Attn: Standard WordPress Users

Flexpress earns more visitors, and longer visits

For media websites focused on growth, Standard WordPress is not enough. 

Upgrading to Flexpress makes editors' lives easy, while ensuring via the backend that sites load faster, more securely, and rank higher in search and syndication. For example, migrating Saveur.com from Standard WordPress to Organic took 3 weeks, and the site now sees +24% more monthly visitors, with +28% longer session times.

Here are the seven signs it’s time for a publisher to level up from Standard WordPress:

  1. UI | UX: Editorial teams share concerns about site speed and appearance
  2. SEO: Business leaders keep asking how to boost SEO and earn more free traffic
  3. Syndication: People feel that content should be driving more traffic from syndication feeds such as Apple News and MSN
  4. Affiliate: Website needs more consistent traffic and revenue, and there's an apparent opportunity to optimize (or start!) an affiliate strategy
  5. Ads: Revenue leaders want to experiment with ad placements and AI bidding technology
  6. Mobile App: Publisher is ready to bring its content to a mobile app
  7. Web Engineering: redesign timelines seem overly long, and creating new experiences for visitors seems complex.

If any of the above apply to your publishing business, please talk with us.

We want to help.

— The Flexpress Team

Expert publishers trust Flexpress

WordPress is a great foundation...

...but publishers need more to grow audience and earnings substantially

65.2% of all websites needing a content management system (CMS) choose WordPress. According to Tech Jury, 62% of the top 100 fastest growing publishers in the U.S. use WordPress, and 500 new WordPress sites pop up daily.

Reason being, WordPress is designed to be intuitive for content creators—even those without technical web engineering experience. The user-friendly interface and intuitive block-by-block content generation tools make it simple to build modular, custom articles. Plus, WordPress has a large and active community of developers that contribute to the tech, as well as an ecosystem of plugins that’s more than 70,000 strong. 

For all these reasons, Flexpress selected WordPress to be the foundational software and UX framework that powers our CMS. However, publishers know that standard WordPress installations leave too much traffic, impact, and revenue potential on the table. So, we designed Flexpress to supercharge that WordPress baseline so that publishers could immediately earn more visitors via search and referrals, as well as more revenue via ads and affiliate.

In Other's Words

10up Recommends Flexpress for Publishers

"Flexpress is well aligned with our recommended CMS strategy for publishers."

“As 10up has learned through its decade-plus working alongside enterprise content publishers, the majority of publishers with custom-built platforms — even when built atop a framework like WordPress – invest the majority of their time and effort in building nearly identical functionality. There is value in outsourcing the distraction of product managing the entirety of a content focused CMS [...] Flexpress is well-aligned to this approach."
The Uniqueness of Flexpress

Welcome to Publisher-Friendly CMS

Our team of media-seasoned engineers designed Flexpress to supercharge audience and revenue growth for publishers. The modern engineering architecture unlocks media websites' potential to drive more value for visitors, and staff:

  1. Headless Frontend: Built using Next.js and React instead of an outdated approach blending UX code with backend PHP, Flexpress's headless frontend connects to the editorial backend via a GraphQL API that boosts page speed and performance.
  2. Expanded Wordpress Toolsets: Organic combines the familiar, intuitive Wordpress editorial experience with specifically-designed features to increase visibility to Google, as well as syndication feeds including Apple News, Flipboard, and Smartnews.

Unique benefits of Flexpress:

  • A fast, flexible frontend for designing engaging audience experiences while simultaneously improving search rankings.
  • Vetted, out-of-the-box features specifically for publishing, including schema blocks, syndication controls, recirculation modules, author pages to emphasize E-E-A-T, sponsored content blocks, commerce tools, and 100s of media SaaS integrations yielding improved SEO, syndication, and earnings.
  • Lower engineering costs due to our modern, developer-friendly codebase that enables faster redesigns and top-tier site stability.
Features for Publishers
Drupal Core
Wordpress
Flexpress
Web Schema for Content Blocks
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Affiliate Marketing Blocks for Commerce Articles
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Amazon Auto-Linking
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Content Blocks for Improving Google E-E-A-T Scores
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Options for Hosting and 24-hour DevOps Support
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Internal Taxonomies for Cohort Analysis
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Syndication Controls
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React Frontend for Easy Redesigns
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Preferred Engineering Partners for Custom Projects
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Frontend Component and Template Library
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Built for Publishers...

Writers, Editors Prefer Flexpress

"Flexpress is easy to use, it feels stable, and it's intuitive and quick."

“I am deeply involved in the CMS in the sense that I use it every day, multiple times a day. As journalists know, the only way to get content out there in the world is through a CMS—and so I am “knee deep” in the CMS all the time. As I have worked with a lot of CMS’s, I would say that the CMS we're using right now is the best that I've seen. Flexpress is easy to use, it feels stable, and it’s intuitive and quick, which is critical when I need to get a story up as quickly as possible."
...Designed for Developers

Top-Notch Developer Support

Using Flexpress, publishers realize significant engineering cost savings. Engineering and development projects are faster thanks to Flexpress's intuitive headless architecture.

Flexpress also replaces rote, ongoing engineering costs with self-service tools made for anyone. Finally, Flexpress also provides hosting and security infrastructure that makes publisher sites faster, more GDPR/CCPA compliant, more secure, and more reliable.

That's why today's engineers love building on Flexpress.

In other's words

Flexpress enables First + Third to execute massive design overhauls in less than 30 days

From CEO Greg Allen
(Partner Testimonial)
Watch Video
"I strongly advise publishers move to Flexpress instead of another WordPress platform. The architecture is superior and it is faster to build on Flexpress versus any standard WordPress platform. Working with Flexpress, we can just focus on user experience as the technology removes all of the Deveops stuff that normally takes up so much of our time.”

Beautiful User Experiences

Publishers choose Flexpress to create beautiful, fast websites that meaningfully engage audiences.

 
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A delicious approach with an appetizing layout, ingredients, introduction, and step-by-step instructions.
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Direct sell with sponsored hubs.
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Seasonal hubs containing curated articles bring audience back time after time.
Pain-Free Migrations

Migrations Are Not Scary; Flexpress = Certified AWS Partner

Migration credits are available for publishers through Flexpress's partnership with AWS, and publishers earn hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent on migrating to Flexpress from standard WordPress.

Positive ROI payback comes within months due to Organic's integrated SaaS tools for Content, Ads, Affiliate, and Analytics. The macro economic climate says now is opportune time for publishers to evaluate their technology strategy and consider how much growth they want to create from their CMS.

Flexpress partners with leading engineering and development agencies to execute migrations — and migrations are at the end of the day WordPress-to-WordPress. Flexpress also offers affordable, pay-as-you-go options for those who want to remove the barrier of upfront migration costs.

During the migration process, Flexpress works tirelessly to improve publishers’ data schemas, taxonomies, sitemaps, E-E-A-T, and site performance. This detailed effort, combined with the underlying technology, results in material post-migration improvements to traffic and earnings for our publisher customers.

Traffic Growth (Flexpress vs. Previous CMS)
Improvement in page views for first six (6) months

Source: Google Analytics.

Site Speed & CLS Scores (Headless vs Non-Headless)
We Are The Mighty upgraded to Flexpress's headless frontend in April and improved mobile and desktop CLS scores by more than 100%
 
 

Source: Lighthouse Metrics.

Case Study

Kat Craddock is a New York-based editor, writer, and recipe developer with 20 years of experience in food and food media.

Experience Saveur.com
(Built on Flexpress)
Test Drive
“Flexpress's user-friendly developer infrastructure helped us implement a complete site-design overhaul in under 30 days; we immediately saw our time on site increase by more than 25 percent. Now, we rely on Flexpress integrated analytics—across SEO, content management, programmatic ads, direct-sold campaigns, and affiliate revenue—to ensure we’re making the smart and data-driven decisions that allow our business to thrive, while providing our readers with the premium culinary content they’ve come to expect from our brand. "

Flexpress exceeds all Saveur KPI goals

Audience Growth
(comparison vs. previous front end design)

 

Time to Flexpress?

Please fill out the form below and let us know how we can help you upgrade your CMS.