How To Automate The Boring Stuff In WordPress
As your website or eCommerce store grows, so does the work you need to do to upkeep your site, contacts, and everything else. This also means that the need for automation grows. The more stuff you can automate the fewer mistakes will happen because there will be less human interaction to break anything. But how can you automate WordPress and all the boring stuff related to it? In this article, we will teach you how to automate the boring stuff by using a plugin called Uncanny Automator.
Why automate your WordPress site?
Now the big question is “Why should I automate my WordPress site?” and the answer is quite simple. To save your time. Let’s face it, there is nothing more valuable than your time and by automating the boring stuff we can save your time for something more important.
The second reason which we already mentioned earlier is to lower the number of mistakes that can be done. Since a “robot” does exactly what it told every time there is less chance of doing mistakes than when a human would be doing the same stuff over and over and over again.
Third but not last, by automating your site you can increase your productivity. You will have more time to run your WordPress site and focus on the important stuff.
“What about blog posts? I can’t automate my writing, can I?”, yes you can and we even have a solution for that. But more on that later or simply click here to see how you can automate your writing as well.
What is Uncanny Automator?
Uncanny Automator is an automation tool for WordPress. You can build recipes that can do certain actions when certain triggers are triggered. You can, for example, build automation to move data from WordPress to Google Sheets or you could build automation to roll users to a certain course when they create an account on your eLearning website. All this and more is possible with the Uncanny Automator.
How to automate WordPress
But how do you automate the boring stuff with Uncanny Automator? Let’s dig in and see how to do this. First, we are going to need the Uncanny Automator plugin to be installed and activated on your WordPress. To do this click below on the link and preferably get the Uncanny Automator Pro while you are at it.
After installing and activating the plugin head on to the Automators dashboard. Here you can see the number of premium credits you have left for testing and the premium features if you haven’t purchased the premium plan for unlimited recipes and tasks.
Creating a new recipe
To create a new recipe simply click the “Add new” from the sidebar to get started on creating new automation. The first thing you will see is a prompt to request you if the recipe will be triggered on all users on only on logged-in users.
In our example, we chose the “Everyone” option. Continuing on we can then create our recipe. Information we need to add is:
- Recipe name
- Triggers (one or multiple)
- Actions, meaning what we want Automator to do when these trigger conditions are met.
For example, we could create a trigger that when a user lands on a landing page we will send a notification to Slack that the user is viewing our landing page. Please note that you will need the premium version on many of the integrations to work.
A few things you should notice when creating the recipe is that you don’t have the old “Publish” button anywhere. Instead, you need to click the small “Draft” buttons to turn each trigger and action as “Live”. To turn the recipe live you need to click the “Draft” button on the right, where you would normally see the “Publish” button to turn the recipe “Live”.
Automator logs
If you wish to see how your recipe, trigger, or action logs. You are going to need the Pro version of the Automator. Otherwise, they will be locked and will not be generated.
This is a great feature for those who want to see how well their automation is working and really help with the setup.
Automator integrations
Regarding Uncanny Automators integrations, there are tons of integration out of the box, ready to be used with the plugins you already might have in use. For example, you might be using ACF or Elementor Pro, or Formidable forms. All of these integrate and work with Automator out of the box so don’t need to code or create your own integrations for that reason.
For the full list of +80 integrations Uncanny Automator offers, click here.
Delay or Schedule actions
Another cool feature that will help you automate your WordPress website, introduced in the Uncanny Automator Pro version 3.0 introduced is the possibility to delay or schedule certain actions.
This is huge since now you can delay and schedule actions for whatever you want. For example, you might want to schedule a certain email sequence that is sent when a user buys a product or joins on a course, or registers as a reader.
How to automate content generation
If you wish to automate your content generation and create high-quality search engine optimized posts automatically, there is a solution for that as well. With a writing AI like Jasper (used to be known as Jarvis), you can easily generate SEO content.
Simply create your account by clicking here and you get 10 000 FREE words to test Jasper out.
Click to “Templates” and choose a template you wish to use, tell Jasper what you want it to write about it, and click “Generate”!
What about plagiarism? Jasper has a built-in plagiarism checker to check that there won’t be any plagiarism generated by you or Jasper. Jasper also generates completely unique text so this shouldn’t be even an issue for those who might be worried about plagiarism.
How to automate your social media
Now that we have automated our WordPress, blog posts, and pretty much everything else related to our website, we can head on and automate our social media. But how do we automate social media?
Well, there is an easy solution for that as well. We can use a service called Missinglettr. Missinglettr helps us generate social media posts, with images, from our existing content and will automatically schedule each post.
On top of this, you can automatically post each of your posts with Missinglettr to Medium, with automatic canonical linking, giving you even more exposure without hurting your SEO.
Conclusion
What have we learned? We have learned how to automate our WordPress with Uncanny Automator, how to automate content generation with Jasper, and how to automate our social media with Missinglettr.
In short, if you ever wish to automate all the boring stuff in your WordPress, there are a ton of tools how to do this and multiple ways to automate the most important aspects of your site, to ensure they are handled with care. Leaving you the time you need to focus on the important stuff.
