Powering Your Website Progress For Maximum Results With Taco Verdonschot

In this LMScast, Taco Verdonschot presents Progress Planner, a proactive solution for website optimization and maintenance made just for WordPress users, including developers, agencies, and site owners.

Taco makes a compelling analogy when he says that creating a beautiful website is only the first step, much like growing a garden. To remain healthy and functional over time, both require frequent care updates, cleanups, and continuous enhancements. This is the role of Progress Planner, which functions as an omnipresent and persistent setup wizard that keeps helping users even after the initial site creation is finished.

Progress Planner helps users properly optimize their tools by integrating with plugins like Yoast SEO to reveal hidden or overlooked options. Through the use of badges and points, Progress Planner gamifies the experience, motivating users to do activities they may otherwise put off. Progress Planner guarantees that websites continue to expand and function smoothly long after launch, whether it is by resolving minor SEO problems or finishing onboarding chores that developers overlooked during initial setup.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Taco Vendor Shot. That’s the best I can do with a Dutch last name. We’re gonna get into how to make your website progress better, get the tasks you need to get done to, to help builders also set their clients up for success.

It’s a really cool project. You can check that out@progressplanner.com. But first. Welcome to Show Taco. 

Taco Verdonschot: Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. We were chatting at a WordPress event and you were telling me about Progress Planner. I’m like, oh, this is cool. I build complex sites. Our users build complex sites, and there’s a lot of things that need to happen, even with just regular playing WordPress to get going.

But tell us in a nutshell, what is Progress Planner? 

Taco Verdonschot: I. So I like to use an analogy and that is where I compare your website to a garden. If you have a new plot of land and you want to build a beautiful garden out of it, you need to spend a lot of time and energy getting it ready, putting in the plans, designing everything.

It’s very similar with your website. You need to spend a lot of time and energy to get it up and running. But just like a garden, you can only sit back and relax and enjoy it for so long before little wheat start popping up. And you need to mow the lawn at some point. And with your websites, it’s the same.

You can only leave it alone for so long until you need to start doing little maintenance tasks. Maybe update the plugin, revise some content write a new piece of content. It’s those tasks that people oftentimes forget or really don’t like doing. It’s pretty much like me and gardening. I like having a nice garden.

I swear I hate gardening, so I need some extra motivation to do those tasks. And that’s where we build Progress Planner to be your little motivator to help you do those little maintenance tasks that weeding on your website. 

Chris Badgett: I think it’s really cool. I was thinking about it in terms of the user journey.

I. There’s a lot of stuff around like getting people to your site, getting traffic or getting a sale, a conversion. And then but the other half of the funnel is what happens after that. It’s about onboarding, activation. I. Retention, giving them coming back, staying around, telling their friends.

There’s like this whole other journey after the beginning of getting the traffic, which you know a lot about from Yost, SEO. Yeah, for sure. And we have these setup wizards as an example, like some WordPress plugins. All right, you got one shot to proactively give somebody some advice. And a lot of times if you’re in a hurry or you’ve been building sites for a while or something, you just close that thing.

Yeah, 

Taco Verdonschot: whatever. Yeah, exactly. And then later you’re 

Chris Badgett: like, wait, what was that thing I had to set up for this thing to work? And you, and then this is like a, it is like a setup wizard that never stops being proactive and working for your best interests. And I find that really cool. 

Taco Verdonschot: That’s yeah, exactly that.

And so right now we started fairly recently August last year, and we’re still billing new things and new checks and new tools and new tasks for you to do. But one of the cool things that we recently introduced is an integration with another plugin. And you. Probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that Yost as yo it’s a plugin that we know quite well since the majority of our team used to work at Yost.

So what we now do is we look at those settings in Yost as yo that were really hard to surface from within the plugin, and we help Yost users to make the most out of their SEO plugin. And that’s definitely something that we want to expand to other plugins as well. We’re looking for next integrations to see which plugins have a need to nudge their users into some of the settings, into workflows that they have in the plugin that their users tend to skip and will happily help them get their users activated to do all of those.

That’s awesome. 

Chris Badgett: I know as a guy who’s been trying to figure out SEO for a long time, I think I’m pretty decent at it. But it, it took me a while and I remember getting into the Yost tool and you had the workouts and there was some progress bars of Hey, don’t forget about this thing over here.

I just found it super helpful. Like you said, there’s buried. Components and pieces that if you miss it, you may be really hurting the success of your project. 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And those exist in plugins, but also in WordPress core. Yeah. One of the things that we see a lot with sites that have been around for years, that they still have the tagline, just another WordPress site.

Yeah. And if your theme doesn’t expose it on the front end. There’s no way you’re gonna see that unless you either dive into that menu and then it doesn’t stand out as being a problem. Or if you look at the source code, because WordPress does output your tagline on every single page, and it’s quite annoying if.

You are just one of those, just another web workforce website websites according to search engines, because they do see that output. So that’s one of the checks that we have in Progress Planner where we really find problems that oftentimes have existed on sites for years. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it makes total sense.

I think I just got it naturally ’cause I’m in the LMS space and progress tracking is a big part of what our software does. Yeah. And for most courses you can, you don’t complete it in one sitting, so you need to come back, figure out where you left off. Some people may jump around to different lessons out of order.

And need to know what’s done, what’s not done. And if that didn’t, that’s literally the whole point of the LMS and a lot of building a website is just like that. 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Absolutely. And so the interesting thing is you just talked about onboarding experience in your plugins, what we, and that works perfectly if the person setting up the website has all the information about the end result.

But especially if your website’s built by an agency, we oftentimes see that a more technical person is doing the initial setup and installing a set of plugins and all of that, and then later on a content team is filling the website. But if your plugin has shown its onboarding wizards to this developer who has no clue about the.

Eventual name of the site about social images, about users, what have you. They’re going to close all of those onboarding wizards. And then