Customers: start here
This section is for the organizations and people who already run a site on Exponential for their own needs: publishing news, a magazine, a blog or documentation; selling in an online store; serving members or staff; reaching readers in several languages or with several sites. It is written for the site owner and the team around the site: the person who answers for it, the managers and editors who work in it every day, and whoever talks to the hosting company or the implementation partner.
You do not need to be technical to use it. Each page says what to do, how often and who on your team usually does it, and links to the step-by-step help for editors and administrators and to the technical pages for your provider.
Note
Every fact here comes from the Exponential repository, from a demonstration installation or from https://exponential.earth, and the source is named on the page. The section names no customers and quotes no figures of anyone's business. Where a page calculates, the inputs are labeled as example assumptions to replace with your own. Pages about VAT, contracts and personal data describe the software and what to check; they are not legal advice.
Contents
- Start with your kind of site
- The six parts of owning a site
- Your first 30 days
- When something is wrong
- Reference
- Other sections of this help
Start with your kind of site
Each kind of site has a start page and a reading path. Not sure which you are? Answer the questions in Which type of customer are you?.
| Publishing | Commerce and members | Organization |
|---|---|---|
| Newsrooms | Online stores | Intranets |
| Magazines | Membership sites | Multilingual sites |
| Blogs | Owners of several sites | |
| Documentation sites |
All nine are listed with their reading paths in Customer types.
The six parts of owning a site
| Part | What it covers | Start with |
|---|---|---|
| Day-to-day ownership | Roles for your team, onboarding and offboarding, the content calendar, approvals, media, SEO checks, accessibility upkeep, analytics | Day-to-day ownership |
| Running the store | Products, prices, VAT, orders, payment gateways, shipping, returns, invoices, customer accounts, data requests | Commerce operations |
| Keeping the site healthy | Updates and upgrades with your provider, backups, security basics, monitoring, what to ask your host or partner, reporting problems | Keeping the site healthy |
| Growth | Newsletters, landing pages with Layouts, new languages and new sites, mobile and apps, integrations, Exponential Intelligence | Growth |
| Partners and hosts | Who does what, choosing, contracts and SLAs (templates), handover checklists, when to call whom | Partners and hosts |
| Getting value | Measuring return on investment, a feature tour, features customers often miss, checklists | Getting value |
Your first 30 days
If you have just taken over a site (a new job, a new owner, a new partner), Your first 30 days as a site owner gives you a week-by-week plan. Before anything else, make sure you know:
- who can sign in with full rights, and that each of those accounts belongs to a named person (Admin accounts and access);
- where the backups are and when one was last restored (Backups, Restore test);
- who to call for content, for the code and for the server (When to call whom);
- what you own: the content, the data, the code written for you, and the license of the software (What you own).
When something is wrong
| Situation | Go to |
|---|---|
| The site is down or very slow | When the site is down |
| An error message, a page that does not work | When something goes wrong, then Reporting problems |
| You found a bug in Exponential itself | GitHub issues and the help's report page |
| You suspect a security problem | Private security reports: by e-mail to [email protected], never in a public issue (SECURITY.md) |
| A customer asks for their data | GDPR requests |
Reference
- Customers reading path: the path every type shares
- Customers FAQ
- Customers glossary
- Quick reference: where things are in the administration
- Checklists: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly
- The owner's year at a glance: the recurring work on one calendar
Other sections of this help
This section links to the other sections instead of repeating them:
| Section | For |
|---|---|
| Editing content, Publishing and versions, Media and uploads | The steps in the editor |
| Admin tour | A tour of the administration |
| Businesses | Organizations that are still evaluating Exponential |
| Website creators | The people who build and change the site |
| Hosting companies | Your host's view |
| Partners | Your implementation partner's view |
| Who is 7x?, Who is the Exponential Foundation? | The people behind Exponential |
Related pages
- Customers reading path
- Which type of customer are you?
- Your first 30 days as a site owner
- Getting started
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
See also: Adopters, E-commerce, Local businesses, Individuals, Non-technical people.
Become an Exponential Partner
Partners share their information, provide funding, contribute back and develop the products with us, and that is how Exponential grows. A partner website and dashboard are planned for mid-2027: please become a partner today to speed up our growth rate and land new features faster.