Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson. Hi, and welcome to episode number 50 of the WP Innovator podcast. This is your host, Lee, and yes, we’ve made it to episode 50. Super, super proud. And just want to thank Larissa and Karthik for their ongoing support and everyone else who’s been involved in the podcast to date. That’s all the guests as well as everyone in the Facebook group as well, who’ve really helped contribute to ideas and just supporting each other as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So if you’re not part of that Facebook group, do head on over. We’re rocking well over 200 members now and that’[email protected] group. Now you’re in for a great treat. Today we’re going to be talking to Brian Jackson from Kinster and basically I grill the poor guy for 40 odd minutes asking tons and tons of questions that I think agencies have always wanted to ask their hosts. So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Hello and welcome. This is your host, Lee, and we have with us today Brian Jackson. Again, mate, how are you doing?
Brian Jackson:
Hi, I’m doing good. Glad to connect again.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yes. Well, if you don’t remember, just a few episodes we had Brian on the line and he was talking all about content delivery, networks and he did that amazing podcast. If you just go to the website right now, leejacksondev.com and tap in Speeding Up WordPress. He talked all about speeding up WordPress. And I’ll tell you what, I keep going back to the notes that I made from that podcast on the show, Notes to speed up all of our client sites as we go. So we talked about cache, enabler, all sorts of cool plugins. So the time with you, mate, was absolutely invaluable. So for those people who have not yet listened to that podcast and do not know who Brian Jackson is, do you mind just saying hello and giving us a quick intro as to who you are?
Brian Jackson:
Sure, yeah, yeah. I am currently the director of inbound marketing at Kinsta. So before, I think in our last podcast I was at KeyCDN, which was the content delivery network, and I have now moved on to Kinsta, which is we deal with high performance managed WordPress hosting. So I’m still in the, I guess you could say the web performance industry and probably always will be, just because I love, love speeding up websites, I guess, and love dealing with WordPress too. So that’s Currently where I’m at.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. And do you want to give people as well just a quick background? You run a few of your own sites as well and you’re very much into WordPress. Do you want to just kind of name drop a few of the blogs that you’ve got out there that you do?
Brian Jackson:
Sure, yeah. One is workup and it’s w O-O-R-K-U p.com and that’s basically it’s a digital marketing blog. But I deal with a lot of web performance stuff too, so you’ll find a lot of how to speed up WordPress, how to even I recently posted how to compress animated GIFs because a lot of people will put GIFs in their posts and they don’t realize actually some of those gifs are like 2 megabytes which will destroy your entire page right there. So little cool tidbits like that I like to post that usually you can’t find anywhere else on the web. I don’t like posting stuff that’s already out there.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I like that.
Brian Jackson:
And another site is WP Coupons IO and that’s actually a plugin my brother and I developed. It’s mainly for affiliate marketers, but you could use it in any type of niche. Some people are using it on food blogs so it could be used for anything. But basically it’s a Coupon plugin for WordPress which helps you sell stuff easier and it will usually it helps us increase our click through rate conversions, everything by making coupons appear as you scroll down in your WordPress blog. Stuff like that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Very, very cool. So that’s Workup and wbcoupons IO so we’ll put both of those links in the show notes already. So mate, it is really cool to have you on. Like I said, your last episode was phenomenal and always grateful for all the advice you gave. It’s just some stellar tips and I’ve already bookmarked your blogs as well on things like speed, etc. In fact last night we had a site that we’d inherited that went down and instantly I had your blog back open and I was like okay, let’s see how they set this up. What? Not even gzips enabled? This is nuts. So I essentially followed your your blog right the way through and I went from I think it was 20 out of 100 what they were scoring and got us right up to something like 85 out of 100 just in a couple of hours and obviously I’ll do some more tomorrow, etc.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But just phenomenal. So, guys as well, we’ll share those links in there as well. So one of the reasons why we’ve got you on is we want to find out what’s happened. You were at Key Cdn and now suddenly you’re at Kinsta. How did that happen, mate?
Brian Jackson:
So I’ve been a big fan of everything that Kinsta has been doing for years. If you’ve been following my blog for the past two or three years, people will know I’ve been with Kinsta for some of my sites for a long time. And it’s kind of a funny story because I probably would have ended up there to begin with, but the timing and situation for the position just didn’t work out and so I ended up going to Key Cdn first. And I loved working at Key Cdn. I love the team over there. The stuff they’re doing is great. I’ll be a customer of theirs for life. Like, I totally believe in everything they’re doing.
Brian Jackson:
But the reason I decided to move on to Kinsta was an opportunity came up with them for a position. And I love, really it came down to I love WordPress and I’m really kind of knee deep already in WordPress with my blogs and the plugin and everything. And so leaving, I guess, more of the dev community and Moving more towards WordPress community and WordPress devs really was exciting for me and so I’m really happy to now be kind of where I’ve always wanted to be. I guess you could say I get
Lee Matthew Jackson:
you with a company that not only is giving your passion for performance, but also your passion for WordPress. It sounds like you’re in the ideal place.
Brian Jackson:
It is. Yeah. I am exactly where I want to be. Super, super happy and really excited to. I’ve only been with them for a little like two months now, but I’m really excited to connect even deeper with the WordPress community than I have ever had a chance to before.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. So do you want to tell us what your role does? Because from your job title I actually have no idea what you do. So do you want to give us the lowdown of what it is you’ll be doing over the next few months?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, my legal title is Director of Inbound Marketing and it’s a very similar thing to what I was doing at KeyCDN. So a lot of the stuff you see on our blog will be written by me and we try to do longer posts that are tutorials and helpful for users. We don’t like dealing with a lot of news that you kind of see on other WordPress blogs. Fluff kind of blog posts. So we are very strongly for longer blog posts that will actually help the user and that offer good information. Very similar to what I post on my own blog too. Oh, go ahead.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No, no, carry on.
Brian Jackson:
So I’m doing a lot of SEO, so a lot of keyword research, optimizing things on their website, fine tuning things that they haven’t had time to really do because they’re so busy with the hosting aspect of things. The SEO and all this other sorts of stuff gets kind of left behind. Yeah, I’ll be. We’re going to be launching our affiliate program here in about very shortly, probably in this next 30 days here, which is very exciting for us because we’re going to help be outreaching to a lot more people than we have in the past. I’ll be definitely spending time outreaching to bloggers, sign them up. We actually have a reoccurring commission structure which is exciting for a lot of people. If you refer somebody you can earn, I think it’s at 10% right now for the life of that customer, as long as they stay one.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s pretty cool. That’s epic. I would recommend people go and check out the Kinsta blog. It’s actually a place where I’ll go quite regularly. It’s Kinsta, that’s K-I-N-S-T-A.com blog. There’s some pretty cool blogs in there. And one recently that I was taking a look at was the building inefficient WordPress queries in with sorry with WPQuery. And there’s a good little breakdown and some good advice in there.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that’s definitely one for you guys who are creating, you know, these big loops. It talks about, you know, the best ways of building up a loop. It talks about the SQL behind that and it also talks about caching as well. So it’s a pretty good post. And that’s one thing I’d noticed about the Kinsta blogs was the like, well, the blogs you do as well is the length and the amount of information in there. That’s why I always appreciate following the stuff you put out there because like I said, it’s just one blog post that I have to follow. And then I can speed up my website from, you know, 20 out of 100 to nearly 90 out of 100 just in a couple of hours. Sitting with the one blog post rather than having to try and go elsewhere or your blog post being kind of the same as everything else, so it’s very different.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I’d definitely give you a thumbs up for that one, buddy. So have you submitted any blogs yourself yet? Because I hadn’t noticed any of you yet on the Kinsta blog.
Brian Jackson:
Oh yeah, there’s a couple on there if you scroll down. I think on there right now, I published an in depth HTTP to HTTPs migration. Nice. It’s a very, very long post and that will be constantly updated as things change and things. Everything I publish is evergreen, so it’s always relevant. If it isn’t or gets out of date, I make sure to go back and update it. So that one is. Yeah, I mean, pretty much everything you need to know if you’re going from HTTP to HTTPs is in there.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s brilliant. Including one of my favorite plugins, really simple ssl.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. Which I don’t recommend using that long term, but it is a good quick fix.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly. If you just need to quickly. When the client’s like, what’s going on here? And you’re like, hang on a sec. Okay, try now. Oh, that’s brilliant. Thank you. You’re like, phew.
Brian Jackson:
And I have used that myself, even, to be honest. But definitely you definitely want to update those hard links eventually.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Because the problem with that is things like that really simple ssl, depending on the setting, it can slow down the page as well, can’t it? Because it’s trying to scan everything from memory.
Brian Jackson:
Correct. Yeah. If that plugin ever gets disabled or discontinued, you’re out of luck, basically.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly.
Brian Jackson:
Because if you turn that plugin off, you’re going to have some mixed content errors immediately.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Instantly. That’s right. Actually, I’m quickly scrolling down. I also see my favorite search and replace tool as well in there. It’s not the better search and replace, it’s the one from Interconnect it. I just did an episode recently on that, which is I’ve been doing this series throughout October of WordPress tips to try before you die. And one of those was using this search and replace tool from into connect it because absolutely love that. Just for like finding names or replacing HTTPs or changing domains, etc.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s flipping brilliant. So cool. Good call. All right, well, let’s. Let’s talk to you about WordPress hosting then, mate. So obviously you’ve made the shift over to Kinsta. They are very much focused on WordPress. Do you mind giving us.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
For the people that don’t know much about Kinsta, do you mind just giving us a little bit of a history of the company.
Brian Jackson:
The thing that sets us apart is we deal mainly more with higher traffic WordPress sites. So we’re all about optimizing for sites that get, we’re talking, some of them get millions of visitors a month. We’re talking that kind of scale, but we have smaller customers too. But our price ranges, we start out at $100 a month, so we don’t compare ourselves to other hosts like SiteGround or Things because we deal with sites with a lot of traffic. We kind of like to think of ourselves in a different game than some of the other hosts are. What sets us apart a little bit is that we were the first host to exclusively use the Google cloud platform for WordPress hosting. So there’s only a couple other companies doing that out there right now. I think Cloudways also uses Google Cloud as an option, but we’re the only ones using them exclusively.
Brian Jackson:
And that has worked really, really well for us. Google Cloud platform is super fast and, and yeah, we’ve been super impressed with it. We also offer higher end performance options such as hhvm. So a lot of hosts will offer or should be offering PHP7 now, hopefully if they haven’t upgraded. But HVM is another performance thing you can turn on while you’re on Kinsta. And for higher traffic sites, basically the larger your site is, the more HHVM actually matters. It comes to a tipping point where PHP7 is fast, but HHVM will be even faster if you have a large enough site. Basically, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And when you say the higher traffic sites, what would you define as a higher traffic site? Because somebody could say, hey, I get 2,000 visits a month. This is a high traffic site. Are we talking a minimum of a million visits or what is classed as high traffic? Is it visits? Is it bandwidth? What would you term as a high traffic site?
Brian Jackson:
Well, we don’t charge you by visitors like some other hosts do. Ours is all by bandwidth. And so you would have to calculate with your current host what your bandwidth is if you were wanting to migrate over to calculate what plan would fit you. But yeah, I mean, a high traffic site, it really depends too on what you’re doing. Because if say one of my sites has around 100,000 visitors a month, um, you know that at that point, you know, that website is a very important investment for me. It’s, you know, it’s making money and I treat it as a business. It’s not just a hobby anymore.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yep.
Brian Jackson:
And so $100 a month is, you know, an investment to keep that that website safe and fast and up all the time. So I think you kind of have to look at it as more as how important is your website to you kind of a thing. And so for a lot of businesses, $100 a month is actually not that much of an investment if you don’t have to ever worry about your website going down.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s true. And on that kind of what is your uptime guarantee? Because I can never quite understand how people say 99.99% uptime guarantee, etc. I don’t even know what that means because my site’s not on my current host, but on previous hosts. My site has gone down umpteen times. I’ve never told anyone off necessarily. But do you guys have any those sorts of guarantees? Does that work?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, I mean, ours is very similar. I mean we have a 99.9% uptime guarantee and we do have in our agreements, you can go look at our SLA agreements and stuff on the website. But we do give out credits if we fail to meet that. So some hosts won’t do that. But if it’s something that we should have been fixing and we fail, we give credits back. But really for us that hasn’t been an issue.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So tell us more about the Google Cloud platform that you’re using as well. Because isn’t that something that’s relatively new?
Brian Jackson:
I mean, Google Cloud platform has been around for a while now.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I mean for Kinsta, because I put a client on Kinsta about a year ago and there was no mention of Google Cloud platform a year ago that
Brian Jackson:
I was aware of. Yeah. And we transitioned everything to Google Cloud. It was about a year ago. And so before we were on VPS’s very similar to other WordPress hosts as well. And then we moved everything to Google Cloud because we saw going forward this is going to be. Being an SEO person, I have a love and hate relationship with Google. I rely on them for everything, but I also hate them at the same time.
Brian Jackson:
But you can’t beat Google. Basically. They have the biggest infrastructure, they have the biggest network, the biggest data centers. I mean, it’s a powerhouse, basically. I actually just published a blog post the other day. You can go check it out. But it’s top five advantages of choosing Google Cloud hosting that’s on the Kinsta blog. And it actually goes through a comparison of Google Cloud versus AWS and Azure and how it deals with WordPress hosting.
Brian Jackson:
It goes into a deeper level and I think it does a good comparison of why we chose Google Cloud for keensto.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I can see here as well. I’ve taken a quick look. It looks like it’s a combination of both speed and cost.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, cost is a big one. If you compare it to aws, it’s a lot cheaper. And Azure as well. And the network, I mean, it’s just you can’t beat the latency in their network. It’s crazy. Even Linode and DigitalOcean, they have lots of spots, but Google’s network is just huge. They’re actually building their own infrastructure. There’s fiber and stuff that runs under the ocean to get across continents and Google is building their own.
Brian Jackson:
So you can’t say there’s no other company you can say that’s actually building their own network under the ocean, basically.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So for people like us, a lot of us are agencies and where we tend to be asked about hosting. Do you guys do any? I mean, I guess you wouldn’t necessarily white label, but a lot of us struggle with the concept of do we buy the hosting and then put the website on it and then we then have to have the relationship with the support center to. So our client will call us in the middle of the night and say, hey, the website’s gone down and then we have to deal with it. Or do you have anything where, you know, like I could still pay the bill and the client. My client actually contacts support about any issues, etc. How do you work with support?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, so support. We use the tool Intercom, which you’re probably familiar with. It’s the little. A lot of companies use it now. It’s that little chat client kind of you see in the bottom right.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That makes that little noise.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah. Kind of thing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And then keeps beeping at me and I want to throw it out the window sometimes.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, but it only shows if you’re in the dashboard for us.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, yeah.
Brian Jackson:
And so that’s how people can open tickets there. And we actually have a thing we recently launched called Companies and the companies actually allows you to add additional companies. And this is more for agencies specifically. So you can add new users with access to different companies and have different websites under different company branches, if that makes sense.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Brian Jackson:
So you could have 20 clients and maybe you have 20 different companies set up in the Kienst dashboard and all the sites are under a separate company.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So does that mean I would still control the billing and then invoice my client, but the client can go into that control panel to submit support tickets?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. So what we’re adding. And this is actually Something we’re working on right now is right now we don’t have a granular permission level for the companies. So if you give them access to that company dashboard, they get the whole access, which is not necessarily always good sometimes. So we’re adding granular accesses and you can give them just FTP access if you wanted to, or you can give them just management of the site access, stuff like that. We’re adding actually right now and there will be the billing, granular access as well, for the exact same type of thing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. But I guess for me, because I am looking currently quite seriously for who can I start to host with. Because clients want me to host, but I do not want the stress of being called in the middle of the night having a client telling me these initiatives. Now obviously you’re going to tell me that if I go to Kinsta it’ll never go down anyway, so I’ll never have to worry about it. But hey, I’m probably going to get a kind of cool now and again. And the ideal scenario for me would be able to find a host that I don’t care how expensive they may be. But for me, if I know that my clients can log onto a control panel and submit a support ticket to say the site’s down or whatever, and that’s going to the big call center or the big support center at Kinsta or whichever company it is, that’s my ideal mecca as an agency, because agencies, we’re already working a lot of hours, we’re doing designs to deadlines, putting sites out to deadlines, finding that sort of extra service where we know the host looks after our client, support the client, have a communication, etc. Whilst we could still manage everything.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Everything sounds ideal. And I think that’s kind of what you’re describing.
Brian Jackson:
It is. And actually technically, even right now, that would work. What we’re actually working on is more granular access for people that don’t want to give the client everything because they don’t want them to go click into the MySQL database in phpmyadmin. They only want them to see certain things. But technically, right now, if you added a client as a new company, the client could log in and they could submit their own support tickets. So that exact scenario actually does work right now.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think I need to explore this after this call. Lynn.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, so yeah, check that out. And we’re working right now on the more granular because we have a lot of people that they might want to give a developer just FTP access So he can work on a plugin for them, but they don’t want to give them access to their billing or anything like that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No, exactly. I mean the granular thing sounds brilliant, obviously, but for me, my main pain point is that support issue. It’s. I’ll look after the billing of support and I’ll manage the site and I’ll upload everything for you and I’ll do your updates every month and etc. Etc. But when it comes to the call in the middle of the night, that’s just the one thing that fills me with dread.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
You know, if they can go and submit a support ticket, you know, because even if I gave them a support center of my own to go to, I’d still have to make sure someone’s checking it. Whereas if you guys are looking after the whole of support and I know my clients can just go straight to you. Everyone’s aware of the relationship, that’s all good. So you’re going to say something?
Brian Jackson:
Sure. No, yeah. I was just going to say I totally understand that myself. I don’t like dealing with clients. That’s why I work in the marketing side, not the support side because I’ve worked support before in my life and I just, I hate it. I cannot deal with clients. It’s just a nightmare.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That makes it sound like I don’t like dealing with clients either. But I guess I don’t like dealing with clients when it comes to my free time and they’re screaming down the phone that there’s a problem with the website. That’s probably the point where I don’t like dealing with clients though. That makes me cry and get stressed
Brian Jackson:
and in a flap and like I said, I mean you probably won’t have much of an issue here at Kingsta. Like we don’t have downtime like that. It just doesn’t happen with us. But you know that that is always there because, you know, I mean, once in a while something might happen but you know, I wouldn’t worry about that with us, so.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, no, I mean, there you go. So there’s your new strapline, Kinster. We don’t have downtime.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
All right, tell me about this then. I’m looking at your website and I’m seeing expert support. So pro. Expert support for WordPress. What’s that about?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, and so I like our support and actually I just spent a week last week in Budapest, which is some of our team is there in Budapest, Hungary and actually just spent a week with the team. I met all of them in person, you know, because even for KeyCity and before I’m always used to working remotely and so I don’t always get to meet some of my team in person. So it’s cool. I met everyone on the Kinsa team and we even played Airsoft together. So we’ve been through the grind together. So everyone there, they live and breathe. WordPress 24. 7.
Brian Jackson:
We don’t outsource this stuff. Everyone’s there in that office. So you get a lot better support than would say some of these other companies. It’s more hands on and since we deal with bigger clients, we actually know everybody by name. There’s not a client that signs up with us that we don’t know and we communicate with them. So it’s definitely a more hands on approach than you’ve probably ever seen in the past because some of these bigger companies you’re just another number, another sign up. But for us it’s, it’s a lot different.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, I guess because the amount of money people are paying there as well means you don’t have to fill up with as many clients and therefore you can give a smaller group of higher paying clients the sort of attention and care they need. But what, exactly what does that attention and care need kind of look like though? Because you know someone’s going to say, hey, I give WordPress support. That to me sounds like somebody could potentially take advantage. Does that mean that you guys are like you’re fixing bugs? Are you just helping them install a product? Are you giving them like updates and stuff like that? What is WordPress expert support?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, expert support. And we do have something in our TOS about that, you know, obviously, so we don’t get taken advantage of ourselves. Yeah, yeah, but you know, we’re, we’ll probably go the extra mile more than most hosts do. You know, if you have trouble with a plugin working on Kinsta, we’ll help you figure out why it’s not working. But it’s not support for anything it does have to deal with. If it’s not working with the hosting plan that we will help you figure it out.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Alright, so in a scenario I have a plugin and the plugin saying such and such is not enabled some sort of package sometimes you’ll see, I don’t know, modxyz is not installed, we can’t compress images with this plugin or something and then I can reach out to you guys and say, hey, my plugin is telling me I need this installed on the server. How can I do that? And you guys can help out or say, sorry, we don’t support that. Find another plugin sort of thing.
Brian Jackson:
Exactly, yeah, exactly. We’ll help with that. If something’s not enabled on the server and your thing, we’ll enable it or if we don’t allow it, there are some things we don’t allow on the servers. Kind of similar to. I mean, you’ve probably used or seen WP engine in the past. We have a kind of a similar approach today because since we deal with performance so much, it’s a very similar thing that we don’t allow certain plugins that we know will actually slow down your site. And so we don’t do this to hurt people, we’re actually doing it to help them.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Wow. So do you actually have a list of those?
Brian Jackson:
We do, yeah, we do have a list of those. I can name off a couple if you want. Just do it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I would love to have the hall of Shame.
Brian Jackson:
Some disallowed plugins. Let me see here. WordPress popular posts plugin, that’s one. Wordfence is another one.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Really? Well, you guys look after the security, don’t you? So you don’t.
Brian Jackson:
We do look after the security and a lot more than most hosts do. So you don’t need wordfence if you’re running on Kinsta. You just don’t need it. And let’s see some other things here. Some backup plugins like WPDB Backup, we do backups for you and you can automate them. You can do a one click backup if you want, manually in the dashboard. So we do all that for you. And so we don’t want backup plugins constantly running because all it does is slow down your website in the back end.
Brian Jackson:
Okay, so most backup plugins we don’t allow. Cache Enabler is another one.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
The one that you recommended in the last episode.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, and I totally still recommend that for people if they’re on sitegrounder. I get you. Or other hosts. But for us, we actually do caching at a server level. It’s much faster. And then you don’t actually have to deal with caching at all, which is sometimes for bigger clients and even for my sites, it’s actually nice not to have to even worry about caching. If you just take that out of the scenario, it’s like, oh my God, this is so nice. The caching at Kinsta is very, very fast.
Brian Jackson:
So it’s, you know, I’ve gotten the speeds just the same as Cache Enabler, but it’s because our infrastructure is Totally different. So, you know, if you were to actually use a caching plugin on Kinsta, it would actually slow you down.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, I get you.
Brian Jackson:
So another one. WordPress Minify. Better. WordPress Minify is another one.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Do you guys do the minification as well in.
Brian Jackson:
We don’t, but there’s some other ones that you could use, like Auto Optimize. It’s another great one that we allow there. But WordPress Minify, I don’t remember what the reason was, but there’s some things with that one that we’ve noticed some performance issues with. Yeah, and there’s a couple other plugins in there. WordPress gzip compression. Obviously we do that at a server level, so we don’t allow that plugin to be installed.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay. So there’s nothing like majorly shocking in there. A third first I thought you might suddenly say something like, yeah, we’re not allowed ACF on there. And I’d be like, you what?
Brian Jackson:
It’s pretty much just caching. Some of the security plugins and some of the related post plugins because they’re all known to. They’re either constantly running or the popular post plugins just create so many database queries. It’s ridiculous that people don’t realize.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s funny, I’ve seen a lot of plugins like that, like really bad queries or plugins that load everything everywhere. So like, I know there’s eight scripts that are needed for one admin screen and yet they’re everywhere. If you look in the source and it’s so frustrating seeing things like that happen. You know, even in the front end you’re like, why? Why? You don’t even need this. You only need it on that one admin page. And yet you’re calling. I know the entire bootstrap library and a whole load of other stuff everywhere. That frustrates me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna name the plugins because I can’t remember who it was. But you know, there’s a couple I’ve seen in the past that really frustrated me. All right, this is really good. I’ve never had the opportunity to grill a host, so I’m asking all the like pre sales questions I would want to ask a hosting company and I never really get the opportunity because most of them are, hey, fill in this form and you’ll get a contact back. So I’m totally taking advantage of you right now and just pummeling you with info, with questions, mate. To find out more about Kinstas and you’re doing well, you’ve not burst into tears yet. So that’s good backups.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s a massive thing for me. Now I’m thinking to myself, you’re saying now we don’t need any backup plugins because we do all the backups for you. How do you do that though? Because I want to know what happens if Kinsta goes bust tomorrow and I’ve got my sites hosted with you and then in theory, my backups are done by you as well. What happens there?
Brian Jackson:
Well, and so that’s a good question. And actually we were discussing this last week because we’re always making improvements and so we will be offering different ways to get backups. So right now your backups are in the dashboard. You can go in there and create manual ones like say you want to install a new plugin and maybe you want to go create a backup manually really, really quick so that you can. We have one click restore too, so you can restore if something goes bad. But for right now, if you want a manual backup, you would actually have to reach out to our support and get one. So that’s something we’re actually changing here. In the future we’re going to have ways for you to actually go in there and say, I want to download a zip backup of my entire WordPress site.
Brian Jackson:
Here’s how to do it. The reason we don’t have that yet is we’re still working through the ways to do that logistically with the bandwidth. Because obviously if you download a backup that’s, you know, it’s costing us bandwidth on our side. Yeah. So we have to figure out how to do that with the pricing and things to allow clients to actually download the backups while it’s taking our bandwidth. Because if someone downloads a backup manually every single day, that could be a terabyte of bandwidth per month just in backups.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, I see what you mean. I guess though, if you guys are dealing with the higher end clients, then they are the sorts of companies that need to have good business continuity programs and plans. If their website, which could be the main driver of their business, is backed up by the very same company that hosts them, and then that company disappears overnight because nothing is safe, is it? Then there’s a massive floor in the business continuity plan. If they’ve not had a manual backup with you guys within say the last two or three weeks, they’ve potentially lost two or three weeks worth of data, which is going to be terrible. I mean, one suggestion I’d have is I don’t know if it solves your bandwidth issue or not though is if you think of these plugins that they make a nightly backup, they have the ability to connect with like your, you know, your Google Drive and push the backup to there. So is that something you guys could potentially do in the future? It’s an idea kind of for you guys to mull over. But if your backups, if you’re taking a snapshot every night rather than storing the snapshot on your server necessarily, it could also be for a small fee or whatever stored on the person’s Google Drive as well if they. Or a Dropbox account as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So they know there is a zip of the entire site with the SQL database in the absolute worst case scenario. Because with these plugins, I mean if I talk about Duplicator for a second, I use Duplicator to do the backups because my own, I want to make sure that at least once a week I’ve got a copy somewhere else. So I’m using Duplicator and I’m pushing that into my Google Drive and it’s only then keeping two versions of that. So I always have. I’m not like got a hundred files in there, I’ve just got two zips at any one time and it backs up once a week. So the potential thought process there for you, that was.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, that’s actually one of the options we have discussed is actually that was just my idea.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Come on, man.
Brian Jackson:
No, it’s another add on for maybe we’ll charge a fee if somebody wants it backed up every single night, something like that. As far as for us, it’s really the bandwidth. It’s not the plugin itself that’s the issue, it’s the bandwidth. And so that’s something we were discussing. And right now companies do reach out for manual backups because like you said, you always feel safer if you have another backup somewhere else. Totally.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But also for business. I mean if you get again we’re talking about these big companies and you’ve got the rise of Sarbanes Oxley. So you’ve got Sarbanes Oxley. You have to have an absolute ironclad business continuity plan. So that obviously includes security, which you guys are covering, but also includes secure backups. So you’ve got your backups stored with you. Obviously they’re highly secure off site vaults. I read that on your website.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But the idea of also making sure there is another copy of the backup. You remember the old tape drives that people used to use, they always had to make sure, like with Sarbanes Oxley, you had to make sure that you had like two tapes. You had a tape in two different locations and the tapes were stored at least, you know, outside of a two mile radius of the building and stuff like that. It’s insane. But you’ve heard of Sabanes Oxley?
Brian Jackson:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. Just you’d gone quiet. I was like, just in case. Yeah. Because I’ve worked with a lot of US companies and I’ve had to sign so many forms it’s ridiculous just to do stuff or get permission to do stuff. But it’s a good thing, obviously, for security. Cool. Sorry to pummel you there, man.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I was just interested. It’s always been a burning question that I’ve always had. You know, with a lot of these hosting companies, I’m like, great, they do backup, but what if they go bust? They’ve got band backup on my site. I don’t know what to do then. So.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, no, totally, totally understand you on that. And that’s actually something we’re working on at this very moment.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. Hey, well, I mean, thank you then, anyway, for letting me drill you about Kinsta and about hosting. I’m always intrigued to find out what, you know, what the companies are doing different, especially because you guys are a higher ticket for entry and you are specifically WordPress, you know, WordPress focused as well. So as an agency, I know I want to know all this sort of stuff. I’m pretty sure the other agencies listening want to. So why don’t we switch gears into WordPress. You love WordPress. You already shared a few plugins you liked.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But hey, it’s been a few months. You’ve been working with WordPress for a few months. Why don’t you share a few plugins, be they old or new, that you’ve been checking out recently that you want people to go and have a look at.
Brian Jackson:
Let me see here. Yeah, let’s check out here what I’ve been doing recently here.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
This is exactly what you did last time. You have like a list of plugins you’ve used recently.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And then you like reeled off 20 plugins or something. I was like, what? I’ve still got Gonzalez running as well that you recommended. That’s epic.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. Gonzales is a great, great plugin. Highly recommend anyone to get that. Definitely. It’s not free, but it’s definitely worth the money.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
$19 for two sites, and I’m only using it on two sites that I need to use. It on, but I can. That was, you know the plugin I was talking about where it puts like code everywhere and it only needs it in one admin screen. That’s why I’ve got Gonzalez to disable it everywhere.
Brian Jackson:
Yep, exactly one thing, it’s not a plugin but it’s rather a theme I’ve been using. I don’t think we discussed themes last time, but.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, let’s, let’s.
Brian Jackson:
I’ve been using my theme shop for probably the last four, five years. Maybe it’s even five, five or six even maybe. But for a very long time. And if you look in my ThemeForest account, I have probably over 80 purchases in there. So I’ve used Aveda, I’ve used ThemeX, I’ve used all those for different clients to different people for my stuff. I’ve been consistently using my theme shop for years and I use it for the coupon website I have, I use it for my workup site and I actually have another website that’s a gluten free website and I use it on there. I’ve been consistently impressed with my theme shop and I actually don’t launch any website on my own without my theme shop now. No way.
Brian Jackson:
And one of the reasons is just because they’re so well coded and they’re so lightweight that you can’t beat the speed. I have yet to find any other theme developer out there that is better.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Wow. So that’s my themeshop.com I believe.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So what’s theme wise? Do they have like their own visual builders baked in, which always annoys me or are these things like how are they built in the backend? When you say they’re lightweight, how easy are they to manage? Is it tons of shortcodes to create pages etc. Or what goes on in the back end?
Brian Jackson:
So they don’t have a visual builder, which I’m glad because I hate visual builders myself. I like just using the what you see is what you get editor. I’ve always just liked that myself. But they do have a plugin, it’s a very, very light plugin that has shortcodes. So if you install their theme, they recommend that you install their shortcode plugin and you can do additional stuff with a short code such as columns and all that crazy stuff. Then as far as managing the themes, they do have a dashboard built in where you can change all the style options, all the Google fonts, all the widgets, the ad placements, all this. Different sources of stuff, the author boxes on the single posts all that kind of stuff.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Brian Jackson:
So it’s very lightweight, but they still let you change quite a bit in the dashboard.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I mean, sometimes too much choice is a pain in the backside anyway because then you end up playing too much and making things look awful. Is it a theme club then? Or is it more of a theme? You buy the theme that you want to use.
Brian Jackson:
They actually offer both. Both options.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool.
Brian Jackson:
So I actually pay for the yearly membership just because I use them for everything all the time. So it makes more sense financially for me to just pay for the yearly thing. But you can’t go on there and buy the single themes as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Brian Jackson:
And I actually use, let’s see, two of their plugins as well. They make really good plugins too. Okay. And their developers are always concerned with speed, which is what I, you know, I always appreciate that. But one of their plugins is WP Subscribe Pro. And so if you’re on my websites, if you see a pop up, that’s what is powering the pop up, basically.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What’s that one called again? I was just looking at their plugin list.
Brian Jackson:
Oh yeah, it’s WP Subscribe Pro.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
WP subscribe Pro. So that’s like, fair. And does that integrate with like, lists building?
Brian Jackson:
It does, yeah, it does. Mailchimp get response. All the. All the, you know, big ones.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool.
Brian Jackson:
And actually it integrates. I requested a month or so ago and they added it actually within two days of me requesting it, which is awesome. Is integration with Mailerlite. I’m using Mailerlite now.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay.
Brian Jackson:
Recently. Recently migrated away from mailchimp.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m pretty sure you did a blog post on that.
Brian Jackson:
I did, yeah. I think I read it and I
Lee Matthew Jackson:
went and checked it out.
Brian Jackson:
Nice. Yeah, it’s a great service, especially for people that don’t have ginormous lists. It can save you a lot of money because once you hit the 2000 limit on Mailchimp, I mean, you’re paying 30 bucks a month, which is kind of crazy.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No way. Yeah, No, I agree. It looked really lightweight as well. So I’m just checking out these plugins. They look pretty cool. I’d never heard of this. I can’t believe I’d never heard of it. I mean, I’ve been in Envato and I have bought themes in the past for clients because back in the day, very early days, people would say, I just really like this theme, could you install it for me, etc.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I’ve had such nightmares with using themes like Avada, etc, So I Tend to stay away from them. Obviously we build them from scratch nowadays, but it’s always nice to see a new theme place. Like, I’m quite impressed with WP Zoom. I don’t know if you’ve heard of those. They’ve got a few themes that are just quite lightweight. You can add, like all of the extra shortcodes and all the other stuff if you want to, but the actual base theme itself just comes really lightweight. And we’ve actually done a site for someone recently where we used a WP Zoom theme for them at their request because they really liked it and the theme was lightweight. Nicely done.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
W3C compliant, which is kind of nice. Saves me some time. It was just a, you know, a real pleasure to use. I really like it when you eventually do find those theme developers that, you know, do concentrate on clean, lightweight code. Not too many features, but the ability to have all the junk in there if you really want it. And when I say junk, I mean Visual Composer. I hate it with a passion. Is it visual? It’s called Visual Composer in it.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah. I also hate that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I know you said you don’t like Visual Builders, but there is definitely one visual builder that I would challenge you to hate, and that is Beaver Builder. It’s brilliant.
Brian Jackson:
I keep hearing people talk about that. I have yet to try it, but I’m gonna have to give it a try.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
You so have to try it, mate. You will see the light. Even Pippin. Pippin’s plugins. Yeah. He did a big blog post the other day where he goes through Visual Builders because he doesn’t necessarily like them either. And he was going through the whole list and Beaver Builder and two other Visual Builders. He wasn’t like, I’m converted, but he was like, you know what? If I had to use a Visual Builder, then Beaver Builder is definitely one of those.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And again, I think it’s pretty lightweight. I’d be interested in your opinion on it if you ever get around to checking that one out.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, no, I’ll definitely have to check that one out. Especially if Pippin recommended it. Because I use easy digital downloads. I use affiliates wp. So a lot of stuff that he created on my coupon site and another site I have, he’s a big performance guy too. All his stuff loads really, really fast. And so I’m always impressed with his stuff. So I value his opinion very greatly.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ll have to. What I’ll do is I’ll try and find out that blog and I’ll put that in the show notes as well, for everyone to read because it is really interesting. And you’re right, I’ve got the EDD plugins for things like taking payments and subscriptions for my own digital downloads that I’ve got on different websites. And I’ve used it with clients, his tools with clients as well. And like I said, load really fast. Nice, clean and easy to use. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a WordPress plugin that doesn’t use EDD. I can’t remember.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It always seems to be. I recognize this interface. I even bought Caldera the other day and they’re using EDD as well, baked into their high level edition.
Brian Jackson:
Nice. Yeah, it’s nice to have Finally a good WooCommerce alternative for some of the stuff because I’m not a big fan of WooCommerce myself.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Wow, WooCommerce. I can hear some people a bit shocked about that. Are there any. I mean, actually that’s a good thing. WooCommerce. Okay, sorry, I was a bit flabbergasted there because WooCommerce is like everyone’s using it in the agency world because it seems to be the only solution that has enough edge case coverage with all of the different plugins that are available for it. That’s probably why people don’t like it necessarily, because they might consider WooCommerce as bloated. But one of the things I’ve had to do is have had to use WooCommerce because there are so many plugins out there that do cover those edge cases, you know, where someone might want my multiple different types of shipping, there’s a plugin out there that will help you do that, etc.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Other than EDD, are you aware of any other ecommerce plugins that are out there? Or do you have any bad experience with WooCommerce at Kinsta as well?
Brian Jackson:
Not really. And I mean, we have a lot of WooCommerce customers and a lot of them come to us because WooCommerce is a little slower and so they need a fast host to kind of make up for some of that slowness. But I don’t know of any other good alternatives. The one thing in the last year I can say is that there are a lot of plugins even from the EDD guys on their website, that try to make up for a lot of those case scenarios that they didn’t have before. So all those weird scenarios with the shipping. EDD has a lot of different stuff you can do with it now compared to even A year ago.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. I think I need to go check out those other add ons.
Brian Jackson:
They even have ways you can do physical products now too, which, you know, EDD started out as, you know, a way to do just digital downloads and now, you know, you can use it to sell clothes, you can use it to ship stuff. I mean, it’s, you can use it for anything now. So it’s, it’s definitely, it’s definitely a WooCommerce competitor.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
See, I did not know that because of the name Easy Digital Downloads. I did think it was just still all about digital downloads, but I wasn’t where you could actually sell physical and do shipping. So I’m going to be checking that out. I’ll put a link to that as well. Easy Digital Downloads. So we’ve just had a complete WordPress geek out. We’ve name dropped tons of stuff and that’s amazing. So we’re coming up to the end of our 40 odd minutes of the show.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s been brilliant grilling you about Kinsta. Fascinating to find out, you know, what’s going on behind the scenes, what sort of conversations you guys are having behind the scenes and obviously what’s important to Kinsta. Great to see that you’ve got this exciting new role as well. So high five and congratulations. Do you mind just leaving us with a parting piece of guidance, something you may have picked up over the last few months that’s not the same as the last episode that will inspire people for the rest of this week.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Never eat yellow snow. There’s one.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah. I would probably say when it comes to WordPress hosting, just be very, very careful with some of the cheaper hosts and do your own research. Don’t always just go by bloggers, like even my blog. I’m biased sometimes too. Do your research when it comes to hosting because there’s a lot of good ones out there and there’s a lot of bad ones. So I would say lots of them have trials and stuff. Go out there, try different hosts and don’t always go for the cheapest price, I guess you could say. So with hosting, sometimes you get what you pay for.
Brian Jackson:
Obviously at Kings 2 here, we’re a big believer in that. So, you know, if your business is a business, you should definitely treat it as an investment and hosting should be, should be that way.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Amen, brother. So before you go, how can people connect with you? Obviously they can head over to kinsta.comblog to go and check out the content that you and the team are putting out. But where else can they find you, mate?
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, I don’t really go on Facebook that much anymore, but I pretty much live on Twitter, so my Twitter handle is just Instagram. That’s Brian B R I A N Lee Jackson.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s so cool. That is the fact that your name is Lee Jackson.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, yeah, I know we talked about
Lee Matthew Jackson:
that last time, but I still can’t get over that. Every time I see a tweet and it’s like, brian Lee Jackson, Brian Lee Jackson.
Brian Jackson:
I’m like, no, yeah, that is crazy. Never share the name or two names, I guess before with someone, especially in the same niche,
Lee Matthew Jackson:
mate. Thanks so much for your time, Evan, and amazing week and I’m gonna be fascinated to see how things go for you at Kinsta. And we. We. I was so glad you reached out because we were talking internally ourselves about moving our own sites to Kinsta to see what that was, you know, what that was going to be like for us to make that investment because our own traffic is starting to grow quite significantly because of the podcast. And, you know, we were. Kinsta and a couple of others were on our radar as things to go check out, so. So I appreciate you letting me grill you.
Brian Jackson:
Cool. Yeah, yeah, anytime.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Have a good one, buddy. Take care.
Brian Jackson:
Yeah, you too.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Bye. And that wraps up episode number 50. That’s 5o. I feel like we should be having a party right now, so maybe I’ll go drink some beer tonight to celebrate. Maybe you should too. Maybe we should all drink beer and go on the Facebook group as well. Whilst drinking beer. Leejacksondev.com group that would be quite interesting to see what the results are this evening.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Alright, guys, thank you so much. Looking forward to seeing you in episode number 51. That’s next week and until then, keep on innovating.
