Thomas Griffin
Co-Founder and CTO of OptinMonster. Expert software program architect with a deep know-how of constructing products for the mass marketplace.
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If you want to start a software as a carrier (SaaS) commercial enterprise and you’re acquainted with WordPress, you might be thinking if it’s viable to use it on your platform. As a SaaS startup founder, it is also probably now not inexpensive to lease a developer to construct a domain for you on Laravel, as an instance. If you’re already familiar with WordPress, why no longer stick with what you already know? After all, WordPress powers 31% of all websites, and it’s validated itself in phrases of scalability and security. But can WordPress cope with 500 million requests a month?
A lot of people say that WordPress can’t make paintings as a SaaS platform. My employer commenced out, some years in the past, as a WordPress plugin. We kept getting requests from purchasers who desired to use the plugin on different website platforms, like Shopify and Magento. We realized we had to pivot, so we converted our WordPress plugin to a standalone SaaS. Making the trade from plugin to SaaS on WordPress allowed us to retain entire control and scale our organization. Although it became challenging at instances, we discovered a lot along with the manner. Here are 3 recommendations that helped us do it.
Consider Routing Requests
We discovered the routing gadget in WordPress to be unnecessarily complex, so we chose to change out that capability for the Slim framework to address routing requests. To do that, we created a custom plugin that sits in the front of the entirety else that loads to your WordPress site. That plugin then booted the Slim framework, and if it determined a course that becomes described, we would go through and allow what had to be loaded so that we should make sure our requests have been performance-optimized. This prevents all your WordPress plugins from loading on requests when they aren’t essential. We dropped our average non-cache request from 800 milliseconds to one hundred fifty milliseconds as a result. That’s a large overall performance growth, and it’s important if you need it as a way to handle hundreds of thousands and tens of millions of requests. In addition, we leveraged OpenResty to cache various API requests with Redis, significantly improving the performance and scale of our usual software.
Enable A Notification System
Enabling notifications for your SaaS website is a crucial advertising tool to promote engagement. However, notifications also tell customers of app crashes and introduce them to new updates and features. Many SaaS platforms have a few kinds of in-app notification machines. Even as WordPress gives a ton of plugins to send a push notification by email when you submit a brand new post, it doesn’t offer any in-app notifications for SaaS platforms.
We labored around it by constructing our own easy notification gadget for in-app updates. We created a custom publish type that we referred to as “notifications,” after which we started writing notifications. It’s that easy. We used user meta to test the notification nation, whether or not it was study or now not examine, and then checked it through the “person registered” date to make sure they simplest received applicable notifications. Now we’ve got an easy, pulsating dot that notifies customers any time we’ve something essential to tell them.
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Scale Your Support
No count what length your employer is, supplying brief and accurate help to your customers is critical to preserving them gladly and lowering customer churn. We take all of our help requests via Help Scout, which allows for clean ticket sharing, notes, workflow, and live chat. For example, if you have refunds, pre-sales, worm reports, and documentation, all of this gets automatically segmented into exceptional folders so that you can, without difficulty, locate what you’re looking for and decide how to assign the guide price ticket.
Another thing we centered on is having a ton of documentation for our customers. We used Fuse.Js, which plays a fuzzy seek that permits customers to assist us in creating documents. So when a consumer types in a query, Fuse.Js returns files based on what they were attempting to find so one can, with a bit of luck, solve their issue. If the problem isn’t always resolved, at the lowest of the documentation article, there’s a link wherein they could ask us an instantaneous query. Based on what they write and the way we solve, we can then replace the documentation to offer higher, quicker help in the future.
WordPress started as a simple blogging platform; however, nowa even greater, in nowadayscluding powering a software device that reaches tens of millions of customers each day. Whether you’re a startup or searching to turn your WordPress plugin into a complete-fledged SaaS enterprise, you could make use of WordPress in your platform and grow your employer tenfold; all it takes is a piece of experimentation and creativity.
