When Gamification Backfires

Sent on

Happy Monday!

Well, unless you’re sending off your tax check today. Tax day it is, which means we need to make sure our annual extortion checks are off to the IRS. After all, those “public servants” don’t become multi-millionaires for nothing. 🤬

But, pop that thing in the mail… and let’s get on with making cool websites and building our businesses, shall we?

This week… do you need gamification on your membership site? And, when can it go horribly wrong?

Well, I’ll show you. 😇

Let’s roll…

When Gamification Backfires

Gamification.

This is one of those things the “experts” say you need on a membership site. To drive engagement. To drive community. All of the things.

So, people install GamiPress. They set up some points. Maybe set up some badges.

But, is anybody even noticing? Do your members actually care?

This last week, I had a client with a big performance issue on his membership site. And he came to me for a fix. Big long page load times. Logins took forever. And his members were noticing, too, because there was even a thread in his forum where people were complaining about the speed of the site.

My client is on Rocket Hosting, too. And he was beginning to wonder if they were up to the task.

But, the issue wasn’t his hosting. The issue was mostly…. GamiPress.

First, I installed Query Monitor and had a look. While his query count wasn’t too bad, there were a few really SLOW queries. And those queries were being run by GamiPress.

When I looked at his GamiPress event log, he had over 1.1 MILLION entries in there! 🤯 That’s because he had points being awarded merely for visits and he has a fair amount of member activity on this site. So, his site was just sitting there chugging trying to add points and query some massive log with well over a million entries in it.

But, here’s the thing…

These little badges weren’t even being looked at by his members. Nobody cared. And nowhere across his membership were points being displayed or used.

The moment I deactivated GamiPress, his site performance shot up. Few other little tweaks I did, but removing GamiPress got us 90% of the way. Him running GamiPress like that was like trying to haul a big 5th wheel camper down the interstate with a Toyota Corolla. 😂 Unhitch the trailer and the thing performs fine.

Now, this isn’t a big knock on GamiPress. There’s nothing wrong with the tool. Like all tools, it can be used well or poorly. In this case, it was set up according to what they thought would be a good idea, but not realizing the effect it would have over time.

GamiPress is indeed a great plugin when it comes to gamification. But, the question is…

Do you NEED gamification?

Truth is, most membership sites simply don’t need it.

Most membership sites are a delivery vehicle for things people buy. Like courses, services, etc. For such things, there’s rarely much of a point to gamification.

And if you wanted it in order to drive community engagement, ask yourself… why? Is that as important as you think it is?

In some cases, it may be. But, such a thing needs to be thought about holistically as part of a strategy before you set it up. Just giving out little badges isn’t going to rock anybody’s world.

Do those points get them things? Can they “buy” things with points? Are there any special privileges that come with certain numbers of points?

And even if you say “yes” to those things, do your usage stats show it being used? Because if nobody is even using it, there’s not much point.

If you set that stuff up, gamification can make sense. But, again, only for the type of membership where high levels of engagement are actually important. And I submit to you that… for most membership sites, it isn’t nearly as important as the owner thinks it is. If the idea was to keep up retention rates, I think there are far more effective ways to do that than giving people cheesy badges.

In most cases, I recommend against gamification on a membership site.

Not because it is a bad thing. But, because most sites don’t stand to benefit from it as much as one may think.

And because… depending on how things are set up, that gamification can introduce substantial amounts of technical overhead to the site and slow things down unnecessarily.

FOR MORE: The Ultimate Blueprint To Building Your Membership Site

WordPress Quick Bits…

xCloud Hosting Launches OpenLiteSpeed Servers. xCloud continues to iterate. I feel like there’s something new from them almost every week. Now, they’re offering OpenLiteSpeed. In short, OLS is server software that is very, VERY fast. It is basically the open-source version of Litespeed. I won’t get too nerdy here, but because OLS is a thinner, lighter version of Litespeed, it means you can get insanely fast web performance from even lower server specs. Read the announcement from xCloud here.

Uncanny Automator Will Lose Facebook Group Integration. One of the many functions of Uncanny Automator was the ability to post to a Facebook group. But, that functionality will be deprecated. Why? Because Facebook is cutting off third-party access to Facebook groups. You know what? This is just another reminder of why you should never, ever build important business assets on Facebook. It isn’t your’s. They can and WILL remind you that you don’t own it. They do.

Gravity SMTP Released. Gravity Forms has release a new add-on called Gravity SMTP. As you might have guessed by the name, it allows you to connect up to SMTP providers for reliable email delivery. The add-on is only available to Elite license holders… which runs $259/year. So basically, there’s no point to this thing. Fluent Forms is a far, FAR better deal than Gravity Forms. And FluentSMTP is already free for anybody to use.

Disable Emails Per Product for WooCommerce. This new, free plugin was released last week to allow you to disable outgoing emails on a per-product basis with WooCommerce. Potentially handy. Check it out here.

WordPress Powers NASA. Did you know WordPress is behind the NASA website? Not only that, but Matt Mullenweg posted a little flex on his X account… sharing that during the eclipse, WordPress handled more than 1 billion requests in a 4.5 hour span… with most under 400ms response time. Of course, this has more to do with Automattic’s server infrastructure than WordPress, but still… if anybody was wondering if WordPress can handle busy sites…. it does.

Taming The Notifications Inside WordPress

With what I do, I am going in and out of multiple WordPress admin panels every single day. So, I see a lot. And one of the most annoying things about the WordPress admin panel is how it currently handles notifications.

You know, stuff like this…

That’s an actual screenshot of a site I logged into. That’s supposed to be the list of posts. But, there are so many stupid notifications going on that the entire list of posts was pushed below the fold of the screen. And mind you… I have 3 big 32-inch 4K monitors in my office. Lots of screen space! Still… the entire screen was taken up with notifications.

  • Requests to review plugins
  • Upsells to get the “pro” version of a plugin
  • License expiration notices
  • Various to-do items (like upgrading the database)

Some of these plugins are literally turning the WordPress admin panel into their own damn billboard.

Now, I could sit here and just blame plugin authors for abusing notifications. And I’d be right. But, in the end, the fault lies with WordPress itself. It makes it far too easy for these notifications to clog up the works.

Ironically, this is where some plugins have come in to help. Here’s a few to check out…

  • Admin and Site Enhancements (or ASE). I discussed this plugin more in-depth last week, however one of the things it does well is hiding notifications and putting them into a dropdown in the upper right of the admin panel.
  • Disable Admin Notices individually.
  • Organize Admin Notices. This one is on Github. Very simple plugin and it stuffs notifications into a toggle. If you’re not familiar with using Github, just hit the green “Code” dropdown button and press “Download Zip”. Then, upload the ZIP as a plugin to WordPress.
  • Hide Admin Notices

Lastly, there’s always… you. As in, if you find that a plugin is being obnoxious with upsells in the admin panel, don’t reward them with your business. Don’t use the plugin.

Awesome Motive is rather bad at this, BTW. They use notifications to upsell and cross-promote other plugins. They’re not the worst, though. Some plugins come in with fully formatted ads!

The worst ones are the ones that you close and yet they keep coming back over and over again.

Anyway, there has been lots of discussion within the WordPress community over this issue of notification abuse. I suspect a future version of WordPress will handle this in some way. In the meantime, the above plugins will help tame it.