Plugins I Always Avoid

Well, hello from Maine. 🌲🥶

This Florida dude has been in Maine the last several days visiting family. And right now, there’s snow all over the ground as we just got a few inches overnight. Just… cold. Tonight, we’ll be in the single digits.

The locals say this is a warmer winter. But, still colder than snot to me. 🥶

Oh, and I tried to ski. Didn’t go well. Kept ending up on my ass on the bunny slope… while kids ski right around me. 🤣 Was rather funny, actually.

Anyway, heading back to Florida tomorrow. Maine is really a great state. But, time to head back to our normal.

So, let’s dive into this week’s issue of the newsletter…

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The Take-Away From The Shock Of My Dog’s Vet Bill

Earlier this month, my family had a super-stressful weekend when my dog chewed up and ate a plastic squeaky toy. And long story short, they ended up having to go into his stomach via endoscopy and extract all the pieces. It ended up about as well as it could have (the alternative was actual surgery), but the whole experience sucked.

But, there’s also an important business lesson here, too.

See, when we tally up everything we did over a couple of vet visits, my wife and I dropped about $6,900 to save our dog.

It happened fast, too.

That nurse brings in the estimate and…. what do you do? Just sit there and hope the dog gets over it on his own?

There was a young couple in the next room over who had a more serious issue than we did. I think their bill was over $10K.

When we’re in positions like this, the amount of money becomes less of a concern. We love our pets. We’re potentially talking about a life and death situation… and you’re presented a solution that makes sense. It costs a lot, but… you figure it out.

Now trust me, I could very easily get pissed off about this. But, in the end, there’s a big reminder to it.

We were in a position where we needed and wanted a solution to our problem. There was indeed a threat to it. We could have lost the dog. The pain was real. It was right there in our faces. And they presented a solution. It was an expensive solution, but it was workable. And yes, they definitely solved the problem. Our dog is back to normal completely.

But, the prices you charge can – and probably should – be proportional to the value of the problem you’re solving.

If you’re solving a very REAL problem, you can charge accordingly for your product or service.

And when your product or service isn’t solving a problem that seems like that big a deal to somebody, they’re just not going to pay much – if any.

It is the scale of the problem you solve combined with the immediacy of it that most affects the price.

With our dog, the problem was quite real and time was of the essence. We couldn’t sit around for a few days and think about it. We had to handle it. And we ponied up to do exactly that.

So, with your business… and with your own offers…

What problem are you solving? How serious is it? What’s the danger of them not doing anything about it? And, how quickly does it need to be solved? How quickly can you alleviate their problem?

I get it. Most of us are not dealing with life and death problems with our offers. However, the problems we DO solve still should be real ones. There’s a pain to them not being solved… and a relief when they are solved.

And when you’re marketing your product or service, you really need to make that clear. Otherwise, your sales will stall out.

The more directly and clearly your offer will solve their pain in the fastest possible way, the higher your price.

It isn’t about your hourly rate. It is about speed and relief.

4 Plugins I Always Avoid

There are some plugins I just usually recommend against. It doesn’t make them horrible or dangerous, but I just have my reasons. And I’m going to tell you about them. 😇

JetPack

JetPack does a lot of things and WordPress really promotes it to you because it comes from them. I’ve seen a lot of people, for instance, use it for stats. But, I don’t recommend you use JetPack.

For one, it is a beefy plugin that does cause performance issues. Secondly, it is a big privacy risk because it is constantly syncing all of your WordPress activity back to WordPress.com servers even if the services are disabled and you’re self-hosting your site.

There’s nothing that JetPack does that justifies that because you can find better options.

WordFence

To be clear, WordFence is good at what it does. So, this isn’t a complaint about WordFence. However, the truth is that you’ve already sorta failed if your site even requires WordFence. Why?

By using WordFence, you’re making your WordPress site defend itself. By the time a threat or bot has to be blocked by WordFence, it has already gotten to your site itself. And your WordPress site shouldn’t have to sit there and defend itself. For that reason, WordFence is also often a major performance hog and can also break things on your site.

Security threats should be handled before they ever make it to your WordPress site. With a proper firewall (preferably at the DNS level), you keep that stuff from ever hitting your site in the first place. Good hosting with a proper setup (and, of course, keeping your site maintained properly)… and you just don’t need to use WordFence.

And BTW, this goes for any similar security plugin for WordPress. Security is best taken care of off-site, not by a plugin.

Anything By Awesome Motive

This is a matter of opinion, of course. And I hold no ill will toward any of the folks at Awesome Motive. But, I generally avoid any of their plugins. This includes the likes of OptinMonster, MonsterInsights, All In One SEO, WPCode, and a number of other ones.

They’ve done a good job with many of these plugins, too. It isn’t as if they’re bad plugins. But, for me, it comes down to this:

• I find most of their plugins to be overly pushy in promotions to sell upgrades or cross-promote their other plugins.
• I find some of their plugins to be bloated and I suspect some of that is because of the commercial stuff they smash in there.
• I find their promotional tactics to be questionable and, in many cases, misleading.

And BTW, did I mention that it was Awesome Motive who purchased and then (in my view) began to kill Thrive Themes? After several years of me being quite happy with and recommending Thrive Themes, this company purchased it. They radically increased the pricing and then proceeded to start locking site owners out of even being able to edit their sites if they don’t pay up.

So, I don’t support this company’s tactics. And I see no reason to use their plugins.

Contact Form 7

This plugin is bloated. It also loads assets on every page of your site even if there’s no form there. I have also found that forms built with it tend to be huge spam magnets.

If I take over a site that is using Contact Form 7, one of the first things I do is replace it.

WordPress Quick Bits…

FluentCRM 2.8.4 Released. This release contains several notable new features, including one-click unsubscribe (for compliance with the new Google/Yahoo deliverability guidelines), event tracking (to see what your contacts do on your site), multi-threaded email sending (for faster email sends), custom field grouping (for better control how your custom fields show on profiles), and much more. Check out the full announcement here.

Cloudways Launches Autonomous. While it was in beta, it was called AutoScale. Now that it is come out of beta, it is being renamed to Autonomous. The idea behind is that your Cloudways server is no longer constrained by it’s specs. The power of your hosting will scale automatically to accommodate higher traffic load. Frankly, it is basically cloud hosting of the kind you’d get from Kinsta, Rocket, WP Engine, etc. For this reason, you have limits on number of sites and traffic counts, but you no longer need to choose servers based on CPU and memory like the traditional VPS. Learn more here.

Rocket.net Announced Bulletproof Disaster Recovery. All customers now have TWO sets of encrypted backups. Also, every virtual machine gets a snapshot every few hours. Sites are indeed in good hands with Rocket, which is why I use them to host Concierge client sites. Check out the announcement here.

Rapyd preps for public launch. Rapyd is the new hosting offer from BuddyBoss, and it has been in beta for a little while now. Looks like it is coming out of beta and open to the general public tomorrow.

Feedzy Pro has feature image generation using AI. You can see it in this preview on their X account, but Feedzy is getting the ability to generate missing feature images on feed imports using ChatGPT integration. That’s handy.