My Journey into building Wordpress plugin and SAAS

[njbox]

In the past 10 years, I have built two web apps and have moderate success due lack of interest in marketing. I am a developer so once I am done with development, I somehow lose interest in the actual tasks of marketing. I want to change this behavior.

This time I am focusing on small applications and plugins. I want to build a web app that can do SEO Change monitoring but before going that route I have decided to make a WordPress plugin.

The wordpress marketplace would help me validate the need for the plugin and eventually help me decide whether to go SAAS route.

I am very close to finishing the plugin. Once done, add website, documentation and upload for WordPress approval.

Will keep posted

 

[Ababba2]

Good luck bro!

 

[Floch]

Good luck mate keep going strong

 

[sasukeU]

Good luck with the venture.

 

[liberties]

Nice, any update on your progress?

 

[Sandie2018]

Once you have finished the plugin, you might think about affiliate marketing done for you if you are not interested in marketing yourself.

 

[njbox]

Nice, any update on your progress?

Yes, I did post it but the update was removed. I will repost without putting any links. The link was simply to my blog update where I had put some history in the making process.

 

[njbox]

Once you have finished the plugin, you might think about affiliate marketing done for you if you are not interested in marketing yourself.

Can you share more details on "affiliate marketing done for you" ?

 

[liberties]

Yes, I did post it but the update was removed. I will repost without putting any links. The link was simply to my blog update where I had put some history in the making process.

Thanks, looking forward to it

 

[GenesisOne]

Sounds good.
Let us know when the plugin is available to test it.

 

[RevGlue]

Best of Luck .........

 

[njbox]

Past three weeks has been extremely productive.

Got major diff checking algorithm implemented and displaying alerts in a meaningful way. I will post some pictures later as I doing some UI work right now.

Never thought a wordpress plugin would stretch so many months into development.

Although I want to release this as a plugin, this functionality deserves to be its own SAAS but that will have to wait for some time.

 

[njbox]

Another idea that I am working on is how to turn the features into small utilities on my website.

For e.g the diff checking algorithm is very unique and I can see it provides good value. So I was thinking why not keep this as independent utility where users can paste urls or text and the tool will tell the differences visually.

I can use this as lead magnet, put ads or ask for donations at the bottom. Just thinking out loud.

 

[njbox]

Here is a screenshot of the diff algorithm in action. The crawlspider will take snapshot at set time interval and it will compare the snapshot at extremely detail level.

It has the ability to detect if Keywords were completed removed, if NEW keywords were added or simply replaced. This is useful if someone in your team accidently or knowingly changed the keywords in your anchor tags, Page Titles, H1, H2 or other H3 tags. The same diff algorithm works for script and body tags. One issue I found is that if a website is built with say elementor, then in the javascript it has a "NOUNCE" feature. This generates a unique ID everytime the snapshot is taken. This creates a false positive alert. Similarly there could be other server generated values that could be tagged to various URLs. Currently I plan to just alert them in low priority

 

[beriener]

Good luck with your journey

 

[ArchBotter]

Good luck with your journey

 

[Dragonasu]

Good luck with your journey

 

[njbox]

I am reviving this thread with a new update.

Towards the end of 2021, I had finished the MVP version of my plugin "CrawlSpider SEO monitor". After that I installed on several of my websites and few testers. I saw some success in marketing. Later due to change in priorities and in order to help my wife's business, I jumped into Etsy and Amazon selling personalized art items. I was dedicating most of my time helping her setup the process, setting up the shops, websites etc. Now she is running the show by herself. Now I am getting back into the groove and continue the plugin journey.

When I bought the crawlspider domain, I had the intention to build a very grand SEO Audit tool. That is still my long term goal. I needed the Audit tool to have the "Diff" functionality where it can automatically tell you what changed between audits so I embarked on building that scalable architecture that can run on wordpress.

My plan is
1. CrawlSpider: SEO Change Monitor - Done
2. CrawlSpider: Auto Linker - WIP
3. CrawlSpider: SEO Auditor - Planned

I am now documenting my build and journey for WordPress Internal Auto linker. Using the same architecture as in the "SEO Change Monitor", it is very easy to add modules and that is where my focus is currently.

More about the Auto Linker plugin
1. The reason why I call it the Auto Linker is because that is my primary focus. It will use combination of AI tech to determine the match and implement links based on the rules. But it will also allow you to easily monitor what was implemented and undo them very easily. It will also tell you exactly why it thinks the internal link was implemented.
2. Provide manual inter linking process just like other popular plugins like LinkWhisper but my primary focus is to build the UI that is geared towards automation and totally hands off approach.
3. Collect metrics
4. Provide stunning reports

Scalable Architecture
Let me describe what this means with respect to wordpress and hosting services with limited CPU execution time
1. Majority of the wordpress hosting is on shared servers and even the dedicated ones have a PHP execution timeout.
2. This timeout varies but let say it is set to 30 seconds.
3. So if you were to scan a page, extract the contents, run various checks on them then it is possible that 30 seconds maybe just enough to process few pages.
4. For e.g in the SEO Monitor, it has various checks like https redirect, certificate, sitemap, missing Titles, H1, H2, anchor tags and so on.
5. Each page goes through say 20 individual checks.
6. The plugin database architecture allows for micro processing of these individual checks and has the ability to resume the checks where it last left off.
7 . Say for e.g It was scanning page2 and stopped at check #4 due to a PHP timeout or server crash. The next time it resumes it will pick from the same point and complete the scan.
8. Auto linker will use the same mechanics and this will enable to scan potentially large websites.

Stay tuned for more updates...

 

[seomaster5]

You should do partnership with someone good in marketing. All good products need marketing and promotion.

 

[njbox]

Was a productive day. Completed the logic to collect anchor text and as a bonus the algorithm to identify site navigation links from the main body links


This was very important for the plugin to identify the site navigation links from the main body links.
If we are using wordpress functions, then it is possible to just get the body of the post/page but this will provide details of only the links within the body.

It can now identify internal vs external and other anchor attributes.

Orphan pages: If you are using a decent wordpress theme then the basic page navigations ensure that no page remain orphan (i.e without incoming links). But for the purpose of this auto linker, it makes sense to ensure that internal links are coming from the main body of the page, not just site navigation or Prev/Next links.

Any ideas what would you call this type of orphan page where they have links from sitemap or sitewide navigation links but no links pointing from the body of the post or page itself?