Wow, the speaker list for the WP Agency Summit is finalized now and I couldn’t be more happy. In December, I’ll deliver a free virtual conference to you that will teach you how to scale your agency, without burning out or drowning in client work.

Just planning this event gets me excited! And it brings me in touch with so much great content that I can condense for you in these weekly emails 🙂

Enjoy!

Business & Growth

How to Build an Agency into a Media Brand | Liquid Web — www.liquidweb.com
Podcaster and media genius Lee Jackson, who runs a white-label WP agency in the UK, shares how he uses media to position is business as authority in the crowded WP space.

How To Break Out Of The Feast / Famine Cycle In Your Agency — www.funnelpacks.co
Are you sick and tired of the feast & famine cycles in your business? Some months go great and you bank more money than you can spend. Then you have months with no clients coming in at all? My buddy Matt has written a fantastic article you can literally implement step-by-step to generate a steady income.

How to Incentivize Your Team With Agency Profit-Sharing – Smart Agency Masterclass: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies
Keeping your team engaged is crucial for any agency that wants to succeed.

In this podcast, Jason Swenk explains that – for some agencies – it’s a great idea to share company profits with your team.

Certainly worth listening to if you want to hire A-players and also keep them in your team!

How to Have a $100k+ WordPress Product Launch – Freemius
I met Vito, founder of WPFeedback, at WCEU this year and love sharing his success.

He’s such a generous guy and with his breakdown of this $100k launch, he knocked it out of the park.

Inspiring to see such a humble guy not just grow a solid business but also fix the issues of countless agencies along the way. Kudos.

WordPress News & Tools

Dissecting the WordPress 5.2.3 Update — blog.sucuri.net
Sucuri specialist Marc-Alexandre Montpas took a deep dive into the WP 5.2.3 security update.

I like these looks behind the scenes to understand WHY installing the update is important. And a better understanding of the fixes included in the update also help me sell maintenance plans to my customers 😉

Gutenberg Team Explores the Future of Full-Site Editing with New Prototype – WordPress Tavern — wptavern.com
Get a look at Gutenberg Phase 2! The new editor is taking over full-site editing, including areas like widgets, menus, and other parts outside of post content.

While I still think that Elementor, Beaver Builder & Co vastly outperform Gutenberg, seeing this initiative grow is a fantastic feeling.

It shows that the block areas introduced in Gutenberg phase 2 might even replace the Customizer – so we should stay on top of this progress.

How-To’s & Dev

Docker is a Must-Have for Local WordPress Development — www.liquidweb.com
As I kept referencing this article for my mini-course on Jenkins automations, I thought it’s a good fit for this week’s newsletter. It’ll show you how to use Docker for your local WP development.

I use this for almost 2 years now to set up stable WP installations within minutes and with just the command line.

WP Cron in Practice: wp_schedule_event Examples + More • WPShout
Getting WP Cron right in your code isn’t always easy. When I think about my projects and maintenance work, it’s mostly Woo-based sites that are heavily slowed down by WP Cron.

David Hayes does a great job of breaking down the correct usage of WP Cron, esp. with wp_schedule_event, in your code.

Hashing a Custom Taxonomy – WebDevStudios
Here’s a nice tutorial on OOP-based handling for custom posts and taxonomies.

I’ve been following WebDevStudios for a while now and they continually impress me with their in-depth tutorials.

Certainly a great example of a nicely structured codebase for creating a custom data structure.

Random Articles

Yikes! iOS 13 Coming Next Week With iPhone LockScreen Bypass Bug — thehackernews.com
Be careful to install iOS 13 just yet. It has a bug that anybody can use to access contact data saved on your iPhone.

Crazy that this bug has been reported on July 17th and Apple will still push the version live.

Adam Jacob Advocates for Building Healthy OSS Communities in “The War for the Soul of Open Source” – WordPress Tavern — wptavern.com
Inspiring talk by Adam Jacob at OSCON 2019, about how Open Source Software changes with big companies entering the markets. Well worth watching!

That’s it for this week! I hope you enjoy this handpicked list of articles! If you think that I’m missing certain topics or blogs, don’t hesitate to reach out and let me know!

Best,

Jan

https://wpmastery.xyz

P.S. Here are some tools I use daily, maybe they’ll benefit your business too.

Cloudways (hosting). I host all my own and our client sites with them. We have 7 servers and roughly 50 sites on Cloudways and are in love with them since 2014. Their servers make our sites blazingly fast, they give us plenty of flexibility for development workflows (e.g. Github auto-deploy embedded), and the servers run stable. What more could you ask for?

Elementor (page builder). We use the Elementor page builder plugin when building new sites or adding landing pages to existing client websites. It’s super easy to use and gives plenty of flexibility. And the predesigned layouts are a great starting point if you’re not a designer.

Ora.pm (project management tool). When collaborating with a team, you need a strong PM tool. Ora serves this need for us with its combination of Kanban and List views. You can even embed single projects on websites, e.g. to automatically keep your client updated on progress!

Page Builder Cloud. Looking to transfer your Elementor layouts from the staging site to the live website easily? Page Builder Cloud is my tool of choice. It works with Elementor, BB, Divi, Fusion Builder, Oxygen and so many more. And it’s just $99/year. Even if it saves you just 1h, it pays for itself.

WP Buffs Maintenance Partnership. Want to sell WP maintenance plans but don’t have a team to handle the actual work? The WP Buffs offer white-label maintenance plans at exceptional quality. Schedule a free call with them now to get to know them and to partner up. I keep referring my friends to them.