Plugin Lockout: Consume Alert

Coming to you this issue from the RV in a campsite here in Florida. With wind, rain, ants and other excitement. Took my son fishing and not everything has been cooperative, but hey…. I got a laptop and Starlink and…. let’s kick this issue out the door!

In this one, I’m going to have to call out Awesome Motive again. I want to talk about the tactic of plugin developers locking you out of aspects of your own website if you don’t renew their license. Did you know MemberPress does this, too?

We’ll also discuss some of the common messages that come up from the “Site Health” section of WordPress…. and whether you need to be concerned or not.

This week, a lot of folks in the WordPress world will be in Portland, Oregon at WordCamp US. I’m sure there will be some news coming from there this week.

But, me? I’m sitting in an RV. LOL!

OK, let’s get started….

Plugin Locking You Out Of Your Own Site: Is This Acceptable?

As you may know if you’ve been a subscriber for awhile, I had a fairly public breakup with Thrive Themes after a few years of recommending their stuff. This was after Awesome Motive acquired them and instituted a bunch of changes I thought were bad for end users.

Chief among them was that they will lock you out of your own content if you fail (or decide not) to renew your license. You literally cannot access your own content in order to edit it.

Last week, it came up again on a post on X. This time, the culprit is MemberPress.

If the license is not renewed, not only will they add additional fees to transactions, but they will also lock you out of admin screens. You cannot manage your own membership site anymore until you pay the license fee.

Both plugins come from the same ownership. Yep, it is Awesome Motive. This kind of thing is how they roll. Basically, any plugin you see the “WP Beginner Verified” seal on is one that is being managed by Awesome Motive.

The question is: Is this acceptable? Is this ethical? Legal?

I’m not questioning this because I don’t like buying plugin licenses. I pay quite a bit of money to maintain active licenses for plugins in the Concierge Toolkit. I am definitely a believer in supporting the developers who create the software I use in my business.

But, my tolerance for my site being held hostage by it is ZERO.

Is it legal? Yes, it is. Plugins in the WordPress ecosystem are covered by the GPL software license. Basically, they can build lock-out functionality into their plugins as long as the code is open source. Technically, you could go in there, find the code that locks you out, and get rid of it. Of course, most people won’t know how to do that.

I would say that locking users out of their sites like this goes against the spirit of open source, but it is legal.

Now, is it ethical? Depends on who you ask, frankly. I’ve talked to developers before who describe it as a balancing act. They have a need to stay sustainable and pay the bills so they want people to pay for the licenses for their hard work. How do you keep people from “stealing” the plugin and running it for free?

Especially in a world where so many people try like hell to not pay license fees. End users often don’t know just how much work goes into these plugins. Or they assume it is some big corporation making them, so it doesn’t really matter. That’s bad karma to think that way, but people do it all the time.

So, here’s where I stand…

Awesome Motive happens to be one of the worst in the space when it comes to tactics like this. I tend to avoid anything operated by them.

Their subscription fees for their software are usually way too high (if you look at the normal fee, not the one they hook you with). Back when I recommended Thrive Suite, it was $299/year and a great deal. Now, it is $599/year. MemberPress clocks in at $359/year for the Basic plan and goes all the way up to $799.

Now, companies can set their own price. And the software is good, so I get it. But…

To hold a user’s site hostage until they pay is not ethical, in my opinion. Keep in mind, your website belongs to YOU. You’re hosting it. You pay the hosting bill for it. From that perspective, it is unethical for a plugin developer to lock you out of it. Awesome Motive views their software as a SERVICE, but that would only be the case if they were hosting it. They aren’t.

Nowhere on their website is it crystal clear what will happen if the license expires. I see language deep in the terms of service, but it is still vague. I know full well most site owners are surprised when they get locked out.

Tools like Thrive Suite and MemberPress are VERY difficult to get out of once you’re deep in it. In the case of Thrive, you practically have to re-build the entire site. With MemberPress, it is a very drawn-out affair to convert over to another subscription system for a membership site.

So, I would think users would want to know this before using this kind of software! It violates all of my thoughts with regard to the importance of digital sovereignty.

When a plugin license expires, I believe you should renew it if you’re still using it. If you don’t, I’m ok with nag notices. I’m OK with offering no support and no updates and the developer basically saying “you’re on your own”. I’m OK with any hosted services from the company stopping. That all makes perfect sense to me.

What I am NOT OK with is the code crippling itself on purpose and locking you out of your own content on a site which you own and host yourself.

That’s like the plugin mafia.

Be Careful out there.

One of the things that makes the case with Awesome Motive worse is that this company acquired these plugins. A lot of the users of these plugins were customers before Awesome Motive came in and started these kinds of tactics. Now, in many cases, customers of the prior company are surprised when the new “awesome” tactics come bite them like that.

I’ve seen several instances now where site owners didn’t want to use Thrive Themes anymore, but felt forced to do so just so they could access their content again while we were busy re-building so as to finally ditch the platform.

The original Thrive Themes company never locked you out of your site. They offered a great software package, with frequent updates, good support… and even a Thrive University membership site to make the fee extra valuable. Then, Awesome Motive buys it and the good mojo blew off quickly. It was sad to watch.

Just be careful out there. And I would avoid any plugin that will hold your site hostage in such a way. Especially if it is a tool which would be really hard to get out of later.

Concierge Client Update

At the core, Concierge has been more or less about looking after your website. Being your “web guy” and simplifying the tech stuff for you and alleviating the need for you to waste time dealing with that stuff is sort of the point.

But, as you know, I have quite the background when it comes to the strategic side of business as well. For years, my focus was on teaching it. Business strategy, marketing, things like that.

I’m one of those guys who understands BOTH. I know the business and marketing end of things, but I can also geek out and handle the tech stuff. Frankly, I kind of enjoy the tech stuff more, which is why I pivoted into what is now Concierge.

But, I’m looking to a little more overtly combine my skills into Concierge.

Meaning, not just handle tech stuff, but also be a sort of advisor for my clients.

To advise on strategy and tactics. Ways to expand business. In addition to helping implement the tech stuff to make it happen.

It is the kind of thing I’ve been doing when needed anyway, but I figured I’d just embrace it.

The great thing about Concierge, too, is that I get to know the businesses of my clients somewhat. Most of my clients are with me for awhile. And, by nature, I work with less people within Concierge than I do with an open membership site like I used to do. That means I get to know the context my clients are working in.

So, for my clients… know that this is happening. It is not any kind of major change from what we’re doing now with Concierge, but I am going to put more intention (and tools and systems) behind helping my clients with some business strategy and executive planning.

If you have any cool ideas you’d like to run by me on things that would be super helpful, let me know!

I’d like to help my clients expand their business as much as I can, in addition to looking after the tech stuff.

WordPress News & Updates

MetaBox New User Interface. MetaBox AIO has gotten a new, updated interfac, with a new left sidebar and a floating toolbar. This is all part of their 5.0 release, which you can read about here. I probably owe it to myself to take another look at MetaBox. If you’re unfamiliar, it is a tool for custom fields, custom post types… and basically making WordPress into a fully dynamic CMS. It is like an alternative to Advanced Custom Fields, but in many ways, it looks better. Funny thing is, I think I have have an unlimited lifetime license for MetaBox and I never use it. I should check it out again.

WooCommerce 10.1. WooCommerce was released recently. In fact, there’s already been an incremental fix release for it as well. This version has a faster checkout, two new product collection blocks, and some other things. You can check out the full announcement here.

Cloudways CoPilot. While I no longer use Cloudways, I still keep tabs. And it looks like they’re launching CoPilot, their built-in AI agent to help you handle issues with your hosting faster. In this announcement post, it looks to me like CoPilot is more than just another chat agent. It looks like it has the ability to work directly with your server and provide insights and fixes. Will be interesting to see how this developers, and this is something that is going to become more the norm across the hosting industry.

WordCamp US 2025. People from across the world of WordPress are descending on Portland, OR this week for WordCamp US. I’m sure there will be some news that comes out of it. Hopefully nothing as dramatic as last year. I myself am not there, but we’ll see about next year.

WP Clean Admin. Jack Arturo (the creator of WP Fusion) has some side projects. And he just released a small little Chrome extension on Github called WP Clean Admin. The purpose is to hide all of the non-Core features of WP-Admin to make it looks more barebones. His purpose was for screenshots and other things, so as not to show all the “innards” of your site when you take screenshots.

Database Reset Pro. Ever wanted a reset button that just brings WordPress back to it’s default state without needing to re-install? Database Reset Pro was launched which does that. In fact, it looks like it has some smarts built-in, so it can preserve uploads, plugins, etc. Might be worth a test, although bear in mind, this plug is from SeedProd and has Awesome Motive involved. Could be some auto-installs and things involved, so just keep your eyes open.

AI Summaries And Changing Traffic Patterns. A post at Human Made discussed how AI summaries in search engines are changing the face of web traffic. Major drops in click-through traffic to websites from search engines. Site owners are seeing traffic declines as a result. There’s not much sense in complaining about it, because this is just how things are progressing. One needs to find ways to keep things sustainable without relying solely on search traffic.

87% of WordPress Exploits get Past The Hosting Protections. That’s the findings of Patchstack, in this writeup of a case study that found 87.8% of exploits were not stopped by the security setup of the hosting. The system that performed best was the Cloudflare WAF, which I will add is also baked into the hosting I provide for Concierge clients via Rocket.net. But, I will also say…. Patchstack has a vested interest in scaring people. Not that they’re being hyperbolic, but generally speaking, a secure hosting environment, quality plugins and maintaining your site properly keeps security issues away. Best practices, not paranoia, is what works.

Cart Abandonment Recovery 2.0 Launched. This free cart abandonment plugin for WooCommerce (built by the CartFlows devs) has been updated to version 2. It looks like they’re gearing up to a Pro version, but this one is free. Keep in mind, if you’re on FluentCRM, it has built-in cart abandonment so you probably don’t need this.

How To Interpret The WordPress “Site Health”

The WordPress folks were trying to be helpful when they came up with the “Site Health” setup inside of WordPress. But, most people end up ignoring it because they don’t know what to do about anything it says.

Not only that, but sometimes it just throws out warnings that aren’t actually that big a deal. Sometimes, it will warn you of “critical” issues, but there’s nothing critical about it in reality.

So, let’s discuss a few things you may observe with this “Site Health” thing. These are things I see on client sites. I won’t bother with the potential things I barely ever see.

Critical Issue: Autoloaded Options Could Affect Performance

If your site’s autoload options end up being beyond 800KB, then you will get this warning. If you’re not aware, autoload options are basically settings and stored information that is loaded up every time there’s a page view. The bigger this gets, the more it harms site performance.

Thing is, I consider anything under 1MB to be perfectly OK when it comes to autoload options. If your site is giving this warning but it is reporting 1MB or less, then there’s not a major problem at all.

If you want my help reducing your autoload options, just get in touch. There’s also a little code snippet that can be added to raise the threshold for your site and make the warning disappear. Object caching also helps reduce the performance impact of autoload options. A cohesive look at this issue is important, rather than just freaking out over the “critical issue”.

You should remove active plugins.

In an ideal perfect world, you wouldn’t have any inactive plugins sitting on your site. But, in the REAL world, this is something we do. We turn off a plugin and leave it sitting there in case we need to use it later.

In the real world, there’s nothing wrong with leaving it there. There’s always an outside chance that some really bad security issues is on that plugin that opens up a security hole, but the reality is that the code for an inactive plugin is not being executed. So, in almost all cases, it hurts nothing for it to be there outside of taking up disk space.

This is one of those things where you roll with your comfort level.

Performance Messages

You may get messages about recommended modules missing. Or the need to enable object caching. Thing is, these warnings usually don’t take into account the holistic understanding of the site and how it is working.

Object caching is one of the ones I see the most… and yes, technically, object caching can help performance. Thing is, it is only on the more dynamic sites that it tends to help more. Many sites will see little to no real world improvement with object caching. Just using standard caching (like FlyingPress) is all that you need.

Disk Space

One thing to keep an eye on is the amount of disk space your site is taking up. To see this, go to Site Health then click on the Info tab. Then go to Directories & Sizes. What you’ll see there is a breakdown of the disk space being used up by your site on your web host.

Now, if your web host only provides a certain amount of disk space, then this might be something you want to use as a diagnostic. It can help you find what is blimping up your site so badly. It is the /uploads/ folder that is usually the largest. You can save disk space by removing the unnecessary folders from the /uploads/ folder as well as optimizing images.

One thing I’ve seen many times is that the reported disk space in Site Health is not what your web host is reporting. In this case, that tells you that you have extra “stuff” sitting outside of the public_html folder where WordPress is sitting. And it may be useless, but you’d probably need to discuss that with your host.

Overall….

Overall, I find that this Site Health section often causes more concern than is warranted. Usually, it is something you can ignore. When in doubt, just ask me. But, frankly, this is a dashboard widget that I often simply hide so that it won’t cause any undue concern.

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