Why You NEED Stats

This week is getting off to a busy start… and you may have noticed this week’s newsletter is a little bit later than normal. 😇

Two client calls just this morning, a site migration, and helping a client recover lost access to his stuff that he had misplaced. All while finishing this newsletter to get it out to you, then off to do the weekly maintenance rounds for all of my clients, debug email delivery issues for a client from Keap, and migrate a list out of MailerLite to save a client some money.

In other words, welcome to a new week and a beautiful Monday! 🤪

This week, I want to talk about stats with a little business 101. Because I see a lot of people who don’t really track anything and I think that’s an oversight.

Then, I want to share 5 of the biggest mistakes I commonly see when I log into people’s WordPress sites for the first time.

So, let’s get into it….

Why You NEED Stats

Let’s talk business…

You’ve probably heard the phrase “you can’t manage what you can’t measure“. Or, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure“. I’ve heard various versions of it, but it is as true as the fact that water flows downhill.

If you are trying to grow, manage, improve anything… you simply cannot do it if you have no statistics. A statistic, of course, is just some numerical measurement of how some activity is doing tracked over time.

Without stats, you’re basically flying by the seat of your pants. You’re going on gut feeling. It is completely subjective and, frankly, too much “in your head”. If you really want to make things happen, you gotta get it out of your head.

Any activity you want to manage or improve should be tracked. This goes for both business and personal. And you need to pick a statistic that is a direct result of your progress in that area and make a point to track it every day or week and graph it.

Yes, I said graph it.

Whether you do it in a spreadsheet like Excel or pull out good ol’ pieces of graph paper and do it that way, you need to graph your stats over time. This way you can see trends and see how things are going up and down over time.

The key here is:

• Pick the right stats to track
• Be consistent in tracking them

What you track is completely dependent on what you want to manage.

For instance, if you want to get healthy and lose weight, then the obvious thing to track is your weight. Hop on the scale every morning and plot your weight on a graph so you can see what is happening. You may also want to log what you eat and your exercise so you can see what affects things for you.

For business or our websites, you want to track the things that are truly actionable and relevant to the actions you’re trying to manage. This includes the big things (like weekly income), but also the smaller products that go into that. Some things I track in my own business are:

• Weekly gross income
• # of Anytime Credits Delivered (not bought, but actually debited since this is a direct measure of production)
• MRR (Monthly recurring revenue)

Now, the interesting thing I’ll mention here is that I don’t necessarily make a big deal out of stats such as website traffic. Sure, I track it like most people. But, I don’t closely monitor it. The reason is because it isn’t directly actionable by me and directly related to what I’m trying to manage. Website traffic and income are not related. By main priority is service delivery and raising the MRR through Concierge services. The things I track are related to that since that’s what I am actually doing. Website traffic is interesting, but not directly related to income.

Other things I probably should track better are:

• # of booked Roadmap calls
• # of weekly newsletter subscribers

One thing, too, is that you can literally concoct a measurement system out of thin air when needed. For instance, how could you track productivity? Could you track progress on something even if the action wasn’t completed?

I’m trying to help my daughter get more productive with her school. Time management isn’t her best strength. So, I gave her the advice of creating a point system that she could then use to track her productivity. She would make up the point system. She would give herself points for things like looking up a word, reading a page, completing a quiz, etc. Then, each day, she would track her points and graph them. She’d then have a nice stat that she and I could both SEE on how productive she is during the day on her school.

Stats are super important.

It removes the guesswork. It gets it out of your head and makes things clear. It keeps your vision focused on what matters so that you can actually manage that activity and improve it over time.

If you’re not already doing it, here’s some homework for this week:

• Look at those activities you want to manage or improve and decide what stats are most useful to track.
• Begin tracking those stats and plotting on a chart in a spreadsheet or on a piece of graph paper.
• BONUS: Print that graph and have it on the wall wherever you work and do things.

RELATED TRAINING: If you’re a ONEPass member, I have a workshop I did awhile back called Reversing The Slide: Debugging A Shrinking Online Business. In this one I provide some advice on how to increase your stats when you don’t feel like things are growing.

This Week In Concierge

A few updates for Concierge clients…

There are still a few of my clients powering their sites with Thrive Themes. For one client, I had already converted his site to Kadence, however we still have Thrive Architect in place for some sales pages. We’re about to wrap up the re-build of those pages and all I can say is…. the sales pages are MUCH faster without Thrive Themes. Not only that, because he hadn’t renewed his subscription with Thrive, he was locked out of editing his own pages. Now that we’re about to finally kick Thrive to the curb, he’ll have full control again – and much faster pages to boot! So, a reminder to my few other clients still using Thrive…. the grass is greener once we switch. 😇

Secondly, a little minor thing, but anybody who is using one of the “Sure” plugins (like SureCart) or CartFlows along with FluentSMTP may be seeing a weird issue on their dashboards where the FluentSMTP widget sprawls out past the edge of your screen. This is a CSS issue because caused by an embedded survey in the “Sure” products (or CartFlows) that is conflicting with FluentSMTP. Word is it will be fixed in their next update.

Lastly, I am testing out options for being able to support marketing emails for Concierge clients when desired. I already use PostMark for transactional emails, but marketing emails (like promotions and newsletters) are a bit of a different breed. If the volume gets too high, we usually create an Amazon account for the client and get set up with Amazon SES for outgoing email. But, Amazon is notoriously sucky to use. 🤪 Not only that, sometimes they just outright decline to allow a site to use them without any explanation. We just had that happen for a client a couple weeks ago… and there’s just nothing you can do. So, I’m looking at other options such as Mailgun and ElasticEmail to be able to offer a higher volume of marketing emails from the likes of FluentCRM, but do it “in house”. I’ll keep clients informed. 😇

WordPress Quick Bits

Gutenberg vs Full Site Editing. This one is more of an educational bit, but there’s been this fuzzy line between the block editor in WordPress and full-site editing. Many don’t know the difference. The OllieWP blog (the blog for the Ollie Pro theme) has a nice 101 breakdown of what the difference is. Short version is that FSE means you’re using the block editor to design the entire site. It is definitely a little different. For the record, Kadence Theme (which I use) is not a FSE theme. With Kadence, you still use the Theme Customizer to customize global theme elements. Word is that Kadence is approaching FSE with a “hybrid approach”. The last few paragraphs of this blog post spell that out, which is interesting.

WooCommerce 9.5 Incoming. WooCommerce 9.5 is scheduled to drop on December 16th (so, next week). According to this X thread, this new release is going to get an improved Product Collections block which can do context-aware placement of products. For instance, upsells. There are some other improvements mentioned in that thread.

COGS Also Coming To WooCommerce. Tracking COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) used to require an add-on plugin for WooCommerce, but is soon to be integrated into the core product. This will allow tracking profit margins.

WPEngine Is “Woke”. OK, this is purely editorial on my part. But, last week WPEngine tweeted out a video of one of their employees painting something “that challenges people to think critically about equity and equality”. This video was clearly produced, employees are spending time on this, and… I don’t get it. WPEngine is in the heat of battle with Automattic and is already an overpriced web host (IMO), and they’re spending time and money making DEI statements and paying their employees to paint and make virtue signaling videos? Is this what happens when a web host goes big and corporate?

WPEngine Tracker Update. Speaking of WPEngine, Matt’s war on them wages on with their WPEngine Tracker site which tracks sites which are migrating away from WPEngine. The site now also tracks which hosts people are moving TO. Ironic because I am literally migrating a site out of WPEngine just this morning to bring it over to Rocket. 😇 But, according to the tracker site, top destinations are Pressable, Bluehost, Digital Ocean, Kinsta, etc. The whole thing just seems… low. 4 companies are literally doing promotions specifically to get people out of WPEngine. The top two are Pressable (owned by Automattic) and Bluehost (who pays out huge commissions to affiliates, but otherwise sucks). Clearly, the hosting business is brutal. 🤡

WP Social Ninja Now GDPR Compliant. The team behind WP Social Ninja has a difficult job to do integrating with social media platforms that keep changing things. Version 3.15 was just released which now offers fully GDPR-compliant Youtube and Review feeds. Instagram feeds took a downgrade, though, because Meta changed the rules (again) on usage of the API. Instagram feeds will now require a business account. More about this update here.

State Of The Word 2024. Mullenweg will be delivering the 2024 State of The Word in Tokyo on December 16th. It will be live streamed right on the official WordPress Youtube channel. Wonder which company Matt will attack this time. 🤪

Kadence Gets Advanced Table Block. If you’re using Kadence Blocks, the brand new 3.4 release now includes a new Advanced Table Block. This will make it much simpler to create tables that look great without the need for a special plugin just to do tables. Check out more on this new block here.

FluentCRM Update! FluentCRM 2.9.30 has been release just this morning. This release has labels for automations and campaigns, WordPress date format support on custom fields, testing outgoing webhooks and some other changes. The full announcement is here.

5 WordPress Mistakes I See FAR Too Often

Given what I do day in and day you, I am in and out of a whole lot of WordPress sites every day. And there are certain things I see too often when I log into people’s WordPress sites for the first time.

Let me spell out some of the common ones, just so you can keep them in mind with your own site…

#1 – Going On Install Sprees With Plugins

This is the biggie. There’s nothing wrong with running a lot of plugins if they’re good quality, well developed and supported, and don’t conflict. But, I can take one look at a site’s plugin list and tell if the site’s owner has just been installing things willy-nilly.

It goes like this…

• “I want to make my site do X”.
• “Let me go search for some plugin that will do X”.
• “Mmmm… that weird free plugin seems like it might do it. Let me try it”.
• Rinse and repeat. And, in a lot of cases, leave the plugin there, too.

Installing random plugins clutters things up and could potentially bring security risks. And often, there are more efficient ways to do things. I’ve seen a lot of instances where people install some big beast of a plugin just to do one little thing. This big mass of code is sitting there and they only needed like 5% of what it does, yet it sits there and negatively impacts site performance and adds a ton of clutter.

I tell my Concierge clients to always keep me in the loop on new things they want added to their sites. Because, many times, I know how to do it without randomly installing plugins. And we can then do it more efficiently. Not all clients listen, but hey…. I try. 😇

#2 – Leaving Old Plugins/Themes

When you leave old, inactive plugins and themes in place, there’s not much of a risk since that code isn’t active. However…

• In rare instances, even an inactive plugin can pose a security risk. It depends on the nature of the vulnerability.
• When Wordpress checks for updates, it is still checking for updates on the inactive stuff, too. Which slows things down.
• It takes up disk space.

Unless you know you’ll be using a plugin again, I would generally recommend deleting a plugin you’re not using. Same with old themes. Still got the old Twenty Nineteen theme on there? 😜

#3 – Installing an SMTP plugin and using PHP email

People seem to think that by merely installing an SMTP email plugin that their site is going to have higher email deliverability. But, that isn’t even remotely true.

When I see an SMTP email plugin in place and it is connected to send mail via PHP, it is essentially doing NOTHING. It is just sending email using your web host, which in most instances sucks.

The whole point of an SMTP plugin is to connect your site to an EXTERNAL email provider that is actually in the business of delivering emails reliably. Something like PostMark, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.

Personally, I recommend FluentSMTP as your plugin. Free and rocks. 👍

#4 – Using Cheapo / Free Plugins Too Liberally

This goes hand in hand with #1 above, but I will just say…

You get what you pay for.

Trying to only use free plugins and themes can get you into a lot of trouble. The quality varies. Also, you subject yourself to tons of upsells and nag notices inside the WordPress admin and it just gets in the way.

#5 – Using Poor Hosting

Running WordPress on crappy hosting would be like trying to race that cool new sportscar over a rough mountain road. It is going to suck.

It isn’t just about performance, either. It is also about security as well as ease of use.

For instance, I’ve lost count of the number of sites I’ve watched get hacked on Bluehost. Bluehost is a true piece of s**t host. Yet, because of the affiliate payments, you’ve got a lot of people saying great things about Bluehost. And it is cheap. But, it sucks.

I also generally recommend people stay away from hosts that drop you into cPanel. This one is a matter of preference, of course, because there’s not really anything wrong with cPanel. But, it is complex and these outdated, overly complicated systems put regular people into the seat of finding their web hosting too complicated to deal with. It isn’t worth it.

I recommend fast and simple web hosting. Hosting you can understand when you log into your account. And is WordPress focused. This is why I recommend Rocket Hosting and use it for my Concierge clients.

BONUS: Not Knowing When To Move On

I also see sites which were built on old tools which might have been popular back in the day, but now suck. The right thing to do is re-do the site so as to stay on a modern framework and, in a lot of cases, it isn’t too much work to do that. But, instead, people are afraid to rock the boat as if something is going to blow up on them.

Sometimes, it is just time to retire old themes and plugins that are now just dusty old dinosaurs. 🤓