 

Choose from .blog, .me, .art, .store, .link, .click, .online, .shop, .life, .live, .world, .guru, .today, .info, .pro, .agency, .boutique, .directory, .run, .solutions, .wtf, and many more!

Get your domain today! WooCommerce: 40% off all themes and extensions 

Now’s the perfect time to launch or level up the online store of your dreams. With 40% off all WooCommerce themes and extensions, you can turn your WordPress site into a powerful platform for ecommerce. 

Start selling! Jetpack: 20% off all products and bundles 

There’s never been a better time to secure your website with real-time backups, automated malware scanning, and powerful spam protection. This weekend, get 20% off all Jetpack products and bundles. 

Get 20% off Jetpack!

Fun fact: If you’re a WordPress.com customer, Jetpack is already built into your site at no additional cost!  

Crowd Signal: 50% off plans and upgrades 

Gather feedback and insights from your customers with polls, surveys, feedback buttons, quizzes, and more. Get 50% off new plans and plan upgrades through Monday. 

Get 50% off Crowd Signal! Sensei: 40% off all products 

Create and sell courses that would make your favorite teacher proud. Get 40% off all Sensei products, including Interactive Blocks, Sensei Pro, and Sensei Agency.

Get 40% off Sensei! WP Job Manager: 30% off

A job board plugin like no other. Get our Add-on Bundle for 30% off to collect resumes, promote job listings, and more.

Get 30% off WP Job Manager!

New Patterns: Subscriptions, Link in Bio, Wireframes, and More

Have you used Patterns on your site yet? 

These prebuilt, customizable templates combine professionally-designed blocks for specific uses like stylized quotes, contact page layouts, and product listings. But that’s just the beginning. All told, we have more than 275+ Patterns you can insert into your pages and posts at the press of a button.

If you’ve never used Patterns before, they’re like any other site element: Access them by hitting the “+” button at the top left of the page or post you’re working on, then selecting the “Patterns” tab. You can also click on the “Explore” button to bring up our entire library of Patterns, organized by category. 

Think of them as sophisticated slices of web design for your posts and pages. You can drop them in as-is, or customize them to your liking. Even better, we’re adding more all the time.

Here are just a few of the most recent arrivals to the Pattern library.

Newsletter Subscriptions

WordPress.com has newsletter capabilities built right in. All you need to do is add a Subscribe Block! Readers who enter their email address will get notified when you publish new posts. To make those Subscribe Blocks look a bit jazzier, we’ve added a number of newsletter-focused patterns to our library.

Find these and more in the “Newsletter” category. Link in Bio

We’ve added a handful of visually stunning Patterns for your link-in-bio pages and sites. Pick one, customize as desired, add your links, and you’ve got a brand new way to let your readers know what’s new.

Find these and more in the “Link in Bio” category. Wireframes

Wireframe patterns are those that have less of a design element built-in and allow you to start with a blank slate. Your imagination can run wild this collection of patterns. (Remember, though, every pattern is fully customizable.)

Find these and more in the “Wireframe” category. Explore All of Our Patterns!

Even if you don’t have a specific need in mind, take a look around the full Patterns library. We have options for featured products, menus, events, coupons, footers, and more.

Patterns can be an incredibly useful resource for your design toolbox. Customize, experiment, and turn inspiration into eye-catching reality.

If you need help with Patterns, check out our more detailed guide. 

And be sure to let us know in the comments how you’ve used Patterns on your site and any ideas you have for new ones. We’re always working on more — so stay tuned!

Embed a Pocket Casts Player in Seconds With Our New Block

The library of blocks in the WordPress editor is always growing, providing websites with fresh and intriguing features on a regular basis. Our most recent update will appeal to podcasters, bloggers and Pocket Casts fans alike and we are thrilled to share it with you today.

Spread the word about your favorite podcasts and episodes with the Pocket Casts block

Are you a podcaster? Add the Pocket Casts block to any post or page on your website to let people know about your passion project and to embed the most recent episodes of your podcast. If you’re an avid listener but haven’t started your own podcast (yet, at least), you can now embed episodes and shows by other people within your own writing so that readers may listen to them without ever leaving your website.

You won’t need any special codes or embed URLs once you select the Pocket Casts block from the editor’s list of possible blocks. You will simply need to provide the episode’s or podcast’s URL.

Here’s what the Pocket Casts player will look like on your site — the example below features the latest episode on the Distributed podcast, hosted by Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg:

We truly hope you give the Pocket Casts block (and app) a try. Please comment below if you have any questions or would like to provide a link to a post where you’ve already used it.