 Can you hear me okay? All right. Excellent. Okay, so if you're looking for word, press management and operations, you're in the right room. Hopefully a whole lot more. I do wanna tell my story today. I know this is gonna take up quite a bit of time, but there are a lot of things in my story as a business owner that I believe that will help you understand operations and management. This is a picture of my wife and I. And back when I didn't have so much great hair. One of the things, so when I first moved to L.A.J. Georgia, before we signed the papers to buy our home, I was unemployed, so I went full-time with Shepard's Loft in 2005. We had formed the business in 2000 with a couple friends from school. So it's been a long, a long time coming. It's been a long road, I should say. And I thought this picture kind of illustrated that road that it's been. And I like to say, my joke is it's been a 17-year overnight success. So I've learned a lot about what success is. It's not really a destination. It's the journey that counts. And so how this ties into management operations is that there's a lot of things that I learned because as you can see from the roadmap, I made a lot of progress and then I would go backwards. So the old wise tell, three steps forward, two steps back is true. But what you gotta remember is that the math works out, you're still making one step forward, right? So this is the journey that I have taken. The first real decision was choosing WordPress. And the reason that I chose WordPress as a, not really an agency, but as a company, was that I really wanted to give the power of being able to edit a webpage, give that power back to the business owner to help them to be able to help their business grow. The next big hurdle was, not a big hurdle, but a next key thing was choosing Divi by elegant themes. And this really helped because we were able to standardize what we were doing. So how many of you have used, bought a theme from ThemeForest? Anybody, couple, few, many, yes. So when you buy a theme from ThemeForest, hopefully you get a documentation of how to use that theme, which is good. But once you build the second or third or fourth website from a theme from ThemeForest, you realize that that's a lot of work to go learn how to use a theme every time that you build a site. And so that was, that pain kind of equalled the decision. It was like, okay, well let's just pick one technology. Let's pick one theme technology and work from there. And so we chose Divi by elegant themes. One of the next things that really made a difference for me was putting in a support system. There are, so again, this is also management, right? So how do you manage all of these methods of communication? You got Twitter, Skype, text, email, Facebook. I mean the list just goes on, right? There's this big huge, everybody has their preferred method of communication and they don't really care how you prefer to communicate, right? And then on the back end of this, since we're talking about how we're gonna manage all of this, on the back end or the bottom, so I always picture a funnel, right? So the funnel is how do we get all these different methods of unification to come in to one place, to one centralized location. And then on the bottom end of that, like an hourglass, you have all these solutions. Okay, well I know how to fix this and I know how to fix this. So we took all those solutions and put them into this support system and then, as long as the communications have come in, we can use those solutions and insert them into the responses to the client. And so this can drastically help you save time when you're trying to manage a website. Then the real big difference was setting up a referral program. And this will work for any kind of business, but it changed the game because it solved two problems at once. One, it solved the problem of, okay, well I need a sales force. Well, how do I hire sales people? I don't have any money to hire sales people. But setting up a referral program does that. It allows you to have a formal way of paying people to help sell your services. And of course that ties in with WooCommerce. Again, choosing one technology, this is the technology we're gonna use to deliver what it is that we build. So the WooCommerce and the affiliate program together was awesome in that we, and then even after we've got web designers to partner with us and to bring their customers to us, we went back to our own clients and said, hey, you can pay online now. And it's really kind of funny because I think about, wow, we started a web-based business back in 2000 and we were using QuickBooks to send invoices so the clients could print them out and then mail a check through the United States Postal Service. It was ridiculous, right? Why would you do that? When you can build a website that can process those payments. So that was a big, huge change in the acceleration and the growth of our business. The final key point was a CRM. And I guess my point here with telling my story is that this is how you can manage your day-to-day operations, right? You gotta find the ways, you gotta find what's sucking up all of your time so that you can find some kind of method and process to be able to handle it so you can focus on the things that you want to do. And so getting a CRM in place allowed us to automate one simple thing which is getting new customers to fill out a recommendation form. But it didn't really work instantly, there was one piece that was missing and that was booking an appointment. So how many of you have ever sent an email to somebody that you wanted to talk to, a client or a friend, and then say, hey, are you available on Tuesday and they respond, no, I'm booked on Tuesday, what about Wednesday? No, I can't do Wednesday, how about Thursday? Okay, Thursday is great. Let me send you an invite. And then next thing you know, there's like five emails, right? All over just trying to set an appointment. If you've got Office 365 or if you've got a CRM, it's real simple, you get the URL, hey, I've already got some designated times and I'm available, just click on the link and set an appointment. It's one email. So again, one of the big challenges with management and not just WordPress, but if you're running an online business or a web designer is trying to manage all these emails as well. Third component here is training. And WordCamp is awesome from that perspective. You can learn a lot here at WordCamp. There's an additional thing that I did, which is I went and got my Scrum Masters training. So I'm a certified Scrum Master, which means I am certified to use the agile process, which is exactly what it sounds like. And again, this is another way that you can operate linearly and be able to manage multiple things is the agile process, you just do little increments, break things into little tiny steps. And that's all it was. It was very simple. And other types of training that I've personally done is I started investing more time than myself, reading, reading books, audio books, like John Maxwell and Zig Ziglar, one of my favorites. Then also in scouting, some training there, I took my Scoutmaster training, also my Trainer's Edge training, which tied back into how to present. So these are the three things. I believe this was by Robert Kiyosaki. Hope I didn't misspell his name too bad. But it's leadership, training, and teamwork. And that all plays into management operations because what I want you to think about is what are your skill sets? Where are you, and whether you're managing one website or many websites, where's your skill set at? What is it that you want to do and accomplish? Should you be the leader, or should you have, and find the team person, find somebody that's gonna work with you, to be able to manage a website? Because even just one website takes a lot of different skills. And so this is really the challenge, right? So you need a copywriter, you should have a designer, maybe you got a marketing person. And if you're a blogger and you're just that one person, you still can outsource, right? So then you have choices. You can either do it yourself, you can go to Upwork and find a contractor, or you can choose a specific technology, right? Through a theme or a plugin, and that comes with support. And I highly recommend, and I'm a big advocate for using premium themes and plugins, because that's part of your team now, and that's how you can help manage your website, and other websites, is by building your team. And so those are kind of the three components that you need to be able to do your operations. So okay, so here's the big picture. The last year, I think this number went down, that the two years ago, prior to that, it was the same. 83% of the content management systems that needed cleaning were WordPress. This is kind of good and bad. There are over nine billion WordPress websites, I believe. It's an astronaut, a large number. None of the other content management systems like Drupal or Joomla or any of the other ones, even come close to how many WordPress installs there are. So we're always gonna have the largest number of websites that needed cleaning after they've been hacked. But I believe that we can do better, because if you look at the next statistic underneath that, 39%, we're talking almost half of the websites that were hacked and needing cleaning simply were not updated. Okay, if you only remember one thing, it's mash the update button. That is the core of your management and operations is mash the update button, because it impacts everything that you're doing. These are some statistics from 2016 and 2017. This is a personal survey that I've conducted. So it's a small sampling. Some people actually, right here from Raleigh, 69% of the web designers have used WordPress for more than three years. 71% of us don't have a ticket system. That's kind of sad. 69% don't run upgrades at least once a week. There it is. This is the core problem that we have with management operations. We are not hitting the update button. And the last statistic there really says it, only 81% of us, well, 81% don't enjoy doing WordPress operations. So that leaves like 19%, right? So only 19% of us only enjoy doing that. So if you're not in the 81%, or if you're in the 81%, then this is where the leadership and the teamwork comes in, right? So you need to go out and you need to find somebody that has this skill set or is willing to, it's not even really a skill set. It's just very mundane. Just go in, mash the update button, right? But there's other things. So we're gonna expand on that a little bit. But I wanna take a minute here. To give you a chance to participate in this year's survey, which I'll be using in next year's presentation, you can go to bit.ly slash wordpress-agency and you can fill that form out. If you, especially if you have, if you're managing more than one WordPress website, you wanna go fill that out and help me build those statistics. Okay, a couple of definitions. I call maintenance as anything that's add, edit, or delete. So when I say maintenance, that's what I'm referring to. Support, I consider running the updates, doing the backups, fixing anything that breaks, right? And then a framework is the beginning set of code. I believe this is an evolution process. Typically, a framework, I believe it's changed from just being a theme or a control panel that allows, that gives you options and works with multiple themes to where it's kind of come down to where you just have one theme. And it's even expanded by that because some themes have their own builders, right? So Divi being one of those, the Divi builder, they actually built the theme first and then they built the plugin, the Divi builder plugin that you can put and it actually will work with other themes, right? So now we're kind of morphing from the framework being something like elegant themes or genesis to using these form builders where the form builder is really becoming the framework of your WordPress website. Then the last piece there, the theme set of templates used for building webpages. I think this is kind of fading out, but just as I described, because the page builders are really taking over the industry and now you really only need two templates, right? You need a default template that has a sidebar and then you need a full width or blank, that's it. You really only need two templates. Okay, so four hidden values of maintenance and apologize, my fonts may be off. I've changed computers three times. Okay, the statistic here is 63% of leaders, of operations leaders, say that they don't understand what the customer's value. And so this is a very undervalued task as operations and management goes. People are not gonna say, they're not gonna thank you for updating their website most likely. They're not going to, but if something goes wrong, if it gets hacked into, they're gonna say, hey, it's your fault, right? So they're gonna point their finger at you when something goes wrong, but they're not gonna appreciate the fact that you do all of this work behind the scenes. So it's very undervalued in my opinion. The first four things, we're gonna go through each one of these four things. The first one's optimization, second security. The third is support and the fourth is products and I'll explain that one in detail. Okay, so the first one optimization. I don't know, I've lost count. I think there's over 40,000 plugins. Does anybody know what the rough number is? Over 50,000 yet? Anybody pay attention to that number? No. So there are a lot of plugins on the market and so oftentimes I see that we get plugin happy and we install a plugin and it doesn't do what we think and then we install another one and it doesn't do what we wanted it to do and then we install another one and another one and another one. Next thing you know, we got 15 plugins that are doing nothing except slowing down our website. So besides this top list of five things, one of the main things is just, if you're not using a plugin, just get rid of it. Just delete it. So our top five list here is clean the database, remove the spam, delete autosaves, reduce the image sizes and use a caching plugin. On the delete autosaves number three here, I wanna point out that I had a situation where a customer not only deleted their contact page but they also saved it. It was very unfortunate. And so we were so efficient. We deleted the autosaves. I don't know why you guys don't laugh and that was hilarious to me. So anyway, so he emails in the support success system and says, hey, I deleted my contact page. I was like, okay, no problem, go in. Look at the autosaves, they're gone. I was like, okay, we're just gonna have to rebuild the page. And luckily we kind of knew what was there and we were able to do that pretty quickly for him. So since then I've learned, I made a new policy that we're only going to delete the autosaves one day a week. I like to think of it as optimization day. We also have this guy that comes around in a truck and he gets our trash can and he puts the trash in the truck. I don't know if you guys, anybody, you just have one of those. So I call that optimization day but just because I'm like to be a positive person but I also take that same day. So that's the day, Thursday, that we clean out the autosaves. So you may want to develop your own policy for that. The next thing, number four, reduce image sizes. Guys, I hate to tell you but we're pressing, I have not seen, and maybe I'm just got blinders on, but the builders, even the Divi builder, I have not seen a page builder or a web press function that does this correctly. It will allow you to put a 4,800 pixel wide image into a hole that's this big. And you're like, why? But there's a couple of little hacks there, I'll be quick, I wanna tell you about those. But so just make sure, especially on the homepage, your homepage is 80% of your traffic, right? So if you don't do any other page, just make sure the homepage that you're not putting that 4,000 pixel wide image into that little big hole. And the neat little hack there is if you look, if you ever FTP or you look at the list of images in your, or even if you're in the media library, it has a little drop down. It says you can pick like a 640 or a 300. The problem is when you choose that and you say, okay, it doesn't use, it doesn't append the end of the URL to put it into the page builder. But if you know what that size is, if it says it's a 300 by 400, the hack is that you go in, if you got a URL bar there, you can put a dash 300, dash 300 X 400 at the end of the URL. And it'll pull that image, cause it does exist. And WordPress gave you the option to choose it in the drop down menu. It's just that it didn't assign it to the image box in your page builder. So the images are there. You just gotta make the connection. So that's a little hack. There is a theme forest. There was a plugin on theme forest that would assist you with it and unfortunately it didn't work right either. So anyway, so there's a little hack. Make sure you put the right size images there. The grunt way of doing this was just going Photoshop and make a 400 pixel wide image and put it in a 400 pixel wide hole. So there you go. Okay, so there and then use the caching plugin. My favorite is WP Rocket, especially if you have more than one website. You can get the professional one and that'll save you some money cause it's unlimited. Also, I'll point out my little bitly link at the bottom if anybody wants to fill that survey and help me out there. Two points here on assist security. That's what we're talking about. I already told you the first easy step which is to upgrade, just run the updates on your plugins and your themes. The next one is to update your PHP, update your core, your theme, your plugins in that order. The point here is just upgrade everything all the time. And then, so once you get into a sequence, maybe it's just one day a week, could be Thursdays, make sure you're running all those upgrades and cleaning out all your autosaves, right? Then the second big thing is to install your security plugin. My favorite is the iThemes security plugin. It has the most security options out of the box for free. And so I believe that's awesome but I do recommend getting the paid version because then you get support, right? So if there's a problem or you don't understand something, you can ask a question and you can get an answer. So that's... What was that called? iThemes security. So those are the two main things that you can do that are quite simple. I'll tell you a quick little story. We were managing quite a few websites, several dozen or more. And we also host those websites and we got into a situation where our websites weren't responding, there was something going on with our server. We were using a software, we were using a management software program, which I'm gonna talk about in a minute. And we were scanning the viruses every single day. And somewhere along the way, it ran an update the management tool that we were using was connected in to 11 different scanning services. So we basically used up all our resources on our server and maxed it out to 100% because we were running 11 security scans on every single website every day. And it just about brought our server down. And it was the same. So my point here is if you do the work up front with the security, if you use something like iThemes security and you do that work up front and make sure your website is safe, then you won't have to run scans every day. And you can save some resources because that would have cost a lot of money to be able to pay for those 11 different scans every single day, right? Support. Support is fixing anything that's broken and then also answering questions. So the conversation here really is, I'm afraid to run the update button, right? Has anybody just been like a little bit nervous about squashing the update button? Yeah, okay. It doesn't matter how many websites I manage or how long I've been doing this. It always does make a little bit nervous. But let me tell you, I mean, even the last three years, which is about as far as I can think back right now, I've maybe had one website that got a white screen. But I can tell you that if you did not run your updates and you've got some free plugin or free form builder out there or the Next Gen Gallery or Contact Form 7, not to call any names, but if you've got one of those and you didn't run your upgrades, probably within a week you could get hacked if you don't have your security in. So it's a lot more devastating not to run the update button than it is to take the risk of getting hacked and then having to repair your website even if this is as simple as just restoring the backup if you've got one or if you've got a piece mill it back together and that's no fun at all and that can take you days. Done a lot of those. The other key note here, Zendesk makes up 63% of the websites using it to technology for support. I like the third one down over there, Fresh Desk, not to be confused with Fresh Books. They're all together, Fresh Desk. I absolutely love my support queue. I believe it's the lifeblood of my business and depending on what you're doing, even if you're managing one website but you've got customers that you're trying to support, that could be your lifeblood as well. Again, that's about optimizing your communications. Okay, the fourth one, products. Probably not the right word that you're thinking about but really this is vendor license management. That's what this is. So I recommend buying premium plugins but the key here is that you want to, when you buy those premiums, make sure you register it in your website so that you can run that update so when you hit the update button, it's gonna get the latest version, right? And I realize there's some themes and plugins out there that don't have this yet but they should be getting with it soon. ThemeForest does have an Envanto plugin that will allow you to see what you've purchased and I believe there's even one that will allow you to pull your latest version of what you've purchased. So even if you purchase a ThemeForest plugin and it doesn't have an API key to update itself, you may be able to install the Envanto and connect it to your account and pull the plugin update that way. So it's kind of a back door and it's a very unusual situation but I just want to let you know that that's available. It's one of those hidden things that you wouldn't really know about but it is a way that you could keep your plugins updated. And then the other note there is, if they have a support form, I will go ahead and register so that you're getting that emergency situation and you're ready to ask a question and ask for help. And then there was, I don't know if it was here, I may be speaking at a certain, but the other key part here is when you go to that premium provider, when you buy a plugin from a provider, if some of them even ask right on the support form, give us a status report which says, what's your core version on? What theme are you using? What version of the plugin are you using? They will ask for all that information right up front because they want to know, basically they want to know if you ran your upgrade, right? So anytime that you have a problem, your first response is go run the upgrade. Do I have the latest version? Ask yourself that question. That's a great debugging process, okay? All right, so now we want to continue to increase our efficiency and be able to do things quickly. Nobody likes management. So let's just make sure that it's easy for us and if it's quick, then it's easy, right? So standardize the technology. That's one of the great ways. If you've got more than one website, use the same technology, it's okay. The page builders allow you to be creative so you don't have to go buy a different theme just for a hairdresser or if you are a hairdresser. You can use the same theme. You can use the same frame builders to build those websites. Really the second sub-bullet there, follow best practices. This really should have been its own point here. I didn't get a chance to move it up. Follow best practices. This is more convenient probably for you if you have more than one website. However, it could apply to just one website because you may want to think about what your accessibility policy is. You also want to make sure that what you've done is mobile responsive which affects your SEO results. You want to make sure you've got your SEO done. So you can build a set of best practices even if you only have one website. So my policy is always just go check my work. So when I finish a page, go look at it in the browser. Go look at it in different browsers and read it again. Look at it, read it again. So create those best practices for yourself and make sure that you're delivering something of quality to the web. Number two, this is where it gets a little interesting. Use management software, and I'm going to get into this a little deeper. You can either hire someone to do this again. So you can outsource, hire a contractor to do these operations for you or you can get some software. First, only explain the pain a little bit more. This is probably not 100% accurate, but this is my attempt at showing you how exponentially complicated things get. So this is a compatibility chart. So if you've got one website with 10 different plugins, then you've got 100 different possible conflicts between your plugins and your themes. I haven't really seen any core conflicts in a long time, so maybe we're past that. But if you had 100 websites with 100 different plugins, you have 10,000 possible incompatibility issues that could arise. But what I'm telling you before is, after three years, this is very minimum. But this is why you want to choose one's technology because the less plugins that you can use, the faster your website's going to be, also the more efficient you're going to be at building pages, but also the less risk you're taking at something breaking because you don't have as much there to conflict with each other. So a lot of great reasons to reduce plugin usage. Theme versus framework. This is a little bit interesting because I really feel like, again, that the framework is kind of evolving. It's moving more over to the page builders and the page builders are kind of owning that technology or that kind of that place. So a theme typically, again, is a beginning set of code and it gives you options to be able to change things. I like to think of the theme customizer. Does anybody use the theme customizer? You know what I'm talking about, okay? So really, those are options that are built into the core now, right? But some of your themes will actually expand those theme customizations and there's more options there. So a theme, depending on who built the theme, you may have less options in there. And also a theme is usually supported by an individual. So a web designer might create a new theme and that's great as long as that guy's around, right? And then features and options can be limited because he may just have a sole purpose. Again, if you're buying a niche theme, if it's just for book sales or something or if it's just an author theme that may be limited. So your compatibility with other plugins and themes may also be limited because again, you've got one person that's developing a theme versus a framework that's gonna have more options. And then oftentimes the upgrades are cumbersome. You know, or the designer that built the theme, he just decided, okay, we're done. Well, I've even seen a company that said, okay, well, we're not going to continue this theme anymore. And so then that, so you're really kind of stuck because you can't let technology get too far behind. So then you really have a limited amount of time, okay? Once you find out a theme is no longer, is gonna be discontinued and no longer supported, you need to convert it into something else. You need to get out quick. So here are the top five frameworks in 2018. Genesis, Tesla, Themify, Thesis, and Woo. These are all great frameworks. And of course, then number six there is my favorite is Divvy. It wasn't really in the top five, so I had to put it in there somehow. These are great frameworks. Genesis has been around forever. So they have a great system. And one thing that I wanted to mention a minute ago is that when you're doing your upgrades, the reason things are running a lot smoother than they used to is because the developers are now paying attention to the WordPress core. So the WordPress core says, hey guys, we're about to release a new feature in the WordPress or we're going to change the way this function works. So if you have anything that's connected to this function in your theme, then you need to update your theme and do a release. So the good thing is these guys are watching the theme developers are watching the WordPress core and they know what's coming. You got two weeks, okay? You got a week, okay? Let's push out the theme update. So if you're doing your updates every day or at least every week, right? Then you're gonna run that theme update first and then those plugin updates and then the core can just happen automatically. And then you're ready for core. So when the core drops down, you're not stuck with the white screen. And that's how you can really prevent a lot of maintenance issues. So why choose a framework? It's usually supported by a company, not just an individual. So your life expectancy of that theme is gonna be much longer. It's featured packed with options. And then it's also the compatibility is gonna be greater because they're gonna have a whole team of developers back there watching the core, making sure that everything's ready when it happens. So this was just a little analogy here. WordPress is the engine of your website. I call it the core, you can call it the engine. And your framework or your page builder is really kind of the body, kind of the fenders that's on your car. And then typically a child theme sits on top of that and it's kind of just the paint job and the clear coat that makes it shiny. So choosing a framework equals easier WordPress management. Again, this is all about choosing one technology to work with. You're gonna have less compatibility issues. It's gonna be easier to update. It's gonna be more secure because you updated it. And then it's gonna be faster and more reliable. So come on, let's do it right. This is Bossy's slide. Use your framework options. So this is where we start thinking about if you're wanting to become a hacker, right? Stay out of the marsh, right? Use your framework options first. If you really get in a sticky situation, then there's specific places like CSS. There's usually a custom CSS field where you can put some CSS code if something is really just not behaving or maybe it's just misbehaving in one browser. I love my Mac, but nobody cares about Safari. It's less than 5% of the marketplace. And it's got a lot of bugs. So Chrome is over 70-something percent of the marketplace. So you just gotta pick your battles there when it comes to CSS. Use purchased and professional plugins whenever possible. I think I've said that three times. I probably can't say it enough. I'm a firm believer in premium products. And that's it. So don't edit your theme. Don't edit your plugins. Don't use bulky plugins. My analogy here is I have opened websites that had three slider builders in it. Three. I just won, but three sliders. Is it really worth adding another 40 megs of files to your server, slowing down your website by five to 10% just to make that phone number go psh. And that's all you get. Is it really worth it? There's some really cool sliders out there and you can do some really great things. But my point is you need to kind of balance between do I really want this little thing to be animated? Is it worth the wait on the homepage? I mean literally, sliders are like putting ambles like right on top of your homepage. 80% of your traffic is now gotta wait another second. And if you gotta wait two seconds already, you add another second, you're up to three seconds. And then you add a big giant photo that's 5,000 pixels into a 400 pixel while whole. Now they gotta wait five seconds. There's some, I don't forget the statistics, but a majority of users are just gonna leave before your page even loads. So don't do those things. They're bad. Okay, so now you've got a choice. You can outsource your management or you can get some management software. So let's talk about what kind of choices you have there. Outsourcing benefits are break, fix, repair. If you're outsourcing it, they can do things like, especially if they're managing more than one website, right? So then they can do these things every day as opposed to you just doing them once a week. They can do those daily updates. They can be available to fix things. And then the other benefit there is if the company that you've hired to help you has an affiliate program, you can be a part of that affiliate program and you can also earn some recurring revenue on the back end. Okay, so here's some outsource options, us, of course. Our mission is maintenance free WordPress. But there's also some other ones out there, the Butler and the Valet and the Pentique. The important thing here is you need to look at what your requirements are. If you're working for a corporation and there are hours on Monday through Friday, nine to five, and you're in the Eastern Time Zone, then you need to think about, okay, well as most of the upgrades and things that are gonna be done need to be done in a different time zone because we don't want to impact daily operations or if you have a corporation and all of their customers are online in the evening and on the weekends, then maybe you want to run your operations during the day, in the morning. So you need to think about what time zone you're in and what your provider, what the outsource person is doing and when they run their upgrades and updates so it doesn't impact operations or sales for that website. Okay, so top five supported features. So that's another thing when you're looking at if you're gonna outsource the management is to look at what kind of services they offer. Some of them do not include small fixes. We don't include small fixes even though a lot of times we will but we don't say, hey, you get an extra hour every month or two hours every month to fix things. So you need to look at those little details when you're looking to outsource the management of your website. So whether or not the hours are included, make sure that they're doing daily backups. They're doing all the updates and this is an important note. Some hosting providers, they've started to catch on. They go like, oh, wait a minute, there's a whole thing here that's not happening which is management and operations, right? It got completely laughed out and there's a lot of companies that are still just doing hosting. Okay, you get five gigs of bandwidth, you get five gigs of space, you get XYZ. That's the garage that you just park your car in, right? That doesn't help you at all with the management. So you need to be aware that if a hosting company is doing updates, what kind of updates are they doing? Are they gonna do the core? Well, the core can happen automatically. You can just tell the core to update automatically. So are they really doing anything there? Are they upgrading your themes? Are they upgrading your plugins? And I think the real issue with the plugins is that if a company, whether it's a big hosting company like GoDaddy, I'm gonna use them, they're not here, I don't think. You know, if they are up running your, it's very difficult for them to run your plugin upgrades because they don't know what plugins you have and they don't know how you're using those plugins. So GoDaddy doesn't have a set of technology. They don't have one technology that they use to design and build websites. They're basically saying, here's a garage, you can park your car in it. And however you want to change the oil is up to you. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to them. So when you're making your selection, take these things into account and make the right choices. Make sure you're getting a hosting provider or if you're using an agency or a management company, make sure that they're in the right time zone and they're doing the right things for you, okay? So this is also some of the benefits of management software and I'm gonna show you a list here in a minute, the most popular ones. But the monitoring, so these are additional services that you would get that you would have to go out and find individually. I think I'm using service called Status Cake for monitoring. So it's an external website. I think I'm kind of locked in on the price. I don't know if they have a free version but it will do a string test on your website to make sure it's still online, which is kind of cool because if you got the white screen, the string is gone and the monitor service says, hey, your website's down. So that's kind of an external monitoring service. There's also other kind of monitoring as well beyond just being up. But the virus scans is another service like Security. I think they're the best in the industry and you can purchase security services directly. But it's also included in one of the management software tools I'm gonna tell you in a second. And then again, the small fixes. But so my point here is that sometimes when you're hiring a management company, they're gonna be able to give you these additional services as opposed to you going out and paying for them. They'll be bundled. Okay, so here it is. Managed WP is number one on the list. That is the management software that I use. It was purchased by GoDaddy, so there's their positive plug. And they're doing really well with that. Those tools that I just mentioned to you a minute ago were included in that list. They give us a performance monitoring. They give us virus scanning monitoring. They give us uptime monitoring and that's all included or they've made it so that you could purchase like a 50 cents, dollar, dollar, 50, whatever, but you can pay per item of what you want to have on your website just depending on how vital it is to your business, right? I have tried many of these depending on what your budget is. There's Jetpack is out there. I think security or SYNC, I think SYNC was okay. Infinite WP was kind of nice. And then I think there was one other one on here. Main WP is not listed here. I think it was one of the ones that I actually wanted to use, but the user interface wasn't quite as nice. So we ended up sticking with Managed WP. So again, so here's your next challenge, right? Is what is the cost versus the value? I'm using little stars to kind of indicate the value. Managed WP is probably well known as being the most expensive management, WordPress management tool out there, but that's probably because of all the add-ons that you can get. Like I said, you can get backups, performance, fire scanning, uptime, and then there's reporting. There's actually even SEO. So it'll do, you can connect your SEO, your Google Analytics account, and it'll include that in your management report and just email it out to yourself, your boss, your client, whomever. So you'll have to make the right decision for you financially, but I recommend that you get one if you don't have one. Okay, so these are my top five favorite tools to fix stuff, because we fix a lot of stuff. The Better Search and Replace is super awesome. It does exactly what you tell it to do, so if you make a mistake, your website's toast, so if you use that tool, be very, very careful. Again, these tools are very helpful if you're migrating from one server to another and then you need to clean up or clean up the site. So Better Search and Replace is great to find and replace those development URLs when you're launching the site. WordPress, we've used it to be able to search and find viruses that's being hacked. The Broken Link Checker is a really good tool. I highly recommend that one. The Quick Page Post is one of my favorites. It's, that's one of the few plugins here that you can actually leave installed. And then the Database Manager, again, if you're migrating from one place to another, you can eliminate. And this is a really good tool for inspection as well. If you think that you have been hacked, you can install this WPDB Manager and you go in and you click on the database, the main link in the left column, and it'll show you a list of all the database tables. And you don't have to be a geek to know if you see two different prefixes in there, something's wrong. That's a good indicator. Either A, somebody didn't clean up when they moved and recycled the boxes, or B, you've been hacked and somebody's picking back off your website. And I've seen a lot of that and that's an easy indicator. Also, another indicator there is from that tool is that you can look at the size of your database and if you're running a blog and it's only two years old and you're over 20 mags, you're bloated. You need to go on a diet, something's wrong. So if you've got a big website, maybe you got 2,000 pages and you get 2,000 hits a day, maybe it's okay if you're over 20 mags. But after a while, you'll kind of get the feeling of, okay, well yesterday it was at 10, today it was at 22. And now I see two database prefix tables in there. Then that's a good indication that you've been hacked and somebody's cloned your site from within. And then your security alarm should be going off. Okay, so all of these tools, except for the quick page, you don't wanna leave any of these tools installed and running, especially the broken link checker. It will eat your resources and it will slow down your website, I guarantee you. I love the tool, but once you're done checking all your pages, I always think about, my uncle used to have a garage shop and we would go in and we would change the alternator, even it's a battery, whatever, something simple. And we'd have our little Coke flat with our tools in it and we'd get the tools we needed and we'd carry it over to the car and we'd fix whatever we're fixing. So my point is, when you get done fixing the car, put your tools back in the toolbox. Don't leave these plugins installed, deactivate and delete, get them out. Okay, so the results fill out the WordPress survey. So if you have not filled out the survey, please do that for me. And at this time, I will take questions. I don't know what time it is, is it 1.50? 1.51, okay, now I'm in. Yes, sir? Oh, it hasn't? No, it's not. That's very disappointing. I'd love to, if there's anything else to add, I'm gonna say, we're leaving it over. So expect a new plugin with a slightly different name. It'll do the same thing. So my question is, I use i-Things a lot. Good? Have you ever used the Pro version? I have not used the Pro version, no. Okay. That's why I wanna find out how long it probably is. No, I haven't used the Pro version, and thank you, you bring up a very valid point. If you're installing plugins and you see that it hasn't been updated over a year, then you probably should just not even use it. Again, my case point, or exception here with the broken link checker, is that you use the tool and then get it out. But the QuickDirects, I usually leave that one installed. But even with that one after, even after two months, Google is gonna pick up your old URLs. If you've got this redirects in there, then you probably could throw the redirect plugin out after a few months. There is a comparable plug. Redirects? Redirect. Redirection, okay, yeah. Yes, I've seen them use that one before too, as well. Yes, ma'am? That's a good question. It depends on how often you're publishing new content. Typically, when I use the plugin, I'm using it because I've migrated a website either from DAV to production, or I've launched the website on the live domain, or if we've migrated from another server to this server. So that's mainly when I use it, is when I'm launching a site. But that's a good question. Maybe for the small business, it's once a year. Maybe for a corporate business, maybe it's quarterly. If you're a heavy blogger, and you've got 10 years of blog posts, I don't know, maybe you should do it monthly. Yes, yes. Well, my reason behind saying not leaving it installed is because it will actually, it will keep scanning the website constantly, and that's what uses those resources. And so you don't want, you don't want it using resources all the time when you just check it. So just install it and use it when you're in there, and then when you leave, just take it with you. So yeah, just install it. I don't remember if there's a checkbox to turn off the auto scan, right? Right, right. Yeah, and then, and I know there's a force rescan on there, but I don't remember if there's a delay, if you could just, if you could tell it when to scan. That would be highly useful because like I said, it does eat resources. Any other questions? Yes. I believe the free version is good if you can't afford the professional version. I believe it, I believe the free version is the best, has the most options and is your best choice. Do you run iThemes and WordFence? Cause I did a research on iThemes and security, and I chose security over iThemes, but I run security and WordFence, the free version of WordFence on my site. Is there some? Okay, so WordFence is actually a plugin to use to help keep things out, the bad characters out, right? So it's, WordFence is kind of in there with iThemes security, but I believe iThemes security does a better job, but then as a tool, I believe WordFence is a little bit better when it comes to search and seizure, finding things. So that's where I prefer to use WordFence, but your security is gonna be your scanning, which is completely different. So you gotta have some kind of security plugin in the site to keep things out, but then either your management software or your security, something needs to be scanning at some point. And what I was getting around, what I failed to tell you guys is that when ManagedWP includes, now includes a security account. So out of one of the 11 sources that they use is security. They use their database to look for known bad characters. So if you're using ManagedWP and you set it to once a week, you're getting security services, which is awesome. Yes, for security or, okay, I have not used Jetpack for security. I believe there's a place for Jetpack. I have tried it multiple times, but when it comes to individual businesses, I've not been able to successfully continually use Jetpack, mainly just because of compatibility issues. My understanding of Jetpack is that you could, you pretty much gotta choose whether you wanna use Jetpacks or everything else. I mean, literally, because Jetpack has like 40-something plug-ins or extensions included in it. And so I had it was already down the road of using everything else. And if I tried to put Jetpack in there, I just had a problem. Every time I had a problem, I was like, oh, yep, Jetpack's installed, delete. Does that, I probably didn't answer your question. It's okay, all right, thanks. Yes, you had a question back there? Okay. But for anything else, login, it'll give you the login attempts. It'll let you know that you have any login attempts that's like spam-related. It's all right. Okay, we have one minute, so I wanna show you your results from today. My page, see if I can get to the results page. I think some of you guys filled out the survey. So if I'm going from, if I get back to the top here. Okay, so so far we are active clients, five to 20. So two people filled out the survey. Half of you have, so one of you have more than 20, the other one less, a number of active clients with e-commerce, so less than five, more than five. And using WordPress, more than three years. Ticket system, so we have 100% no on the ticket system. So really what we're interested in is how often do you perform your client's WordPress updates. So one of you doing this once a week and the other one is only once a month. So we're only 50% there, not really a big enough survey, but the big recommendation out of today is do your updates every week. That's the bottom line. Start doing your updates every day, every week. If you can get a management software, I recommend Manage WP, get it, set it up. Makes it easy, you log in, you press the update all button and optimize and you're done. And don't worry about it breaking because it's a lot better if it breaks than if it gets hacked. Because it's a lot less work to fix something that's because of a compatibility issue than it is to try to restore a hacked website. Especially if it's gotten hacked and it's been over 30 days and you have no backup to go to, then that's really bad. So then you have no restoration whatsoever. Yes. Again, I'm using Manage WP which uses Amazon. So the backups are there. I've tried UpDraft, which I thought was okay. I believe iThemes may even have something backup buddy. I've heard good things about that. We're out of time. If you have questions, hit me on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram and I'll be glad to answer those. Thank you.