Automate & Optimize

Happy Monday. Ready to kick off a new, productive week? 😎

Been super busy on this end. Among many things, I’m working on internal processes and documentation.

I know…. exciting. 🤓

Strangely, though, I find it a little bit fun. I know I’m weird.

On that note, one of the things I had to re-visit and systematize is my system for handling failed payments for renewals. Below, I’m going to share with you how I built a quick automation to put that on automatic. If you’re running a business with recurring billing, could be handy.

Also last week, I did a WP Speed Fix service for somebody and took her site from a starting performance score of a paltry 41/100 and got it up to a cool 99/100. 😎 I’ll share what I did.

So, let’s roll straight into it….

Does Your Site Recover Failed Payments?

If you have a site which does recurring payments (for memberships, services, etc.), then payment failures are just a fact of life.

Cards get declined. Things happen. But, the question is… does your site have a graceful way of handling it and communicating to customers about it?

I use WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions pretty much as my “go to” for subscription payments. And this setup has a default way of re-trying failed payments. It goes like this:

• Re-try after 12 hours.
• Re-try after 12 more hours.
• Wait 24 hours, then do it again.
• 48 hours later, re-try it.
• 72 hours later, one last try.

If the charge goes through successfully at any time, everything goes back on schedule. If it gets to the end and still wasn’t successful, it will send the customer an invoice, mark the payment as “failed”, and the subscription will be on HOLD.

Now, this whole time the system does this automatically, the only emails the customer is getting are from WooCommerce. Basically, emails notifying them of the failed payment. That isn’t very graceful. Nor all that friendly. 😇

So, it is good to humanize it by building a marketing automation that will trigger when a payment fails. I recently discovered that my own site lacked this, so I took care of it over the weekend. Here’s what I did…

When a payment fails, a tag is added to the user’s profile in the CRM. The tag is something like “Payment Failed”. I use WP Fusion to do this.

That tag then triggers an automation. This automation is basically a short series of emails that are timed around the re-try schedule above.

The idea is to humanize it. To send a few emails written by me, in a friendly manner, and handle the situation gracefully rather than WooCommerce doing all the talking. The basic sequence is this:

• The automation is triggered automatically when the PAYMENT FAILED tag is added.
• I wait 15 minutes just so they don’t get both the WooCommerce email and my own email at the same time.
• Send them my first notice. Keep it very friendly, of course. Let them know the system will re-try several times and I tell them the schedule. And I link them to their account screen so they can change/verify their card on file.
• Wait 24 hours.
• Send them another reminder. At this point, my system has already re-tried the charge twice and it hasn’t succeeded. I also send an internal notice automatically to my inbox so I am automatically notified that their subscription is on HOLD.
• I then wait 5 days. This way I can time the final notice about 24 hours before my system will try to charge them for the last time.
• Send that “one final attempt” email.
• Wait 2 days, then send notice to myself that their account is delinquent. This triggers certain internal policies.

At the end of this automation, I have a GOAL. If the PAYMENT FAILED tag is removed, we instantly send them an email saying “We’re good to go!” and I thank them for taking care of the matter. This instantly ends it. And seeing as it is an automation goal, if this takes place at any time during this process, it instantly stops. No need to bug them. 😇

And being that this is a marketing automation, you can integrate it with other systems as needed. For instance, at one point earlier on, I send a webhook off to Make.com, which in turn updates my Notion database for clients to put them in HOLD status so I can see it.

Your site is there to do work for you and act as an extension of yourself. Through marketing automations like this, you can scale yourself.

Tools used in this setup are WP Fusion (with it’s integration with WooCommerce Subscriptions) as well as FluentCRM.

Concierge clients: All of this is included in the Concierge Toolkit for clients. Contact me and I can assist you in setting up this payment failure automation on your site.

This Week In Concierge

Last week, in addition to moving several client projects forward, I was (and am) also spending time on my internal systems and, yes, documentation.

Systems, processes, and documentation. The most exciting topic ever! 🤪 LOL. But, funnily enough, having some fun doing it.

But, I’ve got two frontward facing things in progress here that directly impact Concierge clients…

First, I am working on a brand new client reference portal. And via a plugin, this portal will be embedded right into the Admin panel of client’s sites as a menu option (unless they don’t want it). My plan is to turn this portal into a valuable resource for all of my clients, with how-to’s, walk-through videos and more of some of the top tools I use for clients. Of course, it will also be a reference for all things Concierge.

Kinda cool, but I’m managing to use Notion to build a good chunk of this. 😎

That plugin will be ready for clients pretty quickly here, but the portal itself will be a constantly evolving resource.

Secondly, and on theme with this week’s article above, I firmed up some policies with regard to those rare moments when failed renewals happen for Concierge clients. Hey, it happens. 🤷‍♂️ So, here’s the basic gist…

In the event of a failed payment and the rebill attempts don’t go through, we can (and will) use Anytime Credits on account to credit toward your Concierge service. One credit per month per site. If the client doesn’t have credits on account, then a 30-day grace period will apply. Trust me, I’ll be making every attempt to get things handled with you during that time…. because, in the end, we would end up facing site deactivation. And nobody wants that. 🥴

The cool thing is, it took until now for this matter to even come up. As Concierge has grown, it was only a matter of time. And it became clear I didn’t have a firm internal process for how to handle it. And now I do. 😇

WordPress Quick Bits

WordPress 6.7.2 Launches. WordPress 6.7.2 launched last week. 6.7.2 is pretty much a maintenance release, fixing a number of bugs in WP core and the block editor. An update to the 2025 theme also fixed one little thing. Chances are, your site auto-upgraded to 6.7.2 already. If not, go ahead and smack the button to do it. Concierge clients…. I’ll be makin’ the rounds today to make sure everybody is upgraded.

ASE Had A Hole. I really like (and use all the time) the Admin and Site Enhancements plugin. Well, apparently there was a rare security case with it of privilege escalation, according to this report from Patchstack. The hole only exists in versions 7.6.21 or lower. Just make sure you’re upgraded and you’ll have no problem.

Digg This. Robert DeVore continues his mass production of plugins, this time with a new social media sharing plugin called Digg This. The idea here is to be lean and mean without any bloat or weird tracking scripts. And it is free, so… yeah. 👍

WooCommerce Email Designer. Robert has also released an “experimental” plugin… Email Designer For WooCommerce. While still early, this plugin is taking a pretty unique approach to customizing the emails. It is using the block builder to build and customize WooCommerce emails. Very interesting! Like I said, it is early, likely has bugs, and lacks some features. But, worth watching.

SEOPress 8.5 Launches. SEOPress is now my “go to” SEO plugin for myself and Concierge clients who need an SEO plugin. And they just launched 8.5. This version was refactored to drastically increase performance and decrease RAM usage on your server. It also has some interface improvements throughout the interface. Click here for the full announcement.

Mullenweg Is Centralizing. Matt Mullenweg has been talk of the town for several months now due to his escapades with WP Engine. He has also been making some appearances on podcasts lately, including recently on the Logan Barlett show. Among many topics, he also talks about his efforts to turn Automattic into a “functional organization”, and centralizing engineering and design. Overall, I get the sense that Matt is indeed working on tighening control and, in some ways, maturing as a CEO. Not saying all of his actions have made sense, of course. But just that… I think there might be a bigger effort at play. When big VC firms that own WP Engine make way more money than the company that founded the entire WordPress project, it probably made him realize action had to be taken. Just a guess. 😇

GenerateBlocks 2.0. For those of you who may be into GenerateBlocks, big news that they just launched version 2.0. They call it a “new era of high performance websites”.

Big WooCommerce Performance Changes Coming. Speaking of performance, WooCommerce appears to be putting some real effort into making Woo… faster. Check out this GitHub issue where you can get a taste for all the things coming.

EchoDash Releases Plugin. The EchoDash service has released their free plugin for WordPress to connect your WP site to EchoDash. If you don’t know, EchoDash is a dashboard service that tracks events across all the platforms you use in your business. It happens to be by the same team as WP Fusion. 😀

FluentSMTP Supports SMTP2GO. FluentSMTP was upgraded to now support connection to the SMTP2GO email service. SMTP2GO is a pretty popular transactional email service. One that has gotten a little more attention in some circles lately because the rumor is PostMark has some price increases coming.

Case Study: Improving A Site’s Performance From 41% to 99%

Last week, somebody signed up for the WP Speed Fix service. I went to town on the site and managed to get a big improvement with things. I thought I would go over the big picture of what I did in case others may find it helpful.

Now, it takes some time and definitely some experience to be able to look at these things holistically to determine how to proceed.

The interesting thing is that this wasn’t exactly a bloated site. She had a WooCommerce store and she had most of her site built with Elementor. But, it isn’t as if she was running a ton of plugins. No community stuff like BuddyBoss. The site was fairly standard stuff.

The first thing I noticed was that her TTFB (time to first byte) was insanely bad. It took between 1 and 2 seconds for her server to even respond to a request. Since she was on a web host that I had never heard of before and the backend of her hosting account offered ridiculously little options to control much of anything, my first instinct was that she really needed to find better web hosting.

But, I could tell she was hesitant to do that. Plus, I never take a cop out like that. 😇 I had to look further.

She was running a caching plugin. However, the more I dug into it, I realized…. it wasn’t working. 😩 She thought she had caching in place, but literally it wasn’t doing anything at all. It was some half-baked thing. So, I ripped that thing out of there and replaced it with WP Rocket. The result…. INSTANT increase!

I literally tweaked nothing, but simply turned on a properly working cache and those performance scores shot up a lot. It wasn’t that her host was just innately bad on response times…. it was that it was processing every single request “raw” because there was no cache. And it just took a lot of time to do it.

But, there was quite a bit more I ended up doing here….

• I installed PerfMatters and did numerous tweaks to the site to thin it out and disable things not required.
• I optimized her entire Media Library using ShortPixel and left that in place for future optimizations on new images.
• I cleaned up her Admin dashboard by removing useless widgets, hide those annoying admin notices, and basically leaned out her admin panel and got rid of the clutter.
• Her wp_options table was bloated and every page load was pulling up over 3MB of autoload options. This combined with the lack of caching was a huge problem. So, I went to town on her options table and managed to shrink it down to just 1.3MB. I might have been able to shrink further, but in the end I didn’t want to risk breaking anything.

Now the site performs admirably with both GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights. And she now has some new tools in place to help keep her site that way.

Fixing WordPress speed issues is definitely not a “one size fits all” thing. Every site I look at is different and you end up having to look at things pretty holistically. The plugins you use matter, but so does your hosting.

And, of course, don’t think that just having a caching plugin installed means it is working. Some of these cache plugins work differently than others.

Does your site’s speed need fixin’? Let me take a crack at it.