Daily ArchivesSeptember 9, 2021

If you’re a WordPress user without a technical background, you might find yourself looking for a freelancer to help you sooner or later.

Even though WordPress is quite straightforward to use, there’s only so much you can do with your website if you can’t code. If you want a certain functionality on your site or want to change how your theme looks, hiring a WordPress freelancer can be the best way to go.

However, the WordPress freelancing world is bloated. At the time of this writing, there are over 6.6k active job postings on Upwork for work on WordPress sites.

As the usage of WordPress continues to spread across the Internet, more and more freelancers are trying to tap into this huge market to get jobs.

WordPress is used by 59.9% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 31.3% of all websites. – W3Tech

Having so many freelancers available at a mouse-click makes it tough to choose the best fit for your project. Hiring the right freelancer isn’t as easy as just posting a job on a platform like Upwork, Freelancer or Fiverr.

That’s why I’ve outlined a four-step workflow you can copy for your own business.

Preparation Phase: Before You Talk to Any Freelancer

Finding the right freelancer begins with you preparing the job description and getting clear about what goals you want to achieve. Without clear instructions from your end, no freelancer will be able to fulfill your needs – and both of you will end up frustrated.

In theory, a job description for a WordPress freelancer should be treated equally as a job description for e.g. a painter painting your living room or a plumber building a new bathroom.
You wouldn’t let a plumber tear down your current bathroom without having a clear idea of how the new bathroom should look, would you?

That exact attitude is how you should treat a project for a WordPress freelancer too.

First, Outline Your Goals

What specifically should the WordPress freelancer do for you and why? It’s important for you to clearly communicate WHY you’re hiring the developer. If the developer understands the bigger picture of what impact his work has on your business, she might be able to:

1. Perform better and
2. Give recommendations for other tweaks you probably haven’t thought of

Don’t say something like “I need to hire you because I don’t know how to write code”. Instead, come up with something like “I really need my site to load faster so that I can turn more visitors into email list subscribers”.

Second, Define Your Standards for the Job.

Remember that the freelancer you’re about to hire comes from a different position than you’re in. He or she doesn’t know what standards you’re setting for yourself. I know from my own experience that many freelancers are just working for the quick money and don’t have maintainability, performance, and user experience in mind.

They are looking to get the job done with the least amount of effort needed, just as you’re doing in your own business. As freelancers, they have to be very cautious about not spending more time than your project’s budget allows them to.

Hence, you need to clarify in your project description what standards you demand. Usually, you’ll want to include statements like:

• I need to be able to maintain the new function without touching code
• I need the new function to work with future WordPress updates, theme updates and plugin updates
• Ensure that the new function is not impacting loading speed in a negative way

These are three standards you can copy and paste into any project description for your WordPress projects.

Third, Be Clear About What Happens After the Project

Once the job is completed, what’s next? Will you have the freelancer work on a one-off task that you’ll never have to touch again? Or will you have to work with the new function every single day?

You have to keep in mind how the website might expand in the future. For freelancers, it’s usually no big deal to build whatever function you request – no matter how intimidating it might sound to you.

The challenge is in building the function the RIGHT way. That means you need to emphasize that (amongst others):

• The freelancer has to follow WordPress coding standards
• The code has to be written in an update-safe way (e.g. always use child-themes and never directly extend existing plugins)
• If your site needs to be translated in the future, the freelancer’s code needs to reflect that

Posting Your Job Online

Ok, now that you’ve got a clear job description and know exactly what outcome the freelancer should produce, it’s time to actually post your job online. There are multiple platforms where you can hire freelancers, and I’m going to tell you about two of my favorite ones: Upwork and codeable.

From my experience, it’s possible to find great freelancers on either of the platforms. However, codeable only works with WordPress freelancers, whereas Upwork is a broader platform that gives you access to a much bigger variety of talents.

Hiring WordPress Freelancers on Upwork

With Upwork, you have to be more thoughtful when you’re hiring a freelancer.
Your job description has to be more precise and there are ways to make selecting the right freelancer more straightforward.

After you published a job, expect to get applications of freelancers almost immediately. On my posts, I regularly got up to 100 applications within the first 24-36 hours.

As you can see in the screenshot, there are plenty of fields to fill out. While it’s too much to go through the entire job posting process in detail, I want to share a couple of tips that’ll make sorting through applicants faster.

In this example project, I prepared a job posting for optimizing a website for loading speed. For confidentiality reasons, I’m hiding a part of the description. But in the part that’s visible, you can see two methods I use to filter through applicants fast. I learned them from outsourcing expert Chris Ducker.

In the middle of your posting, tell your applicants to start their application with a certain phrase.

Why? Because you can immediately dismiss all applicants that don’t start their application correctly. It’s a great way to rule out those people who didn’t fully read or understand your job description.

The second tip is to have your freelancers to summarize your job posting.

Again, this is to ensure that the applicants understand what you’re asking them to do. I’m emphasizing this point, as Upwork has no objective qualification test for WordPress freelancers. All their expertise levels are self-assigned.

Remember that freelancers will tell you anything to get the job. They’ll tell you what they think you want to hear to get them the job. Usually, they have worked with any WP theme you mention, know all the plugins you use, and can do the job for less money than you’re budgeting.

Upwork themselves have published a short, free course on using their platform. Check it out if you want to learn more.

Hiring WordPress Freelancers on codeable

If Upwork is the Walmart of freelancing, codeable is a gourmet food store. Upwork has all sorts of freelancers, while codeable has an intense review process they put every single WordPress freelancer through before advertising their services on their platform.

While Upwork freelancers start working for rates as low as $5/hr, codeable experts charge between $60 – $90 per hour.

That premium reflects in every aspect of the platform. Just look at the popup that opens when you click on Add a new project:

See how they’re trying to make the outsourcing process as easy as possible? The benefit of working with codeable experts is multiple-fold:

• The platform is more intuitive to use than Upwork (IMHO)
• They offer a live support-chat for immediate questions
• For $59, you can talk to an expert for 1 hour and have him consult you on what exactly you need
• You can be assured that every freelancer that applies to your project is a true and tested WordPress expert

When writing the job description on codeable, you have to be as precise in defining your requirements as you have to be on Upwork. But can be assured that you’ll be working with an expert in WordPress, rather than a self-assigned expert.

Sometimes it’s the better decision to spend more money when outsourcing, especially if you’re not experienced in managing staff online.

Communication During the Project

Now, let’s assume you started the project with a freelancer you feel comfortable working with. Regardless whether you’ve hired on Upwork or codeable (or any other platform), communication during the project is essential.

If you fail to communicate your goals clearly, it’s highly unlikely the project produces the desired results. Right from the beginning, you should make it clear that regular communication is crucial for you.

I’d suggest you talk to your freelancer at least twice per week. Generally speaking, the more you communicate, the better you can react when things go wrong. Notice that I wrote, “talk to your freelancer,” not “chat with your freelancer”. To ensure a clear communication, going on calls and talking to each other is my preferred method. It’s easy to not notice misunderstandings when you’re just chatting.

Hence, you should use Skype, Hangouts or Zoom at least once per week and keep on chatting on the other days. Upwork and codeable both offer pretty reliable chat programs on their platforms.

When communicating, make sure to:

• Get the latest updates on what the freelancer has been working on (ok, that’s an obvious one)
• Ask for anything that did not go as planned. In bigger software projects, things almost always go sideways. Be cautious if you’re told that there are no problems whatsoever.
• Get a timeline for when you can review the next piece of functionality
• Ask if you can do anything to simplify the work of the freelancer
• Tell the freelancer that you’re appreciating their efforts (a freelancer is a human after all)

Working with a freelancer does heavily rely on your communication skills. Since you’re not working together locally, you have to sense when things are slacking off. You have to have clear milestones assigned with dates, and have the freelancer explain how he’s going to meet the due dates.

Ideally, plan a few days of buffer for yourself, without telling the freelancer. This ensures that you have time left to fix things you didn’t mean to fix – or to react to changes in the project.

Finalizing the Project

Finalizing a WordPress freelance project is a straightforward task, but there are a few things for you to take care of.

First, you have to confirm that the WordPress freelancer completed all tasks. If they didn’t, don’t release the final payment yet (obvious, but some freelancers are good at finding reasons why they didn’t complete a task).

Second, make sure to have a backup of your website in the working state. Hosts like Hostdedi make backing up your WordPress super easy; otherwise, you can use a free plugin like Updraft Plus or BackWPUp Free.

Third, take away all logins from the freelancer. When the project is over, you don’t want them to have access to any account you shared with them.

Fourth, release the final milestone and leave a review of the freelancer on the platform. It’s a simple four-step process to finalize a project, but each of these steps is mandatory; especially taking all logins from a freelancer, which is likely to be forgotten in the daily stress of managing your business and website.

I hope this introduction gave you a good idea on how to best work with a WordPress freelancer. Hiring freelancers is a fantastic way to enhance your site!

Want an Easier Way to Manage Your WordPress Site?

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When you’re getting ready to create a new WordPress website, one of the most important things to find is a trustworthy WordPress theme that fits your business needs, is flexible and reliable, and isn’t going to haunt you later if/when problems arise. You also don’t want to spend hours searching for the best free WordPress theme or the best premium WordPress theme only to bring it to your designer and developer and have them tell you it’s garbage, which happens more than you may think.

Choosing a good WordPress theme can be difficult because:

• If you choose a bad theme without knowing it, it could cause problems later or other developers may refuse to work on your site because of the theme.
• Themes with poorly written code or bloated themes can negatively affect performance — but you can’t easily “see” if a theme is coded well.
• Horror stories are floating around the Internet of theme companies with terrible support or no support at all.
• Anyone can create and sell a WordPress theme without any oversight—which means not all themes are created equal and not all have been built well.

How Do You Find Trustworthy WordPress Themes?

One of the questions we get asked the most by new website owners is, “How do I know if a WordPress theme provider is trustworthy?” So we put together a collection of things to consider before choosing a WordPress theme.

If you are looking for a free WordPress theme, the best place to find free trustworthy WordPress themes is the WordPress.org theme repository because the theme repository is actively managed by a team of contributors who vet all of the themes before they are added.

Form Get is another good place to look for free premium WordPress Themes.

Looking at Themes in the WordPress Repository

When reviewing themes on the repository, thing to look at include:

1. The Number Of Active Installs:
   While newer themes aren’t going to have as many installs as older themes, in general, the number of installs will give you an idea of how many other people like and are using the theme.
2. The Reviews:
   Read the best and the worst reviews. See what other people have to say about using the theme and what, if any, their issues were.
3. The Last Updated Date:
   The last updated date will tell you if the developer is actively working on and improving the theme or updating it as new versions of WordPress are released. If it hasn’t been updated in a long time, you may not want to use the theme.
4. The Support Forum:
   Each theme available through WordPress.org has a dedicated support forum that is public. Spend some time reviewing the forum to see how quickly the developer responds to posts and how helpful they are.

If you’re brave and want to download a free WordPress theme from somewhere else, download the theme and run the zip file through Theme Check, an online service that reviews and evaluates WordPress themes for code quality and security. ThemeCheck will provide a quality score for the theme and warnings of any problems that were encountered. The tool also lets you search for a WordPress theme by name and if someone else has submitted it already, you can see the results.

Purchasing a Premium Theme

If you are buying a premium theme, here are seven things to consider before making a purchase:

1. Evaluate The Theme Author:
   Where the theme is coming from and who built it matters. Review the theme provider’s website, their WordPress.org profile, and their social media profiles. Look at their engagement with customers, and their participation in the community, Meetups, and WordCamps. Active community members with helpful blogs will care more about adhering to WordPress coding standards and best practices.
2. Review The Support Policy:
   Learn what happens when you have an issue and how and where you can get help if you need it. If possible, review support forums or threads and check their response time and response quality. See if they have a Facebook group or other community for customers.
3. Check Out The Ratings And Reviews:
   See what other people have to say about the WordPress theme company, the theme, and their experience using it—and evaluate responses (or lack thereof) from the theme author.
4. Read The Company Blog:
   Chances are if a WordPress theme provider is investing in their blog and regularly posting new content, they’re planning on being around for a while and care about their reputation.
5. Do A Google Search:
   Do a quick search for [THEME NAME]+Review or [COMPANY NAME]+Review to find reviews and blog posts written about the WordPress theme company and/or their themes.
6. Ask The Experts:
   Before purchasing a premium WordPress theme, don’t be afraid to reach out to the professionals you trust in your network and ask what they think of the theme, or to see what theme companies they recommend. Those who work in WordPress have an overall vested interest in helping other people have a great experience with WordPress and they’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.
7. Go To A WordPress Meetup:
   See if there is a WordPress Meetup in your area and go! Network with other WordPressers and ask what they think of the theme or to see what theme companies they recommend

Thinking About an All-in-One Theme?

When looking for a trustworthy WordPress theme, it can be tempting to go with a multi-purpose, all-in-one theme, but beware. Those themes, while they may have hundreds of thousands of downloads, are jam-packed with huge numbers of options and features—many of which you’re never going to use.

And that means you’ll not only have more code to be updated, maintained, and cared for, but chances for something to go wonky in the future. Plus, bloated themes tend to slow down your site. It is always best to go with the lightest-weight theme possible that fits your needs.

Need Help With Your Site?

Hostdedi has a vested interest in helping your WordPress site succeed too! Try a demo with Managed WordPress Hosting, where we take care of image compression and plugin updates for you, so you can focus on your business and building your site.

Dear Summer,
It seems like you arrived only yesterday. Won’t you consider staying for another month or two? Halloween is so anxious to meet you!
Forever your friend,
Michigan Read More »

Whether you’re launching a new WordPress blog or managing an existing WordPress site, eventually you’re going to have to make a decision about comments: Are you going to enable comments or disable comments?

WordPress began as a blogging platform and many WordPress blogs thrived for years with active and engaged communities who commented and fostered conversation around their posts. WordPress website owners and bloggers with large active communities argue that comments are part of what makes a blog a blog.

Reasons to Turn Comments On

The most common reasons to turn on comments on your WordPress blog are:

• Readers can share tips, insights, stories, and ideas for future content.
• The conversation between you and your readers in the comments can create greater rapport and brand evangelists
• Responding to comments will often bring those commenters back to your site, increasing views and the potential for other conversions
• Comments can help you build a community around your blog of engaged readers
• Enabling comments shows readers that you’re interested in their feedback and what they have to say
• Quality comments help build social proof and show readers that other people care about your content

As WordPress grew, it evolved into a complete website content management system and eventually its use for business websites skyrocketed. With this growth, the role of the blog shifted from being the website’s primary focus to being a marketing tool attached to the website.

More and more businesses began to embrace WordPress as their preferred content management system. At the same time, social media’s meteoric rise in popularity provided new and exciting avenues for bloggers and website owners to connect with their communities and audiences, and some began to wonder if allowing comments on their sites was worth the hassle.

Reasons to Turn Comments Off

The most common reasons to turn off comments on your WordPress website are:

• Moderating comments takes time
• If you get a lot of comments, responding to them all eats up a lot of time and if you don’t respond it may hurt your brand
• Many comments are spammy and low quality
• Comments don’t necessarily add value to the core content or visitor experience
• Comments can turn into a forum for trolls or a venue for free support
• Few comments may send the wrong message
• A lack of comments isn’t representative of the quality of content you’re creating

But what is right for your WordPress website?

Should You Enable Or Disable Comments?

Whether or not you turn on comments or remove comments from your WordPress website is a matter of personal preference. You need to decide what is right for your brand, business, and website. Some things to consider are:

The industry you’re in or type of business you have:

Some businesses lend themselves to commenting more than others. Ask yourself, “Will the readers I am targeting realistically want to comment publicly?” For example, if you’re a marriage counselor, are people really going to want to air their dirty laundry in the comments of your blog? Probably not. But if you’re a chef sharing recipes, would readers want to be able to ask questions or share their experience making the dish? Probably so.

The amount of content you’re creating:

If you’re publishing one new blog post a week, managing comments isn’t going to take as much time and effort as it would if you’re publishing new posts every day. Evaluate how much time comment management is taking and whether it is worth it.

The activity of your community:

Do you already have an engaged community who is active and comments of your site? If you’re not bogged down in comment management, keep them open. But on the other hand, if you’re ending every post with a call to action to encourage comments and no one is commenting, maybe it’s time to turn off comments and try a new approach like asking for feedback on posts in a Facebook group.

The goals of your website:

What are the primary goals and objectives of your website? If they are to make sales, gain new clients, grow an email list, and generate leads, chances are your blog is a tool for education and marketing. In this case, comments aren’t critical to achieving your goals.

If your goals are to build a thriving community and connect with your readers, then your blog is going to be the center of your entire site and comments will play a key role in achieving those goals.

Different Businesses Require Different Approaches

If you research the topic of blog comments online and look for a definitive answer, you’re not going to find one. While one expert will say comments help with SEO, another will say they don’t, and while one blogger will say comments are critical to the success of a website, another will say they turned off comments and it didn’t make a difference.

The Two Most Important Factors to Consider

Here are the two most important things you need to understand about making the decision to turn on or turn off comments on your WordPress website:

1. When evaluating other people’s opinions about blog comments, make sure the context of their opinions is actually relevant to your website. For example: If you’re trying to decide whether or not to enable comments on a high-end professional services website, listening to what a blogger thinks about comments isn’t going to be as helpful as what other service providers have experienced with comments on their websites.
2. It’s your website and you have to do what is best for you. If you want comments, enable comments. If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of comment management, disable comments.

Finally, if you’re not sure about comments and you’re struggling with the decision, with WordPress it’s easy to turn them on and off. So give comments a shot and if after a set amount of time they’re not getting any traction, you can always remove them later.

Just Launching Your New Site?

You just launched your new site, congrats! For non-developers, this is where the rubber meets the road. Here are 14 strategies to help grow your audience, sell your products and more.

The free WooCommerce plugin simply turns your WordPress website into an eCommerce one. Managed WooCommerce Hosting transforms it—into a full-featured, hassle-free, eCommerce platform that will increase the speed, consistency, and functionality of your WooCommerce store.

Think of the WooCommerce plugin as your stock car in the race for online sales. Managed WooCommerce Hosting is your pit crew. It makes sure your tires have enough tread and your fuel tank is full. All you have to do is drive.

Consider this checklist of questions to see if Managed WooCommerce Hosting is right for you.

Is Your Host Optimized for eCommerce?

Shoppers are impatient. If your site’s product pages aren’t loading between 1.8 and 2.7 seconds or faster across all device types, you’re not converting shoppers into buyers. Even a two-second delay can send customers bouncing off your site. Simply put, store owners can’t afford slow websites, yet many WordPress hosts are built to serve blogs and online magazines, not the high traffic loads of eCommerce traffic.>
There are many ways to improve your store’s performance, like compressing images, leveraging static caching, or using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). But these optimizations require technical training and upkeep time.

Web hosts designed for eCommerce sites include these services as standard features. But Managed WooCommerce Hosting offers these optimizations and more. You’ll always know your website is running at full capacity, with less downtime and lost sales.

Is Scaling Your Business Costing You Money?

When your business grows or you get traffic spikes, your store needs more resources — CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. Often, hosts solve your growth problem by upselling you to different plans, charging more, and shutting down your site for migration. This all adds up to extra costs.

Managed WooCommerce Hosting uses a web server environment that’s elastic and scalable. The system dynamically monitors your traffic and adds resources on the fly, all without migration or downtime. That means no lost sales and a consistent shopping experience for your customers.

Your website’s performance can slow because of conflicting spikes in traffic or conflicting plugin updates. Instead of making changes to your site and hoping for the best, Managed WooCommerce Hosting makes a duplicate of your website and tests it before pushing out updates. These tests ensure your site is always open for business, especially during high volume traffic days like Cyber Monday.

Are You Missing Out on Hidden Sales Opportunities?

You entice customers to your store only to have them leave with their shopping carts full of items. It happens more than you think. Cart abandonment is a big problem in online retail, with almost 70% of customers leaving items in their carts at checkout.

Abandoned cart email campaigns get customers back on your site so they can complete their purchase.

Jilt for WooCommerce is a plugin that recovers lost revenue from abandoned carts by tracking customer purchases, identifying cart abandonment, and sending automated emails to those customers. Email marketing is still effective, with returns of $40 for every $1 spent, so investing in abandoned cart platforms like Jilt can quickly pay for themselves.

Jilt is included with Managed WooCommerce Hosting, so there’s no need to add that extra expense. It comes preinstalled with the service so you can start getting the most out of Jilt WooCommerce right away.

Is Google Analytics Giving You Actionable Data?

You’ll sell more when you can turn good data into good business decisions. Google Analytics gives store owners a wealth of information—but with so many different sales channels and customized marketing options, will you know what to do with it?.

Managed WooCommerce Hosting comes standard with Glew, an eCommerce reporting platform that automatically tracks your sales channel ROI, product sales data, and customer lifetime value.

One way Glew helps you grow revenue is by creating powerful customer segments based on different factors like purchase histories or physical location. Segmentation is a highly effective way to get your customers to open your emails and click through to your store.

When compared to non-segmented email lists, segmented ones have a 14.31% higher open rate and a 100.95% higher click rate. If you could identify your customers who were “Top Spenders” or “Most at Risk”, then you can customize your emails’ messaging, timing, and incentives to dramatically increase their impact.

With Glew, you can…

• Automatically create common customer segments, such as First Purchase, or Repeat Customers.
• Create custom personas, like Coupon Users or Full Price Payers. No more special offer emails sent to customers who always pay full price.
• Identify channels and campaigns that generate the highest customer lifetime value.
• Generate reports off-site. This means the data crunching won’t slow down your site.

Glew lets you create and deliver powerful marketing emails — bringing the right message, at the right time, with the right story.

Does Your Host’s Customer Service Specialize in WooCommerce Sites?

Any extra time your website is down or slowed, you’re losing money. You need answers right away.

But your host’s customer service folks may not know any more about WordPress or WooCommerce than you do. With Managed WooCommerce Hosting, you’ll reach WooCommerce specialists who offer quick fixes and more accurate advice than general tech support helplines. This saves you time and money.

Managed WooCommerce Hosting offers 24/7/365 phone or live chat assistance with real humans who know the ins and outs of WooCommerce — over 250 Windows, Cisco, and Red Hat Linux Certified technicians.

All of the website templates and plugins included in Managed WooCommerce Hosting are pre-tested for their functionality and fine-tuned for seamless integration. So, you can start selling quickly with a platform that’s fully optimized and integrated.

WooCommerce is an open-source plugin, so your IT team can also build your site any way you want, writing customized code for templates or using third-party plugins. While customer support is more limited for customized elements, Managed WooCommerce Hosting will still provide some advice and consultation for any conflicts you run into.

If you answered yes to most of these questions, you need Managed WooCommerce Hosting. Managed hosting optimizes your store’s performance, dynamically scales your business, helps you discover hidden sales opportunities, gives you usable data, and provides comprehensive customer service. These are benefits that increase your revenue and quickly pay for managed/hosting costs.

Stop choosing between your time and your money. Optimize your online store without the hassle of doing it yourself.

Like any complex piece of software, Magento requires a bit of maintenance every now and again. As your store evolves and your business grows, new products and customer accounts are created and deleted, extensions and themes are installed or modified, and the general day-to-day operations of the store leave their mark.
Diligently maintaining your store will ensure that it remains secure, fast, and reliable as the years go by. In this article, I’m going to focus on five of the most common tasks that Magento store owners should add to their to-do lists. Read More »

“If you’re looking for advice on automations, please dial 2 now… Please say what you’d like help with: you can say things like, ‘I need to increase revenue,’ or ‘I want to hire a developer.’”

That feels awfully impersonal, doesn’t it? Whenever we think of automation, we tend to think of systems like automated call menus: cold, unfeeling, and indifferent to our goals. A call menu doesn’t know anything about you, it’s just running through a script, and you have to wait around until this robot gives you an opportunity to tell it what you’re looking for.

With that example in mind, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want your customers to have this experience as a WooCommerce store owner. Who would want their customers to feel undervalued like you don’t care about their questions or concerns?

When I talk about automations, that’s the exact opposite of what I have in mind. When done well, automations should be more personal than the attention you can offer customers yourself, especially as your store scales. There are plenty of WooCommerce automations to streamline your business and elevate your customer relationships and service.

You’re Already Using Automations

Are you leery of adding automations to your store? I guarantee you already use several automations in your day-to-day workflows, and that your business is better for it.

• When your store starts to get low on inventory, it sends you an email to let you know. This automation saves you from checking stock levels manually and ensures that items aren’t out of stock longer than necessary.

• When a customer places an order with your store, it sends an order confirmation without any action required from you. WooCommerce automations the process of sending receipt emails so you don’t send each receipt by hand. Otherwise, customers would likely grow concerned without knowing that a payment was processed successfully.
• Schedule calls with your customers or colleagues? You likely have automated calendar alerts to email you or remind you when these events are upcoming so you don’t miss them or show up late. (I use an automation via IFTTT to ping me in Slack, too.)
• Looking to build your email list? Your opt-in forms automatically push subscribers to your email list with basic data; you don’t have to enter these emails into your preferred email platform one by one.

As a merchant, your attention and focus should be directed at high impact activities, and there are plenty of store management tasks that don’t meet this goal. This is where automations help — not to make your store less personal, but to either remove low impact tasks or increase personalization at scale.

Why use WooCommerce automations?

If you were to pick between one of these tasks, which would you choose?

• You can enter new inventory into your online store as you unpack boxes from your supplier.
• You can work on a prototype for the next version of your best-selling product.

Most of us will choose to work on the prototype. That’s not to say that inventory is unimportant, but that improving products is a high impact task, and one that’s best done by the store owner or product expert, while entering inventory is not — it doesn’t improve your USP, create better products, or foster better customer relationships.

Automations give you the bandwidth to make this choice: they’re a way of purchasing focus for high impact tasks while removing or significantly streamlining low impact tasks. They let one of your most expensive resources (people) do what they’re best at while removing tasks that don’t need to be done by people (or making them more efficient).

Automations can also help you personalize the experience with your store. Imagine you have a few customers who come into your store regularly: you ask them how they’re doing, thank them for their previous purchase, and show them the products you know they might like. The beauty of automation is that you can take this knowledge that you already have and start to abstract it from yourself.

If you can say, “Joan likes jewelry with emeralds and white gold. And here’s how I figure out if someone is similar to Joan,” then you can use tools to automate parts of these interactions and segment new customers so that more of them get personalized attention. We encourage users at Jilt to do this based on what customers purchase.

How Do I Find Areas to Automate?

There are several areas of your store that make great candidates for WooCommerce automations based on how much effort they require, impact on your business, and how they can be personalized.

Product Setup & Management

Your product lifecycle is often a prime candidate for automation. While detailed attention can be valuable during setup to add great photos or good product descriptions, it’s often not needed on an ongoing basis. Inventory replenishment and product updates are often great tasks to automate, since doing them manually doesn’t provide a lot of benefit to your store in terms of better products, marketing, or customer service.

There are some helpful tools that can help you streamline product management already:

• WP All Import can automate product updates. You can set up a recurring import from a CSV file (such as one in Google Sheets), and the plugin will pull these updates in on a recurring basis, then update your products with them. Updating a spreadsheet for inventory or pricing can be easier than changing products manually, especially for large catalogs.
• You can automate inventory management with a partner like ShipStation, TradeGecko, or Veeqo. This is especially helpful if you sell via multiple channels (not just your WooCommerce store) to keep inventory synced across all channels.
• Google Product Feed syncs product data to AdWords, automating the setup process to run product ads for your store.

You can take automations even further as well with custom development. Let’s say you know that you want to send an email to a supplier every time a product is low in stock to automatically reorder it. You could use the woocommerce_low_stock hook to automatically trigger an email with the product information, or even send emails to different suppliers based on the product.

Customer Browsing & Shopping

The customer browsing and shopping experience can become highly personalized through automations. The first thing you need, though, is good analytics for the browsing process so you can start to identify customers. Google Analytics or Mixpanel help gain insight into customer behavior — Google Analytics is free with both paid and free WooCommerce connectors, while Mixpanel is a premium service (and provides a bit more detail on customer properties).

Once you’ve got great automated tracking in place, you can start to automate portions of the “pre-purchase” journey for your customers.

• You should automatically follow up with customers who show interest in your items, but abandon a cart, to get feedback or try to close the sale. Jilt helps you send automated emails to recover abandoned carts and helps you collect email addresses during your browsing process. Even better, if you use Hostdedi for hosting, Jilt is included for free. 🙂
• Collecting email addresses from customers as they shop? Be sure to send an automated welcome email to thank them for subscribing, and show them some top-selling products or offer a discount on their first purchase. For example, if you use MailChimp, here’s a guide to setting up a welcome automation.
• Offering a sale, or do you provide free shipping promotions? Tell your customer automatically at the right time with a tool like Hello Bar or Cart Notices so customers aren’t surprised by sales, shipping costs, or fees.

Purchasing & Fulfillment

The purchase and fulfillment lifecycle can vary wildly between online stores. Often, there are many moving pieces (like how items are packed and packaged, along with how they’re shipped to the customer), and there are opportunities to streamline several parts of this process via WooCommerce automations.

• Let’s start with the point of purchase: making the order. While your customer is checking out, you can automate the shipping rates you show to them, pulling live rates in from a shipping provider. This can then carry through to the order and how you ship it. You can get live shipping rates via full-service provides like Shipwire or from WooCommerce Services (USPS and Canada Post). WooCommerce Services even offers live rates for free.
• WooCommerce Services can also help with packing orders, as it includes label printing with discounted rates. This means you save time on packaging, as you can print USPS labels yourself instead of waiting in line at the post office.
• Looking to automate the fulfillment process completely? Fulfillment by Amazon or Shipwire will handle holding your inventory, then packing and sending items. You simply sync orders with them and they handle the rest.
• Want to do the same thing with apparel or gifts? Check out this guide to automating your printing and fulfillment with Printful.
• If you’re dropshipping or automating fulfillment in some other way, you can automatically export orders with WooCommerce Customer / Order CSV Export to transfer order information easily.
• Finally, what about post-purchase? You can sync order data to other services via Zapier — this is one of my favorite automation tools, and it’s useful to sync orders to QuickBooks, Xero, or other services for bookkeeping and accounting.

Like the product lifecycle, the purchasing and fulfillment cycle has plenty of areas for automation, especially via custom solutions. Having a developer who can understand this process for your store and put functional automations in place can cut out hundreds of hours of time in packaging and shipping. (And if you’re a developer, you should work hard to understand this workflow for your client!)

Post-Purchase Communication

Existing customers have a 27% chance of purchasing again from your store, and your post-purchase communication is vital to encourage repeat purchase. This is an area we specialize in at Jilt, and using automated emails can help you increase customer loyalty and lifetime value. Here are some examples of post-purchase communication our customers at Jilt have used to drive more revenue:

• Ask for product reviews after purchase to increase social proof, which can improve the conversion rates for your products.
• Send thank you emails based on order count — this lets you welcome new customers and thank repeat customers, tailoring new product offers, discounts, or messaging based on their behavior. We’ve got a detailed guide to sending thank you emails here.
• Reward VIP customers when they reach a specific order count or lifetime spend with a discount, free gift, or status (like a membership) — this can cement loyalty and help turn those customers into brand advocates.
• Send emails based on customer status. Jilt can send emails based on subscriber or member data from WooCommerce Subscriptions or WooCommerce Memberships — welcome customer or subscribers, inform them of upcoming events (like payments or expirations), and win them back if they cancel.
• Send replenishment emails when reordering is expected to remind customers to order. This is helpful for stores that sell coffee, temporary tattoos, and everything in between, so long as customers should buy more of a product.
• Email customers who haven’t purchased in a while with a win-back email. These emails can re-engage 10-12% of your customers, and once re-engaged, these customers tend to remain active.

As for other tools, you can also ask for feedback and product reviews using the Follow Ups plugin, and use Review for Discount to build testimonials and reviews using incentives.

Evaluating WooCommerce Automations

To discover areas you can automate, I recommend doing a few things (or if you’re a developer, asking your client to do this).

• Keep a work log. This doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed, but it should give you an idea of when you do the same thing every day. For example, I track all of my time in Harvest so I can see what I’ve spent time working on. This can help identify small things you do often, but may not think about, or things that are repetitive.
• Write out outlines of important workflows. If you’re a developer, make sure your client describes these in detail — having a thorough understanding of product and fulfillment workflows helps to uncover candidates for automation.
• Look to optimize for impact: when thinking through workflows or work logs, be sure to highlight tasks that are low impact or ones that aren’t fun or enjoyable. While it might be more expensive to automate something I don’t like doing, it can also be more valuable if it increases my energy and motivation for other tasks.

Low-Cost WooCommerce Automations

When an automation is low in cost, you’re almost always better off spending the money and evaluating it later, vs evaluating that investment up-front. If you can spend under a few hundred dollars to automate something, it’s worth trying. While not every automation will work out, if you can make a quick decision that does work out, it pays back in a big way.

For example, let’s say I spend 10 minutes on something every day — that’s inconsequential, right? But what if I can automate it for $100? That’s essentially the amount of money I’m spending per week already, so it should be a no-brainer. Give it a try and see if it works out, and it will have paid off immediately. For small investments like this, they’re usually worth it, and if not, have a minimal downside.

High-Cost WooCommerce Automations

For automations that cost more (I’m thinking a few thousand dollars, but this is all relative to your revenue), here’s my framework to evaluate them:

• First, assume the store owner’s rate is at least $100 per hour. If you’re the store owner, you need to be sure you don’t value your time at less than this, as your attention is a valuable resource.
• Calculate the “by-hand” costs of your task:
  Hours you spend each week ✕ $100+ per hr ✕ ~12wks (payback goal)
• If the “by hand” cost of doing this task over a few months is greater than the cost to automate it, you should go for the automation without looking back.

This is an investment in time, and as soon as a task is automated, you can be doing things that contribute to growth while this automation is in place.

Automations can help your store grow while remaining personable and customer-focused. They help you prioritize what’s most important and streamline what’s not important.

Pick at least one thing to automate this week, and start buying back your team’s focus and attention to improve your store.

Ready to Automate?

Jilt is included with Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting solution, making it easier than ever to get your store running efficiently and your revenue skyrocketing!

Getting traction on many stores is a hard thing. The “build it and they will come” idea just doesn’t hold up even to basic scrutiny. Many sites look at standard marketing like online ads and content marketing. A smaller number look towards adding affiliates to their store.

Today, I’m going to walk you through what it takes to have a good affiliate offering to attract high-quality people to your store. I’ll tell you some of the best methods to use to make sure that you have high-quality affiliates and to avoid fraud. Finally, we’ll look at helping your affiliates succeed and provide a quick overview of some options for setting up affiliates on your site.

When Is It Right to Add Affiliates?

Before you can jump on the affiliate bandwagon you need to take a hard look to see if affiliates are right for your store. The place to start this look is with your profit margins. Can you carve off a few percentage points and still have a profitable business?

Even when it might not seem like it on the surface, stop and take a look around at your competitors. If three other stores just like you, with the same volumes being ordered are offering affiliate programs than it’s likely you can afford it as well. Maybe their affiliate stores drive higher volume in sales, which would let you order more and thus get a better discount on your products.

As you look at your competitors the next question to ask about their affiliate program is how long has it been around? If it’s 3 months in, then they don’t know if it’s working yet. If they’re 3 years into running an affiliate program then it likely is driving more sales to their business.

What about the businesses that are just a tier above you in the industry, do they offer affiliate programs? What size were they when they started? Can you figure out how it changed as they’ve grown?

Make sure you sign up for the affiliate programs of your competitors. See how they run them. What assets do they offer to help affiliates sell well? Do they offer any training to help affiliates understand the product and the target market that it hits?

A second big question you need to ask yourself is if you have the extra bandwidth to set up an affiliate program right now. Yes, I know that you always have so many things to do in your work. The list of important things is a mile long and it only seems to grow.

That means you need to ask yourself if the affiliate program is what will help you reach the next level of your business? If it’s only going to result in a small percentage growth, then maybe you let it wait. If it looks like it could be a high growth area, then maybe you need to devote the time needed to build out a solid affiliate offering.

Vetting Affiliates

Once you’ve decided that you want to try out an affiliate program, it’s time to figure out what type of affiliates you want. One of my clients has a small list of trusted friends and site partners that are on the affiliate list. This small list of affiliates yields a high conversion rate and low maintenance.

Another client has their affiliate program open to pretty much anyone that has any relationship to their business. Write a random blog once a month that might fit, they’re happy to have you as an affiliate. This yields lower conversion rates, and a bit more maintenance to get people set up on the affiliate program. The sheer volume of extra sales makes up for the extra management work.

To test your affiliate program, start with the small model. Reach out to some of your trusted clients and influencers in your field that you already know. Offer them an affiliate account and then dig in with this small list to help craft your affiliate offering. Tell them that they’re on the short list and that they get to help shape the program.

People love to be on a short list of influencers and love to have a say in the development of new programs. If you’re not sure where to start, look at these areas.

• Long-term email list subscribers
• Frequent commenters on your site or on your competitor’s sites
• Frequent commenters on YouTube
• People leaving product reviews on similar items on Amazon

Once you have the basics set up, you can decide if you expand the number of affiliates you allow. Put together an application form and limit the numbers at first. Scaling slower will mean a higher quality affiliate program.

Set a standard for your program up front. This will help stop the window shoppers that just want to plaster their affiliate link all over the place. This can lower the perception of what you’re offering, so be very careful about accepting affiliates that practice this type of affiliate marketing.

Stopping Affiliate Fraud

One of the things that many affiliates programs have to deal with is fraud. Often this can be stopped with a longer payout timeline on your part.

Usually, these scams have someone make a bunch of purchases via an affiliate link with stolen payment information. From there the affiliate gets a payout in a few days. Then you get a chargeback on the card but your affiliate has disappeared. That leaves you out the cost of the product and the affiliate fee.

By paying every 30 days you can avoid this since you’re more likely to catch fraudulent charges.

After that, the more work you do vetting your affiliates the less likely it is that you’ll experience fraud. My one client with 15 affiliates that he knows never deals with fraud. The other client with lots of affiliates had fraudulent issues until they went to longer payment timelines. Once that change was made they rarely see affiliate fraud.

It’s also worth auditing your affiliates every so often. Amazon removes first-time affiliates that haven’t made a sale in six months. Removing affiliates that are not keeping up to your high standards will keep the whole network strong and converting well.

Helping Your Affiliates Succeed

In his great book Reach, Andy Molinsky talks about the barriers that get in the way of our success. One of those barriers is doing a job so poorly that the only plausible outcome is failure.

As you research the affiliate plans of your competitors, note how they help their affiliates succeed. Next, copy their success, and then do better. Tossing links at your affiliates is a poor strategy for a sustainable affiliate program.

A great way to frame this work is by asking yourself this question: “What would it take to have the best affiliate program in my niche?”. Then go about making that true.

First, make it easy for your affiliates to grab links to the products they want to link to. Provide them with easy to grab images they can use in social media. Give them some suggested copy to use as they write about your products.

If you decide to scale up, you’re going to need to make sure that you have someone that’s running point on your affiliate program. Questions will come up as you scale. People will forget how to log in. They’ll want to know about getting faster payouts or higher percentages. Dedicate someone to dealing with that once your program is off the ground.

If you really want to kick your affiliate program into high gear, then produce some content just for your affiliates. Highlight affiliates that are doing well, and show your other affiliates how they’re leveraging their audience to bring in sales.

Finally, create an affiliate newsletter and highlight products you want to sell by giving them a higher percentage payout for your affiliates. This can be a great way to get traction in a slightly new market you’re trying out.

Which Affiliate Tool Should I Use?

There are two main types of affiliate options for WooCommerce store owners. First, are plugins that are built specifically for WooCommerce like Affiliate WP or Affiliates Pro. These are both considered self-hosted affiliate stores.

With either self-hosted option, you own the relationship with your affiliate from end to end. Since they’re both hosted alongside your WooCommerce store you can also modify them to do something you need that is not currently offered.

The second option is going with something that’s hosted for you like Tapfiliate or iDevAffiliate among many others. These systems will mean that you don’t have the same setup process. They’ll handle the payouts for you and you’ll pay them for the use of their affiliate software.

The advantage to hosted for your solutions is that they have a process set up for you. It’s more of a “fill in the blank” system that you set up instead of the options you host which take more configuration. That also means that if you don’t like how they handle an aspect of the affiliate relationship, you are just going to have to live with it.

In Summary

For every growth level in a business, there are different things that will bring the most traction and growth. If you’re stuck in the growth of your WooCommerce store, then it’s time to take a look at leveraging an affiliate program to see if it’s the thing that might help you reach the next level of growth.

Ready to Get a Successful Store Started?

If you haven’t gotten a domain and website set up yet, Hostdedi’ Managed WordPress Hosting and Managed WooCommerce Hosting both take the hassle out of hosting so you can focus on a great affiliate program!