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- Is Weebly Getting Out of the Website-Builder Business?
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- Wix Harmony Is Now in Google Gemini. So Why Are Users Still Complaining?
- When AI Sounds Confident but Gets It Wrong: The Mount Shasta Rescue
- When AI Agents Start Working Together, Who Is Really in Control?
- WPForms and Rank Math: Did These WordPress Plugins Create a Backdoor With Admin Access?
- AI Can Text Your Friends for You. Wait, Who Am I Talking To?
- Bill Gates Is Betting on AI to Help Healthcare – While Warning About What AI Could Do to Jobs
- Wix Says AI Website Owners Should Care About Portability. There’s Just One Problem.
- WordPress 7.1 Broke WP Rocket: The Fatal Error and the Plugin Problem
- WordPress vs. UltimateWB for an Artist Website: Which Should You Choose?
- Thinking About Switching From WordPress? What Should You Consider Before You Move?
- The Airtable Acquisition Raises a Bigger Question: Do You Really Own the Software Your Business Runs On?
- How to Use Google Search Console’s New Generative AI Data to Improve Your SEO
- How to Update the Same Website Content on Multiple Pages at Once
- Discovered vs. Crawled Not Indexed in Google Search Console: What’s the Difference and How to Fix Each
- The Small Business Guide to Auditing Google Ads and Website Costs
Categories
Tag Archives: third-party plugins
How to Build a Directory Website: Softr + Airtable vs. The Better Way
If you ask an AI model like Claude or ChatGPT, or if you browse a popular web development forum for advice on how to build a directory website, you will almost certainly be given the exact same recipe: Use Softr for your frontend layout and Airtable for your backend database.
At first glance, it sounds like an easy way to get a project off the ground. But why is this specific combination universally pushed as the default starter pack?
The
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Posted in Compare Website Builders
Tagged ai, airtable, chatgpt, claude, commissions, database, directory website, hosted vs self-hosted websites, html, javascript, monetize, monetize directory, paywalls, saas, seo, softr, subscription fees, third-party plugins, venture capital marketing
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The Developer’s Paradox: When No-Code Takes Longer Than Code
When searching for a development platform that wouldn't restrict their workflow, one developer reached out via our “Ask David!” support form with a familiar frustration:
"I tried Webflow for a client project. I'm a developer, and I found myself constantly fighting the interface instead of building the site. I just want to make sure that UltimateWB
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Posted in Ask David!, Compare Website Builders
Tagged bloat, cms, css, css gradients, database, div, gradients, html, javascript, linear-gradient, mysql, no-code, no-code website builder, php, plugins, third-party plugins, webflow
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GoDaddy Storefront Disaster: Why a Forced Update Is Scrambling E-Commerce Sites
If you are currently running an online shop on GoDaddy’s all-in-one website builder, you might want to log into your dashboard and check your active inventory right now.
Over the last few days, a massive wave of store owners have taken to community forums and subreddits to report what is being called a complete "storefront disaster." GoDaddy has been quietly executing a massive, mandatory overhaul to the commerce backend of their Websites + Marketing platform.
This wasn't an optional migration
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Posted in Compare Website Builders, E-commerce, Technology in the News
Tagged bloat, bugs, clear browser cache, data corruption, e-commerce, forced updates, godaddy, godaddy alternative, godaddy storefront disaster, google merchant center, hosted website builder, incognito, inventory, third-party plugins, WordPress
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Skool vs MemberPress + LearnDash: The Pitfalls, Hidden Costs, and a Better Alternative
The creator economy is facing a structural crisis. If you want to launch a paid community with structured courses, locked content, and tiered membership levels, the current software ecosystem gives you an ultimatum:
Sign away your digital autonomy to a restrictive, high-fee SaaS platform like Skool, or step onto the endless treadmill of the WordPress "plugin stack."
A recent debate on the WordPress Reddit community exposed the exact breaking point creators hit when trying to build these platforms. The
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Posted in Compare Website Builders
Tagged bloat, community website, learndash, lms, locked content, memberpress, membership levels, membership paywall, paid community, paywall, plugin bloat, plugin stack, plugins, reddit, saas, Skool, structured courses, third-party plugins, tiered memebership, WordPress
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The 30-Minute Job Interview That Steals Your Entire Hard Drive
If you're looking for freelance development work on Reddit, LinkedIn, Upwork, or similar platforms, be careful. Scammers are increasingly disguising malware as coding assessments and technical interviews. What appears to be a simple GitHub repository for a 30-minute coding test may actually be an attempt to get you to execute malicious code on your own machine.
The setup looks completely legitimate. A recruiter or startup founder reaches out with what appears to be a freelance opportunity. The interview
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Posted in Technology in the News
Tagged coding, developer, downloads, freelancer, GitHub, linkedin, malicious code, malware, phishing, plugins, reddit, reputation, sandbox, scammer, tech interviews, third-party code, third-party plugins, trust, upwork, virtual machines, vm
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What’s Going On with the Etch WP Team? (Digital Gravy Drama Explained)
If you’ve been tracking the recent product rollout from Digital Gravy, you know their new website builder, Etch WP, launched with a massive amount of hype. It was marketed as a revolutionary "clean code" visual development environment that would completely shake up front-end development in WordPress.
But despite all the promises of a stable future, there is a lot of buzz right now about the Etch WP team leaving, and web agencies are trying
... Continue readingWooCommerce Subscriptions Cost: Avoid the $279 Add-On Trap
If you are building an online shop with WordPress, the initial pitch sounds incredible: the core software is open-source, and WooCommerce is "completely" free.
But there is a catch that catches almost every small business owner off guard.
The exact moment you try to move away from simple, one-time checkouts and add a recurring revenue stream - like a monthly subscription box, a premium membership, or a repeat service plan - you hit a major financial wall.
Suddenly,
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Posted in Compare Website Builders, E-commerce
Tagged bloat, core web vitals, e-commerce, hacked, open-source, pagespeed insights, performance, plugin vulnerabilities, plugins, stability, subscriptions, third-party plugins, vulnerabilities, woocommerce, WooCommerce subscriptions, WordPress
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The Dogfooding Test: What Happens When Web Platforms Don’t Use Their Own Tools?
Choosing a web development platform usually comes down to reviewing a checklist of features, viewing templates, and reading marketing copy. However, there is a far more reliable metric for evaluating the true capability, speed, and structural integrity of any software platform.
You simply have to look at what the creators of the software use to run their own business.
In
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Posted in Compare Website Builders
Tagged authority, bloat, bugs, conversion rates, core web vitals, credibility, css, database bottlenecks, database glitches, divi, dogfooding, elegant themes, elementor, fast load times, fast website, headless frameworks, html, javascript, latency issues, low maintenance, maintenance, page speeds, scalability, source code, static html, third-party plugins, ux, view page source, Wix, WordPress, WordPress page builders
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The 2026 Kadence WP Corporate Takeover: What Liquid Web’s Consolidation Means for Your WordPress Website
The standalone kadencewp.com domain is gone. So are learndash.com, givewp.com, and theeventscalendar.com.
On May 12, 2026, parent company Liquid Web executed a massive, aggressive corporate consolidation. Over the course of a single morning, they quietly retired the entire StellarWP software brand and folded years of prominent WordPress plugin acquisitions directly into the primary Liquid Web ecosystem. Independent product domains were abruptly killed and redirected to corporate landing pages, and long-standing standalone end-user license agreements (EULAs) were instantly swapped for
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Posted in Compare Website Builders, Technology in the News
Tagged bait-and-switch, client dashboard injection, EULA, events calendar price hike, Events Calendar Pro, feature-bloat, iconic, is wordpress free, Kadence, kadence takeover, learndash migration, liquid web corporate consolidation, lock-in, monopoly, ownership, restrict content pro, solidwp, stellarwp, stellarwp dissolution, supply chain security risks, third-party plugins, website ownership, WordPress, wordpress alternative, wordpress kirki customizer, wordpress monopoly, wordpress plugin acquisitions
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The Right Way vs. The Wrong Way to Do Programmatic SEO (pSEO)
If you’ve been tracking digital marketing trends lately, you’ve likely run across the phrase Programmatic SEO (pSEO). The pitch is incredibly seductive: instead of writing blog posts one by one, you connect a database to a page template, press a button, and instantly deploy thousands of pages targeting long-tail search terms.
Traffic multiplies overnight, you dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs), and you win.
Except, that’s exactly how you get your entire domain penalized and deindexed.
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tagged algorithm changes, authority, automated page generation, bloat, core web vitals, database, duplicate content, google algorithm, google algorithm penalties, Google Search Console, google search engine ranking, indexing, long-tail keywords, organic traffic, plugins, programmatic seo, pseo, scalable, scaled content abuse, search engine results pages, seo, serps, spam, thin content, third-party plugins, trust, trustworthy, url structure, visibility, webflow, WordPress
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