Website builder update: We’ve released new blog features

Last March, we launched our website builder—an awesome addition to our growing suite of marketing features that already included landing pages and pop-ups. With the website builder, everyone using MailerLite can create entire websites, including a blog section!

Many of our customers have since built beautiful websites and launched new blogs. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve released even more blog features.

With our latest blog feature updates, you’ll be able to:

• Add a signup form, videos, spacers and custom code

• Schedule blog posts

• Change the date of blog posts

• Add SEO settings for blog posts and categories

• Use automatically-created feeds for RSS campaigns

• Show recent blog posts

Let’s take a look at all these updates in more detail.

Let’s start with the biggest update: We’ve added 4 additional blocks you can add into your blog post with your drag & drop editor.

Signup form

Many of you requested this feature, so here it is! A signup form is a great way to motivate people to subscribe to your email list to receive more content after reading a blog.

Videos

You can now drag a video block in your blog post to easily show videos. Add the URL and your video will be embedded and automatically resized, so it looks good on all screen sizes.

Spacers

There were already dividers available, but now you can also insert spacers. These “empty” blocks are used to create more room between other blocks. As you’ve learned from our website design best practices article, it’s good to be generous with white space in your page and blog designs.

Code block for customization

Add this block and insert your code. The code block will be mostly used for people who want to make custom changes or add features that aren’t (yet) available in the website builder.

You can now prepare all of your blog posts in advance and easily schedule them within the blog post editor. 

Instead of clicking Save and publish, click on the arrow pointing down and choose the Save and schedule option instead. Then choose the time and date, and schedule. The time in your time zone will automatically be displayed (it’s the same time as you’ve set in your account settings).

You can see all your scheduled posts on your website overview page under the tab Blog. When you press the green Schedule button, you can change the date again to publish the blog immediately or first later.

Changing the date of blog posts can be useful in different instances: When migrating from another platform (and wanting to repost blogs with their original date), or if you’d like to change the date for blog order purposes or after optimizing the content for SEO purposes.

To change a blog post date, go to the Blog overview page and click on the Details button next to any blog. Under Post created you can then choose any date and time in the past. You’ll see this option for published posts, not for drafts. Then click Update details to save the change. 

Back in the Blog overview, you’ll then see that the Date created date was updated to the new date.

You were already able to add general SEO and social sharing settings, but now you can do so for each individual blog post and blog categories.

This update is great because it gives you:

• Better optimization capabilities: If you optimize each individual blog post and category, you have higher chances to rank in search engines.

• More blog visits: When you optimize your meta titles and descriptions, it encourages people to click through to read your blog when they see it in the search engine results. Write the copy in a way that people know what to expect when clicking the link.

• Better SEO practices: Having unique meta titles and descriptions for important pages is a good practice to follow in general.

If you want to learn more about SEO best practices, we’ve got just the guide for you.

From now on, whenever you create a blog page in the website builder, we’ll automatically create a feed for it. You can find the link for this feed in the Blog tab, and use this feed URL to send RSS campaigns in MailerLite.

Note: Did you already create blog posts before this release? To see your feed URL, you have to quickly update your website. In the website overview, click the Edit button next to the desired website. Then inside the builder, press the green Save and update button. Now you’ll see the feed URL in the Blog tab.

RSS campaigns are amazing as readers can sign up and automatically get notified whenever you publish a new blog post. You only need to set it up once, and readers will never miss a new blog post. Super convenient!

Wondering how RSS campaigns work in MailerLite? Watch the video below or read our articles on this topic.

• Help article: How do RSS campaigns work?

• Feature: RSS to email

Just like the Newsletter archive block, you can now also show previously written blog posts by dragging the Recent posts block anywhere on your page when building a website.

You can automatically show your latest blog posts or pick your favorites manually. Adjust the display settings, date format and edit the text that’s displayed to continue reading. 

Choose up to three blog posts that are shown horizontally and expand vertically by dragging and dropping more Recent posts blocks underneath each other.

Are you excited about these blog updates? Show us your blog below!