DEV Community: Jan Koch

Building An Agency? Avoid These 5 Mistakes At All Costs

Jan Koch — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 10:23:52 +0000

This article will break down five common mistakes many entrepreneurs make when building an agency. Many factors go into whether an entrepreneur should start their own business, and you should not decide on a whim.

A lot of people mistakenly believe they have found their life’s calling when in reality, they haven’t given it enough thought or research. As such, here are some things you might want to consider before leaping building your own business.

Even if you have an agency already, this article can help. Take it an opportunity to evaluate whether your agency is running as it should or whether you have just created another job for yourself.

1. Not having a business plan when building an agency.

Without a business plan, it’s challenging to grow. You will not have direction, and you won’t know how to get where you want to go. With the right planning, however, you’ll be able to set your goals for your new agency and identify steps that will take you there!

Many people are confused when it comes to starting their own business. They think entrepreneurship is the best path for them, but they aren’t aware of all the pitfalls that come with running your own company.

It’s essential to have all of the facts and understand what kind of commitment running your agency will require from you. If you don’t have any business experience, then there is no doubt that it can be overwhelming for most people. These challenges are why I want to help by providing some insight into how much effort it takes to start an agency. So that you can make an informed decision about whether or not this path is right for you.

If you want to skip steps in the learning process and want to learn from the mistakes other entrepreneurs already made, you can sign up for the free WP Agency Summit replay.

2. Focusing on the wrong metrics.

Many agencies are still focusing on the wrong metrics for digital marketing and business performance. There was a time where “hits” and “clicks” were all that mattered, but now those numbers just don’t cut it anymore. Instead, marketers need to be focusing on engagement rates or bounce rates to see if their strategies are working.

It is crucial to know what you are getting into before starting your own business. And what key performance indicators to pay attention to after your agency has its first few customers. There is no shame in doing research first or taking some time for introspection on whether entrepreneurship is right for you at this point in your life.

The last thing any entrepreneur wants is for their new venture to fail because they didn’t do enough research before committing to it full-time. You don’t want to be in a position where your livelihood depends on something you have little experience or knowledge of how things work behind-the-scenes.

When looking at all aspects of running a successful online marketing agency, there are several factors involved such as:

finances,
operations & process management,
human resource management (hiring staff),
technology infrastructure (server hosting & maintenance),
software development (customer facing applications)
etc.,

I am just mentioning a few examples out loud here. Monitoring metrics is critical and requires different skill sets from those who wish to run them successfully; however, these aren’t even half of what you’d need if you want to build an agency for the first time.

And all these areas of expertise have their metrics you need to track to keep your agency operating smoothly. Here is a good article if you want to learn more about which metrics to track.

3. Not diversifying your skillset (or that of your team).

There are many reasons why it’s essential to diversify your skillset as a freelancer. And it is the same for soon-to-be agency owners. The most fundamental reason is that you never know what will happen. You might get hit by a bus tomorrow, and your livelihood could be gone. Even if you don’t get hit by a bus tomorrow, there may come a day where you can no longer do graphic design or write copy for websites.

Many people stay in jobs because they’re afraid to lose their income whether they like it or not; this isn’t how we want things to be! It’s always wise to have backups so that unfortunate events don’t stop us from finding happiness in life again when things go wrong.

Not diversifying your skillset can leave you high and dry when things start to go south. You might not be able to find new clients quickly enough because the work is specialized, or you might discover that the skills you’ve been honing for years are no longer in demand. The easiest way to avoid this pitfall is by continually building up your portfolio of skills so that you’re ready for anything life throws at you.

4. Spending too much time on social media.

Do you spend too much time on social media? I know I do! It’s so easy to get caught up in posting and getting likes, especially when you’re building an agency and want to generate new leads via social platforms.

I always feel like the most popular person when someone comments and says something nice about my pictures, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just a photo of me. Spending too much time on social media can be really addicting, distracting, and ultimately unhealthy. Sometimes you need to log off or take a break from scrolling through your feed or feeling like everyone else is having more fun than you are.

The constant barrage of notifications from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has caused many people to become addicted. This addiction is so strong that some people spend their entire day on social media sites scrolling through posts without even stopping for food or drink. That has adverse effects on your health and performance – and is the opposite of the approach of active listening my friend Dennis Yu preaches.

This has led to an increase in anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues due to the lack of human interaction they are receiving by spending all day online. It forced me to take mental deload weeks in the past, which have proven very helpful.

5. Hiring employees for your agency who don’t have the right qualifications.

Some agencies hire employees who don’t have the right qualifications because they are in a hurry. They are looking to fill empty slots no matter what, and it’s not working.

The best way to figure out if this is true for you is by considering what kind of skills you need and whether or not the person has them–but always evaluate their performance on an ongoing basis before fully committing!

Some agencies are hiring employees who don’t have the right qualifications because they are in a hurry. They are looking to fill empty slots no matter what and it’s not really working.

Now their team has less experienced people, which means mistakes will happen more often, which is slowing them down even more. It was just easier for this company to hire someone with experience, but now they’re paying for it with a slower workflow.

Hiring unqualified employees can be a gamble that costs you time, money, reputation. All of those things quickly add up when mistakes become more commonplace because of inexperience or lack of knowledge.

As you can see, building an agency is a daunting task. It takes discipline, creativity, and patience to succeed in this industry. As someone who has been part of the entrepreneurial world for years, I am saddened by how often people make mistakes when building their business, costing them more time and money in the long-run.

I hope this article gave you a few starting points to consider before building an agency. And if you’re running an agency already, you might now have starting points for making sure that you’re on track.

Mental deload for developers & entrepreneurs

Jan Koch — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 15:13:28 +0000

Last week I had the opportunity to take a mental deload week. In that week, I did almost no business-related work and instead focused my energy on spending time with my family and doing some gardening. It was a much needed break from the rollercoaster of being an entrepreneur.

It is a concept you might be familiar with from the gym. When doing a deload training, you are reducing your weights so that your body can regenerate muscle and joints. The point is to grow stronger through a short, active rest period. If this sounds new to you, my friend James Rose has created a short video about mental deload on Youtube. Tim Ferriss also wrote about deloading phases on his blog.

The truth is, that I have a really hard time taking vacations. With Covid19 shutting down all travel inside Germany (not to mention internationally), I am stuck at home currently. Working from home makes it easy to constantly work. When I’m home, I will constantly think about my business. Chances are that you are wired similarly. And we rarely have times for mental deload.

Signs I Needed A Mental Deload

It is really hard to destress for me when I’m home. Thoughts about the summit, new ways to deliver value to my audience, and current challenges occupy my mind when I’m just near my home office. Even though I love my family, I would find myself sitting on the couch with my wife but just being physically present. In my mind, business was taking the majority of my attention.

Eventually, my wife told me that I wasn’t paying enough attention to her. And I sure didn’t. She is amazing in putting up with the pressure I put on myself. I hold myself to extremely ambitious expectations, knowing that I am silently failing on at least half of them. Yet, she puts up with me and I lover her for that.

Whenever she tells me that I am getting too occupied with business (which is a recurring pattern), I know that my schedule is seriously off. That is why I decided to switch gears and reduce my workload.

I tried recharging by directing my energy to other tasks than business. I did a mental deload week, adapting the model from the fitness workouts.

What Mental Deload Looked Like (For Me)

For the first days, I focused on garden work and made a ton of progress – I’m going to implement a smart watering system next spring and finished a lot of prep work for that.

But on Wednesday, business started creeping in again. I just cannot help myself when this happens. Even though Tina told me repeatedly that I said I didn’t want to work, I justified spending a 2-3 hours a day in the home office with some seemingly urgent and important tasks.

I focused on high-level tasks that involved a lot of thinking and no hands-on implementation – and allowed myself to play around a little bit. Playing around in that I stepped into new business ventures. The result is, as you might have seen in my Facebook group, that I started working on WP Agency Summit Merchandise.

Designing shirts, hoodies, mugs, tote bags, and other stuff is fun and a nice variation from the day-to-day coding and running the business.

That’s how I spent my Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, my wife brought me back to mental deloading again. She’s really good at grounding me, which is one of the many reasons I love her.

We took the time to do a nice extended walk in a nearby forest with our daughter and our silver lab. We had a great time and I definitely recharged my batteries on that walk.

Lessons Learned From The Mental Deload Week

Now that the week is over, I’m feeling excited about my tasks at hand again. A feeling I lost a little bit in the day-to-day hustle. A feeling I think is crucially important to avoid burning out and staying on top of your agency.

I also realized that I still suck at delegating and team management. While my VA did continue with her tasks and created more workbooks around the WP Agency Summit, there are tons of tasks she cannot do. This includes stuff happening in German like accounting or client communications – which I don’t yet have a solution for.

So, I highly recommend you also incorporate mental deload weeks. My process helped me realize that I need to continue to work on my team and internal processes. It also shows how important detaching yourself from the business is.

James says he’s doing them every 8 weeks, which is the rhythm I will also try. The next week is planned over Christmas already – I blocked it in my calendar.

Hope this concept helps you and this blog post serves as a reminder to not fully lose yourself in grinding for your agency.

Jan

How To Improve Your Video Meeting Quality

Jan Koch — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 15:38:41 +0000

One thing I learned from doing all the interviews for the WP Agency Summit is how important it is to look and sound professional on video and audio.

You could be doing a call with your client via Zoom, are getting interviewed on a podcast, or record a video for your YouTube channel. All of these situations demand solid audio and video quality for you to be perceived as an expert.

I've been on interviews with C-Level executives of multi-million dollar companies who joined from a MacBook without any lighting, bad audio, and cameras being positioned way too low so you could see into their nose.

That setup certainly did not help to convey the authority and expertise they had.

I don't blame anybody, getting a home office ready for video and audio production can be hard (and expensive).

That's why I wanted to share a few tips I learned over the years to help you improve your setup. And no worries, we're not going to break the bank.

Audio is the most important aspect. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Without proper audio quality, even the best camera setup will not let you come across as the expert that you are.

Firstly, I would recommend that you get yourself a pair of headphones before joining your next call or video. Wired or not doesn't matter at all. A simple pair of in-ear headphones will do, don't break your bank with this.

By using headphones, you are eliminating echo from the recording. Without headphones, your counterpart will hear themselves through your speakers and will have a hard time doing a proper recording with you.

Secondly, grab yourself a lavalier microphone or a USB microphone. You can get the good Rode Lavalier mic for around $50. The difference in audio quality compared to your internal microphone will surprise you!

An alternative can be the Blue Yeti or the Elgato Wave 3. Both more expensive than the Rode Lavalier microphone but will also produce better audio.

Without proper audio, your listeners will have a hard time understanding you. And sometimes, the "s", "t", or "p" noises can be so annoying, that listeners even tune out of conversations. I certainly did that myself. There's a low tolerance for bad audio these days because it's so easy to fix.

Thirdly, set up lighting in your home office. This can be seen as optional, though it shouldn't be underestimated. By simply placing two lights at a 45° degree angle to either side of your camera, you can drastically improve the video quality.

Notice that I don't specify which camera you are using. It doesn't really matter. You can make a simple Logitech C920 look great with proper lighting - or you can invest thousands into a DSLR.

As a bonus tip, avoid light in your back. Avoid sitting in front of windows or at least close your blinds. I have all window blinds closed when I do recordings and just rely on my lighting kit.

That is because natural lighting is inconsistent. Any cloud can change the lighting in your recording or live stream, which makes you look really unprofessional.

However, bad audio quality will always have a more negative impact than bad lighting.

These three tips will help you improve the perceived quality of your next video call or recording drastically.

If you need more specific advice on gear or how to set up your home recording studio (can be your regular desk), shoot me an email!

All the best,

Jan

Why devs should use email marketing regularly

Jan Koch — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 18:47:56 +0000

In this post, I want to share three actionable email marketing "hacks" for agency owners and freelancers with you, which will help you build a more engaged email list and turn it into a valuable asset.

If you're like me then email marketing isn't your strongest discipline. I'm the first to admit that I struggle with writing newsletters consistently - even though I'm fully aware of the benefits.

Think about what having an engaged email list really means... people are giving you their permission to send them information and want to interact with you. It might sound cheesy but it's a relationship that needs to be treated with respect.

While I'm trying to not come across as a sleazy marketer in my emails, I certainly also did not do a good job of keeping you in the loop about what is going on.

That's why I'm happy to share three tips I learned today from interviewing Davinder Singh Kainth for the 2020 WP Agency Summit. He runs three weekly newsletters and managed to scale multiple income streams for his WP business using email marketing.

Tip 1: How to never run out of things to write about.

You probably know this feeling as well as I do. You want to write a newsletter but don't know what to write about in the email.

Davinder is very pragmatic about this. He has three draft emails in Gmail for each of his weekly newsletters. As he comes across interesting articles or news, he just pastes the respective website links into the email drafts and then expands on them when he's writing the actual newsletter.

It's brilliantly simple. I'm doing the same from now on with a simple Notepad file on my desktop PC.

Tip 2: Clean your email list to improve deliverability.

Chances are that you have email subscribers that didn't open your last 10 campaigns. Guess what, they won't open any of the next 10 either, Davinder says. By removing inactive contacts, you increase your overall open rate and help improve the deliverability of your emails.

This point certainly is true for me. My business shifted so much over the years that subscribers who signed up five years ago likely don't care about what I'm doing now.

Davinder recommends to go through your account and tag those inactive contacts. Send them an email campaign asking if they want to stay subscribed and follow up after 3-4 weeks. If they still don't engage, tag them to be excluded in future communication or remove their email address altogether.

Tip 3: Keep your customers engaged throughout your projects.

Davinder introduced me to the concept of the "Friday" email. Every Friday, he recommends sending an email to your active customers about how far their project has come.

You'll receive two benefits from this:

Firstly, you keep the communication in the project going. This helps avoid frustration on the customers' end and clears potential miscommunication quickly.

Secondly, you are held accountable to stick to the deadlines you set. If you don't produce results, you have nothing to write about in your Friday email - which will look bad.

By simply sending your customers an update about what happened during the week, you can speed up your projects massively.

Now, these are just three tips I pulled out from a 45-minute interview with Davinder. If you want to hear all he has to say about how agencies can increase their bottom line with email marketing, make sure to catch his session at the WP Agency Summit from October 12th to 16th.

Grab your free ticket here: https://wpagencysummit.com

A Hack To Building Your Personal Brand As A Developer

Jan Koch — Tue, 12 May 2020 07:50:20 +0000

Developers from all over the globe are competing for jobs these days. Due to lockdown, businesses are even more open to hiring remotely as they already were.

That's why your personal brand as a developer needs to stand out in the market brighter than ever. In this post, I'll outline three steps you can take today to build your personal brand.

I've learned these steps from Dennis Yu, who I interviewed for my upcoming Ecom Services Summit. We talked about how agencies can increase their perceived authority to double your prices. And some of these lessons, you can easily apply to your freelance career too.

Executing these branding steps will look simple but you might not find it easy. If it were easy, everybody would do it, right? However, you'll find the results you can achieve from these steps are worth getting out of your comfort zone.

Now, why should you pay attention to what Dennis said in his interview on the summit?

Firstly, he's the CEO of Blitzmetrics, a company that spent over $1B in ads for its customers. Yes, that's one billion.

Secondly, he is a regular contributor to publications like AdWeek, has spoken over 730 times in 17 countries on 5 continents, and has been featured in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TechCrunch, and other authority platforms.

I understand that the topic of building your personal brand does not come naturally for many developers. But think about what the alternatives are...

How would clients find you if you don't have a strong personal brand?
How can you command higher prices than other developers in your field without having a strong brand?
How can you ditch customers you don't like working with if your brand is weak and you are desperate for the money coming in?

Those were the questions I asked myself when I started working online. And I'm lucky in that I found a good way to build my brand.

Now, with the lessons I learned from interviewing Dennis a couple of days ago, I too will be able to take my brand to the next level. Let's dive in!

Create your 3x3 grid of videos on "Why", "How", and "What"

In the following, I'll describe Dennis' infamous "3x3 grid" of videos you can create to build Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

He recommends you work on these videos in the following order:
Conversion -> Consideration -> Awareness.

Your "Why" videos

Did you ever hear the term that companies hire people and not other companies? And that "people hire people" and not companies?

Here is where the 3x3 grid of videos comes in. Essentially, you create three short videos about "Why" you are doing what you are doing.

For me, this is what my three topics for my "Why" videos are:
1) "Life is too short to not follow your dreams"
2) "Use technology to save time and money in your business"
3) "Leave an impact for your clients"

I can easily record a 2-3 minute video about each of these headlines and share a personal story about why that specific topic is important to me. You could certainly come up with three reasons why you became a developer too - you just have to think about them if they aren't obvious to you.

The purpose of these videos is to build an emotional connection with potential clients. If somebody is looking at your social profiles or website and evaluate if you're the right fit for their open position or project, giving them emotional reasons of why you're passionate about what you're doing is going to set you apart from the other developers competing with you.

Your "How" videos

In these videos, you will explain how you do what you're doing. I'm not saying that you'll give away your exact coding methodologies, your stack, or any other intellectual property you developed over time.

However, you'll need to make your way of working tangible for potential clients and demonstrate that you know what you're talking about. Again, these videos need to be just 2-3 minutes long (if at all) - so there won't be much time to lose yourself in technical details anyways.

My "How" video headlines are:
1) "Use content & digital tools to build a business"
2) "Leverage automated workflows and collaboration tools to simplify communication with your team and with clients"
3) "Provide efficient services, sell helpful products, and deliver projects on time smoothly"

I believe that with these topics, I'll have a good follow-up video sequence to what I am talking about in my "Why" videos.

Your "What" videos

Lastly, you'll get to pitch your services and products in your "What" videos. These videos are your conversion drivers, the ones that bring in the $$$. Dennis recommends that you record these videos first, because you likely already have an audience that is interested in what you're doing.

Those people could be your past customers that you can pitch your services to again, people who visited your website or engaged with you on social media, or essentially any leads you've been in touch with.

To give you some inspiration, my three "WHAT" headlines for the videos are:
1) "Run virtual summits to kickstart your business and overcome plateaus"
2) Learn Continuous Integration and Continuous Development workflows with my WP-CI course"
3) "Scale your agency by learning from experts on the WP Agency Summit or Ecom Services Summit"

These are essentially my three core offerings: I help people run virtual summits (that's a new one), I have a course on CI & CD, and obviously I have my own virtual summits that are set up as evergreen events.

One thing I will make sure in all these videos is that my skills in client communication and project delivery shine through.

Why? Because that's most often the difference between charging $2,000 or $6,000 for a project. That's what Dennis said in his interview (see the snippet here) and what I found to be true in my own projects as well.

If you want to learn more about positioning your agency or freelance business as an authority in the market, you'll want to check out the Ecom Services Summit.

It'll be especially valuable to you if you work with e-commerce brands, but even if you don't, you'll learn a lot about growing your agency and attracting higher-paid projects.

Check out the website and secure your free ticket here: https://ecomservicessummit.com

How To Take Your WordPress Agency From $0 to $1,000,000+ Within 5 Years

Jan Koch — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 04:36:44 +0000

If you’re running a WordPress service agency or build websites for a living, you’re likely familiar with the so-called “feast & famine” cycles.

In some months, you have plenty of work and cash flow is looking good. You’re watching your bank account grow and might even work extra hours to finish all projects on time.

The downside of these months?

You don’t have time to do sales and your pipeline of leads runs dry. So the following months are not as great, with less cash flow and more selling needed to keep the lights on.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let me introduce you to Joe Howard.

Joe earns high 6-figures every year and has banked over $1m in total, without building WordPress sites or writing code.

That’s because he built an agency focused on selling WordPress maintenance services, direct to customers and as a white-label partner for other agencies.

So what, you might think. You don’t have time to read further, because you’re either pressed to get work done or to do sales.

Stop it. You can learn a lot from Joe. We all can.

In fact, I would argue that his approach should be modeled by the vast majority of WP agencies.

Selling maintenance services - or care plans as they’re often called - has two advantages for WordPress professionals.

Firstly, it’s a relatively easy sell if you are already building a website for your client. You’ve already earned their trust, understand their objectives, and know the website inside-out.

When pitching a maintenance service, you can easily hit on all the goals your customer has with the website and all the requirements that go into keeping the website up and running so that the goals are met.

Secondly, selling maintenance plans is a fantastic way to build recurring revenue. With that, you fight the dreaded feast and famine cycles.
Even you have just 5 websites you can host & maintain for just $100/mo (which is not extraordinarily high), you cash in another $500/mo.

Let me break down how Joe started his agency, WP Buffs - and how you can start offering similar services. Even if you are a one-man or one-gal shop, you’ll see how this can work for you.

1. Offer very basic maintenance for backups, updates, and security checks.

You don’t have to start offering fancy services and 24x7 support. Trying to offer 24x7 support simply is impossible if you’re handling everything on your own.

But you can certainly spin up a free installation of MainWP and add websites to your new maintenance platform.

With that, you can efficiently handle maintenance tasks like updates, backups, and security checks.

As these are the most mandatory tasks that need to be performed to keep the website up and running, you can sell your customers on those.

Just don’t talk about the technical tasks, but explain how having you perform the maintenance helps your customers achieve their business goals.

To quote Kyle van Deusen, agency owner at OGAL Web: “No customer ever came to me and asked me to do their backups, updates, and to keep your website secure. But every customer asked me to keep the site up and running so that their business is represented online.”

You’ll see that companies will easily pay you $50/mo for those basic services.

2. Hire a VA once you reach a certain threshold.

Once you start selling more and more care plans, you can replace yourself from the daily business by hiring a virtual assistant.

Document your processes in every detail and have somebody else execute them. That documentation doesn’t have to be complex.
A simple Google Doc outlining how often you do backups and updates, how to check the website’s functionality after a backup, or how to validate backups will do.

This will allow you to take on more WP maintenance customers without drowning in the work yourself.

3. Create content around your target market.

One thing Joe’s agency excels at is content marketing. They run a podcast and have a very active blog.

When I asked him about the strategy, he answered that he wants to rank for keywords that aren’t targeted by the big companies in the WP space (e.g. hosting companies) but are still relevant for his target market.

You can certainly do the same if you invest some time into content creation. Whether you write blog posts that help your customers, launch a podcast or start recording videos is totally up to you.

It’s important that the content you create is full of value and helps your customers achieve their goals.

The harsh reality is that they likely don’t care a whole lot about your business. At least new leads won’t.

But when you get them hooked with your content, you’ll soon earn their trust and will be able to get into sales conversations to sell your care plans.

4. Set up a robust onboarding process

Joe's onboarding process really impressed me. WP Buffs are a white-label partner for my maintenance services, and their semi-automated onboarding was nothing but a-ma-zing.

He has set up an automated email sequence that tells their agency partners everything they need to know about the partnership.

They firstly let me know what information they need from me to onboard me as a partner.

Once I submitted my first website for them to manage, they triggered another automation to onboard the website.

The emails they’ve sent me went for several days and contained all sorts of information, from logins and special requirements to the ways how the communication with the website owner will be.

5. Keep your customers updated at all times.

Client communication is key to keep your maintenance clients happy and reduce churn. You can achieve that in various ways, two of which I want to outline for you now.

WP Buffs have the great service for their white-label partners to sell branded reports every week. Their management tool allows them to upload the logo of their white-label partner and send the report under their branding.

You can achieve the same with MainWP by using their Reports extension. You can specify exactly what type of information should be included in the reports and how often to send them.

The second way - and a more personal approach - is to simply shoot your customers an email every other week or every month.

You can forward them an article that will help them in their business, ask them how their business is doing and if they have any questions, or just offer to call for a chat and discuss the current state of their website.

As you can see by Joe’s success, selling maintenance services can be a nice addition to your income and provide stability. It can even turn into a whole business on its own.

It is certainly becoming essential for my own brand WP Mastery, as I’m banking in four figures monthly with the help of WP Buffs.

But there’s a whole lot more to growing your WP agency than selling care plans.

If you want to explore other ways to break through feast & famine, understand how to attract high-paying customers, and scale your agency without working 10-16h every day, join the WP Agency Summit.

This free online conference starts on December 6th and brings together 30+ world-class experts that all have grown ravingly successful agencies. Get your free ticket here: https://wpagencysummit.com

How I use Continuous Integration in WP Development

Jan Koch — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 06:56:27 +0000

This post was originally published on my blog at wpmastery.xyz/continuous-integration-for-wordpress-developers/.

Writing high-quality and stable code for WordPress is tough. The Core is written in a procedural style and keeping data in sync between local, staging, and production environments can be a nightmare. Staying on top of the changes in new releases, implementing best-practices while writing code, and ensuring your code plays nicely with 3rd-party plugins requires our full attention.

But if your WP agency wants to deliver websites, plugins or themes that run stable and perform well, you need to write maintainable, performant and secure code. Continuous Integration can play a huge role in the process of developing WordPress sites and WordPress products. In this post, I want to share with you how and why I added Continuous Integration into my WordPress development workflows.

Let's first take a step back and see what Continuous Integration is. Microsoft defines CI as:

Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of automating the build and testing of code every time a team member commits changes to version control. CI encourages developers to share their code and unit tests by merging their changes into a shared version control repository after every small task completion.

Sam Guckenheimer - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/learn/what-is-continuous-integration

In the WordPress world, it means that your theme code or plugin code will be thoroughly managed in version control systems and thus can be analyzed & tested automatically. Upon each commit to your repository - no matter if that's GitHub, Bitbucket or something else - you can execute a series of tasks that monitor and ensure your code quality.

As you might have experienced yourself, working on WordPress projects doesn't always work in this beautifully structured way. Sometimes we have to deploy hot-fixes on live websites, change code via SFTP directly on a server, or do not even bother to set up version control because the project is so seemingly small.

I have been guilty of doing all of this. And I paid the price more than once. Projects got out of hand, bugs that were once fixed got re-introduced by accidentally overwriting a hot-fix, and I lost track of what bugs were still open. You've probably seen projects go very messy very quickly, too.

That's why I set out to find a solution for these situations. I wanted to bring predictability and stability to my projects. Continuous Integration came to the rescue!

This is how a CI pipeline looks in one of my WordPress plugin projects.

For example, I read that WordPress developers can use Continuous Integration to run PHPUnit tests, automatically deploy code onto your staging or live server, or use static code analysis tools like PHPloc to make your builds & deployments fail if your code gets too messy. That sounded like exactly what I needed, so I implemented CI in my development workflows.

Getting Started with Continuous Integration for WordPress Development

Implementing Continuous Integration does not require a lot of money. In fact, I run my own CI pipelines based on a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet and open-source software. However, it took me many hours to refine the process. Be prepared to spend some time if you're implementing CI on your own.

Let me walk you through the step-by-step process I took to automate my deployments to my Cloudways servers. That should give you a rough idea of how you can leverage Continuous Integration in your own WordPress development processes.

Firstly, I set up a Ubuntu droplet on Digital Ocean for $5 per month. I did not want to spend huge amounts on my CI pipeline and wanted to avoid being limited by 3rd-party tools - so hosting my own server felt like the way to go. It turned out to be much less effort in maintenance than I expected. I do have a referral link to Digital Ocean that gives you $50 in credit.

Secondly, I installed the Continuous Integration software Jenkins on the Ubuntu droplet. I see Jenkins as a virtual butler that handles automation for me. I connected Jenkins to my GitHub repositories so that it has access to the project files I'm working on at any time.

Thirdly, each project (e.g. plugin or theme) needed to have the tool PHPloy installed. PHPloy can be used to deploy code via SFTP/FTP and was the perfect choice to run automated deployments independently from your target server. Though Cloudways offers automated deployment via GitHub, I found that to be limiting. I could just connect one repository per application, so it wouldn't work for a plugin and a theme on the same application if those reside in two repositories.

Fourth, I set up simple automation pipelines in Jenkins using Jenkinsfiles. Those are scripts written in Groovy (I have no knowledge of Groovy whatsoever) that tell Jenkins what to do when you commit code to your repositories. In my case, they trigger PHPloy and perform static code analysis. Soon, they'll also trigger unit testing and code optimization.

That's all it took for me to automate my deployments when working on code. I am not touching FileZilla or other SFTP clients anymore to upload code to a staging or live server. It's all fully automated and I'm loving every bit of it. Honestly, setting up this CI pipeline was quite a strain. There were moments I felt like giving up and throwing my MacBook against the wall or my Win10 desktop out of the window. But in the end, the work pays off.

I now have a dashboard where I can easily monitor the status of all the projects I'm working on.

Issues I Solved With Continuous Integration

I wanted to add CI to my WordPress development workflows to get rid of multiple issues. Those were things I faced on a daily basis and that led to me wasting time in my projects. And time is the last thing we developers can afford to waste.

Easier collaboration in teams. I'm in multiple projects that involve another agency. Knowing that we all are forced to work in the same repository streamlines communication and increases transparency in what's happening on the staging and live server.
No more accidentally overwritten files. Especially in the projects mentioned above, it would happen that file transfers via SFTP would accidentally overwrite files that had been changed on the server instead of in the repository. Somebody would deploy a hot-fix on the live server, which would then get nuked by the next code deployment - bringing the error back to the live website.
No more manual file transfers. I admit it, I'm lazy. Having to always transfer my code manually using FileZilla annoyed me.

If you're still reading the article, I want to thank you for following my thoughts on implementing Continuous Integration for WordPress development. Maybe you're now also seeing the potential it can bring into your organization. And even as a single freelancer, you can save quite some time with CI and its automation capabilities.