Category: Case Study

So someone tried to hack my website, here’s what I did.

Thursday afternoon, I started to get an influx of dodgy contact form entries, this made me suspicious and I started an investigation on my own site.

I’ve got security hardening in place so happily the hacker was not able to get into my site.

Here’s a video of my investigation and how I cut the script kiddie off at the knees.

Video

Plugins And Software Mentioned

The security plugin I use is Wordfence and my CDN / Firewall software is cloudflare.

Wrap Up – So Someone Tried To Hack My Website

The moral of the story is to harden security before the hackers turn their attention to your site.  Get a decent security pugin in place and consider cloudflare for the nuclear option to block an entire country.

If you need help hardening the security of your WordPress site, click here to get a no obligation quote.

Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash

In this video walk-through I’ll take you through a password protected podcast setup I created for a client in WordPress.

The site is Qiological.com owned by Michael Max

Plugins / Extensions Used

Here is a list of the plugins / extensions used in this project.

• WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Subscriptions
• WooCommerce Membership
• PowerPress

Photo Credit: seefit Flickr via Compfight cc

I’m going to be black balled from the Guild of WPers when I publish this post, but here we go anyway! WordPress is not the only game in town, sometimes WordPress is not the best tool for every project {sharp intake of breath from the audience}.

If there is a pre-made website solution for a particular project you are planning, then please look into that before you try and build a custom solution from WordPress plugins and a theme.

WordPress is of course open source and free but any complex problem you are trying to solve probably needs some custom plugins and a decent looking theme and that’s not free.

Don’t get me wrong I’m a huge fan of WordPress and I’ve based my business around it but I have found certain situations pre-made single solutions software as a service is better.  Here are some examples:

Training – If you are looking to create a members only training site, there are plugins out there but they are pretty complex and expensive. There are software solutions to create your training business (more later).

Helpdesk – the plugins out there are not that great, and require a lot of setup, it’s far easier to assign a custom domain to Helpscout.

E-Commerce – I’ve talked about my love/hate relationship with  WooCommerce in Why I’m Breaking Up With WooCommerce if you want a simple robust e-commerce site look to Shopify, I built a test drop shipping store in a few hours.

CRM / Project Management – this is an area that plugin developers have not touched in my experience Basecamp and the rest do a better job.

.com vs .org – WordPress itself has two versions, if you want a simple blogging solution look to WordPress.com rather than creating a custom site with WordPress.org.

Case Study – A Course Website

I’m build a course to expand upon my idea of a µAgency, the free introduction course will be coming out soon and the paid version a little later this year. I was looking into the best plugins to use for a learning management system or LMS.

Here are my requirements:

• Protected course material (video)
• Student registration
• Payment gateway
• Email Integration to up sell courses and keep in contact with students
• Responsive out of the box
• User only forums for questions about content
• Integrates with Freshbooks so my accounts are done automatically
• Nice to have – affiliate program so students can refer me and earn a fee.

WordPress solution

For a WordPress solution I would need:

• Custom theme $50,
• Learndash plugin $150 (learn dash has zapier integration for Freshbooks)
• Private video subscription with Vimeo $100 per annum,
• wp affiliate plugin $99 per annum

So the total cost to build this site per year would be about $400 plus my time to bring all these disparate systems together and build the site.

While searching for LMS plugins I saw some ads for Teachable.com a single solution website builder, I decided to investigate.

Teachable solution

For a teachable solution I would need:

• 1 subscription to teachable $39/month

All of my requirements are built in plus some additional item such as author sharing, automatic affiliate payments.

Teachable is designed out of the box to sell courses. That’s all it does it has design back end features I need.

I signed up for a free account and my site was built, I added a few stock photos and voila a “school” in their terms to sell courses, it looks good has lots of great features and will enable me to build my course with ease.

They host my videos securely, manage students have back end email facilities, affiliates with auto payments, they handle refunds and payments through their system and give me a monthly payout.

The have zapier integration so I can add invoices to my system to automate my accounts.

Neil is a happy chappy, site built in about an hour, custom domain assigned.  My course structure is built I just need to drop in my videos.

I’m busy creating my content once that is done I’ll sign up for a premium subscription at $39 per month or  $468 per annum, so the price is similar but the effort was way less.  That payment is monthly rather than a large up front payment for plugins.  One sale per month will pay for this project.

Wrap Up – WordPress Is Not The Only Game In Town

Choose the best tool for the job, if you need a hole in a wall choose a drill if you need to dig a hole it’s a spade.

WordPress will do the job, but sometimes the effort outweighs results. I love WordPress and I’ll always provide WordPress technical support, but sometimes I tell my clients no, use this instead.

MicroAgencySchool.com will be opening it’s doors soon. I could have built it with Learndash but the quickest route to market is Teachable. I’m using the correct tool!

Are there any single solution website builders you prefer over WordPress? Discussion in the comments below.

Photo Credit: grahamsholt Flickr via Compfight cc

Last week I wrote about a client project where I setup gravity form routing, today I want to write about gravity forms dynamic content.

We can dynamically pass data into a form to add to an entry, this is how you can do this.

What Is Dynamic Content?

Dynamic data is content that changes each time the form is loaded, it can be used on the display of the form or on the notification sent out when the form is completed.

An example; my client has a single form but wants to send a different PDF to form completors based upon which page they complete the form on, so we dynamically pass this data into the form so the notifications can be different.

Types Of Dynamic Content

There are two ways to pass data into a form and use them dynamically, query strings an via the shortcode.

Query String

A query string is a piece of data passed into the form on the URL of the page, here is an example.

https://dev.neilmatthews.com/wordpress-technical-support?referrer=somedata

In this example we are passing in a parameter name called referrer, and the data will be “somedata”.

The time you would use query string is if there is a single contact form page and you want to vary the data.

Shortcode

We can also pass data into the form via the shortcode we use to embed the form, again here is an example.

gravityforms id=1 field_values='referrer=somedata'

Again we are passing in some referrer data and that is “somedata”.

You would use the shortcode id if you had one form used on several pages and wanted different data based upon where it is embeded.

Setting Up  A Field For Dynamic Content

When you add a field into a form you can make it populated dynamically.

Go to the advanced settings and there is a check box to make it dynamic then you add the parameter name you want to collect data from.

You can have multiple dynamic data fields on a site.

Using Dynamic Data

Once you have captured your dynamic data you can use it in logic on the form for example to set prices, or pass it into notifications.

In my example above I passed a download link to the customer notification email

Wrap Up – Gravity Forms Dynamic Content

If you need to pass data into your form before it is submitted dynamic data fields is the thing you need.

If you need help setting up a complicated gravity forms get a no obligation quote.

Photo Credit: Diari La Veu – http://diarilaveu.com Flickr via Compfight cc

I was working on a client project recently where they wanted to send notifications to different teams depending upon a selection made in the form, in this post I want to talk about routing gravity forms notifications.

The client is a property developer and they need to route emails to the sales team of each scheme   This is where we are two countries divided by a common language, I think this would be described as a housing sub division in USA speak.  When I read route it sounds like root in my head not rowt.

What Is Routing?

Routing is the process of testing fields from your form and then sending notifications to different emails based upon form content.

I’ve created a test form on my site to highlight this.  There is a drop down for department.  The options are sales, support and finance.

Once the form has been built move over to the notification section of the gravity form setup, that’s where the routing magic happens.  On “send to”, click routing then you can add the options to route to an email address based upon the drop down value.

Bonus Tip

If you want the email to also go to a central place such as a CRM system or a central support desk, add a BCC email address.

Wrap Up – Routing Gravity Forms

The same project also needed a PDF download based upon the scheme, but I’ll tell you how to dynamically pass data into a form in my next post.

Gravity form never ceases to amaze me with it’s great features and integrations, if you are still dabbling with free form plugins like Contact form 7 please give Gravity Forms a look.

If you need help developing a complex gravity form setup, get in touch for a no obligation quote.

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A lot of my clients have been getting reports from Google about page speed performance recently.  This tells me Google are taking site performance as an increasingly important factor in their ranking algorithm.

You can get a feel for your site performance by running a test from Google Page Speed Insights.

One of the indicators nearly every site is being flagged with is image optimisation or image compression.  In this post I’ll talk about some options you have to compress your images.

Compression Types

There are two types of image compress lossy and losslessly.  These are not real words I’m 100% sure but they are used routinely when talking about image compression.

Lossy – this is a compression type that will reduce your file size and impact a little on quality.

Losslessly – this compression type removed meta information and compresses the file but retains quality.

Resizing Images

No amount of compression is going to fix a massive image 5000 pixels wide that is uploaded to your site.

Before you add an image into your site, scale it down using your image manipulation software.

Compression Plugins

There are a number of plugins out there which compress images as they are uploaded to WordPress.   I highly recommend you install one to compress files as you upload them automatically.

wp-smush – I’ll not talk too much about this plugin in this post I wrote a full write up Can I Smush It, Yes I Can

kraken.io – this is a new premium service to me, it has a plugin like wp-smush that comprsses images as you upload them, but it also has an online service where you can compress images offline before uploaded.  I’m using this for my clients when I speed up wordpress sites.  This has a free trial plan and starts at $5 per month based on the amount of images compressed per month.

Online Image Compression Services

Sometimes images are outside of your media library and cannot be compressed by plugins.  Examples of this are images held inside of your theme directory or inside of plugins.

For a number of clients I have been using a great free service called Compressor.io.

Simply upload your image, select the compression type lossy or lossless and your image will be compressed.  Download it and re-upload it to your theme or plugin directory.

I’ve been getting some really good results with this tool.

Wrap Up – Compressing Images For WordPress

Google are taking image compression as a ranking indicator, I strongly advise you to compress your images.

I offer a fixed price top to bottom performance tuning service, including image compression,  if you would like a quote please let me know.

Photo Credit: will668 Flickr via Compfight cc

Sorry Woo it’s me not you, we just cannot be with each other any more, this is why I’m breaking up with WooCommerce.

It started out as a great thing, we made excellent e-commerce sites together and you still do that for other people, but there are some issues…

Fragile

When ever there is a major update to your software you break on me.

It’s generally not you but your mates, the extensions that cause the crash, they are not sufficiently tested with the new you and major updates to yourself will inevitably cause a crash.

I’ll have to restore to an earlier version of you and wait a couple of weeks for your mates development to catch up before I can apply that update.

Cost

Let’s face it you are not costly but your entourage costs a bomb, and we cannot do any real e-commerce without all your friends hanging around.

Once I  have a payment gateway, a subscriptions, bookable products, integration with my accounting software and mailchimp costs are mounting up.

For open source software you are very expensive.

Complex

Sorry to have to tell you this but you are very high maintenance.

It started out that your deep complexity was something I loved about you, but once you have more than a handful of products the difficulty of variable prices, complicated shipping fees, issues with pending payments and email not being delivered, it just too much.

Too Hard To Change

If I want to make even small changes to the way you are it’s a nightmare.

They say you cannot change the people around you, but you can change the people around you –  hat tip theminimalists.com

Take that time we talked about your checkout and how I wanted to move some of the items around the page, you lost it on me, you started telling me I couldn’t simply edit the template files, nooo! I had to write scripts that interfaced with your hooks and actions.

Anyone else would have some simple code but that’s not good enough for you.

I Hate Your Friends

I’ve touched on the extensions already but I’ve begun to hate some of your friends, they are dragging you down.

They make money sitting on your coat tails but they have no personal development.  They said they would work with you but when you made that change they dumped on you and stopped working bringing the whole relationship to a crash.

Some of the other are untested and of questionable quality, they tagged along from weird locations rather than the extension store (I’m looking at you Code Canyon) they worked for the you, several versions back, but didn’t change and are still on sale, what’s that all about.

Is There Someone Else?

No you are still the main player in my life, some of my friends are saying Shopify is a nice girl, and that Gumroad is sweet if you are selling virtual stuff but I have a lot of friends still living at WordPress and I need to stay there.

Wrap Up – Why I’m Breaking Up With WooCommerce

I hope we can remain friends after this break up, if you could just sort out your friends with perhaps a certification process where an extension is tested and proven to work with you I would be happy.  If you had an upfront costs and a simpler on-going support charge that was lower, again I would be happy.

All joking aside Woocommerce is good but these are real bug-bears I have with using and working with Woocommerce what has your experience been?

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