The big news of the day for hosting and especially shared hosts is the announcement of WordPress Toolkit. WordPress Toolkit Lite is included and free with cPanel version 92, and there is also a paid upgrade called WordPress Toolkit Deluxe. I have had the chance to be looking at it since last week and there will be a full review but in short if you know Plesk WordPress Toolkit then you know everything about cPanel’s version (remember they are both part of WebPros Group which in turn is now owned by CVC Partners). If you don’t know Plesk’s version, it does the things you expect it to do, version deploying a WordPress site to managing multiples to upgrades for core, themes, and plugins.

Black Friday is Everywhere

All web hosting companies and related solutions are in absolute full swing to make sure you and your WordPress/WooCommerce site are ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (look for tags or Google #BFCM and BF/CM). And GN? (see below). Tops on our list is Brian Francoeur for Convesio, Is Your WooCommerce Hosting Black Friday Proof? Using Supervisor.com to load test your WooCommerce store to make sure it can handle sudden spikes in traffic: “We picked Supervisor.com because it’s easy to use and it’s based on bots using real browsers to simulate users. The use of real browsers creates a test environment that’s very similar to the loads created by concurrent real-world users on your site. The AI ensures that the simulation is realistic and not just a script being run to replicate the same behaviours over and over again.”

Infrastructure taken care of, next make sure your email and omnichannel marketing are up to snuff. Omnisend has my favorite term of the year Gray November (though I like to spell it grey, I digress) gets this going with Holiday Email Campaigns 2020: The Who, How, and When: “Year after year, one week at a time, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have expanded to a month-long holiday shopping season, also known as Gray November. This year, however, expect Gray November to shift even earlier into October.”

Finally, collect that payment, self referential to yesterdays Morning Coffee: Payments.

Speaking of Epik (read the Payments post), I actually did get a few minutes on the phone with Rob Monster, CEO of Epik. He would not go on record with any comment regarding the PayPal vs Epik issue except to point me to the blog. Feel free to make your own conclusions.

Movers and Shakers

Big congrats to Dwayne McDaniel, yes that Dwayne McDaniel, for his new role as Developer Advocate at Stackbit (which by the way was mentioned by Mathias Biilmann in his interview)! We’ve got some good shaking for Wednesday:

October 28 @ 11:30 CT: Masterclass in Website Security with BlogVault

October 28 @ 14:00 CT: WordPress Community Social – Customer Journey

Don’t miss them! And the rest of the events.

Correction: Original post stated Oakley as the owners of WebPros, CVC Partners is the existing owner.