We at Forge and Smith are overjoyed to announce that our ground-breaking site builder, Refoundry, is now available to the general public. We’ve cut our build hours by 80% since we started creating all of our custom sites on Refoundry. Additionally, we have significantly improved customer satisfaction. Here’s everything you need to know about what Refoundry is, how it works, and how to get it.
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What is Refoundry?
Refoundry is a low-code, themeless site builder plugin that works with WordPress.
Everything WordPress can do, it can do, plus a whole lot more. It makes building websites faster, easier, and way more customizable for agencies like ours – or anyone who builds websites for a living.
Rendering launch-ready code as you go, Refoundry can be used to build websites that exactly match any UI designs you create. Developers can further customize it with additional CSS, JavaScript, React, and JSON API integrations. It’s compatible with any plugin that’s compatible with the Gutenberg editor, and integrates with any tool that integrates with WordPress.
Since late 2022, our company has officially been using Refoundry to build all of our custom websites. As of today there are nearly 100 Refoundry websites in the wild, with outstanding performance results!
Here’s a small sample of metrics they’ve achieved:
+347% organic search traffic
+173% conversion rate
+168% contributions +86% faster page speeds
Why did we create Refoundry?
Our clients wanted more control over their websites, and everyone, including Google, wants pages to load faster. Within the WordPress ecosystem, there was no solution that could meet both of these requirements without sacrificing accessibility or quality. So we constructed our own. “Custom websites don’t need to be dependent on development skills,” said Shawn Johnston, owner and founder of Forge and Smith and Refoundry. “And clients demand that we move faster. We needed a solution that could deliver the high-performance quality of custom, but be usable by everyone on the agency team.”
Three seasoned engineers were hired by Johnston in 2021 to join the agency’s existing group of strategists, developers, and creatives. Together we built, tested, and iterated Refoundry.
The feedback from our clients has been outstanding, with some agency clients so thrilled that they immediately hired us for another project.
It is loved by end users because it gives them more control in a simple visual editor and eliminates the need for them to hire a developer to make changes to the layout, navigation, and style. They especially appreciate the responsive component templates, which make it quick and easy to add new sections or whole pages. Additionally, their websites pass the speed, accessibility, and SEO tests with flying colors. However, in reality, all of these advantages are precisely what users today expect from a website. For our agency, Refoundry has saved countless hours on builds and QA. Profitability has also increased as a result.
How does Refoundry work?
Refoundry enhances the Gutenberg site editor and block-based system. It essentially gives you all of the best parts of the WordPress experience, without the frustrating drawbacks.
Once you’ve installed and configured the plugin, you unlock the ability to manage every single element of the page within the visual editor. Nothing is hard-coded into the theme, so you don’t need to write code or hire a developer.
Anyone who builds with Refoundry has complete control over all layouts, visual styles, block settings, navigation elements, content, authoring controls, and more. Refoundry is also producing SEO-friendly, lightweight code as you work. This adds up to faster page speeds, total creative freedom, and the ability to launch faster.
It also means that everyone on an agency team can work on websites. Designers, content strategists, project managers, and SEOs can edit the site, without writing code. (Don’t worry, you can also manage authoring controls and even lock blocks to avoid accidents.)
For Developers
Being low-code doesn’t mean Refoundry has less functionality, less customization, or less for developers to do.
Johnston stated, “Refoundry can do whatever is needed, from search to filters, post content to logins and beyond.” “Anything you can do with CSS, HTML, or JavaScript, you can do 80-90% of that same work without code using Refoundry. The remaining 10 to 20 percent of your build only requires you to write code. “Think of it this way: how much more fun would cooking be if all of the prep work was done for you?” Johnston said. “We built Refoundry to speed up and organize 80 to 90 percent of the predictable, repeatable parts of all web projects, and we’re still developing new features that will increase that percentage even more.” But everything still works the way WordPress itself does, developers can add or extend anything you want, the same way you do now.”
Developers can easily keep up with an agency’s build queue and still have time because they can build faster. Less time on production work and fixing bugs means more time for fun stuff like developing animations, customizing the blocks, or professional development to push your agency’s capabilities even further.
For Creators, Strategists, and Designers Refoundry doesn’t just save time for builders – everyone who needs to work on a site or manage content will find it faster and easier to do your work.
You can paste content into Refoundry by copying and pasting it from another document. The plugin will detect all formatting (such as headings, paragraphs, links, and lists), automatically create the correct blocks, and apply your global styles
You can copy/paste blocks from one page to another, or even from one website to another
You can also search for blocks by name and add them in one click
Or our add-on build assistant, ScoutAI, can fetch and even recommend blocks for you
Additionally, you can instantly change the page’s order by dragging and dropping any blocks.
How is Refoundry different from other site builders?
Refoundry is different from any other site builder on the market. It had to be, to accomplish our goals.
There are website builders that are independent platforms. You must utilize their exclusive themes and code. There are also other website builder plugins that work with WordPress, but still require a theme and templates that only developers can alter.
Refoundry has no theme – everything you could possibly need to edit can be done through global settings and the visual editor. And because it’s built for WordPress, you get the benefit of using the world’s leading CMS and open source code that developers can easily customize.