Money Levers + Unbulking WordPress

First off, happy Saint Patty’s day, if you’re into that kind of thing. ☘️ I admit… I forgot to wear green. But, I’m at home so I have an excuse. 😜

Secondly, yeah, I’m a wee bit late getting this issue out to you today. If I don’t pre-write these issues, I end up doing it all Monday morning. And when I have other things going on on Monday mornings, it messes with the ol’ schedule.

But, we’re here! And ready to kick off another productive week.

Below, I’d like to discuss what I call “money levers”. Basically, the predictable controls on your business.

And then we’ll switch gears back into WordPress and talk about how to reduce all the screen clutter when you’re trying to edit posts and pages. It can be intense sometimes!

OK, let’s jump into it…

Your Business “Money Levers”. Know What They Are?

OK, today let’s just talk business. Let’s put WordPress aside – at least for this section of the newsletter – and just talk business strategy.

In fact, this may turn into a series for the next few issues. We’ll see. I’ll play it by ear. 😇

Have you ever had a need (or just a want) to make more money in your business, but needed to figure out HOW?

Perhaps it is just to meet expenses. To pay down a debt. Or to buy something you really wanna buy. 😎 Whatever it is, wouldn’t it be nice if you could bring in some additional revenue more or less “on cue”?

Meaning… a direct cause→ effect relationship.

I remember doing some business brainstorming some years back about increasing the stats in my business. Managing by the numbers, as any manager would. And of course the only good statistic is the one which is increasing.

But, I remember sitting there and feeling like I had a shortage of what I called “money levers”.

A “money lever” was just my own personal slang, but the idea was that it would be like a lever on a machine you’re controlling. Or like the accelerator in your car. You press it… and you get a result. It is like looking at your business as a machine you’ve built, with levers and buttons and the like. And you need to know where the controls are… and how to use them.

It might be like a ship where you move the levers and the results happen slow and steady. But, even with a large ship, you know where the controls are. You know what happens when you use them.

Without any “money levers”, the business feels like a ship without a rudder. Aimless. Adrift on the seas.

You can sit there and build stuff on your website, but traffic feels completely uncontrolled and you feel like a slave to Google.

People either buy stuff… or they don’t. They either come to your website… or they don’t. It feels as if whatever happens…. happens. Like it is up to luck. It can feel a little rudderless.

Look at the kinds of “businesses” that so many people try to build these days online. Heck… it is the kind of business I used to run and the kind I used to talk about all the time. It is based more or less on this old formula:

1. Write a lot of posts and create a lot of content.
2. Get people on your email list.
3. Give subscribers value and sometimes make an offer.
4. Get them into a funnel and convert to sales.

This kind of thing used to work. Today, it is much harder. The environment changed. It is much noisier out there. It is harder to get content noticed. Writing content is not a “money lever” because so much about it is not controlled.

That’s what it comes down to… control.

What can you control? Versus what do you not really control?

We cannot control Google. We cannot control whether people share us on social media. Heck, to a large extent, we can’t even really control what people do on our websites. We CAN ask them and guide them, but we don’t control them.

But, we CAN control some things.

We can control traffic if we’re willing to pay for it. You can control concrete actions you take on your website. You can control your offers and your prices. You can control promotions you run.

And, with a business set up correctly, you even have some control over your revenue. But, not if you’re chasing from one sale to the next constantly. You’ve gotta have a foundation you can rely on, too.

Some money levers are just concrete things you can do because you don’t have to worry about anybody else. It is just up to you, so you can control it.

Other money levers become easier with assets and leverage. And assets and leverage are things you build over time, and with the right strategy long-term. A nice-size email list is an asset which gives you all kinds of money levers. A recurring revenue baseline is leverage that makes a lot of things easier and more predictable in your business. Hence, money levers.

So, for today, let’s end off on this…

Sit down and give yourself a little brainstorming session. Think about your own business. And list out the things you can control and the things that you cannot control.

What are YOUR money levers? What are the controls on your business?

What are your assets… and what things can you leverage as money levers?

And then we’ll circle back on this again next week.

Honestly, this series could go a number of directions here. But, for today, I just wanted to set up this analogy of your business being a machine with levers and controls. And it really helps to know where the controls are if you want to be able to get results. 😇

This Week In Concierge

I spent some time on Saturday working on the new and upcoming Concierge Dashboard plugin for clients. I’m probably not far off from this plugin being made available on all client sites.

This first version is relatively simple. It will put the new client portal right into WordPress, for tutorials and reference information. It will also have a notification system built-in, so I will have a way to send out announcements to all Concierge clients and it will appear as a notification within the plugin. Credit logs for Anytime Credits will also be viewable right inside the dashboard.

Coming up in potential future versions, I am considering a private video library just for Concierge clients. Some will be available to all clients, but I also record private videos for clients all the time. I usually share those videos using private links. Well, I’m also considering a way to have these private videos appear within client WordPress sites right on the Concierge dashboard. This way, when I record a video showing you how to do something, you’ll always know where you can reference it again.

I’m always looking for ways to streamline and enhance core Concierge services. This plugin is going to help do just that.

And on that note, I got a great testimonial from one of my long-time clients, Jessica, from ToyMaking Magic. She said…

Signing up for Concierge was the best move I have made in my 5 years of business. I’ve lost track of all of the upgrades he has helped me make. I couldn’t be happier. I don’t have to panic when something goes wrong or I mess something up. David is an email away and he always responds quick as lightning when it’s urgent. I can’t even imagine trying to run my business without this valuable service he provides. When I came across Concierge I literally could not sign up any faster. 

Appreciate that, Jessica!

WordPress Quick Bits

FluentCommunity Pricing – Lifetime License Stops. At the end of this week, the current lifetime license options for FluentCommunity are ending. The current lifetime prices will all turn into annual prices. As an example, a lifetime option for one site is $199, but it is about to be $199/year. So, if you’ve thought about FluentCommunity, this week is a great time to lock in that license. Reminder that if you’re in the Concierge program, there’s no need to buy it if you don’t want to because FluentCommunity is in the Concierge Toolkit.

Uncanny Automator 6.3. Uncanny Automator 6.3 was released, with new content automation abilities via RSS as well as Discord automations. They also built in some integrations with the Bricks Builder. Check out the full release notes here.

JetPack Tracks Your Search History. Last week, I talked briefly about the Jetpack plugin and why you should never use it. This week, yet another reason. In this Reddit conversion, you’ll see that Jetpack will track the plugin searches you do in your WordPress admin panel and then promote to you based on those searches. Basically, retargeting. Just… not a fan. Jetpack is slow, bloated, and a privacy problem.

AI Overviews Rise While Click Rates Decline. No surprise here, really, but a new study found that AI overviews on search results are expanding on Google (now appearing in 42.5% of searches), which correlates to declining click-through rates on informational queries. Basically, less people are clicking on search results because they just read the AI summary and that’s all they needed. Even being #1 in Google search results doesn’t matter quite a much as it used to.

Secure Custom Fields Plugin Issues. Secure Custom Fields is a fork off the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. You may remember that Matt Mullenweg essentially stole ACF Pro, renamed it and acted like it was new. WebTNG does a writeup of some of the issues with using SCF. Really, the only advantage is that it is free. Outside of that, it is unsupported. They didn’t fork ACF to make a better plugin… they did it just to screw with WP Engine. So, yeah, I would say it is risky as hell to use SCF. I’d avoid it.

Slowdown in WordPress Development. Newfold Digital (the conglomerate that owns Bluehost) has scaled back it’s contributor time to WordPress development substantially, scaling back from 329 hours per week to just 20. At the same time, Mullenweg has proposed only releasing one major release per year of WordPress as a way to deal with all the cutbacks. Sounds alarming… and we’ll see how this whole rebalancing plays out. That’s how I see it… a rebalancing. In the end, it is easy to be pissed at Mullenweg, but at the same time his company has been paying people to develop WordPress core way more than any other company… and those same other companies are profiting off it. Somehow, the inequality of that has to be addressed. We’ll see what happens.

Kadence Blocks Hits 500,000 Milestone. The Kadence Blocks plugin (which I use all the time) has just crossed over the 500K active installation milestone. It is definitely a popular one… and congrats to the team!
State of WordPress Security 2025. Patchstack has released their WordPress security report for 2025. 7,966 vulnerabilities were found in 2024…. and 96% of them were found in plugins while 4% were in themes. WordPress Core itself is actually quite secure as only 0.001% of vulnerabilities were found in Core. Some interesting metrics in this one.

Clean Up Your WordPress Editor Experience (Less Clutter!)

When you’re editing posts and pages in WordPress, the editing experience usually feels pretty….packed. Just cluttered with stuff… much of which you probably don’t even use.

When using the block editor, the list of blocks can be so incredibly long that it takes forever to find what you want. The right-side panel ends up with all these collapsible panels that just get in the way. And below the editor itself you often find yet more crap.

Even if you’re not using the block builder, you often end up with similar issues. Page builders often get jam-packed with so many block options that the interface just slows down.

What a lot of people don’t realize, though, is that we can customize quite a bit about these editing experiences. By disabling the things we never use or hiding it from our editing screens.

For example, in the block builder, you can click on those three itty-bitty dots in the top right and then choose “Preferences” in the dropdown menu.

And in there, you can go to town disabling panels and blocks you never use. Just hit the toggle and disable the stuff you never touch.

If you’re not using the block editor and are instead using a page builder, most page builders have the same options to disable blocks you never use. For instance, Elementor has the “Elements Manager” where you can go through and toggle off the elements you just never use. This will thin down the Elementor builder and make it so it isn’t so bulky to load up.

So, maybe take a few minutes and take some control over your editing experience. Make it so when the stuff you never touch just gets out of your way. Don’t allow plugins to just add crap to your editing experience willy-nilly even if you never will use it.

WordPress is highly customizable. Pretty much everything about it can be changed.

So, feel free to mold it to your will. 😎