Showit and WordPress Tandem: Everything You Need to Know

Showit Blog Runs on WordPress: Why, How, Plugins and Everything Explained

Showit is an amazing tool for building modern and fast websites. You can use it to build pretty much any website imaginable – from sales pages, to portfolios, to online stores. If you decided to use Showit and want to have a blog on your website (or otherwise regularly publish other content, like articles or reviews, for example), there are several nuances you should consider.

Unlike some other platforms, like Squarespace or Wix, Showit works in tandem with WordPress to enable blog functionality. In practice this means that you handle all your content and design for all your static pages via Showit, design the look and feel of your blog also on Showit, but use WordPress to publish blog posts.

If you hear “WordPress” and immediately feel the urge to turn away, scared of having to manage plugins, updates and thinking that you need to know how to code or manage hosting servers to run your website, don’t worry as with Showit this is not the case at all. In this article we dive deep into how exactly Showit works with WordPress and why it is a blessing in disguise more than anything else.

The simplest way to publish a “blog” on Showit

Now, since you can create any number of pages using Showit, in principle, you can create new pages for every new piece of content you want to publish without having to ever touch the blogging interface – WordPress. But this approach is simply not sustainable long-term, as you can potentially end up with dozens and hundreds of pages.

How to set up a blog on Showit

One thing to know before you even consider adding a blog to your Showit website is that it is not a matter of simply flipping a switch. In fact, this is something you need to request the Showit support team to enable for you. This might sound counterintuitive or simply too much work, but in fact, the Showit support team is very fast to react to messages and is fairly amazing at their support work.

Another consideration is the price tag. Your basic Showit subscription at the time of writing of this article is offered at $24 per month (or $19/mo when billed annually) and does not include support for a blog. To enable it, you will need to go for the “Basic starter blog” price plan at least, which now goes for $29/mo (or $24/mo when billed annually).

Once you decide you want the blog functionality and pick the correct pricing plan (we’ll talk about the “Advanced blog” plan in a bit), you need to go to your Showit website editing interface and select the “Site Settings” option. From there, navigate to the “Blog” tab and follow instructions and prompts to request adding a blog to your website.

The setup itself usually takes the Showit team around 24 hours and they will send you an email with blog admin access details once that’s all done.

How to access the blog admin on Showit

To access the Showit blog admin, simply navigate to YourDomainUrl.com/wp-admin and enter login credentials you receive via email from Showit. The admin interface will look exactly like it would for almost any WordPress installation out there, with several caveats. First, if you went with the basic plan, you won’t be able to add any additional WordPress plugins besides those already installed by the Showit team. You also won’t have access to things like switching to a different WordPress theme – which is very much expected, since you are using Showit as your website – and effectively theme – builder.

There’s a vast quantity of tutorials out there on publishing blog posts using WordPress, so this is not something we’re going to cover in this post. Just keep in mind that if you need to change the design of your blog post, besides actual content, that’s something you will need to do via Showit, not WordPress. Simply load the Showit editor, select one of the blog templates from the sidebar menu (under Blog Templates) and edit one as you like using the familiar Showit controls and elements.

How do I change the URL of my blog post in Showit?

Using WordPress as a management platform for blog posts comes with other perks, including the ability to edit certain more particular settings of your website directly via the WordPress admin dashboard. Log into the WordPress admin interface and under the Settings sidebar menu option, select Permalinks. Here you can actually set up how you would like your Showit blog URL structure to look like. Want to explicitly have it under YourWebsiteUrl.com/blog/… or use a post category name in the url? This is where all that is set up.

Can I have a store on Showit?

Yes! While there are simple solutions, like embedding Pay by PayPal or Shopify Starter buttons on your pages, this is an article about the world of WordPress inside Showit, after all, and we can leverage that for a much more sophisticated e-commerce solution.

One of the most popular plugins for WordPress is WooCommerce, which allows you to not just list and sell physical and digital products directly on your website, but effectively has all the tools needed to turn the back end of your website into a full-fledged online store management system. And Showit supports it and its key elements!

Before you get started though, keep in mind that in order to enable WooCommerce, you will need to be on the “Advanced blog” plan with Showit, which is currently being offered at $39/mo ($34/mo when billed annually).

Although treated as a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce is pretty much a complete e-commerce platform in itself, which means that it comes with a lot of its own front-facing service pages and elements. For instance, there’s the product and the product listing pages, client dashboard page (where your customers can edit their delivery addresses or other personal information, for example) and so on. And most of those you can actually edit and style using Showit without ever having to worry about installing or managing additional themes or plugins in WordPress! Showit comes with WooCommerce support out of the box and has this great quick tutorial on how to get started with WooCommerce on Showit.

Installing and activating WordPress plugins on a Showit website

Another great plus of such interconnectedness between your Showit website and the WordPress-powered blog is that with the advanced plan you can have access to a vast gallery of other powerful WordPress plugins which you can utilize to power charge your website and blog.

Having said that, for most users you should be fine even when being on the “basic blog” plan, as it comes with not only the blog support itself and actual access to the WordPress back end, but also with a collection of pre-installed plugins, guaranteed to work with Showit. They come pre-installed, but not activated by default, leaving you the control to enable them or not. To help you decide what you might need, let’s look at some of them and review how you can utilize them to make your blogging experience on Showit even better.

• Classic Editor – makes blog writing and editing more simple and streamlined. If you start a new blog post on WordPress, the blog editor user interface might seem confusing and even a bit too much, for first-time users particularly. Activating the Classic Editor plugin on Showit website will swap that editor for a much simpler, and arguably familiar, one.
• Contact Form 7 – arguably the simplest form builder plugin for WordPress. It can take a minute to learn how to set up form fields using it, but since it’s by far one of the most popular solutions for WordPress, a quick YouTube search will land you a bunch of free and well-produced tutorials to help you get started. 
• Jetpack is another powerful and feature-rich plugin that we can’t really describe in just a few words. As its description states, it’s “Security, performance, and marketing tools made by WordPress experts” all bundled in one thing. Check out more about it here and for sure consider enabling it on your website. Now, although they do have pricing plans, the free version comes with many great features too.
• Yoast SEO – activating this plugin is simply a must, in our opinion. It gives you vast control over the SEO settings of your blog, every individual blog post, and some SEO-related aspects of the whole website as well. After you write your blog post, it can also tell you if you lack keywords, if it’s too short or long, if it misses key formatting components, etc. And even will give a general prediction on how well that post is expected to perform with search engines. Not to mention that it will give you much better control over what content (title, image, description) gets sent to social media when someone decides to tweet your post or share it on some other social network.

Takeaways

Blogging on Showit is easy and straightforward – and not despite its reliance on WordPress, but because of it. If you decide to go for a Showit blog, just think of your website as no longer powered by Showit alone, but by Showit and WordPress in tandem. From pre-installed plugins to never needing to worry about server management or platform updates, to being able to tweak the more hidden settings of your website and blog, this link between the two platforms is definitely a great thing.