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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the PublishPress Podcast. I'm Steve Burge And on this podcast, we interview people who use WordPress as it's intended, as a world class publishing platform. And today, I'm talking with Andrew Wilder from NerdPress and he uses WordPress for world class bloggers. Nerd Press focuses on people in particular niches such as food bloggers, travel bloggers, DIY bloggers, so on, and helps them succeed.
Steve Burge:Some of these companies are well, they're not just mom and pop operations anymore, not just individual bloggers. They are multimedia operations with YouTube channels, kitchens in their home, with big budgets, with big newsletters, with big fan bases. And Andrew supports bloggers like that who are really pushing WordPress to the limit. And I talked to him about those niches, about what those successful bloggers have done to grow so big. I think you're really gonna enjoy this conversation.
Steve Burge:Hey, Andrew. Welcome to the PublishPress Podcast.
Andrew Wilder:Hello. Glad to be here.
Steve Burge:Hey. So, Andrew, you are a nerd, or at least you you run a company called Nerd Press?
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. I'm I'm I was a nerd in high school, so I guess I'm still a nerd. Yeah. My company is called Nerd Press.
Steve Burge:We wouldn't be on a WordPress podcast talking about techy things if if we weren't nerds. Right?
Andrew Wilder:Yep. I was actually when we came up with the name, I was a little hesitant because I was like, nerd's kinda problematic. But nerds are taking over the world. And, like, I you know, we wanna take ownership of the word. So, yeah, I'm a proud nerd now.
Steve Burge:Software is eating the world. Nerds are eating the world. Exactly. So the name NerdPress kind of hints at what you do, but what exactly does NerdPress do?
Andrew Wilder:Sure. So we provide WordPress support and maintenance, or I should say maintenance and support for WordPress websites. And we work with hundreds of independent publishers and content creators.
Steve Burge:Oh, okay. Because there's there's a lot of WordPress maintenance companies out there. People that will take your website and for 50 or a hundred bucks a month will run the updates, make sure your plugins are not conflicting with each other, do some some basic minimum checks on your site. And there's a lot of maintenance options out there. But over at Nerd Press, you do things a little differently.
Steve Burge:You you focus in particular on publishers and bloggers?
Andrew Wilder:Yes. And I kinda like to say we do things the hard way. Actually, for better or worse, we don't automate everything. For example, the way we run updates, we have a dedicated team of four people who are all based in The US who are our updates team. And they when they run updates, they run the updates on the site.
Andrew Wilder:They look at the site before and after and make sure nothing broke. And then if something broke, they'll roll it back or they'll fix it or they'll address it in some way. Whereas most of the companies out there, you know, they automate everything, and you only find out something broke later. And particularly with our clients, you can't just automate everything because they're generally very high traffic and very complicated websites. You know, we're not working with too many portfolio sites.
Andrew Wilder:We're working with very active blogs and ecommerce sites.
Steve Burge:Also, you don't even have an automated visual checker tool. People are manually checking to make sure that the updates ran correctly and things are still working.
Andrew Wilder:We've experimented with visual regression testing in the past. We were using Staging Pilot many years ago, and and then they were bought by Pantheon. We always had problems particularly because our client sites run a lot of ads. And so that makes the regression testing, the visual comparison, very difficult. We are doing some experimentation right now with WP remotes testing.
Andrew Wilder:We actually just moved to their platform to help us manage it, manage things. And they have our testing tool. So that's something we're gonna be doing in the coming months is like, hey, let's see how it's coming along. And if we can utilize it, we definitely want to, but we're still going to supervise the updates no matter what because we wanna be able to have eyes on the site.
Steve Burge:Yeah. There was a a very talented developer I knew several years ago who probably introduced me to AI for the first time. This is probably six, seven years ago, and he was trying to solve the the visual regression problem using some some some of the AI that was available at that time trying to automatically compare before and after and then use AI to check for differences like an ad change or maybe a change in a related post's block, which maybe has just been updated with a new post, it's a difficult problem. And so perhaps, really, the only 100% guaranteed solution is to have someone manually check them.
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. I think I'm all for using tools, but AI isn't replacing humans completely yet. It we're not there yet. The other thing that we do is we read change logs before we run updates. Right?
Andrew Wilder:Tina, our updates team leader, she looks at the change log. She decides, hey. This update looks really big. Maybe we'll wait a few more days, make sure there are no new bugs. And if we have a problem with an update, we'll stop updating that plugin on all of our client sites until we can figure out the resolution.
Andrew Wilder:So it sort of provides all your clients with a type of herd immunity. So if, you know, if we've got a hundred sites to update a specific plugin only and that plugin has a problem, you know, maybe one of those sites will have that issue. The other 99 will hold off, wait till the problem's figured out, whether it's a point release or whatever it is. And so there's a layer of protection there. And I think that would be very hard to automate that across sort of the whole collection of sites that we manage.
Steve Burge:Oh, so that's how you manage to keep four people busy just on updates because they're doing all the manual checks. If something wrong something goes wrong, then they stop, and all the other sites have to wait. That's a lot of processes.
Andrew Wilder:Yes. We you know, we're working on these high traffic sites, and we're we've we've actually got an internal knowledge based card card called how to be a safe cowboy. Like, we do a lot of cowboy coding, as it were. Okay. Because we it's some of these sites are also very large.
Andrew Wilder:They might be ten, twenty, 30 gigabytes of images because they've been running for many years. So like we can't just create a staging site on a whim, test it, and then push it back. Like And so we've found it's actually better for us to work on sites live most of the time. If it's a big change that we need to test something, we might do it on staging. But for most things, we're better off just doing it live and then fixing it very quickly.
Steve Burge:Hence the name cowboy.
Andrew Wilder:Giddy up.
Steve Burge:So do you mind introducing the the kind of publishers you work with then? What kind of site has 300 megabytes of images?
Andrew Wilder:So most of our clients are food bloggers, and we work with also a lot of travel bloggers and DIY, crafting, parenting. We do work with a number of WooCommerce sites as well. But most are independent publishers, and we're working directly with a site owner. Or maybe they have a small team, and and, you they have a few authors, and they're they're publishing regularly. Some of them may have been publishing for a couple of years.
Andrew Wilder:Some of them may have been some of the original publishers. You know, some of our clients go back to, I don't know, 02/2005. So we we develop develop a long term relationship with our clients. We really get to know them and get to know their sites. And we really make it very personal for us.
Andrew Wilder:So we we like to think of of it more as a partner, you know, rather than a, like, rather than a vendor. We we try to be more of a partner than a vendor, I guess, is the best way to put it.
Steve Burge:Almost kind of becoming part of their team. I think there's a word for that I'm I'm missing, but you you provide a good number of hours each week as part of like, maybe joining their Slack channels or having quite a quite a deep relationship with the customers?
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. So we we have a few different tiers of support. And actually, when I so to back up for a second, I started I started working on websites in 1998 originally, but I started my my own food blog in 2010.
Steve Burge:And Oh, okay.
Andrew Wilder:That's that's why we kind of fell into the food blogging space. It was I was a food blogger.
Steve Burge:What was your food blog?
Andrew Wilder:Oh, it's called Eating Rules.
Steve Burge:Oh, it still is?
Andrew Wilder:Eating Rules, man. That's how you you'll remember it now. Yes. Still up in lie online. It is sadly neglected, so please don't go there.
Andrew Wilder:I mean, sure, go there, but don't don't judge me. I've been so busy with Nerd Press that I just haven't been updating it lately. But but, yeah, I started my food blog in 2010, and I also got really involved in the Food Bloggers Los Angeles community. And we would have actually monthly meetups where we'd have a potluck and talk about a topping topic of of the month. And
Steve Burge:when I guess the I guess the food was always good at that meetup.
Andrew Wilder:Always. Yes. And we'd share the recipes. And it was a real you know, whenever you find a community of people who loves food and celebrating food, they tend to be really nice people. Least that's been my experience.
Andrew Wilder:So they asked me to do a session on Google Analytics. And this was, oh, maybe 2012, '20 '13. And we were at someone's home, you know, sitting on the back porch, and I didn't have a projector or, you know, a slide deck. So I printed out like this 14 page PDF. Or I printed it, handed out to everybody, and spent like two hours going through Google Analytics and how to use it better.
Andrew Wilder:And afterwards people swarmed me and they're like, Oh, I've got this other problem on my site. Can you help me fix it? And I said, Oh yeah, sure. And they said, What are your rates? I'm like, No, no, no, no, no.
Andrew Wilder:I'm just going help you out. No problem. And they're like, No, I insist on paying you. What are your rates? That's where you could see the light bulb go off above my head.
Andrew Wilder:Right? And that's the moment I realized that publishers are treating their sites more like a business. And even if it's a hobby, people spend on their hobby. And if you're frustrated with some aspect of your site and you want to love your site, you want to solve that problem. So people needed a lot of technical help.
Andrew Wilder:And so I started basically working just as a freelancer, helping people on their sites with whatever the problem was or redesigning their site. And over time, I started doing a lot of the same things over and over again, like setting up backups or doing security scanning. And in 2014, I realized, like, I'm doing these same things. Why don't I turn this into a service and turn it into a subscription? So I was one of the first people doing WordPress support subscriptions.
Andrew Wilder:And so I started doing that. And over time, that kept growing, and I was able to standardize things. And you had asked about hours. So I actually decided not to include development hours, which is what many of the companies do. And instead, I came up with what I call quick support requests.
Andrew Wilder:So it was basically like anything we can help with that's fifteen minutes or less. And nowadays, we're not sticklers on the time. But the idea is like if you have a question or a small task, just ask us and don't worry about like, oh, is that using up my hour? Because as a client, when I work with a lawyer or an accountant or somebody else, I don't like being nickel and dimed and being charged, sent a bill for a quarter hour or whatever it is. And so I didn't want to do that to my clients.
Andrew Wilder:And so we came up with the quick support requests, and that's been a game changer for us. And, you know, if somebody has like, our middle plan has five per month. But if somebody asks us six things, we don't we don't worry about it. You know?
Steve Burge:It's just there as terms and conditions just in case they start to abuse it. You can say, okay. You're you're over your limit.
Andrew Wilder:Exactly. And and we know some months will be busier than others. Right? And when we start working with somebody, the first few months, there's always a lot more questions. And then we work out all the kinks and solve all the problems, and then it gets a little quieter.
Andrew Wilder:And then when things come up as they always do, we can jump in and help whenever.
Steve Burge:So what does a a big successful food blog look like in 2025? Are these, like, fairly substantial teams now with bloggers and maybe social media people, maybe they have a YouTube channel or a newsletter, how big are some of these sites growing?
Andrew Wilder:It really depends. We have some that are just like a husband and wife team. And we have some that the publisher has grown and grown and added a team. And they have chief of staff, and they have five authors, and they have a recipe tester, and they have a photographer. And so and some of them have built test kitchens.
Andrew Wilder:A lot of people have built a they might take a space and transform it into a studio kitchen where they can do more video and more photography. So it could be they convert their garage. And they're basically instead of just working in your home kitchen, which may not have the best lighting, may not be the most photogenic, they can build a whole studio now. And so it really runs the gamut though, I think. And you can't the interesting thing to me is you can't tell really how much traffic a site has by looking at it.
Andrew Wilder:Right? Oh. You know, there are tools that kind of guess. In my experience, they're pretty wrong. And we have the privilege of seeing what the actual traffic is.
Andrew Wilder:And so it's interesting to see what a site looks like from the outside. May or may not really indicate how popular it actually is. And I think the most important thing is that the content has to be good. Everything else is secondary. And I think also a lot of us working on WordPress, we tend to forget most most visitors are on mobile now.
Andrew Wilder:So you've got you've got a tiny little screen, and that's what the site looks
Steve Burge:like. Particularly, I'm sure.
Andrew Wilder:Especially. I think it tends to be about 85% mobile for recipe sites because people are in the kitchen looking for recipes on their phone. But publishers tend to work on their laptop, right, or their tablet, and they're working on a much wider screen. And once you shrink that down to that single column format, the design and layout doesn't matter quite as much. So just something to think about.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Mobile, tablet, certainly have having your iPad propped up in the in the kitchen. And from experience, probably the the print option as well. So many sites have ugly or bad print options, but I know if I'm looking for some kind of a recipe, I'm normally hitting the print button, and some of the sites put out some pretty ugly some pretty ugly design PDFs.
Andrew Wilder:That's a good user feedback. We're we're gonna start looking at because we don't oh, actually, I don't I don't tend to look at the print version. I'll hit the jump to recipe button, which brings me down to the recipe card in the in the post. But, yeah, I think a and a publisher who's been doing this longer will probably have at some point thought, hey. We should make our print version nicer, and they might make sure their logo is printing nicely, and there aren't ads that actually go get sent to the printer and things like that.
Steve Burge:That's a big problem. Yeah. Yeah. So is this a a brutally competitive niche? Are these these bloggers are scrambling for traffic, competing against each other?
Steve Burge:Or well, I guess that's my question. Is this a tough place to make a living? You're always fighting for one versus two in the Google rankings.
Andrew Wilder:I love this question because I think there's this crazy dichotomy, I guess, or I don't know. What's the word? Well, the there's the interesting thing about food blogs is they are all in competition with each other. Right? Because most of the traffic these days comes from Google search, and there's only those 10 spots.
Andrew Wilder:And, really, the difference between even position one and position two can mean a huge difference in traffic. But at the same time, most food bloggers are very supportive of each other and collaborative. The most popular Facebook group is called Food Blogger Central. I think there's about six or 7,000 people in it. And the community there is just incredible.
Andrew Wilder:So one of the reasons I love working with food publishers in particular, and now we're branching out into travel publishers, and I'm finding a very similar ethos there, is everybody's very supportive of each other, and they're answering questions and lifting each other up. And, you know, there may be some stuff going on behind the scenes because this is becoming a little bit bigger business. But in general, the community is incredibly supportive and welcoming. It is a difficult way to make a living, to your second question. Okay.
Andrew Wilder:It is a roller coaster. It is not easy. It you know, people think, oh, well, I'll build a website, I'll get lots of traffic. I'll make a ton of money. And we do have publishers making millions of dollars a year doing this.
Andrew Wilder:Lots of publishers making a solid 6 figures. But it's not easy. So it's not passive income by any means. You know? It may not be directly correlated with your time, but you're gonna be putting a lot of time in.
Andrew Wilder:And I think you have to be you have to have a a strong stomach to withstand all of the Google updates. You know, every time there's a core update, your rankings are probably gonna change, and it's gonna be a roller coaster. And so, you know, it it definitely got more competitive during the pandemic.
Steve Burge:It it sounds a little bit like the WordPress community in that sense that a lot of the people in the community are I was gonna say frenemies, but that's not quite the right word for this. Friend friendly competitors maybe that they are competing with each other, but also they may go to the same conferences, hang out in the same Facebook groups. They may know each other well. I mean, you you've just got back. I think there's the the tastemakers conference for food bloggers, and there's at least a couple of big travel conferences for travel bloggers as well.
Steve Burge:And that's where these people hang out together, share knowledge, just like WordPress people.
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. It's you know, there's a conference for everything now. Right? So we just went to the Tastemaker conference and just got back from the travel maker a TravelCon conference. Excuse me.
Andrew Wilder:And it's very similar. It's travel publishers and food publishers. And and a lot of the sessions could be the same because they're really about the tech technical aspects of building a blog or building your social media community or how do you monetize, and how do you diversify your income, And how do you build community, build your audience? I know when Colin was on, you talked a lot about building your email list. Right?
Andrew Wilder:Because that's the only way you can quote unquote own your audience. Because if it's just on social media, you don't you can lose it anytime. Right?
Steve Burge:A couple of episodes ago, we interviewed Colin from your team who also runs the Hubbub social plug in that that you guys run. And I asked him the question, well, what social networks all the Nerd Press bloggers using to drive traffic nowadays? And he thought for a second and said, newsletters. The newsletters are the newsletters are the best social network.
Andrew Wilder:Absolutely. I mean, it's it's the only one that that you'll have forever. You know, email hasn't died, you know, contrary to popular reporting. I'm surprised I'm not seeing more SMS sign ups. There were a lot of people doing that a few years ago with push notifications, but I think users just found them annoying.
Andrew Wilder:Like, they don't necessarily want to text every time there's a new blog post. But I I think there might be a frontier of some more texts. You know, I think the key for a publisher is to always provide value to their audience. That's the most important thing. Know, we could talk about SEO.
Andrew Wilder:We could talk about technical things. But the bottom line is you have to be providing value as much as possible. So you don't wanna be like, hey, I'm interrupting your dinner with a new blog post. Right? You wanna send something that's useful, ideally at the right moment when they're ready to receive it, if you can, and really trying to find ways to make the make your audience's life better in some way.
Steve Burge:We're seeing quite a bit of SMS use in local publishers. Again, the audience quite often is on mobile, and they may be signing up and visiting your site on mobile, and WhatsApp or text messages are a way to to get notifications out there for people that may not regularly come back to your website or may not want to get a newsletter. There's there's definitely something there for for that kind of audience. I I guess the the problem may be if you have a recipe, when are you going to hit someone with your latest recipe? Is it sort of maybe Monday morning, Tuesday morning when someone's planning out the food for the kids for the week?
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. I mean, I think it it depends on the audience. You know, most successful publishers have niched down to some area. For example, I was speaking with somebody at TravelCon, and she you know, I said, what's your blog about? She said, about travel.
Andrew Wilder:I'm like, okay. Let's get a little more specific. Right? And she's like, yeah. I've been learning I need to niche down.
Andrew Wilder:And then she said, oh, it's about Gen X travel. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I'm a Gen Xer. Keep going. And I'm like, but Gen X is like, you know, a huge audience too.
Andrew Wilder:Right? So what okay. And then she then she drills down further and she says, actually, it's about Gen X, intergenerational Gen X travel. So when you're trying to plan a trip with your parents and your kids for the whole family, that's what she's writing about now. And I just found it so compelling that it's like, okay, you've got an audience.
Andrew Wilder:Like, if if you don't have to please everybody. Right? If you try to please everybody, you'll please no one. But if you find that's a big enough niche to support your site and that you can speak to, it's going to resonate, and people are gonna find it use really helpful and useful.
Steve Burge:Also, if someone wants to do a a big family trip, maybe even like a family reunion trip with several generations, she would have advice how to how to go somewhere to keep the grandparents and the parents and the grandkids happy at the same time.
Andrew Wilder:Exactly. Yeah. Nice. And and, I mean, you could just see the you could very easily see the blog post she's write she'd write, like, you know, what to do in certain cities with your family, how to search Airbnb better, you know, more effectively. There's just it kind of just makes its the path is so much clearer there.
Andrew Wilder:And when you're a reader, you're gonna know what you're gonna get by going to that site.
Steve Burge:How are these how are these people generating revenue these days? I can imagine that maybe some of them have subscription options, but advertising is still big. Maybe some partnerships. What's what does the revenue model look like for a successful blogger these days?
Andrew Wilder:All of the above. Okay. I think by far display advertising is the biggest thing, which is why when you go to sites, you see so many ads on the page.
Steve Burge:This is like Mediavine and other companies?
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. Mediavine and Raptive are the two biggest players in the space. There are others, of course. And besides display ads, though, I think all the ways you mentioned, whether it's selling a membership, selling a a product, you know, you could sell a cookbook or a travel guide, selling a newsletter, or, you know, a you could have a general newsletter and then one with more VIP content. So there's lots of ways.
Andrew Wilder:Partnerships is a big one too. You know, for travel publishers, that's big. Getting getting deals with, like, tourism boards, you know, you you go to travel Tucson, and they may put you on a trip and pay you to produce content to promote visiting that city, for example.
Steve Burge:It's this is the about the depending on when it comes out exactly, be about the the tenth or eleventh episode of this podcast we've done. And I swear in every episode so far, the word that's come up has been this can sound a little geeky, but some variation of, like, multichannel or omnichannel that just about everyone who's in publishing nowadays, to make it work, they're adding up subscriptions and advertising and maybe YouTube revenue and partnerships. And then by the time you've got five, six, seven different sources of traffic and revenue, then you quite often have a sustainable business if you're able to to juggle those successfully.
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. I think the word I'd use for that is diversify diversification.
Steve Burge:That's probably a better word than the one I've been using there.
Andrew Wilder:Be because well, because when you say multichannel, I think, oh, I'm publishing in lots of different places.
Steve Burge:They're doing that too.
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. Yeah. Which that sounds exhausting. And and I think you have to try a bunch of different places, but then really find the ones where you find your audience and it resonates and you enjoy publishing the most. I think that's really important too.
Andrew Wilder:You know, if you if you hate publishing on Instagram for whatever reason, like if you just think it's drudgery, you either need to stop doing it or hire someone else to do it. But if you especially if you love publishing on, let's say, Facebook. Right? Then because I think if you have joy in it on that particular platform, that's going to come through. And if you don't, it's also going to come through.
Andrew Wilder:So it it's it's the same kind of thing, though. If you try to do all of it, you're just gonna burn out, and you're not gonna win at any of them. So, you know, maybe maybe try two things at a time and see which one resonates with your audience and helps you grow.
Steve Burge:Is there a place where travel bloggers and food bloggers will normally go on social media? I'm my first guess might be, say, Pinterest for food bloggers and maybe Instagram for travel bloggers. Where are they going to to get traffic to build their audiences?
Andrew Wilder:So most traffic is Google still. Although that's challenging these days. Since the helpful content update in the fall of twenty twenty three, it's been definitely a roller coaster. Anecdotally, I've seen the larger sites tend to be getting more traffic, and the smaller sites are getting pushed out in Google results. So that's been challenging.
Andrew Wilder:Pinterest used to be fantastic. For some people, it is still, but it's much harder in Pinterest as well. The rise of AI images and AI spam
Steve Burge:Ouch.
Andrew Wilder:Is a real problem that the platforms haven't really figured out how to solve yet. A lot of publishers still do well on Facebook. What's interesting to me is the publishers that I'm interacting with in to to work with or talk with in their communities, it's on Facebook. It's basically Facebook groups, which are really just forums. You know?
Andrew Wilder:It's a little different than the Facebook social news feed and sharing because they're just a forum. But for whatever reason, at least at least in the food space, that's where the food publishers like to hang out.
Steve Burge:They will create a Facebook group for their own blog, whether it might be Mexican food or or Thai food, and they'll build a community on Facebook around around their recipes, around around the type of food that they're promoting.
Andrew Wilder:Yes. A lot of them do that. So you'll you might have a Facebook page and a Facebook group. You could sell membership to a group. There's so many different ways you could do it.
Andrew Wilder:And I think it really does depend on what excites you and what you're interested in, but also what your audience is going. You know, some audiences are on Facebook and some aren't there at all. You know, Facebook is I think the demographic is skewing older now, you know, and the younger crowd is on TikTok. And
Steve Burge:Oh, yes. You
Andrew Wilder:know? I'm guessing your kids don't you know, if they're gonna search for something, they're probably gonna go straight to TikTok. Right?
Steve Burge:Well, we we don't allow them to have TikTok at the moment, which now I've actually seen how they they use their devices is a little dumb because, basically, we allow them YouTube instead, and just about anyone that posts short videos on TikTok will repost them to YouTube. So, basically, they they see the same videos, get just about experience on YouTube as they do on TikTok, just maybe a slightly different algorithm.
Andrew Wilder:I I don't envy trying to parent in this age. It's gotta be tough.
Steve Burge:We they get one or two social networks to choose from, and YouTube is their their drug of choice.
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. See, that's the same advice. Right? Pick one or two and and lean into it.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Parenting and and social media promotion and marketing, that's the same thing. So are there ways in which NerdPress can help these publishers? For example, you've got their WordPress site under your control. Are there things that you can do such as speed optimization to to help them be more competitive?
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. Absolutely. So as many of you probably know who are listening, Google introduced Core Web Vitals a few years back, which are basically speed and user experience metrics. And Google said, hey. We're we're judging every site on these these measurements, and it's a ranking factor.
Andrew Wilder:And the reason they did this is because they want websites to provide a good user experience. That's the whole point, is really user experience. But because it's a ranking factor, everybody started paying attention. Because it's very rare that Google says, hey, we're ranking you on this thing. Right?
Andrew Wilder:They don't usually make it that easy. And so everybody took notice. So that is a huge part of our services as we will do Core Web Vitals optimization. So we do a lot of caching, a lot of page speed optimization on performance, fixing layout shift, and it runs the gamut. And one of the things about our service is since we're an ongoing service, we don't just do a onetime optimization.
Andrew Wilder:We'll we'll get everything set up and working. And then anytime something changes, we can jump back in and and tweak it or adjust whatever needs to be adjusted Because it's really not a one time thing. It needs to be maintained a lot. So to the to the bigger question, like, we try to be a technical partner for all of our clients so that they don't have to worry about the technical stuff in general. And so they can focus on creating great content for their audience.
Steve Burge:Do do small differences in the in their scores, in their speech scores make a substantial difference? I imagine a lot of these sites are really quite similar. You may take this the wrong way or not, but maybe some of the recipes are quite similar too. When it comes to the speed and the caching is, say, the difference between ranking first and second on a for a Google search result, maybe the difference between having, say, a a 97 or a 96 speed score. Is this a a super competitive industry where just minor changes and improvements can have a big effect?
Andrew Wilder:I think minor changes can. I wouldn't say a tiny, tiny bit in core web vitals will be make or break. It depends on the query. It depends on the competition for that query. It depends on what what not not just how much competition, but what what the competition is.
Andrew Wilder:You know, since it is a ranking factor, you want to be like, it's table stakes, basically. Google has said that, you know, the the each of the factors has a good needs improvement and poor range. And Google has said once you're in the good range for each of the metrics, there's no SEO benefit to being any better because they consider good to be a very high bar. So if you're good on CLS, INP, LCP, then you're good. Right?
Andrew Wilder:So as long as you're in the good range it's I'd say it's better for your visitors to make your site faster and more performant. Right? We're talking about like, once you're in good range, your site's already very good. And I don't think you're going you're certainly not gonna see an SEO benefit by pushing it even farther, at least not directly.
Steve Burge:And you've kind of answered this already, at least to touch with your answer on Pinterest of being spammed by AI. But are there ways in which you can help or maybe advise them on using AI with their platforms? Or is this still very much a kind of a handcrafted industry where people have a lot of trust in the bloggers and any kind of AI generated content might harm that trust?
Andrew Wilder:I think it would it depends on what you mean by AI generated content. I think it's interesting because I think publishers have a love hate relationship with AI at the moment. They love it because they use it too as a tool to help them iterate, to come up with blog post ideas, to come up with content outlines, to analyze content. And we're all using AI at this point in some way. The hate part is when peep AI spammers, I'll call them, are creating tons of AI content and flooding flooding the zone, basically, and and are ranking well on it.
Andrew Wilder:And they're making money on it. And so those sites are really difficult because they're so easy to proliferate and to generate, and there's a lot of bad actors doing that stuff. So I think that's a problem. I I think a food blogger, if they were to create AI food images, that would be frowned upon because it's not it's still not real. They're not that good yet.
Andrew Wilder:But I've heard like, I know of one publisher who, you know, they had a picture on their site, and it was all the ingredients were sent out on the counter, and they forgot one of the ingredients. So they used AI to add the ingredient back in.
Steve Burge:Okay. That seems acceptable.
Andrew Wilder:Right? I mean, you could do that with Photoshop ten years ago, twenty years ago even. Yeah. Right? So, you know, it's definitely a question of where you draw the line.
Andrew Wilder:I think as long as the core content is human and uniquely that person, I think we're good. And then AI is just a writing tool. It's just an assistant. It's when AI is creating the content that we have a problem.
Steve Burge:And I guess it's probably more difficult to fake this for travel bloggers. I mean, if if you're not there in person, maybe I guess you could fake that too.
Andrew Wilder:So I think I think that what it's gonna come down to is humanity, and we're creating websites for people, not for AI. And people resonate like, connect with other people. And I think one of the keys is to show that you are human in your writing. So if you're a travel publisher, have those beautiful pictures, but have some selfies to prove that you were there. Right?
Andrew Wilder:If you're on a cool river barge cruise, turn around and do the selfie off the bow, and everybody can see that you were really there. Right? And that's gonna really show people that, hey, they can have that experience too. And if all their pictures are just too perfect and they look like they're out of the stock catalog, it's not gonna feel real because it's like, oh, is that person there? Do they really know what they're talking about?
Steve Burge:Is that maybe the secret sauce? I was going to ask, like, are there special things that the successful bloggers these days are doing? Are they the ones with the largest newsletter or the largest Facebook group or the largest social media following? But is it better to ask maybe are the most successful ones the ones that are authentic and are able to build a community regardless of which particular platform they choose?
Andrew Wilder:I don't think you can get to be the biggest and most successful, having the largest audience like you just listed, without being authentic. And in the case of recipe publishers, the recipes have to work. And, you know, there are some of our clients who are very, very large, when I mention their name, people who aren't, you know, aren't affiliated with recipe blogging or WordPress or anything, they go, oh, I love her recipes. They're so good.
Steve Burge:Nice.
Andrew Wilder:Right? I have a couple of clients who I hear that over and over and over and over again. So every single recipe they publish is fantastic. It's easy to follow, and it works. And so they're helping home cooks be successful.
Andrew Wilder:So those cooks are going to go back to those websites. And what happens is you do that enough, and instead of searching for, I don't know, a pound cake, you're gonna go to Sally's website instead. Right? You're just gonna go straight to the website and say, hey, what's her recipe for this? It it and it takes a long time to build up a library large enough for that.
Andrew Wilder:Another example, at TravelCon, I was talking with a couple who has a travel blog. And they've written, I think it was like a hundred or a 50 posts. They've added an AI chatbot to their site that is trained on all of their content. And so if somebody asks a travel question on the chatbot, it's gonna answer with it with their content first. But if they haven't written something, it's going to expand on that with other travel content.
Andrew Wilder:And they've they've put some guardrails on it, so it's only gonna answer with travel content, not other AI stuff. And that's a way that they've they're building community and getting people to stay on the site longer and interact and helping them surface content that's useful to them. And I thought that was a really interesting way to use the tool.
Steve Burge:So are you sampling any of the work of your of your customers? You have hundreds of food blogs, hundreds of travel bloggers. Are you are you downloading recipes from your customers and trying them out or downloading travel tips from your travel customers and using them for vacations?
Andrew Wilder:Oh, absolutely. You know, if I if I'm searching searching for a recipe, of course, I'm gonna click to our client site. Right? But and I'll and I'll give Palin from Hot Thai Kitchen a shout out. My husband has made her Pad C U recipe many times, and it's incredible.
Andrew Wilder:We'll have to
Steve Burge:put it
Andrew Wilder:in the show I actually saw her at Tastemaker last year and had to run over and fanboy and give her a hug. So
Steve Burge:Are the are the vast majority of the bloggers at conferences like Tastemakers or TravelCon, are they all on WordPress? Is this a a WordPress dominated niche?
Andrew Wilder:For food, absolutely. For travel, so so we've just gotten into travel a little bit more. You know, the the pandemic was an interesting time. Right?
Steve Burge:For
Andrew Wilder:sure. Very good for some and very bad for others. And for food blogs, the pandemic was ultimately really great because everybody had to stay home and cook. Right?
Steve Burge:And so food bloggers
Andrew Wilder:Travel bloggers have the opposite. And so, basically, travel publishing was decimated from from the pandemic as was travel. And, you know, we're we're a few years out of that now, and we're seeing new travel publishers come into the space. So we've had a lot of people who are just getting started, and they've only been doing it for a few months or a couple of years. Technically, they're still learning a lot.
Andrew Wilder:Last year at TravelCon, we had a lot of people say, Oh, I need to start a site. I know I need to be on WordPress. Or, oh, I'm I started on Wix. I know I need to move to WordPress. And this year when we met with publishers, many, many more were already on WordPress.
Andrew Wilder:So it's really actually cool to see the evolution just in the last twelve months between the two conferences, how much they've grown. So next year, I'm sure they're gonna be now asking about other tools and other site speed, and they're gonna be evolving and getting more sophisticated as they grow and have more content.
Steve Burge:Oh, so this is quite possibly an audience, an industry where other WordPress people could join you and sell their wares. They could target these audiences. There's a really substantial market out there. I mean, we do we focus on publishers. And certainly on the local news magazine, serious publishing industry, 90% are on WordPress.
Steve Burge:And I guess the same is true with bloggers as well. This is quite a quite a substantial market, which there are some plugins out there, some people who sell, like, recipe card plugins. And I'm not sure what you do for travel websites, but it sounds like there's certainly a market out there for WordPress people to to help these bloggers succeed, to to sell them services, to sell them plug ins.
Andrew Wilder:I think so. You know, when we were at TravelCon, they pulled me aside and asked me to do like a little promo video and, you know, do a quick little interview from the brand's perspective. And he asked me how how what's your ROI gonna be like on the on TravelCon? And I said, I'll tell you in a few years. Okay.
Andrew Wilder:So we're we're really we were going we're doing education and meet we were doing site audits basically all day long at our booth with people and giving them advice. And so we're really investing in the travel space and the community because we want to see them succeed and grow. I personally love travel, so it's a, you know, a great, great area to be in, for me. And I don't know if we're gonna get a lot of clients out of it, frankly. I hope we do.
Andrew Wilder:If we don't, okay. So it's to me, we're still experimenting. But I would love to see more more WordPress technical folks sponsoring these conferences getting involved. And, you know, when we were we were one of the early sponsors of Tastemaker, and now there's a whole tech hall basically of all these booths of of tech sponsors. And it's very interesting also seeing the difference between conferences for publishers and conferences for WordPress nerds.
Andrew Wilder:You know, we go to word camps, and that's they're primarily for inside baseball WordPress stuff, I think. There's not as many end users. It's agencies and developers. Right? And so it's very interesting to to see technical companies now marketing directly to the consumers who are using WordPress.
Steve Burge:We've been to a few WordPress open source kinds of conferences over the years. But one that really sticks in my mind is one in New Orleans A Few Years ago. This was a Drupal conference, and the conference center in New Orleans is big enough that they can fit six or seven conferences in at once. One of the very biggest conference centers in The United States, I think. And they put the open source one at the very far end, and all of those different conference areas were busy, so me and my wife started at one end.
Steve Burge:And the first one was like a a doctor's conference, and you walk through. Everyone was in their scrubs, in their medical uniforms. Then you walk through, and there was a travel blogging area there. And they everyone looked like you might imagine, travel bloggers too, lots of sandals, lots of shorts. And we we went on.
Steve Burge:There was a sales conference. Everyone was in suits and ties. There was a, I think, a drag queen conference at one at one of the booths, one of one of one of the areas. And then we finally got towards the end of this big conference center, and my wife looks around. I think we're at the open source area.
Steve Burge:And everyone was there, big baggy T shirts, big baggy shorts, kinda slouching around like open source people do. It I I imagine going from that to going to a a food bloggers or a travel bloggers conference would be an eye opening experience.
Andrew Wilder:I mean, I I'd say food bloggers and publishers are they're pretty casual because everybody works at home too. So, you know, it is a chance to dress up a little bit nicer and put some pants on maybe. But
Steve Burge:But if if people get the chance to attend these, they should go. They should see you there. It'd be an interesting experience for many WordPress people. Cool. So NerdPress works with hundreds and hundreds of bloggers at this point.
Steve Burge:So you might be able to give a good answer to our final question here. We ask everyone a blog roll question. And the blog roll question is, is there a publisher at the moment whose work you really admire? Someone who's when their newsletter drops in your inbox or when you see a new post, you'll jump up and read it. Who are you really happy to read at the moment?
Andrew Wilder:So it's a great question, and I have a horrible answer because I don't read a ton of blogs. But I knew you were gonna ask me this, and I looked through to to see who I'm reading. And I'm embarrassed to say they're not using WordPress.
Steve Burge:Okay. That's okay. We we don't define WordPress in this.
Andrew Wilder:But but it one publisher I'm reading a lot is Thomas Pueyo. He has a substack called Uncharted Territories, and he's an interesting first principles thinker. So he he approaches things in a different way than I would or from unconventional thinking, and I find that interesting. But I do wanna give a shout out to two of our WordPress publishers. They lost their homes in the LA fires in January.
Andrew Wilder:And so I just wanna give them a shout out. Dorothy from Shockingly Delicious and Valentina from Cooking on the Weekends. They're both fantastic publishers. I've I've known them for fifteen years. You know, I've we've had been at Potlucks.
Andrew Wilder:They're really good cooks and wonderful people. So I just wanna send some love their way.
Steve Burge:Oh, because Ned Press is a Los Angeles company.
Andrew Wilder:Technically You're
Steve Burge:global now, but you're in Los Angeles.
Andrew Wilder:I happen to be in Southern California, so that's where our headquarters are. I'm actually the only one in California. The rest of my team is scattered around the country.
Steve Burge:Okay. But the the LA fires were were bad for people you know, bad for the the LA Food Bloggers community or at least many members of it.
Andrew Wilder:Yeah. Yeah. They it was it was really bad. And, I mean, they lost everything. I mean, there's their homes were gone.
Andrew Wilder:So yeah. And A lot of people did.
Steve Burge:And I guess to end on a a slightly more positive note, you might be able to recommend some some good Thai food as well?
Andrew Wilder:Oh, yes. Thank you. So Hot Thai Kitchen. It's hot dash Thai dash kitchen. So Palin's recipes are fantastic.
Andrew Wilder:I definitely recommend her Pad See You. That's that's chef kiss.
Steve Burge:Awesome. Well, it sounds like you have a great job hanging out with these food bloggers and travel bloggers. I wish you all the best with twenty twenty twenty five, Andrew.
Andrew Wilder:Thanks. It's been a pleasure chatting.