In Q3, we shipped two major features: a new analytics dashboard and tech-stack integrations that bring all your reader data into Newspack, so you can target messaging on your site.
We also deliberately paused a few projects so our engineers could focus on improving site stability and security, given the industry-wide surge in AI bots hitting sites.
Here are the most noteworthy updates we made in Q3.
Access all of your performance metrics in one dashboard
Understanding how audiences engage with the journalism and where signups and revenue come from shouldn’t require publishers to switch between multiple platforms. That’s why we built Newspack Insights, a dashboard built directly into the WordPress admin that brings key audience and revenue metrics together in one place, so publishers can see what’s working and where to focus their efforts.
Insights gathers analytics from multiple sources in one place to answer questions other platforms can’t on their own.
It provides publishers with a comprehensive view of their readers and performance metrics in one dashboard. We also make the data easier to understand by using newsroom-friendly terminology instead of analytics jargon.
It answers questions publishers might use to inform their strategy, like:
- How big is my audience?
- How engaged are readers?
- Where are conversions coming from?
- How effective are my campaigns and content gates?
- How healthy is my subscriber and donor base?
- How are my ads performing?
Connect your tech stack with Newspack
Publishers often rely on third-party platforms for key parts of their business, particularly for sending newsletters and emails and generating reader revenue. Newspack Integrations makes it easier to connect those services to Newspack so reader data can flow between systems and inform more targeted messaging on their sites.
This tool wouldn’t be possible without our partner, BlueLena, who shared their invaluable expertise with publisher workflows in third-party tools, data integration, and feedback on the user interface during the iterations of Integrations along the way.
The three integrations available right now are:
- ActiveCampaign
- Gravity Forms
- Mailchimp
We’re actively working on more integrations and will release them soon.
What we’re doing to keep your site stable and secure
Automated crawlers and bot traffic now outweigh human traffic. Across many Newspack sites, bots now generate more than 90% of all incoming requests. This volume can strain servers and slow down sites, while some bots also probe for security vulnerabilities. It’s an industry-wide problem affecting publishers across all platforms.
That’s why our team chose to briefly pause new feature development to focus on site stability and security. This behind-the-scenes work ensures you can keep publishing stories and generating revenue without worrying about hacks or uptime.
We addressed several performance bottlenecks and scalability issues, primarily caused by third-party plugins, that slow sites when bots scrape thousands of URLs in quick succession. We also made improvements to Content Loop blocks, media uploading, sitemap generation, autosave handling, and other Newspack components to make them more efficient and use fewer server resources.
To help us monitor and troubleshoot, we enhanced our internal dashboards to identify and resolve site issues faster. This work also included improving our tooling for managing bots and blocking several troublemakers.
We also improved our security pipeline to proactively identify, assess, and patch vulnerabilities in Newspack code.
Initial results showed meaningful progress, including:
- Improved speed on many sites
- A significant decrease in server usage and frequency of sites hitting their usage ceiling
- A 47% reduction in the number of support tickets opened about site reliability issues
This quarter, we’re working on updates that will help you manage transactional email from one place, and control content gating from one dashboard. We’re also testing a live blogging tool designed to help newsrooms publish real-time updates during fast-moving events, including elections, as part of our Emergency Mode for News initiative. Stay tuned for the Q4 update.
If you missed the last product roundups, you can find them here.