5 WordPress Admin Hacks

Good morning and happy Monday. 😇

Around here, all the kids are going back to school today. Which means the “cheese wagons” will be out in force. 😂 But, since my kids are homeschooled, not a lot changes on this end.

Saturday, we went to a local theater to watch my daughter play the role of Sandy in Grease. And, she nailed it. Really proud of her and seeing how she has grown into that role. Proud dad moment. 🥰

But now, time to get to work. 🧐

In this issue, I’m going to talk about my experience with WP Grid Builder (it wasn’t good) and we’ll take some lessons from it.

I’m also going to share my top ways for hacking and improving the WordPress admin experience.

So, let’s do this….

My (Unfortunate) Experience With WP Grid Builder

I tried to use WP Grid Builder and ran into a snag. I couldn’t get the facets to appear correctly. Not sure what I was missing, I reached out to the developer for support. It didn’t go well.

Refund Requests And Business Mindset

Back in Issue #488 of this newsletter (which you can read here), I talked about using WP Grid Builder to build custom post grids. Well, things have changed. And I think it does lend itself to some lessons that would be relevant to other small businesses.

You can read about my experience in the latest post on the blog.

And I want to be clear, this isn’t about bashing the developer of the plugin. He may be a really nice guy. And his plugin is actually quite powerful, there’s no doubt about it.

But, I do think there are a few lessons here on systems and, perhaps, even mindset.

Like many (if not most) of us, the developer of WP Grid Builder is a one-person small business. He’s wearing a lot of hats, including customer support. So, blind spots can happen.

One issue was that his documentation was more like a “how to” manual, but it didn’t really have anything in there about common issues, troubleshooting, etc. If it had, I might have been able to self-serve.

So, one lesson here is that a business owner can (and should) spend some time to systematize for common issues. This way it doesn’t all have to be handled manually each time. Could be an FAQ, or better documentation, or whatever it takes. Even some canned responses in your email system. It can all help.

Secondly, perhaps due to a language issue, I felt like he wasn’t actually responding to what I said. I felt like I was getting cookie-cutter responses and he wasn’t really looking.

The lesson here is just the importance of good communication. Treating people like people. Being a human being and talking like one. People like talking with regular people. And they want to feel heard. I didn’t feel like that guy was hearing me at all.

But, let’s talk about mindset here…

When I finally decided to just cut my losses and move on, I asked for a refund. I wasn’t rude about it at all. But, the reason I bought Grid Builder was for the support and clearly I wasn’t getting it.

And he denied the refund. Quoting his 14-day refund period.

I didn’t fight it. I don’t care enough about a couple hundred bucks, and his policy was there on his website. It is his right to make his own business policies, and I’ll respect that.

But, it goes to mindset of the entrepreneur.

When I asked him about that, he basically came back with two reasons:

• He isn’t legally required to give a refund for digital products. So, he thought his 14-day period was generous.
• He makes no exceptions because he fears abuse of his refund period.

Clearly, he’s stingy. He has a scarcity mindset and he’s worried about people trying to cheat him.

I’ve seen people really handicap themselves over this stuff. People worried about refund abuse of money-back guarantees. Or worried people will steal their content. It goes more to mindset of the business owner than anything else. And it can hurt them.

Refund requests should be looked at as a problem with your business. It is a system problem. It is a symptom. If refund requests happen, you look for what YOU did wrong. You look for how things got to that point and you look for ways to change your processes so it doesn’t repeat.

It isn’t about blame. It is about responsibility and making your business better.

You don’t sit there and blame the customer and quote back policy. Especially for a stupidly short 14-day refund period. He thinks that’s generous. I think it is stupidly small. It takes longer than that to even learn how to use the plugin if you have other things to do.

Anyway, the lesson here is…. money-back guarantees are there to protect the customer. And when refund requests happen, you look at it as a symptom of a larger issue. That’s the only way to approach those things.

This guy’s mindset is limiting his business. He even bothered to complain to me about the fact that I apparently mispronounced his name in my video. Like, really? 🤯

Anyway, I wish him luck. It is indeed a good plugin. He’s clearly a good developer. But, can’t say some of his business logistics are all dialed in.

This Week In Concierge

This last week, we moved a client’s site from Kinsta to Rocket.net. This client’s site was repeatedly having ad code injected into it. I had to go in and fix it for him numerous times. And the whole time, I was saying it could very well be 3 older plugins he was using for his membership that had a security hole.

Interestingly, tho, the hacks ceased the moment we moved the site to Rocket. Same site…. same plugins. But, no more hacks. And all we changed was the hosting.

This is why I love using Rocket.net hosting for my Concierge clients. Not only is the performance stellar, but the environment is secure.

Kinsta isn’t a slouch. Frankly, I was a little surprised switching hosts had such a profound impact. But, it did. Also, Kinsta upcharges you for downright stupid things. I think Kinsta has gotten way too money-focused, if you ask me.

Here’s what else we were doing for Concierge clients….

• Converting a client’s pages off an old page builder called “Site Origin” and over to a more modern Kadence setup
• Working on a major re-build of a client’s membership site, moving it off Divi and onto modern “plumbing” to make his site a heck of a lot less trouble than it has been.
• Changes made to a client’s WooCommerce account dashboard
• Began a full (and fast) rebuild of another client’s membership to a more modern setup. Planning to wrap up this one early this week.

Another busy week coming up.

WordPress Quick Bits

Kadence Gets An Update. Kadence gets a host of fixes in it’s 3.2.49 update. The new feature is a tooltip option for images, which is cool I guess. But, a host of little fixes make the product better. Full changelog here.

Fluent Forms 5.2 Released. This one’s got some goodies. New options to print entries and a contextual menu in the editor in the free version. For the Pro users, you can now populate form fields dynamically using submissions, taxonomy, posts or even remote CSV. Image uploads now offer a dropzone rather than the usual file upload. There’s also advanced search on all form entries. Cool update! See the full enchilada here.

New Booking Solution. I am a big fan of FluentBooking for booking calendars. But, StellarWP (the guys behind Kadence and Learndash) acquired a booking plugin awhile back… and now they’re launching it as BookIt. You can learn more about the plugin on it’s homepage. Looks like this could be a strong contender. Always good to see competition.

Use Your YubiKey With WordPress. I’ve been pondering getting a YubiKey, but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Basically, it is hardware-based two-factor authentication. Well, the WP 2FA plugin for WordPress now has “out of the box support” for the Yubikey. So, now it can be used to lock down your WordPress site, too.

Rocket’s Plan To Scale. The CEO of Rocket.net has posted a blog post about their plan to scale up to $10mm ARR without losing what makes them so good. It is a good read.

5 Useful Customizations To Your WordPress Admin

There are some things about the WordPress admin panel I don’t particularly care for. But, the great thing about this ecosystem is that we have a nearly infinite ways we can make changes to it and bend WordPress to our will.

So, let me spell out a few things I often do inside of the WordPress admin:

#1 – Hide Admin Notifications

The WordPress admin panel can get really noisy with plugins abusing the notifications system. Pushing you for things like upsells, reviews, and other notifications you just don’t need to see.

Plus, when they really stack up, it can push all the actual “guts” of WordPress way down and you have to scroll down to use it. It’s ridiculous.

I use the Admin and Site Enhancements plugin on a ton of sites. And one of the many things it does very well is to hide admin notices.

It will put them into a little collapsible dropdown at the top right of the screen, nice and tucked away until you’re ready to see them. Really reduces the clutter.

#2 – Customize listing screens

I like to be able to take control of the columns being shown on the screens for posts, pages and any other custom post type. This way I can see the data I want to see…. and hide the stuff I don’t need to see.

While the Admin and Site Enhancements plugin offers a decent ability to customize columns, my preference is Admin Columns.

Admin Columns is super powerful and flexible… and it just works well. You can even create custom screens with different sets of columns and even pre-applied filters. Once set up, you can greatly reduce the amount of clicks you need to see and manage content.

#3 – Custom Fields For Any Purpose

A lot of people just don’t realize how insanely flexible WordPress really is. What is there when you first install it is definitely not all that you’ve got.

I use Advanced Custom Fields constantly. You can create custom post types, custom fields, and much more. And while this is obviously useful for different kinds of content, one nice thing relevant to the admin panel specifically is that you can use ACF to create internal custom fields which might be useful to YOU.

For instance, you could use what’s called a Repeater field with ACF to create a change log for all changes made to any blog post. That’s just one of many potential things you could do. And you’d be able to keep that info to yourself in the admin area…. or display it on your website if you’d like.

#4 – Media Library Folders

You can make better sense of your Media Library by organizing it into folders. I talked about this in this post (and video) about how to do it using Filebird.

But, the ASE plugin also does it. These days, that’s what I would use since it is more efficient. It is one plugin that just does a lot.

#5 – Make Patterns Easier To Use

When using the built-in block editor for WordPress, one of the useful capabilities is to be able to save pre-built components called “Patterns”. Then, you can save a ton of time by pre-inserting these patterns anywhere you want. Useful for putting calls to action within your content and managing them all from one place.

The Reusable Blocks Extended plugin makes it even more useful. It gives you a central screen where you can view your patterns, easily view them and organize them. You can find out where they’re used across your site, access them using a shortcode, etc.