Your Site’s TRUE Cost

Have you ever sat down and added up the true cost of your website? We’ll be talking about that more below.

We’ll also talk about my little “side gig”. 😜 The little site in the RV niche I have just for giggles. I’m pondering plans. Which is also timely…. since I signed papers to buy another RV this last weekend and I likely pick it up on Thursday.

Lots going on – as always.

So, let’s cut to the chase here and get started….

What Does Your Site Actually Cost To Run?

Operating a website that actually conducts business for you isn’t free. It is unfortunate that too many people try to stay as close to “free” as possible. Things like the cheapest hosting they can find, “free” themes”, free” plugins”. And the result is usually a site that sucks and does next to nothing useful.

It is ironic that while WordPress itself is completely and totally free… there is nothing free about running a WordPress website.

On the plane back to Tampa a week or so ago, I busted out my laptop and planned out a calculator form that I’m going to build. This calculator is going to be to calculate your website’s TRUE cost.

Some of the things that will go into it are:

• How much are you paying for web hosting? (if annual, amortize into a monthly amount)
• Do you have automatic image optimization? (Important, and usually not free).
• Do you have automatic, off-site backups? (This does not include your web host. Most are not free, although UpdraftPlus is a viable option.)
• Do you have a website application firewall and malware protection? (lots of ways to do this one).
• SMTP email delivery for reliable email delivery from your site? (If you’re using your webhost to send those emails… bad idea).
• Website analytics? (Google is “free”, but with lots of catches. Most good ones are not free).
• Email marketing platform?
• Cost of plugin license renewals?

For each of these things, often the expense is made annually. So, to make it more applicable, I like to break annual costs down into monthly by dividing by 12.

But, then here’s the kicker for some people…

• How much time each month do you spend doing updates and maintenance of the site?
• How much time each month do you spend debugging things?
• How much time do you spend each month trying to figure things out that you don’t understand or don’t know how to do?

and…

• What is your time worth?

Now, when I get this calculator built up, it will all become more concrete. The goal is that you arrive at an actual dollar amount.

Now, what do you do with this information?

The answer depends on your goals. If your site is just a side hobby, your expenses may not be that high and it probably makes next to no money. So, not much to worry about. Carry on!

If you’re running a business, however, you obviously want to think about return on investment. Just like any other asset. Is the website making more than it costs? Is it pulling it’s own weight?

Yes, reducing costs is always a thing people want to do. But, you can only reduce costs so much before you end up reducing the functionality of the site. Cheaper hosting often create slower sites that can hurt sales. Cheaper software ends up wasting time with things that don’t work or the need to chase workarounds for functionality you don’t have.

It is an interesting thing to think about. But also very much why clients join Concierge.

With Concierge, pretty much everything I mentioned up there is included. Instead of having to chase all of the best tools and pay for all of them individually, I bring all of it together into Concierge. That alone is not only a way to potentially reduce costs for clients, but simplify accounting.

But, then there’s that time. Man… that time! And simply put, time spent updating and fixing things, debugging things, figuring things out in WordPress…. is NOT time spent actually making any money. If that kind of thing is not what you are great at, then why are you doing it? You should be focusing on growth instead.

You can probably see why I am going to be building this calculator. 😎

From a marketing perspective, obviously this calculator is going to be a funnel that talks about Concierge services. It makes perfect sense. But, I also want people to be AWARE of their site’s true cost whether they enroll their site into Concierge or not.

Because thinking about the ROI of your website is important, after all. It is a true ASSET. And you should be thinking of it as one.

More to come. 😇

This Week In Concierge

Last week, I announced that FlyingPress is now part of the Concierge Toolkit. It is now available to all Concierge clients. As a reminder, FlyingPress is a VERY good WordPress performance and caching plugin.

Funnily enough, not every client really needs it. Some of you guys have sites that already perform pretty good because I’ve done things. 😎 Plus, you’re on Rocket Hosting anyway and they’re fantastic. But, hey, FlyingPress just makes it a little bit better, so why not. 😜

But, last week, I had somebody come on for the WP Speed Fix service. He isn’t in Concierge, but just needed a fix up. His site started out with a GTMetrix score of just 57% as well as some failing core web vitals. And here’s his numbers now…

Funnily enough, this is a site which is currently sitting on Bluehost, too. Yuck! Not a fan of Bluehost at all. But, still, with some of the optimizations done – including setup of FlyingPress – we still achieved some notable improvement. There’s still some structural stuff to do to increase his mobile scores, but it will take some homepage design changes to finish that one up.

In other news, I am about to do some testing on another tool to enhance the WordPress search functionality. The WordPress search function which is built-in basically…. sucks. The accuracy is poor and it really begins to show it’s shortcomings when you have custom post types on your site. And most of my clients do.

SearchWP is a popular option, however it is owned by Awesome Motive and that rubs me the wrong way. 😇 So, I’m going to be testing another one here called Relevanssi. It looks to be every bit as good, so we shall see and I’ll let you know. If it checks out, I’ll be adding this to the Toolkit, too.

WordPress Quick Bits

FluentCommunity 1.5 – Major Update. FluentCommunity has just been updated to 1.5 and this one brings with it one of the most requested features – theme compatibility. You can now create pages in your favorite page builder or block builder and you can show those pages within the frame of your community. This provides a LOT more flexibility. Read the announcement here. More to come on this front, I’m sure. One of the things I’m looking for is the ability to put components of the community onto actual pages, so it can show up within the theme itself. But, they’re moving fast!

PressConf Recap. Rae Morey, from The Repository, wrote up a nice recap of the PressConf conference in Arizona. It was indeed an interesting conference. I’ll probably go again.

FlyingPress Version 5. The release candidate for FlyingPress v5 is available to customers in their account… and final release should be soon. Some of the notable improvements are an updated UI, more automatic optimizations powered by the cloud, automatic detection and delay of third-party scripts, and some other nerdy stuff. 🤪 But, the theme here is… more automatic optimizations that “just work”.

TutorLMS 3.5 Release. TutorLMS has been updated to 3.5. This version includes support for membership trials, more controls in the course builder, Paddle integration and ability for admins to download invoices. Read the full post here.

A2 Hosting Rebrands As Hosting.com. A2 Hosting is one of those popular bulk, commodify hosts and… they’re actually not too bad. Not my cup of tea, though. Well, they just rebranded and now they’ll be known just as… Hosting.com. Read the full announcement here. Can’t help but wonder how much money that had to spend to acquire that domain. 🤪

Elementor V4 Alpha Release. Elementor is working on it’s next major release – version 4. And they just released the alpha version for people to begin testing. You can get the test release over on GitHub. This is going to be a major shift with Elementor since it is taking on a CSS-first approach. In fact, the builder is being re-built with that approach in mind. This is going to put Elementor in the same ballpark as more CSS-first builders such as Bricks and the upcoming EtchWP. Will be interesting to watch how they do this transition.

WordPress 6.8.1 Pushed Last Week. Last week, WordPress pushed out the 6.8.1 maintenance release to fix some bugs from the new 6.8 release. Most sites have been updated already and it seems like a painless release, so it is recommended. More on that here.

People Want Human Support. From the “no shit” department, apparently consumers really want human support. According to a survey by Kinsta, 93% of U.S. concumsrs prefer human support over AI. And nearly half say they would cancel a service if it only relied on AI for support. Most view AI support solely as a way to cut costs. I’ve said this time and time again… the lurch into AI for these kinds of things is going to result in a pushback and demand for real humans. When I have to deal with a company that is only using AI bots, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Oopsie. Interestingly, Joost deValk, the original founder of Yoast and the famous Yoast SEO plugin, wrote a post on his blog about the unintended consequences of making SEO “for everyone”. In short, he says they accidentally helped flood the web with quantity over quality. In a candid section, he says “We turned SEO into a checklist. Our traffic light system, meant to encourage good habits, became a finish line. People wrote to get the green light. They optimized, published, and moved on. Sometimes they were writing with purpose. But sometimes, they were just filling in the blanks.“. Really interesting.

xCloud Now Offers Full Edge Caching. While Rocket is my go-to host for most things, I also use xCloud for some stuff. And as a guy who used to use Cloudways, it is awesome to see how fast xCloud is evolving and blows away Cloudways, IMO. The xCloud platform just recently released full Edge Caching integrated with Cloudflare. Read more about it here.

Ottokit AI Agents. Ottokit (formerly SureTriggers) has just introduced AI Agents. In essence, you can now put bots into your automations that will smartly conducts tasks for you and perform logic. While OttoKit didn’t invent AI agents, this is a powerful addition to the platform. AI Agents are just going to get more and more prevalent.

Brainstorming My Side Gig

Alright, a little change of gears this week for the second section of the weekly newsletter. 😇 Because, for a few years now, I’ve had this little side gig WordPress site.

Many of us have that main business site (mine is obviously Blog Marketing Academy)… and then one or more little side hobby sites. You know, those sites you barely spend any time on, but you just dabble with.

Mine is called HappilyRV.

It is a site for RV owners. As you may know, I’m kinda into RVs. 🤪

The funny thing is, the RV niche is pretty large. It wasn’t always, but these days it has a lot of content creators in the niche. And there’s also a lot of money flowing around in this niche, so from a a blogger’s perspective, I take notice of that. There’s a lot to like about this niche.

BMA and the Concierge services keep me pretty dang busy, though. So, I haven’t spent very much time on this site at all. For the most part, HappilyRV has coasted.

But, I just recently checked out the stats. And while it was doing fairly well in 2024, it did subside just a little as the year went on. Then, in January, it began to pick up yet again. And right now, the site is averaging about 1,800 unique visitors per month with a little over 2,000 page views. The site also happens to have an email list (in FluentCRM, of course) of 2,279 people.

Now, considering I do pretty much NOTHING for this site outside of updating the plugins, those numbers aren’t bad at all.

So, I think I’m going to start putting a little bit of intentional time into this site again. Mostly as a hobby, but…. we’ll see. 😇 In the line of work I am, I’m always looking at the business angle to something like this, too.

Am I going to start making online courses for RV owners? VERY unlikely. 🤣 That’s just not my gig. But, a few thoughts right now are:

• Turn on the content machine again and begin posting new articles and videos. Also, curation is going to play a large role in this site as I compile some of the best stuff from other resources.
• I may test out usage of FluentCommunity on the site and build a little social network for RVers.
• Spin up a weekly newsletter. Call it… the RV Edge? 🤣 Just kidding…. or am I? 😉
• Affiliate revenue and/or ad revenue actually could be more of a thing on that site, since RV product creators are constantly looking for distribution in that space.

Could be fun. 😎

Ironically, too, but I happen to live in one of the RV capitals of the world. This area of Florida has all kinds of RV businesses and dealerships. For half the year when it isn’t scorching hot outside, you get a lot of people flocking to Florida with their RVs. And annually, perhaps the largest RV supershow in the entire country takes places only about 10 miles from my house.

Maybe I should do something with it, huh?

How about you? Do you have a side gig website like this?