On today’s episode, we’re going to take a look at a case study, a website that has too many opt-in plugins, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 273. Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today, we are going to be talking about a website that you may be familiar with, that you may have seen in past, that has been using too many opt-in plugins.

Not gonna give you any hints about what that is. You’ll find out in just a few minutes. There are some announcements that I want to share today. Of course, as always, there are WordPress things that are going on in the news, and there’s a few things that I wanna talk about this week.

The first one is there is a critical security vulnerability discovered in Elegant Theme products. If you are running a theme from Elegant Themes, you definitely want to upgrade. It looks like they are doing some really cool things on the way of allowing people to upgrade, even if their subscription has expired, for the license for their themes.

They’re just doing a really great job of letting people know and communicating to make sure that, “Hey, your theme needs to be updated because it is a very vital issue that has been found that needs to be fixed.” If you’re running Elegant Themes, make sure that you have a full backup of your website and you go ahead and update your theme. That is something very important that I wanna talk about.

The other thing is there was a post out there on the WordPress.org news site, and it was called An Experiment: WordCamp Incubator. If you don’t know this or not WordCamps all around the nation are put together by volunteers. I’ll talk about just in a second about word camp date that’s coming up in two weeks. I’m a volunteer to do this. I’m not getting paid or anything, I’m doing it for the love of the community, and just an excitement of a day filled with WordPress information.

There’s a lot of people that contact the word camp organization and ask, “Can you bring a WordCamp to my city?” That’s not how it works. It’s basically driven by people inside of the community. A great place to start is to have a meet up in your local area. Whether it’s a small community or a larger city, you could always start a meet up.

Right now, there are 241 meet up groups on meetup.com, the chapter program. There’s lots of volunteers that are running these things, but they’re wondering about how to start a word camp and just kinda figure out what the steps are to make this happen.

This year, the reasoning experiment called the WordCamp Incubator, and it is a program to help spread WordPress to underserved areas by providing more significant organizing support for the first event.

Basically, what’s gonna happen is it in this experiment they’re gonna choose three cities in 2016 where there is not an active WordPress community, but there seems to be a lot of potential and people that are excited to become organizers. Basically, the WordCamp Foundation is going to do a lot of the organizing, and help people find venues, and all those logistics to get setup for their very first word camp.

There’s an application that is due by February 26th, that’s just in a couple days from now. There’s a link in the show notes so you can go ahead and find that, and you can just go ahead and sign up and see if your city can be one of those ones that the WordCamp Foundation helps to get setup.

I know from organizing WordCamp Dayton in the last couple years, it has taken a lot of effort and energy. It doesn’t sound like it takes a whole lot, especially – I’m in charge of the speakers this year, and it’s like, “Oh, it’s not that big a deal,” but then there’s 30 plus speakers, and some are dropping out, and some are changing topics, and you gotta make sure they’re all registered, and get their T-shirt sizes, and all this good jazz. There’s a lot of moving pieces and moving parts. That is something that I wanted to share, that’s the WordCamp Incubator.

The other thing is WordCamp Dayton, there’s a link in the show notes. I did say that it’s in a week in a half, and I’m so excited that I get to talk about the first WordCamp in Ohio, and it’s the first one kind of in the Midwest that’s happening. I’m just really excited to be part of this and to get out there.

If you’re interested, if you live within a few hour drives of Dayton, head on over to the WordCamp Dayton site, that’s at Dayton.wordcamp.org/2016, and you can register, and buy a ticket, and hang out with us and learn WordPress information over March 4th and 5th.

Then, the last thing that I wanted to share is an article that was shared on medium.com, way was kind of ironic that it was shared on Medium, but it was about WordPress, and the title of the article is Brought Back to Life by WordPress. There was a guy in Denmark, his name was Holger, and his story was that he was sick for many years, he got a blood virus at the age of 5 after he was in a car accident, and of these things took place.

He ended up, he was fighting hepatitis C, and his body couldn’t move. He couldn’t really do anything, but he found WordPress, and he loved WordPress, and he just got so addicted to learning JQuery, and PHP, and CSS. It’s a really neat story, I put a link to it in the show notes.

The main reason I’m sharing this is because it’s awesome, and one of the call to actions in this article is to please follow Holger and tell him something good. Send him an uplifting word of encouragement.

He’s doing some really cool things in Denmark, and if you are in that area of the world, be sure to meet up with him and hear about his story. It sounds really neat, and it’s really encouraging to see just the ability to keep his mind busy with using WordPress and learning different systems within WordPress has really saved his life, which is really, really cool.

All right, onto the Is There a Plugin for That section. There are lots and lots of plugins. The last time I checked, there was for than 42000 free plugins in the WordPress repository, and it’s hard to find the perfect one, let alone find one that you’re really looking for.

Today, I wanted to highlight one called Ninja Forms. This one, I gotta be honest, I thought this was a premium plugin, and it is a free plugin on the WordPress repository. They’re getting really close to launching Version 3 of this thing. It’s basically the easiest thing to build forms inside your WordPress website.

I took a look at it and was playing with it, and it was almost as easy as using Gravity Forms, which is a huge, huge deal because Gravity Forms is that premium plugin that I highly recommend and use it on every website, but Ninja Forms, it looks really cool. It’s drag and drop, you can easily create forms and fields, it’s got dozens of fields that you can add, there’s not limitation.

You can use these forms to collect a contact form on your website, or you can are have an email sign-up box, or you can customize your emails within the WordPress editor, there’s anti-spam options. There’s a lot of really cool things that you can do with the Ninja Forms plugin. It’s downloaded for than 300000 times, and you would highly recommend this over Contact Forms 7.

If you’re using Contact Forms 7, I highly recommend using this plugin instead because I think you’re gonna have a lot better user experience, and it’s just gonna be a lot easier for you to use. Search for Ninja Forms in the plugin repository, or you can find the links to it in episode No. 273 in the show notes for this episode, of course.

Okay, today I have a little listener feedback. It really hurts to say this, but the case study is all about yourwebsiteengineer.com. I got a few pieces of feedback this past week when – last week, we talked about the five things to remove from our website, and one of the things was a annoying pop up sequence on your website.

I had several people say, “Hey, why don’t you look at your own site? You’ve got some pretty annoying pop-ups,” and I knew that this was the case, and I knew that I needed to take some of my own medicine, but I just didn’t realize how out of date and hodgepodge my systems were all put together.

That’s what we’re gonna study today. We’re gonna look at the case of the too many opt-in plugins. To be honest, this is something that, “Oh, I see something cool. Oh, this plugin is really cool, it can do this,” or, “This plugin’s cool and it can do this. I’m like, “I should just do all of these things. I should use them all, of course.”

That’s kinda the way that my brain thinks. Right now, as I’m recording this episode, I haven’t done anything yet but give you this case study, and I’m gonna tell you what I plan to do in the next week. That way, I mean, I can work on this as I am trying to get everything up and running and all of my systems working correctly.

One other thing that I have noticed was I’ve been getting even mails from people saying that they’ve opted in for one opt-in and got a different opt-in, and there was a case where I didn’t have things correctly set up, so I was telling people, “You can download my 50 free ebooks,” but then I was sending them the five premium plugins opt-in, and so there was some disconnect there as well, which I’ve gotten that all taken care of and fixed.

Right now, as we speak, as I’m recording this, I have five different opt-in plugins. Yeah, five of the them. The ones are OptinMonster, LeadPages, Thrive Leads, ConvertKit, and SumoMe.

I only have 20 plugins running on yourwebsiteengineer.com. I try to keep it lean and mean and trying to have as few of things as possible running, but of the 20 plugins that I have, 25 percent of them, one out of every four plugin, is related to opt-ins, and that is insane.

There’s no reason that that needs to happen like that, so let’s go ahead. I’m first going to dive in and say why I’m using each of these plugins, or why I think I should be using these plugins, and then I’m gonna kind of attack the plan of what I’m gonna do in the next week to kinda resolve these issues.

The very first one is OptinMonster. I’ve been using this one, I think, since OptinMonster came out, or relatively shortly after. One of the reasons is I’m friends with the creator, Syed, friends of his, and I wanted to support him, which that’s pretty a lame reason for buying and using a plugin.

I could just buy the plugin, or I could just send him money if I really wanted to support him. I don’t necessarily need to be using the plugin if it’s not gonna work for the needs that I need on my website.

OptinMonster captures leads with an automatic pop-up on which website, currently, and it also does it with a – if you click one of the blue banners, there’s a blue banner on most of the right-hand sides of pages, that if you click that, it pulls up a module and you can enter your email address as well.

It also does the, in the show notes for each episode in the plugin section where I say, “You can learn more about plugins with my free eBook,” if you click on that, that’s going to pull up an OptinMonster opt-in as well.

Okay, the next plugin that I’m using is the LeadPages plugin, and this was something that I was using more in the past. I haven’t been using it quite as often, or I’ve always tried to use it in conjunction with doing a life webinar and trying to sign up with Webinar Jam and LeadPages, and the two systems did not connect very well.

I don’t know, I never really used it as it should be. Right now, I’m using it only to serve thank you page when somebody signs up for my list. Yeah, how lame is that? I’m spending all this money for LeadPages, and that’s the only thing I’m doing, which is a static page that could be created pretty easily within my theme.

I don’t really need that plugin anymore to do anything. LeadPages has some really cool things that you can actually do. If you have that setup, you can have – it runs a lot like OptinMonster with what’s called lead boxes. You can have those, when you click on different things, they can pull up a lead box, and people can sign up for your email download or whatever your free give away is, or put their email address in the box and get subscribed or whatnot.

That’s something that I’m not using, and I’m not really using that. I’ll talk about that, and I’ll probably be getting rid of that one when we get to that section of the show. Thrive Leads is another one, another plugin that I have been using since about January or so. This was when I chatted with the creator of Thrive Themes, and he was telling me some of the cool things that you can to with these Thrive Leads, and how you can get opt-ins and all that stuff.

I started using this. I think the only place that I’m using this is the capture banner at the top of my site, and quite honestly, I don’t think it’s doing a whole lot. There’s a lot more page views, obviously because it pulls up on every single page, but I think some people just don’t even look at it because it’s a static thing, it just kinda sits up there. I don’t think it’s really working, so that’s gonna be something that I probably dismiss as well.

The next plugin that I’m using is ConvertKit. A few months ago, I moved my email list from – this was the ninth time that I moved my email list, and this time, it was from MailChimp over to ConvertKit. I moved them there for a couple reasons because I wanted to segment my list better, I wanted to be able to easily send out emails.

Honestly, I’m not using it nearly as much as I should be, but I really like the system better, and I was getting to the point where I had to pay for MailChimp because I went over the threshold of the free amount.

I’ve been opted in for – I’m a long-time subscriber, so I was getting all of the options and bonus stuff for being such a long-time subscriber from MailChimp, and so it wasn’t a big deal to continue using them because it didn’t cost me anything because I’d signed up so many years ago.

ConvertKit, with MailChimp, now I had to start paying, and ConvertKit was about the same price, and I just really like the ease of use with ConvertKit, and I’ll talk about more of that in an upcoming show.
This plugin, I had to add it, felt like because I was using ConvertKit for my email subscribers, and so I thought I should probably have this plugin. Honestly, I haven’t done a whole lot with it. It basically connects with my account and allows different pages to pull up, or different opt-in boxes to pull up on a page-by-page or post by post basis. That’s something that I was using that for.

Then, the last plugin that I had that I was running, or I still have on my website right now as of this recording, is called SumoMe. This is a free plugin by the folks over at appsumo.com. It can do a lot more than collect email addresses.

You can view heat maps, or what people are actually clicking on in your website, you can see Google Analytics inside the module, you can do what are called welcome gates, I believe. That’s basically an opt-in form that take up the whole homepage of your screen, and then, as you scroll up, the form kinda disappears.

You can do banners, you can do all kinds of different opt-in stuff as well. It’s got a lot of features. I think the main reason that I installed SumoMe initially was for the social sharing buttons on mobile. I believe that’s the main reason that I did that.

I wanted my new website to have the easy ability to easily share things within social media on those buttons and those icons, and I’m pretty sure that functionality got turned off at some point. Not being used. I’m barely even using SumoMe for anything.

Right now, nothing is being done with SumoMe. I’ve got five plugins, you can hear that I’m barely uses – OptinMonster, I’ve got two different forms, LeadPages, I’m using it for a thank you page, Thrive Leads, I’ve got a little banner at the top of my package that’s opting in for people to opt in, ConvertKit, that box pops up occasionally. I have no idea how it’s really working because I’m not really paying attention to it, and SumoMe, there’s really nothing going on.

I’ve got this whole hodgepodge of stuff. It’s making this discombobulated page because sometimes, you get to a page, OptinMonster pops up, then you close that, and then you scroll a little bit on page, and now ConvertKit pops up, and you’ve got all these pop-up boxes.

Yeah, I need to take my own medicine and try to figure out what’s going on, and how I can fix this, and how I can make this a better user experience for both people that are coming to my website for the first time, people that are return subscribers, people who are just coming to check things out all the time.

I had to kinda think through, “Okay, now, what’s my next plan of attack? It’s 2016, I’m doing a horrible job with making sure that things aren’t being annoying on my website. Let’s see. What am I gonna do?” My first approach is I can easily get rid of, I think, three plugins pretty quickly.

The first one is OptinMonster. The two to three forms that I have there can easily be duplicated to a ConvertKit form pretty quickly. It’s not going take a lot of work. It’s a shame that some of the plugin features that were unique to OptinMonster are now coming to all of these other platforms.

That was one of the coolest things about OptinMonster when it first came out, was called exit intent strategy, or exit intent something, and that allowed people to – as people were leaving and going to click the X or the back arrow, it would automatically pop up and say, “Wait, before you go, he’s something free,” or, “Sign up now,” type of a thing.

That was one of the first features, but I think that’s stating to be built into a lot of the different services. That can be removed. I can build a thank you page very, very easily within my theme, and then just get rid of LeadPages because that’s not necessary.

I’m probably gonna go ahead and cancel the LeadPages account just because I’m not using it in its fullest potential just because there’s so many different things that I can do, or so many different ways that I can do it that I just don’t feel that LeadPages is perfect for me, especially since I’m not using Go To Webinar, some of the other software that really interact well together.

That’s something that I’ll probably get rid of as well. LeadPages and OptinMonster are gone. Thrive Leads will probably get removed this week as well. I can see that the opt-ins haven’t been that great. I can see that it takes up a lot of real estate on the top of my website, and if I really needed to, I could use SumoMe to do that same banner, something along those lines on my website as well.

That leaves me with two plugins after I’ve gotten rid of OptinMonster, LeadPages, and Thrive Leads, and so that leaves me the ConvertKit Plugin and the SumoMe plugin. The reason that I’m sticking with ConvertKit as a plugin, there’s several different reasons, of course, but one of the first reasons is within the form itself within ConvertKit, when I’m designing the form on my website, whether that be something that pops up, or something that slides in, or something that’s just kinda built into the page, then what I can do is I can set all these settings within ConvertKit itself.

I can say, “Display this form when somebody intends to exit the page,” or, “Display this for when somebody scrolls 70 percent down the page, or when somebody waits there on the page for more than ten seconds.” I can set the display settings for all devices, and if somebody closes out of the box, if they don’t sign up, then don’t show them again for 15 more days, or whatever that looks like.

I’ve got custom CSS that I can add right in there all through ConvertKit. Probably the most powerful thing, the thing that excites me the most about, really, taking on the full potential of using this plugin is it’s smart enough to know if somebody has already signed up. It sets a little cookie in the browser, but if it knows that somebody has already signed up, you can either hide the form for them so they won’t see the form ever again, or what you can do is you can show custom content.

Maybe you’re running a promotion for people who are already on your newsletter or something like that, or if you are – you can do hundreds of different things, but if they’re already on your list, you don’t want to show them, “Hey, sign up for my list again,” and you can build something custom for them, which I think is really, really cool. That’s one of the main reasons that I’ll be using ConvertKit, that plugin.

The other one I’m gonna you use is SumoMe. Some of the things that I’ll use this one for are things that I can’t use ConvertKit, maybe that top hello bar that goes across the top. That’ll be something I use. I’ll probably start turning on and looking at the heat map to see where people are actually clicking on my website, just to get a overall sense and feel of what that looks like.

SumoMe is a great plugin for capturing email addresses in general, but the thing is, I don’t have enough experience with SumoMe to recommend that as an option for people. Right now, I basically say, if somebody wants the best email opt-in that’s out there, I’m gonna say OptinMonster. That’s a really good one, and it fits a wide range of needs. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re using, you can use OptinMonster pretty easily.

SumoMe is a free option. I love recommending free options because some people just are building a website. They don’t wanna invest a lot of money into it, and so SumoMe could be perfect for them.

That just gets me more excited to use SumoMe and get everything kind of working in unison, and figuring out how I can use this, and how I can teach people and share with other people, “Hey, you can use SumoMe, and here are the options, here are the things that you can do with OptinMonster, or with SumoMe, that is.”

That’s a case study. I’m studying my own site. I’m sure that there’s hundreds of other sights that I could take a look at and see what their strategies are and say they’re much better than what mine was. You’re gonna keep me to it. I’m gonna try my best within the next week to get everything that I just said that I was gonna do, get that updated, and so that there’s a better experience on yourwebsiteengineer.com.

The call to action the week is take a look at yours, honestly. Yes, I said that last week in the podcast episode, and I kind of blindly thought about it, like, “Yeah, mine’s not very good, but I’ll get to it someday. I’ll fix it someday.”

Well, it was very apparent that it’s annoying and it needs to be fixed. I mean, honestly, I don’t spend a lot of time on the front end of my website because I’m always on the back end fixing, and tinkering, and doing things, so I didn’t really notice it. Once I was called out a couple times, I decided to take a look, and it’s horrendous, so I’ll be working on that this week. Take care, bye-bye.