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How To Offer Website Care & Maintenance Services To Your Web Development Clients

Providing website maintenance services is a great way to generate monthly recurring revenue from your web development business. In this article, we cover all the essential and profitable web care plan services you can offer to clients and the tools you need to do it.

If you’re looking for an easy way to provide more value to your clients, keep them for longer, and earn recurring revenue – offering website care plans (A.K.A ongoing maintenance) is one of the best ways you can do it.

In this article, we take you through the essential web maintenance services all website owners need and how to offer these services to your clients with the help of WPMU DEV’s built-in tools.

Maintenance services involve keeping your clients’ websites secure, up-to-date, and fully optimized – giving them complete peace of mind to run and grow their business.

We also surveyed our 50,000+ members and researched a number of web developer websites to ensure we give you the best options in this article.

By the time you’re done reading this article, you’ll know:

  • What types of maintenance services you can offer to your clients.
  • Why maintenance services can be a profitable source of monthly recurring revenue for your business.
  • How to set up website care and maintenance service packages with WPMU DEV.

Skip ahead to any section of this article:

What Website Maintenance Services Can You Offer To Your Clients?

Before we get to how to provide website maintenance services with WPMU DEV (and the practical tools involved).

First, let’s look at the best examples of the services you can offer as part of your overall WordPress/web maintenance package.

12 Maintenance Services Every Website Should Have

According to our research and data obtained from our members, every website needs these essential services:

1. Security Monitoring

Hackers attack over 30,000 websites every day, so protecting your clients’ websites is vitally important.

Ongoing website security and continuous peace of mind is a major reason why clients invest in website maintenance services.

Regularly scanning for vulnerabilities, removing malware, and checking for any spam helps to protect your clients’ sites and ensure these will not be hacked, attacked, and taken over.

2. Website Backups

Backups provide clients with additional peace of mind, especially if they know their website is being regularly backed up and fully-restored in the event of a disaster or accidental deletion.

3. Repairs and Fixes

Broken links and page errors frustrate users and can have a negative impact on a website’s search rankings. A good maintenance routine involves checking the site for broken internal and external links, errors, and issues caused by bugs, plugin conflicts, etc.

4. Software Updates

WordPress sites rely on core software, plugins, and themes, and these are updated regularly by developers, so it’s important to keep both critical and non-critical software and site components regularly updated too to keep the client’s business running smoothly online and avoid security issues.

5. Support (Content Updates & Minor Tasks)

Many clients are just too busy or lack the skills to perform content updates, add new pages, add new links to their site header, footer or sidebar, reconfigure menus, etc.

Offering a service that includes a certain amount of support hours allocated to performing content updates and minor site tweaks and tasks can add tremendous value to your web care plan.

6. Site Speed & Performance Optimization

Clients that depend on new leads and sales coming from their website need fast-loading sites that are continually being optimized for better performance. Being able to quickly identify and fix issues that are slowing down their site’s speed is critical.

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In addition to optimizing sites for speed, clients also need their sites to be optimized for search engines. This involves identifying SEO issues that are affecting their site’s ranking and their web traffic.

8. Uptime Monitoring

Sending clients alerts if their websites become inaccessible online and notifications when their sites are up again is extremely helpful.

9. Reports

Regular reports are not only useful for clients, but they also provide proof of the great work you’re doing for them. Send reports detailing security, SEO, or performance issues on their site, as well as analytic reports, and details of any updates or changes made to software, plugins, or themes.

10. Site Functionality and Tweaks

Having a website where essential functions work correctly (like filling in signup and registration forms, sending enquiries through contact forms, keeping privacy policies compliant with rules and regulations like the GDPR, etc.) is very important for clients. Part of your website maintenance service is to check that everything on the site is working correctly on a regular basis.

11. Analytics

Providing clients with analytics reports that help them understand key site metrics like user behavior and identify traffic trends can help them improve their content and see significantly better results in their business.

12. Browser Compatibility Testing

Another important service that must be done at regular intervals is to make sure that a client’s website displays correctly across all browsers and devices. This includes areas like mobile responsiveness, accessibility, etc, which can be affected when changes are made to the site or the site’s theme, new plugins are added, etc.

Additional Maintenance Services

In addition to the above website maintenance services, there are additional services you can provide, such as:

  • Content Writing – If you manage content updates for clients, why not offer them a content writing and publishing service too?
  • PPC Management – Pay-per-click ads need ongoing management. This service can be offered as an add-on.
  • Email Marketing – This service can be offered as an add-on and include writing, scheduling, and sending regular email newsletters to your clients’ subscribers.
  • Renewals: Domain names / SSL Certificates – If you manage client sites or resell hosting, you can also include managing renewals for domain names and SSL certificates (i.e. paid SSL certificates with OV and EV options to validate business identity).

Website Maintenance Checklist

Providing regular maintenance ensures that your clients’ websites remain secure, optimized, and free of errors and issues that can affect the user experience of their customers.

Offering these services, however, is one thing. You also need to know when to do what.

So, to help you design your own website maintenance services schedule, check out our comprehensive checklist of WordPress maintenance tasks.

Why Offering Website Maintenance Services Is a Great Opportunity

Keeping a WordPress website secure, up-to-date, and fully optimized is not hard, complicated or time-consuming.

Especially with automated features built into WordPress like enable auto-updates, various applications and plugins that provide one-click troubleshooting scans and automated solution fixes, and other fully and semi-automated services (we’ll cover all this later in this article).

Any WordPress site owner or user could do basic website maintenance themselves if they invested some time into learning the fundamentals of:

Many clients, however, lack the time and/or the interest to learn these skills.

Many businesses don’t want to figure out how to create and run an efficient maintenance schedule for their websites, they are happy to pay someone else (i.e. YOU) to do this for them.

In other words, here is what most clients want to hear you say…

“I’ll take care of your website. If you have any issue with your website, you call me and I’ll take care of it.” – Guigro (WPMU DEV member)

The bottom line: Providing maintenance services is a great opportunity to generate monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from your web development business while helping your clients keep their websites running at their best.

So, providing clients with website maintenance services is a “win-win” deal and earning monthly recurring revenue sounds mouth-watering.

How realistic and achievable, however, is earning MRR from website maintenance services? And what kind of services do you need to provide to earn this?

Let’s take a look…

Monthly Recurring Revenue Potential – Setting An Achievable Target

“I need about 45 customers to meet my target of 5k/month recurring. I think I’ll hit this by the end of the year.” – David Baker (WPMU DEV Member)

  • How much recurring revenue do you want to earn each month from your web development business?
  • How many clients would you need?
  • How much would you need to charge your clients? Can they afford to pay this amount?

These are all great questions! Fortunately, we have an active member community of web developers we can ask….

And that’s exactly what we did to get the answers.

We’ll start with the end in mind — earning monthly recurring revenue — and work backward from there.

In terms of setting ideal monthly recurring revenue goals and hitting these targets, many or our members actually shared these with us.

Our research shows that many web developers on average:

  • Would be happy to earn US$5,000-US$10,000 per month billing clients for recurring services.
  • Would need around 25-50 clients on a monthly maintenance plan to hit this target
  • Can personally handle and maintain around 50 clients (if running smaller operations, e.g. 1-person or a small team).

The following are some of the actual responses we received from members regarding their targets and earning a monthly recurring income by providing website maintenance services:

  • “I need about 45 customers to meet my target of 5k/month recurring. I think I’ll hit this by the end of the year.”
  • “My goal for this year is 50 clients, and I currently have 35.”
  • “My goal is 50 (on basic plan), which is the number of sites I believe I can manage on my own.”
  • “I would like to get $5,000/mo to be able to have a full-time person doing these things, so that way I have time to keep building the business, and other tasks. I would need about 50 clients for this.”
  • “If that was my only job, I’ll try to make only website maintenance. I’ll need around 50 clients and I’ll manage them every day.”
  • “In an ideal world I’d host all my sites here and charge enough for me to earn a healthy basic living with like 40 or 50 total clients.”
  • “My goal is $5,000 per month. The number of clients required depends on the chosen plans I sell. For example, if I could sell 5 of my highest plan, I would be there. If I sell only my lowest plan, this would take about 250 clients/sites.”

Not all web developers, however, are looking for “retire and sit on the beach” income from maintenance service revenue.

Some would be happy if the services covered their expenses or simply provided them with additional income.

For example, consider these responses from our members:

  • “My goal is to have my monthly expenses covered by my recurring maintenance income.”
  • “If maintenance sales can cover my monthly expenses (personal + business) then I’m happy. I’d need about 30 clients…”
  • “For us it is all extra income since we usually set it and forget it until the client has an issue.”

Now that we have looked at setting targets and what it takes to reach these, let’s look at what kind of pricing you would have to set for your services to hit your goals.

Pricing Your Maintenance Services – Setting Realistic Prices

“$110 USD for Weekly, $165 USD for Daily. Having a membership site and or eCommerce component will increase the monthly cost.” – P Taubman (WPMU DEV Member)

What can you realistically charge clients for providing website maintenance services?

While in theory the answer is “charge whatever you want, it’s your business!” we all know that you can only charge as much as the client is willing or able to pay you.

Working this out, however, is not that simple either. Pricing services is tricky and many factors can affect this, including:

  • How you communicate the value of your services.
  • Your fixed and variable costs, the clients you are targeting.
  • Which country you’re doing business in.
  • Current social and political climate, economic cycles, etc.

Sometimes, you can undersell your services for years and it often takes trial and error (or breaking through personal fear barriers and limitations in your self-belief) to get the pricing formula right for your business.

Fortunately, some of our members provided us their actual pricing straight up, (while others told us their services simply ranged from xxx to xxxx).

Here are some of the actual responses we received from members that were happy to share their pricing:

  • “$110 USD for Weekly, $165 USD for Daily. Having a membership site and or eCommerce component will increase the monthly cost.”
  • “Currently, $100 a year for the bare minimum up to $100 a month for the more intensive hosting plans.”
  • “Starting at $35/month but scales according to needs, up to $300 or more.”
  • “I have Basic (US$45 p/mth), Pro (US$85 p/mth) and Premium (US$145 p/mth). Basic is monitoring and weekly updates, Pro includes performance and troubleshooting and Premium is for transactional sites and also includes SEO optimization, serving from a CDN and 1 hr of ‘consulting’.”
  • “From R$40 (US$7) to R$700 (US$130) depending on the client’s needs.”
  • “Care plans start at 5 € (US$5.30) per month and go up to 490 € (US$518) per month.”
  • “Currently plans range from 120€/2h (US$127) which is the minimum, to 4490 € /120h (US$4,750) of work per month.”
  • “The minimum charge is $150 to $600.”
  • “$50 per month.”
  • “Flat $100 to cover all. single plan.”
  • “I made a small detailed quote, but they can’t change anything about it. It’s a 100$ a month fee that they pay once a year. It pays my personal server so it’s perfect.”
  • The maintenance plans are $88/month incl GST, but I’m beginning to wonder if that is too little. I offer updates to some really good clients, but most likely removing it for others now.”
  • “I try and maintain a $300 average charge per maintenance plan depending on the client and need around 20 clients. Again its mixes and matches. My goal is to move clients to WPMUDEV so I only have to keep abreast of a single set of primary plugins, thereby making the plans manageable!”
  • “$99/mo (Weekly Plugin + Theme Update, 24/7/365 Total Care Response Team, Weekly Cloud Backups, Uptime Monitor, Monthly Reports), $159/mo (everything mentioned, plus Unlimited Website Edits, Link Monitor, Security Hardening/Monitoring), $229/mo for e-Commerce stores which include everything mentioned, but for E-Commerce.”

Our research shows that the members we surveyed charge their clients anywhere from US$5 per month to US$600 p/mth in maintenance fees or more, with an average of around US$170 p/mth).

Monthly Maintenance Services Fee - Chart
The members we surveyed charge their clients between USD$5 – USD$600 per month for web maintenance services.

Other members mentioned how they calculated their pricing:

  • “It is usually the price of making the website, divided by 12, and with a contract of at least 12 months of stay.”
  • “A set percentage higher than your prices [editor’s note: your prices = WPMU DEV member pricing] for setting up and maintaining the site and the plugins and various issues.”
  • “I use a percentage based markup, typically 10-30% above my total costs.”
  • “Monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on client preference.”
  • “Depending on the client, either a monthly recurring fee, or a quarterly, semi-annual or annual one. The price stays the same whether the customers pay monthly or annually.”
  • “Currently I provide a yearly plan – a low fee for plugin set up and access, and then a by-the-hour charge for fixing issues caught by uptime monitoring, defender scans, restoring from backups, etc. This way I can offer a low yearly price to small businesses I work with, and then still charge appropriately when there’s work to do. I am also working on launching a more comprehensive monthly hosting and plugin plan that includes a lot more hands on management.”
  • It varies but I’m going to need to standardize it, and dramatically increase it somehow as I have some clients who are still paying me what I started charging them like 8 years ago. Haven’t really settled on the best way to do that yet, my older clientele aren’t typically wealthy people and I’m going to need to figure out something else for them or give them a lot of time to figure something out… I’m going to have to adjust it but I don’t want to screw ’em over either and obviously I can’t just email them and be like “Y’all it’s gonna be 5 times what you’re paying me now, thanks.” So… still thinking on that.”

There’s one more question we should address before we take a look at the services you can offer to your clients with WPMU DEV and show you how to start building your maintenance service packages.

Is Providing Website Maintenance Services Profitable?

Many web developers offer website maintenance services. But, are maintenance services actually profitable on their own or as an upsell to your web development services?

A simple way to research this is to fire up Google and search for terms like:

  • website maintenance services
  • website maintenance services list
  • website maintenance services near me
  • website maintenance services cost
  • website maintenance proposal
  • website maintenance for small business
  • website care plans

The presence of paid ads on Google search results is normally a good indicator of profitability, especially if you see the same ads regularly appearing on search results.

After all, no business can afford to keep advertising products and services that are unprofitable.

Google search results - website maintenance services list
Paid ads on website maintenance related searches is a good indication of profitability.

Now that we have established that website maintenance seems to be profitable, let’s look at some actual examples of maintenance services web developers are offering.

Providing Website Maintenance Services to Clients

“Website maintenance is a small part of our revenue stream, but it is important part as it allows us to react and work faster compared to clients that have their sites hosted somewhere else, which ultimately saves our clients money.” – Antti-Pekka (WPMU DEV Member)

When we asked our member community of web developers whether they provide website maintenance services, and if so, what kind of services they provide, here are some of the responses we received:

Do you provide website maintenance services (or plan to)?

  • “Yes, for 90% of customers.”
  • “We inform the client there are minimum maintenance fees.”
  • “Usually my company offered maintenance services included with initial proposal. Such as website development + 1 year of maintenance.”
  • “I’m beginning to offer the services. They include all the WPMU DEV plugins, as well as “regular” plugin/theme updates. The updates will be with the Safe Updates feature, my main selling option.”
  • “Our focus is on improving clients online sales, which includes driving traffic through SEO and online marketing + optimizing sites for conversions and improving the sales process after that through automation etc. Keeping everything updated on their site and solving conflicts is part of it.”
  • “Website maintenance is a small part of our revenue stream, but it is important part as it allows us to react and work faster compared to clients that have their sites hosted somewhere else, which ultimately saves our clients money. One-click staging, SSO and automatic daily backups being the most important aspects of this.”

What kind of services do you provide?

Here are some of our members’ responses…

  • “Maintenance services can range from providing core, plugin, and theme updates and backups, to full range of services that also include security and performance monitoring, SEO, reporting, etc.”
  • “I provide hosting, uptime monitoring, backups, updates, malware scans, blocklist monitoring, GDPR checks (automatically updating privacy policy when necessary), SEO ranking and functional tests.”

And an aggregate of the maintenance services they provide:

  • Updates/Safe updates: WordPress core, theme, plugins
  • Backups: Daily/weekly full-site cloud/local backup, and backups before updates in case rollback is required
  • Security: Optimization, brute force IP lockout, vulnerability scanning and malware removal, country-blocking rules for web application firewall and block lit monitoring, spam checking, full restoration if the site is hacked or crashes.
  • Performance: Caching & enhancements, image compression, CDN for JS/CSS/image optimization
  • Uptime: 24/7 uptime monitoring, with email & webhook notifications
  • Setting up Google Analytics and forms
  • Weekly/monthly reports
  • Technical assistance to solve plugin/themes conflicts.
  • Content modification (Up to 5 basic modifications/uploads per month).
  • GDPR checks (automatically updating privacy policy when necessary)
  • Technical SEO optimization and audits

When asked how they bundle their services, few members said they offer maintenance as an additional service, but most members said they prefer to bundle maintenance with hosting.

There are some good reasons for this too:

  • “At the moment I bundle it with hosting. I’ll probably continue to do that. If they can see the actual number for the hosting amount, then I get questions about hosting at some cheap trash company and I end up having to explain why my hosting is worth the cost, which is mostly technical reasons that they don’t understand anyway.”
  • “Bundled with hosting, this is the goal. Bundled without hosting – trying to avoid. Bundled as part of a website rebuild or new – prorated over 1,2 or 3 years.”
  • “We bundle it together with our initial proposal. Hosting is by default for me and I’m not comfortable to use other hosting that is not reliable. In short, I will convince client to utilize my whole package (dev + design + SEO + maintenance + upgrade + hosting + domain name provider + DNS & security provider)”
  • “Hosting is included in our plans. If a client has hosting and comes to us for maintenance, we do not automatically take over their hosting and transfer to our account. In the case that the client is on terrible hosting, we may charge a surcharge.”
  • “I have three main plans, depending on the amount of content updates or consulting they want per month. Hosting is included in all plans. If they insist on using their own host and it is decent, I’ll let them host there with the understanding that the care plan investment price doesn’t change and hosting support isn’t included (unless they want to pay me to work with their hosting provider). We set clear boundaries.”
  • “We have a few different models that we use. First, we have the stand-alone models where we basically resell WPMU DEV tools, minus hosting. Clients can select unmanaged which gives them white-labeled Hub access and access to the WPMU DEV plugins and site management tools. The managed plans let the clients have the WPMU DEV tools active on their site, but managed by us. So the former is set up similar to Manage WP. The latter is more of a full-service maintenance plan. Then we have the managed hosting plans. There are 2 models here as well: Basic which literally just re-sells WPMU DEV plans. Managed, which includes hosting as well as the aforementioned managed care plans.”
  • “We offer maintenance on a weekly basis, as default. However, we also offer a daily plan for an additional fee.”
  • “I resell managed hosting which includes the maintenance, but I also offer the maintenance for third-party hosting which includes the same features. Full-site backups are weekly instead of daily, though.”
  • “Maintenance is a separate line item. I am not sure what the price is, but I know the maintenance plan includes all core, plugin, and theme updates as well as 10 hours per month of web content updates/changes.”
  • “I work with a lot of small businesses with varied budgets, so I have to adjust the services to fit what they need and can also afford.”
  • “Hosting, email marketing, SEO, maintenance and other plans are being sold within their own tiers, but they’ll be connected with each other as upsell-products.”

What Others Charge For Maintenance Services

In addition to researching what our members had to say about offering maintenance services, we also looked at other sites for examples of pricing.

For instance, according to research from ExpertMarket, different sized websites have different average monthly maintenance costs…

Website Maintenance Costs
Average monthly website maintenance costs (USD). Source: ExpertMarket.com

Here is an Australian site targeting small to medium-sized businesses for website maintenance services…

Screenshot of VisualDomains.com.au website maintenance services page.
A site maintenance services page targeting small to medium-sized businesses. Source: VisualDomains.com.au

Here is another business offering website care plans from basic to high-level support services, with additional support addons.

Screenshot of Strong.Digital's web care plans page.
This business offers web care plans for websites of all sizes, plus extra developer support options. Source: Strong.Digital

To see what maintenance services web developers are offering in your country or business region and their pricing, enter some of the suggested search phrases listed earlier into Google and add geo-related keywords (e.g. your city, country, or “near me”) to your search.

Now that we have looked at various website maintenance services you can provide to clients in your web development business and done all the background research to confirm that offering these services can be a profitable way to generate MRR, let’s show you…

How To Build Your Website Care Plan Packages With WPMU DEV

Ideally, you will want to offer your clients a quality service that delivers maximum value for money with a minimal investment of your time and resources.

This means using tools, automation, leverage, and other efficiencies whenever and wherever possible.

WPMU DEV provides everything you need to deliver high-quality professional website maintenance services that can be customized to suit your business and your clients’ needs and budgets.

As an example and to show you what’s possible with WPMU DEV, let’s show you how to set up the following website care plan packages in your business…

Website Maintenance Services and pricing table.
Offer your clients a complete website maintenance service to suit their needs and budget with WPMU DEV.

We’ll also add the additional services shown below as add-ons that you can upsell to clients…

Website Maintenance Service Addons
Offer these additional services and various maintenance options as addons and upsells.

Let’s go through the services listed in the above menus to show you how you can easily and quickly build your website maintenance service packages with WPMU DEV:

Software Updates

From our site manger, The Hub, you can easily manage all your clients’ sites’ core software, plugin, and theme updates.

This includes performing manual or automated updates, adding and removing plugins and themes on client sites (individually or in bulk), configuring updates to be ignored for specific plugins and themes, and more.

The Hub - Plugins & Themes screen
Easily manage core, plugin, and theme updates for unlimited sites from The Hub.

Additionally, you can use our robust Automate tool to set up automated update schedules for unlimited sites.

The Hub - Automate
Use The Hub and Automate to save time performing vital update checks and scans.

The Hub’s Automate feature lets you automate checks, schedules, backups, scans, and updates for all your clients’ sites, giving you a virtually “hands-free” software updating service to resell.

The Hub - Automate screen.
Use The Hub and Automate to save time performing vital update checks, scans, and backups.

Essentially, you are offering clients a service that not only updates their WordPress core software, plugins, and themes, but also checks the site to make sure that it’s safe to update.

Automate also performs a full backup of the site before updating, ensuring your client experiences no downtime or disruption.

“…it’s extremely convenient to be able to have all of my clients in one panel with a one-click login, see all the plugins out of date, quickly restore backups, etc. It’s a huge timesaver.” –Daniel M 

Start Profiting From Software Updating Services

Providing regular software updates is an essential service that all websites need.

You can automate this service and include it in all your web care packages.

For more information on all you can offer with this service, see our documentation section on using The Hub to automate plugin and theme updates.

Scheduled and Automatic Backups

With WPMU DEV, you can deliver full hosting backups and incremental backups to your clients on a monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly backup schedule.

Backups are uploaded securely to our servers (if your clients host their sites with us) or external storage locations like Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

The Hub - Scheduled Backups
Provide automated scheduled backups to clients with your website care plan.

You can provide this service even if your clients choose to host with someone else using our Snapshot Pro plugin.

Snapshot Pro Dashboard
Set up automated backups for externally hosted client sites using Snapshot Pro.

Start Profiting From Automatic Backup Services

Our range and flexibility of backup options means that you can set up different plans for different website care packages.

For example, monthly backups to external storage locations for basic plans and more frequent backups (weekly, daily, hourly) for premium plans.

For more information, see our documentation section on hosting backups and backups via The Hub.

Security Monitoring

Another value-added website maintenance service you can offer to ensure your client’s peace of mind is ongoing website threat management and protection through security monitoring.

You can quickly and easily set up and configure a website security monitoring service for clients that will automatically scan their website files and database for vulnerabilities, block suspicious code or activities, and prevent hackers from accessing their website.

All this is done via The Hub’s Security section, which links to and is powered by our Defender security plugin.

The Hub - Security tab
Monitor all your clients’ sites for security threats from The Hub’s Security section.

This service will alert you if anything suspicious is taking place on their site, allowing you to quickly jump in and rescue your client’s business from potential disaster.

Defender Dashboard
Defender keeps your client sites safe and protected automatically.

Start Profiting From Security Monitoring Services

Using The Hub and Defender provides WordPress security features like scans, security tweaks, IP lockouts, Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), login masking, firewall, and more.

If your clients also host their sites with WPMU DEV, you can offer a “total security plan” that includes additional security options like site password protection, WAF, and brute-force attack protection, in addition to secure and dedicated hosting.

When planning your service packages, consider offering scans, monitoring, and alerts as part of your basic plan, and adding a “troubleshooting and problem fixing” component as part of your premium offering.

For example, if you charge an hourly rate for providing technical support, your premium website care plan could include a number of hours per month (e.g. 2, 4, etc.) of “priority support” time allotted to fixing and troubleshooting website issues related to security, optimization, hosting, etc.

For more information, see our documentation section on running a full website security service via The Hub, using Defender security plugin, and the articles and tutorials below:

Website Monitoring

Offering an uptime monitoring service to clients whose businesses depend on their websites being up and running is another powerful way to ensure their peace of mind.

You can set up, configure, and fully automate this service via The Hub’s Uptime feature.

The Hub - Uptime Tab
The Hub’s Uptime feature automatically notifies clients if their site goes down.

Uptime monitors a website’s uptime, downtime, and response times, and the service can be configured differently for each client.

Uptime Settings screen.
Set up and apply different Uptime configurations to client websites to suit your service plans.

With Uptime’s 24/7 automated monitoring service, your clients (and you) will receive instant email notifications if their website goes offline at any time of day or night.

“For a lot of clients, I put Uptime Monitor on the site, and when the site goes down, clients think I am the superstar. And then I bill to fix the site for whatever reason it is down.” – Blake W (WPMU DEV Member)

Start Profiting From Website Monitoring Services

This is a ‘set and forget’ service that can be included in all your web care plans, or as part of a ‘premium’ services package.

For more information, see our documentation section on the Uptime monitoring service.

Website Support

“What I mostly like about WPMU DEV is their quick chat support. I have many websites in their system and in numerous times I have experienced issues that are not even related to their product and they have always provided exceptional support.” Giovani R

Supporting clients is vitally important to their business and yours.

It not only helps to build trust in your relationship with clients, it can also lead to additional work and new clients.

Besides, you know that clients are going to contact you after their website is built requesting your help and assistance, so you may as well turn this into a service that will pay for your time and effort.

Providing amazing support on all WordPress-related areas is what makes us a stand out business in the WordPress industry, and we extend this service to support our members’ businesses.

In a nutshell, here’s how this works…

You provide your clients with support and we provide your business with the support you need to support your clients.

You can use whatever method you like for customers to contact you for support.

Customers can contact you via your contact form, email, telephone, text message, or via The Hub Client and Live Chat if they have issues that need fixing or need some troubleshooting done on their website.

If you cannot solve their issue, you can turn to us for help on anything, any time of day or night.

We have an entire team of expert web, hosting, and software developers and engineers ready to back you up and provide you and your business with fast 24/7 expert support.

We also have an active community forum of members just like you and resources like comprehensive documentation, step-by-step tutorials, and our immense library of blog articles that you can turn to for help, additional knowledge, and solutions to every problem you will face in your business.

To access immediate help via live chat and ticketed support, and all of our resources, just log into The Hub and click on the Support link.

WPMU DEV Support
Provide website support to your clients with backing from our 24/7 expert support team.

Our support team works behind the scenes to help your business, so even if you are a solo developer, your clients will never know that you have a horde of experts standing behind you, ready to help you help your clients.

Start Profiting From Website Support Services

Let’s say that as part of your web development services, you charge an hourly rate for providing technical support.

Your premium website care plan could include a certain number of hours each month (e.g. 2, 4, 6 hours, etc.) of built-in and prepaid priority support which doesn’t roll over to the next month.

So, if your client needs support with any issue they are experiencing on their website, great!

They have already prepaid you for a certain amount of supports hours. If they don’t need your help or support for that month, then you’ll have built a “goodwill” bank to cover you financially during times where you may need to provide them with assistance without charge.

Website Optimization

When clients come to you asking you to make their websites go faster, you have a wonderful (and profitable) opportunity to put them on your Web Care Maintenance Plan, where you will continually optimize their site to make sure it runs as fast and efficiently as possible.

Optimizing websites for speed and performance is vitally important for many businesses, especially for sites where even the smallest increase in page loading speeds can make a significant difference to their bottom line.

In The Hub’s Performance section, you can easily set up and configure a service that will let you monitor, optimize, and improve the speed of your clients’ WordPress sites with automated scans, recommendations, caching, Gzip compression, Asset Optimization, and other performance features.

The Hub - Performance screen
Optimize your clients’ websites from The Hub’s Performance screen.

This combines two of our most powerful and feature-rich plugins: Smush Pro, our award-winning image compression and optimization plugin for WordPress, and Hummingbird Pro, our WordPress site optimization plugin.

“We’ve improved site speed quite a bit using Smush and Hummingbird. It has saved us a ton of time compared to doing these tasks manually.” – Michael N

Start Profiting From Website Optimization Services

We recommend offering website optimization as part of a ‘premium’ services web care package.

Check out our documentation on Smush, Hummingbird, and The Hub’s Performance section, or read our article on Optimizing Your WordPress Site Performance with Smush, Hummingbird, and The Hub.

Also, see the articles below:

Smush

Hummingbird

 

SEO Reports

Providing SEO Audits is not only a great way to attract new clients to your business, it also allows you to provide existing clients with a valuable maintenance service.

You can help clients improve their results by including ongoing SEO audits and reports in your Website Care packages.

These reports show ways to optimize their web pages and their content, how their site ranks on Google, how much traffic and engagement their marketing efforts are generating, and other valuable key metrics.

You can set up, configure, and automate an SEO service that lets you monitor client sites to improve their page rank and search results with testing, recommendations, improved tagging, social sharing, and other search engine optimization tools.

It’s all made possible by our powerful SmartCrawl SEO plugin in The Hub’s SEO module.

The Hub - SEO screen
Monitor your clients’ websites for SEO issues from The Hub’s SEO screen.

You can then provide SEO reports to clients with your regular website maintenance services, or include it in a “premium” web care plan using our customizable client reports (see the next section for more details on our Reporting tool).

The Hub: Reports - SEO Report
Use The Hub’s Reports feature and SmartCrawl to create a developer or client SEO report.

Start Profiting From SEO Reporting Services

We recommend offering SEO reports as part of a ‘premium’ services web care package.

Note: We cover how to offer SEO services (where you actually perform the work of improving a client’s website) in a separate article.

Also, depending on what you want included in your SEO report, you may need to use a combination of 3rd-party services with the tools that WPMU DEV provides.

This is covered in detail in our article on how to conduct an SEO audit in WordPress.

To learn more, see our documentation on using The Hub’s SEO module, and this tutorial on how to easily configure SmartCrawl in The Hub.

Website Reports

Sending clients website reports that show them exactly what has been done on their website each month allows them to see the value of your maintenance services and is a great way to build stronger relationships with clients.

Monthly reports allow you to keep in touch on a regular basis and gives you an opportunity to reassess their needs and upsell additional services they may require.

You can fully automate this service with WPMU DEV. All you need to do is activate the service from The Hub’s Reports section…

The Hub - Reports
Generate website health reports for your clients from The Hub.

You have the choice of creating basic client reports or detailed reports for developer use.

The Hub: Reports - Report Type
Create automated white label client and developer reports.

You can also choose which services to include in the report.

Which is perfect if you’re designing different client packages with different add-ons, like security scanning, SEO, website performance optimization, etc.

The Hub - Reports - Website Report Services
Choose which services you want to include in your client reports.

You can use the white label tools to customize and personalize your client reports.

This includes customizing the look of the report, the text sent in the email notification to clients, report generation and delivery schedules, etc.

Website report sample
You can fully customize your client reports.

This ‘set-and-forget’ service takes less than a minute to set up.

Once you set up and customize the report, your clients will automatically receive scheduled email notifications and be able to download their report.

Website Report Email example.
Send clients website report notification emails automatically.

Start Profiting From Website Reporting Services

We recommend including website reports in all of your website care packages.

We also recommend setting up both types of reports…

One for your clients, and a more detailed developer’s report for your business, then scheduling regular follow up calls (e.g. every month, 90 days, etc.) with your clients to discuss website performance and ways to improve their results.

Website reports provide clients with valuable information about their websites and give you opportunities to upsell additional services.

“I like that they have a group of plugins that eliminate the need for having to use multiple suppliers to get the same result.” David B

Packaging Your Website Maintenance Services

As you can see, we provide a range of options with a ton of flexibility for customization, allowing you to create different service levels or packages for your website maintenance services offering.

Here, for example, is a simple way you could create a website care plan with “Basic” and “Premium” packages:

WordPress Maintenance Services Table
Create different website care plans to suit different pricing points and client needs.

Start Building Your Website Maintenance Services With WPMU DEV Today

When it comes to building a sustainable recurring revenue with website maintenance services, we know there is no one better to partner with than WPMU DEV.

We provide all the tools and the support you need, backed by a 200+ strong global team of experts in all things WordPress.

If you’re already a member, then great! Follow this guide and add your website maintenance services module to your web development business today.

If you’re not a member yet, choose one of our membership plans to get started. If you’re interested in giving our platform a try, our free plan is the best place to start.

It includes unlimited site management, built-in billing, plugins, and more.

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How to Integrate Square Payments in WordPress (Step by Step)

Do you want to accept Square payments to your WordPress site?

By default, WordPress does not come with credit card payment options. Square is an excellent payment gateway that can be connected to your site using several popular WordPress plugins.

In this article, we’ll show you how to integrate Square payments in WordPress, so you can easily accept credit card payments on your website.

How to Connect Square Payments in WordPress

Why Connect Square Payments in WordPress?

Square is a popular payment gateway that makes credit card payments easy. You can use Square on your WordPress website to securely accept payments through a simple payment form or a full-featured eCommerce store.

Like the Stripe payment gateway, it provides a flexible option to accept payments by credit card online or in person.

Credit card acceptance is available in USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, France, and Spain. Square offers a fixed transaction rate, and this varies for each country.

Note: You will need to enable HTTPS/SSL on your website so that you can securely accept credit card payments. For more details, you can follow our guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your WordPress site.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to connect Square payments in WordPress.

We’ll show you how to add a Square payment form using WPForms, and then cover other methods, such as accepting Square payments in an online store using WooCommerce.

Connecting Square to WordPress Using WPForms

The simplest way to create a form for Square payments is by using WPForms. It is the best WordPress form builder plugin used by over 5 million websites. You can use their drag & drop builder to quickly create any kind of form, including payment forms, to your WordPress website.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the WPForms Pro version because it gives you access to the Square addon that will allow you to accept credit card payments without writing code.

You can also use WPForms to accept credit card payments using Stripe, Authorize.net, and PayPal.

Installing and Activating WPForms

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WPForms Pro plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After activating WPForms, head over to WPForms » Settings in your WordPress dashboard.

WPForms' pro settings

On this screen, you need to enter your license key into the ‘License Key’ field. You’ll find this key in your WPForms Account.

After that, make sure you click the ‘Verify Key’ button to activate your license. This will allow you to easily enable the Square addon for WordPress.

Connecting WPForms to Square

After activating the core plugin, it’s time to install the Square addon.

In your WordPress dashboard, head over to the WPForms » Addons page and then scroll until you find the Square Addon. Next, you need click the ‘Install Addon’ button.

Install the WPForms Square Addon

Once the addon is installed and activated, go to the WPForms » Settings page and click on the Payments tab.

By default, WPForms will collect payments in American dollars. If you need to accept payments in a different currency, just open the Currency dropdown and choose from the list.

Set Your Currency in WPForms Payments Settings

The next step is connecting WPForms to your Square account.

To make this connection, scroll down the page to the Connection Status section. Then just click on the ‘Connect with Square’ button.

Click the Connect With Square Button

You can now follow the onscreen instructions to either create a new Square account or connect WPForms to your existing Square account.

If you wish to test your payment form, then you should check the Test Mode option. This allows you to make dummy payments to make sure that the form is working correctly. Don’t forget to uncheck the box when you have finished testing.

Make sure you click the ‘Save Settings’ button at the bottom to store your settings.

Creating a Square Payment Form in WordPress

Once you’re successfully connected to Square, you’ll need to create a payment form. To do that, head over to WPForms » Add New in your WordPress admin area.

First, you’ll have to provide a title for your form. Then you should scroll down to the ‘Billing / Order Form’ template and click the ‘Use Template’ button.

Select the Billing Order Form Template in WPForms

WPForms will now automatically load your form template in the drag and drop builder. It includes most of the fields you will need and makes it easy to add, remove, or change the fields on your form.

For example, a Multiple Items list has been added to the form, so your visitors can select the product or service they wish to pay for. Once you click on this field, you will be able to customize the field’s label along with the name and price of each item.

Customize the Multiple Items List

If you are only offering a single item, then you should delete the Multiple Items field by clicking the trash icon in the top right corner of the field.

Next, you can scroll down to the Single Item field and drag it onto your form.

Add a Single Item Field to Your Form

You can click on this field to customize it.

For instance, you can change the field’s label, description, and price. The preview of your form on the right will be updated automatically.

Configure the Single Item Field

If you are only offering a single item, then the Total field is unnecessary. Feel free to delete it.

Next, you need to add the Square field to your form to collect the customer’s payment information. Simply click on the ‘Add Fields’ tab and scroll to the Payment Field section.

Add the Square Field to Your Form

You can now go ahead and drag the Square field into place on your payment form.

As soon as you do that, a notification will pop up letting you know that you need to enable Square payments for this form.

Notification to Enable Square Payments

Once you click the OK button, head over to Payments » Square in the WPForms editor. Once there, you’ll have to toggle the ‘Enable Square Payments’ setting to the on position.

After that, you can type a description in the ‘Payment Description’ field. This text will appear on the customer’s credit card statement.

Toggle the Enable Square Payments Setting to the On Position

It’s a good idea to also complete the other optional settings. These let Square know where to find the customer’s email address, name, and billing address in the form you have created so that an email receipt can be sent.

Finally, WPForms also allows you to set up smart conditional logic for your forms. This is useful when you want to allow your customers to choose from several payment methods, such as credit cards or PayPal.

When you’re happy with how your credit card payment form looks, it’s time to save your changes. To do this, just click on the Save button at the top of the screen.

Configuring Notification Emails for Square Payments

Next, you can configure the email notification that is sent to you when the form is submitted. You can also set up notification emails to your customers after they make an order.

Every time a customer completes the payment form, WPForms will send an email to your WordPress admin by default. However, you may want to send these emails to a different address or even notify multiple people.

This is easy to do using WPForms. To customize your email notifications, simply click on the Settings tab then select Notifications.

Creating credit card payment notifications

On this screen, find the ‘Send To Email Address’ field. By default, this is set to {admin_email} and tells WordPress to use the WordPress admin email.

You can delete this dynamic text and replace it with any other email address. Simply type the new address into the ‘Send To Email Address’ field. If you want to email multiple people, just separate each address with a comma.

Creating email notifications

You can also edit the email’s subject line, message, and more.

Next, we’ll set up an email notification for your customers, confirming their purchase and thanking them. To do that, you need to click on the ‘Add New Notification’ button.

Creating a new WPForms notification

WPForms will ask you to provide a name for this notification. For this tutorial, we’ll call it ‘Customer Notification.’

After that, WPForms will show all of the notification fields that you can customize.

How to easily accept credit card payments in WordPress

You can enter a smart tag so the notification email is sent to your customer’s email address. Simply click on the ‘Show Smart Tags’ link next to the ‘Send To Email Address’ option.

After that, you need to select the form’s ‘Email’ field. This allows WPForms to use the email address the customer provided when submitting their payment.

Adding smart tags to your credit card payment emails

You can now customize the rest of the notification email, such as the subject line or email message. For example, you might personalize the email content using smart tags for the customer’s name or some information about the product they bought.

WPForms will also display an onscreen notification when they place an order. You can customize this by clicking the ‘Confirmations’ tab and editing the confirmation message.

Creating a payment confirmation message

Instead of showing a message, you might prefer to show a specific page or redirect customers to another URL.

To make this change, simply open the ‘Confirmation Type’ dropdown. You can now choose from the available options.

Changing the payment confirmation settings

Finally, you will want to make sure that these email notifications are delivered to the recipient’s email inbox and not to the spam folder. The best way to do this is by using an SMTP service provider to improve email deliverability.

For more details, see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue.

Adding the Payment Form to Your WordPress Website

The final step is adding your new Square payment form to your WordPress website. WPForms makes it super easy to add forms anywhere.

Simply create a new post or page, or edit an existing one. Then, click on the plus (+) sign at the top and add a WPForms block in the WordPress editor.

Drag the WPForms Block Onto Your Post or Page

After that, select your payment form from the dropdown menu in the WPForms block.

Once you’re finished, you can save or publish your page and click on the preview button to see your form in action.

Preview of Square Payment Form

Congratulations, you’ve now connected Square payments in WordPress.

You can connect your Square payment form with email marketing services, Google Sheets, and other apps to further streamline your workflow using WPForms native integrations.

Bonus Ways to Connect Square to WordPress

WPForms offers a simple way to create a payment form that connects Square payments with your WordPress site. However, some users may have different needs.

For example, you may want to start a membership site or online store to sell physical products, sell ebooks, sell online courses, or even accept donations.

Square is not always the best choice. That’s because Stripe has much better plugin support than Square in WordPress, making it a better choice if you are looking to add a credit card option.

Many popular plugins like MemberPress, WP Simple Pay, and Easy Digital Downloads offer built-in Stripe integrations.

However, if you are running a WooCommerce store, then you can easily add Square support using the official Square for WooCommerce extension.

Square WooCommerce Extension

This extension syncs products between your website and your Square account. That means that when you add products to your Square account, they will be automatically added to your WooCommerce store as well.

Besides that, it supports recurring payments when used alongside the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to connect Square payments in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to run a giveaway or contest in WordPress, or check out our list of the best social media plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Integrate Square Payments in WordPress (Step by Step) first appeared on WPBeginner.

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Using CockroachDB Workloads With Kerberos

GSSAPI authentication is becoming increasingly popular as CockroachDB starting to make inroads in Fortune 2000 customer bases and financial services segment. That said, ecosystem coverage for GSS needs to improve for parity with other authN methods. Today, we are providing a workaround and a look at the future. By the way, do you realize this is my 15th article on Kerberos and CockroachDB?

Articles Covering CockroachDB and Kerberos

I find the topic of Kerberos very interesting and my colleagues commonly refer to me for help with this complex topic. I am by no means an expert at Kerberos, I am however familiar enough with it to be dangerous. That said, I've written multiple articles on the topic which you may find below:

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CockroachDB With GSSAPI Deployed via Systemd

Articles Covering Topics on CockroachDB and Kerberos

I find the topic of Kerberos very interesting and my colleagues commonly refer to me for help with this complex topic. I am by no means an expert at Kerberos, I am however familiar enough with it to be dangerous. That said, I've written multiple articles on the topic which you may find below:

  1. CockroachDB With MIT Kerberos
  2. CockroachDB With Active Directory
  3. CockroachDB With MIT Kerberos and Docker Compose
  4. Executing CockroachDB table import via GSSAPI
  5. CockroachDB With SQLAlchemy and MIT Kerberos
  6. CockroachDB With MIT Kerberos Cert User Authentication
  7. CockroachDB with Django and MIT Kerberos
  8. CockroachDB With Kerberos and Custom Service Principal Name (SPN)
  9. Simplifying CockroachDB Kerberos Architecture With a Load Balancer
  10. CockroachDB With MIT Kerberos Using a Native Client
  11. CockroachDB With Mixed Kerberos and Certificates Authentication

Motivation

Systemd has become a standard approach for deploying Linux services. We have documentation to deploy CockroachDB via systemd, however, we do not have steps documented to deploy CockroachDB with GSSAPI and systemd. This tutorial attempts to bridge that gap.

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Execute mTLS Calls Using Java

Supposing we have an NGINX instance secured using SSL and mTLS. If you are using Java interacting with a service secured with mTLS, it requires some changes on your codebase. In this tutorial, we shall enable our Java application to use mTLS using different clients.

To get started fast, we can use an existing example of adding mTLS to an NGINX instance. Our java mTLS configuration will use the certificates and keys used to add mTLS to an NGINX. 

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How to Secure a Previously Insecure Cluster in Production

Cockroach Labs does not recommend running an insecure cluster in production. There are only a few additional steps necessary to secure an instance, so why do it? Convenience, you say. It can hurt you down the line but fret not, this article will demonstrate how to fix this. We are going to follow the standard insecure cluster start-up procedure. Once complete, we're going to flip to the documentation for a secure cluster to turn each node on with security enabled. Here's a handy video of the procedure in action:

Step by step instructions are below:

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Simplifying CockroachDB Kerberos Architecture With a Load Balancer

Today, I'm going to try to simplify our architecture or at least management of Kerberos artifacts as they relate to CockroachDB by introducing a load balancer. Given the presence of LB, we can obfuscate the CockroachDB cluster architecture from Kerberos and ease the management of Kerberos keytabs as well as service principal names.

Articles Covering CockroachDB and Kerberos

I find the topic of Kerberos very interesting and my colleagues commonly refer to me for help with this complex topic. I am by no means an expert at Kerberos, I am however familiar enough with it to be dangerous. That said, I've written multiple articles on the topic which you may find below:

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CockroachDB With Django and MIT Kerberos

Today, I'm going to talk about the means of using Django with a kerberized CockroachDB and what that entails. This is not uncommon in a production use case and expecting enterprise-grade access to development frameworks is table stakes for some of our customers.

Articles Covering CockroachDB and Kerberos

I find the topic of Kerberos very interesting and my colleagues commonly refer to me for help with this complex topic. I am by no means an expert at Kerberos, I am however familiar enough with it to be dangerous. That said, I've written multiple articles on the topic which you may find below:

Posted on

Import data into CockroachDB with Kerberos authentication

Articles Covering CockroachDB and Kerberos

I find the topic of Kerberos very interesting and my colleagues commonly refer to me for help with this complex topic. I am by no means an expert at Kerberos, I am however familiar enough with it to be dangerous. That said, I've written multiple articles on the topic which you may find below:

I was recently asked by a customer whether GSSAPI gets in the way of doing a table import in CockroachDB. The short answer is it shouldn't as GSSAPI is abstracted from any bulk-io operations. I've previously written articles on doing an import into Cockroach, here and here and encourage you to review those articles. So today we're going to focus on specifically the import with Kerberos.

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Adding a Custom Domain and SSL to AWS EC2

In our previous article, we Dockerized our Node.js server, pushed that container image to AWS ECR, and then launched an EC2 instance with that container running inside. With our network and security group configured, we could send HTTP requests to our EC2 instance (at port 80) and receive responses from our server.

For our next trick, let's set up a custom domain name and make our server accessible via HTTPS. Here are the steps we're going to take:

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18 Best Membership Site Examples That You Should Check Out in 2021

Are you looking for the best membership site examples to get inspiration?

WordPress is used by some of the biggest and most popular membership sites in the world. By looking at successful membership sites you can learn what they’re doing and improve your site.

In this article, we’ll share some of the best membership site examples that you can use for inspiration and direction.

18 best membership site examples that you should check out

What Do You Need to Build a WordPress Membership Website?

WordPress makes it easy to build nearly any kind of membership website. For example, you can put content behind a paywall, run an online community with a forum, sell pay-per-view content, bundle online courses, and more.

A membership site can be an addon to your existing WordPress blog, or be a standalone online business.

To get started with your own membership site you’ll need four main things:

  • A domain name: This is the address for your website (ours is wpbeginner.com)
  • Web hosting: This is where you’ll store your website files, and visitors can access your site
  • A website builder: This lets you easily build a membership website without code.
  • A membership addon: This will add membership functionality to your WordPress site.

Usually, a domain name will cost around $15-20 per year, and web hosting starts from $7.95 per month. When you’re just starting, this can be a big investment.

Luckily, Bluehost has agreed to offer our readers a huge discount on web hosting, along with a free domain name, and a free SSL certificate. You can get started for as low as $2.75 per month.

→ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

Next, you need to make sure you’re using the right version of WordPress. We recommend using the self-hosted WordPress.org version because it gives you access to all the features you need right out of the box. For more details, see our comparison of WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

You also need a high quality WordPress membership theme and WordPress membership plugin.

If you want to sell subscriptions, paid content, or digital downloads, then a feature rich membership plugin, like MemberPress, is a great option.

MemberPress site creators around the world are expected to earn over $600 million this year alone.

To have your site up and running as fast as possible, see our ultimate guide to creating a WordPress membership site.

With that said, let’s look at some of the best membership site examples that you can use as inspiration when building your own membership site.

1. Book Riot

Book Riot

Book Riot is one of the biggest and most popular book blogs in the world. There’s all kinds of content for book lovers, including reviews, podcasts, author interviews, and more.

Readers can join a unique membership program called Book Riot Insiders, an online book club with access to exclusive podcasts, email newsletters, deals, giveaways, and much more.

2. Copyblogger

Copyblogger

Copyblogger is a long-running WordPress blog that offers all kinds of valuable articles on content marketing, improving writing skills, growing an online business, and much more.

It uses a membership program to power its writing service and academy for new writers.

3. The Script Lab

The Script Lab

The Script Lab is a very useful online platform for screenwriters. There’s an active blog, screenplay competition listings, and a massive script library.

To get access to the script library, readers will need to become a member. There are multiple membership levels to get access to different features.

4. Nomadic Matt

Nomadic Matt

Nomadic Matt is a very popular travel blog for people looking to travel longer while on a budget. The site provides valuable travel tips, resources, virtual events, and more.

Beyond the helpful free content, there’s a paid membership community that gives readers access to courses, guidebooks, discounts, giveaways, and much more.

5. 40 Aprons

40 Aprons

40 Aprons is a high traffic food blog that provides healthy recipes for families. There are recipes for all types of diets and cuisines.

Members get access to an ad free reading experience along with premium content, recipes, resources, and more.

6. Copyhackers

Copyhackers

Copyhackers is one of the most popular and well known websites for copywriters. It provides a variety of articles, videos, and resources for copywriters and business owners looking to improve their craft.

There’s a paid membership program called Copy School that offers members the best training on ads, emails, funnels, and more.

7. Mark Manson

Mark Manson

Mark Manson is one of the most popular personal development blogs with millions of monthly readers. The popularity of the blog led to multiple New York Times and Amazon best-selling books.

There’s also a paid membership component where members can access exclusive articles and audio, a course catalog, ebooks, and more.

8. The Measured Mom

The Measured Mom

The Measured Mom is a website that provides math and literacy resources for child educators. There are all kinds of useful articles, printables, book lists, a podcast, and more.

The site is monetized with digital downloads and a premium membership program to access the resource library, discounts, courses, and more.

9. BiteSize Bio

Bitesize Bio

BiteSize Bio is an online resource for everything related to biology, genes, biochemistry, and much more.

There’s also a membership community aspect, where readers, researchers, and mentors can engage with each other. Dedicated experts can also host webinars, publish articles, and more.

10. SkillCrush

SkillCrush

SkillCrush is an online coding and design school to help people break into a career in tech. It provides free content with a simple online course and a blog.

It’s monetized by a huge membership academy that provides a ton of online courses and career and education paths.

11. Be More with Less

Be More with Less

Be More with Less is a blog and online community dedicated to minimalism. The website offers blog posts, courses, podcasts, and more.

It’s monetized with an exclusive VIP membership program that offers members an exclusive community, a resource library, virtual calls, and more.

12. Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute

HWM Research Institute

The Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute at the University of Buffalo provides helpful information about the research institute and its contributions to the field of biology.

There’s a membership program for donors who want to contribute. High level donors get access to a VIP platform where they get benefits like members-only events, behind the scenes information, and more.

13. Teach Beside Me

Teach Beside Me

Teach Beside Me is an online community for homeschoolers looking for creative teaching ideas. There’s all kinds of free content, including an active blog and podcast.

Premium members can get access to done for you teaching ideas and free access to the growing premium content library.

14. Booooooom

Booooooom

Booooooom is one of the most popular online platforms for new artists to get discovered. It’s helped to launch the careers of many artists across the globe.

There’s a paid membership program where artists can apply for open calls, submit their work to be featured, and get discounts in the online store.

15. Toolshero

Toolshero

Toolshero is a global online community dedicated to helping its user learn new skills. There are all kinds of valuable resources to help support professional development, like articles, original research, and videos.

There’s a premium membership plan where users can access professional articles, worksheets and templates, questionnaires, an ad free reading experience, and more.

16. The Sweet Spot

The Sweet Spot

The Sweet Spot is a local business that offers customers an interactive Topgolf experience. It has activities like golf and sports simulators, golf lessons, and more.

Customers get different perks like discounts, reservations in advance, and more, depending on the membership level.

17. Bulletproof Musician

Bulletproof Musician

Bulletproof Musician is a WordPress website dedicated to helping musicians perform better under pressure. There are all kinds of free resources like articles and introductory courses.

It makes money by selling one on one coaching, group coaching, and in-depth courses powered by a membership program.

18. See JH

See JH

See JH is a travel website that provides all kinds of helpful information and live stream videos of the Jackson Hole region.

There’s also a membership portion where users can access discounts, high-quality live cams to see the weather conditions, and more.

We hope this article helped you find some of the best membership site examples using WordPress. You may also want to see our picks of the must have WordPress plugins and tools for business sites and our guide on how to choose the best domain name registrar.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 18 Best Membership Site Examples That You Should Check Out in 2021 first appeared on WPBeginner.

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Extracting Server Certificates Made Easy With Certificate Ripper

Introduction

As engineers, we sometimes need to grab a certificate for different purposes. It may occur that we need it to update the truststore of our application with a new trusted certificate, or just want to analyze the content of it, or use it for testing or just for some other purpose. There are multiple ways to accomplish this such as drag-and-drop the certificate from your browser to your desktop or by using OpenSSL. The browser is only capable of exporting binary certificates and the commands of OpenSSL might be sometimes complex or tricky to build depending on which kind of output you want. I was seeking a simple way of just printing server certificates to either a pem format or human-readable format and I also wanted to export all of it into a truststore file and in that way Certificate, Ripper came into life. 

Certificate Ripper is a CLI application available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and can be found here: GitHub - Certificate Ripper

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countrylayer – The Must-Have API for Any Website

If you have ever worked on a project that deals with geographic information of any type – which, let’s face it, most websites and applications do these days – then you have likely had to come up with a solution for providing or accessing information about one if not more countries. Whether it’s population, location, currencies, languages, or any other information about a country you need, it can be challenging to find a way to dynamically bring those details into your project.

There are tools available to help you solve this problem, but all too often there are obstacles such as programming language, ease of use, complexity of integration, pricing, and other hurdles that you may encounter.

Until now.

countrylayer is a JSON API that is compatible with all programming languages, provides extensive and accurate data from almost 200 different countries, is simple and easy to integrate, and is affordable to use – starting at free!

In this article, we’re taking a look at what countrylayer has to offer and how you can start using it in your projects.

What Is countrylayer?

countrylayer is a service brought to you by apilayer that provides common information about countries via a REST API. With this API, users will be able to get detailed information about countries in the world. Because they can filter by name of a country, language, code, currency, the capital city, calling code, region, or regional bloc.

Using your project’s API key, you can access country data that is returned in a standard JSON format, which can then be easily parsed in any programming language.

Here is an example of an API response. Check out all of the information it provides:

[
  {
        "name": "Germany",
        "topLevelDomain": [
            ".de"
        ],
        "alpha2Code": "DE",
        "alpha3Code": "DEU",
        "callingCodes": [
            "49"
        ],
        "capital": "Berlin",
        "altSpellings": [
            "DE",
            "Federal Republic of Germany",
            "Bundesrepublik Deutschland"
        ],
        "region": "Europe",
        "subregion": "Western Europe",
        "population": 81770900,
        "latlng": [
             51,
             9
        ],
         "demonym": "German",
         "area": 357114,
         "gini":  28.3,
         "timezones": [
             "UTC+01:00"
        ],
        "borders": [
            "AUT",
            "BEL",
            "CZE",
            "DNK",
            "FRA",
            "LUX",
            "NLD",
            "POL",
            "CHE"
        ],
        "nativeName": "Deutschland",
        "numericCode": "276",
        "currencies": [
            {
                "code": "EUR",
                "name": "Euro",
                "symbol": "€"
            }
        ],
        "languages": [
            {
                "iso639_1": "de",
                "iso639_2": "deu",
                "name": "German",
                "nativeName": "Deutsch"
            }
        ],
        "translations": {
            "br": "Alemanha",
            "de": "Deutschland",
            "es": "Alemania",
            "fa": "آلمان",
            "fr": "Allemagne",
            "hr": "Njemačka",
            "it": "Germania",
            "ja": "ドイツ",
            "nl": "Duitsland",
            "pt": "Alemanha"
        },
        "flag": "https://restcountries.eu/data/deu.svg",
        "regionalBlocs": [
            {
                "acronym": "EU",
                "name": "European Union"
            }
        ],
        "cioc": "GER"
    },
    {…}
]

Available API Endpoints

The countrylayer API comes with a number of endpoints, each providing different functionality. You can customize the request output data to get only the fields you need. This causes the request to execute faster, and reduces the response size.

  • Endpoint for all countries 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/all
    ? access_key = API_KEY
  • Endpoint for country search by name 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/name/{name}
    ? access_key = API_KEY & FullText=
  • Endpoint for country search by capital 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/capital/{capital}
    ? access_key = API_KEY
  • Endpoint for country search by language 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/language/{language}
    ? access_key = API_KEY
  • Endpoint for country search by currency 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/currency/{currency}
    ? access_key = API_KEY
  • Endpoint for country search by region 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/region/{region}
    ? access_key = API_KEY
  • Endpoint for country search by region block 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/regionalbloc/{regionalbloc}
    ? access_key = API_KEY
  • Endpoint for country search by calling code 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/callingcode/{callingcode}
    ? access_key = API_KEY
  • Endpoint for country search by alpha code 
    GET https://api.countrylayer.com/v2/alpha/{code}
    ? access_key = API_KEY

As you can see, these endpoints can be very useful for you to be able to access and utilize the country information needed for your project in a variety of manners, and helps to streamline and speed up your requests for the fastest execution possible.

You can learn more about how to integrate the countrylayer API into your projects by reading their extensive (yet surprisingly succinct and simple) documentation.

How Much Does Using The countrylayer API Cost?

You can get started for free with 100 searches per month and a rate limit of 1 per second. From there, pricing goes up from $9.99 per month for up to 5,000 searches, all the way to $149.99 per month for 250,000 searches. Enterprise pricing is also available on request. It’s important to note that SSL encryption is only available with paid subscription plans.

How Will You Use The countrylayer API In Your Projects?

As you can see, countrylayer is a relatively simple yet robust solution that can be used in a multitude of ways in your current and future projects. It is easy to integrate, provides accurate and extensive data, and is very affordable. We encourage you to give it a try – especially since you can get started for free! When you do, be sure to let us know what you think by reaching out on any of our social channels.

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How to Create an Online Restaurant Menu in WordPress (Step by Step)

Do you want to create an online restaurant menu in WordPress?

Sharing your menu on your website will help convince more people to stop by your restaurant. When people can easily check out the food, drinks, and prices, they’re more likely to place an order or visit.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create an online restaurant menu in WordPress, step by step.

How to create an online restaurant menu in WordPress (step by step)

What You Need to Start a Restaurant Website

Before you can create an online restaurant menu, you’ll need to setup a website. If you don’t have a website yet, then don’t worry.

You can easily start a website using WordPress, which is the best website builder in the world used by millions of small businesses, restaurants, bars, and cafes. Over 42% of all websites on the internet use WordPress.

Best of all, you can start building your website without a large upfront investment.

The first thing you need is a domain name and web hosting. We’ve worked out a deal with Bluehost, one of WordPress’s recommended hosting providers, to offer our readers a great deal.

Basically, you get a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a 60% discount on web hosting.

→ Click Here to Get this Exclusive Bluehost Deal ←

Beyond hosting and a domain name, you also need a WordPress theme. A theme is like a template for your website.

There are tons of great WordPress restaurant themes to help you create a professional website that will encourage your customers to place an order.

If you need help setting up your restaurant website, then see our step by step guide on how to make a website.

Why Create an Online Menu in WordPress?

Creating an online menu page on your WordPress site lets you create a better experience for your visitors and potential customers.

When a visitor comes to your restaurant website, the first thing they usually look at is your menu. If you’re only offering visitors a PDF menu, then you’re making it difficult for them to see the food choices you offer.

By creating an online menu on your website, there’s no need for your users to download your menu. Downloading PDFs can be difficult depending on your customers’ data plans and connection.

Plus, a menu page on your website will be mobile responsive and look good on every device, so your visitors can easily read it without zooming in and out.

Best of all, with a menu page, you can easily edit your menu and even add online ordering. PDFs are much more of a hassle to edit and upload when you need to make any menu or pricing changes.

That being said, we’re going to share two different WordPress plugins that can help you add an online restaurant menu to WordPress. Simply use the quick links below to choose the plugin you want to use.

Method 1. Add a Restaurant Menu to WordPress with SeedProd

We recommend using SeedProd to create an online restaurant menu in WordPress. It’s the best drag and drop WordPress page builder used by over 1 million websites.

It lets you create a stunning restaurant menu using a drag and drop builder. Plus, you can easily edit your menu as it changes and new menu options are available.

For this tutorial, you can use the free version of SeedProd to create your menu. However, a pro version of SeedProd is available that has 150+ templates, color schemes, email marketing integrations, image carousels, social media blocks, and much more.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, navigate to SeedProd » Pages and then click the ‘Add New Landing Page’ button.

Add new SeedProd landing page

This brings you to the template screen, where you can select a page template. There are dozens of templates for different niches and purposes.

To choose a template, hover over it and click the ‘Checkmark’ icon. You can choose whichever template you like, but for this tutorial, we’ll be using the ‘Dinner Sales Page’ template.

Select landing page template

This brings up a popup where you can give your new menu page a name. You can also edit the URL of the page. We’re simply calling our page ‘Menu’.

Then, click the ‘Save and Start Editing the Page’ button.

Name landing page

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be taken to the page editor screen.

The right hand side of the page is the preview and can be fully customized. The left hand side of the page has different blocks and sections you can add to the page.

SeedProd landing page template example

First, click on the page logo.

This will bring up a menu on the left where you can upload your restaurant logo. To add a new logo, you can follow the same process as adding an image to WordPress.

Change menu logo

Next, you can change the navigation menu button to go back to your homepage. That way, when your visitors are done viewing the menu, they can return to your website.

Simply click on the navigation menu button, and then you can change the text and link in the left-hand menu.

Change menu navigation button

After that, you can delete the main content section.

Simply hover over the page headline and click on the ‘Delete Block’ icon.

Delete existing sections

Then, you can do the same for the image, text, and button elements.

Next, you can add a headline for the title of your menu by dragging the ‘Headline’ block over to your page.

Add menu headline

Like the other elements, you can change the text size, color, and font with the menu on the left.

After that, you can edit the existing food items and replace them with your own text and images.

First, click on the image and upload your own image with the menu on the left.

Add menu item image

Next, click on the current headline to enter your own text.

You can also change the text by clicking on it and adding a description.

Change menu item text

Once you’ve changed the headline and text, you can add a price for the item.

Simply drag the ‘Text’ element to your page and then customize the text with the left hand menu.

Add menu item price

Then, simply follow the same steps as above for the rest of the items on your restaurant menu.

You can customize all of the sections of the page template.

If you want to add another menu section with the same style, then hover over the element and click ‘Duplicate Row’.

Duplicate section

This will make a copy of the same row and add it directly beneath.

Feel free to continue making customizations to your restaurant menu. You can fully customize every part of the page, including colors, sizing, fonts, and more.

If you don’t want to add a photo for every item, then you can easily use a list block to add menu items.

Once you’re done creating your online restaurant menu, click the drop down arrow next to the ‘Save’ button and select ‘Publish’.

Publish menu live

Your new restaurant menu is now live for your visitors to see.

Now, you can add your restaurant menu to your navigation menu, and other areas of your WordPress blog.

WordPress restaurant menu

Method 2. Add a Restaurant Menu to WordPress with Food Menu

This method involves using the Food Menu – Restaurant Menu & Online Ordering plugin. This plugin lets you quickly create an online menu in WordPress.

It also integrates with WooCommerce, so you can give your visitors the option to place an online order.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, navigate to Food Menu » Add Food.

Add new menu item

On this screen, you can enter your menu item name, description, and image.

After that, make sure to click the ‘Publish’ button to save your menu item.

Publish new menu item

To add more items to your menu, simply follow the same steps as above.

Once you’re finished adding items to your food menu, it’s time to add this menu to WordPress.

First, you need to go to Food Menu » ShortCode Generator, and then click the ‘Add New’ button.

Go to shortcode generator

Next, you can give your shortcode a title to help you remember the type of menu items you added.

Then, you can customize how you want your menu to display.

Name your menu shortcode

We will keep the default options, but you can customize how the menu displays with the settings in the ‘Layout’ section.

Here you can select the number of items to display per row.

Change shortcode layout

In the ‘Filtering’ tab, you can choose whether you want to display a simple menu or if you want to enable online ordering.

To turn on online ordering, simply select the ‘WooCommerce’ radio button. You can also control which items you want to display.

Shortcode filtering

If you’re planning on letting customers add food items to their carts and checkout, then you need to add your menu items as products in your WooCommerce store.

For more details on adding products, see our step by step guide on how to start an online store.

Next, you can customize the information that displays for each item by clicking on the ‘Field selection’ tab.

Field selection shortcode

As you check or uncheck the boxes, you can see a real time preview of what the changes will look like.

After that, you can change the appearance of your menu items by clicking the ‘Styling’ menu option.

Shortcode styling menu

Once you’re done customizing how your menu items display, make sure to click the ‘Publish’ button.

This won’t make your menu live on your site yet, but it will save the shortcode that we’ll add to your website below.

Publish menu shortcode

Now you need to create a page where your menu will display.

To do this, navigate to Pages » All Pages and then click ‘Add New’.

Add page for menu

After that, you can give your page a title. This will appear to your visitors, so you’ll want to name it something like ‘Menu’.

Then, click the ‘+’ icon to add a new block.

Add menu page block

Next, type ‘Menu’ into the search bar.

Then, select the ‘Food Menu’ block.

Select food menu block

After that, you need to select the shortcode you just created from the drop down menu.

This will insert your menu into your page.

Select menu shortcode

Then, click the ‘Publish’ or ‘Update’ button to make your menu live.

You can also add other elements to this page like text, a contact form, your Instagram feed, and more.

Publish new menu

Now when your visitors view your menu, they’ll be able to view items and even place an order if you added WooCommerce functionality.

No matter the screen size your menu is being viewed on, it will display your menu items perfectly.

WordPress menu example

We hoped this post helped you learn how to create an online restaurant menu in WordPress. You may also want to see our expert picks of the best HR payroll software for small business, or our comparison of the best business phone services for small business.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Create an Online Restaurant Menu in WordPress (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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7 Best WordPress Real Estate Plugins Compared (2021)

Are you looking for the best WordPress real estate plugins?

WordPress is used by many real estate websites to showcase listings and get new customers.

In this article, we have hand-picked the best WordPress real estate plugins that you can use to grow your business.

7 best WordPress real estate plugins compared (2021)

How to Make a Real Estate Website Using WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular website builder in the world. It’s widely used by real estate companies, realtors, and property management companies to showcase their listings and make more sales.

There are two different types of WordPress that often confuse beginners. First, there is WordPress.com which is a hosted solution. Second, you have WordPress.org, also known as self-hosted WordPress.

For more details, see our comparison on WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.

We recommend using WordPress.org because it allows you to use all WordPress features out of the box without any restrictions.

WordPress real estate website

You will need the following things to build your own real estate website using WordPress:

First you need to get a domain name and web hosting.

We recommend using Bluehost for your web hosting. Their hosting plans are officially recommended by WordPress.

Bluehost special offer for WPBeginner readers

WPBeginner readers can currently get a big 60% discount on hosting, plus a free domain name and SSL certificate.

Simply click on the Bluehost button below, and the discount will automatically be applied.

→ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

Once you have purchased hosting, make sure to check out our ultimate guide on how to make a website.

That being said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress real estate plugins that you can use. These plugins will allow you to easily add your real estate listings and attract more customers.

1. IMPress for IDX Broker

IMPress IDX Broker Plugin

IMPress for IDX Broker is one of the best WordPress real estate plugins. It is easy for beginners to get started, and flexible for advanced users to create powerful real estate websites.

You can add as many details for each listing as you want with images and video support. Listings are beautifully displayed in a grid layout, and a single listing page allows users to get all the information they need including maps.

There’s also support for automated social media posts, email capture and lead management features, a real estate agent directory, and more.

It also allows you to import listings from your MLS database and supports IDX integration. It comes equipped with contact forms so that interested buyers can directly contact you.

2. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is the most advanced WordPress form builder plugin in the market.

It has a simple but advanced drag and drop form builder that helps you create forms that go beyond simple contact forms.

Formidable Forms comes with a real estate listings form template so you can allow your website visitors to submit listings to your website, and then display them in a grid.

Formidable Forms listings

There are all kinds of form fields for you to customize and add information about your real estate listings.

Formidable Forms real estate listing form

Note: You’ll need at least the ‘Plus’ plan to get access to the real estate listing form template.

You’ll also find other helpful real estate tools you can use to enhance your website. For example, there are templates for mortgage calculators, mortgage application forms, rental applications forms, and more.

Formidable Forms mortgage calculator

For more details, see our step by step guide on how to add a mortgage calculator in WordPress.

3. WP-Property

WP-Property

WP-Property is another all-in-one WordPress real estate management plugin. It includes an easy to use interface to add and manage all your listings.

You can add detailed information with tons of fields to add rooms, bathrooms, location, features, and more.

WP-Property listings

Listings are beautifully displayed on your website, and there are also free themes and addons that you can use to customize the design.

WP-Property includes Google Maps support, a powerful search feature with filters, SEO friendly URLs, featured listings, and more.

You can even add a neighborhood walkscore to your listings, and downloadable PDFs.

It is available in multiple languages and can be easily translated into any other language. It also comes with sidebar widgets and shortcodes that allow you to display listings throughout your website.

4. Estatik

Estatik

Estatik is another excellent plugin to manage your real estate listings in WordPress. This powerful plugin comes with an easy to use property management system allowing you to easily add listings to your website.

It includes photo gallery, property search widget, Google Maps support, built-in social sharing, and multilingual support. It also includes a custom fields builder which allows you to easily add new fields to your listings.

Estatik listings

It has an ajax powered search feature with auto-complete. Users can also sort listings by price, date, popularity, and more.

There’s a pro version of the plugin available that has even more features like saved search, email notifications, and much more.

5. Easy Property Listings

Easy Property Listings

Easy Property Listings is another powerful and highly customizable WordPress real estate plugin. It allows you to easily build a real estate website without touching code and without changing WordPress themes.

The beginner friendly listing management interface makes it super easy to manage your properties. It also comes with mobile-friendly listing templates to display your properties in a grid layout or a single listing page.

Advanced features include support for REAXML, JUPIX, worldwide MLS systems, translations / multilingual support, advanced maps, and more.

Paid addons and extensions allow you to add many other features including a real estate agent directory and management system, agent ratings, and more.

6. WP Real Estate

WP Real Estate

WP Real Estate is an easy to use real estate plugin for WordPress with tons of cool features. It can be used for buying, selling, and rental properties as well.

It includes an advanced search feature, Google Maps, IDX/MLS integration, contact forms, custom fields, and list or grid layout views.

WP Real Estate map view

It also comes with shortcodes and widgets so that you can display different real estate listings throughout your website or create your own landing pages for different properties.

7. Realtyna WPL

Realtyna WPL

Realtyna WPL is flexible and powerful WordPress real estate management plugin. You can easily add your listings with a filterable search feature for the front-end.

It has real estate agent profiles, Google Maps, different listing views, and a powerful custom fields feature to add property features.

The pro version of the plugin can also be integrated with MLS/IDX services.

Plus, it works well with some of the best WordPress themes in the market.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress real estate plugins for your website. You may also want to see our expert picks of the best business phone services for small business and our must have WordPress plugins for business websites.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 7 Best WordPress Real Estate Plugins Compared (2021) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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How to Change Certificate Without Downtime

Certificates Are Always a Pain in the Production Environment!  

Security is the one the most important part of any application these days especially the fact that most of the applications are running on a public cloud provider puts the security part on a higher priority. One of the ways application are using to keep communications secure is through the certificate. The certificate is one of the concepts that it is not as easy as another part of software development. First, you should understand how a certificate plays in the security part to figure out how to incorporate it into your application security. Moreover, you need to know how to generate/issue a new certificate for your application. 

Unfortunately, certificate generation is not a one-time job and it has expiration date. So, it means a new certificate should be replaced with the current certificate before the expiration date comes. In most cases, the certificate information is used in configurations of a deployed application on production. Therefore, you need to generate a new certificate and redeploy your application on production. This creates difficulties for software teams to see how they can handle this issue and justify the downtime in production. Lack of knowledge and documentation in projects often makes this operation highly error prune. Therefore, there is a high chance that even after a new certificate something fails on production unexpectedly because of misconfiguration. In this article, we are going to see how we can solve this issue without having downtime on production and also any change on the application level.

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How to Set Up a Site Like Teachers Pay Teachers with WordPress

Do you want to set up a website like Teachers Pay Teachers using WordPress?

Teachers Pay Teachers is an online marketplace for educators where they can sell educational resources to other teachers. The platform makes money by selling memberships and taking a small fee on transactions.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily create a website like Teachers Pay Teachers in WordPress.

Setting up a website similar to Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) using WordPress

Getting Started with Your Teachers Pay Teachers Like Website

To make a Teachers Pay Teachers like website in WordPress, you’ll need a few things to get started.

First, you’ll need a domain name (example: wpbeginner.com) and a web hosting account to store your website files.

Normally, a domain name will cost you 16.99 per year and web hosting starts at $7.99 per month (paid annually). Now if you are just testing the waters, then this may sound a little expensive.

Luckily, Bluehost has agreed to offer WPBeginner users a generous discount with a free domain name and an SSL certificate. Basically, you’ll be able to get started for $2.75 per month.

→ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

After sign up, Bluehost will automatically install WordPress for you. You’ll be able to login to your WordPress website from your hosting account dashboard.

Next, you need to set up a WooCommerce store on your website. This will allow you to convert your website into an eCommerce platform and accept online payments from your customers.

For complete step by step instructions, see our tutorial on how to create an online store.

Step 2. Converting your Website into a Marketplace for Educators

Now that you have set up an online store, you’ll need to open it up for other educators to create an account and list their resources for sell.

By default, WooCommerce is a single vendor eCommerce store. In order for other teachers to sell their resources, you’ll need to convert it to a multi-vendor marketplace.

First, you need to visit WoooCommerce » Settings page and switch to the ‘Accounts & Privacy’ tab.

Opening user registration in WooCommerce

From here you need to check the boxes to allow users to register and allowing users to register on the ‘My Account’ page.

Don’t forget to click on the Save changes button to store your settings.

Next, you need to install and activate the WC Vendors plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

WC Vendors allows you to convert your WooCommerce store into a multi-vendor platform.

Upon activation, the plugin will ask you to install WC Vendors marketplace plugin. This is the limited free version of the plugin that acts as the base for the pro version. The free version lacks all the features you’ll need to create a professional marketplace platform that’s why you need to have both items installed.

Next, the plugin will show you a set up wizard which you can skip as we will show you how to manually set up the plugin.

After that, you need to visit the WC Vendors » Settings page to configure plugin.

Allow vendor registration

From here, you need to check the box next to the ‘Allow users to apply to become a vendor’ option. This will allow teachers to register as a vendor on your platform.

After that, you need to switch to the Commission tab and set up the default commission you want to pay to the sellers.

Set commission default

There are a number of ways you can set up commission including percentage, fixed amount, percentage + fee, based on total sales, and more.

Next, you need to switch to the Capabilities tab. From here, you can choose how other educators will add their products on your website.

Allow vendors to add and edit products

From here you need to check the box next to the ‘Allow vendors to add/edit products’ option. By default, all products on the website will need to be approved first.

Next, click on the ‘Products’ link at the top and select which type of products vendors can add.

What types of products educators can add

You can choose Simple Product type with Virtual and Downloadable product type options. This would allow teachers to upload their resources in downloadable format which other teachers can buy.

Next, you need to switch to the Display page. From here, you will need to set up pages that will be used for crucial sections of your marketplace platform.

Add shortcode to pages

For each option, you need to copy the shortcode shown below it. After that, create a new page in WordPress and paste the shortcode in the content area.

For instance, we created a page called Vendor Dashboard and then placed the shortcode [wcv_vendor_dashboard] inside it.

Don’t want to use ‘Vendors’ as label for sellers? Don’t worry you can name your pages whatever you like. You can also tell the plugin what label to use by clicking on the Labels link.

Change labels

Don’t forget to click on the Save changes button to store your settings.

Step 3. Adding Links to Your Marketplace in Navigation Menus

Now that you have set up an online marketplace for teachers, you can go ahead and the links to the signup and account management pages to your website.

Simply go to the Appearance » Menus page and add the My Account page to your navigation menu.

Add marketplace links to your navigation menu

You can change the label of My Account page to anything you want and even add it as a button in navigation menu.

Additionally, don’t forget to add shop page to your navigation menu where users can view available resources that they can buy.

Once finished, click on the Save Menu button to store your changes.

You can now preview your website to see your navigation menu in action. Clicking on the My Account page will take the non-logged in users to Login / Registration page.

Seller registration page

Users can now register on your website and apply to become a vendor or seller. After that, they will be able to access their Vendor dashboard and add their own products to be sold on your website.

Seller dashboard

Step 4. Approving Products Submitted by Sellers

As users register and submit their own resources to be listed as products on your website, you will see a notification on the Products label in your WordPress dashboard.

Pending products

From here you can edit a pending product and review its description and details. If everything looks ok, then you can go ahead and publish the product to be listed on your website.

Publish pending product

These resources will now appear as product on your Shop page with a ‘Sold by:’ label with the seller’s name.

Seller products listed in your store

Users can now buy these resources from your website like they would buy any other product.

Step 5. Paying Sellers on Your Website

As the platform service provider, you’ll be accepting online payments from your customers. WooCommerce provides a bunch of payment gateways including PayPal and Stripe to accept payments.

Once you have sold enough products, you will need to set up a payment solution to pay the vendors their commission.

The easier and more reliable method is to export all unpaid transactions to a CSV file by visiting WC Vendors » Commissions page.

Paying the sellers

You can then process the payments manually using PayPal or Bank transfers.

This allows you to see how each seller is doing on your website and allows sellers to make enough sales and ratings before they get paid.

You can also automate this process by installing plugin’s Stripe Connect extension. Go to the WC Vendors » Extensions page and to install the WC Vendors Stripe Connect extension.

Connect Stripe to pay vendors

Step 6. Promoting Your Marketplace to Grow Your Business

Now that your marketplace for teachers and educators is set up, the final step is to start promoting your website.

There are multiple tools and plugins that you can use to grow your business online. Here are some of the must have tools and plugins that you can start using rightaway.

1. All in One SEO for WordPress

All in One SEO for WordPress

All in One SEO for WordPress is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It allows you to easily optimize your website for search engines and social media platforms.

It comes with built-in WooCommerce SEO support for your products. It includes powerful schema markup which makes your search listings appear with rich snippets leading to higher organic click through rates.

2. OptinMonster

Get OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the #1 conversion optimization and lead generation software in the world. Basically, it helps you convert website visitors into paying customers.

It comes with tools like lightbox popups, countdown timers, spin to win, header and footer banners, and more. All of them help you nudge visitors into making a purchase.

3. SeedProd

SeedProd website

SeedProd is the best WordPress page builder plugin on the market. It allows you to quickly create professional looking web pages for your website regardless of which WordPress theme you are using.

Plus, it works really well with WooCommerce allowing you to create highly optimized product pages, landing pages, sales and marketing pages. It is really easy to use with an intuitive drag and drop interface.

4. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights allows you to easily track your website visitors using Google Analytics. It comes with powerful eCommerce tracking feature which helps you see which products are performing well on your eCommerce marketplace.

It also helps easily track conversions which gives you a clear picture of what’s working on your website. You can then plan and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily create a Teachers Pay Teachers like eCommerce marketplace using WordPress.

You may also want to see our complete WordPress SEO guide and take a look at these practical tips to easily grow your website traffic.

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The post How to Set Up a Site Like Teachers Pay Teachers with WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.