 So, good morning everyone, thanks for showing up and I'm really excited to be talking to you. I want to talk to you about automating WordPress workflows, how you can save time and a little bit about myself. So I'm Arun Bansal, I run a managed hosting company called server guy and it's okay. So I run a managed hosting company called server guy, we've been doing a managed hosting for last 10 years, WordPress, Magento, cloud management and recently we launched a new product called Breeze, it's a managed WordPress platform built on AWS and containers. So the question is who needs automation? Before we get started, if I could get a sense of the room, so who am I talking to? So how many of you are WordPress developers and do you develop themes and plugins or just build websites using, so how many of you build themes and plugins? Perfect. And how many of you are marketeers, anybody? And what about the rest of you? So how do you use WordPress? If you could share how you use WordPress, okay, sorry, litigation sector, education sector. So you have a website built on top of WordPress. So, okay, and what about you? How do you use WordPress? Yes, okay. So I think we have a mix of audience or some are expert developers and some are just starting out. So I try to balance it. Who needs automation? Pretty much everybody, okay. If you are a developer who's using others, plugins and themes to develop, you can gain a lot from automation. If you are building out themes yourself, there's a lot to gain from there. If you're running an e-commerce store or if you're running a website which captures leads, there's a lot you can gain from automation. In all the marketeers, boy, you can really, really amplify your campaigns and save time. And automation basically what it helps in much faster development. So things which will take x time, you'll easily be able to cut them by half. And once you start automating, the process becomes much less error-prone versus if you were doing things manually. And you can get to focus on your core tasks and yeah, and the best part of automation is it is scalable. So if today you are working on one website, you build out your workflow for automation. Tomorrow, the new websites which you launch or as your existing store or website grows, all the processes will be scalable. And effectively you'll be making a lot more money and that essentially what it all comes to. Now the decision comes what to automate. I say pretty much everything. Try to find where exactly you're spending most of your time and what are the parts which you do not like. See, guys, today's session would be super productive if you guys make it interactive. So as we go along, anything which you do not understand, just stand up and ask. We could do Q&A at the end but I would much rather prefer that as we go along, any questions you have, just ask. So when I say automate everything, I'll say just start with something. If today's session were to successful, if I were to save one goal which I have today's, each one of you can find one thing to automate in your website. Even if you're just starting out or if you have a store which is like five years old, six years old, just pick one thing which you think you can automate and take it back home and just develop a mindset of automation. First thing, so I'll start with some very, very basic automation things. First is a very powerful tool I call uptime robot. It's a free website. Each one of you should go and sign up. Everyone. What it allows is, in the free plan, it will monitor your website every five minutes. So could you tell me the name of your website? Your website? OpenLaw.org. So the website is openlaw.org. Just go enter that website on this platform and enter your email address. Every five minutes, it will go and check if the website is up. If it's okay, there's no problem. If it gets an error, it will send out an email. It can send out messages. Second thing it can also do is keyword tracking. So for example, you have a website. Just select any keyword. Say your brand name and tell it. It will go open your website. Check if that keyword is present. If it's present, it's okay. But if the keyword is missing, it will generate an alert. So this is very, very powerful. You'll never be caught off guard. So your client will call, okay, my website is not working. What can I do? Very simple, no cost. This is uptime monitoring. Any questions regarding that? Anyone of you who are already using uptime monitoring of some sort? What tool were you using? Uptime robot. Uptime robot, okay. Second thing, which I think everyone should try and use is image compression. Today, loading time, monitoring your loading time is absolutely essential. So whenever you build a website, first thing you'll want to do is take care of the search engine optimization, SEO. And today, a very, very key metric for having the website show up on Google on top rank is how fast your website can load. And for that, image compression is essential. So typically what happens is, so if you have a blog, there would be multiple people who would be entering content or adding images. And sometimes those images can be very large and unnecessarily large. So I've seen websites where simple image, which was supposed to be open on mobile, was like 6 MB. Doesn't make sense. All these tools, they automatically, whenever you upload any image, it will automatically compress, depending on what settings you have. So it can be a lossless compression. So you would not, so basically you would not lose any image quality. And so for example, this is image compression. We are using Short Pixel on one of our sites. Essentially it has saved 3.4 TB outside here. So essentially we saved 3.5 TB bandwidth using this tool. Third sort of automation, which I recommend is database cleanup. So now if you're running a small website, or if you've just built out a website, you can pretty much ignore this. This really comes into play. If your website has been there for like at least one year, there's a lot of revision which you have done. In WordPress, what happens is, every time you edit a post, a revision is saved. So it is really helpful if you want to go back. But over time, those revision history, they keep on adding up. And they just clog up your database. So to optimize, install any of these plugins, what they will do is, they will purge old revision files. So you can keep a setting. Say, three revision history is good. So whenever I make a change to my website, keep last three changes and delete the rest. It optimizes your database, again allowing you the website to load much faster to use less server resources. And if you're just starting out a website, just pretty much ignore this because this comes into play much later. Another very, very important automation is backups. I see a lot of developers, business owners say, okay, we'll take manual backups once every month. Or they say that our hosting company takes care of the backups. While all that is good, you have to have an automated way of having backups. So these are a few of the free plugins which you can configure. What these do is, every night or every week or whenever you configure, they will take the entire backup of your site and keep it off to that location. So that can be Google Drive, that can be Amazon Storage, or that can be a Dropbox account. Any place apart from your server. And another important thing you can try is broken link checker. This is something really important. So as your website grows, so the old pages, they would be referencing to some say external links or internal links within your own website. And whenever somebody changes their URL, essentially your website is taking your visitors to a 404 page, an error page. What broken link checker does is, it automatically on a regular basis, checks all the links on your website. And if anything is broken, it will give you an alert. So that is really helpful in terms of user experience and also in terms of SEO. So SEO is, guys, SEO is not just putting a lot of content, keywords, and description. Making your website fast, making your user experience better is also a very, very important part of search engine optimization. So these were sort of basic automation, which I think everybody can use. If you're just starting out, or if you have been using WordPress for last 10 years. Any questions so far? Okay. Another sort of automation, this is a bit more technical. So this is more for theme developers, theme plugin developers is, first is Git. How many of you know about Git or are proficient with it? Perfect. So pretty much anybody who wants to develop or become a developer has to be very, very comfortable with Git. What it will allow you is, you'll be able to set up right development workflows. So it can be either deployment or setting up staging server, building or having a much scalable architecture where you can scale up your servers. Second, I would recommend is Embrace WPCLI. So WPCLI is basically a command line interface for WordPress. So things which you do using user interface, you'll be able to do via commands. So it can be adding user, removing user, installing themes, doing a lot of customization. So you will be able to script a lot of things as a developer which you'll want to do using WPCLI. It is really very simple and really well supported. Another thing for developers would be task runners. So the developers in the house, so do you use SAS or less for developing any CSS framework? So manual compiling them every time is a big hassle. What these task runners do is, any time you code, make any development, any changes, it will automatically run certain set of scripts. So that can be compiling less or SAS. It can be linking your code. So JS link, very important for maintaining quality. Image compression. This is a bit different from the earlier image compression we were talking about. So any core theme files or plugin images which you have uploaded, it compresses those. Your CSS and JS minification. And these task runners, they also have a sort of auto reload and watch. So let me describe a development workflow. So you made certain changes to your plugin or theme. Then you'll have to save, upload and probably refresh the browser. What happens with these task runners is, they'll watch your folder. Whenever you save changes to any file, say CSS or JS file, it'll automatically compile and reload the browser. So even a few minutes saved in this workflow really adds up to in a year. And again, the best part for all the developers is everything is reusable. So if you today develop this workflow for a single customer, tomorrow, again, it'll come in handy and there'll be no additional work. So the first were general automations, then were developer focused. And these are marketing automations. Pay very close attention to these because all the websites, they essentially are built for marketing. Can anybody describe what marketing automation would mean to them? So how many of you are using your WordPress sites for marketing purpose? So what would marketing automation mean to you? Yes, perfect. So that is one way. So they basically sell subscriptions and whatever can help them sell it more, essentially is marketing automation. For somebody who's running a e-commerce store, for them, marketing automation would also mean whenever order comes in, whatever workflow they have to follow, say there are three departments, each of them has to be notified. That can be an automation. So in marketing automation, how I see it is, first thing is analytics. Today, when a user comes to your website, he is giving you a lot of data. How, and you just have to understand it and respond to it. For example, I'll tell you, in analytics, what we see is which pages the visitor is visiting. So for example, if he goes to pricing page and he goes to about his page, then you know the chances of him buying is a lot higher. So if tomorrow you want to retarget him, that is something you can do. So other is cookie with the GDPR coming in, you'll have to figure out automation workflows in which say only your European customers, they'll be able to see the cookie consent or now GDPR compliance. Does everybody know what GDPR is here? Okay, so I'll give you a brief. So GDPR today is very, very important. If you are selling or serving European customers, so if you're even collecting email addresses from anybody who is in Europe, so they call it EEA, European Economic Area or something, you, your website will have to be GDPR compliant, not just that your business is not located there. So with automation, you can ensure the data is being handled properly. Landing pages again, something very important. So anybody, how many of you do AdWords campaign? Google ads or Facebook ads or any other ads on your website? So landing pages, so creation of landing pages is also something I will suggest you try and automate. In AdWords, what happens is, there's a thing called quality score. So whenever a visitor is coming to your website, he would be coming via a certain keyword. So what product do you sell? In what sort of subscriptions do you sell? I have a WordPress plugin. WordPress plugin. So if somebody were coming with any particular query, you can identify that query and modify your landing page according to that or create a custom landing page. Now imagine you were to create multiple custom landing pages manually. A, that is impractical and super expensive. These are avenues where you have to understand your business workflow, understand that WordPress offers allowing you to automate all these and just do them. Call to action is also something you can try to automate. So there's a thing called A-B testing. In A-B testing, what happens is, so you'll have a, say, subscription checkout page and you can have two options. So if you have a cart, sorry, e-commerce store, you can have a button which says add to cart or you can have buy now. And you can run a test between both those call to actions and see which one performs better. And people have seen improvement of 2x, 3x. If the color is right, if the message is right, if the placement is right. So you'll have to figure out how you can automate that. Forms is also something very important in automation. So typically what happens is whenever there's a new form entry field filled in, that data will have to go to certain places. So it can be sales team, it can be the marketing team, it can go, so for example, we have a website in which a career pages, any form which is filled has to go to an HR and the team manager. So using forms, you can automate that. You can automate how much data goes to which place and then popups. So I know a lot of people do not like popups on their website, but if used right, if the messaging is right, if the context is right, they can be really powerful. So I was discussing with a friend on when popups make sense and when they do not. So imagine you have a blog and a visitor comes in, first time to read your blog. He hasn't even read and you show him a popup, subscribe to my blog. That is a bad kind of popup because you haven't even read what I haven't even read your website. I don't know if you're credible or not. Why would you want me to subscribe? So that's a bad kind of popup. But if you know the visitor has reached the end of that article, if he was reading that article diligently, now it is the right time to show the popup. That popup can either be subscribed to my blog or say if it were sort of a say a legal blog. At the end, you can say, okay, this was helpful. If you want the documentation done, or if you want professional services, you can fill in this form and we'll reach out to you. So in marketing automation, these popup forms, these are absolutely critical. You just have to understand how and where would they make sense and email automation. So whenever you get data, whenever a user would give you any data, you'll have to figure out what to do. So typically in any sales cycle, the website, user does not make a buying decision on first interaction. So if you have a website which is selling or selling any products or services, typically users would need anywhere between three to 11 touch points with you before he will trust and make a purchasing decision. Nobody goes to a new website without a brand and, okay, sell me this. Email automation comes in really, really handy. Now we know that everybody gets a lot of spam, a lot of emails, but if done right, there's a thing called drip marketing. So whenever you get somebody's email address, so for example, what we do here is whenever somebody summits a request of say managed hosting, that lead, could A, go to my sales team, who will reach out to them, but it will also be added to a drip marketing emailing list. So if you came in, so which subscription plugins do you sell? Which sort of plugins do you sell? If you could... Page builder. So what he could do is one, he could sort of retarget the customer, probably hand off to sales team, but also send out a series of emails which go after say every four days on why page builder is necessary, next week he could send out five beautiful websites which were built using that page builder. Third week he could send out a discount coupon saying, okay, it seems like you're interested. How about I offer you 10% discount? Something very, very simple, very easy to do. There are plugins available for all these. So plugins which are available within WordPress ecosystem and which are outside ecosystem, which are like huge marketing automation tools like Padot or Marketo or something. And the good part is with WordPress, for everything which I just talked about, you will find a free plugin, okay? So there's nothing so far where you really had to pay money. Everything can be done free of cost. And then comes external and larger integrations. So for example, one integration which we do is integration with CRM. So today you were to visit my website for the first time and whenever you fill in your email address, your details would go to my CRM. And every page which you visit, my sales guy would be able to see. So if you made a visit like today and now three months again, you again click my ad and came to my website. All that data would be fed into my CRM, which really helps the sales team in making decisions. A simple tool is post scheduling. So for example, if you're launching a Black Friday campaign or a new year post, don't try to go and manually post it. Their post schedule is available. Social media posting is also something very, very important and which you can very easily automate. So there was a time when your website was only source where you were putting content. But now it is sort of a hub. Any content which you put on your website has to go to multiple channels. So it has to be posted to LinkedIn. It has to go to Twitter. It has to be mailed to customers. It has to go to Facebook. All that is a manual effort. Figure out what exactly is your ideal flow and there's a plugin called Co-Schedule and multiple plugins out there which can automate that for you. And another thing which we recommend, mainly for somebody who's collecting leads or something is chat and chatbots. So for example, we have this chatbot on our website in which anybody who comes in, because it's very expensive to give round the clock chat support. So you'll be interacting with the chatbot. So if you want to move a project to AWS, it'll automatically initiate a workflow and a conversation which can eventually end up collecting email address on your behalf. So chatbots are very simple and very important. So any questions so far? Okay. They're multiple and they're just building out. You can tell me your exact use case and I'll probably suggest something. So there's a chatbot, a friend of mine actually is making that, it's called TARS, okay? There it will put up certain questions and depending on that it'll give results. And there are certain chatbots. So the one we use is from Zoho. It's called Sales IQ. This particular chatbot hands off to a user agent. So like one chatbots are essentially they're just a bot, complete bot, eventually you'll collect data or you'll help out the visitor. What we use is it'll do sort of initial screening, collect certain data and then hand off to a human. So if the lead is qualified, if he's much more interested then we'll want to talk to him. So you can definitely check out Sales IQ as well. You're pretty happy with that. Last integration we have is Zapier or Ift. So it stands for if this, then that or Zapier. Now this is something very simple and very powerful. What Zapier has done is it has sort of built integration for almost all APIs out there. So if you have any project management software, if you have any CRM, if you're using chat messenger, anything, it can make anything talk to anything. So for example, what we do is any time a new sales lead comes in, it goes to Zapier and it sends that to our sales channel on Slack, okay? Any interaction which happens, say for example, any comment which gets posted on a particular blog, rather than get it on email, you can configure it so that it comes to your messenger or if you're using telegram, it can come to that. So once you'll be using Zapier, you'll get an idea of what sort of integrations are there and it can come in really handy. And just to sum it up, find your routine tasks, okay? Just observe yourself. Note everything you're doing during a working hour. It will throw up opportunities of automation. Figure out where you're putting manual effort. Automation essentially helps you in three ways. One, it takes, it automates the boring part of your job. So whatever you don't like, you can remove. It can make you more efficient. So you'll be able to focus more on what you do best and it can make you a lot more money because it increases your capabilities. And this is the need to automate for everybody and it also bridges the gaps. So if two departments or data has to line multiple silos, that can happen and yeah, that's pretty much it. Thank you guys. And any questions? Perfect. So I'll be around if anybody has any ideas to discuss or any interesting case studies of automation, how they've done it. Love to hear. Thank you. Okay. You can go ahead. And unfortunately, this room, next to the room, you can move to your room, take these, and then you can see English in the picture.