How WP Mayor Works

WP Mayor is brought to you by the team at RebelCode, all of whom are trusted WordPress experts in their own fields. We have been building, breaking, and writing about WordPress since the early 2000s, and everything you read here comes from that hands-on experience.

This page explains exactly how we make recommendations, how money flows through the site, and what our commercial relationships do and do not change.

How We Make Recommendations

WP Mayor launched in 2010. It began as a way to document what we were learning while running a WordPress development agency, building sites for clients around the world. We wanted to keep track of the products and services we actually used, and making that public turned out to help a lot of people in the same position.

That agency no longer operates, but the philosophy has not changed. Almost every product and service recommended on WP Mayor has been manually tested by our team. Two decades in this ecosystem have given us a clear sense of what separates a tool worth recommending from one that just markets well.

Every recommendation is grounded in that experience, and it is made without bias. The rest of this page shows you how we hold ourselves to that.

How We Review and Score Products

When we publish a full review, we do not hand out a star and call it a day. We score every product against the same five dimensions, each rated out of 5 in half-star increments, and the overall score is the average of all five.

Here is what each one measures.

• Features: Does the product do what it claims, and does it hold up against the standard set by its competitors? A 5 is feature-complete and mature. A 1 lacks the essentials.
• Pricing: Is it fair value for what you get, and is the pricing structure clear and honest? We weigh this against comparable products in the ecosystem.
• Product market fit: Does the product solve a real problem for a clearly defined audience, and does it bring something genuinely useful to that audience?
• Customer support: How fast and how helpful is support when something goes wrong, and how good is the documentation? We factor in public feedback to determine this.
• User feedback: What are real users saying across the WordPress repository, Trustpilot, and other public platforms?

Where it helps, reviews include screenshots of the product in action so you can see what we saw. Reviews are shared with the product owner before publishing so they have a chance to fix issues we flag. If problems remain, we say so plainly. We do not omit, soften, or lie about flaws that are still there at publish time. All prices shown reflect standard retail pricing. Discounts may be available from time to time on the product’s own website.

Our Independence Promise

This is the part that matters most, so we want zero ambiguity about it.

Money can affect whether and when we look at a product, but it never affects the verdict.

A paid review buys our time and a thorough, honest evaluation. It does not buy a good score, and it does not buy edits to a bad one. Our rating, our pros and cons, and our conclusion are ours alone.

When a paid review comes back unfavourable, the product owner has exactly one decision to make, which is either to publish the honest result or not publish it at all. They cannot ask us to inflate the score, remove the criticism, or rework the verdict into something it isn’t. There is no softened version on the table, so the review you read is the review we wrote.

We think that is the only honest way to run a paid review service, and it is why we are comfortable telling you about it openly.

Paid Reviews

Some of our reviews are paid for. That means the product’s developer paid for the evaluation. It does not mean they paid for the outcome.

Every sponsored review carries a clear notice within the article so you always know when payment was involved. Beyond that notice, a paid review follows the exact same scoring process described above, with the same independence promise attached.

Advertising on WP Mayor

You will see occasional ads on the site. We only accept advertising from companies whose products and support we would be comfortable recommending anyway, so a paid placement is still a product we stand behind.

Advertising keeps the lights on. WP Mayor is entirely self-funded, and this income is what pays our team of writers and editors to keep producing work every week.

Affiliate Partnerships

Many articles on WP Mayor use affiliate links. If you buy through one, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The price you pay is exactly the same, and the commission comes out of the partner’s pocket, not yours.

In some cases we go further and work with product owners to secure exclusive offers you will not find elsewhere.

Every affiliate link sits alongside a description or comparison explaining why we are recommending that product. That reasoning comes from our team’s research and testing, backed by decades of combined experience in WordPress and web development.

We also recommend and link to plenty of products we have no affiliation with at all. A large share of the links across this site exist purely because we think the tool is the best one for the job, with nothing to gain financially on our end.

Committed to Delivering Value

Every recommendation we make, whether the link is clean, part of a paid ad, or an affiliate relationship, is one we believe in and stand behind.

The financial side can influence the timing of when a product gets tested and featured, but it does not touch the validity of what we conclude. We have tested products that did not meet our standards, and we have told their owners so. Some take that feedback, improve, and come back later. Others decide not to publish. Either way, we never publish a verdict we do not mean.

If you ever spot a recommendation that looks off, it may simply be due for an update. Leave a comment on the article and our team will look into it right away.

Thank you for trusting us for over 15 years.