Welcome back to the 26th edition of The Lab Report!
And the first one of August.
It’s definitely not my ideal sending frequency, but I’ve come to learn that turning 31 means you’re basically either at a bachelor party or wedding every single weekend during the summer.
I’m sure once we get back to -25° outside here things will slow back down.
The good thing is that it means there’s more to talk about, so let’s get into this week’s newsletter!
🚀 Free Resource: Link in Bio template
A couple of weeks ago I put out a free Link in Bio template that you can use for your FB/IG/Twitter/TikTok profiles.
You can preview the live version here if you want to see what it looks like.
The idea is that rather than just sending people to your portfolio or agency’s homepage, you can be a lot more specific about the information you want to get across and show a direct call to action.
For example, you can showcase your latest work and let people contact you with a click of a button if they’re looking for a blazing fast new website.
How you want to use the template is also completely up to you.
It’s made for web designers, but since you have full control over the page, you can put whatever you want on there.
You could easily pitch it to a client for $200 and save them money on their Linktree subscription.
Or just boost their sales and look like a hero.
It’s currently available for Bricks Builder, Oxygen Builder, and Figma.
Download it for free here.
🎥 Behind the scenes of releasing a free template
I chose a Link in Bio template not because I’ve been dying to build one, but because I thought it’d be a good first template.
Man, setting up the infrastructure for releasing a digital product took WAY longer than actually making the template.
Here were some of the steps involved:
- Design the template
- Name your layers and make it so that it’s not embarrassing when someone else is inside your Figma file
- Create a Digital Product custom post type
- Design & build the landing page for your template
- Write the copy for your landing page
- Create the opt-in popup that’s integrated with your email marketing platform
- Create an email automation that sends the link to the template after someone has opted-in
- Create a dev site for each page builder
- Build your template for each page builder
- Ensure that when someone imports your template, styling & images properly carry over
- Create a Download page for your template, where users can either download the template file or copy shortcodes
- Promote the template
I’m probably even forgetting about some steps.
Once you’ve set up the process the first time, it should be a lot easier the second time around.
At least that’s what I’m hoping!
🐇 Bunny Storage Edge Tier: Make your site faster for global visitors
I know a lot of people on this list are using Bunny.net as their CDN, so I thought I’d share a new feature they quietly added last month.
It’s called the Bunny Storage Edge Tier – a new option available when using their Perma-cache.
In case you’re not familiar, the perma-cache a secondary layer that sits in between their CDN and your server.
Normally if someone visits your website and the request isn’t cached, the CDN has to pull the file from your server.
With the perma-cache, it makes a copy of your files all across the globe, and your CDN can pull from that repository instead.
That means you’re making far fewer requests to your server and the CDN can retrieve the file much faster.
This is actually something Bunny.net has offered for a year or so now, but they just added the SSD-based object storage option.
This has apparently made the TTFB almost 40% faster than it was before.
If your site gets global traffic, it’s definitely something worth checking out.
🌊 Cloudways acquired by DigitalOcean
Honestly I didn’t see this coming.
DigitalOcean (a server provider) just bought the super popular Cloudways for $350mil.
While I’m using GridPane for most of my main sites, I still have a few clients on Cloudways and think they’re one of the best bang-for-buck hosting options out there.
I don’t love that they got acquired by DigitalOcean.
They’ve mentioned that this won’t bring any major changes for the time being, but the writing is on the wall.
DigitalOcean didn’t spend $350mil so that users can continue to sign up for their competitors’ servers.
I’ve seen some people panic, but I don’t think that’s necessary either.
I can’t imagine they’d force you to switch servers for your existing sites.
And even if you’re fully bought into the Cloudways ecosystem, the Digital Ocean AMD Premium droplets have been very comparable to Vultr HF in my experience.
If Cloudways does become a DigitalOcean-centric panel provider, get ready for all the new democratized panel providers we’re going to see pop up in the mean time.
💬 Closing Comments
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for reading to the end!
If you ever want to discuss any of the topics in this newsletter, I post a dedicated thread each week inside of the NewPulse Labs Facebook group.
You can also suggest any topics you think I should cover there, so be sure to join 🙂
Stay cool and see you next week (hopefully).
