WordPress, a leading provider of blog infrastructure and hosting, has taken a step towards making blogging more sustainable by allowing sites to easily accept recurring payments, such as subscriptions.
This comes after WordPress launched the 5.3 version of the CMS, which runs on more than 30 percent of the web, and the latest version is called Kirk, which focuses on improving the user experience.
The tool should be available to anyone with a paid WordPress site and sites using the company's Jetpack toolkit.
Blogging's popularity has declined since its peak in the first decade of the century, when bloggers could earn enough money to live and keep the site running.
Although blogging is not dead, it needs support to survive, and the difficulty of earning money is one of the main reasons for its decline.
WordPress seeks to help website owners earn money, as many rely on advertising revenue, but advertising revenue is not always sufficient to meet the financial needs of website owners.
`` Small businesses, sustainability perspectives, subscriptions and membership are key to monetizing your site in 2019, especially for small publishers, '' says Mark Armstrong, Longreads founder and editor at Automattic (parent company of WordPress).
"We have made a lot of observations in terms of the things we have seen, and we have had membership and membership in Longreads since 2011, so we have experience working with memberships and subscriptions spanning about eight years."
The idea is to build something simple that can be merged relatively easily, so that sites can immediately start collecting revenue from their fans, Armstrong said: The first version of the product was first tested in Longreads.
However, the new product reproduces some functionality, such as the PayPal plugin for WordPress, but it fits into a broader trend to enable creators to accept payments and build communities in easy ways.
Armstrong believes that WordPress supports all other products within its ecosystem, such as Patreon, Memberful and WooCommerce, that serve different needs, and are available to all WordPress blogs, not just paid ones.
The editor at Automattic explained that the service that people choose is tailored to the needs of individual users, and that the new recurring payments feature is essential for any small business.
The new feature allows direct payments from visitors to be accepted, scheduling pre-defined payments automatically with the ability to unsubscribe at any time, offering ongoing subscriptions, site membership and monthly donations, and integrating the site with Stripe payments processing and fundraising.