In the past months, we have been working on a very exciting new product. Today, we are proud to introduce TravelFeed blogs. You can get started right now with setting up your own blog on your own domain, all from your TravelFeed dashboard and your existing TravelFeed posts.
Why TravelFeed Blogs if there is Wordpress?
Wordpress originally started out as a blogging software, but through its extensibility it has become much more than that. Wordpress is no longer limited to only blogging, through plugins it can also become an online shop or pretty much any web app, even a crypto exchange. This extendability does not come without a payoff though and there are many reasons why specialised solutions are able to offer a much better and more reliable experience. For example, for setting up an online shop, Shopify is often preferred over Wordpress add-on Woocommerce and many company blogs have switched from Wordpress to Ghost. However, most private bloggers are still in a love-hate-relationship with Wordpress, appreciating the extensibility and cheap hosting, but regularly growing frustrated with its problems and low performance.
No more Headache: Easy Peasy Blogging
If you have ever set up a blog in Wordpress, you will realize that it is everything but simple. Most bloggers start by watching hours after hours of tutorials to master the basics of Wordpress only to shoot their blog down after having installed a dozen different plugins. Even after you have configured a Wordpress blog, you have to invest time into maintenance regularly to update Wordpress, your plugins and themes - and if one update goes wrong and breaks your database or breaks compatibility between your plugins, themes and Wordpress itself, you have a problem. On the other hand, not only Wordpress itself, but every single plugin is a potential open gate to hackers, especially if you don’t update regularly.
With a TravelFeed blog, we manage all of this technical stuff for you, so you have no headache with setting up and managing your blog and you can focus on what you do best: Creating amazing content.
You can get started with your TravelFeed blog in under two minutes:
- Open the “Hosting” Tab in your TravelFeed Dashboard
- Choose a subdomain, name and slogan for your blog
- Configure optional settings such as your logo and color scheme
- Select which posts you want to have on your blog
That’s it! We automatically generate a blog customized for you and set it up on a complimentary subdomain, e.g. yourblog.truvvl.blog. Of course, you can assign your own domain as well.
Full Customizability with our Site Builder
No matter if you want Dark Mode, Sitemap, RSS, SEO optimization, Mobile Responsiveness, Search, Image Optimization, AMP, automated organisation by location: Instead of having to install a dozen plugins like on Wordpress, all your important features work out of the box on TravelFeed blogs!
However, you are not locked in to this automatic configuration: With the widget system of our site builder, we make it as easy as possible to change your blog to your liking - no coding skills required!
While this does not give you quite as much extensibility as Wordpress, it comes without the headache of incompatible plugins and we are aiming to offer enough widgets to satisfy 99% of travel bloggers. However, we will focus on blogging since we believe that for advanced features such an online shop, you are better off setting that up separately with a service specialised on that (e.g. Shopify) and linking to it from your blog. While all your essential widgets are already available, we would love to hear which widgets you would like to see next: For example dynamic maps, your latest Instagram posts, a weather forecast for the destination of each post, a map of all the countries you visited or an integrated newsletter system? Let us know!
Watch the video below to see in action how easy it is to customize your TravelFeed blog:
Your Fastest Blog. Ever.
While Wordpress itself has received many updates since its launch in 2003, the basic technology hasn’t changed: Each time a user opens any subpage of the blog, his browser communicates with Wordpress the webserver, Wordpress then fetches the information from the database, generates the HTML and sends it back to the browser. This is slow, especially if you are using a low-performance server and when the server is located on the other side of the world, which happens very often for travel blogs that are accessed from anywhere. In fact, many Wordpress blogs are so slow that they rank worse in search engines because of that and loose potential income.
Contrary to Wordpress, for TravelFeed blogs, we are using cutting-edge technology: Every time you update your site, we fetch all the information from the database, generate the HTML for your most important pages and distribute it to a network of servers around the globe (CDN) while your less important pages are built in realtime the first time they are accessed. This means that it may take several minutes until changes are visible for your blog, but once a user accesses it, it loads lightning-fast, from anywhere in the world, and if one server goes down, your blog remains accessible from dozens of other servers! And through our use of a modern Single Page Application in combination with server-side rendering, navigating your site is even faster!
While a developer using headless Wordpress could theoretically achieve similar speeds, very few Wordpress blogs take advantage of this technology and on average, TravelFeed blogs are up to 19x faster than Wordpress blogs.
And the best thing: You don't need to worry about any of the technical stuff you just read ;)
Ready to Give it a Try?
TravelFeed blogs are available today. We are giving you the option to try hosting for free until March 31, 2021 - we are not asking for any payment information and if you take no action by then, your trial subscription will end automatically without any charge and we will stop hosting your blog. If you wish to keep your blog after that, we are aiming to keep it affordable.
There currently is a waitlist for getting access to TravelFeed blogs, but if you are subscribed to our newsletter, you will find a link there to get priority access! If you are not subscribed to our newsletter, join the waiting list now and we will reach out to you soon.
Wordpress Imports
Do you have an existing Wordpress blog that you want to migrate to TravelFeed? Now you can! With our new Wordpress import feature, you can import all posts and drafts from your Wordpress blog in a breeze. This works for both Wodpress.com blogs and regular hosted Wordpress installations! You find the new Wordpress import assistant under Integrations in your TravelFeed dashboard.
Join TravelFeed!
Are you not on TravelFeed yet? We invite you to check out TravelFeed.io and to join over 1000 travelers on our Discord community. We’re also looking for one more curator to join our team.
We’re in Beta and continuously improve TravelFeed, meaning that there are still some bugs. If you notice anything or have feedback for us, please don’t hesitate to contact us on Discord, leave a comment or open a bug report on Github!