The Best Image Optimization Plugin for WordPress: A Conversation with EWWW Founder

Shane Bishop:
Download them optimism and upload them again. That seems silly.

Artem Daniliants:
People tend to install like 100 plugins and then they're like, why my site is slow.

Shane Bishop:
Within I think the first week had over 500 downloads.

Artem Daniliants:
Did you move everything to your server and now you're just using API? Or are there some bundled tools?

Shane Bishop:
We'll let you use our API for free in lossless mode only.

Artem Daniliants:
So how are you guys different and why would somebody pick you over something like Cloudflare?

Shane Bishop:
Because we have a $25 plan that's unlimited sites.

Artem Daniliants:
By the way. I'm a paying customer, just so you know. Hi guys, it's time for another episode of our podcast today. I have the pleasure talking to Shane Shane Bishop. By the way, Shane has the best last name ever because it always reminds me of Mass Effect. I don't know if you know the the Bishop, the main character in the game, just like really good vibes and. Yes. So Shane is founder of. You don't know how to pronounce that correctly? Sure.

Artem Daniliants:
We will talk about, you know, naming of the company a bit later. So first of all, thank you very much, Shane, to. Thank you very much for joining the podcast. And thank you for making the time, you know, so early in the morning.

Shane Bishop:
Yes. Yeah. Great to be with you. Looking forward to it.

Artem Daniliants:
Thank you. So first of all, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and, you know, your journey? How did you become founder? Why did you start your company and what do you do? By the way, I'm a paying customer, just so you know.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, I was I was wondering about that because I was looking back through my emails, trying to refresh my memory on what all we were going to talk about, and I was like, wait a second, this is an email from way back with his name on there. Like, wow, I've been using you for a long time. So yeah, it all started.

Shane Bishop:
A little over 11 years ago, I had started trying to build some websites for family, for our church, and I'd been using WordPress for 36, seven years at that point, just for personal websites, just for fun. And I had set up a website for my in-law's green house and wanted to showcase their plants and flowers, of course. And so they've got a lot of pictures. I was doing some speed testing, had been working on that at my day job as well. I worked at a small community college here. I thought, well, doing really good with this site, but the images need optimized. It's like, man, I really don't want to have to download them, optimize them and upload them again, that seemed silly. I was like, well, there's going to be a plug in for that, right? Got to be, well, kind of the the ones that were there. One I couldn't run on on my shared hosting, it was the CW Image Optimizer back in the day, and then Smosh was still using the Yahoo API at that point.

Shane Bishop:
Which was chronically unreliable. They would just have outages randomly. And you can only do like really small images. It's like, so what's the point of using it if you can't use it on your big images that need it the worst? I looked at, you know, I can't fix the Yahoo API, obviously. So I thought, well, what about this other plugin? It uses these free utilities to compress images right on the server. That seems like a good idea, you know, not having to rely on some third party service. All your stuff is done right, right by your own server. But I'm on shared hosting. I was using Bluehost at the time though. Well, what are the odds that I can actually, like, compile and set up some of these open source utilities that I'm more familiar with on this server? And sure enough, they had all the build utilities and everything that you could compile stuff right within your home directory. And so I forked CW Image optimizer called it the Image Optimizer, because my business at the time was exactly that.

Shane Bishop:
We EWWW. So it's an abbreviation and also a little bit of a joke. Like you, your images are gross and bloated. Yeah, I forked it and rewrote it so that it would use those utilities instead directly in my home folder, instead of having to install them as the root user if you know what that is. I don't have on a shared server, obviously. So that was kind of how it all started. And I thought, well, I wonder if anyone else could use this. So I submitted it to the WordPress repository and got it approved. And within I think the first week had over 500 downloads. I thought, oh, I'm on to something here. So it just kind of took off from there. Yeah. And morphed over the years into now we have our own API for some of the premium options that we always can't bundle with plug in. Reason, some proprietary tech in there.

Artem Daniliants:
So yeah, I started like developing websites when I was in high school. And, you know, at that time I was running FreeBSD and, you know, GHB and some MySQL.

Artem Daniliants:
I really didn't get into WordPress development until, you know, until I actually started working for myself. And it seems like in WordPress there is a plugin for everything, like anything you want under the sun nowadays. Nowadays it wasn't the case, you know, maybe like ten years ago. But that's the situation. But one of the biggest pet peeves that I have when it comes to WordPress is that people tend to install like 100 plugins, and then they're like, why? My site is slow, why it's always getting attacked, why it's bloated and load so slowly. So obviously having plugins is wonderful. Having plugin ecosystem is wonderful. Um, but can you tell me a little bit, maybe more about how can you create a good plugin for WordPress? Because as you probably know in the plugin repository, probably maybe 3,040% of plugins is something that somebody developed over a weekend or maybe a month. And then they kind of like, hey, there is, you know, I'm not motivated to keep up with the development, just like kind of forget about it.

Artem Daniliants:
And then they become this dormant, you know, orphan plugins that really don't get any updates and so forth. So as I understand, you still have the plugin, but for as you mentioned, for some premium functionality, you are calling back your own server and you do compression on your server and then you serve it probably locally or maybe from your as well. I don't know how it works. Maybe you could talk a little bit how it works, you know, um, because as you mentioned before, you just bundled some, some tools with your plugin or, you know, you built it in the home directory so you don't have to have root. But now I'm sure it's a lot more sophisticated.

Shane Bishop:
Originally the idea was, yeah, you had to have you had to either compile it yourself, these tools yourself, the plugin would allow you to say, hey, here's where I put them. And then it would go and use them, assuming you did it all right. And that was I quickly discovered that was asking a lot of the average WordPress user.

Shane Bishop:
So, well, there's all these other people obviously, that could use the plugin if I could bundle utility. So that's where we're kind of the next step in the evolution was that started bundling optimizing Jpeg, Tran and GIFs with the plugin and using it still directly on the server. A couple of years later, there were still, you know, like if someone's got exact disabled. That's the function that PHP uses to run command line utilities. While a lot of web hosts are like, no, you can't do that, we don't want you accessing command line stuff on the server, so they disable that, and it's really difficult to secure that kind of stuff. You've got to be really careful about escaping the command, escaping the arguments. There's a whole lot of considerations there. And so a lot of web hosts are just like, no, we don't we don't trust anyone to take care of all that stuff well enough that it's worth leaving that wide open. And so there's all these people still that even though we bundled the utilities with the plugin, couldn't use it.

Shane Bishop:
And so back in the early days and then probably close to when you started using it, it was just let's take these utilities, put them on a server that I own or lease from originally I had one from HP. They did virtual servers way back then and then shortly thereafter. Man, I don't even remember who I started using after that. That was a long time ago. Might have been DigitalOcean, but. But don't think I was using them quite that early.

Artem Daniliants:
Where are you hosting your stuff now?

Shane Bishop:
Now everything's DigitalOcean, but I can't remember if I had started with some of their stuff way back. I was like 2013. So it seems like it might have been. That kind of shifted the compute stuff over to some host that had more high end processors before DigitalOcean had their CPU, maybe.

Artem Daniliants:
Or something, maybe linode or something.

Shane Bishop:
A Ram node was one that had really good. They had like 3.4GHz servers that were just kicking, but vulture at the time had pretty high performance servers. There was one oh, they got bought out.

Shane Bishop:
Speedy KVM was kind of they were real big, but they had servers in Texas and a couple other locations and they all had they were almost kind of like. Older gen processors. Some of them, or I guess less. They were less cause I think was was the issue. And a lot of the, the big providers were like, no, we want lots of cause we don't care about the gigahertz. But for our use case that's what we need. So performance has always been a big thing. Back to your question about how do you write a plugin that's not a pile of steaming poo? You got to be concerned about performance. And for me, I suppose that's probably been, you know, the impetus from from the very beginning. But that's an important thing. When someone's got 50 plugins, they don't want it slowing down their site. I've got 45 on our main site and it runs fine. Yeah, you can have 50 or 60 plugins without it slowing down your site too much, especially on the front end, because most, you know, like our plugin should never hardly run on the front.

Shane Bishop:
Well, unless of course you're using the CDN. Then it does some front end processing. But you know, all the optimization stuff happens on the back end.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, you are saying that the next iteration was that you bundled everything, put it on your own server basically, and then probably created like an API or something that the plugin uses.

Shane Bishop:
So yeah, we created an API and it was a similar, I think, to the style of Smosh, although I can't remember exactly how their API worked, but where your site uploads the image to our server, our server does the work and sends it back and then. Fast forward a couple of years, 2015. We were still doing all lossless, but we had some people saying, hey, there's tools like Tiny Ping and Jpeg mini and some of these cool new lossy options that really do a pretty good job of managing the quality and and compression trade off without making your images look terrible. And so that started looking into some of those and thought, well, hey, we've got a few thousand, maybe not a few thousand, probably a few hundred at least users at that point, maybe a thousand.

Shane Bishop:
And we could kind of pool the costs of that, because for one person it was like 100 bucks a month to use Jpeg mini, like, yeah, okay. If you've got a really big site, maybe. But I mean, if you run a small blog, there's no way you can afford that, of course. And Tiny Tiny Pig was decently expensive. They at least did per image pricing, but it still was on the higher end. And so now all if I spin up a Jpeg mini server and then kind of proxy the stuff through our system, we can make that work. And so we did. So that was the first option that we had to run in there. And then we added Ping Quant, which is one of the tools that Tiny Ping uses. It's an open source tool developed by Cornell Luzinski. I think he works for Cloudflare now. So that was. Kind of the evolution of the API. It's still pretty similar. We do offer tiny ping and tiny Jpeg compression through Tiny Final as well.

Shane Bishop:
We got a sweet deal with them where we've been able to lower the costs, kind of in the same vein where we're doing over a million images a month, and so we can get lower pricing for everyone that way.

Artem Daniliants:
That's awesome. That's awesome. But is it is it the last evolution of your product? Or you know, what happened? Like, did you move everything to your server and now you're just using API? Or are there some bundled tools still that come with the plugin?

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. So there's still the bundled tools. So everyone that's almost everyone that's in free mode is using the bundle tools. We did open it up a couple of years ago. So if you're on what we call an exec deprived server, we'll let you use our API for free in lossless mode only. So basically doing the same thing as what the bundle tools will do. But you don't get any of the premium goodies, but you can still get something of at least as much as what the free plugin would do.

Shane Bishop:
And that includes WebP compression, which is lossy. So that's you can get a lot of savings that way. Awesome. And then we added. In 2017, a service called E0, CN, and so that instead of compressed all the images that live on your server, it copies your images to our servers as they're requested by the user, does its magic on them, and then delivers it to the user. And then of course, it caches that. So does that compress it every single time. Then the last kind of iteration is where we went beyond image optimization with our Swiss performance plug in. I'd use WP rocket and I'd optimize a few other plugins, but it was kind of a mish mash and there was extra stuff that I wasn't using and thought, what if we could put all this into one plugin? And so that's what this performance is. It's everything that I use outside of image optimization. Some of the tools that I had already created as well, because I was like, well, none of these are doing exactly what I want, and so I'll build it.

Shane Bishop:
And so had a few of them already built and thought, well, take those and then add the others that. That don't have built in. We released that, I think, in 2019.

Artem Daniliants:
Is it a separate product or is it part of the.

Shane Bishop:
It's a separate plugin, but if you get our our standard unlimited bundle, it includes everything. It includes the original compress API where you can compress your local images and save storage. Includes the easiest CDN, which makes it super dead simple for stuff like WebP conversion and AVX, and that it also includes Swiss.

Artem Daniliants:
Wow. That's cool. So you did mention something that I wanted to talk about is Cloudflare. Right. Because I think I don't know if they're if they're your competitor, but I think they're trying to create this kind of like one stop shop for everything pretty much under the sun every day. It feels like they're releasing a new product. They're like, oh, we have this firewall. Oh, we have this, you know, we have this DDoS attack mitigation.

Artem Daniliants:
Oh, we have this, you know, pages. Now you have Cloudflare pages you can push with git to Cloudflare and whatnot. So it seems like they're really, really good at releasing new products. I don't know how good is there is their product offering, but I've been using Cloudflare for quite some time and to be honest, I like it quite a lot. It's very it's very easy to set up since you are just changing DNS, and after that you can make all the changes in Cloudflare itself. And they do image optimization. So my question is, and they support WordPress, I think they have a plugin as well. But I think it's mainly for just resetting cache and all that good stuff. I don't think they do anything. Any processing on your machine, I think it's still done, you know, by Cloudflare, even if you use a plugin for WordPress. But like, how are you guys different and why would somebody pick you over something like Cloudflare that does quite a lot already, like for free out of the box.

Shane Bishop:
And like you have been using Cloudflare for a very long time, actually set up one of the first 500 sites on Cloudflare. Have the t shirt to prove it.

Artem Daniliants:
Oh wow, that's awesome.

Shane Bishop:
They sent out a limited edition 500 t shirts to the first 500 sites, so it's kind of cool. But back then it was it was all for the security stuff, you know, because proxies your site, protects you from bots and all that. And I had been using Project Honeypot to kind of spam trap bots that were visiting my sites even before then. And then they said, hey, we're launching this Cloudflare thing. Try it out. Okay. So I've been using Cloudflare ever since on at least some sites. The ever since. I can't remember how long that's been 2011 maybe? No. Now maybe. Yeah. So and then they do image optimization. And there's is similar to Ezio to the CDN side of what we do. And so. Originally it was like, well, we're doing two different things.

Shane Bishop:
We're compressing the images on your server, making sure you're not using too much storage space. And they're, you know, expediting delivery, making sure it's as close as possible to your visitors. Great. Grand. We're kind of working together that way now. It is a little bit more of a competitive deal. But I guess one of the main things that's different is the autoscaling that we have that's built into our lazy loader that kind of integrates more tightly with WordPress because they do some kind of automatic, you know, based on, on device, your connection speed, device size. They do some of that. It's a little pricey. I think their lowest plan is still 20 bucks a month per site. And so that also is one of the differentiators that. You're not just paying for image optimization, then you've got to pay for the advanced security. You got to pay for the whole Cloudflare package if you want their image optimization. And if you're doing that and using their image optimization and you love it, great.

Shane Bishop:
You don't need our stuff. That's awesome because they're providing a pretty good service. But for someone who's not using Cloudflare Pro, our solution is a lot more affordable. How much is especially. I was just going to say, especially because we have a $25 plan that's unlimited sites. So that's a lot, lot difference in price. Our lowest plan for a single site is seven bucks.

Artem Daniliants:
Oh wow. That's really affordable. And I think you have a free version as well. Right. As you mentioned.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. So yeah, there's the free, free version of the plug in that, you know, like I said, it does lossless plus WebP. So you can get you can save a little bit of on your your images but also get the big wins with begins with WebP and then Lazy Load is included for free. And you can scale down your images. And the auto scaling engine is included in the free version, although it's not quite as good, but it'll do like any of your images that are already responsive.

Shane Bishop:
It'll make sure that just in case you're, you know, if you're using the stock WordPress responsive stuff, sometimes it's not quite perfect. Depending on how well your theme developer set things up, which sometimes not that good. And so it goes. And it says, yeah, this is exactly the size we need. And so it picks the exact right one from the sources list. But otherwise if you've got non-responsive images, that's where E0 comes in. Because then it can say, hey, we need this size. It doesn't exist to us. And easy I will go do that.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. It reminds me of what is it image X or something. I think there is another like big player right.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah I think.

Artem Daniliants:
That image X or something. Yeah yeah.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah yeah. It's um, optimally started a year or two after we got going and they're doing a similar thing with I believe they do auto scaling, but it's the same sort of image optimization via CDN. In short, pixel launched their version of that a couple of years ago.

Shane Bishop:
I think there's a few different options and it's very similar. What it is actually built on originally was jetpacks photon. I'm Image Accelerator, so that's kind of where it came from. And then added some of the front end stuff with the lazy loader. That makes it even more accurate with the scaling, because there's been a lot of issues with photon over the years, and quite honestly, it just doesn't get the attention that it needs to improve those things. So and sometimes it just with all the different ways you can do things and themes and, and CSS and everything, it's really tough to get that right. So we keep, keep pushing the, the edge and and keep advancing that.

Artem Daniliants:
That sounds great. So you know, you started this company quite a while ago. So where are you now in terms of, you know, staff and size? Of course. You know, your front page already says that you have 1 million plus WordPress installs, which I think is quite an achievement. So, you know, kudos to you guys for making it like really big when it comes to WordPress ecosystem.

Artem Daniliants:
And you have optimized over 7 billion images. So, you know, in terms of numbers, it's it's pretty impressive. But what about your company? Are you still kind of like lean and mean?

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, we're still pretty lean and mean. So maybe three years ago I hired Adam to help with customer support. And he he loves doing support. That's just that's his jam. Wow. So it's really that's taking a load off of me. So I'm helping him periodically with some of the more advanced cases still. But he's taken out a lot of the day to day support issues, and that frees me up for server management and development and marketing, which I'm not very good at marketing, but I try.

Artem Daniliants:
No, I like your website. I think when it comes to just like marketing for WordPress plugins, I mean, you know, if you're big enough, then at some point you will just rank really well. When people search for like image optimization, there is like internal SEO for the WordPress plugin world.

Artem Daniliants:
I'm sure some stuff.

Shane Bishop:
That you do, and that's probably been something where we've had a little bit of a leg up since we, you know, started so early on back in in 2012, even when Smosh got taken over by WP dev. We already had, I think 100,000 sites using our plugin and theirs was in decay. They of course brought it back and made it significantly better, way more reliable. But yeah, by that time we already had gained a significant user base and just kept on growing and.

Artem Daniliants:
So it's you and none of them.

Shane Bishop:
Out there now.

Artem Daniliants:
So it's kind of.

Shane Bishop:
Crazy to see how many people are using, you know, all these different solutions. So it's pretty cool.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, I guess I guess in a way. But, you know, it leads to, for example, our clients asking us like, hey, what is the best XYZ plugin for WordPress? And I'm like, well, there is, there is no best plugin for it. There is like three for ten options.

Artem Daniliants:
And it depends on your needs and your you know how sensitive you are to like paid plugins and all of that good stuff. But did I understand correctly that it's you and Adam currently? Just two of you?

Shane Bishop:
Just the two of us? Yeah, to us.

Artem Daniliants:
That's pretty awesome.

Shane Bishop:
That's that's the reaction we get a lot.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. I'm just thinking that that obviously support is really, really hard to automate. And especially if you want to really serve your customers, you have to provide really good support. So it kind of makes sense that your first hire, so to speak, is customer support. But like if you're thinking beyond, you know, the numbers that you have been able to achieve, I mean, you must at some point hire some additional engineers. And like, what are your aims like you have achieved now? Some very good success. But I'm sure you're not stopping here. Like, what is the big picture? What is the dream so to speak.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. So probably the next might be, you know, a developer I'm starting.

Shane Bishop:
To work with Adam a little bit because he's interested in some of that. So even though he really loves the sport side, he'd like to help out with development. So he'll be starting to take on a little bit of that. But yeah, there's a different possibility that will be needing development help. I've got a to do list of mile long at this point, so it certainly wouldn't hurt. But it's yeah, it's getting getting the revenue to a point where it makes sense to, to bring on another at least half time, maybe full time person and having, you know, having enough work to keep them busy for perpetually, you know, because I don't want to be like, well, we'll hire you for six months and then we get caught up and sorry, I don't got anything else for you to do, which probably is not likely. It wouldn't take six months. It'd be it'd be a.

Artem Daniliants:
While, a couple of years for sure.

Shane Bishop:
Right. So yeah. And maybe, you know, somewhere in the marketing thing, although I don't know, some of that stuff is, you know, I, I like having my own spin on things, my own silly, dry sense of humor sprinkled throughout our health stuff and our blog posts and, and whatnot.

Shane Bishop:
So it's it's a little hard to give up some of that, but I got to have the time to do it or I got to have someone else do it. So that's those are probably the next areas that I'll be looking. Looking, looking into. But I'm in a rush. We get. You know, you see some of the other companies and that are doing all these big, fancy things and you go, and maybe we should be doing that. It's like, well, we've got a million users. We must be doing something right. So yeah, we really we focus on support. We make sure that's not neglected, make sure we're keeping keep it up on that and and meeting our users needs. So even though I have a to do list a mile along, sometimes there's things that come up. Healing support, and we've seen it a couple of times and then like, yeah, maybe we could do something with that real quick. And so we spend half a day or something getting it done.

Shane Bishop:
And if you happen.

Artem Daniliants:
So in terms of like 1 million WordPress installs, of course, I think maybe not most of it, but like a substantial chunk is people just using your like free version of the plugin. Right. It's it's not the premium offering that you have. So like what's the ratio there. Like is it, you know, 100,000 paid customers or is it very secret.

Shane Bishop:
It's very small. Oh really? Yeah, it's maybe 1% of that. We've got, you know, about 40,000. User accounts, I think at this point, but I would say probably only. 5 to 10,000 of those user counts are actually active users. Was there a little bit easier way to see. So it's hard. Hard to say. I used to look at that and go, oh man, it makes it seem like we've only got like 5000 sites using our stuff. But now that we have Ezio and we have a little more visibility there and see, that's actually probably more and maybe it is closer to 100,000.

Shane Bishop:
It's just people using it on multiple sites. But we have 25 to 30,000 sites using the right now. That's just the and people using the API. It could very well be 100,000. I haven't ever really run numbers or tried to track. How many different sites are using the API. We could that would be maybe an interesting thing to figure out, because when you're sending images remotely, it automatically includes your URL in the user agent. So it's possible that we can, you know, figure that out somehow. Yeah, that's something I've done yet.

Artem Daniliants:
So so basically you have a huge like user base. And I think you maybe you don't push hard enough to convert those customers into paying customers. Like the like you have very, very substantial like amount of installs, but the amount of paying customers is not so big. So I guess you're not very aggressive when it comes to, you know, getting people to buy your premium offer.

Shane Bishop:
I try to keep it a little more organic. We've things still never run a paid ad, except for 50 bucks I spent on Facebook ads once but didn't do anything or.

Shane Bishop:
Well why not? I'll give it a try. It's just 50 bucks. And. Yeah, it was. It was over pretty quick and like, well, okay, that was fun. But yeah, try to do it a lot more organically. We do have an affiliate program and so that's that's been helpful for us. And we did a push with Appsumo a couple of years ago to do a lifetime option that that really got us some different users, got us a lot more agency users, and also allowed us to get some additional revenue and spend some money actually on our website and stuff, because it had gotten a little long in the tooth. It was a theme from around 2015, and I had tweaked things here and there, but it was definitely not the prettiest. That's some of the the bigger things, but. But yeah, a lot of this has been, you know, word of mouth, people posting reviews.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. I just think that, you know, there is opportunity maybe to expand to other CMS systems now to capture more, more, you know, users.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. And there probably would be. We've had requests for Shopify and we probably had requests for a few others. I know we've had requests for a few others, but I'm trying to think if we've had requests for once or it actually makes sense, we've had people asking like, can I use this on Wix? Does it make sense? No, no it doesn't. Wix does their own thing with image optimization. I think Squarespace, I believe, is the same way. So a few of those that are more proprietary, they do their own, you know, performance stuff on the site. And so it's not really anything we can or should do with those. But Shopify is one that definitely interested in. But again, it's one of those things that I can't spread myself too thin, so got to have time to keep it up, to maintain it and do a good job with it. And so that's that's something where we're going to need another developer, probably to to be able to take on Shopify and do some of the expansion stuff like that.

Artem Daniliants:
I'm just thinking that I was thinking maybe more, you know, in terms of something like Drupal, maybe, you know, because Drupal is very popular as well. It's open source. It's very close to WordPress in a sense, because you run it on your own server. You don't you don't buy it as a service like Shopify. It's not a SaaS offering. Drupal has a very good plugin ecosystem and so forth.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, yeah. That would that would certainly be an option. I don't know if if Joomla would be popular enough. I almost feel like we've seen some requests for that though. But yeah, I've used those in the past. Junos I don't know, it's been. Lenny almost 20 years since I've used it. So we use it for an internet site way back at the first college I worked at. So it's it's been a long day and back then it was. Or was it called? It was something else, not Joomla.

Artem Daniliants:
I thought, oh yeah, I remember they changed their name.

Artem Daniliants:
Actually, you are absolutely correct.

Shane Bishop:
Mambo.

Artem Daniliants:
I think Mambo sides or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shane Bishop:
And yeah. So it Drupal definitely. You know, I feel like that's more developer centric. Yes, it was when I was using it, but I could definitely see, you know, one of the things I think that sets our plugin apart from a lot of the others is the flexibility, the customizability. We've got hooks for everything. We've got overrides and constants for everything. And then besides that, we've already got so many options within the plugin that you can use to customize things to any given site. So. So I think something that would probably cater to the Drupal audience pretty well.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, I think so. I think so, it's less user friendly if I'm completely honest. At least that's how I feel. It's not as easy to use, but it's way more customisable and it just feels it's a little bit more stable. And it's very opinionated when it comes to development, I think it kind of has its own way to do things, and if you're okay with that, it seems like a very good solution.

Artem Daniliants:
So yeah, I think that could be interesting. But as a person who, you know, has the Cloudflare 500 t shirt, by the way, big props. And as a person who probably has seen every possible variation of a good or a bad WordPress website, what do you think people who are building WordPress websites and they don't have to be technical people. I mean, you know, just people who are buying WordPress websites or, you know, getting some subcontractor to do the website for them, like what do you need to keep in mind? Like what is a good WordPress website that is pleasure to use that is easy to maintain loads fast? Of course your plugin installed, but you know, like what is the like in your opinion? Like the best practices when it comes to WordPress? Because I've seen some horrendous WordPress websites where nothing works. It's very slow and, you know, just it's not a good experience. So what is your take on that?

Shane Bishop:
Well, I think one of the things is being careful.

Shane Bishop:
You mentioned, you know, people with 100, 100 plugins and so being careful of what plugins you actually put on your site, because even one all it takes is one to, to really slow things down. I had one way back, I been using jetpack on a site and. Use the widget visibility back when widgets were still a big thing. And maybe for some people they still are. I probably use them on some sites. Where it's just they're still there and haven't done anything with them. But it was widget visibility, which was kind of slick for choosing where different widgets would show up on which pages, and it was really slick, but I thought, man, don't use anything else jetpack. So I could just get rid of that and go get a widget visibility plugin. So I found one and I was using it. After a while I thought, man, things are just getting slower and slower when I try to save a post or do stuff on here. Just weird. While I found out that that Widget Visibility plugin was querying the entire list of users doing that every time I would save a page because it was had the option that you could show it on different user.

Shane Bishop:
For author pages. Maybe is something weird like that. I can't remember exactly, but that was the idea and was like, oh, that's way, way too much time. It was taking like 20 30s. Wow. Just for that, that query as well. And you know, when we had 10,000 user accounts on our site, that's a little slow. Initially I just hacked around and disabled that query. I'm not using that. I don't even know exactly what you would use it for. Why would you show different widgets to different people? Yeah, eventually. Then I went and got a different plugin that didn't even do that. And so now I don't use the plugin at all.

Artem Daniliants:
So plugins being really aware of your plugins.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. And so things.

Artem Daniliants:
Like how do you know which ones are good. How do you know which ones are good.

Shane Bishop:
I actually just wrote an article on that a couple of days ago.

Artem Daniliants:
Oh, okay.

Shane Bishop:
So check out our check on our blog for sure.

Shane Bishop:
Io look for the blog. Most recent articles about plugins called You must have plugins.

Artem Daniliants:
Yes, I actually checked it out. Yeah. I am aware of an excellent example of time-efficient image loading. I came across it in an article about Home Office Essentials on the furnifusion website. Thanks to time-efficient image loading, the webpage maintains a smooth and unobtrusive appearance.

Shane Bishop:
But so some of the things that I recommend you look at is of course look at how many installs it has. That's not the end all be all, because you might find a plugin that's got 5000 active sites that works really, really well. It might be new, or maybe it's just a niche thing that, you know, there's only 5000 people that can actually use this thing. Um, and then look at the reviews and look at how recently it's been updated. One of the things that is, I think really a good indicator is if an author is updating the tested values, so are they checking their plugin with the latest version of WordPress? Because plugin authors don't have to release a brand new version to update that value, they can just update that value and then that tells you, hey, they've done the testing and they then that reflects also in the last updated time on the plugin.

Shane Bishop:
And so that's a good way to if you see one that hasn't been updated in three years. Yeah. Stay away from that. A lot of times that won't even show up anymore in the repository unless you search for by name. But that that's definitely a good indicator. So last updated test set up to reviews and not just, you know, because if a plugins get some bad reviews see how the developer handled it. Just sometimes honestly batteries they're just people being jerks and don't we don't get a lot of value out of that most of the time, because someone that's just mad, it takes someone that's pretty upset to leave a bad review, and they're usually not in the right frame of mind. Unfortunately, it'd be nice if they would cool down a day and then leave a constructive review, right? But that's not usually how it works.

Artem Daniliants:
People don't operate like that saying they just don't know.

Shane Bishop:
No. So we mean because we get definitely constructive feedback from our users, but it's usually not in the the one star review section.

Artem Daniliants:
I usually also go to see the recent reviews. I think it kind of reflects better the situation.

Shane Bishop:
Maybe with the plugin. Yeah. So not just to look at what's their rating, but actually look at like like you said, the recent reviews go and read what and see. You know, I was looking at a plugin that I've been using for anti spam for ages and ages, and they had 200 some reviews like well yeah, they're still doing okay I guess. And then I looked at the reviews and when the company that took over expanded it. And you'll probably if you've seen that plugin you know what I'm talking about. A lot of people are mad that are like, hey, we don't want this garbage. Well, you can still use it for spam. I still do, but a lot of people were upset about that. And since then there's been like four reviews in like two years, which is kind of weird. There's are people just not that happy with it enough to leave a review.

Shane Bishop:
I don't understand why you only have that few of reviews in the last two years, when they had 200 before that. That's something that kind of a trend would be a little worrisome to me. So I say I still am using that plugin, but may not be for long. After I looked through that, I was like, oh, okay.

Artem Daniliants:
So plugins definitely. What about hosting? Should you go out and buy the cheapest hosting you can get? Oh goodness.

Shane Bishop:
No sir. Don't. And to be fair, you know, if you're doing just a hobby project, sure, get cheap hosting. Who cares? You're just having fun. But if this is a site that you want to make money with and it matters to you, you know you want to support your family or whatever it may be. Don't don't skimp on the hosting. You don't necessarily have to go with the top of the line hosting, but don't don't go with something that's going to be two bucks or even five bucks a month.

Shane Bishop:
It's just, how.

Artem Daniliants:
Much should you spend? Like, what's the adequate amount?

Shane Bishop:
It's hard to say. Honestly, probably 1520 bucks minimum a month below that. You're getting you're getting into pretty sketchy shared hosting, I know. Yeah, like Bluehost is probably still below that. And I haven't used their servers for years and years because it would get overloaded. And fortunately they're usually at least back eight years ago. Last time I used them, they were good about moving you to a new server. If it got too crowded and you complained about it. They may not be anymore. And they're also owned by one of the biggest conglomerates and I don't trust them, so that's not who I would recommend. Of course we use WP engine. That's who I recommend. It might be a little expensive for some people, especially just starting out. So there's no no harm in going to something a little cheaper if it's the right fit. Cloud ways is a decent option because they're they're cheaper and you get your own server.

Shane Bishop:
You know, it's a small server. It's a, you know, a cheap server, but you're not you're not usually competing with resources because whether, well, if you're using DigitalOcean droplets, there's different options, but that's a decent option. What about I don't have a lot of good options under that threshold. There's ones.

Artem Daniliants:
You have? Have you heard about it? Kinston.

Shane Bishop:
Kinston. Kinston is pretty good. Kinston Flywheel are both pretty good. I think it's been a while since I looked at the prices I was trying to remember. Like which which ones are below that? I know, yeah, it does have cheaper options than engine and they've I've still, I think even got a test site on their system and their support is great. They were a little bit of a thorn in my side for a couple of years, but I think we're back to being friends now. Why?

Artem Daniliants:
What happened?

Shane Bishop:
One of the evolutions of the plug in was that hosts like WP engine Kinser Flywheel would not allow our plug in period, even though they had already blocked the exact function.

Shane Bishop:
So you couldn't run it without using our API. You couldn't use local server resources to image optimize. They're like, no, you still can't use the plug.

Artem Daniliants:
That's why. That's weird.

Shane Bishop:
So. Well, okay, what if we created a plugin that was a clone of the main plugin that just used the cloud service, the API service? And didn't even have the option, didn't have the binaries or nothing. So it's safer. And I think that was one of the main things. They wanted security as well in the other aspects, and they didn't want the binaries even sitting on the server for someone to misuse. That's what we did. So we created this separate plug in for I don't remember how many years. And then WP engine did something dumb. I can't even remember what it was. But they they screwed something up with our plug in. And there must use plug in. And it wreaked havoc and I thought I'm going to use this as leverage. So I said hey guys, how about getting us off the banned list? And so we went through that process and we made a lot of improvements on the security side was, you know, code formatting, code quality to get it up to their standards and, and make sure that we batten down the hatches.

Shane Bishop:
There's no possibility of security leaks and really locks it down. Good. And they're like, okay, let's go. So that was when we finally started to see that shift where we could start using our plugin, all the others well. So I thought, well, contact Kenta and see what they think, because be pinned as one of the biggest players and they unbanned us and like, oh, that sounds like a great idea. You know, it makes sense because you're not allowing the exact function because even in our plugin, if executed disabled or even if it's on one of those hosts, we're like, no, you can't use it, you got to use the API. It took two years for that process to complete. Wow. That was the. Yeah, they had it done in a few months. And then there was some holdup with updating their must use plug in that, just like, really, we're waiting this long and if you asked for it, they would update it. So that's what we had to keep telling people.

Shane Bishop:
They're like, hey, Ken says your plugin is band. Yeah. Just go tell them to unban it on your site.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay, well, at least there was a loophole of some sort. So that was good.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. They were they were willing to work around and they were trying to make sure their, their support engineers knew about it. But yeah, it was just two years. It was a. The folly got the back in shape. To be fair, I think they were working on some pretty big stuff. And so once that finally got done, then that kind of I don't know what their development team looks like. I don't know how big that is, but. Imagine there are some bottlenecks and. Not not enough people to get that push forward.

Artem Daniliants:
So yeah, it's all about priorities for sure. So when when it comes to plug ins completely understand same you know have we are on the same page when it comes to hosting. I always say that, you know, you should probably pay about like 50 bucks for hosting minimum if your business depends on the website staying up.

Artem Daniliants:
And just, you know, being available and so forth. Because at that price range, you usually get some good stuff, you get some really good backups, you get maybe a staging server as well, so that you can do some testing. You know, support usually becomes a little bit more responsive at that price range. So you can actually get somebody, you know, on the phone, maybe even and so forth. So yeah, for sure. Don't go with the cheapest hosting and you know, probably get hosting that is closest to your end users. Of course, there are CDNs and other cool things you can use, but if you are just like if you just want to run your website, you know you don't really want to wonder too much about CDN. Don't want to set it up at all. You know, get hosting from the place where you know most of your users are.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, definitely. So if you're in Europe or Asia, somewhere in North America where a lot of, you know, web hosts have their locations.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, definitely look at a local option. Some of the big ones, of course, have global locations. And so that works out well. But yeah, location is definitely important if you're wanting to make sure that's fast because I've seen, you know, even well not that close but you know thinking something. Well just North America to Europe, they have great transit lines and whatever. But it still takes time. And that triples at least triples the time to first bite and then everything else is slower. So yeah, definitely something to consider is make sure make sure your web host has locations where your visitors are located.

Artem Daniliants:
And maybe the last one there is really big part of this whole puzzle is a theme. So there is so many ways to, you know, get a theme on WordPress. You could go out to Envato or Themeforest and you can buy a theme for like, I don't know, what is it like 40 bucks, 50 bucks, something like that. You could actually have some WordPress shop, create a theme for you and and it could be absolutely from scratch.

Artem Daniliants:
Or you could do something yourself. You could get a free theme or maybe even use some stock themes, even though I don't think anybody uses them. But that could be wrong. It feels like they come bundled in with WordPress, but I've never seen one in the wild. I never seen somebody actually use it. But we'll surprise you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure there are people who do that. But the biggest problem that I that I've seen is that clients, usually when they like buy WordPress, they usually buy WordPress website because or they commissioned somebody to do it for them because they've heard that WordPress is most popular, easy to use, and maybe they have some previous experience with it. But nowadays there are just so many ways to do things in WordPress. So you could have an Elementor website, right? Like you install elements and then everything becomes drag and drop and it's, you know, it's not a very good solution for a large website, that's for sure. Like, I think that's an understatement.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Then you could also, you know, have something like Genesis theme and then it could create a child theme based on it like, but the end user like the customer who is, you know, paying the bills, he has no way of verifying that the theme was created properly. It adheres to WordPress standards and so forth. So how can you navigate in this, you know, weird environment where everybody says the same thing like, hey, you know, your website will be so easy to use. Everything is drag and drop. It's easy, it's super fast. But then when you look at the code underneath, it's just garbage.

Shane Bishop:
That's a tough one. We're using a custom built theme on Uio. And like I said, I'll shock you. I have a site that uses a stock default 2017 theme for that first one that I built for my in-laws. I don't remember what I built it on originally. Yeah, but it's not using the same theme anymore. Now it's actually using I believe 2017 is the theme it's using, and they haven't been doing as much with it in recent years.

Shane Bishop:
So I just left it on that and it looks pretty, so it's fine. But yeah. It is definitely. And you look at the numbers, there's just a lot of sites using the stock default themes. But that's not necessarily there's quite. Yeah, it's it's shocking when you look at the active installs how many people are actually using those. It's like wow. And to be fair, some of the more recent ones with full site editing and stuff, you know, allow a ton of flexibility. But honestly, for someone getting started, I don't know if full site editing is necessarily the best option. I'm not even using that. So it seems like there's a lot to learn when you when you go that route, whereas a theme that's, you know, can use blocks, but yet still gives you a framework and kind of a template to work within, I think helps for for a beginning user, helps them navigate things a lot, a lot easier. Is it going to be performant? I think that's something that honestly, you just have to test, because I haven't seen any particular themes that I'm like, oh yeah, these are the most awesome code ever.

Shane Bishop:
I honestly don't look at theme code very often, even performance wise. It's kind of hit and miss. Sometimes you have a theme that's really popular and it's just dog slow, and then sometimes you've got and then you've got ones that are great and you know, they work pretty well. Elementary and divvy probably aren't the greatest. There are some of the most popular, but they're not speedy. And even working with Elementor, they've they've been resistant to some of the changes that could make it. What are our services and plugins better? Just because it's more work for them. And they're like, no, we built it this way, we like it better and we're not going to change it. It's like, okay, fair enough. So there's been things that we've done to work, work kind of within that constraint to to make things work better. But it's still still limits our ability a little bit. Yeah. I've got a friend here locally that believe they're using Genesis themes, and they've been big fans of that.

Shane Bishop:
And from what I've seen, their sites run decently well. She's of course our plug in on everything.

Artem Daniliants:
Of course.

Shane Bishop:
But she didn't used to. But she does now. And we yeah, we co-host a local meetup here in Glendale and yeah, it's it's a lot of fun chatting. And so I've seen a few of her sites that use Genesis and we, you know, looked at different things and generally they run pretty fast. So that's really kind of the only pre-built ones. Well, I shouldn't say that on on one of my demo sites that I've done, I use ocean WP, which I think works with Elementor and it's decently fast. But again, you got to be careful. Yeah of course if you if. Because those page builders sure they're easy, but they also let you do stupid things too. So just be careful that just because it's pretty doesn't mean it's smart or clever or useful for your users. Sliders.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. We didn't talk about where you based.

Artem Daniliants:
Maybe you could talk about that a little bit and maybe like did you incorporate like right away when your plugin started to get traction, like how did you transition from the, you know, working for somebody to being basically a founder of a cool startup?

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. So, I mean, Glendive, Montana in the United States. And so it's middle of nowhere and pretty, pretty small. Not the smallest. There's much smaller towns around here, but smaller town than a lot of people are used to. Yeah. So and Adam's in Saint Louis, so it's it's all remote.

Artem Daniliants:
So how did you make the.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. That transition.

Artem Daniliants:
Transition. Yeah.

Shane Bishop:
I don't remember exactly what it was, but pretty pretty early on I think I had initially just kind of tracked because I was doing kind of web development stuff for my in-laws and for our church and a couple people in town here. And so I was just keeping track of those transactions. And I thought, you know, I probably should have a separate bank account for that.

Shane Bishop:
And so I set that up pretty, pretty early on. I don't know that it was necessarily before I started the plug in, but then of course, the plugin was free for. Year and a half before I started monetizing anything and had any paid service. But for sure, by that point I was like, yeah, I got to have separate bank account, got to get set up with the state. And you know, it wasn't necessarily. Yeah, not incorporated necessarily. So in the US we can do like an LLC for a, you know, if you're a solo developer or whatever and to set up a business entity. And so that's what I've done on that end of things. And so yeah, that was pretty early on. So like if I'm going to start bringing in any amount of money, I want to make sure this is set up right and that people can see that, hey, this is a legitimate business. It's been registered properly. And, you know, this is this is legit.

Shane Bishop:
So awesome. I think that's important. One of the other things. Just kind of a side tangent, but one of the things that I think is, is helpful and important if you're trying to appeal to a bigger audience, is using your own domain for email first emails great. And it's free or whatever you're using for email. But when you are emailing clients and customers from that, it doesn't look very professional. So try to use your own domain for email. I think that I think that goes a long way in establishing user trust.

Artem Daniliants:
For sure. For sure. And now just a few questions before we wrap up. You mentioned that you do a little bit of marketing yourself. So the blog and so forth. So, you know, like how did you grow your business? I mean, somebody who works alone, basically you only hired Adam just recently like more or less recently. So you've been doing developing support, marketing. Maintain your website and you know everything else administration and so. So on.

Artem Daniliants:
So how did you manage to grow your business like what really worked for you? Did you attend like WordPress events or did you talk to agencies locally, like how did you just grow or was it just organically? People thought like, hey, this is awesome plugin and pretty much like through the Grapevine they've, you know, got more users for you.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, it's it's been almost all organic, so I can't really take a lot of the credit for it because it's, it's just been. It's just been people spreading the news and letting others know about our plug in. It's hard to say. Or even pinpointed on any one thing. I know one of the bigger sites that we've worked and some of it's been, you know, getting connected with different companies. And Ken can't necessarily take credit for that because I don't go out looking for for people to, to promote our products necessarily. A lot of them come to me and, and it's been it might sound weird to say, but it's been kind of a god thing that he just has directed things.

Shane Bishop:
And I go, oh, I could never imagine like one examples with tiny ping. I had been struggling a little bit with the Jpeg mini set up, and they contacted me when I was kind of thinking about it. I was like, man, it's kind of expensive. I don't think we could do that. And they contacted me and were like, hey, we wonder if you would be interested in working together? And I was like, okay, I guess so. And it's it's been a great, great deal for our users. Yeah. So it's been pretty cool to see.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, so pretty much organic, I would assume. And nowadays, probably most of the people they find you through the plugin, you know, system in WordPress. Right? That's how they search for you most likely. Like maybe there are a few keywords that you rank really highly for and people find you that way.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, there's probably some search stuff. And of course, you know, image optimization performance is a part of search engine optimization.

Shane Bishop:
It's not the most important part. Yeah. So don't get caught up in that whole in order don't. Don't do that to the exclusion of doing your job and doing other things, because writing good content and making a useful tool is is way more important than, than a lot of other things. So yeah, content always trumps everything else. Performances is a very small portion of the search engine rankings. It's important, but it's still just a portion. It's not the whole picture.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. The way that I think about performance is that you don't optimize performance for search engine. You optimize performance for user experience because the user experience is much better. When site is snappy, you can, you know, browse more products, you can see more pages. You are just generally you feel happier. If I could say that and user experience, good user experience influences SEO in most cases. So I think they kind of go hand in hand.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah, and I think that kind of ties into our marketing efforts or lack thereof with the user experience.

Shane Bishop:
People have good experience with us because of our support and our focus on support, and that trickles down to more users and more users and more users. Whereas if we just got all the technical bits right and we spent money on advertising not and still going to be awesome if we don't provide good support, if we don't back it up. Yeah, you get you got to make it good for your users. And that's ultimately what Google and other search engines they're looking at. Are you making your site a good experience for your users? They're tried even though there's ways to game the system, they're trying not to allow that to to dominate the search rankings. They're trying to make it focused on. Is it a good experience for your users because they can deliver a good experience for their search users as well? And if they send you to a crappy site, then like Google sucks.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And they don't.

Shane Bishop:
Because they're they're sending it usually to good sites.

Artem Daniliants:
So yeah, for sure.

Artem Daniliants:
And now that there is even more competition, maybe now for the first time in many, many, many years, Google actually has a competitor being thanks to integration and whatnot. So I definitely think that they even more will double down on user experience and making sure that people are actually happy using Google. But I think we've been talking for quite some time. Shane, this has been just wonderful. You're so happy go lucky person smiling and I can see that you actually enjoy what you do. And you know, you are definitely growing your business, but I don't think you're aggressively growing your business. I think you're kind of you're letting things happen as they should happen, and you don't really look for that. You know, obviously I think you didn't get any funding, right. You didn't raise any funding. You bootstrap and everything basically done out of your own pocket using your own time.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. And I think that's important because even I mentioned the Appsumo lifetime deal that we did a couple of years ago, and I think had we done that way early on, well, one, they probably wouldn't have done it because we weren't mature enough in our product offering, but.

Shane Bishop:
It might have might have been too much where we couldn't handle that influx of of lifetime users. Whereas a product that I've been using for a while just announced they're closing up shop because they had too many lifetime users and they didn't grow organically enough, and now they just can't handle the cost. And so that sort of thing can happen if you try to. I think if you try to move too fast and try to move beyond yourself, I think it can be a recipe for disaster. So grow at your own pace. Don't try to rush things. Be realistic with what you can handle and and focus on that.

Artem Daniliants:
That's good. That's really good. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Shane. It's been a pleasure. It's been wonderful having you here. And I learned quite a lot myself. And now if somebody is looking to create a chat wrapper and publish it as a WordPress plugin, hoping to get millions, I think they might think twice now. They hope so. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Artem Daniliants:
But I really appreciate your time, Shane. It's been wonderful. And let's stay in touch on LinkedIn. And if there is anything I can do to help, let me know. But I'll be definitely checking out. I actually wrote it down. Have some notes. I'm really looking forward to testing the Swiss plugin that you mentioned, the the all in one performance plugin to replace like WP cache and stuff like that. So. Looking forward to.

Shane Bishop:
That. One of my favorite features, probably one of the might be one of the lesser known performance things, but it's kind of like Asset Cleanup Pro, where you can disable certain JavaScript and CSS assets on any given page. And so I was using a different tool and it didn't have quite the flexibility I wanted. So that was part of what I rebuilt into Swiss when I built that. So I love that being able to, because there are certain scripts that you need to have that don't need to be on every page. And it's honestly especially with CSS, from a developer standpoint, it's really tough to to nail down CSS for specific page or specific use or like a shortcode or whatever.

Shane Bishop:
It's because you usually have to incur CSS in the head and then you got your content down below. You've already included your CSS. How do you connect the two? So it can be really tough for a developer to get those two lined up. So something like this really helps with that.

Artem Daniliants:
Awesome. Looking forward to testing that out. Thank you again, Shane, and it's been a pleasure and I hope all the best to your company. I think you have a bright future ahead of you, that's for sure. With that attitude of yours, I think there is nothing else but success.

Shane Bishop:
Yeah. Thank you. It's it's it's been fun. It's been a great 11 years and looking forward to many more.

Artem Daniliants:
Thanks. Thank you. Take care guys. And remember everything that Shane mentioned is in the show notes. So just make sure to check out the website, the plug in the blog post. We will link to that as well. It's you must have plug ins, must have plug ins essentials.

Artem Daniliants:
Definitely. We'll link to those. And yeah thanks so much. Have a good day guys. Take care.