Today WordPress turns 17 years old. If you’ve been in web development a long time you’ll know that the only thing that stays the same is how fast things change.
Just since I started dabbling in web development in college all of these happened:
We learned how to lay things out with HTML tables
Then we learned how to use CSS for styling and layouts
We learned how to use Javascript for interactive elements
Then came Javascript frameworks like Prototype which was quickly eclipsed by jQuery
Then server side languages became really popular like ASP & PHP
The world moved onto Ruby on Rails and Python for a bit and it seems like React and JavaScript frameworks are having a comeback
The web world is constantly moving and most technologies only last 2-3 years before people abandon the technology for something new & shiny. But that’s most technologies, and today we’re talking about WordPress, which turns 17 years old. One more year and it can buy lottery tickets.
So today I want to discuss what makes WordPress so special. Why does WordPress thrive while other technologies – even the most popular – only last a couple years?
I reached out to some of my long time WordPress friends to find out.
Democratize Everything
I love WordPress because it pioneered the democratization of the web. Anyone, even people who can’t code, can stand up a simple website, a magazine, or even a store using WordPress. Looking towards the future is exciting because now that we have everyone publishing, the next set of interesting problems come up for us to solve: how do we best deliver this content? How do we make this experience not only democratic, but also delightful? How do we improve?
Christie Chirinos – Product Manager for Managed WooCommerce hosting
WordPress made it possible for anyone to publish. Because WordPress is open source & GPL licensed you don’t need anyone’s permission to do anything. You don’t need to get approval from a board, submit an application, or explain to anyone what you’re doing.
You can set up WordPress on a host and start building.
I love that WordPress is versatile enough to serve content creators, store builders, and big businesses while at the same time providing the warm hug of a unique collaborative social community.
Mendel Kurland, Agency Developer Advocate
Mendel Kurland, who many of you know if you’ve been to WordCamps in the past 5 years,appreciates the versatility. WordPress was born a blog and it evolved to sell t-shirts, manage memberships, and power enterprise businesses. It’s incredibly flexible which is what makes it so appealing.
WordPress is whatever you make it – you can keep it super simple or build something exceptionally complex while still maintaining its ease of use. The flexibility empowers you to scale as big as you want, when you want, and how you want. Also, when you use it, you’re joined by one of the most diverse communities in the world. With an enormous global community and more than 300 local communities, it’s easy to find, share, and collaborate with other people who love WordPress as much as you do.
Jess Frick, Product Manager for Managed WordPress
If you want to make a blog chronicling bread baking 🍞 during a pandemic go for it. If you want to start your eCommerce empire selling bread machines, go for it. And if you’re just hungry for warm oven-baked-bread (as I am ✋) then start your own photo blog where you eat bread and post pictures of it. WordPress does it all.
Once this pandemic is over, I strongly recommend you check out your local WordPress community. The code behind WordPress is only half the magic. The rest is in the community.
Opportunities & Growth
WordPress as a software tool has given me a career I never thought existed. WordPress as a community has given me a life I never thought I would be able to have.
Andrew Norcross, Senior Engineer & Developer Advocate
There’s an entire ecosystem built in & around WordPress and if you look, you’ll be able to find a place where you can sell your skills and expertise. WordPress has a thriving community where designers recommend copywriters who recommend website builders who recommend hosting companies who recommend premium plugins.
The industry is growing and it’s incredibly open. We’re all here to support each other.
Financial Freedom
It’s pretty gauche to quote yourself so I won’t add a quote of my own, but I will add something important that builds on the previous point.
WordPress has enabled me to constantly experiment. Over the years I’ve:
Sold websites as a freelancer
Sold both Ninja Forms & WooCommerce plugins
Wrote 3 books about WooCommerce
Helped organize both in-person and online conferences
I’ve been so incredibly fortunate to work in an industry where everyone is experimenting. I’ve been able to experiment and play with WordPress on the weekends and evenings and earn a little extra money. And while the money is great, it’s really that extra knowledge that’s helped me. If you like learning and making a little money while you do so there’s still so much untapped potential.
WordPress is Special
WordPress is special. Not just to the people who work at WordPress companies but to people who want to build a website, run a store, develop a career, and people who want to belong in a community.
So, from all the WordPress nerds here at Hostdedi, Happy Birthday, WordPress!
Patrick Rauland is obsessed with ecommerce. He’s built ecommerce websites for clients, worked for WooCommerce doing support, development, product management, and helped plan their yearly conference (WooConf).
At the end of every WordPress project, after the final website is launched into the world, there is one final task to complete: educating the client on how to use WordPress. The length and depth of the training depends on not only the client’s technical savvy and familiarity with WordPress, but also the complexity of the website itself.
When it comes to educating clients on how to use WordPress, there are several common ways freelancers and agencies fall short with clients:
They fail to account for the depth of training that will be needed based on the client’s knowledge and complexity of the site, so the cost of the training is not properly accounted for in the client agreement.
They try to cram all of the training into one single training session and it is rushed and stressful.
They cover too much and the client feels overwhelmed, and begins to tune out.
They don’t prepare the client for the training sessions and properly set expectations about what can be achieved.
They start from scratch and reinvent the wheel with every client.
They are surprised by the client showing up to a website training with members of their team—and now they’re teaching a group instead of an individual.
When starting out my own agency, I unfortunately experienced all of these scenarios which used up valuable time, added stress to my day, and made it harder for my clients to do what they wanted to do.
As I worked to establish repeatable systems and processes, I created a client management system to improve the client experience and increase profitability. As part of that process, I began to explore options to not only deliver better WordPress training to clients but make it more enjoyable, engaging, and stress-free.
My goal was to:
Provide detailed, consistent WordPress training (no matter who was delivering it).
Ensure all clients have a baseline understanding of how WordPress works.
Shorten the WordPress training sessions to no more than 60 minutes, including client Q&A.
Reduce the total number of training sessions per client.
Reduce the amount of beginner questions asked by clients during the training.
Reduce the amount of support clients required in the 30 days post-launch.
WordPress Training Videos
One of the solutions I came up with was offering my clients a set of WordPress training videos that would take care of the basics.
The idea was that these pre-recorded videos would get the clients up to speed on how to use WordPress and I would then only be responsible for providing training on the custom features created for their unique website and answering their questions. I also had the idea to provide all clients who sign a monthly support agreement continued access to the videos as a bonus.
But here’s the thing:
I didn’t have time to create all of the WordPress training videos I needed. I didn’t have the right equipment to do it. And I didn’t want to be responsible for recreating them every time WordPress pushed out an update.
Luckily, that’s when I discovered WP101.
With the WP101 Plugin you can provide clients 31 WordPress training videos right inside their WordPress dashboard, which is awesome. But what I love most about WP101 is that you don’t have to use the plugin. Instead, you can choose to embed the WP101 WordPress training videos on your website with the white label option, which keeps clients coming back to your site over and over again.
How I Leverage The WP101 Videos
For several years, the WP101 suite of WordPress Training Videos—which now includes Gutenberg—has been an integral part of my client website training process. Leveraging the WP101 videos has not only saved countless hours of time but provided more value for my clients while helping boost profits.
Let me explain…
STEP 1: Introduce The WordPress Videos
I introduce the collection of WordPress videos to my client during the development stage of the website build, providing them with a secret URL and a password. While my team is building out the site, I ask the client to watch all of the videos—each less than 5 minutes in length.
STEP 2: Make The Videos A Prerequisite
When planning the official website launch, I set a date for the WordPress training session with my client. At this time I do three things:
I remind them to watch the training videos provided
I ask them to write down any questions they have
I let them know that watching the videos is a prerequisite to the hands-on training. If they don’t watch the videos, we reschedule the training session, which also delays the client receiving the keys to the site.
STEP 3: Host A Quality Training
By making the WP101 videos a requirement for the website training session, I guarantee every client is showing up to the session with the prerequisite understanding of how WordPress works and how to use it.
This means I can skip over that information during the live training. Instead, my time with the client is focused on the specific features built for their site, the plugins used, and the questions clients might have, which results in a better, more engaging, higher value training.
STEP 4: Provide Ongoing Access To The Videos
If a client signs on for ongoing, monthly website support, they receive continued access to the WordPress training videos for as long as they remain a client. This means that when they have turnover on their team, they can have their new staff watch the videos and get up to speed or if they forget something, they can watch the video and get it done quickly. This single step alone has practically eliminated all post-launch client support requests, which has saved time, reduced resources, and increased profits.
My Advice To You
As you can see, while my goals were lofty, they all were achievable with the right tools.
Some of you might read this, click over to the WP101 Plugin site, see the price for the Professional Plan (which is worth every penny), and think:
“I don’t want to pay their annual fee. I’ll create my own videos.”
Truthfully, yes, you could do that. But to do so you would need to invest in the right audio/video and sound equipment, write each individual video script, record all the screencasts, perform hours of editing, create splash images, and upload the final videos to a video hosting site, which you also need to pay for. Then after spending a crazy amount of hours to finish the videos, WordPress will push out an update, they’ll change things in the user interface (UI), and you’ll have to do it all over again.
So my advice to you is:
Think about how much your time is worth and consider how much you charge per hour and how many hours this would take you.
Then think about the amount of stress you already have in your life and ask yourself if this will create more stress by piling on more work.
Finally, check out the WP101 Plugin again, do yourself a favor, and just say yes. Buy it, integrate it into your workflow, and benefit from their hard work and ongoing updates.
When you build in efficiencies that benefit you by saving time and increasing profits, and benefit the client by delivering a quality product that adds value to their experience, everyone wins. Plus, when the client’s last interactions with you as part of their website project are positive, engaging, and valuable, they’ll remember those good feelings later and provide a better testimonial.
The Tools You Choose Affect Profitability
While choosing to leverage the WP101 videos in my agency has helped improve the level of services I provide clients, the biggest impact is the effect that decision has had on my ability to land monthly support clients and increase the profitability of my projects.
What’s amazing about this approach is that you can do the same thing with other tools like Hostdedi’ Managed WordPress hosting, which takes care of image compression, automatic updates for WordPress and plugins, automatic daily backups, automatic SSL, and staging environments, as well as access to developer tools and no pageview/traffic limits.
With 22 years experience in the graphic design and web design industries, Jennifer Bourn has worked with a wide variety businesses — from enterprise organizations to local small businesses — to create content, build brands, and establish profitable online platforms. Her renowned business systems and automations drive her creative agency while she travels with her family (often to places with no wifi), speaks at events, hosts workshops, and delivers online courses like Profitable Project Plan, a business training program for designers and developers.
With more than 35% of all websites using WordPress, you can tell it’s absolutely massive and is very much still growing. There is still a ton of room for good people to do good work and create a thriving business with WordPress. Today, we’re going to look into becoming a freelance WordPress developer.
I’m going to talk about getting started as a WordPress developer but you can use this same advice if you are a designer or even a writer in the WordPress space. Yes, you will need to find different teaching resources, but the most important elements, like making good decisions and building your reputation, are essentially the same across different fields.
Start With Why
If you want to start your own business, it needs to begin with a pretty good reason. Sure, the freedom of working where & when you want is great, but you can get that with many jobs now. You don’t need to take on all the terrible parts of running a company yourself to get freedom in where you work.
That means you need to have a separate reason to run your own business outside of having freedom. One of the reasons I work for myself is that in addition to getting to write what I want, I get to take the time to help parents run a business that lets them be an awesome father or mother. Taking a job at a company would mean that I can’t sit down in the middle of the day to write about being a dad running a business.
I accept all the downsides of running my own business because I get to help the parents I interact with be the awesome people they dreamed of being. When I’m having a down day because someone hasn’t paid me, I remember someone I’ve helped and keep pushing forward.
Ask yourself:
Why will I put up with the hard days of working for myself?
Who specifically can I help by working for myself that I can’t help otherwise?
Understanding Your Value
The next thing to tackle when you work for yourself is understanding the value you bring to the table.
When you’re starting as a developer it’s easy to think that the most valuable thing you bring to the table is writing code for your clients. Your clients also think that this is the highest value thing you do for them but you’re both wrong!
The most important thing an experienced developer brings to the table is the wisdom to make good decisions. When you know which of the 10 WordPress form plugins suits this project best, you are bringing value to the table.
Making the right decision about putting code in a plugin or in the theme is another valuable bit of knowledge that clients don’t have. The code you type out is simply the visible evidence of that knowledge.
A good way to start talking about value with your client is in your initial email with them. I’ve shared my initial client email previously. Please note, the questions center around the value that the client expects from the project. I don’t worry much about the hours that something will take when I’m starting to talk to a client. At that point of the process they don’t even care.
The only thing a client cares about is that your fees provide value to them. They want to know that if you’re going to charge $5k to build their site, they’re going to get at least $10k of value out of it in the next year. If you want to charge well for your services, then you need to show your clients that they will get value from the work you do.
If you leave the value question to chance then you’re not going to win much work.
Ask yourself:
How can I show my client they’ll make 3X or more from my work?
Where can I help a client avoid known problems?
Learning the Field
There are a few steps to learning any field. First, it starts with some research so that you know what the best sources of information are. One good spot to start for almost any field is LinkedIn Learning. They hire top professionals in the industry to provide training.
For WordPress development you can get some deeper dives once you’ve got a handle on the basics:
The biggest mistake that people make as they start learning anything is waiting for too long to get their work out there in the world. You will always be better tomorrow. Your code will be cleaner, your writing will be more concise, and your design will be tighter.
Start putting your work out there by picking a personal project, building it and then sharing it with people. Share it on social networks and ask for feedback. Most people in WordPress remember everyone that helped them and are happy to spend a few minutes helping someone that is just starting out.
Finding Your First Freelance Job
Now, how about finding your first job as a WordPress professional? Do you know where to start?
When you don’t know anyone you’re going to need to use places like Craigslist, Upwork and Fiverr to find clients. When I started out on my own, I made a rule that I needed to make 10 new contacts a day with potential clients. Sometimes at the end of the day, that would be done just by new emails coming in via an ad on Craigslist but other days I’d search far and wide for anyone to contact about doing work for their WordPress site.
Two popular places to get started at are Fiverr and Upwork so let’s take a quick look at both options.
Fiverr
Fiverr is no longer people doing jobs for $5. You can put a range of prices on your work. On Fiverr, you put your ad out there and then customers come to you to get you to do the work. You don’t have to come up with a custom proposal for each project you want to work on.
Even 10 years into building sites on WordPress, I’ve used Fiverr to try out new services because of the built-in audience. I may reduce the prices a bit to hit the audiences that Fiverr attracts, but otherwise, it’s the same service I’ll use with clients once it’s been tested, adjusted, and validated as something people want.
Upwork
Like Fiverr, Upwork has a built-in audience of projects. Some companies will only work with contractors that use Upwork as a platform. If you’re looking for a large selection of projects, then you can log in to your Upwork account and select from a huge volume of projects.
The downside with Upwork is that you have to create a proposal for each project you want a chance at working on. That adds a bunch of unpaid administrative work to your plate.
Both of these platforms are valuable under different circumstances. Decide which one is right for your current situation, timelines, and gaps in current project load.
Other places to find WordPress work
If you don’t have your daily quota of new contacts, start to go through these sites to make sure that you reach out enough potential clients to keep your business going. To really take your career to the next level though, you need to start building your reputation in your field.
Use Blogging to Build your Reputation as a Freelance WordPress Developer
If you’re working for yourself, your goal should be to position yourself as an expert so that customers come calling looking for your expertise. To get that happening you need to take the initiative and start showing customers that you are an expert before they work with you.
One of the easiest ways is to start publishing your own content on your site. When I began my WordPress journey every time I’d have a problem that I had to look up and solve I’d write a blog post about the problem and the solution. I’d make sure to title my content with the search terms I had used at the beginning of my journey.
This quickly got other developers to notice me, and 10 years later Hostdedi asked me to write for them. I write for Hostdedi now because someone on their team noticed my work and started to follow me.
If you can, take the time to write something and add a screencast explaining the problem. Some people will prefer the video and others will prefer to read through the text of your post, or maybe even just jump to the code. Even if you’re just starting, teach what you’re learning once you have a bit of a handle on it.
When I was writing about WordPress code issues, a single post solving a problem brought in $15k that year alone, and then $10k a year for the next five years based on a single client that found that content. My quick easy fix was something they could do themselves, but they had a bunch of other problems with their eCommerce site that they needed me to fix. Even a few weeks into your learning journey, what feels easy for you will be amazing to someone else.
Becoming Your Own Boss Takes Work
Working for yourself is not all beaches and breaks. It takes lots of work to succeed as your own boss, but you can do it. To build a successful WordPress Development business make sure you have a solid reason why you’re working for yourself. Take the time to understand the value you provide to your clients so you can charge properly. Learn to find your ideal customers, and market yourself as a professional.
If you can do these things, then you can become a freelance WordPress Developer and run a business that you love to work in.
Curtis is a husband, father, developer and business coach. He specializes in helping people build a business that lets them spend time with their family instead of working all the time.
Imagine what business would be like if you didn’t have to pitch and sell, or seek out and convince new clients to hire you. Imagine how different your business would be if your pipeline was consistently full and potential clients said “yes” with excitement after only a conversation or two.
It’s possible. Providing clients with the information they need to know quickly and effectively will turn your agency into one that persuades them to work with you almost instantly. By identifying clear data points for conversion, you’re able to build a client acquisition strategy that resonates and converts.
Key to this is understanding what your leads and prospective clients need to feel, know, and learn to make a confident buying decision. While every client may present a unique situation, budget, timeline, and set of project requirements, the way they decide whether or not to hire you is ultimately the same.
How Buying Decisions Are Made
Buying decisions are made with the heart and justified with the head.
How many times have you purchased something you wanted even though it wasn’t in the budget? Each time you’ve done so, it was probably because that thing triggered emotions so strong that you threw logic out the window and made the purchase. You saw it and felt happy, excited, relieved, or even nostalgic.
Like you, your potential clients make buying decisions based on feelings and emotions. They want to do business with other people — people who they know, like, and trust. Ultimately, they make decisions about who they hire based on how they feel and how strong their connection with the service provider is.
Once a lead feels in their heart that hiring you would be a good decision, it’s up to you to make sure the head or brain is satisfied with the fine details and logic — their brain is looking to justify the emotional buying decision. Whether they realize it or not, there is a mental checklist of information they need to get so they can feel good about taking action. This is where you must follow up on promises of solutions and results with facts, figures, data, and social proof.
A lead who is on the fence about hiring you is one who is dealing with a battle of heart (emotion) and head (logic).
SITUATION 1: Their heart is saying yes while their head is saying no. This happens when it feels right, they like you, and they want to say yes, but there are logical details that are missing or have not yet been addressed and the lead needs clarification and reassurance.
SITUATION 2: Their head is saying yes, but their heart is saying no. This happens when the contract, the fee, and everything you discussed is right, but for one reason or another, emotionally they’re just not feeling the partnership.
Your job as a business owner and service provider, is to help your audience connect with you and your brand emotionally. To do this, you need to build a relationship with your leads and provide prospective clients with the critical information they need to sign a contract. Some of this will be done in conversation and on sales calls, but most can be done on your website with the right approach.
Once you’ve built up a sales pipeline, it’s vital you keep your agency sustainable. Learn how.
A Foundation For Lead Generation
To stay in business and grow your business, you need to generate a consistent pipeline of new leads, which means you’re expending time, effort, energy, and resources on brand awareness tactics, marketing campaigns, and lead generation strategies. With so much effort dedicated to developing leads, the worst thing that could happen is that a prospective client reaches your website, fails to make an emotional connection, and leaves without taking action.
To avoid this, it is imperative that when a new visitor reaches your website, they can quickly discover what it is about, confirm they’re in the right place, and find more valuable information.
When potential leads find your website:
You want them to feel like it’s their lucky day because they found exactly what they needed
You want them to feel like you “get them” and that your services were designed just for them.
You need the right information to help them self-identify as a perfect fit or near perfect fit for your services and/or packages
But how do you get a visitor to self-identify as a prospective client and become a hot lead? And, how do you turn your website into your best salesperson that generates leads for you around the clock?
Your website can become a solid foundation for lead generation that works when you’re not working by implementing the four-step Know, Like, Trust, Convert approach.
Know
Help people learn more about you and your background, what you do and how you do it, who you serve and why, and what results you get.
The basic web pages that typically help leads get to know you are the Home page, About page, Services page, Contact page, Thank You page.
Like
Help people get to know your personality, form a connection with you, and decide if they like you, like your perspective, and like your approach.
This content offers glimpses into your personal life, showcases your personality, and shares your opinions and is typically found on the About page, Media page, and Portfolio page, as well as in case studies and blog posts.
Trust
Establish credibility, reliability, and trust by positioning yourself as an expert, providing value and quality content, and showing a history of proven results.
This content typically includes the About page, Testimonials page, Portfolio page, Media Page, and Privacy Policy and Disclaimer pages, as well as blog posts, case studies, as seen on logos, and links to interviews and features.
Convert
Help people take action—contact, click, register, enroll, sign up, buy, subscribe, download, opt-in, call, email, join, or purchase.
This content includes the Get Started page, Contact page, Sales pages, and Landing pages, as well as opt-in offers, pop-ups, and registration pages.
By applying the Know, Like, Trust, Convert approach to your website, visitors who are a great fit for your services will naturally self-identify as an ideal client and receive the exact information they need to move forward in the buying process. As a result, the quality of inbound leads your WordPress agency receives will improve and more leads with convert to paying clients.
Managed WordPress Hosting Is Better For Clients
When beginning a new website project, the last thing a client wants to do is figure out what website hosting company they should choose. Make it easy for your clients by recommending Hostdedi Managed WordPress Hosting. Managed WordPress Hosting takes care of image compression, automatic updates for plugins and the platform, automatic daily backups, automatic SSL, and staging environments, as well as access to developer tools and no pageview/traffic limits.
Founded 20 years ago, Hostdedi managed platforms have always provided agencies with the ability to deliver the site experiences their clients expect. Built on the four pillars of speed, security, scalability, and service, our solutions are designed to help your website realize its potential. Visit Hostdedi.net today and see how we can help.
Historically, consumer use of ecommerce stores has been a mystery to merchants. Traffic sources, bounce rates, and others were the metrics of educated guesses and opinions. Today, however, powerful tracking tools like Google Tag Manager for WordPress have brought data to that mystery, answering questions with a level of certainty never seen before.
These tools now allow you to build a clearer picture of the customer experience. Instead of guessing a consumer’s journey, you’re able to understand their path to purchase. Not only does this help you discover crucial touchpoints, more importantly, it also helps you drive your store’s growth by identifying conversion bottlenecks and finding new opportunities.
If you’re not sure you’re hitting the mark with Google Tag Manager, now is the right time to revisit your implementation and make sure everything is running smoothly. Here, we’ll walk through what Google Tag Manager is, how you can add it to your WordPress site, and how you can start measuring store performance where it matters.
Google Tag Manager is a free, widely-used tool that lets you create and manage the tags (more on this later) published on a website. Though it can be used on virtually any site, it’s commonly used by ecommerce business owners in conjunction with other marketing analytics platforms to manage their online stores. For example, Google Tag Manager is almost always used alongside Google Analytics for the purpose of tracking marketing campaigns, conversions, and site performance.
What Is a Tag?
When you inspect the source of a site, you see tags like <html>, <img>, <p>, <a href>, and many others. Functionally, the tags you manage with Google Tag Manager are similar to the HTML tags found in the raw code of a website. But where HTML, CSS, PHP, and other coding languages use tags as building materials for website construction, the tags in Google Tag Manager track conversions, traffic, user behavior, and a number of other important metrics.
Tags track and relay important user engagement data to another analytics platform. When a tag runs, or picks up an instance of the intended interaction, it’s called “firing” – i.e., “The tag has fired.”
Besides connecting to other platforms, tags can be created so you can track specific events — (like abandoned carts and video views) on your website. While Google Analytics can track many types of events, creating tags for certain events in Google Tag Manager can make tracking more specific, and situational events more effective.
Google Tag Manager vs. Google Analytics
Since Google Tag Manager and Analytics are used in tandem, it can be confusing as to what role each platform plays when it comes to marketing analytics.
Google Tag Manager can be used to manage many third-party tags, including the Facebook and Adobe Analytics tracking pixels. You can even customize and calibrate your tags, and decide when and why they fire. But Google Tag Manager just manages these tracking code snippets; there’s no actual analytics or in-depth reporting in Google Tag Manager.
Google Analytics doesn’t have the granular tag controls of Google Tag Manager, but it plays the very crucial role of collecting data from those tags. In other words, it collects, analyzes, and reports data from your tags. Thus, the two platforms have a symbiotic relationship.
How to Add Google Tag Manager to WordPress
If you’re one of the many ecommerce business owners using a managed hosting platform to run your online store, you need to know how to add Google Tag Manager to your WordPress site. Let’s go over the steps for setting up Google Tag Manager with WordPress.
Step 1: Create a Google Tag Manager Account
The first thing you need is a Google Tag Manager account.
Head over to Google Tag Manager. If you already have an account, then select the account you want to use to connect to your WooCommerce store. Otherwise, click “Create Account” to begin setting up a new Google Tag Manager account. This is how you get Google Tag Manager code.
After clicking “Create Account,” you’ll see some account setup options.
Name the account, name the container — basically just a folder for your tags to be kept separate from other Tag Manager accounts you may have — and select “Web” as the target platform. Then click “Create” to immediately be taken into your new Google Tag Manager account.
Once you’ve finished with the setup options, you’ll need to install the code snippets for Tag Manager to begin working with your ecommerce store on WordPress.
The first snippet needs to be added to the header of your WordPress site. This will ensure that the code appears on every single page of your site — which is important for Tag Manager to work with WordPress.
There are a couple of ways to add it to the appropriate file of your WordPress theme. However, the easiest way is to use a plugin like Yoast. Instead of editing the raw code of your site, just copy and paste the code into Yoast which will automatically add the code to every page of your site.
Then there’s the second snippet of code which must be added just after the opening <body> tag on your site. Again, Yoast and other plugins can help.
If you need additional help, Google Tag Manager offers a useful Quick Start Guide that you can use as a reference. When these code snippets are installed, you’re ready to begin setting up Google Tag Manager with WordPress.
Step 2: Install Google Analytics
Once you’ve created and set up a Google Tag Manager account, you’ll need to do the same for Google Analytics. After all, you won’t get much benefit from using Tag Manager unless Analytics is receiving data from your tags. If you’ve already installed Google Analytics, you can skip this step.
These steps might seem a bit odd as you’re completing them, but don’t worry. You can, in fact, install Google Analytics from within Tag Manager.
From your new Google Tag Manager account, click “Tags” from the left-hand sidebar, then click “New” in the upper right-hand corner of the window.
Name the tag “Google Analytics” and click “Tag Configuration” and select “Google Analytics: Universal Analytic” for tag type.
Set the track type to “Page View” then click “New Variable” under the Google Analytics Settings. Finally, name this new variable and install your Google Analytics tracking code on your WordPress site as prompted.
What Can I Do With Google Tag Manager?
Now that you have completed the installation and setup process, you need to know how to use Google Tag Manager. And, perhaps most importantly, how is Google Tag Manager used?
Google Tag Manager helps you gain insight into how people are using your ecommerce store. By setting up tags and events, you can gain valuable insights on key areas. That includes tracking form submissions, file downloads, and the effectiveness of interactions in your conversion funnel.
While there are many things you can do with Google Tag Manager, let’s go over a few of the most important (and most useful) for ecommerce businesses.
Track Goals and Events in Google Analytics
Although pageviews and referrals are important metrics, tracking how your customers and leads are using your ecommerce store provides the most accurate picture of your store’s performance. Without Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, you’d have very little insight into how customers and leads are interacting with your store. In turn, you wouldn’t be able to identify and address variables that might, for instance, contribute to high cart abandonment.
Although we’re not going to spend too much time covering it in this Google Tag Manager overview, we’re going to give you examples of a goal and an event you can track with Tag Manager.
Goal: Added-to-Cart
With Google Tag Manager, you can set up a tracking goal for each and every time a product gets added to the shopping cart. Once you’ve completed the steps to set up an added-to-cart tracking goal, these interactions will be reported in Google Analytics. It’s important to note that this isn’t a goal that you’d be able to track in Google Analytics without using Tag Manager to create the event.
Event: Video Views
Video content is the most popular form of digital content today. So it follows that ecommerce sites that feature product reviews, launch videos, instructional videos, and other video content should be tracking how customers and leads are engaging with those videos, and most importantly, how those engagement rates affect conversion. Using Google Tag Manager, you can set up tracking events for videos and compare those events to cart abandonment, checkout abandonment, or any number of other metrics.
Install Tracking Pixels for Google Pay-per-Click Ads
One of the key uses for Google Tag Managers is to install and manage the Google Ads Remarketing and Google Ads Conversion Tracking pixels. The steps to install these tracking pixels are largely the same for both.
Google Ads Remarketing Pixel
From your Google Tag Manager account, create a new tag. Name it “Google Remarketing” and select “Google Ads Remarketing” as the tag type.
In the tag configuration settings, locate your Google Ads Conversion ID. Create a label if you’d like, then set “All Pages” for triggering.
Google Ads Conversion Tracking Pixel
For the Google Ads Conversion Tracking pixel, the steps are much the same. From your Google Tag Manager account, create a new tag. Name it “Google Ads Conversion” and select “Google Ads Conversion” as the tag type.
The main difference with the Google Ads Conversion Tracking pixel is the option to set a value for the tag. In the screenshot above, the value is set at 100 USD, meaning that each conversion the tag tracks is worth $100 to the business. Use an amount makes the most sense for your business. Many ecommerce business owners set the value of a conversion as the average transaction value.
Install Third-Party Tracking Pixels
Similar to the Google Ads tracking pixels, Tag Manager is often used to install tracking codes for third-party platforms. In particular, the Facebook Pixel is often installed on a WordPress site using this method.
The important thing to note is that when Google Tag Manager doesn’t provide a template for the tracking code you want to install, you’ll need to use the custom HTML option. To illustrate this process, here are the steps for installing the Facebook Pixel in Google Tag Manager.
From your Google Tag Manager account, create a new pixel. Name it “Facebook Pixel” and select “Custom HTML” as the tag type.
After selecting “Custom HTML” as the tag type, you’ll be given a place where you can paste the Facebook Pixel tracking code.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the trigger is set to “All Pages” — but there are other options available, and Facebook provides some tips to help you choose the right option for your case.
Do You Need Google Tag Manager?
We’ve gone over the ins and outs of Google Tag Manager. As we bring this overview to a close, let’s tackle one last question: Should you be using it?
For the owner of an ecommerce business, there’s arguably nothing more important than learning about customer behavior. Because if you don’t know how your customers are interacting with your online store, you have no way to optimize to increase conversion. In other words, any effort made to improve the customer experience and the buying journey is just a shot in the dark.
Google Tag Manager gives you a window into your customer experience. By using Tag Manager to publish and manage tags for your ecommerce store, you can boost conversion and generate more revenue for your business.
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Hostdedi WooCommerce hosting plans were designed with three principles in mind: reliability, scalability, and speed. Every ecommerce store running on a Managed WooCommerce Hosting plan benefits from everything Hostdedi plans have to offer from cart abandonment technology to minimize lost sales to the nearly limitless ways in which you can customize the look and feel of your online store. Best of all, Hostdedi hosting plans are competitively priced and come with outstanding round-the-clock support.
Tracking interactions between customers and your ecommerce store is essential if you want to gauge the performance of your business. However, it’s not always obvious which interactions you should be tracking. If you track too little, you’re not getting the most representative picture, and if you track too much, the important data gets buried.
In order to drive revenue effectively, it’s vital you understand the performance of each of your site’s touchpoints. By identifying key goals and events through Google Analytics, and standardizing their reporting structure, you’ll be able to leverage that data to create campaigns that promote engagement and growth.
To help, we’ve created the ecommerce business owner’s guide to Google Analytics event tracking. With this guide, you’ll know which tracking events are most important and how to create tracking goals for your ecommerce store.
Google Analytics Event Tracking vs. Goal Tracking
Google Analytics event tracking can illuminate patterns in user behaviour that you can use to make more informed decisions.
Finding out how customers and leads are interacting with your online store is crucial for optimizing your customer experience. As it happens, you can learn a lot about how customers are engaging with your store by tracking goals and events in Google Analytics.
Events
As Google defines them, events are “interactions with content that can be measured independently from a webpage or screen load.” This includes things like:
Clicks
Video views
File downloads
Code loads
Page scrolls
Account logins
Media shares
Products added to the shopping cart
In a more technical sense, events are interactions between users and your ecommerce store. This includes:
Mouse interactions
Keyboard interactions
Frame interactions
Form interactions
In Google Analytics, event tracking can illuminate patterns in user behavior that you can use to make more informed decisions and further refine your customer experience. While certain events — like abandoned carts, for instance — are often tracked by default, you can track many different customer interactions with Google Analytics custom events.
Google Analytics has four conditions for events: category, action, label, value, and non-interaction. Each type of event condition has its own application, whether it’s for organization in Google Analytics or for assigning monetary value to a trackable event.
An event category is a name assigned to a group of events. They’re used primarily for organizational purposes. For example, you might assign events like pageviews and clicks to an event category called “engagement.” Or you create an event category called “downloads” for events related to the downloading of files from your website.
An event action is a certain type of event that you want to track for a specific page element. For example, when users click play, pause, or rewind, or scrub through a video to a particular location, you can track those interactions as event actions.
An event label is an optional name assigned to a certain element on a webpage. Similar to event categories, event labels are largely for organizational purposes. For example, if there are multiple PDF files that can be downloaded from your website, you could use event labels to distinguish downloads of one PDF file from others.
An event value is an optional numerical value assigned to a trackable event. Although value is often a monetary value, meaning how much (in dollars) an event brings to your business, there are cases where value could be a length of time or raw quantity. For instance, you could make the value for a confirmation page event equal to your average transaction value since you know (on average) how much your business makes from each conversion.
The non-interaction condition is applied when an event is non-interactive. When the value for this condition is “true,” the event isconsidered non-interactive. Typically, you only classify an event as non-interactive when you don’t want it to affect your bounce rate or other metrics in Google Analytics.
Goals
Google Analytics goals are essentially events that have value and that you want to boost in order to generate more revenue. When you set a tracking goal, Google Analytics begins counting instances of that goal as a conversion. For instance, if you set a duration goal of five minutes, and then a visitor spends 5 minutes or more on your site, Google Analytics will consider that a successful conversion.
In Google Analytics, there are duration goals, destination goals, pages/views goals, and event goals. As you’d expect, a duration goal is a minimum amount of time that you want users to spend engaging with your website. Destination goals refer to when users visit a specific page on your site like a thank-you page or an order confirmation page. With pages/views goals, you want users to click onto a minimum number of pages on your site. Finally, event goals are more specific interactions including form fills, click-to-call link clicks, and file downloads.
5 Google Analytics Goals and Events You Should Track
Tracking goals and events is an effective way to gauge or boost the performance of your ecommerce business. So let’s go over some specific Google Analytics goals and events that you should be tracking.
Google Analytics makes it very easy to access and create goals. Once you’re logged into your Google Analytics account, go into the Admin menu and in the View column, then click Goals.
Goal: Confirmation Pages
A confirmation page can be used to confirm an order that’s been placed or to thank a lead for joining a mailing list. But in any context, a confirmation page is what someone sees after an interaction with your brand or company. In other words, it’s a conversion follow-up that makes confirmation pages an important goal to track.
How to Set up a Confirmation Page Goal
From the Goals menu in Google Analytics, click the “+ New Goal” button to open the new goal template.
At the top of the goal template, you’re given a list of template options. For this tutorial, we chose to set up a completed purchase confirmation page — the second option on the list.
Next, create a name for your confirmation page goal. For the tracking goal type, choose “Destination” since a confirmation page is the URL destination that marks the completion of a conversion.
In the third section of the goal template, you’ll need to provide a destination and value, and then outline the conversion funnel for the tracking goal.
The destination is similar to a label and how the goal will be shown in Google Analytics. Think of it as a URL suffix and choose something simple that’s representative of the confirmation page you’re tracking.
The value is, quite simply, a monetary value assigned to the goal you’re tracking.
The funnel refers to your conversion or sales funnel. A confirmation page will likely take the final position in the funnel. The screenshot above shows how the funnel section will look when set up properly.
Finally, click “Verify This Goal” at the bottom.
Verifying your goal will manually filter your Google Analytics data from the past seven days through your new tracking goal to tell you how many hits you would’ve gotten during that period. When you see numerical values for every step of the funnel, your confirmation page tracking goal is functional.
Goal: Form Submissions
There are a number of different uses for forms on an ecommerce site. For instance, many sites use forms for newsletter signups and as a convenient way for users to contact the company. You can also set up a form so leads can request a quote for made-to-order products and services.
Just as there are multiple uses for forms for your ecommerce site, there is more than one way to set up form submission goals in Google Analytics. First, if you use a confirmation page as a follow-up to a form submission, you would set up a form submission goal in much the same way as a confirmation page goal (outlined above). Alternatively, you can set up form submissions as Google Analytics events, and then use a form submission event as a tracking goal.
Once you have completed that setup in Google Tag Manager, return to Google Analytics, open the Admin menu, click “Goals” in the View column, and click the “+ New Goal” button.
In the screenshot above, you can see the options we chose while setting up a tracking goal for a contact form. In the first section, we chose the “Contact us” template. In the second section, we named the goal “Contact us” and selected “Event” as the goal type. Finally, we completed the details for the goal by filling in the category, action, and label. Since a form submission doesn’t equate to a sale, no value was assigned. However, you may choose to assign a value to an inquiry. It’s simply a matter of preference.
Goal: Products Added to Cart
Adding products to the shopping cart is another important goal to track and is a prerequisite for a purchase. The idea is to see how many people are adding products to the shopping cart so you can compare that to how many of those added products end with transactions. Doing this gives you an idea of how often users are abandoning their shopping carts.
There are two ways to set up Added-to-Cart goal tracking in Google Analytics, depending on how your ecommerce site is setup. If there’s some sort of confirmation page when a product is added to the shopping cart, then you’d follow the same steps as you would for a confirmation page. But if adding a product to the shopping cart isn’t followed by a confirmation, you’ll need to set it up as a triggered event with Google Tag Manager.
How to Set up an Added-to-Cart Goal
As you configure the trigger for the event in Google Tag Manager, you’ll want to select “Click – All Elements” as the trigger type. This ensures that mouse clicks will trigger the event. Next, select “Some Clicks” for what initiates the trigger and input the class and conditions for the event trigger. Use the + and – buttons to the right to add or remove triggers as needed.
You can see how these settings are reflected in the underlying code on your site by right-clicking on your “Add to Cart” button and selecting “Inspect element.”
After configuring the tracking event trigger, your Added-to-Cart goal is ready to start tracking.
Event: Abandoned Carts
When a cart is abandoned, it means the person who added the product to the shopping cart has changed his or her mind. On average, 69.57% of shopping carts are abandoned before purchases are made. With so many sales falling through the cracks, cart abandonment is a very important metric for ecommerce business owners to track.
It’s worth noting, though, that a tool like Jilt that can act on cart abandonment data can be especially useful. In addition, Glew.io can actually show which products are being left abandoned in the shopping cart most frequently and makes it easier to identify potential roadblocks in the buyer’s journey. Both Jilt and Glew.io are tools that are included with Managed WooCommerce at Hostdedi.
How to Set up an Abandoned Cart Event
Abandoned cart event tracking is most commonly done automatically when you have ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics.
To access your abandoned cart events, navigate to ecommerce > Cart Behavior. Not only does this show instances of cart abandonment, but you get to see instances of no products being added to the cart and instances of check-out abandonment. The idea is to get a concise visual representation of how many sales are lost at different points in the buyer’s journey.
Event: Video Views
Videos are the most popular, high-converting form of digital content today which is why setting up tracking for video views is important for ecommerce businesses. With Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, you can set up video tracking for instructional/information videos, video reviews, and product launch videos that are available on your website.
Tracking video view events on your site is particularly useful when combined with an ecommerce analytics tool like Glew.io for more insightful customer analytics. When you track video views, you can compare that figure to metrics like your pageviews, unique visitors, and conversions for a clearer picture of how users are engaging with your online store.
How to Set up a Video View Event
The most effective (and easiest) way to set up video view events is to use Google Tag Manager. And if your videos are hosted on YouTube, then Google Tag Manager takes just moments to set up.
In the screenshot above, you can see a pretty standard trigger configuration for a video view event. For the trigger configuration, all four capture options are selected including progress percentages in 25-percent intervals, but you can set it to track as much or as little as is helpful for you.
Once you have finished with trigger configuration, the tag configuration for your video view event should look similar to the screenshot above.
After you’ve finished setting up your video view event in Google Tag Manager, those events will be reported in Google Analytics. You can monitor instances of video view events in Behavior Event Reporting.
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Hostdedi is your premiere hosting provider, offering high-quality, performance-focused hosting plans for ecommerce businesses of any size. However, when you choose Hostdedi Managed WooCommerce Hosting, you’re not just getting the best in speed, performance, and reliability at a great price: You’re also getting tons of extras, like Jilt for cart abandonment and Glew.io, a comprehensive ecommerce analytics program. So when you want the best for your growing ecommerce business, choose Hostdedi Managed WooCommerce Hosting.
Success and income posturing are a constant throughout social media. Across the Internet, freelancers and agency owners tout their high-dollar contracts and big money months. The hustle, grind, and slay lifestyle is glorified through staged luxury lifestyle photos. But eventually, these same people making a big splash, and even bigger claims, slowly fade away or disappear. Their tactics, while initially impressive, aren’t sustainable.
To build a sustainable WordPress agency, you need to dispense with the gimmicks and posturing and take aim at developing a strategy that maintains your agency’s momentum. Success isn’t built overnight, but it’s also not an impossible climb when you know what to pay attention to.
By realigning your agency processes, you’ll be able to build on your core objectives to turn your WordPress agency into a business that is both sustainable, profitable, and that drives growth.
Constant And Consistent Marketing
When you become a business owner, you also become a marketer whether you like it or not.
For a services business to thrive, it needs a pipeline full of qualified clients. That means you need to be investing in lead generation and marketing efforts — and it can’t be sporadic.
Marketing efforts can – and should – begin as soon as your business and its brand have been established. The right marketing techniques place you front-of-mind and help to bring you long term business.
Consider this:
The best time to market your WordPress services is when you’re booked solid because those efforts create leads that will become future clients. This is the key to ending the feast or famine roller coaster.
Clients decide to hire you when they are ready, not when you’re ready. You need constant and consistent marketing to stay top of mind.
Dependable Baseline Income
Earning a dependable base income every month eliminates the tremendous stress that comes from living project to project.
A stable base income also provides more flexibility and opportunity in future projects, growth planning, and hiring.It is critical for your budding agency to not only offer single website builds and one-off projects, but services that provide reliable recurring revenue.
Consider offering monthly website support, ongoing retainers, and other long-term services. WordPress is used by 35% of global websites. These site owners know the value of upkeep and you’re in the perfect position to deliver on that.
Consider this:
To get started, set a goal to earn enough recurring revenue to cover 50% of all business expenses. When achieved, extend your goal to cover 100% of all business expenses.
If you’re building an agency, aim to secure enough recurring revenue to cover all of your team salaries.
Documented Systems And Processes
Systems and processes are the keys to sustainable business growth.
When you’re freelancing and working solo, it’s okay to have all of your business systems and processes in your head. If you want to grow an agency, however, you need to document each and every system and process step-by-step.
Process documentation can start with just a simple spreadsheet. As your agency grows and your client base expands, you can start to build this out, covering each area of your business in more detail.
As you build out your processes, keep future goals top of mind. What are your plans for 6 months from now? What does your forecast look like in 12 months? Having insight into how your processes may have to change in the future is key to being able to provide clients with the right expectations.
Consider this:
Process documentation creates clear instructions that enable delegation and set new employees up for success. Without it, you become a bottleneck that prevents forward progress.
Documenting systems allows you to leverage software automation for repetitive tasks to save time, reduce resources, and increase profits.
Crystal Clear Communication
Ambiguity leads to confusion and uncertainty, which in turn, leads to doubt and procrastination, which in turn leads to inaction and delays.
When it comes to communication, there can’t be too much and you can never be too clear. Whether you’re guiding your internal team, working with paying clients, or engaged in sales conversations with prospects, clear communication is critical to your success.
Consider this:
No matter what you’re doing, all stakeholders need to be on the same page, understand the goals, and know the expectations—and they must be aware of their role, what needs to be done, and when it must be done by.
When providing instructions of any kind, provide them in writing, review them verbally, and ask them to be repeated back to you so there is zero confusion.
Strong Administrative Practices
You’re great at what you do—you wouldn’t have started a business if you weren’t—but as a business owner, you now also have to be great at managing your business.
Without a foundational understanding of critical business concepts and the tactical ability to execute on them, your business will suffer and you will struggle to stay afloat. As the owner, you need to learn about bookkeeping, payroll, and taxes, estimating and invoicing, project management, client management, marketing, and sales.
Consider this:
Business owners must create responsible, consistent administrative habits. Without them, it becomes easy to ignore the “paperwork” side of the business when swamped with client work. The problem with this, however, is that the unsexy administrative side of the business is what makes sure you get paid.
Grow Your Agency With Managed WordPress
Focusing on the development of your agency is a time-intensive task. Besides the everyday hustle and bustle of client requests, you’re also dealing with the continued management of existing projects. Very quickly, this can cause growth goals to fall to the wayside as maintenance tasks take over.
By following the five tips above, you’ll be able to better align your business practices with those growth goals and strategies. Instead of finding yourself on the receiving end of an impossible workflow or uncertain project, you’ll be able to proceed quickly and efficiently; optimizing both you and your client’s time.
At Hostdedi, we’ve created a solution designed to help you build a sustainable WordPress agency without worrying about the basics. Managed WordPress solutions from Hostdedi take care of the infrastructure, plugin updates, image compression, and more, leaving you with the time you need to develop a winning business strategy and focus on finding new clients. Get started with Managed WordPress today.
With more than half a decade of experience in the tech industry, Robert has worked as a marketing consultant, product strategist, and content developer. At Hostdedi, he spends his time helping clients find the best hosting solution for their needs through online content and as a brand ambassador.
Have you ever browsed through your favorite coffee shop’s website and as you check out with that new order of coffee, you end up getting a 504 error after a delay?
Or maybe you were browsing your favorite sports website and as you try to load the next page, it takes a while to load and comes back with a timeout error?
These situations are frustrating, and not what we expect when we look at a site. In both cases, the cause may be not having enough PHP workers allocated to a site. Without enough PHP workers, a site can’t process all site requests that come in if there are a higher number of them. It’s not a good situation, as site speed is incredibly important for converting visitors to sales leads and customers.
What is a PHP Worker?
A PHP worker is essentially a mechanism that handles requests for a website that require back-end processing. Generally, any non-static or cached files that require processing are handled by PHP workers.
This is usually active tasks like an inventory check on a specific item or it could be something as complex as viewing and listing all prior orders for a customer. When a PHP worker is started, it remains persistent until processes are completed or certain conditions are met.
Think of PHP workers as a check-out line at a grocery store where each item that is to be scanned is a PHP process.
If you only have one PHP worker (one checkout line) then everything must go through that single checkout lane, and the cashier can only work through one order at the time. PHP workers can limit the number of concurrent, or simultaneous, transactions on a site. As previously mentioned, if you have only four PHP workers (four checkout lines) the site can only process four transactions at once.
However, this does not mean that the fifth customer (PHP process) or beyond does not get processed. PHP processes are placed in a queue for the worker which means it processes the first request in line then moves onto the next PHP process in the queue. In other words, a long line forms and people start waiting.
Luckily, PHP workers process the information faster than grocery store cashiers. They work very quickly and can clear many and most processes within milliseconds. By having only a few additional PHP workers, you are able to have many more concurrent processes that can be run at one time, meaning more customer orders can be processed at once.
What Happens When You Have Too Few PHP Workers
Let’s say you have only two PHP workers on a site and you have several plugins and a heavy theme. Those two PHP workers will constantly be used only to process plugins and theme processes leaving a queue to build up immediately for new page requests from visitors to your site.
If you are running an ecommerce site on top of this, it will only increase the queue amount. Much like customers waiting in line, some PHP processes will abandon the line. Processes that are not written to abandon the line, or time out, and will sit and wait. Then, they will begin to put a much higher load on server resources. It’s like the checkout line is now wrapping around the block!
PHP processes on a WordPress website can be as simple as the submission of a contact form or a request to geolocate a visitor based upon their IP or zip code.
For eCommerce websites, this can look a little different. Items such as new orders being processed, carts, and customer logins would all utilize PHP workers. The products or descriptions will usually be cached so that generally would not require a PHP process for viewing. Having only three to five PHP workers means that you can only have that many simultaneous transactions on the website and that the PHP workers will process requests in the order they were triggered (just like a shopping line).
How To Lighten The Load For Your PHP Workers
A common problem area to start with for PHP workers is having too many plugins and heavy themes. You can generally help alleviate issues caused by a bloated website with these tips:
Site optimization can get complicated, especially with sites that experience heavier traffic which requires more attention to detail. Generally, the larger the site, the more efficient the site must be in the way it requests its styles, products, orders, and customers. This way, you utilize the PHP workers for general site functionality less and PHP workers can process what matters – your traffic – effectively.
Hostdedi plans come with enough concurrent users for even the largest of sites to manage traffic.
With Hostdedi, you already have 20 concurrent users as part of an XS plan. This increases in increments of 20 as you move up to the XXL plan (which has 120).
Other managed application platforms offer anywhere from two to four PHP workers in introductory offerings. Hostdedi Managed WordPress and WooCommerce also have server-side caching built-in which helps minimize the use of PHP workers to process static content, allowing the PHP workers to process requests from the people who matter most: your customers.
Maintain a Faster Site with More PHP Workers
PHP workers can manage thousands of processes each, however; many factors come into play, including:
How many exterior calls are they making?
How many plugins are competing with inquiries to the database?
Additionally, adding PHP workers to a site will also increase the resource allocation being used from the server. The more PHP processes running, the more RAM and CPU allocations will be needed, thus creating heavier loads on the server and having as much optimization as possible can reduce that server load. PHP workers are key, but they are not magic, one-size-fits-all solution.
The more plugins (even inactive ones), the more PHP workers are utilized to process non-static requests. The same applies to heavily featured themes. For this reason, it is always a good idea to use caching and a CDN to help reduce the task load for PHP workers. This will optimize your site to process customer requests in the fastest manner possible.
Start your WooCommerce store knowing that it’s ready to handle traffic requirements. Learn more.
Liquid Web is a proud sponsor of the WordPress community. This year was our first year as a global sponsor, which means we sponsored every WordCamp in North and Central America. That also included WordCamp US 2019 in St. Louis at the platinum level. This is part of our ongoing commitment to support the WordPress open-source community that supports us.
WordCamp US 2019 is the largest WordCamp in North America each year. Not only did we sponsor the event, but also two of our colleagues, Chris Lema and Steve Grunwell, volunteered their time to prepare and give presentations to the conference attendees on their active areas of expertise. In total, about 20 of our Liquid Web teammates went to WordCamp US. Below is a roundup of how it went, what we thought and what we learned.
State of the Word
One of the highlights of WordCamp US every year is the keynote speech given by one of the co-creators of WordPress, and CEO of Automattic (makers of WordPress.com), Matt Mullenweg. During the State Of The Word, over 1500 conference attendees gather for an update on this year’s latest developments in WordPress. After this, Matt Mullenweg opens the floor for an open Q&A session with any attendee. It is a very unique event.
Among some of the more interesting developments in WordPress during 2019 was the release of the Open film, a film about the WordPress open-source community, ongoing developments with the Gutenberg block editor, and other items. Additionally, Matt Mullenweg referenced the 9 goals set for WordPress at the State Of The Word last year in 2018 in this blog post. Most have been accomplished!
Alex Denning, owner of Ellipsis Marketing Agency, gathered a live Twitter thread of the rest of the updates delivered at the State Of The World.
Hello! This is my thread for State of the Word 2019 @WordCampUS! @photomatt is going to tell us what’s up with WordPress #WCUS
Of course, the main attraction during WordCamp US is the community-presented talks. WordCamp US consisted of two days of talks, and each day had three tracks. The last day was a Contributor Day event. At WordCamp, no speakers are paid–the whole conference, in fact, is volunteer-driven. Our teammates Steve Grunwell and Chris Lema presented. Steve spoke to us about testing in WordPress, and Chris spoke on business and strategy.
fun fact: did you know our Managed WooCommerce and WordPress plans at @LiquidWeb automatically update themes & plugins with visual regression testing? pic.twitter.com/dT4y6RgBjW
— CHRISTIE, the parent company of Christie Chirinos (@xtiechirinos) November 2, 2019
In addition, Nathan Ingram from our sister company over at iThemes hosted a panel called “How The WordPress Community Can Embrace The Next Generation.” In this panel, we watched younger WordCamp speakers present on what they’re excited about and what gets them interested in the community. It was an excellent reading and inspiring session.
We also attended the highly anticipated workshop by Rebecca Gill. Rebecca walked attendees through a holistic understanding of what it means to have a solid SEO strategy. As we know for both ourselves and the merchants that we serve, having a solid understanding of SEO is key to success as a web professional in 2019.
All WordCamp US events end with a Contributor Day. Contributor Day is a collaborative effort among the attendees of WordCamps to give back to the WordPress project. Attendees gather in a large room and learn how to make the WordPress open-source project better through their contributions. Contrary to what some think, you don’t need to code to contribute to WordPress. Many teams focused on improving open source marketing, providing support for the open source project, and more. Our team sat in on the development, hosting and marketing contribution teams.
The People & Their Feedback
Of course, for our teams at Liquid Web and Hostdedi, one of the most exciting parts of going to a large event like this is getting to talk to new and existing customers. This was a great opportunity for us: at our final count, we talked to over 110 people over the weekend! We also met some of our favorite customers such as DC-based Knucklepuck and the fully-remote Beacon Agency. In addition, some of the other sponsors were also people we were excited to meet. We were pleased to see AWS Lightsail and Google sponsoring WordCamp US. Opportunities for technology and collaboration that make the life of a web professional easier and better are apparent at WordCamp US.
We also use this opportunity to listen deeply. Our partner team representatives consistently asked one of two questions to prospects depending on if they were technically minded or business minded. Either “Tell me about your business strategy for the coming year” or “What hosting and business processes have you changed to make your life easier?”
We learned about what’s making the web better, and we contributed information about our highly profitable affiliate and partner programs, as well as the time and cost-saving benefits of our Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce plans.
The Activities
Of course, no event is complete without a host of activities to keep everyone entertained and engaged. At the Liquid Web booth we had a photo booth that both employees and attendees used to take photos of themselves, share them with friends, and learn more about our offerings. It was a fun opportunity to kickstart conversations and share in the fun.
We believe that our Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce offerings allow web professionals the flexibility and freedom to focus on what really matters: growing your business and staying happy and healthy. For this reason, we decided that one of our swag items would be Liquid Web-branded hammocks. These hammocks were a huge hit! Our key agency partners and affiliates were invited to receive a Liquid Web hammock, and in addition, we gave them to potential new partners and affiliates to enjoy after the event.
Finally, the Liquid Web booth served as the recording location over the weekend for theWomen in WP podcast. They interviewed attendees who identify as women about their experiences. At Liquid Web, we have an ongoing commitment to increasing diversity in technology and it shows. Check out the Women in WP podcast recorded episode at our booth on their home page, as well as our own Liquid Web Women In Technology series.
Our team contributed and gained a lot from attending WordCamp US 2019. But you don’t have to travel all the way to St. Louis in 2020 to do the same thing. By checking out the WordCamp Central page, you can find a local WordCamp event near you–and if it’s in North or Central America, we’ll see you there! In addition, 2020 will also bring us WordCamp Europe and WordCamp Asia, in Porto, Portugal and Bangkok, Thailand respectively, for our international WordPress fans. We’re excited to go into 2020 energized for more success with WordPress and WooCommerce. When it comes to your next choice in hosting and managed services for your WordPress and WooCommerce site, consider our Liquid Web application hosting on our Hostdedi platform.
Christie Chirinos is the Product Manager for Managed WooCommerce Hosting at Hostdedi. Christie is a passionate advocate of online business owners, and is a frequent speaker and writer on entrepreneurship, strategy, marketing, technology and activism. With her previous experience as the co-founder of Caldera Labs, creators of top global WordPress plugin Caldera Forms, she knows both what makes an online shopper tick, and the unique challenges that today’s modern website creator faces. Christie has a Master of Business Administration degree from Florida State University. When she is not working, you can find her with her cat Snickers in her home in Washington, DC. You can also catch her on the WPMRR WordPress Podcast every Tuesday.
Another year of WordCamp US has come and gone, and we hope everyone who attended – and didn’t attend – found the best hosting solution for their business. This year, our partner Liquid Web was in attendance. Not only did they offer some incredible booth experiences (recap article to come!), but team members also hosted sessions and talked community.
Carrie Wheeler, executive vice president and COO of Liquid Web, talked with the Women in WordPress, discussing her journey to where she is now and how Liquid Web and Hostdedi are offering innovative solutions that help both merchants and content creators to do more. Below are some of our highlights.
On her journey to where she is now
“It’s been a “three decade journey. Started in consulting. I started in software development. Spent a couple of decades in telecommunications […] and along that path got super passionate about cloud hosting.”
On why she has such a passion for cloud hosting
“I’ve just seen the entire explosion of technology […] and it is just such a huge enabler for businesses.”
On creating innovative solutions for the community
“We could not be happier to be a big part of this community. We love the fact that it is the democratization of publishing. [And] we’re putting together the best platform you could possibly have for both content and commerce.”
To hear the full podcast, watch the video below or visit womeninwp.com.
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