432 – How Dave Grey is fixing WordPress admin pain points with smart utility plugins

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 432, entitled How Dave Grey is fixing WordPress admin pain points with smart utility plugins. It was published on Thursday the 7th of August, 2025.

My name is Nathan Wrigley, and before we begin a few bits of housekeeping.

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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I am joined by Dave Grey. Dave Grey has been on This Week in WordPress many times, but he's also decided to venture out into the WordPress world. In the past, he's been working for a variety of different corporations, and now he's decided to go it alone.

So we talk about him, what he's done in the past, what he is building, the utility plugins that he's concentrating on. And really the umbrella of his idea is to neaten up and tidy up the admin interface. And he's got a whole suite of plugins. So he's got Administrator Toolkit, Nag Me Not, Launch That Website.com, and a variety of other things.

And it's really nice just getting into a conversation with somebody in the WordPress space who might be on the same journey as you are. I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Dave Gray. Hello, Dave.

[00:04:18] Dave Grey: Good morning.

[00:04:20] Nathan Wrigley: It is the morning. It's nice to chat to you Dave. And I really, honestly, we've done probably close to 35 minutes of gossiping already, so saying hello seems weird, but hello

and nice to, see you. Dave has joined me many times before on this week in WordPress, but I believe this is the first time that we've had a direct podcast chat.

That's right, isn't it?

[00:04:42] Dave Grey: Yeah. 'cause basically it's after sort of Michelle at Word Camp Europe said, oh, we need to get back on this week in WordPress. So then messaged you to say, oh, what about that? And you thought, you know what? Let's have a one-to-one. And here we are.

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's really nice 'cause you have been in the WordPress space for a fair length of time. We're gonna talk about the bits and pieces that you've done, your journey and where you're at the moment, and the products that you've got, and hopefully products that you're going to be selling into the marketplace in the near future.

Do you just wanna tell us a little bit about you? Like your potted bio, if you like, how long you've been working with WordPress, what you have done, what you're embarking upon.

[00:05:16] Dave Grey: Yes. So without getting too waffly on here, been around in the WordPress space for quite a number of years, back in the old five minute installer days and cPanel on there, but then got a commercial interest in it back in early 2022 when I got into WordPress. Reselling. Hosting on that side, through, ironically via a creative agency that used to help on there.

Then in 2023, started to move across into site builds with Divi, which wasn't the best choice at that point, but they had a lifetime license. And when you're new to that side, you thought that's a good deal on that side through and then progressed into the plugin world in 2024 with a few that I acquired from Andrew Palmer before then, starting on my own new sort plugins, which we can Covering a minute on that side through, and then, yeah, this year's gonna be more doubling down on the whole ecosystem behind the different ideas and things I've had. Because as of the start of July, I gave up 20 years in the corporate world to go fully on my own business, which is somewhat e scary on that side through.

But over the last, I think year and a half, I dropped from five days a week down to four, then down to three, and asked if I could drop to one, and they said no, we needed to be for three. So I said. Side arrow and gave my notice in. And now I'm not quite up the creek without a paddle 'cause I was financially astute on that side.

And I've been planning the last three years for the get out plan. But yes, I'm now gonna be more focusing on the kind of, probably less on the site build side of things, but more kind of the product based approach and then hopefully a sort of a sas of some sort to be a kind of the hero product on there because.

While I don't want to diversify too far away, you kinda just wanna have a backup plan in case Matt has another interesting meeting somewhere.

[00:07:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that's very brave for a start. Firstly, congratulations. I know that many people hold this dream of working from home and not just working from home. 'cause obviously you could be working from home for the man, as they say, but in this situation, it's working from home for you.

But it, it does sound like you've got yourself. In a good position, but also still nervy. 'cause it doesn't matter how good that position is, presumably you've got a bit of runway, which doesn't go on forever unless you are, some kind of millionaire, that I don't know about.

[00:07:35] Dave Grey: Yeah, I didn't win the Euros last night, unfortunately. So that 64 million is gonna be going to someone

[00:07:41] Nathan Wrigley: what a waste, It should have

[00:07:42] Dave Grey: Yeah, it'd been planning like the last couple of years that this is gonna be the end game on there. And then from other sort of family situation with the in-laws and things and their health situation and I'm not getting any younger and spending another 10 years sitting at desk, my knees and things wouldn't really cope too well on there.

So it's yeah, not quite the midlife crisis on that side, but it's the case of something needs to change that kind of better fit which family needs and things on that side through for the. Ah, having trouble to get into school in the morning. On that side, do I need to worry that I'm starting work half an hour at eight?

No, because I'm on my own terms and things on

That

[00:08:16] Nathan Wrigley: that is the single most profound thing that I enjoy about the fact that I'm a freelancer. So I was a freelancer building websites, for many, years, and. I really enjoyed that. Now obviously I just make content in the WordPress space. I create podcasts like this, but that's the single most profound thing.

The idea that so long as the stuff gets done and you can be, I don't know, efficient at creating that. In other words, you don't just sit. Downstairs reading books 24 7. You set yourself targets and stick to those targets, but it doesn't matter whether you do it at four in the morning or seven in the morning or what have you, you can dip out, muck around with your kids, take 'em to school and all that kind of thing.

I, I think it's so easy to forget how sublimely cool that is and how lucky those people who manage to pull it off are, it's fabulous.

[00:09:10] Dave Grey: Yeah. 'cause when I think that over the last few years, the amount of evenings and weekends, it's been a case of right, the kids are in bed. I can start hacking around on this plugin or this other part on that side through that. Yeah. The aim for me is also to then be. If I get work done during the day, then that's all good.

But then if my sort of youngest wants to stop at the park after school for half an hour, it's not gonna be a case of, I'm gonna have to line my time sheet again to say I've been working all this time through, and yeah, I can then crack on for a bit in the evening if I want to on that side through, or you're not just making hours up because you've got to fill in the time sheet.

It's the case of if I'm feeling productive, do this thing. If there's something else going through, you can just wander off and do some of those things.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: I am, really quite relish doing things at peculiar times of the day. normally you and I are chatting. It's the middle of the morning that's fairly typical. I'll sit down and crack on. But I do quite enjoy that whole process of starting at midnight. There is something occasionally doing that I love.

And just the fact that I can, I've got something to finish. It really ought to be done by tomorrow, but I haven't done it. Everybody has gone to bed and I can start now. I just love it. I just love that freedom. It's absolutely fabulous. And in, in my case as well, so long as I get the podcast scheduled, I could take a longer period of time off.

And obviously if you get to your goal of having a suite of, successful plugins, you could do the same, couldn't you? You could in theory sit on a beach somewhere doing that work or just take a couple of weeks off so long as the support is dealt with. Anyway, that was a total aside off we went and, really got into that.

So let's first of all just outline the bits and pieces that you currently are working on. So each of these plugins are so you, for a start, you're not doing like elemental, you're not doing some like giant. Thing. You've got a bunch of smaller products which do a smaller subset of things and hopefully do them rather well.

Do you just wanna rattle them off all the ones that you've got?

[00:11:09] Dave Grey: Yeah, so the kind of the idea of having like utility plugins feel a bit more. Enticing on that side. 'cause also as a solo developer and I previously had limited time on there, there's no point trying to tackle something that's humongous on that side. But the, from having the web hosting and site building backgrounds, the last couple of years there's been a few different sort of pain points that I've had or seen other sort of freelancers talk about on Twitter on that side and thought, ah, let's combine some of those bits together.

It basically the two plugins, or my two hero plugins I should say are gonna be the administrative toolkits and it's gonna its sister or companion plugin, NME knots. And they're more aimed for kind of. The people doing site build and maintenance where their clients might be logging in to look after their sites and you want to restrict some of their capabilities so they're less likely to break things on that side with a kind of a light dusting of security sort of elements and bits on there as well.

So that if you are just maintaining the site completely for a customer and most customers wanna have their own emergency admin account on that side through, then it can also ping you notice if they ever log in on that side. 'cause. I think from spending far too much time on Twitter over the last couple of years, there's been a few different horror stories where the clients let some other SEO agency on that's then installed.

Some other plugins either broken the site. Massively mucked it up or eventually, oh, they've now just moved the site to a different hosting on that side for them to manage. And then you get locked out from that bit because they delete your user account, but you still get the WordPresses updated through 6.8 0.2 emails through, but then you can't get through.

So yeah, administrative toolkits more around kind of the need for people maintaining this site from The care plan or supports perspective on that side, but then it's also for people just doing like independent WordPress reselling and hosting on that side through. You can also do things like customizing the plugin list, so when you go to featured, you could get rid of Jet Pack and Gutenberg and BB press and things that.

No one wants to put on there and recommend your own sort of repo or external kind of other sort of plugins, like better anti sort of spam things on there or your search and replace and things through. So it's it's it branched out from its small little need of just basically making sure your user account can't get deleted, which is why I thought, if there's an administrative toolkit, multiple different things in there. It's not gonna be like your professional level, like solid security power tool for that bit, but it's more your multifunction sort of Swiss tool that you can do lots of small things to a level that you need it to do on that side.

Kind of,

[00:13:51] Nathan Wrigley: I really?

[00:13:52] Dave Grey: a far and forgetting that just sits in the background sort of thing for that.

[00:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: I really like this, so I guess I would encapsulate it as it's the kind, it's a thing which you would use if you are, let's say like I was, you're a freelancer, you're building WordPress sites, and you've just got that hassle of handing over a website. Knowing that the WordPress permissions system isn't robust enough and it's quite likely that if you give them, oh, I don't know, editor for example, there's gonna be a whole bunch of stuff that they can still break.

and it feels like what you've built here is just a way of locking that down. So me as the administrator, I can go in and tick some boxes and say, okay. That's no longer allowed to you, but also enhancing different things. So like you said, you can promote different plugins or a different repository and that kind of thing.

And, and it grew when you launch this, it felt like it was just one thing. It was making sure that the emails got through and what have you, and then it's expanded from there. And it, this one feels like you could really grow it. You could turn this into the all in one suite for everything, but it sounds like you don't want to do that.

[00:15:08] Dave Grey: yeah, because that's part of the whole sort of catch 22 situation on there that you're, see other people say, this plugin's not had any new features in the last couple of, not this particular one, but the plugin they're talking about hasn't had any new features apart from like compatibility updates. Is that a good or bad thing? Then some people say, it's a good thing 'cause if it does what it needed to do and what people have installed it for, then that's good. Rather than you get some other ones, which I want to not go to down the line that every six months they put yet more things into it because they feel they got to justify it and now it does.

10 million things beyond what you really want it to do on that side through, which is where, for quite a while I was debating, do I bake? Nag me not for blocking your notifications and things into that one as well. But then it's they do two different things on that side. So I thought, NME Knots, it's gonna stay a separate plugin, but it's they, you can basically use both side by side on that bit.

So if your clients do have a login, you can basically just say for their user accounts, they get 99.9% of all the kind of. Upgrade for this plugin review. So and so banners and things at the top blocked away so they can go through and do their day-to-day editing without saying, you are looking after my site.

Why is this thing saying I need to review it in five stars and all those things. Whereas if you log in as the site maintainer, you could just toggle it on and off to see, I want to get on and do things versus close down all these other adverts and things on that side through. So that's why I'm going a bit more.

Lots of smaller plugins, so you can basically pick and choose what you want on there rather than trying to do one plugin that does literally everything, I might need to rename it to my website toolkit domain rather than administrator toolkit

[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah,

[00:16:48] Dave Grey: other things on that side through,

but.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: it is interesting that whole debate of you buy, like you've called it a utility plugin, and by that I guess you're meaning, it does little, but it does it well. it's functional for a subset of things. You mentioned solid security, which has, I don't know how many things, but many options in there.

I agree with you. I, but I also, I also. agree as a user, it is quite nice to see updates and there's this whole interesting path you are gonna have to tread. if you decide definitively not to add a load of features, I suspect that some customers will be pushy about that. It's, okay, it doesn't seem to be getting too much attention, but if you think about it, you pay your, I don't know, you pay your.

your, let's say you using, I don't know, something like Evernote, a SaaS product, whether you use it or not, or whether it receives updates or not, you're still paying for it just because of the fact it's not receiving a ton of updates or, the, necessary updates that you think are necessary.

that'll be an interesting path. You're gonna have to tread. How, much do you cram in, order to make people satisfied? 'cause I can guarantee at some point you're gonna annoy people for having too many things in there.

[00:18:06] Dave Grey: Yeah, I need to kinda tread the line carefully of not just adding, oh, this idea would be really great. 'cause on the, this week's episode when they're saying about blocking, I can't remember what it was now, but they on the call, they set up about blocking something else. I thought, oh, that'd be quite a good thing to put in there.

Then I thought, oh no, that's not directly related to. The use case for admin toolkit. So then got as far as opening Claude up, could you do this thing? And they're like, no, I'll ignore that bit. I can't remember what the actual part on the show was on there, but some other blocking something else or filtering something else.

oh no, it's the draft, not using the trash can. And there's

[00:18:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's right. Yeah. Bernard Cow wrote a

[00:18:45] Dave Grey: oh, that might be a good thing to say. Can you get extra status? And I was like, no, that's not related to what that bit is. I was like, no, put the blinkers on. I'm not gonna add new features to that, but I need to.

Finish off the knowledge base and things. But yeah, it may well be more smaller plugins on that side, which I might then have in like new access or bundle equivalent on there to say, right one monthly or annual thing on there. Just get access to anything plugin related that I make on there that hasn't got backend SAS needs behind on that side.

We'll just factor that a bit in, but

[00:19:17] Nathan Wrigley: that, that's an interesting idea. The idea of, if you make this into just the, administrative toolkit that does absolutely everything, you water down the messaging, you make it harder to understand and to pitch. but e.

[00:19:32] Dave Grey: thinking about that, just rebrand my website toolkit domain to say, buy the overall bit on there and get access to all these other things. So it basically is a toolkit for your website. You can do your admin insecurity bits, you can do notices, you can. Get some extra stuff in your media library or other parts on that

[00:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: I do like the idea of a plugin. I've often seen this, so for example, in, I don't know, a load of block set block suites, things like stackable and cadence and things like that. You, you purchase the plan, but then you can toggle things on and off. So that it, it's almost like having a separate plugin, so everything's bundled within the code, but then you can turn off this thing and this thing and this thing so that you've got this slim down version.

However, other developers, I'm thinking of Mark West Guard with his WS form, he's gone down the route of, you have to download a separate plugin for each thing that you want to add. So for example, if you wanna add active campaign as a place where you can send, People who fill out a form and tick a box, they can have their email sent to active campaign.

that's a separate plugin that you have to download. I think it's a diff difficult tightrope to tread. but I also like the idea that you suggested of having a. Like a business, which is, possible to, sell the all access plan. So you've got, I don't know, 12, 15 plugins, but they all follow like a similar theme.

They're all to do with cleaning up the admin or being an administrator of a WordPress website and you subscribe to the whole lot that then I guess, would encourage you to build loads of little utility plugins. 'cause then it feels like if you've got 15 of those available as opposed to.

Three with three really big plugins as opposed to 15 little ones. Feels like you're getting less of a good deal. I don't know. It's difficult. You're gonna have to figure all this out.

[00:21:26] Dave Grey: This is what it's been like as it comes down, like the whole support of how do you then support that many small ones versus a large one on that side. But I think most of my ideas have been fairly well self-contained on that side. So if you are the sort of person that would understand why this plugin would be useful, you'd have enough knowledge to go through and do some of those bits in place.

But yeah, it's good, as you say, get that balance between Do. Lots of different things to cover, lots of different use cases. I'll just focus on a couple of large ones on that side. But I think I need to get sort of admin toolkit and nbe not properly polished off in a bit more marketed on that side while also then planning how to diversify out on that side.

So not then spreading too thin or moving on to the next bit. 'cause you

[00:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you're gonna have

[00:22:09] Dave Grey: other product owners scream, like just focus on the one thing, but.

[00:22:12] Nathan Wrigley: right. You are gonna have to be really good at disciplining yourself to not be, you get that kind of, I don't know, one support request comes in and demands a thing or says, why? I didn't, why hasn't it got this? And it's easy to get derailed.

Like you said, you were listening to our show the other day and something popped into your head. It's oh, I'll add that in. You've gotta be disciplined, haven't you? Otherwise you lose the, the marketing becomes harder. Because you're now doing 4,000 different things. Let's, let's just quickly go through what the, in some detail, let's make the audience aware of what the, the administrator toolkit can do.

Firstly, nice, nice domain, nice and straightforward. Head to administrator toolkit.com. No hyphens, nothing weird. Just administrator toolkit.com. You can see on the headline there, it says WordPress. WordPress admin, security and plugin management. And then underneath that, there's, I don't know, a list of about 20 odd bullet points.

so they're grouped into four sections. The first one is admin user management. So it's things like email domain, white listing for admins, email only, login enforcement, admin, activity tracking, emergency only admin accounts. Various other things. The other subset would be user account security, so login attempt monitoring, notification of suspicious admin activity, plugin protection mechanisms.

Then you've got plugin management. So again, bear in mind, you are the administrator, you're handing this over to clients, you can hide. you can hide plugins from other admins. That's quite nice. So you actually give people an admin role and it won't be the end of the world. prevent plugin, deactivation admin role notes to plugins and more.

And then active staging site warnings is the, final of the four login, screen warning, admin, bar warning, and various other bits and pieces. Are you about there with this one? Do you think you've nailed roughly what this product is, or are you still getting

[00:24:06] Dave Grey: I think I've got enough different use cases for people's different pain points on there because you get. There's a million different types of sort of freelancers and people that go out there and do things, so it's Hopefully ticks enough boxes for people that work in different ways on there.

'cause you get some people that say, I'd never give my client an admin account on that side 'cause I have everything locked down on there. okay, you wouldn't necessarily need some of those bits through. But then you have others that they do wanna let their. Client have an admin account because they may be a bit more of a pro user on that side, which then you also then want to protect yourself from them accidentally being a bit too proactive on that side for updating WordPress to a major release on that side before you've tested, it's part of your maintenance thing.

So yeah, that's where different things like hiding the plugins from other admins come in because you can completely hide it, have it shown, but have a little protected things. They can't deactivate it or update it on that side or. Even just down to a simple admin note to say, license renews on Black Friday.

This bit on that side through, so it hopefully ticks enough boxes for the many different ways that sort of people work on there. Rather than saying you've gotta have everything on here, you may get, some people just literally wanna have the plugin notifications and bits on that side through so that your client may just be able to have full access to their site, but you just want to keep.

A bit of oversight on that side through. So whenever they install a plugin, you can get notifications through to say, oh, this thing's come through from the repo, or This other plugin's been developed elsewhere. We've got installed on that side. So you can say, oh, you've just installed this plugin, but you've already got X security plugin in place on there.

Is there anything we can guide you with on that side through? So it was, yeah, it just. Hopefully covers enough different points for how people want to use, even if you're just offering WordPress hosting as an independent person on that side through, and you just have this just to have an extra sort of set of eyes on them just to keep an eye out for the bits on that side.

Or there's do they normally log in from the uk but then they user accounts now suddenly logged in from a completely different country, get in contact on that side. You could also pop on force, log that particular user out on that side and do things on there. So yeah.

[00:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: so the idea really is to make your job of being an administrator less likely to be derailed by some other human being who.

[00:26:34] Dave Grey: 'cause it's more.

[00:26:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. The expertise to know what they're doing or do something accidentally. And then there's that whole tracking side where if people do make mistakes, at least you can figure out what the heck they did and who did it, and then go and have a word.

[00:26:47] Dave Grey: Yeah, because this, at the moment, it's more a full like activity. Logging of this change in so and so is what happened on that side. It's more the, if this user deactivated this plugin or updated this bit, then you can see at the high level on there. 'cause it's also trying to balance the fine line between.

Recreating 10 different plugins that are out there to do the exact same thing, versus trying to fit in that gap between. Big plugins. I don't wanna wave my hands 'cause it's not on the video on that side. But yeah, you have your big plugins that do one thing and then like your site management tools that might do something else.

I'm trying to position this in that nice little sweet spot between, it hasn't got much overlap with different areas, but it still covers quite a few different pain points on that side. Yeah, I think I've now got it feature rich to start trying to market and get more sort of bums on the seats to try out and feedback on that side.

[00:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: it strikes me, forgive me for being so bold, but it strikes me that this is the one that I think is gonna take off.

[00:27:46] Dave Grey: Yeah, I want this to be my hero sort of plugin on that side or through, because you're the ones that are more minor on

[00:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the user base for the other ones is, whilst it's definitely there is less, because and also it's fairly straightforward to figure out who the market is for this, it's people who build WordPress websites who wanna hand them off to clients and obviously they don't think that there's enough permissions or granularity in the security infrastructure, WordPress, and they wanna be able to make that more fine grained.

So it's also, it's really easy to speak to them and. Figure out who they are and market to them and what have you. But, definitely go and check that out. And obviously, it's fairly young, it's new out the gate if you like, and so there's probably a lot of bits and pieces that will be added despite the fact that you have to be blinkered

[00:28:33] Dave Grey: Yes, because I think it's just over a year and a half-ish old on that side, and it's had a well. If you ever see the release notes on that, but it evolved quite a bit from literally having the one feature of preventing the site owner user from being deleted if it matched up to

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: I remember. Yeah, I

[00:28:53] Dave Grey: literally has just built around that one

[00:28:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember when you brought that out thinking, yeah, okay. It does that one thing and now, a year on, we're looking at a full suite of different things and, it's pretty comprehensive. I can't see too many. No doubt. Your customers will figure out some area that you've missed and we'll let you know and you'll add that to the roadmap and what have you.

Let's move on to the, other one that you mentioned. There are four in total, but we're gonna concentrate on this one next. And this one's called, nag Me not. Nag me, not for WordPress. We all know the pain of this. Oh, I'll give you the URL. It's nag me, not wp.com. Again, no hyphens or anything. Nag me not wp.com.

Go check that out. This is so self-explanatory. but say, tell us what it is anyway.

[00:29:44] Dave Grey: Yes. So this also comes from other people commenting on sort of their Twitter about the amount of admin notices or nag notices for upgrade and reviews and those things coming through. So I had thought about building this into. Admin toolkit to start with and thought, oh, it could just be separate on that side.

'cause the amount of, you can see on the, if you visit the homepage on there, the amount of client sites just have all these endless notices on that side. Through that, if they've got paid plugins or free plugins on that side, they don't want to get. All these other confusing sort of things popping up on there to come through.

So basically the blurb on the site. So it stops WordPress admin notifications from overwhelming users. You can install the plugin on your client's sites or use the brand new browser extension of your troubleshooting across multiple dashboards. So this is One name, but it's actually two products.

So if you are doing site builds and you're letting your clients in, but you just want an easier life, you can put the plugin on their site so that you could see all the nags and things if you are maintaining the site. But for each individual user on there, you can set them to have, have it off.

Normal or extreme modes to block everything on that side so they can just focus on what they're trying to do. But then I had also late last year started on a Chrome extension so that if you are a support person, so think if you are like a plugin support team, you are logging into different, and the customer sites, you can't put the plugin on that side.

But trying to navigate round on there, the few sites that I've been doing there. The last year or so on. Now I thought, I need to get this bit finished off as well. So as of a couple of days ago, that's now in the Chrome web store as well, and you can try it for free on up to two sites at a time, but there's no restrictions on just swapping the URLs out.

You just got to go into the setting screen to do that bit and it fully works on there with your built in block list. That should be all of the ones that are found during testing on that side. So even if it like. Your anti-VAX stuff kills 99% of notices. It should be a lot cleaner on there. But then I've also then got the kind of the premium features in there as well.

So you can import your own list on that side or add your own extra blocks on that side, through to customize it and also have an unlimited number of sites. So say you are a plugin support team, you've gotta go on there. The amount of notices you tend to see as like a new admin accountant on there that haven't all been dismissed trying to go to the add new plugin screen to find the add new in between all those ones.

Even if you think, it might save 30 seconds per site on that side to find things, or even like a minute or two, the amount of sites that they'd be going across to during the year on there, it should be hopefully like a no brainer for support people to have in place.

[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: It's.

[00:32:30] Dave Grey: rather than trying to have the two different products on our thought.

Buy the one license. You can just use both depending on how you want to use stuff. So I thought, yeah, just keep it simple.

[00:32:39] Nathan Wrigley: So it's a WordPress plugin, which obviously you can install, and then that is following that WordPress around. Or if you want to, if obviously if you can't install a plugin or if you just choose not to, you can go with a browser extension. How does it work technically? let's talk about the plugin quickly.

So again, we're trying to get rid of those. Admin notices, basically adverts. I imagine most of the sort of native WordPress things like, there's a bunch of plugin updates or WordPress core can be updated. Most people are probably okay with that, but it's when you get the, giant advert for upgrade X plugin because we want you to do that and so we're gonna pester you until you jolly well do it.

how does it technically, how does it do it? Is it is, are you just looking for certain telling signs of. Of how they typically deploy these? Or are you literally finding these adverts and then reverse engineering them and saying, okay, I'm gonna filter for this text. How? How are you doing it?

[00:33:42] Dave Grey: the funniest thing, the first attempt on this bit was a case of this gets a bit more technical, buffering the output. On the page to see what things were getting put in there. Then try and strip it out to then go through and thought, performance wise, that's probably not gonna be the best thing on there.

It must be an easy way. Then I thought, each of these different notices have basically got their own CSS classes or

behind it, so that. Basically just see what the most common ones are in there and build up the block lists, behind the scenes on there. So outta the box, the plugin and the chrome extension have got I think, 20 or 30 different things on there that is like so and so notice in this particular page then try and get rid of, so the lighter weight approach for both of them was to.

Basically inject a bit of extra CSS in the page. So if it sees any of these ones, it says display none. So it's physically there in the source, but then just hides on there. So depending on how infested your sort of dashboard might be, there might be like a fraction of a second where you see bits and it kinda just like manages to get rid of them all on that side or through.

But then, yeah, because it's taken that lighter approach, it doesn't do It doesn't have an extra panel as though you can click on that bit and see all these bits because it's a case of, if you wanted to have a panel to see things, you could just easily toggle the mode on and off on that side or

[00:35:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:08] Dave Grey: yeah, it tries to do it in as lighter way as possible on there for doing it at the last moment by basically saying, oh, you got these notices, these mattress tops. Are these styles just. Send 'em to be display none on that side. And then, yeah, the Chrome extension does the same that if you allow it onto or to run or activate on particular sites and you change it into like normal or extreme mode, it'll say, oh, I've got this list of 20 or 30 different things to try and check for.

If anything matches, just say display none. So they just disappear on that side through.

[00:35:39] Nathan Wrigley: What's interesting about this is obviously it annoys people For one thing, we'd all rather have TV without adverts 'cause it is just a bit infuriating. And so the same thing is true of the WordPress dashboard. It's just a bit infuriating. Is it the end of the world? No, but we're people who understand that these are just upsells and they're to be ignored.

But the, but I think especially with regards to what we were talking about a moment ago, your administrator toolbox the, sorry, administrator toolkit, the The clients may well not have the same impression as you, and they may see this stuff as necessary, and why hasn't, why haven't you done this?

I've got this thing from this plugin X. It looks really important. There's this big thing saying we need to do this, and this. okay, it's an ad, but the clients might not see it that way. So stripping it out, especially for the clients, might be quite helpful to stop them pestering you.

[00:36:39] Dave Grey: Because this is why you've got like the two modes on it so that you as a site maintainer could say, yeah, I wanna see all these things in case something important shows up. But your Sally, your sort of a WordPress or client on that side, she's not over technical. She just wants to go on and put a blog post or news articles on that side.

Depending on the different plugins. Sometimes I have the thanks for installing it close. That's closed it for that user, but then two weeks later on, you've been using this plugin for two weeks, here's a massive upsell to go to the pro version. They log in, think, where's my screen gone? Because it's pushed everything down there.

They raise a support ticket for you. Your time is money on that side versus the kind of the whole, if it stays like a couple of hours across a year for them not asking. I say pointers questions, but unnecessary questions on that side. On that side, then yeah, they can get a clean thing on there. You can still see what you want to maintain the site and yeah, you can hopefully strike the balance on

[00:37:33] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's

[00:37:34] Dave Grey: the whole. Yeah, but it's also, if you think, if you're trying to add a new plugin on there, when you go to that new plugin screen, you've got so many notices that either appear above or below to sometimes to try and find that button in the middle there to then go through.

It's like it's halfway down the screen 'cause you've got all these other ones. yeah, it's just the case. The cognitive overload on the kind of trying to work through and close all these ones down on, are they gonna come back? Is it dismissible on that side through, is this like case of Yeah, I can't forgo people wanting to make money on that side with the upsells, but it's a case of sometimes they could do clean aways on that

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I agree.

[00:38:12] Dave Grey: yeah.

[00:38:14] Nathan Wrigley: the thing that never ceased to amaze me when I was talking to my clients was how full of anxiety the WordPress admin can be. So for me, because I'm in it all the time, I know that basically nothing I can do can really destroy anything. even if I trash things, I know that they've ended up in the trash and I can resurrect them again.

But my, clients would often, email me. Repeatedly about the same thing. And it turns out they just were terrified that they were gonna break things. they, they're not really fully conservant with WordPress. They use it once in a month, and they've got this whole process of, they're literally looking at a bit of paper, which has a bullet pointed list of what to do.

So go to this URL. Type in the username, the password, click the blue button, log in now, click this. You know what I mean? Basically, they're following this exact procedure so that they don't go wrong. And then stuff like this comes along. And again, to me and you, it's annoying, but that's where it ends.

But for them, it's not. Suddenly it's oh, I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. It's below the fold. I can't see what I'm supposed to see. I'm not doing it. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna close that down and write an email to the developer. It's crazy, but that's how it happens,

[00:39:32] Dave Grey: Plus the amount of plugin updates and things you have through, even if you do like your monthly maintenance plan and bits on there, you update everything one day. Then something else new pops up the following day, they then log in. It's I'm paying them to do updates on there, but it's shown there's another update and there's red dots.

So what? Why aren't you doing your job on there? we do it on a fixed cadence so we can test these things through. So yeah, that's why it's kinda got different modes on there. And even for the WordPress plugin, you can do like custom mode. So you could literally just say. Even if you had the list of sort of 20 things on there, you could just disable nearly all of them.

Then just have a couple of key ones on there. So if you know you've got like some persistent offenders or you don't mind like little update notice for the plugin screen showed up, you can actually customize it on that side or through. So

[00:40:17] Nathan Wrigley: I like

[00:40:17] Dave Grey: again, it's the case of being

[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: Persistent offenders. I like that.

[00:40:22] Dave Grey: 'cause there are some that kinda oh, I got rid of that a bit.

Like you've been using this product for three months now. Give us a review. Six months. Oh, uninstall,

right. Oh, you're trying to uninstall me. Give us some feedback.

[00:40:32] Nathan Wrigley: Ha. Have

[00:40:33] Dave Grey: No, that

[00:40:33] Nathan Wrigley: this new trend, this new version of Skullduggery where ads are now being injected inside the block editor? So you'll go to write a post, and there's an ad above the first, above the title, basically. So between the admin bar at the top, if you've got it enabled that way, and the first thing, which is the title, there's an ad and you just think, oh, my good.

that's just,

[00:41:00] Dave Grey: Yeah, the new lows

[00:41:01] Nathan Wrigley: there's a whole new field of things that you've gotta try and track down, with this plugin.

[00:41:09] Dave Grey: Yeah, because I've seen a couple that have put their own extra panel on the sidebar with an upsell part on there, which is fair enough because if you don't expand that little panel,

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: are out. Yeah, you're in

[00:41:20] Dave Grey: hole on that side sort through is less on that side through. But yeah, this is gonna be one of those other bits that either be a bit marmar with people like, ah, yes, this is quite useful.

Or Case. Why do you wanna hide these things? 'cause they're important to know you on these, but it's this case. If it comes down to, if you are trying to support clients, they might be the people that get easily confused on that bit. It's once again, to help you protect your time by hopefully having less support tickets and less confused clients on our side through.

yeah.

[00:41:48] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly right. Okay. We're, gonna be in a bit of a rush now 'cause I think I've got a fairly hard stop soon. So let's go through the other two quickly. so the first one I'm gonna, so this is how I think I got to know you. Whenever you came on this week in WordPress, this was the URL that you dropped as the thing you wanted to be known by.

And it's called Heads Up WP again, exactly as you'd imagine. Heads up wp.com. what's this one?

[00:42:14] Dave Grey: This was another idea that started as a bit of a hybrid between a plugin so that when things happen on the site, I someone update. It's a plugin or deactivates bits on there, it would ping that across to a remote service that the portal doesn't exist yet. 'cause I ran outta time with the corporate job on that side through.

But the purpose on this one would've been, once again, if you are doing hosting for your clients, then this could be kinda like keeping a watch for each week or month on there for changes that might cause problems on their site. So you can get an email through or an alert to say, oh, you've deleted this blog post, but it's not redirecting across to somewhere else on there.

Or. Your domain's coming up for renewal in a week's time because some people manage bits. Other people let the clients do things on that side, so it's a bit more like a reputation protection thing. So you may well have built the site, they're looking after it, but you can have a bit of automated oversight on that side to sort keep an eye on things.

But this one kind. Yeah, I don't know what the future for this one will hold because it then some of the heads up features got baked into administrator's toolkit to alert through on some of the different parts on that side through. But then the other parts of this bit for the sort of the checking your websites each week or so may well be baked into my launch, that website service, which can.

Pop to in just a second on that side through. So yeah, heads up may well be amalgamated into its successor on that side with some of the website audit perhaps come across and potentially some of these bits going into administrative toolkit for an extra kind like SAS back offering on that side so that if you've got.

The plugin installed on 50 sites, rather than getting 50 emails through, it may well daily digest through to one bit to come across. So this comes back to the whole ecosystem of all these things into feeding across to each other on that side

[00:44:07] Nathan Wrigley: I am, I'm loving the fact that you are, you're still figuring it all out. I think that's great. maybe if we were to do this podcast again in a year's time, you'll have the

[00:44:15] Dave Grey: I might have finished it.

[00:44:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, not only that, but you'll have figured out oh, you know what? That plugin as a standard that needed to go into the toolkit or not.

I'm gonna beef up what the offering inside of this one, but here we are. This is where we're at this time that we're recording it. So that's heads up wp. And, then the last one we're gonna mention today is, launch that website.com. Again, brilliant URL Well done for bagging that. I'm surprised that's around still.

what are you doing here? Because this feels like more of a service than it does a plugin.

[00:44:46] Dave Grey: It is gonna be a bit of both 'cause I came up with this idea shortly after the word camp US drama last year for, let's diversify outta something that is just WordPress related on there. So this service could also be for anyone launching any sort of website on there. But with a bit more of a leaning across to sort of WordPress on that side.

So it's in simple terms. If you are a new web designer and you've not got any other processes and things in. Behind the scenes for Trello or Clickup or Asana and things like that. Then it'd be a dead simple online portal that you've got your checklist of all the things to do through for your pre-launch and post-launch on that side, but versus being something that you like Trello that you could use for free.

It would also have. Extra functionality in for your web designers. So one of the benefits on here is it can go through and import your site map for your staging or your live site. So rather than having your checklist of, I've checked all the pages in the browser, there's an extra screen on there that basically for every single public you're around or one in your site map, you can say, checked on desktop, checked on tablet, checked on mobile.

So you can't go through and miss those different pages. And then the other small bit that went in was also your. a high letter, high level meta information for your public pages. It will go through, do a quick check on all of them to say, have you got your page title set? Have you got any blanks and things in on that side through?

But this one may well bring in some other parts from heads up, so that once your site has gone live, either once a month or once a week on there, depending on your preferences or pricing plan, it would go through. Do a website crawl on that bit and say, Ooh. You've got these broken links, these missing images.

So once your site's gone live, you've then got that oversight to make sure it's still ticking over on there. And then we'll probably also do things like your domain's up for renewal. Give you a month's notice, a week's notice, few

[00:46:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:46:45] Dave Grey: you've got your credit card, a bits in that side. So this is gonna be like the success of a heads up, but a bit more

[00:46:50] Nathan Wrigley: it might not end up being launch your website. It might be more launch and maintain, because it might be things that are just ongoing that you need to do. I don't know, on a weekly basis, just have you checked in with the client this week?

Yes. Okay. Tick the box. Great. That's done. So it feels a bit like a, at in, in some regard, there's this like checklist possibility. here's, the pro forma for all the things that you need to make sure are done. has it been submitted to Google? Have we got the, I don't know, the, HD access all switched off so that it's actually available and search engines can find it.

Have we got the homepage correctly done, blah, blah, blah. You can just create your tick list, go through that. Do you, launch with like templates that you've built as well so that if you don't.

[00:47:33] Dave Grey: one template in there currently, so if you're on launch site website.com and then go to templates on there. I've got the one site launch template at the moment that covers. A whole lot of different pre-launch and post-launch tasks on that side, but it's built to be flexible. So if you had your own processes or wanted to do things, you could just download the Excel file on there, add your own bits in the standardized format, import that into either your kind of. Sort of SAS or your customer area for an individual customer and tweak things on there to go through or just have one for all of your different sort of projects. But yeah, it's basically a simple checklist on there that you can make your own template and add things in once you've imported on that side through.

But it just wants to be a lot less distraction on all the other bells and whistles that you don't need and literally say, here's the things that you can the task to complete the site launch on that side. And some of these extra things just for your web designers and bits of rounds.

But once again, thinking of the future proofing, if you pop to the about page and pass the little blurb at the top, it would also be useful for helping you maintain, build, and refreshing your website. So the maintain part would be the future site audits for check your broken links and things. If you then publish a new page on your site, if you had the plugin installed that, then let this know that you say, oh, you've got this new page checked.

Send you alert, have you checked it on your desktop and so on there, or check it for broken links. And you've just done, you've done your new marketing campaign launch page, the number one trick that most assistant people do, they write the email address but miss off the mail too. So it's not actually clickable on that side through and all these other bits.

So yeah, there's gonna be a lot more like the heads up. Stuff baked into here. So it's more the reactive or proactive bit on therefore a new page you got published, have you checked it? Oh, you got this broken link. Then also other bits of, if you do sites properly, you have a lot of cross linking between your site.

If you remove a page, it will then double check, say, oh, you are still linking from four other pages. 'cause we did this for site audit. Redirect them or sort some other bits on that side through. So yeah, I've got a long list of other things that can come into this that would be the different ideas through which now that I've got five days a week for

[00:49:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:49:54] Dave Grey: time with some client work, I can actually get all these other little bits finished on that aside.

So I can say, this does all these things. But yeah. Launch that website. I still need to finish the website copy and update it for the approach you wanna do now on that side through. But yeah, it's fully up and running. Should anyone want to, pop in and have a sort, a free test around there just to kick the tires and see what it's

[00:50:16] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's lovely.

[00:50:17] Dave Grey: it's not had any pain customers, so any feedback or interest would be

[00:50:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, lovely.

[00:50:22] Dave Grey: welcome on that

[00:50:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like what we've done today is like paint a story of the rest of your year. Like we're in, the middle of,

[00:50:29] Dave Grey: gotta be busy.

[00:50:30] Nathan Wrigley: we're in the middle of 2025, and you've obviously, you've been the, trash the corporate life and now you're, on your own.

And in the meantime, whilst you were making that transition, you've got these four things and you've got them all now, and now in the rest of 2025, you have to figure out. What things need to be added, what needs to be taken away, and which ones you're gonna promote and work on really hard.

I will link in the show notes if you head to wp builds.com. Search for the episode. Dave Gray, which is an, it is got an E in it, so it's GREY, not GRAY. Search for that episode and you'll find the links to the four properties that we mentioned just there. that's fascinating. I honestly, I wish you all the best of luck.

I know that you are very hard worker. I know that you're very diligent and so hopefully people will pick up on that and these products will become a great success and you'll be in enormously profitable in the rest of

[00:51:24] Dave Grey: That's the plan. But even if it's profitable, just enough to have the nice level of living and bits on that side and the kind of the time freedom to say, we can stop off at the park, or it's nice and sunny. You can go for a walk. And yeah, being immensely profitable would be nice, but I'm not going, Grand delusions of being like a multimillionaire for

being comfortable and having that lifestyle of, yeah, we can do the bits on that aside, not have to worry on things. But yes, I just need one of these bits to stick to then get a bit of cross emotion on that aside or through on the CROs. yeah.

[00:51:56] Nathan Wrigley: go. Dave Gray, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:52:01] Dave Grey: Thank you for inviting me on the show.

[00:52:02] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome.

Okay, that's all I've got for you today. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, head to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 432, and leave us a comment there. If you didn't like it, search for episode number 432 and leave us a comment as well. We'd really appreciate it.

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