Today, we will discuss why having your own plugin made for your store can be the right decision. You can get the features you want and the price tag for development doesn’t have to be outrageous. We hope you can see that custom software like your own WooCommerce plugin is a viable business option by the end of our post.

The Power of WooCommerce Plugins

WooCommerce leans on the power of the WordPress plugin system. This means a developer can write their own piece of code that directly interacts with WooCommerce in an imaginable number of ways. This plugin system has led to a large and still growing community of developers. Every day the number of WooCommerce plugins grows as people find more and more ways to improve the popular online store platform.

Need proof? Take a look at the WooCommerce tag at WordPress.org’s plugin repository. There are almost 1,000 plugins available that let you adjust, change, and modify WooCommerce. And these are just the free plugins you can download and install. There are more plugins, available at a usually small cost, that offer even more options. The WooCommerce ecosystem is so large that multi-million dollar software businesses have sprung up over the years solely to support it.

WooCommerce plugins are capable of impacting the front-end and back-end of your stores. You can use them to:

• Re-arrange and add new features to product pages.
• Improve the checkout process.
• Add new payment options.
• Include additional shipping options.
• Remove WooCommerce features from your theme.
• Add delivery and order tracking.
• Insert important order information in the admin.
• Track inventory.
• Monitor sales and refunds.

The list literally goes on forever. In fact, it’s so long that you might be thinking to yourself: “Why would I ever need my own custom WooCommerce plugin? There seems to be an infinite amount of plugins available already.”

Let’s talk about the benefits of having your own bespoke plugin developed for WooCommerce.

When a Custom WooCommerce Plugin Makes Sense

The beauty of custom software is that you don’t need to settle for what’s available. It’s crazy to consider that even with all of those thousands and thousands of plugins that there are still needs that can’t be met with existing solutions. It’s common to see people request a custom WooCommerce plugin when they have a totally brand new idea or need adjustments to an existing one.

Creating a Brand New WooCommerce Feature

Well, it’s true and we see it here at Link Software all of the time. E-commerce and online sales are such diverse and demanding businesses that most have unique needs. And because not every business has the same needs that means not every WooCommerce plugin offers the right features.

Maybe you have a totally new idea for a WooCommerce plugin. We are regularly asked to take on custom WordPress development projects that expand WooCommerce with unique ideas. Fortunately, WooCommerce is so flexible and has so many useful APIs and programming hooks, that new ideas are easy enough to implement.

Even though there are plenty of plugins already there are new ideas being generated every day. Remember, your business is your own with its own set of unique needs. So when you come up with something to enhance your store that doesn’t exist you can create it with your own plugin.

Rethinking and Reworking an Existing WooCommerce Idea

WooCommerce plugins aren’t just for new ideas though. In fact, a more common need is to take an existing idea and modify it slightly. Many of the free and commercial WooCommerce plugins on the market today are quite inflexible or too all-encompassing. Your store might need a new feature, or slight change, that is provided by an existing plugin but with too much overkill.

You can take the concept behind an existing plugin and replicate it to suit your specific needs. For example, let’s say you want to add a sales notification to your store. Existing plugins are available to handle this but they are quite elaborate and offer more features, and confusing interfaces, than you might want. A simple custom plugin that creates sales notifications quickly, and specifically, to your needs might be a better option.

Copying and modifying existing plugin ideas is common. The WooCommerce plugin ecosystem is full of bloated, one-size-fits-all solutions that sometimes make things more complicated than necessary. Taking an existing idea and trimming and editing it down to meet your needs is a great reason to build a custom WooCommerce plugin.

Connecting WooCommerce to Third-Party Software and Services

One of the common complaints about e-commerce is the number of moving parts. There are so many software applications and third-party platforms involved in making day-to-day operations work. You might have a separate tool for tracking inventory. Creating and monitoring delivery trucks might be an entirely separate system. Keeping everything consolidated and organized can be quite difficult.

You can create a custom WooCommerce plugin to manage all of your various systems. This is a great option to get your business data organized. We recently build a simple WooCommerce plugin for a client that wanted to import data into their CRM. The plugin adds a small opt-in field to their checkout screen and then, on the admin side, they can export out every customer who checked that field into a usable file format. Simple ideas like that, which allow you to pass data back and forth between systems, are a great use for a custom plugin.

In addition, you can use a custom WooCommerce plugin to generate your own reports. Collect data from every service you use in one place to get a bird’s-eye view of your business. Transferring data between WooCommerce and other software is a task made simpler with programming.

Is a Custom WooCommerce Plugin Right For You?

As we mentioned, at Link Software we work with WooCommerce and WordPress every day. If you have a totally new idea for WooCommerce or want to expand on something existing, please let us know. We can help you understand what it will take in terms of time and cost to see your plugin become a reality. The speed and low cost of custom WooCommerce plugin development will surprise you. Contact us today for more information.

The post Why a Custom WooCommerce Plugin Is Right for Your Store appeared first on Link Software LLC.

Thankfully, there is an easy way to handle this problem. We’re going to discuss the best way to import large MySQL database files. First, before we tackle the how, we will briefly discuss the why. It’s important to know why some MySQL database files quickly balloon in size.

Why Do MySQL Database Files Get So Large?

There are many reasons why your MySQL database files can grow to an unwieldy size.

Sometimes the answer is simple: your database contains quite a lot of data. In these instances, there’s not much that can be done to avoid growing file sizes. Our recommendation, in this scenario, is to consider breaking your backups into chunks. Logically dividing one large backup into multiple, smaller backups is often an easy way to manage large SQL dump files.

On the other hand, even small MySQL databases can generate large backup files. One common reason, often seen in older versions of MySQL, is not using extended inserts. In short, an extended insert combines multiple-row inserts into a single command. This helps trim down file size. With extended insert disabled, each row of each table will be its own insert command in your file. It doesn’t take much for even the smallest databases to grow into huge backup files when each row gets its own line in the file.

Extended inserts are enabled by default with modern versions of MySQL. If you are using a newer version of MySQL and still not getting backups with extended inserts check the mysqldump command you are running. If the --skip-extended-insert option is being used you’ll want to remove it.

What do you do if you are using extended inserts and your MySQL backup files are still very large? In that case, it’s highly unlikely your preferred MySQL desktop application or web-based application (like phpMyAdmin) will work. Instead, it’s time to use the command line.

Import Large MySQL Database Files with the Command Line

The best way to import large MySQL database files is via the command line. Specifically, you’ll want to use one of two methods. First, you can import your MySQL file straight into the database with a single command or you can use the source command for more useful output.

Traditionally, you import a file into a MySQL database with the following command:

mysql -h hostname -u username -p databasename < filename

Simply replace the hostname, username, databasename, and filename text with the appropriate text particular to your setup. If done correctly, MySQL will prompt you for the password of the username you entered and the import will begin. When the import is complete the prompt will appear to let you know things have finished. A downside of this approach, other than its limited output, is that occasionally it can choke on very large files. This method is normally reliable but it can fail often enough that another way might be better for you.

Alternatively, if you would like more output during the import and more assured results, you can use the source command. Simply log into MySQL on the command line using your username and password. Once in, you’ll see the standard MySQL prompt:

mysql>

Next, tell MySQL what database you want to use:

mysql> user databasename;

Finally, use source to tell MySQL what file to import:

mysql> source filename;

As in the previous example, replace databasename and filename with whatever is the appropriate text for your situation. In the end, once source begins to run the output to the screen will tell you as each query in your import file is successfully completed. This way you can get some form of real-time feedback that your import is, in fact, properly running.

Don’t Let Large Import Files Ruin Your MySQL Backup Strategy

Large backup files can be quite a hindrance to anyone’s database backup plan. Of course, nothing is so problematic that you should avoid making backups entirely. Simply using the command line techniques we’ve laid out can help you overcome any difficulties. You should be able to successfully import your data no matter the size of your MySQL exports.

The post How to Import Large MySQL Database Files appeared first on Link Software LLC.

The application runs on a virtual private server (VPS) from a very popular hosting company. We were therefore limited by what we could and couldn’t do to solve this issue. Initially, it was recommended that we split some of the application’s processes up between multiple users. This wasn’t the final solution but, in the end, we did take that advice to improve performance elsewhere. In the end, the problem was identified as an issue caused by our use of FastCGI.

What is CGI and FastCGI?

In short, CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a means for a web server to use an external application. In this case, that external software is PHP which is the language used for the application in question. FastCGI is a newer version of CGI built with performance in mind. FastCGI is a complicated piece of technology but the idea is that FastCGI starts a process that lives longer than one created with CGI. The intention is to reduce server load.

Figuring Out Our FastCGI Problem

The hosting company recommends all applications and websites use FastCGI. Until we began having issues, that is what we chose to do. This ended up being our problem. FastCGI has a number of settings that you can customize to increase performance. Unfortunately, our hosting provider wasn’t capable of changing those for us. In particular, we were looking to adjust the following settings:

• FcgidMaxProcesses
• FcgidMaxProcessesPerClass

Our research indicated what common, default settings for these fields were. Unfortunately, the hosting provider had these values very low. They were unable to adjust them for us at all. One of the risks of using a third-party server provider is you are at their mercy on occasion. This was one of those times.

In general, we prefer to use third-party hosts for our applications. Rarely do we spin up our own servers. Managed hosting, while it has drawbacks like this situation, is often more cost-effective for our clients.

Fixing mod_fcgid: can’t apply process slot Errors

In the end, the simplest solution is often the best. We switched the application back to using normal CGI, and the errors and memory issues went away. In addition, some of our other performance-related problems solve themselves as well.

With more server control, we could have solved this issue on our own. Bumping up the values of FcgidMaxProcesses and FcgidMaxProcessesPerClass would have probably sorted this issue out. If you are in a similar situation, running FastCGI with “mod_fcgid: can’t apply process slot” errors, then we recommend switching to regular CGI.

Do you have some questions about this FastCGI issue? Let us know and we might be able to lend a hand. Link Software has built web-based applications from scratch and supported legacy applications.

The post How to Fix mod_fcgid: can’t apply process slot PHP Error appeared first on Link Software LLC.

Let’s talk more about the value of an EDRMS and what I can bring to your organization. We’ll discuss the benefits of using an EDRMS. Then we’ll go over what solutions exist on the market, or via custom software, to give your business the right system for your needs.

The Benefits of an EDRMS

A proper EDRMS will offer your business and team many benefits. So many companies manage important documents in a haphazard way. You don’t want to improperly store contracts, diagrams, blueprints, and other key document-based resources.

Ultimately, this all leads to improved efficiency for your business and team. Anything that can make the workday better is worth investigating and an EDRMS is no different.

Let’s go over some of the key ways an electronic document and records management system can improve your day-to-day life.

Improved Document Accessibility

One of the great upsides of an EDRMS is that it makes your document easily accessible. Documents get lost. This is true if they are paper or digital. People regularly misplace important documents on their desk, in their email, or buried somewhere on a computer’s hard drive. An EDRMS will allow everyone on your staff to have a single place to store and retrieve important materials.

A quality system will not only store your documents but make them easy to discover. High-quality search, document filtering, and other clever tricks will make finding what you need simple. You’ll no longer have to search through email attachments. The days of asking a co-worker where an important contract is stored will be gone. The best EDRMS tools on the market will make searching and finding documents a breeze.

Better Internal Communications

The best EDRMS solutions include ways to keep staff members updated on document changes. When a document is updated or removed, you can have the system notify key team members automatically. Features like automatic notifications keep everyone on the same page. You’ll no longer have to manage communication across email, text, or Slack as a document is revised. Everyone who needs to know will find out immediately without any manual interaction.

Communication breakdowns and confusion are leading causes of daily mistakes at any business. The more tools you have to cut down on mistakes the better. Even the most simple of EDRMS solutions will improve your internal communications. Your staff will thank you for making it easier for them to do their daily work and keep their documents straightened out and updated.

Increased Document Security

A properly built EDRMS has security in mind from the very beginning. At a basic level, just moving your important files into one place is a form of security. This is true whether you are converting from paper documents to digital or simply organizing digital items in a single interface. Keeping everything coalesced and better organized is a simple way to improve the security of important files.

Of course, simply taking your documents from a haphazard filing system to an organized and digital one isn’t enough. Security is not only about how you store things but also who has access to them. A good EDRMS will allow you to set a variety of permissions on a per-document basis. This will prevent just anyone in your organization from viewing any document they want. Your team will have individual logins so they can only access the system safely. Limit what certain employees can see, and even do, to certain documents. This will help keep things safe and free of mistakes.

Many companies know that security is important but few actually follow through correctly. Consider an EDRMS if you need to manage and keep important documents safe.

The Best EDRMS Solutions

There are an overwhelming number of EDRMS software solutions on the market today. Many offer the same features, with slight variations, and similar pricing. Of course, there are other avenues to take as well. You might want to consider building your own custom EDRMS that fits your precise requirements.

The Best EDRMS Software on the Market

There are three well-recommended systems you can sign up and start using today: M-Files and Box.

M-Files is featured packed and built to suit many very popular industries. They support accounting, tax, and audit firms. Construction, manufacturing, and financial services work well with their software as well. Of course, supporting so many industries comes at a price. In fact, M-Files is one of those software solutions that won’t openly tell you their price without scheduling a demo. Various reports have the price of M-Files at around $60/month per user. For a large team, the price of M-Files can grow quite quickly.

Box has many of the features of M-Files but at a lower price. In fact, you can start their cheapest plan at approximately $20/month per user. They offer limited uploads but unlimited storage at all pricing levels. The higher plans offer more features including expensive to maintain on your own things like HIPAA compliance. No matter the plan though Box is more affordable than M-Files. In fact, the highest Box plan is still roughly half of what M-Files charges.

Build Your Own Custom EDRMS

Did you know that custom software is an affordable option for practically every business system? Our specialty here is creating custom software solutions for any sized business. Fortunately, an EDRMS is no different. The two off-the-shelf solutions we’ve covered here are either expensive, have features you don’t need, or suffer from both issues.

You can have a custom software solution built to perfectly fit your needs at an affordable cost. The upfront expense of custom software is always higher than an existing solution. Fortunately, over time, you can offset that expense by saving on the high monthly and per-user fees you avoid with pre-made software. Custom software systems aren’t for everyone but consider it as a valid option and you may be surprised.

Interested in Learning More About EDRMS Options?

In conclusion, the right EDRMS can change your business for the better right away. Do you think an EDRMS will help organize your business? At Link Software, we’ve built many custom software systems and would love to help you create your own electronic document and records management system. Contact us today with any questions you might have and we would be happy to help.

The post EDRMS: Does Your Company Need an Electronic Document and Records Management System appeared first on Link Software LLC.

Let’s talk about inventory control systems, the best systems for different businesses, and ways you can roll your own solution to perfectly match your business and its needs.

What Exactly is a Stock Control System?

A stock control system also referred to as an inventory control system, is a way for a business to track physical items needed for orders or production. A high-quality system will touch all aspects of a business. So any time an order is placed, a vendor delivers fresh stock, staff need to make changes to quantities, or entire product lines need to be removed and replaced. The right stock control system for your business will make handling all of those duties, and more, simple and quick.

Of course, for this to all happen seamlessly the need for software is required. You can try and build an inventory system with pen and paper. Even now, in these modern computing times, there are still old-fashioned businesses doing just that. The problem is that manual systems are breeding grounds for errors and problems. No one who is serious about proper stock control would ever keep tabs of everything on a piece of paper anymore.

So what is the best software solution? Again, some companies with less modern business practices might be using spreadsheets or simple desktop databases. Unfortunately, these types of efforts quickly fall into the same problems pen and paper systems have. Errors stack up, maintenance becomes an issue, and your inventory levels and orders become entangled in bad data.

Let’s consider the best options for two types of businesses built on inventory: stores and manufacturing.

Finding the Perfect Stock Control System for a Store

Stores need to properly manage inventory to make sure their shelves (physical or virtual) are always stocked with products. Keeping track of this can be difficult but there are plenty of software solutions to make it easier.

Retail Store Inventory Control Software

Almost any serious, physical business will have a point of sale (POS) system in place. There are dozens of reasons to run your store on a POS system. Many point of sale systems are attached to cash registers so the entire purchasing process can be digitized. Once you have put every part of a transaction into a digitized system keeping track of inventory becomes a breeze. Each sale, or return, will correct your inventory levels accordingly. High-quality POS systems will generate inventory reports for you so you can know exactly when it’s time to order more products.

Shopify Inventory Control Apps

Shopify, one of the world’s premier hosted e-commerce platforms, has a vary broad and packed app system in place. You can add a variety of apps to your Shopify store that can handle all sorts of things. This is true then, of course, for stock control systems as well. There are dozens and dozens of apps on the Shopify App Store for inventory control.

We recommend you check out these three specifically.

• Stock&Buy
  Stock&Buy offers inventory management right inside of your Shopify interface. It handles the management of purchase orders, refunds and returns, and includes in-depth inventory reporting. This app lets you manage your inventory across multiple stores. You can sync your data with the popular Xero accounting software as well.
• Shopventory
  This Shopify app integrates with many popular POS systems including Shopify POS. It offers reporting for purchasing and inventory. Speaking of purchasing, it can also automate purchase orders for you. This app also integrates across multiple stores as well if you need that functionality.
• SKULabs
  Finally, the last Shopify app we recommend investigating, is SKULabs. This all offers standard inventory management features. It also has order picking and packing functionality. It also has a lot of features to help you with purchasing. The monthly price of SKULabs is high but it does have quite a few valuable features.

WooCommerce Inventory Control Plugins

WooCommerce is the #1 self-hosted e-commerce store solution. It’s a plugin that works with the popular WordPress content management system. WooCommerce has basic inventory functionality in the base plugin. Of course, you can extend that functionality with third-party programs. As with Shopify, WooCommerce has plenty of inventory management plugins to choose from.

Check out these two WooCommerce stock management plugins:

• Veeqo
  The most powerful part of Veeqo is that you can use it to sync inventory across multiple software packages. If your business relies on a lot of different software this is an attractive feature. This plugin also features warehouse management functionality which is useful for pickers and packers.
• ATUM Inventory Management
  This free plugin, available on the WordPress.org repository, has too many features to list here. The plugin developers claim it is the best inventory plugin for WooCommerce and they might be right. There are premiumd add-ons, a common practice with WordPress plugins, to extend the plugin even further.

Picking a Stock Control System for Manufacturing Facilities

Inventory control systems aren’t just for retail outlets and online stores. Keeping proper track of materials and finished goods is incredibly important in a production environment as well. In fact, many manufacturing facilities have stock management needs that are even more complicated than many big-box retail stores.

Inventory Control for Production Materials

The materials needed to build finished goods can vary greatly from facility to facility. The importance of knowing exactly how much of any given material you have though is a universal need. The number of unique production materials worth tracking can be as small as a few dozen up to hundreds and hundreds of pieces. The larger the number of materials the more elaborate a stock control solution a facility needs.

We have seen spreadsheets used for tracking production materials many times. Truth be told, in many cases, this is enough for small to medium-sized manufacturers. Typically, the purchasing manager maintains this list and uses it to decide if and when to order more materials. For larger facilities, with more elaborate software setups, much of this can be automated as production is tracked. Fancier software solutions will subtract raw material counts as finished products come off the line.

Inventory Control for Finished Pieces

Monitoring and recording the number of finished products made each day is vital to a manufacturing business. Not knowing how much useful product you are producing can cause a ripple effect throughout the company. The need for software to successfully track and report back on good, and bad, pieces is very important.

There are many off-the-shelf software packages to handle this. In fact, a lot of robot-driven production facilities will have the recording of good and bad pieces built into their systems. For less advanced manufacturers, a more manual means of tracking finished goods might be required. The best system, regardless of the facility size, will successfully tie into raw material tracking, customer orders, and more.

Looking for More Information on a Stock Control System?

Are you interested in learning more about your options for stock control? Our company, Link Software, has been consulting on this topic for many years. In fact, we have written entirely custom inventory control systems for several large manufacturing facilities. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you might have. We would be happy to help you make the right choice for your company.

The post Pick the Right Stock Control System for Your Business appeared first on Link Software LLC.

So, if you have decided to build your new website with WordPress, you have made an excellent choice. However, before you begin posting content, check out our WordPress tips for beginners. These might come in handy as you begin working with WordPress. Here are six tips to help you get your first WordPress website off to a good start.

#1. Choose a WordPress Theme

The first step is to choose a proper WordPress theme for the site. There are thousands of options out there so selecting the best theme for your site may take some time. However, the WordPress theme you choose will determine your site’s look and feel. So, it is worthwhile taking your time with your selection.

Many of the free themes available online fall under particular design intentions. For example, if you run a gardening business there are plenty of botanical-related themes you can use. In addition to aesthetic concerns, many WordPress themes are built for particular business types. Again, as an easy example, some WordPress themes are built specifically for e-commerce stores and businesses. A theme like that isn’t ideal for a personal blog so take your time to try and find the right theme.

Another option is to have a custom WordPress theme built for you. This is an ok way to go for businesses and organizations with a budget. A custom theme is often an unnecessary and costly route for individuals new to WordPress. We recommend getting started with a free theme, becoming familiar with the system, and investigating custom theme options in the future.

#2. Handle WordPress Security

WordPress is an incredible content management system. Unfortunately, it has something of a reputation for security concerns. A lot of these issues are often overblown but it’s important for people new to WordPress to understand security.

If your new WordPress site is not protected with a security plugin, there is a high probability that the site will get hacked. There are dozens of security-related products and services you can use to protect your site. Think of these like the malware and anti-virus software you have running on your computer.

Installing and setting up a security plugin such as Wordfence or Sucuri is should be one of your first tasks. Most of these plugins offer a free version, which will suffice for smaller sites. But if your site is for a business or your primary source of income, it would be worth considering a premium plugin.

In addition to plugins, make sure your site has an SSL certificate installed. An SSL (secure sockets layers) certificate will encrypt data, such as passwords and payment details, as it passes from a user’s device to the server. Installing an SLL certificate is essential for data protection. Web browsers warn users when a site is not protected with an SSL certificate. So, the absence of a certificate will also deter some visitors.

#3. Install a WordPress SEO Plugin

An SEO (search engine optimization) plugin, such as Yoast will be an invaluable tool to help you optimize your content for search engines like Google. These plugins will help you get keyword density right and help you manage technical aspects of SEO such as sitemaps and robots.txt.

Of course, Yoast is not your only option. There are as many SEO plugins as there are security ones available for WordPress. Each of them has overlapping features and premium versions with upgrades. Do your research and find the plugin that offers the basics (sitemaps, meta tags, etc.) while being easy to use. A lot of this is a personal choice for users new to WordPress and depends on personal preference.

Many experts recommend you install an SEO plugin before you post any content on your new site. This isn’t necessarily true but it can make your life easier. Adding, or changing, SEO plugins after your site has a lot of content can be difficult and annoying to deal with. Installing and understanding how to use an SEO plugin is something you should do as soon as you can find the time.

#4. Install Analytics Software

Analytics software, like Google Analytics, will track visitor numbers and give you insights into what pages people visit. This tool will also tell you how long people are spending on the various pages of your WordPress site. This information will help you understand what type of content works and which pages may need improving.

Google Analytics isn’t the only player in town. There are plenty of privacy-focused analytics solutions that are viable alternatives. You can find plenty of viable Google Analytics alternatives on the market. Every day it feels like a new option competing directly with Google becomes available. If privacy is a concern, and you don’t want Google having access to your traffic data, you can find another way to track your visitors safely.

It is best to install analytics software from day one. There are plenty of WordPress plugins that will help manage the process for you automatically. These plugins are practically identical across the board in terms of basic features. Find the one that is the simplest, with the fewest bells and whistles, if you want to get started with analytics quickly. Many of these plugins offer a look at your analytics directly inside of the WordPress admin. This can be helpful for non-technical people who find many analytics interfaces complicated.

#5. Implement Backup Procedures

Keeping copies of your website is always a good idea. You will need backups if your site is hacked or you make a mistake. Backups also come in handy when your web server experiences issues you can’t avoid. Making sure you have a regular backup routine in place is very important for any WordPress website.

If you use a managed WordPress hosting service, backups will probably be included in the package. This isn’t always the case but it is pretty rare for backups to not be automatic with premium hosting. If you are managing your own WordPress hosting you will need to handle backups on your own.

There are a lot of free backup plugins you can use. These plugins let you schedule when backups run and what exactly they backup. You can backup media, plugins, a theme, and even your WordPress database. With free plugins, these backup files typically live on the server itself. Premium solutions, like BlogVault and Jetpack Backup, cost a monthly or yearly fee but offer more features and more secure, off-site file storage.

#6. Stay On Top of WordPress Updates

WordPress and WordPress themes and plugins are periodically updated. Indeed, once you have several plugins installed, you will probably have something to update almost every time you log into WordPress. Updates often include critical security enhancements.

It is best to install all WordPress core updates as soon as they are made available. For plugins and themes, unless there is a huge security fix, patience is sometimes key. Many plugins and themes are built and maintained by developers working for free. Often times this means they make mistakes when issuing updates that can impact your website negatively. Doing some research before you randomly update a plugin or theme is good practice.

Again, for security fixes and issues, do not hesitate to make updates. Security flaws, especially in plugins, hit the web very quickly and become vectors for attacks immediately. Many plugin updates that include new features can sometimes make the experience using the plugin worse. In non-security updates, make sure you understand what the new changes will mean to your site before committing to the update.

Conclusion

Managing a WordPress website is an ongoing process. Finding the right theme is only the start. It takes time and effort to keep your WordPress website site secure. Search engine optimization is an ongoing issue as well. Making sure your WordPress installation, theme, and plugins are up to date is critical. Of course, the best tip for new WordPress users is to keep learning and refining your site.

If you are new to WordPress and need some help let us know. Link Software has been building and maintaining WordPress websites for our clients for many years. We can help you get started and deal with ongoing issues as your site grows. We also offer WordPress maintenance packages if you don’t have the time or expertise to handle your site on your own. Contact us for more information today.

The post New to WordPress? 6 Tips for First-Time WordPress Users appeared first on Link Software LLC.

Decide What Your NGO Website Needs

Of course, not every NGO is the same. The goals of one organization are never the same as another. With that in mind, the first step to developing an NGO website is to determine its main purpose. Are you trying to raise awareness about your cause or main issue? Would you prefer to boost your number of donors and their donation amounts? Or, possibly, are you more interested in bringing in more volunteers to help your organization?

Raise Awareness

At its core, a website is a vehicle for disturbing information. A well-designed and fully-functional NGO website is a great way to educate your community about what your organization does and needs. Websites that load quickly, work on multiple devices, and present their information clearly are always the best at educating their visitors.

Grow Donations

Generating revenue through a robust donor list is key to many nonprofit successes. A well-constructed website can make collecting donor information and donations themselves effortless. You can eliminate a lot of the pain and frustration over the donation process with a thoughtfully designed and featured website.

Increase Volunteers

Building a volunteer workforce is key to keeping your NGO up and running. Let people know what they will be volunteering for, how it will impact your community, and give them a clear and simple way to ask for more detail. When you put time into your website you will be able to gather volunteer contact information much easier.

Of course, there are other reasons to build a nonprofit website but we have found those three to be some of the most common. Fortunately, you can find plenty of tools and platforms online to help you achieve any three of those goals. Let’s take a quick look at one platform, in particular, that is ideal for an NGO website.

Choose a Website Platform

One of the big challenges nonprofits face when building their website is choosing a platform. There are so many options now that it can be overwhelming. There is a lot of pressure to choose the “right one” to build your site on. This is true because it can be difficult to switch from one provider to another if you decide a change is necessary. As of now, the three most popular choices for building a website are Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.

WordPress Is Ideal for NGO Websites

Of those, we always recommend going with WordPress. There are plenty of reasons to choose WordPress and the first is cost. You can get started with WordPress for absolutely free. There’s no charge to use the software or to maintain it. You will need to provide your own web hosting, which is not necessary with the competition, but practically every web hosting provider on the planet offers one-click WordPress installation. You will be up and running in minutes.

WordPress offers an almost unlimited amount of themes for your site. You can launch an NGO website, without a designer, and have a good-looking web presence immediately. In addition to themes, there are plenty of high-quality plugins you can use to add features to your site. The number of WordPress plugins for nonprofits is growing each day. They can handle donations, email signups, membership pages, and much more.

Need Help With Your NGO Website?

At Link Software, we’ve helped many nonprofits over the years grow their online presence. We can assist you in building a website from scratch or updating your current one to meet your needs. Please contact us today with any questions you might have about how we can help your organization grow.

The post How to Build an NGO Website Quickly and Under Budget appeared first on Link Software LLC.

Yes, that’s right. WordPress, the world’s most popular online publishing platform, is ideal for creating simple online applications. Let’s go through seven reasons that we think you should use WordPress to build web apps. We’re going to cover why WordPress is perfect for simple ideas, how you can save time and money, and the ways you can extend and grow your application with custom code.

Why You Should Build Web Apps with WordPress

WordPress is a really great solution for getting your web app ideas started. You can generate a minimum viable product, or MVP, very quickly and for a low cost. There are a lot of good reasons why WordPress is right for your web app. Let’s discuss seven of the most important reasons now.

#1. WordPress Is Perfect for Simple Ideas

Many web applications, at least in their initial form, are very simple. WordPress is ideal for simple ideas because you can get up and running so quickly. Consider that many web applications are mainly concerned with taking input of some kind and generating output. WordPress has an entire infrastructure in place for this exact workflow. As a content management system at heart, WordPress was built with the idea of taking in data. working with that data, and presenting it in a different format.

#2. WordPress Is Simple to Set Up

There’s a reason WordPress is the platform of choice for 40% of the websites online. Nearly every hosting provider offers one-click processes, or high-level support, for installing and running WordPress. For a very small cost, you can buy a domain name, purchase web hosting, and be working with WordPress in minutes.

One of the advantages of using WordPress for simple web applications is a lot of the technical setup is done for you. Your web hosting will be providing all of the necessary programming language and database infrastructure you will need. WordPress will take care of creating the database tables and configuration files you will need during your initial setup. You won’t need to become, or pay for, a database administrator or programming expert to handle anything for you.

#3. Basic Systems Are Already in Place

WordPress comes, out of the box, with a lot of common systems you find in most web apps. Your fresh WordPress installation will have an accounts system, a login interface, a behind-the-scenes dashboard, and a front end. You’ll have many basic interface components in place without doing any extra work. Getting these features and interfaces “for free” means you can save time, and money, focusing on the working parts of your app. You won’t have to worry about, pay for, or troubleshoot basic systems like user logins when you use WordPress as your base.

#4. WordPress Themes Work for Front Ends

How people interact with an application is a huge part of its development and success. Of course, in addition to the user experience, the visual appeal of an app is important as well. Luckily, by starting with WordPress, you put yourself at a great advantage. WordPress has one of the most robust and flexible theming systems of any content management system. You can leverage the vast amount of themes for the purposes of your web application. Many themes are free, or very low-cost, and instantly provide you with a professional look and feel to wrap around your app.

#5. Features Can Be Implemented With Plugins

There are tens of thousands of freely available WordPress plugins available at WordPress.org. You can easily implement many common features of your application using these plugins. Do you need a simple form for users to submit information? There are widely popular free options like Contact Form 7 and very versatile paid choices like Gravity Forms. There are dozens of membership plugins you can use to expand upon the basic user and login system that comes packaged with WordPress. These are just a few of the hundreds of examples where plugins exist to handle many common software application needs.

Can’t find what you want from the available free and premium plugins? Write your own! You can have a software firm or freelancer who specializes in custom WordPress development make a plugin that handles your unique feature needs. You can solve many simple problems with an equally simple WordPress plugin. Custom plugins can be made to tweak existing themes or plugins that aren’t 100% perfect. Or, if you have more complicated feature needs, a custom WordPress plugin can be made in a faster timeframe than traditional software by taking advantage of WordPress and its expansive codebase.

#6. Simple to Integrate With Other Services

WordPress has several ways that make it simple to connect its data with other apps and services. The WordPress REST API is one available tool that makes data exchange possible. An API, in short, is a way for two applications to connect and exchange information. In addition to the API, you can use popular services like Zapier to connect to WordPress and then pass data back and forth between all sorts of other applications.

Leveraging the API and services like Zapier will allow you to really expand on your web app idea. Features that might seem impossible, or certainly costly, might be trivial with the right third-party integration. You don’t have to have these integrations made on your own as well if Zapier isn’t a workable route. Many WordPress plugins natively integrate with all kinds of service providers and applications. It depends on what you want your web app to do, of course, but there might already be quick solutions out there to connect your app with another.

#7. Easier Transition to Your Own Custom Application

Finally, one of the nice advantages of using WordPress as the base of an application is you are in total control of the data. This is helpful when you decide to rebuild your application in a more traditional way with custom software. Having ownership of your data, via the WordPress database, will make it much simpler to transition to a new infrastructure.

Third-party no-code builders and similar services are often walled gardens. You don’t have easy access to your application’s data if you decide to pivot to something more advanced. This isn’t a concern with WordPress because you will be the one who owns, and maintains, the back-end of your WordPress installation. You will not have to rely on another service provider, or a support team, to get you access to your current app’s dataset and details.

Want to Learn More About Making Web Apps With WordPress?

We recommend you consider using WordPress as a foundation for experimental software ideas. The cost to start development, and ultimately launch your applications, is much lower than custom development. In terms of time to build, WordPress and its built-in feature set make the turnaround time much faster than starting from scratch. The plugin ecosystem surrounding WordPress means you can snap in features in minutes. WordPress themes allow you to have a well-designed front end for your application just as easily.

Contact us at Link Software if you’d like to learn more about how you can utilize WordPress to build out your application idea. We can help you with the initial setup, plugin and theme installation, and any small custom plugin work that your application might need. And, if your idea proves successful, we can also help you transition to a more traditional web application when the time is right.

The post 7 Reasons Why You Should Build Web Apps with WordPress appeared first on Link Software LLC.

If you have a website that runs on WordPress, for example, it’s very common to have a plugin that makes a regular copy of your database and theme. Those backup files are typically uploaded to another server somewhere, for safekeeping, and never thought of again until you need them. When disaster strikes and you need to restore your website it’s just a matter of downloading the database backup, restoring it to the live server and you’re back up and running.

One backup scenario that is less common, but still important, is to make a comprehensive copy of your website that can be viewed regardless of the content management system or database running behind the scenes storing the content.

These kinds of backup, where the site’s content is stored and delivered in a complete but unchangeable condition, are referred to as a static copy. There are many reasons to want a static copy of your website and, as you could probably guess, plenty of ways to download a website in its entirety as well. Let’s go through those reasons and methods in this post and, by the end, you’ll be able to download and browse your own website in a static state.

Three Reasons to Learn How to Download a Website

Creating Website Backups

One of the best reasons to download a complete, static copy of your current website is to generate an alternate and more useable backup of the content. As we mentioned above, a typical site backup in the modern era of the web is just a database dumped into a file and maybe a copy of your site’s theme or layout as well. There are more robust and expensive backup options out there but the bare essentials are those two elements: the database and the design.

While we would never recommend a static backup as the only solution you use it is a great way to augment any existing strategies you have in place. Static backups give you a viewable and interactive copy of your live site that you can browse through, review and archive immediately without having to do any complicated content management, database, or server setup. The second your static backup finishes you can immediately view the site on your local machine without any extensive technical knowledge.

Website Shutdown

People tend to think of websites as these everlasting entities but that’s not always true. Websites are shut down every day for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes a company or organization is closing down so they no longer need a web presence. Other times, a website is only meant to last temporarily for an event or product launch. Regardless of the reason, playing it safe and keeping a static copy of any website shutting down is a smart practice. You never know if the website will need to come back online. It’s also possible you’ll need assets from the site, such as marketing copy of images, in the future.

Losing Hosting Access

Web hosting is an important aspect of any website that a lot of site owners and maintainers overlook. A lot of organizations rely on someone else to make hosting choices and handle maintenance for them. This can be a fine arrangement for some businesses but it can lead to complications and unnecessary trouble. If your current hosting provider becomes unreliable or, in a worst-case scenario, goes out of business you will need a replacement fast. In rare times like this, it’s important to make sure you have access to your current website assets. A static website backup might be your only option depending on the platform hosting your site.

The Simplest Ways to Download a Website

When you want to learn how to download a website there are two choices: use desktop software or a command-line utility. Let’s take a look at those two options and you can decide which way is best for your situation. Either approach is fine and it more or less depends on what technology you are comfortable using.

How to Download a Website with a Desktop Program

Using a desktop application to download a copy of a website is the easiest route to take. There are a lot of programs out there to download a website. Three of the most popular include:

• HTTrack
  This program, which is Windows-only, will download an entire website directly to your computer’s hard drive. HTTrack is intelligent enough to make all of the site’s links and assets work properly on your machine. It’s free to download and use as well which is a nice bonus.
• Getleft
  This open-source program has the same features as HTTrack. The added bonus with Getleft is that is has versions for multiple operating systems: Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD Unix. Getleft is free to download. The developers of this program are no longer actively developing it. There’s a slight chance it might not work for you but it’s worth a shot.
• SiteSucker
  This is a Mac-only option for downloading an entire website to your local computer. SiteSucker has a neat feature that lets you save a template file to your machine which lets you run a download on repeat at a later date. SiteSucker is not free but the price is minimal for the amount of features you get.

How to Download a Website via the Command-Line

Downloading a website via the command-line is our preferred method at Link Software. We often use this technique for our clients who ask us to help them make static copies of their websites. Make sure you install wget on your computer before you do anything. For Mac users, you can use this handy tutorial that will teach you how to use Homebrew to install wget on your machine.

With wget installed, it’s time to get downloading. This couldn’t be any easier. You can begin downloading any site, directly to a folder on your desktop, using this simple command:

wget -P ~/Desktop/example.com -mpck --user-agent="" -e robots=off --wait 1 -E http://example.com/

All you have to do is replace “example.com” in the command above with the address of the site you want to download. This process can take awhile if the site you are downloading is quite large. In the end, the entire site will be downloaded and accessible on your local machine. If you really want to know the inner workings of this wget command check out this explanation at explainshell.com for more information.

Need Help Learning How to Download a Website?

At Link Software, we’ve helped our clients download and maintain static copies of their websites many times. Please don’t hesitate to contact us directly for a quote to have us download a static copy of your organization’s website. You can use your static copy for backups, restoration, or more.

The post How to Download a Website for Backup, Shutdown, or Rescue appeared first on Link Software LLC.

Of course, most of these plugin deals were between huge corporations and large development houses. There hasn’t been a lot of public talk about smaller, less expensive plugin acquisitions. Yet those kinds of transactions do exist and happen frequently enough not to be dismissed. Our company, Link Software, has been involved in several smaller plugin acquisitions in the past several years. The portfolio of WordPress plugins we have put together is now strong enough to generate a nice portion of our monthly revenue.

We thought it was a good time to write out our thoughts, and advice, for other small software developers interested in acquiring their own WordPress plugin. There is an opportunity for WordPress developers with budgets of all sizes. This guide is meant to offer you an explanation of why you should get involved, how to find the right plugin to acquire and the steps involved before and after your purchase.

Why Small Developers Should Acquire WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugin development is a great situation for small and medium-sized developers and agencies to get involved in. Everyone has seen the stats about how pervasive WordPress is as a content management system. Despite claims about the rise of its competitors, or its impending decline, WordPress is going to be around for a long time. It is a great starting place for anyone interested in selling software, the platform is easy to work with, and WordPress offers plenty of ways to develop your skills.

Get Immediate Access to a User Base

Many small and medium-sized developers are looking to create elaborate web applications from scratch. That road is fine, but difficult, and can take quite a while to gain traction and attention from potential customers. WordPress allows anyone to release a software product and get actual users and feedback very quickly. This is a blessing when it comes to acquisitions because you can immediately discover what plugins have traction with the community. Acquiring an existing WordPress plugin lets you start day one of your journey with users. This is much better than spending months trying to build a product and drum up interest to onboard initial users.

Grow Your Marketing and Support Skills

Marketing is a huge part of software development. A lot of developers don’t want to hear or acknowledge that but it is true. Acquiring a WordPress plugin is equal parts programming and marketing and, in some cases, the time spent marketing is even higher. Taking over an existing WordPress plugin is a great chance to sharpen your marketing skills to try and increase installs and sales. You can spend less time getting the product off the ground and more time trying to grow what has already been established by someone else.

In addition to marketing, owning and operating a WordPress plugin helps improve your support skills. This ties into taking over an existing user base. Any plugin you acquire is going to have users who need help. You’ll be required to handle support tickets and learn how to take customer feedback and apply it to the product. For developers without a lot of experience handling support, purchasing a WordPress plugin is a great way to get better very quickly.

Generate Revenue Quickly

Growing a business’s income is one of the main reasons anyone considers acquiring a WordPress product. You can certainly acquire plugins that are pre-revenue but it’s not something we recommend. A plugin that brings in a monthly income, no matter how large, is much more motivating than one that does not. And for those of you concerned about managing an e-commerce setup there is no reason to worry. One of the nice aspects of WordPress development is that a lot of products exist to make managing sales simple. Easy Digital Downloads and Freemius make handling payments and licenses fairly trivial now. You don’t have to worry about rolling your own payment solution anymore.

How to Find a WordPress Plugin to Acquire

Now that we’ve gone through some reasons why you should acquire a WordPress plugin it is time to review exactly how you go about finding one. In our experience, the three best ways to find quality plugins to acquire are through marketplaces, your own social network, and by searching WordPress.org and cold emailing developers.

Marketplaces

Searching through one of the dozen or so marketplaces and auction sites for deals is the most common approach to finding a plugin to buy. Marketplaces can be very hit or miss and a lot of the higher-end ones have valuations that are too high for smaller developers. There are occasionally opportunities worth investigating though and there are three sites we recommend if you are serious about finding a plugin to acquire.

MicroAcquire

Most of the listings at MicroAcquire are traditional SaaS products. You occasionally find a WordPress plugin for sale here and, when you do, they are generally interesting. The valuations on this site are all over the place and a lot of the listing information is purposefully vague or obfuscated. You can reach out to the seller for more information but, typically, a little research and deductive reasoning can help you identify the plugin for sale on your own.

We recommend you keep an eye on MicroAcquire because it’s experiencing incredible growth as a platform now and the number of WordPress-related listings is sure to grow in the future.

Flippa

Flippa has a well-deserved reputation as being a pit of spam sites and general garbage. Occasionally, you can find actual gems there if you have enough patience and understand how to properly search the site. Like MicroAcquire, valuations vary widely but the auction format of Flippa gives you a little leeway in terms of how much you might pay. One upside to Flippa is that they make communication between buyer and seller very simple. It’s also very easy to see exactly what is for sale which makes doing your own research easier than other marketplaces.

Our first two plugin acquisitions came from Flippa listings and we came very close to a third before losing out. There are deals to be had here if you are willing to wade through the mess.

FlipWP

A WordPress-only marketplace, FlipWP is a recently launched site from WordPress community members Iain Poulson and Alex Denning. This is a membership site that requires an annual fee in order to view the listings. This limits the number of people competing for the products being offered. FlipWP sees irregular updates at the moment but hopefully, the number of listings grows and improves. Prices, like our other marketplace recommendations, vary wildly. There are plugins on offer at FlipWP with million-dollar asking prices and others that are only asking for a few thousand dollars.

We purchased a plugin that was listed on FlipWP earlier this year. The process is very hands-off from the perspective of FlipWP. There is a contact form that sends your message to the seller. From that point on it’s between you and the other party to work out details and handle communication.

Of all the marketplaces, FlipWP has the most potential in the WordPress space. We’re very excited about the future of FlipWP as the market for plugin acquisitions continues to grow.

Network and Business Connections

It really does pay to network. The more you get involved in WordPress-related communities the better your odds of an opportunity arising are. There are so many WordPress communities, Facebook groups, and Slack channels to join that you should be able to find someplace to meet others like you. Eventually, as your connections grow, you will hear about potential acquisition deals.

You can do more than just join communities and hang out in forms though. There are more proactive options like running a blog or writing a newsletter to grow your audience and network. We used to run a site called The Plugin Economy where we interviewed WordPress developers about their products. That experience gave us a lot of contacts in the WordPress community and eventually led to our latest plugin acquisition.

WordPress.org Plugin Directory

Finally, the not-so-hidden gem of WordPress plugin acquisitions is the directory at WordPress.org. There are tens of thousands of plugins listed at WordPress.org with marketing copy, screenshots, installation information, download information, direct access to code, and support forums full of customer feedback. Working your way through plugins on the directory, finding potential acquisition targets, and cold emailing the owners is a really interesting way to acquire a plugin.

Keep in mind there is a WordPress.org API available as well. You don’t have to do all of this manually if you are feeling a bit adventurous. We have built a small internal tool we use to do market research and pinpoint plugins and categories that are worth pursuing. It’s nothing fancy but it does a nice job of helping us do research.

There is a lot to consider when you are browsing the directory and looking for potential acquisitions. You will go through a lot of hits and misses, dead ends, and maybe even a few bruised egos. Cold emailing is not for everyone and it does take some practice to develop a good approach. It’s worth an attempt though and, even if you don’t find anything viable to acquire, you will at least have done some market research and expanded your knowledge of the WordPress plugin landscape.

Things to Review Before Purchasing

Let’s say you’ve identified a plugin to acquire. You’ve reached out to the current owner and have established a dialogue. Now it’s time to do some research and really figure out if the plugin is worth persuing and making an actual offer on. This is the most important part of the process and a mistake here can reverberate down the line and cause an untold number of headaches.

Always keep in mind that there is more to acquiring a WordPress plugin than some files full of code. You need to do your research and due diligence about many different aspects of the product. The code needs to be good and work correctly, of course. After that, you need to consider revenue and payment processing (one of the biggest pitfalls of the whole process). The plugin’s marketing and website are very critical as well.

Codebase

This is obvious, at first glance, because you don’t want to take on a plugin that is broken, doesn’t work, or has serious issues that can’t be fixed. It’s also good to understand all of the technology used in a given plugin before you take control of it. Knowing what you are capable of taking on and improving the plugin is a key piece of the acquisition puzzle. If the plugin you are interested in uses technology that you are unfamiliar with or don’t enjoy working with then consider another option.

Ask the current owner if there are any outstanding bugs or issues with the plugin in its current state. There is nothing worse than taking on a new project, finding out on day one that there is a huge issue, and then scrambling to learn a new codebase and solve an emergency at the same time. Most good plugin developers know of any existing problems with their plugins and great developers have plugins that are generally error-free already. This is WordPress, of course, so weird configuration errors and problems do exist so be prepared for anything.

Finally, ask the developer if there is a list of planned features or a release roadmap for the plugin. This includes any in-progress releases they are developing that aren’t finished yet. Almost every plugin developer has a list of ideas for their products. If they haven’t written anything down it is worth asking if they would be willing to do so after a sale just to give you a head start on future features and updates.

Premium Versions and Extensions

Of course, this is where the money is made with WordPress plugins. Almost all plugin acquisitions are for freemium products. It’s important to understand how the premium version of the plugin works and how it differentiates itself from the free version.

You’ll want to review the code for any premium versions or extensions just as closely as you do the free version. Ask the same questions about known bugs and feature roadmaps. Some plugins can have a whole handful of additional add-ons, each with its own level of complexity, so make sure you’re prepared to take on that kind of development burden.

This is a good time to think about some post-purchase possibilities. Do you see some opportunity to raise the prices and still provide good value? Are there additional add-ons, or extensions, the current developer has never thought of that might increase revenue? It’s unwise to put the cart too far before the horse at this stage because you haven’t taken over anything yet. But planning ahead a little wouldn’t hurt.

Financial Statements

Ask for a report or spreadsheet detailing all of the revenue the plugin has generated going back as far as possible. In our experience, this data comes in all sorts of forms and it’s rarely very well organized. The key numbers we look at are the monthly revenue over the last 12 months, the split of that revenue between first-time customers and license renewals, and the license renewal rate. We focus on the last 12 months, if possible, because older plugins might have come out of the gate and been very successful and then trailed off. We don’t want to overpay for a plugin that is trending downward in terms of revenue.

This part can be touchy for some people, especially if you’ve cold emailed them out of the blue. If the plugin owner isn’t willing to share what you need to make a good decision then just walk away. It’s foolish to make any purchase like this without knowing all of the facts. Hesitancy from the owner at this stage doesn’t bode well for the rest of the transaction.

Pay Attention to Renewal Rates

Some owners will boast about their future subscription revenue. We’ve had plugin owners tell us that they have thousands of dollars in scheduled payments coming and ask us to take that into account. There isn’t a lot of publicly available data about average renewal rates for WordPress products but no one has 100% of their licenses renewed. Having said that, we feel anything less than 50% is a sign of big trouble. You can run a successful product on one-time sales or lifetime licenses but recurring payments are the bread and butter of making any WordPress plugin successful.

Payment Accounts

We could write an entire blog post just about taking control of another party’s payment accounts.

Understanding how a plugin handles payments is so important we decided to bold this text.

Please, please learn everything you can about how the plugin you want to acquire has set up their payment accounts. Are they using Stripe? Do they also accept PayPal? Are there other, less-common payment options?

Every serious WordPress plugin that sells licenses should have unique Stripe and PayPal accounts for the product. This is not common practice and is a mistake we have made ourselves in the past. If the owner of the plugin you want to purchase is using their personal, or company, Stripe and PayPal account for their plugin you are going to have great difficulty during the acquisition process.

There are so many headaches this particular situation can cause. In fact, we would suggest walking away from any deal under these circumstances. But if you insist, here are some problems to know about.

Stripe

Transferring Stripe data from one account to another is an awful migration process that can take weeks. And, when it’s done, you will only have customer data. Past payments and subscription data can not be transferred in a Stripe migration. You will need to find an online tool to re-establish your subscription data or build it by hand yourself. Then you have to monitor these subscriptions, as they process, to make sure the licenses successfully renew.

Plugins with low revenue, or no subscription-based payment setups, might make this process acceptable. Unfortunately, a plugin with high volumes of sales or large numbers of subscriptions can make for a nightmare scenario where you could potentially lose out on future recurring income.

PayPal

You can exchange ownership of a PayPal account from one party to another. The process is pretty simple. Of course, if the current owner of the WordPress plugin you are looking to acquire uses their personal PayPal account they aren’t going to give you control.

In this situation, you’ll have to make a brand new PayPal account after you acquire the plugin. All of the customer data, automatic payment profiles, and other information will be totally gone. You’ll have to notify everyone who paid via PayPal that their payment details will need to be re-entered for their subscriptions to continue. You will lose subscribers as people will naturally forget to update details or decide they don’t want to bother renewing.

Website, Social Media, and Mailing Lists

Give any plugin’s website and social media accounts a thorough review before an acquisition. We typically ask for an admin account to be created on the plugin’s marketing site during the research phase. Not everyone is open to this, of course, but it’s important to ask. Understanding how the marketing site works in terms of plugins or third-party services helps prepare you for any potential pitfalls.

It’s not just technical aspects of the site that are important to examine. One of the easiest wins we’ve seen with our own plugin takeovers is improving the marketing website. Fixing bad copy, adjusting designs, and improving SEO have allowed us to quickly double and triple monthly revenue immediately after two of our purchases. Recognizing the current shortcomings and having an actionable plan to solve them can sometimes be enough to want to go ahead with an acquisition.

For social media accounts, we make sure they are currently operational and that we will be given control of them after a sale. Mailing lists are another important area to ask about. Taking over an existing account or at least receiving a subscriber list after purchase is critical to any post-purchase marketing campaigns.

How to Settle On an Acquisition Price

Once you have found a plugin, reviewed it, and found it worth acquiring it is time for the uncomfortable discussion about price. Many plugin developers, even ones you cold email out of the blue, have some general idea in mind of what their product is worth. Of course, someone’s asking price and what you are willing to pay rarely align. Let’s discuss the importance of knowing your limits, some key revenue statistics to consider, and how your own personal constraints can impact how much you want to pay.

Know Your Budget

Decide on what your maximum price is. It’s so easy to get caught up in the excitement of plugin acquisition. Before you know it, you might agree to a price you really can’t afford. It’s vital you stick to your guns when it comes to your budget. If the seller won’t budge on a valuation you can’t suitably afford or recover in time with future revenue, then walk away.

There’s nothing worse than purchasing a plugin and then realizing afterward you made a terrible mistake. Then you have to either work extra hard to recover your lost money or try and pass your new headache on to someone else in another sale. You can avoid this disaster by staying true to your budget and paying what you can afford to risk.

Understand Common Valuations

Valuations are always tough to nail down. Everyone has different methods for placing a valuation on their WordPress product. It’s hard for anyone to take the emotion out of their project which is why you sometimes see people trying to sell their plugins for outrageous prices. In our experience, a common-sense owner will take their recent revenue and then multiply it by 2.5x or 3x. So, for a plugin that’s made $3,000 in the last year, a common valuation might be $7,500 to $9,000.

Valuations are also dictated by a given marketplace as well. For instance, MicroAcquire seems to have higher asking prices than most other places. There’s probably influence from traditional pricing techniques used to value SaaS products in play here. Flippa, on the other hand, has lower prices but also worse product quality so there’s a trade-off involved.

Valuations of Free Plugins

We are mainly interested in revenue-generating WordPress plugins. If you find yourself looking to acquire a plugin making no money then standard valuations can be tossed out the window. Our suggestion would be to try and determine a value based on the plugin’s existing codebase and active installations. If a free plugin has a huge amount of users, with a codebase that can be extended with a premium version or add-ons, then it is worth far more than other free plugins with limited appeal in those areas.

Learn to Negotiate

Finally, don’t be afraid to counter-offer and have a back-and-forth with the owner. Rarely does an acquisition happen where the seller and buyer agree right away on a price. It doesn’t hurt to offer a lower price than you are initially presented as long as your return offer isn’t insulting. If you receive pushback on your counter it might be helpful to explain your reasoning. You should have enough information about the plugin to make good arguments for why you think your offer is valid and reasonable.

If you experience hesitation from the seller, you can ease concerns by making your post-acquisition plans clear. A lot of plugin developers want to be sure their products will be in good hands when they are no longer involved.

Morgan Hvidt, who recently sold his plugin White Label to us, offers this advice:

“As a seller, it’s important for me to trust that the buyer will take care of existing customers. Hearing that the seller has a plan and an understanding of existing users helps instil trust in the early stages of accepting an acquisition offer.”

Negotiating is something that most people find difficult. You get better at it with practice and even when a deal falls through you learn valuable techniques to use in your next attempt. It’s important to get the price you want but without insulting or angering anyone. Keep that in mind during the back-and-forth process of agreeing to a final price and you’ll be ok.

Completing the Acquisition

It’s time to figure out how to transfer the plugin after the final price has been agreed upon. There are plenty of ways to go about this and mainly depends on how the purchase was handled. We’ll go over how to move the assets of the plugin from one owner to another first and then discuss the transfer of funds. Finally, we’ll wrap up by going over your first steps as the new owner of the plugin.

Transfer Accounts and Assets

In a perfect world, the current owner has individual accounts created for everything related to the plugin. As we discussed above, this isn’t always the case. Make sure you have an itemized list of every account you’ll need to maintain the plugin after the purchase. At the very least, you’ll want to get access to the following:

• Payment Accounts (Stripe, PayPal, etc.)
• Domain Name
• WordPress.org Account
• Email Accounts
• Social Media Accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• SaaS Accounts (MailChimp, ConverKit, etc.)
• Source Control Account

There might be other accounts to consider depending on the plugin. If the plugin relies on a third-party API, for example, you’re going to want access to the developer account.

The assets of the plugin can include:

• Source Code
• Files and Database for the Marketing Website
• Lists of Customers and Active Subscriptions
• Marketing Assets (Graphics, Content Marketing Material, etc.)

Transfer the Funds

There are several ways to handle the transfer of funds for an acquisition like this. For small amounts, with a party you trust, you can simply send the money directly from buyer to seller. Some people like to do this in chunks. For example, you send the seller 50% of the agreed-upon price before they send you the assets. Then, after review, you send the remaining 50% to complete the transactions.

For larger, independent deals an escrow service is often preferred. Escrow.com is the most commonly used service. We have had less than stellar experiences with Escrow.com, with some parts of the process taking days, and their support team offering slow or incorrect feedback. There aren’t many competitors though so you might just have to go this route and settle for any small interruptions along the way.

Finally, some marketplaces have their own built-in payment transferring services. This can be similar to what you get with a place like Escrow.com or similar websites. Generally, these are pretty safe and reliable so if you’re seller prefers to handle the transfer via the marketplace, or the marketplace requires it, you should be ok.

What to Do After the Acquisition

When the deal has been completed the real work begins. We suggest addressing tiny wins and fixes first. Get familiar with the codebase you have inherited by fixing outstanding bugs or adding tiny features. Give the marketing website a good lookover and put effort into making improvements. Reconsider your new plugin’s pricing structure. Contact existing customers about the ownership change. Update the plugin’s listing at WordPress.org to reflect the new changes. Don’t forget to make adjustments to the listing’s copy to improve search result placement.

Do You Have More Questions About WordPress Plugin Acquisitions?

There is a lot to consider when acquiring a WordPress plugin. Hopefully, we covered most of them in this post. If you still have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Link Software has been developing and selling WordPress plugins for several years now, and we’d be happy to help.

We are also always looking to acquire more plugins. If you have a WordPress plugin you would be interested in selling, we would love to take a look. Contact us today.

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