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So I woke up this morning and one of my clients had a whole bunch of new plugins installed on their site. And guess who owned them all? They were all awesomotive plugins. And so I want to show you something to be careful of. I want to show you what happened, and I want to show you something to be careful of.

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It’s kind of a known thing that they do, but when you are installing a plugin that’s owned by awesomotive, you need to be careful about the installation process and here’s why.

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Now it might seem like I just like to bash on awesomotive. I really don’t enjoy it particularly much because there are some things about the company and their products that I definitely respect. They’re good developers, they’re very good at business. The thing is, I think some of their tactics are dicey and one of them burned us today. And so basically what happened is I’ve hired on a new developer to help out with concierge, and he probably doesn’t have a whole lot of experience dealing with some of the intricacies, I will call them, of awesome motive plugins.

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Well, one of my clients wanted to, you have an affiliate program. Okay. And so affiliate WP happens to be a really good tool. Well, they happen to now be part of the awesome motive family. Now, I knew that, but I said, well, listen, this is a good tool if it’s what you should, if it’s what you want, and you want that affiliate program, I think you should probably go out and pick up a license to W affiliate WP.

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And so my client went and did that, and I had my new developer go ahead and do the initial setup of it. The problem is I got up this morning and my client’s site had like ten extra plugins that I never put there. And not only that, I recognize who owned them all, it was all awesome motive. The other thing too is my client said, hey, there’s this weird stuff now showing up when I edit one of my posts, because all in one SEO was now on there and it was putting all this garbage up at the top that she did not need. So obviously, once we removed all that stuff, once I removed all that stuff, when I got up in the morning, it all went away.

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But I want to show you what to be careful of when you install awesome motive stuff. So just so I could pull up what actually happened, I went ahead and installed a testbed of WordPress. Okay. And so what you’re seeing here is the same admin panel the same site, installing affiliatewp to this test install. And now over here on this side, I want to show you.

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This is part of the installation wizard that you’re going to be thrown into when you install affiliate WP, where you can set your affiliate percentage and stuff like that. Enter your license code, that type of stuff. But when you get to this screen, notice how we have this thing about pro features and growth tools. It is automatically checked. Okay, so what most people are going to do, and what my new developer did was that he, he’s like, okay, well that sounds good, growth tools, right?

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And he just went on notice down here. While the following plugins are going to be installed for free, monster insights, trust pulse, all in one SEO seed produced WP mail, SMTP, uncanny automator and Optinmonster. Well, that’s kind of a lot. If we expand this down, you can see exactly what’s going to happen. And all this was indeed installed on my client’s website, all of which I would have never recommended, by the way.

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And so this is the kind of thing you need to be careful of. If you were to complain about this to them, more than likely they would say, well, we’ve made it user optional. Technically they’re correct, because I can uncheck that and it will go away. The thing is, it’s, most people, especially with the way it’s positioned, might not pay attention. And I think they’re sort of depending upon that because obviously when you install these plugins, it helps drive up the stats.

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It also puts all kinds of ads and crap into the admin panel because now you’re like, oh, this might be cool. And every single one of these has a pro version. They’re not actually free and it is what it is. And then now over here on the right side, I’m in the same admin panel. In this case, I’ve skipped the, I’ve let the wizard just stay where it is.

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So we got basically affiliate WP more or less ready to begin the actual integration into the website. And it’s still a little annoying, I got to admit. So first of all, my client, I think, paid like $149 for a personal license of affiliate WP for her website. And it’s still got this ad in here to try to upsell her to pro. And so, okay, like whatever, we’re going to take that out of there.

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But look at this other stuff. We got all these like analytics, which, yep, there’s monster insights ad built right into affiliate WP. I doubt you’d be able to get rid of that menu option unless I utilize my plugin to start hiding menu options. So it’s just cluttered. This is going to be an ad for their SMTP plugin that’s built into affiliate WP.

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If you go to about us, of course they’re going to talk about all this kind of stuff and link to all their other plugins. I can put up with the about us part. I mean, that kind of makes sense. But why are we going to put in menu options here for their other plugins that you can’t get rid of? Let me go through settings.

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I don’t think there’s any way where you can get rid of this stuff.

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It’s just kind of like even when you decline all this stuff, it’s still sort of advertising to you. Optin form that would be like almost a perfect place for them to try to pimp. Optinmonster it doesn’t look like they’re doing it, which is kind of nice. So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to, now again, this is a test install. I’m going to say, well, a typical person would probably go through this wizard, set their commission rate, say, oh, that sounds maybe possibly interesting.

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And they probably would not uncheck growth tools because they’re just kind of going through the wizard, right? So let’s go. Oh crap. Loading Trust pulse monster insights all in one SEO seed prod. I don’t even know why somebody would want to use that.

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I don’t use SMTP. I got, I got fluent SMTP. It’s so much better. Uncanny automator. Honestly, I forgot they even own that opt in monster me.

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Okay. Oh, and we get an ad. Would you like to purchase and install? Oh, so they’re going to try to give me an upsell to pro and I’m going to do it later. No, we’re not going to do it actually, but whatever.

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Now we got ourselves, the affiliate program is ready to use finish, setup and exit. Great. Now I’m going to refresh my admin panel and I got all this extra garbage. Look at this WP mail. SMtP of course has this widget on there, but it’s useless unless you buy it, which, why would anybody buy that?

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Okay, Optinmonster like monster insights. Look at all the plugins that have been put on here. Let’s take out this list. Let’s check it out. So all in one SEO, which is outdated, by the way.

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Seed prod monster insights Optinmonster Trust Paul. It’s uncanny. I mean, I didn’t put any of those on there, but I guess I did agree to it in the wizard. So that’s the experience. Now, this is the second time this has happened.

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I had another client that one day I went into his website to do some stuff, a site that I basically built from scratch. So I knew what was in there. And one day I was seeing WP mail SMTP in there, and I think it was one of their other ones, too. And I’m like, how the hell did those get there? Well, my client was experimenting one day and installed one of these, some plugin.

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I forgot which one actually owned by awesome motive, and it auto installed a bunch of stuff. So is it a shady tactic? I don’t know. They would probably argue that it’s not, but they’re basically depending upon people to notice. Well, actually they’re depending on people to not notice and do exactly what just happened.

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It auto installs all that stuff and they. And then basically they’re hoping that people will just sort of use it because they don’t know any better. Every one of these programs, these plugins that were installed, have paid add ons, so obviously there’s additional upsell opportunities there for them. And then even weirder is that once I’ve even declined all that stuff, they’ve got some ads built into the actual software that are going to continue to promote to me. I bet you my client is going to be getting periodic invitations to upgrade her license to pro, even though she just paid the company $149 on my advice, by the way.

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So it isn’t as if I’m like anti. I mean, yeah, I don’t like awesome motive stuff very much, but I realize that sometimes their stuff is good. They did not create affiliate WP. It just happens to be one of the other plugins that they purchase. And so now once they now own it, they also motived it, and now it’s full of all this cross sell stuff.

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But it’s just something to be aware of. You don’t need to avoid. Also motive plugins, unless you feel like it. They’re not always the best. They’re going to always say they’re the best, but they’re not always the best.

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But sometimes they’re good. But you need to be really careful about going through the installation wizards and auto installing things. It’s a common problem. I’ve seen it many times now. It’s always with this company, too.

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I honestly, I don’t recall seeing it with any other developer besides awesome motive. So just be really careful out there when you’re doing it. I’m going to probably also utilize my admin site enhancements plugin that I use on a lot of client sites, and I’m going to hide those menu options for WSMTP and you know, the ads because why do we need to clutter up WordPress administration? Is this good for the WordPress ecosystem that this kind of stuff gets pushed? It makes it feel like when you’re on your own website that it’s one big damn billboard.

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And I don’t think it should be like that personally. So I guess awesome motive. They do some good things for the WordPress ecosystem, but frankly they do some things that aren’t so good either. And I think it’s worth knowing about. So you can at least be an informed consumer on the whole matter.