The Forgotten Page Of Your Site

For those of you who live in the US like I do, I will just say…

These time changes are stupid. 🤡 Personally, I prefer standard time. But, now we’re on “daylight savings”. All I know is… we gotta stop messin’ with the clocks. Just pick one and let it be!

But, maybe it’s just me. 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, let’s kick off the week here, shall we? 😎

This week’s feature is about xCloud Hosting. Which is definitely something to check out. In fact, I moved 11 sites over to it from Cloudways and… now no longer use Cloudways at all. Crazy-pants.

And, we’ll also talk about what is usually the most boring page of your site… and how to tweak it up.

And I’ll talk about just how EASY it is to migrate a website to different hosting.

Let’s do this…

The Website Page We All Have, But Ignore

Now, there’s a page we don’t talk about much. The “Contact Us” page.

We all have a contact page on our site, but in almost all cases, the page is boring as snot. It is the page barely anybody pays attention to. Slap a contact form on there and be done with it, right?

But, actually, it is a pretty important page of your site.

Think about it…

If a person is about to reach out to contact you, they’re kinda hot to trot! 😎 The chances of that person becoming a potential customer are far higher than normal. But also…

In the business world, there’s the common concepts of B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer). But, perhaps we should redefine this to H2H: Human to Human.

After all, people tend to forget that all the decision makers in this world are human beings. Real flesh-and-blood people.

And, in this day and age where you can’t call a company without going through a big phone menu (and we all just dial 0 anyway to try to reach the operator, right?)… people just want human-to-human contact.

Business is driven by conversations. Those conversations could take place on the phone, via email, live chat, social media, etc. There are numerous platforms that people may use to communicate.

Those conversations are what drive business. Those conversations could be:

• A person with a casual question. They might not even be ready to buy from you right now, but the fact that you answered the question in a personal way rather than with a pre-formatted response makes it more likely they’ll buy from you when they are ready.
• A person with a question about one of your products. It is almost impossible for a sales page or a sales video to answer every question a person could possibly have. Conversations are what closes sales.

This is a human business.

Your business should be as open and welcoming to any and all conversations as it can possibly be.

Your contact page is a core component of conversions and sales, just like any landing page.

So, with that in mind, let’s discuss how to make a great ‘Contact Us’ page.

Keep It Personal

One of the more annoying things I see on contact pages is the effort to look more corporate or bigger than you actually are. In my opinion, this is “old school” marketing where people think size equals better. But, these days, people want to do business with people, not inhuman corporations.

Remember, this is human to human. So, talk to them like they are real people. Because… they are.

Introduce them to your contact page. Welcome them to contact you. Make them feel invited. And talk to them like a real person would talk. Don’t use the word “we” if it is just you.

Show Them A Photo Of Who They’re Talking To

In keeping with the “human to human” thing, people like to know who they’re about to interact with. So, show them a photo of yourself. If it is a team, then show photos of the team members.

Include Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

This one depends on the nature of your business and the volume of inquiries you get. If you get a fair amount of email volume, you can often deal with some of the more common inquiries in advance using an FAQ and keep them from having to email you in the first place.

So, one purpose of the FAQ is just that… a first layer of support that might very well handle their question instantly without an email needed.

But, there is another purpose…

The FAQ on your contact page is also a potential marketing opportunity.

You can take common questions of your market and point them right to blog posts or even offers that answer their question.

Provide Multiple, Frictionless Contact Options

It’s disappointing the number of companies (even small ones) who seem to look at customers as a nuisance that needs to be kept from direct contact. But, when you make having a conversation hard, you’re hurting your business.

So, you want to have more than just email. Your contact options should be:

1. Multiple. Give people choices.
2. Frictionless. Contacting you should be easy and not make people jump through hoops. You also want to allow them to reach you on the platform which is easiest for them.
3. Instant. You want to get as close to instantaneous as you can.

If you use social media (and actually check and respond to people there), then show social media options on your contact page. Do you offer live chat? Then have the option there to trigger a conversation.

The standard contact form to send to your email is pretty standard. Definitely include that. But, make it as easy as possible. Don’t ask for a lot of irrelevant data. It should be as easy as sending a regular email.

Make The Contact Page Easy To Find

I see too many sites that hide their contact page way down in the footer. I’d recommend the top navigation, ideally. You don’t want to make people go hunting for how to contact you. It should be easy and obvious.

Anything else is the equivalent of making people go through a phone menu and wait on hold for 30 minutes. You know how much you like that. 😉

Consider A Video

Consider putting a greeting video right on your contact page. Just a friendly video inviting them to contact you and doing a lot of the stuff we just talked about.

Nothing creates a bond better than video.

WordPress Quick Bits…

Tumblr and WordPress.com to Sell User Data. Reports came out that Tumblr and WordPress.com (both owned by Automattic) are preparing to sell users’ data to both MidJourney and OpenAI in order to help train their AI. 404Media has the story. Looks like they’ve been going back and forth on the data to be sent to them. Interesting.

xCloud Gets A File Manager. I reviewed the new xCloud Hosting in full on the site, so you can check that out. But, last week, they officially announced the web-based file manager using Tiny File Manager. It works nicely, but it is an extra step to have to turn it on first. For security reasons, they don’t have it on all the time. It would definitely be better if they had a native file manager you didn’t have to activate and deactivate, but even having a file manager at all is an improvement over Cloudways.

Wishlist Member Integrates with Easy Affiliate. Wishlist Member was literally one of the first WordPress membership plugins I ever saw. It is the true OG of membership plugins and it is still going strong. They just announced an integration with the Easy Affiliate plugin so a quick and simple affiliate program for your membership site. Check out the news here.

Just how big is WooCommerce? There’s a page that shows just how big WooCommerce is. 3.6 million sites use it. It is growing by 11% per year. 350 core code contributors and 441 total employees. I use WooCommerce myself. Frankly, I avoided it for a long time because I thought it was too complex for my needs. But, I was wrong. The flexibility and integrations it offers makes it a great for for most sites. And these days, most membership sites I build use WooCommerce.

Cwicly is Discontinued. This news caused quite quite the stir in the WordPress world, even though it definitely didn’t impact me at all because… frankly, I had never heard of Cwicly. 😇 But, in short, it was a page builder based on Gutenberg and it apparently had a decent amount of fans. And it’s founder Louis-Alexander Désiré just abruptly ended the project and discontinued all development. And in the process, he basically blamed “the relentless onslaught of destructive posts and comments by certain WordPress influencers”. You can read the synopsis of all of this on WP Tavern. There was quite a lot of conversation on the matter over on X, which is how I found about it. I do not know anything about the project or it’s founder, but honestly… it sounds like a shell story to me. If I had to guess, they were having actual business problems and perhaps even some mental health issues with the developers… and they lashed out. But, I don’t know. But, good thing I never used it…. because it’s a dead project now.

Unhappy With Your Site’s Performance?

I have launched a new service called WP Speed Fix.

A slow website can hurt sales and hurt your SEO. The problem is, most people don’t know how to fix it. Heck, many aren’t even aware of what is actually going on and are flying blind.

Fixing the performance of your website is often confusing. Lots of jargon. Lots of advice… most of it confusing. And truth is, it is a pretty holistic thing to tackle. You need to have a “big picture” understanding of what’s going on. You can’t just install a plugin and be done with it.

When you book WP Speed Fix, we’ll fix up your site’s performance scores. And we’ll do it together. I have the experience and all of the tools. And we’ll get it done.

How To Migrate A Website To New Hosting

Moving websites around is something I do quite a bit. I probably migrate 3-5 sites per week most weeks. I basically can do it with my eyes closed these days.

But, one of the things I’ve found in many cases is that the idea of moving their website to new hosting scares them.

It feels overwhelming.

And in some cases, they even stick with hosting they don’t like very much just because the idea of moving the site seems complex.

But, I’m here to tell you…

It is usually VERY easy to migrate a website these days. And I will tell you exactly how I do it.

While there are a number of plugins out there that can be used to migrate a WordPress site, the one I use most of the time is Migrate Guru.

This plugin is done by BlogVault. And it is 100% free. And here’s how it works…

• On your new host, simply install WordPress as a blank site. Brand new installation. It will probably be available on a temporary domain to begin with.
• Install and activate the Migrate Guru plugin on both sites.
• On the target site (on the new hosting), get the Migration Key. That will be a big, long nasty looking string of letters and numbets. Just copy that thing to your clipboard.
• On the origin site (on old hosting), enter your email address and agree to terms and proceed to migration.
• On the next screen, you’ll see a bunch of hosts. But, don’t worry about that. Just click on the “Other Host” option.
• Enter the migration key from the target site. And hit the go button.
• Go grab coffee or something. 😎 Basically, BlogVault will proceed to validate everything, then copy it all, and clone it over to your new hosting. It can take a little while, but it is fully automated.

When you’re done. you’ll have a full clone of your website over on the new host on the temporary domain. Everything will be the same. Same logins and everything. After all, it is a copy.

Log into the new site and verify things. Keep in mind that any licensed plugins may start spitting errors because it doesn’t recognize the temporary domain. Just ignore the noise. It all goes away once you go live with the new site.

And then that’s all there is left to do: GO LIVE.

You make the changes to your domain DNS settings to point web traffic to your new host and you “go live” with it from the new location. Once you’re done, your site will be up and running on a new host.

In a few cases, there’s hiccups that complicate things. But, in about 95% of the migrations I do, this is all there is to it.

So, don’t ever stick with crappy hosting because you’re daunted about what the migration process. It is actually pretty straightforward. And Migrate Guru really works well.