Is Your Email List Shrinking?

Coming to you from our stateroom on the Pride of America cruise ship… from Maui. Enjoying time with family and, of course, Hawaii. But so I don’t miss a beat, I made sure to have a full issue of WP Edge ready to go, as promised. 😇

With website traffic patterns changing, it can be harder to build an email list, too. After all, less traffic = fewer opt-ins. So, we’ll talk about that. Also… I’ve seen it SO many times now where a person hired somebody to build or maintain their website, and then they… disappeared. Or, the relationship soured. What do you do? Here’s my take.

OK, let’s dive in. Next week, I’ll be back in the office as usual.

Why Your Email List Is Shrinking (It’s Probably Not Unsubscribes)

I’ll admit something. My email list has been shrinking.

Not dramatically. But when I dug into it, the trend was clear. And my first thought was the same one you’d probably have… people must be unsubscribing more. Turns out, that’s mostly not it.

Yes, unsubscribes look higher than they used to. But a lot of that is just counting. Gmail now has a Manage subscriptions page that lists every newsletter you get, with an unsubscribe button next to each one. Those one-click unsubscribes now flow straight into your CRM. Before, a lot of those same people just quietly ignored you, or marked you as spam. They were already gone. Now you just get to see it.

And across the industry, unsubscribe rates are actually pretty flat. Omeda’s latest numbers put the typical unsubscribe rate at around a tenth of a percent per send.

The real problem was on the other side. Fewer people were signing up.

And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.

Why sign-ups are harder now

Part of it is simple math. I told you a few weeks ago about my Google traffic dropping. Fewer visitors means fewer people seeing your opt-in form. Even if your form converts just as well as it always has, you get fewer sign-ups.

But it’s more than traffic. Think about what’s changed for the person on the other side of that form…

• They get their answer from the AI Overview at the top of Google, and never click.
• Or they skip Google entirely and just ask ChatGPT.
• Their inbox is already stuffed with newsletters. There are more of them than ever. So many things all vying for their attention.
• And they’ve seen a thousand “free guides.” Everybody has a lead magnet now.

So the bar is way higher than it used to be. A generic “free ebook” isn’t going to cut it when AI will answer the same question for free, in about four seconds, without asking for an email address.

Do the math on your own list first

Before you fix anything, get clear on what’s actually happening.

Lists shrink on their own. People change jobs, abandon email addresses, lose interest. A commonly quoted rule of thumb is that a list loses about 2% a month just to natural decay. So a list of 5,000 people needs roughly 100 new sign-ups a month just to stay flat.

Then look at two numbers separately: how many people joined each month, and how many left. Not just the total. If joins are dropping while leaves are steady, you don’t have an unsubscribe problem. You have a front-door problem.

And if you recently cleaned out inactive or bounced contacts? Your list got smaller… and healthier. That’s a good thing. Don’t let it scare you.

Make the offer ultra-specific

Years ago, I wrote about the 7 criteria for an effective lead magnet. Things like solving one specific problem for a specific person, promising one big thing, giving them a quick win, and being something they can use in a few minutes.

That advice holds up better now than it did when I wrote it. Because “specific” is the only thing that cuts through anymore.

So ask yourself… could somebody get this by asking ChatGPT? If yes, it’s not a lead magnet. It’s a commodity.

What AI can’t give them is your stuff. The actual checklist you use with clients. The template you built for your own business. The thing you learned from doing it 50 times. That’s worth an email address.

Or… give them their own answer

Think about why people go to AI for answers. It’s not just speed. It’s that the answer feels like it’s about them. Their situation, their business, their problem.

So why not give them that on your own site?

Instead of a PDF that’s the same for everybody, build a little tool that gives each person a result that’s specific to them. A quiz that tells them where they stand. A scorecard that grades their website, or their email list, or their pricing. A short questionnaire that spits out a personalized plan, with AI writing the result based on what they told you.

They answer a few questions. They put in their email to get their results. And what they get back is about them, not a generic download they’ve seen a hundred times before. That’s the kind of thing people actually want to hand over an email address for.

The good news? You can easily use AI to do this. Have AI help you build an AI-powered lead magnet for your website. It can even help you brainstorm it. You will need an API key (and an account) to power the AI part of your tool, but it can help you with that, too.

Keep it simple, though. Five or six good questions beat twenty. The goal is a quick, useful result… not a homework assignment.

Put it where the interest already is

A form in your sidebar is easy to ignore. An offer sitting right inside an article, tied directly to what they’re reading at that moment, is a different story.

If somebody’s reading a post about fixing their contact form, offer them your contact form checklist. Right there. I’ve talked about doing this with simple content upgrades, and it’s still one of the best ways I know to turn a reader into a subscriber.

Don’t rely on Google to send people

If search traffic is shrinking, your sign-ups can’t depend on it. Video, podcasts, guest appearances, your own social posts, AI tools mentioning you… all of those can send people who are already warm. And honestly, those people tend to stick around longer.

Also, ask your current subscribers to forward the newsletter to somebody who’d like it. It’s the oldest trick in the book because it works.

Make the newsletter itself the reason to join

Here’s the last piece. With this much noise, people don’t really subscribe to a PDF anymore. They subscribe to a person they want to hear from.

If your emails are worth opening, people stay. And they tell other people. That’s been my whole approach for years… be the steak in a boring inbox.

Yes, the list might be a little smaller than it used to be. But a smaller list of people who actually read you beats a big list of people who don’t.

WordPress News & Updates

DreamHost got hacked, and it went on for months. Attackers got in through a hole in DreamHost’s file manager back in August and grabbed customer emails, login credentials and session tokens (the things that keep you logged in, which means someone holding one can act as you). DreamHost says it hit “well under 10%” of its roughly 400,000 paying customers. It only came out after a multi-day outage. If your site is there, change your passwords, log out every session, and check your WordPress users for any admin you don’t recognize. TechCrunch has the story.

Using Contact Form 7? Update it. Versions 6.2 through 6.2.3 had a flaw that let anybody, no login needed, upload files to your site. That’s about as bad as it gets. Version 6.2.4 fixes it and adds a list of allowed file types. CF7 runs on millions of sites, so if you’ve had it installed for years and forgot about it… this is your reminder. The release notes.

WordPress is building the AI connection right into core. The WordPress AI team laid out its plan for WordPress 7.3: an MCP connection, built-in “abilities” (the things an AI is allowed to do on your site), proper OAuth sign-in, and a simple setup screen. Basically, everything I walked you through in last week’s AI primer, minus the extra plugin. Nothing’s guaranteed until it ships, but this is the direction. The plan.

One bell for all those admin nags. You know the stack of plugin notices begging for reviews and upgrades every time you log in? The WordPress core team is exploring a notification tray that groups site and plugin messages under one bell. Critical alerts stay put until they’re fixed, and you could mute the tips and offers. It’s still a prototype, but honestly… this can’t come soon enough. The design proposal.

WordPress 7.2 lands December 8, with a random button. Mostly a polish release, but there’s one fun addition. Your site will get a /random/ URL that sends visitors to a random published post. It’s on by default for blog posts. Could be a nice little “surprise me” link for a blog with a deep archive. Your developer can turn it off with one filter if you don’t want it. How it works.

StaleWP tracks plugins that have gone quiet. Abandoned plugins are one of the sneakiest risks on a WordPress site. Nothing breaks… until it does. StaleWP watches popular plugins and sorts them into “Replace now,” “Plan a move” and “Watch,” with the evidence for each. Worth a look against your own plugin list. It goes nicely with the second article this week. The Risk Radar.

Squarespace cut 19% of its staff. That’s about 300 people. The company says it’s about simplifying and moving faster, and it’s working on a new AI-native platform called Forma. But the backdrop is pretty obvious… AI site builders are eating the “easy website” market. Funny how all the “WordPress is sinking” talk never seems to mention the hosted builders taking on water first. TechCrunch.

The WPBeginner crew just bought Drip. Syed Balkhi’s group (WPForms, OptinMonster, MonsterInsights) picked up the email and SMS platform Drip, along with the popup tool Sleeknote. Plans include deeper WordPress and WooCommerce integration and more AI features. Syed’s take: “Email and SMS are the only marketing channels that business owners truly own.” Agreed. Which is exactly why this week’s feature is about keeping that list healthy. The announcement.

LearnDash, Give and The Events Calendar are becoming one subscription. Starting with renewals on or after November 16, Nexcess is rolling those three into one “Nexcess plugin stack” bundle. Kadence plans aren’t changing, and lifetime and unlimited licenses are exempt. If you only use one of these, look at your renewal before it hits so you’re not surprised by the new price. The details.

The Independent Analytics folks launched an AI chatbot. It’s called Resolver. It runs right inside WordPress, trains on your own pages in a few minutes, and answers visitor questions using your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. The free version is on WordPress.org. I’ve been a fan of their analytics plugin for a while (here’s my review), so this one’s on my list to try. Resolver.

FluentCart 2.3 gets serious about shipping. If you sell physical products, this one’s big. A free Shipping add-on connects to Shippo for live carrier rates at checkout, you can buy labels right from the order page, and customers get tracking emails for each shipment. There’s also a new reports overview and the ability to refund part of an order. Shippo is in beta, so test it before you trust it with real orders. The release notes.

Feeling Stuck With Your Website? (Or the Person Running It?)

I had a call recently with a long-time reader. They call themselves a novice. They’d paid somebody to build their website, and the site got built. Great.

Then the developer moved on. And now they’ve got a website… and no real idea how to keep it running.

I hear some version of this a lot. Honestly, it’s one of the most common reasons people come to me in the first place.

And it’s not always that the developer vanished. Sometimes they just get harder and harder to reach. Emails take a week to get answered. You start to get the feeling they’d rather not deal with you anymore… like you’ve become a hassle.

Sometimes it’s not even a developer. It’s the person hosting and maintaining your site. You’re not happy with them, but you don’t know what to do about it. So you just… stay. Stuck.

How people end up stuck

Over the years, I’ve seen a few patterns again and again.

The mystery tool. Somebody had a custom tool built for their site. A calculator, a member feature, some special integration. It works. But it was never documented anywhere, and maybe not even backed up. The developer who built it is the only person on earth who knows how it works. And now that person is gone.

The “good enough to call it done” job. A lot of people don’t know who to trust, so they hire somebody off Upwork or Fiverr. Sometimes that works out fine. But sometimes the person doesn’t really know what they’re doing. They hack something together that works just enough to call the job complete… and nobody thought about what happens next. What you actually got was something incredibly hard to maintain. Anybody you bring in later takes one look at it and winces. 😬

The person you don’t want to work with anymore. The site’s fine. But the relationship isn’t. And because they hold the keys, you feel like you can’t leave.

Here’s the thing. You’re not as stuck as you think. To get unstuck, take it in this order.

1. Find out what you actually own

Make a list of every account your website depends on, and figure out whose name each one is in:

• Your domain name. Who’s the registrar, and is the account in your name?
• Your hosting. Is it your account, or is your site sitting inside somebody else’s hosting account?
• DNS and Cloudflare, if you use it.
• Your WordPress admin login. You should have your own administrator account. Not a shared login.
• Premium plugin and theme licenses. Registered to you, or to them?
• Email sending, analytics, and anything else connected to the site.

If any of those live in somebody else’s account, get them moved into yours. Ideally while you’re still on decent terms.

This isn’t about distrust. People move on, change careers, stop answering email. If your domain is in their account and they disappear, you’ve got a real mess on your hands. Same with plugin licenses… I wrote about what happens when a plugin locks you out because the license lapsed.

And once everything’s in your name? Leaving becomes a whole lot less scary.

2. Get the keys and the notes

Ask for:

• Logins for everything above (then change the passwords).
• A list of the plugins they installed and why.
• Any custom code they wrote, and where it lives.
• How backups are set up, if they are at all.

And if you’ve got one of those mystery tools? Get a copy of the code somewhere you control, and get it documented. The good news… AI is really good at this now. Point it at the code and it can explain what it does in plain English, and write up the documentation nobody ever did. That alone turns “only one person understands this” into something anybody can pick up.

3. Have somebody look under the hood

Log into your dashboard and check a few basics:

• Is there a pile of plugin, theme or WordPress updates waiting? That’s a sign nobody’s been looking.
• Is a backup running? Where does it go? Has anyone ever tested restoring it?
• Do your forms actually work? Send yourself a test.

But if your site came from one of those “good enough” jobs, have somebody experienced take a real look. Not to rebuild it on day one. Just to tell you what you’ve got, what’s fragile, and what’s worth fixing first. Sometimes the answer is “this is fine.” Sometimes it’s “this is held together with duct tape.” Either way, you want to know.

4. Decide who’s minding the store

A website isn’t a one-time project. It’s more like a car. It needs regular maintenance, and every so often something breaks.

So you’ve basically got three options:

• Do it yourself. Totally doable if you’re willing to learn, and AI makes it a lot easier than it used to be. (Just know what you’re signing up for. I broke down the real cost of DIY maintenance a while back.)
• Hire another freelancer. Fine, as long as you don’t end up right back here in two years.
• Use an ongoing service. Somebody whose job it is to keep the site updated, backed up and secure, and who’s actually around when you need a change.

That last one is exactly why I built Concierge. A lot of my clients came to me just like this… unhappy with who they had, or with nobody at all, and they just wanted somebody reliable in their corner.

Whatever you pick, the rule is the same.

Don’t get stuck depending on one person again. Own your accounts. Keep your own logins. Make sure whoever helps you is working on a platform you control… not something only they can operate. (I made the same point in a recent post on WordPress and AI.) Even if you’re using a service provider, make sure that they set things up in a way that respects your digital sovereignty.

Your website is a business asset. Treat it like one, and it’ll treat you a lot better.