Stop Overcomplicating

Can’t believe we’re in May already.

And Florida being Florida, we’re getting our 90F+ degree afternoons again. Starting to use the pool again. That time of year where we have to pay the price for the multiple months of awesome weather down here. But hey… I was born here, so I’m used to it. 😎

What’s coming up in this issue:

• Stop Overcomplicating Your Site And Business
• WordPress Quick Bits
• WP Cron: What is it and why it matters

OK, let’s do this thing…

Don’t Overcomplicate Your Business

OK, let’s talk a little mindset. A little bit of strategy, I guess you could say.

Because I’ve seen too many websites and too many solopreneurs who seem to be hellbent on adding a lot of complication to their business.

Now… I don’t come at you here from some kind of ivory tower. I have spent a lot of time in my career making things overly complicated. 😜 I’m in the process of recovering. 😇

Most of the time, it starts with a big concern about appearances. Worrying about perception of other people. Comparing yourself to others.

And in the website business, this often comes down to adding too many bells and whistles that are just not necessary.

I’ll give you an example I see a lot: support desks.

When I see a solopreneur running a support desk portal, I wonder…. why? It is just one person. The whole idea of a support desk is to have team collaboration on handling support tickets. If it is just you, why are you bothering? Just to look bigger than you are?

I’ve done it, too. I tried out Fluent Support. Pretty good product, really. Thing is… I found that it was just adding an unnecessary layer to things. Having things pipe into my email inbox was actually more than adequate.

Plus, do I really need a support ticket portal? Do I really need people’s ticket history to show up in their account on my site? The truth is…. I don’t. I don’t need it at all. If I did that, it is only because I think it’s cool. 😎 And yeah, it is kinda cool… I admit. But, unnecessary in my business. Plus, I think my clients would find it easier to just pop me an email than to have to log in and submit a support ticket. That’s just… impersonal. And I don’t have a strong enough reason to require it.

When it comes to building out online business platforms, it is all too easy to fall into a trap of over-complication.

You see cool tools for sale on AppSumo or via some launch and you just gotta buy that thing! Or… do you?

Whether it is a support desk plugin…

… or some AI chat bot thing….

… or some kind of gamification for a membership site..

… or some super complex process you’ve concocted for taking orders…

… the thing to do is to stop. Step back and ask yourself… are you actually just adding more complexity for no actual reason aside from trying to impress other people?

Because the funny thing is…. hardly anybody will care.

In fact, the simpler you make your site, the more reliably it will work. The faster it will be. And people appreciate that way more than some whiz bang cool tool you decided to install one day to look bigger than you actually are.

And I will just say… this goes for business strategy, too. This goes beyond just tacking on plugins and software to your website.

Are you spending time maintaining stuff on your site that barely anybody actually uses?

Are you, perhaps, offering too many products or services?

Are you so busy trying to concoct fancy sales campaigns that you create these behemoth monster marketing automations with tons of tags and you forgot how the hell it even works?

Uh huh. Been there! 🫣 Don’t ask me how I know.

There’s real power in keeping things simple.

In fact, you should lean into it as much as possible.

A lot of us get stuck in our ways. We get stuck in our habits of doing things even if it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes it is worth it to step back and evaluate the big picture.

I used to run a big membership site with office hours and everything. But, I stopped and pivoted. And in many ways, my business is simpler now.

I used to have a community forum on this site, but decided to kill it off. Why? Simplicity. The forum didn’t add any real value…. so buh bye.

Just because you start something… doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.

Keep it simple.

This Week In Concierge

Here’s a bit of the activity from last week among Concierge client sites:

• Working on converting another client site out of Thrive Themes and over to Kadence (so much better!)
• Rebuilt an order/intake form on Fluent Forms
• Fixed a quick WP Fusion sync issue with ActiveCampaign
• Spam-proofed a client’s contact form (those pesky bots!)
• Set up a client’s outgoing email with Amazon SES from FluentCRM
• Built a new testimonials page and fixed up some blog layout issues

Also, two new clients came on this week and I’m rescuing their sites from the bowels of Bluehost and Hostgator. 😜 Moving them over to Rocket Hosting, of course. I know I might be hard on Bluehost and Hostgator, but honestly… they’re just not good hosts. I’ve seen too many unexplained issues and security issues happen there.

Concierge isn’t just about maintenance. It makes me your web guy. Your advocate. Your “go to” guy for tech confusions and for things that come up that need fixin’.

WordPress Quick Bits

Uncanny Automator Gets User Lists Addon. Besides the fact that Uncanny Automator has surpassed 40,000 installs, they’ve also come out with a new addon that is rather interesting. This is the User Lists addon. This puts Uncanny Automator squarely into the marketing automation arena. You can now use automations to put your users into segments and then shoot them emails. While this definitely doesn’t turn Uncanny into a CRM, it does enable it to basically do marketing automation in a similar fashion to FluentCRM. Interesting! Click here to check it out.

AffiliateWP Gets Flexible Tier Rates. AffilliateWP has gotten an update to their addon to allow flexible commission tiers. Basically, you can set up tiers for your affiliates that will automatically give them better commission rates. Or even automatically increase their commission rate based on amount of referred sales. Learn more here. Of course, now that Awesome Motivate is behind AffiliateWP, I’m not much of a fan. Speaking of which…

AccessAlly Now Part Of Awesome Motive. Isn’t it sad that whenever I see a new acquisition by Awesome Motive, I sigh and say “kiss another plugin goodbye”. AccessAlly has now been folded into Caseproof (the folks behind Easy Digital Downloads)… which is also part of the WP Beginner Growth Fund. Natalie wanted an exit, I guess. I totally understand, actually. But, I just wish Awesome Motive wasn’t the apparent default exit liquidity for WordPress developers who wanted an exit. I don’t like the sway AM has. I don’t like their marketing tactics. It is just… concerning. And, you better believe WP Beginner is going to magically start including AccessAlly in their “Top X” plugin listicle posts. They never did before… but they will now! 😂 Because, you should know… WP Beginner is basically a big marketing vehicle for plugins they have a financial interest in. But, I digress….

Keep An Eye On Fluent Boards. The team behind FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, Fluent Support and others is currently in an active beta testing period for a new plugin called Fluent Boards. I’m definitely keeping an eye on this one. A project and task manager baked into WordPress. It is the integrations that interest me the most. For instance, when somebody fills out a Fluent Form, you can automatically assign yourself a task. Or, when one of your leads from FluentCRM does some action on your site, you can automatically create and assign a task. Complete with a Trello-style management interface. Oh yeah! Keep an eye on this one.

Fluent Communities? Interesting thing is… if you join the waitlist for FluentBoards, you’ll be invited into a community platform. Which looks a little like Facebook. And if I dig into the source code of the site, I see they’re using a plugin called “Fluent Communities”. A little birdie spies another release, perhaps? And here’s the thing… depending on what they do with that one, it could prove to be a BuddyBoss alternative. We shall see! 🙏

15 Web Hosts Compared. WP Shout did a great roundup and comparison of the fastest web hosting, using 14,000 individual tests between 2021 and 2024. Two hosts came out on top as the most consistently fast: Rocket.net and Flywheel. Suprisingly, Namecheap’s hosting came in pretty well.

Migrate From cPanel To xCloud. xCloud web hosting now has a process in place for being able to self-migrate out of a cPanel-managed web host over to xCloud. Check it out here.

WP Cron: What Is It And Why It Matters

Have you ever had scheduled activities on your website not happen on time? For instance, perhaps you’re running FluentCRM and have a scheduled marketing campaign and find it went out way too late. What happened?

Or, on other side of things, perhaps you’ve watched your WordPress site choke under a high traffic load and wonder why.

These could be two potential side effects of the same thing.

CRON is basically scheduled tasks for a web server. You can set up a “cron job” and tell the server to do something on some regular interval.

Some web hosts don’t really provide direct access to CRON. So, WordPress has something baked into it called WP-Cron.

WP-Cron is basically simulated CRON. It basically… fakes it. Fake it till you make it, right? 🤪

Regular cron uses the system clock on the server to run automated tasks on exact regular intervals. So, it runs without fail as long as the server is running.

WP-Cron does it based on traffic. There’s a script within WordPress called wp-cron.php and this script is called up whenever somebody visits your site. And that script will then look to see if any scheduled tasks need to be run. Even if the answer is “no”, there’s still a payload being run every single time somebody visits your site. It is still running that script and querying the database for things to do. Whether there’s anything there or not.

So, there’s the two flip sides of this issue with WP-Cron.

On one hand, if your site gets very little traffic, then scheduled tasks may not run on time. They’ll be late. This is why scheduled emails may not go out on time, for instance. There’s just not enough traffic to provide enough regularity to WP-Cron to be predictable.

On the flip side, if your site gets a LOT of traffic, then the overhead of wp-cron.php can actually become a real performance drag.

So, one of the things often recommended is to disable WP-Cron and instead use regular CRON.

The way to disable WP-Cron is to add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);

But, once you disable it like that, you then need to set up a regular cron job to trigger WP-Cron on a regular interval. This way it will run based on the clock instead of being artificially triggered when people visit your website.

How you set up that cron job is quite different depending on your web host, so I won’t cover everything here.

Whether it be in cPanel, your hosting control panel, or by just asking the support folks to do it for you… you have them set up a Cron job to run wp-cron.php on some regular interval.

I would say to run it every 5 minutes or so. In some cases, you may want to run it every minute. It depends on how timely your scheduled jobs need to be. I usually think 5 minutes is more than adequate.

With my clients on Rocket Hosting who are using FluentCRM, for instance, I usually just ask support to set me up with a Cron job for every minute and they know exactly what to do and it is done lickety split.

For sites on xCloud, this one is nice because they have something they call “xCloud-Cron” in the site settings and you can easily control the timing. So super easy.

If you need any help with this for your site, just reach out and perhaps I can assist.