When it comes to building a website for the first time…
A lot of people get tripped up when starting with WordPress page builders like Thrive Architect from ThriveThemes.com. I want to offer some tips to make sure that you don’t end up having a lot of headaches when trying to build your website using Thrive Architect.
For those of you who are new to Thrive Architect, it is a page builder that allows you to create beautiful-looking pages fast using a drag-and-drop interface. You don’t really need to know how to code, but there are some things to keep in mind.
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No. 1 – Choose the right plugins
I don’t think anyone can argue against this statement: You should choose the best security plugins and caching plugins for your website. If you even have one of these things installed, you could find some problems with your website when it comes to trying to change some of the design elements in Thrive Architect. You may need to clear your cache. If you have a caching plugin installed or Wordfence for security, it may cause some issues when you’re trying to update your site design and not seeing the changes take place as a result of your cache.
No. 2 – Have a staging site
The second thing is, you need to ensure that you have a staging site. A proper, non-live site to test all of your updates and changes. This protects your production copy of your site so that any harmful changes won’t impact your visitors.
When they see or visit your website, you don’t want to be making changes to that same live website, especially when you’re not sure what’s going to happen with it. So, clone your website if you have a staging site capability with your hosting provider. Then, test your plugin updates, your design updates, and everything else to make sure that it works before pushing it to your production live site.
No. 3 – Look for the best support
Lastly, you want to make sure that you have the best support that you possibly can have. With a lot of hosting providers out there, it’s a mixed bag when it comes to support.
When using WordPress in particular, you can go with some of the shared hosting providers out there, like Bluehost, HostGator, or SiteGround, but there’s no guarantee that can get good support. It really depends.
If you’re going to go the shared hosting route, SiteGround, out of those 3, is the choice that I would recommend (mainly due to their excellent customer support). However, just keep in mind that you have to pick out your own security plugins. You have to pick out your own back-up plugins, and so, they may or may not be able to help you because they are not focused on supporting plugins. They’re just providing website hosting.
So, as you can see it can get a little bit complicated when you’re using a shared hosting provider and you use your own plugins that you’ve chosen.
What solution can you use to address all these and use Thrive Architect seamlessly?
You can use Pressidium. At this time, they only host WordPress sites and that’s a great thing. As a result, they can support you better than most shared hosting companies.
But, if you’re going to go with WordPress, this is the one I highly recommend.
I’ve been doing this for the better part of 10 years in the WordPress biz. I work in a corporate environment building scalable web applications in the Cloud, so I know exactly what pain points are when it comes to building a web application or website that your customers want to enjoy and love.
Everything is managed for you
When it comes to WordPress, you want to be able to make sure that you have it all. It’s secure, and you don’t have to do a lot of administration work when it comes to updating the site.
Pressidium takes care of all that for you. It basically provides you a state of the art enterprise grade solution for WordPress in the Cloud and it’s managed. What that means is that they do auto updates for WordPress core security updates.
They also have a very highly available architecture, which ensures that your site has no downtime. It also helps address the common pain points mentioned earlier by making sure you have the right plugins. They’ve already got the backup services and necessary plugins installed for you. You can make sure that you’ve got the backups that are automatically being taken on a day-to-day basis. In case something happens to your live site, you can restore in one click. It’s that simple.
It allows you to have a staging site
Staging sites allows you to clone your site, and Pressidium has a one-click clone feature.
You can clone your live site and use it as a test environment, and you can start hacking away. You can update as many plugins as you want to see if they’re going to break your site or not.
This came in very handy when I decided to update the Thrive Architect plugin to more recent versions. I wanted to make sure that they were stable, especially after checking social media groups and reading about people having issues. Using my staging site, I’ve uncovered some things that weren’t working. So, I didn’t push it to my live website. I kept that update in my staging site as they fix some of those bugs. So, it’s very important that you have staging. I cannot stress this enough.
A lot of people update their live site, and they don’t have a backup plugin installed. Then, they’re dead in the water. They have to try to figure out how to fix it as people are hitting their website and getting a poor customer experience. These visitors and potential customers may never return because they see that the site is not up or it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do.
They have top notch support
Pressidium is dedicated WordPress. There’s no other Content Management Systems (CMS) that are hosted on Pressidium. And, because they only support WordPress, their support is top notch when it comes to asking anything WordPress related.
If you want to clear your cache, there’s a one-click button in your Pressidium dashboard to do just that. One of the common issues that happen with Thrive Architect and other page builders is that sometimes you need to clear the cache for web design changes to take place properly. (For more on what caching is, check out this post from WPMU DEV on understanding caching.)
When you’ve updated plugins and make changes to your WordPress site, your caching plugin will keep some of those old files in place. Those help your users access those files quicker. The problem happens when you’re trying to design and you’re saving some of those old design configuration files. You’ve updated and feel like you should be able to make certain changes, but they’re not working. Well, it’s because you have a caching issue, and 9 times out of 10, you need to clear your cache. So, it really helps to have a one-click button to do this.
Anyway, these are some common things that I see happening with people using the Thrive Architect plugin. You just have to make it simple. Choose a dedicated WordPress hosting provider that’s going to take care of all the administrative overhead and give you the support that you need. You don’t have to keep pulling your hair out when you’re going into Thrive Architect and trying to make changes.
Are you using Thrive Architect? If so, what do you like (or not) about it?
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