In this week’s episode, instead of building a website with just free plugins, this week we’re going to talk about only premium plugins right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode #403.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we’re going to be talking about building a website for the premium user. And by premium I mean maybe you have a customer or a client or somebody that just has tons of money that they want to spend on a website and we could talk about how to use or what premium plugins that I would install on a website if I was just gonna deck out my entire website with premium plugins. But first I’ve got two announcements and a plugin to share. The first announcement is all about the simple payment widget and this is something that’s very similar to the simple payment button that appeared on wordpress.com and jetpack enabled sites I guess it was probably about six months ago or so.

But now this is a variant of the simple payment button and it’s something called the payment widget or the simple payment widget. And what this is you can add a quick payment option to the sidebar or footer of your wordpress.com or jetpack enabled sites and you can do this by adding it just like a regular widget and it gives you the ability to say I want a donation and maybe you can select what type of simple payment buttons that you have. One of the options is buy me a coffee. They have a couple different options that are built in but actually, you can define what these are and you can say, “Oh, this is for buy me coffee.” There’s an image and you can put a description like, “Donate $5 to buy me coffee so I have fuel to keep producing great content.” You can put a price and you can allow people to choose a dropdown menu of which option that they want to pay and it’s all connected through PayPal and it’s just literally a simple payment widget. It just works. It gives you the ability to collect money if that’s something that you’re interested in.

Remember back in the past when if you wanted to have a simple button on the side your website from PayPal, you had to go into PayPal, you had to define the button and then you had to copy some embed codes and it was just really a big pain. And so this is an easy way to add payment button to your sidebar or footer. There’s a link in the show notes for the blog topic that’s over on wordpress.com if you want more information.

The other thing also comes from wordpress.com and this is kind of news that’s been going across the web. I’ve seen it in several different places but starting back on August 1st so a few weeks ago, third-party tools can no longer post automatically to Facebook profiles. And so that means if you have a normal profile page, you can no longer automatically publish things to that page. So, I know for a long time I was using Dustin. blog and I was just posting those things as every time I would post it would go out to Twitter, it would go out to Facebook and to my personal profile page and it would go to Google Plus if Google Plus if anybody even looks at Google Plus, it would go to there. But now that no longer works. The publicized tool that’s built into wordpress.com and jetpack powered sites; it no longer works. You can publish to a page so if you’re connected to a Facebook page, it will work, but it will no longer work with the profile page.

And so it’s just one of those things that’s been banned over there on the Facebook side and so if you do want to share your posts on Facebook, what you have to do is you have to take the URL once it’s been published and then you paste that into Facebook and then you then you can have all your traffic there. I think that it’s good in one case that now you are getting all your traffic going onto your website. If you can somehow figure out a way to get people to subscribe to your website for updates versus getting them via Facebook; I mean that’s a great win because then you can control the entire experience. It’s something that’s a real bummer when it comes to WordPress but it’s nothing that we can handle. It’s nothing that can be done on the WordPress site. It’s all on Facebook and so that is something to shout nasty things at Mark Zuckerberg if that’s going to upset and change your flow of publishing on your blog.

Alright, is there a plugin for that? I looked today and there’s more than 56,000 plugins in that plugin repository and so there are a ton of plugins out there and my goal each week is just to bring you one that maybe you wouldn’t have discovered on your own or just kind of an interesting or a unique one that may work perfectly for your website. The one that I have today is called Confetti Word Count and this is obviously a niche plugin but it is a plugin that you can set up and configure to get a quick overview of how much you’ve written on a weekly basis on your WordPress dashboard. So, you can get a summary of your word count right there on your site. And so it’s really nice; it gives you that ability. It basically gives you confetti; it falls down from the top of your site if you hit that word count for the week. And so if this is something if you’re trying to work on publishing more and writing more content on your website then Confetti Word Count might be the plugin that you need just to keep you writing and keep you hitting some sort of target on a weekly basis.

So, that’s Confetti Word Count. You can search for that in the WordPress repository or as always you can find a link in the show notes for episode #403. Today I just wanted to talk about premium plugins and if I was to build yourwebsiteengineer.com with only premium versions of plugins what would that look like and what would that cost? So, I went through and pretty much checked the outline from last week when we talked about building a website with only free plugins and then kind of converted those into the premium level. I know that you may be working for somebody or have a client or maybe you just want to spend a lot of money on plugins or you always want the best of the best. There’s always certain people that just want to have the best of everything and so some of these plugins were the free versions that we talked about last week and there’s a premium option that you could just upgrade. Other ones are completely new plugins that you can just add the new plugin instead of using the free version that we talked about last week.

The first one on my list is for jetpack and for the professional plan. This runs $299 per year. It runs $300 and it includes premium themes if that’s something that you’re looking for. It gives you real-time backups. It gives you malware scanning and security fixes. It gives you marketing tools like SEO preview tools, Google Analytics tools. It gives you priority support theme supports and network approval so you can generate ad sense on your website and you can accept PayPal payments on your website as well and it includes elastic search which is a powered search that makes your website just search that much faster.

So, there’s a lot of things that come with the jetpack plan and some of the things that I’ll talk about here in just a few minutes can overlap with the jetpack plan so if you have jetpack you probably don’t need some of the other plugins that we’ll talk about but this is one that would definitely be the Taj Mahal of plugins. It gives you all the abilities of a jetpack but then it gives you also additional things like real-time backup and unlimited archive. You can brute force attack your website and make sure that everything looks good without having to have any problems with your website. So, that’s the first one on the list. For $299, it’s Jetpack.

For $89 per year and all these costs are per year is the Yost premium plugin. And again, we can use Yost free but with Yost premium, you can optimize for synonyms or related words when it comes to keyword optimization with when you preview your page within Yost SEO premium you can see what your Google and your Facebook and Twitter previews look like. There’s a readability check within the premium version so we analyze – we being Yost analyzes the readability of copy you wrote and calculate a flush reading ease score. You have full control over your breadcrumbs with Yost SEO premium. There’s no duplicate content. It does a bunch of technical stuff in the background about robots. TX and ht access file, clean permalink structure, and sitemaps. It’s always updated for the Google algorithm so the plugin is updated every two weeks so you’re good and make sure that there’s nothing there and just a bunch of extra features if you’re interested and there’s no ads too. That’s another thing with Yost SEO premium; there are no ads for the plugin and it gives you year-round access to 24/7 support by the knowledgeable support team.

So, if you need a little bit more bang for your buck or if you want some additional features or you just want to pay for the premium version of Yost then I would recommend going with the Yost SEO premium plugin. So, that’s plugin #2.

The third one is one that is definitely more expensive than the last one that we talked about because that was free obviously, but this one is gravity forms and this was a longtime plugin that I used on all of my websites. I didn’t even flinch when it came to the renewal time or however much the renewal cost was I was like, “I use this on every website. Let’s just go ahead and keep using it.” I’ve moved to ninja forms for a lot of things because I don’t have complex forms. It’s usually just a contact form that’s on the contact page but if you need something that’s very robust, then gravity forms if going to be the tool for you. Gravity forms is just $59 per year and it comes with a bunch of add-ons or a bunch of additional features I guess. The add-ons are things like a-Webber or active campaign so you can integrate with some of your email clients and whatnot. If you want even more, so if you want to maybe integrate with High-rise or Fresh Books or Twillow, authorize.net, Quiz, Signature, Stripe – if you want to integrate with any of those you’ll need the elite plan which is $259 but for the most part you can get by with just the regular version of Gravity forms and you can build forms and you have that world-class support.

I think one of the big things too about paying for premium plugins is that support and we’ll see that a lot in today’s episode that when you pay regularly for a plugin, then those are plugins that you’ll get premium support usually for a year since it’s a yearly cost but you’ll get support to just help out with any configuration issues or compatibility or anything like that.

The next one is instead of Elementer Builder, Page Builder which we talked about last week; this one is Beaver Builder and this is a plugin. It also has a price tag like all of them here and this is $199 per year for a basic account and it is a page builder that you can trust for your business. You can take control of your website and you can just really recreate and use your own creativity and build a website exactly the way that you have imagined it in your head. So, you can position images and text with precision and build columns and they’ve got even dozens of gorgeous templates that you can start with and you can do a lot of things with Beaver Builder. So, that is one that I know that there are a lot of folks in the WordPress community and the WordPress space that really like Beaver Builder and it’s one of those ones that they do provide world-class support as well if you have paid for the premium version. You can only get a premium version of Beaver Builder. There is no free version and if it’s something that you’re interested in you can head on over to wpbeaverbuilder.com and they have a demo where you can try some things out and see what it’s like.

The most expensive plugin on my list is called Opt-in Monster and this is kind of a tool that can do a lot of things actually. It will help you grow your email list. It’s an opt-in monster; it’s an opt-in form which allows you to collect data and collect people’s email addresses. You can increase your page view by helping people know how to navigate through your site. You can reduce cart abandonment. You can increase sales. You can do onsite retargeting. You can do a lot of things with Opt-in Monster and like I said it does have a very steep price tag. It does run – the most popular plan is $49 per month so that’s close to $600 per year but that allows you to have follow up campaigns and you can do a count down timer on certain things and you can do ad block detection. So, if you wanted to say, “Hey, turn off your ad blocker” you can do all of that. It’s got cart and form abandonment. You can have five sub-accounts on your main site and I’ve used Opt-in Monster. I used it back when it was a WordPress plugin and now it’s offered as a software as a service. It works really well. You can do some really cool things.

It integrates with a lot of different email newsletter providers so if you don’t want to try to figure out how to build a form for mail chimp or for convert kit or you want to switch between providers and you can keep the same forms without having to redo everything; then Opt-in Monster is going to be a great option. So, that is Opt-in Monster. You can find out more at optinmonster.com or there’s a link in the show notes for Opt-in Monster.
Another plugin by the same team over at Monster Insights is Google Analytics for WordPress which we talked about last week but they do have a pro version and the pro version has again a lot of extra features. You can get all of your data right inside of WordPress. You can set it up. It’s really, really simple and you can find out all of the details of what people are doing on your website. So, that one runs $199 per year for that Google Analytics by WordPress by Monster Insights and that is in case you want the premium version of that plugin.

The next one on my list is Back Up Buddy and this is one if you’re not using the jetpack professional plan that you’ll definitely need Back Up Buddy and it starts at $80 per year if you just have one website. It goes up to $200 per year if you want to back up multiple or unlimited number of sites. So, that would be a good option if you have lots of sites and you want to keep them updated because jetpack is going to cost $300 per year per site where jetpack is going to cost $200 for all of your websites. So, that’s Back Up Buddy. The interface is incredible. It’s been around since 2010. I used to use it a lot back in the day. Right now I have jetpack professional because we get to dog food all of Automatic’s products being an employee there so I get that license for free so I don’t need additional backups but if I was not working for Automatic and paying I would definitely want to save some cost by using Back Up Buddy as my backup system and just paying one time for as many sites as I want.

Also, if I wasn’t using jetpack, then I would use security and I actually used the free version of Itheme security but there’s one called Itheme security pro and of course it adds more things and you can get a blogger license for $80 per year or you can go with the gold plan which will give you an unlimited number of sites to keep hackers out to make sure that your site is safe and secure and just all of the extra features that come with the pro version of Itheme security and that version is $200 to do all of your sites. And so again, for $200 and $200 so for $400 you can get Itheme pro and you can get Back Up Buddy so you can get those and cover all of your websites so for $400 you can cover all of your websites or you can go with jetpack and not worry about anything, just hit the on button and everything works and that’s $300 per website. So, it just depends on how many websites that you have.

And then the last one that’s on my list if I was paying for plugins and I wanted one on my website; I would go with the smart podcast player. This one’s going to cost you $96 per year and this is just a podcast player that I like. Most of them are around that $50-$100 range for premium plugins to just change the look of what your podcast player looks like. But that’s the one that I would choose, a smart podcast player and that is a paid for premium plugin. I guess it’s not on the WordPress repository. It’s on smartpodcastplayer.com. So, if you add up all of the totals if you got all of the plugins we talked about, you can spend $1700 each year just to pay for premium plugins and that’s not including hosting although that’s $30-$50 per month and all of that. So, if you do want to spend some money and you want to make sure you’re getting support for those plugins, then I would probably recommend picking and choosing just using a couple of these as your option for using premium plugins on your website. You don’t have to use them all by any means but that’s the show that I wanted to share with you today just going about the opposite way. So, instead of going free for everything, going for paid for everything and so somewhere in the middle between zero dollars and $1700 is probably a good fit for having some free and some premium plugins on your WordPress site. That’s all I’ve got for this week. Take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.