This guide is for site owners looking for expert guidance in building, launching, growing, monetizing, maintaining, and selling an online business based on the MyListing WordPress theme.
Implementing 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) means that only users who know your password and have a device to verify a security code can gain access to your accounts. I highly recommend implementing 2FA for every account you log into that offers it.
⚡ Bitwarden is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
Procure your domain names, and to avoid brand confusion (i.e., prevent others from confusing your brand with someone else), consider buying TLD (Top-level Domain) extensions (fitness.com, fitness.net, etc.) and region-specific options (fitnesscharlotte.com, fitnesscharlotte.net, etc.) for your brand.
A lot of good can come with the right name, and a lot can go wrong later on if you don’t get it right. Therefore, it’s crucial that you make the right decision. Take some time to consider your target audience, future growth, long-term acquisition/buy-out, etc.
⚡ If you need a new domain or already have one hosted somewhere and want to switch, I recommend Cloudflare.
Website owners often use a free email account (Gmail, Outlook.com, website hosting email, etc.) to get started. While I understand this temptation, I recommend using a business-grade email solution from Day 1 to help protect your email reputation and to ensure you’re using a vanity domain (e.g., hello@domain.com).
Procure your business email, and I recommend services like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
⚡ Microsoft 365 is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
It’s critical to document everything (securely) as you build your online business.
Documentation is essential for daily operations and becomes extremely valuable should you ever hire employees or sell your business. Keep your documentation consolidated as much as possible rather than using 20 tools with similar features.
These are your processes and procedures for dealing with certain aspects of the business, like onboarding/offboarding employees, onboarding/offboarding clients, support ticket management, etc. In short, you should document processes and procedures to avoid mistakes when performing them in the future and to have them ready for handoff if you ever decide to sell your business.
I recommend Airtable (free) for storing and managing this information, which is just one of many features of this powerful solution.
I recommend Bitwarden (free) as the solution to generate unique and strong passwords and securely store them.
⚡ Airtable and Bitwarden are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
This is a critical step in launching a business. The last thing you want to do is spend a lot of time and money building something only to find out someone is already doing business under a similar name or, worse yet, the exact name.
Start by creating a list of your top business keywords and then plug those into Namecheap’s Business Name Generator tool.
After you narrow down your top list of business names, run those names through Namechk to find out which social media account names are available. The need to procure the best domain names, for example, is obvious, but what’s not so obvious (until it is often too late) is the need to procure critical social media accounts for a business.
If, for example, you want to build a photography-based website, having an optimally named Instagram account is likely vital. If you are building a food recipe website, having a Pinterest account with the right name is ideal. Once you’ve completed your research, you should start procuring your domain name(s), social media accounts, etc.
I recommend creating a new Google Account (e.g., name@gmail.com) that will be used for website purposes to shield your everyday business email account (e.g., name@company.com) from all the potential noise and spam.
Use this account when signing up for services, where possible, rather than using your business account.
Once you’ve procured your domain name(s) and defined your color scheme, it’s time to consider building your social media presence.
You’ll want to procure any social media accounts that make sense for your business/brand to be a part of, regardless of whether you need them immediately.
Once you’ve procured your social media accounts, you’ll want to build out each one, apply consistent branding across all accounts, and complete the account as much as possible. When it comes to the images for your social accounts, knowing what image size to use is as simple as doing a quick web search for ‘social media image sizes.’
Set up communication channels between your social media accounts and your website to ensure two-way communication where it makes sense. I recommend using SEOPress for this.
⚡ SEOPress is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Online Presence
Did you know that YouTube is the second-biggest search engine after Google? Sometimes, YouTube can get your business found before Google searches do.
Consider using YouTube to build awareness for your business, whether sharing your knowledge, introducing products, etc.
MyListing Club Guides – Social Media
An excellent option for connecting with people outside of your business is to give them an easy way to book time with you and your team. There are many solutions out there that offer booking, some free and some paid.
⚡ View the booking solutions that are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Online Booking
To help offset the costs of running your website, are there any services you would like to offer as part of the different membership levels?
For example, a photographer building a photography-based directory could offer consultations, training/courses, etc. There may be services you don’t perform yourself but could outsource to people or vendors you trust. For example, a photographer could offer custom framing, even if it’s not their job.
Are there any strategic partnerships you could form to help bring value to your users/customers?
For example, a photographer building a photography-based directory could partner with a vendor that provides custom-framing services. That vendor might then work under the guise of your brand (i.e., white label) or work transparently as a trusted vendor.
Create a pricing model that is easy to understand, matches your brand/message, and entices potential users/customers to sign up for your platform.
While having lifetime, annual, and monthly plans on the same platform may be tempting, consider this carefully and put yourself in the shoes of the person potentially going through your sales funnel. Would you get overwhelmed with all the options?
If you offer lifetime or annual plans, are you prepared to refund thousands of dollars should you experience a change of heart with your business? What if you fall into a hardship?
For the brand/message aspect, sometimes it makes sense to create pricing tier names that are cute or catchy, not the typical Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc.
Founding members believe in you, your products, and your services and are willing to participate in your offerings while you are still in the initial launch phase of your business.
They help you populate your platform to get SEO working and present an active community with quality participants. Your founding members should feel (and know) that they are getting a great deal. Consider a lifetime membership, a lengthy FREE period, a heavy discount, etc.
An affiliate program offers businesses a cost-effective way to boost sales and brand visibility by partnering with affiliates who promote their products or services.
MyListing Club Guides – Affiliate Program
As the website owner, consider displaying social media reviews (e.g., Google Reviews) on your website. By collecting and showing other customers’ experiences, you can help potential customers make faster purchasing decisions by establishing trust.
If applicable, contemplate incorporating social reviews into your website’s listings. This is a fantastic upsell opportunity, as many listing owners depend on reviews to legitimize their business (products, services, etc.).
As one website owner said the other day, “Social media reviews are critical to our business and the businesses of our listing owners. Reviews are everything to us.”
MyListing Club Guides – Social Media
There is no way around it. If you run a website, you must have policies (Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, etc.) to protect your business and users.
While crafting your policies on your own or copying entire policies from other websites may be tempting, every business has different requirements. It’s not worth the risk of guessing what policies you need and what each one needs to include.
To help protect your business from potential fines and lawsuits, I recommend automating your website policies using Termageddon.
⚡ Termageddon is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Policies
Your website will have areas where an email address must be specified to send/receive correspondence to/from users and customers.
For this, I recommend using a business email address (e.g., hello@domain.com) to maintain professionalism and to take advantage of the advanced security/sending enhancements business email provides to help ensure email deliverability.
Cloudflare is a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) designed to make everything you connect to the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. It’s a solution so well-regarded for the offerings that my preferred website host (Kinsta) partnered with it to bring enterprise-level security and performance features to their customers at no extra cost.
⚡ Cloudflare is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Start with a solid foundation (hosting), or you’ll set your website up for failure.
Premium WordPress hosting offers enhanced performance with faster load times through optimized servers, caching, and CDN integration, improving user experience and SEO rankings. It provides robust security features like malware scanning, automatic backups, and advanced firewalls to protect against threats.
Scalability ensures your site handles traffic spikes without downtime. You also get 24/7 expert support from WordPress specialists, premium storage, free SSL certificates, and more.
⚡ Kinsta is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Website Hosting
SSL Certificates help ensure a secure path for the data transmitted on your website, enforcing a secure end-to-end connection over HTTPS. Nowadays, most hosting vendors provide a free SSL Certificate; if your vendor does not, it’s time to look for another.
MyListing Club Guides – Website Hosting
Before you start building your website, you should turn off all levels of caching (Edge Caching, Server Caching, Page Caching, etc.) so you are not constantly fighting to clear your cache to see your changes.
Your staging website is a clone of your production WordPress website. On it, you should test new themes, plugins, WordPress updates, etc., before rolling them out to your production website. These days, most hosting vendors provide a free staging environment; if your vendor does not, it’s time to look for another vendor.
⚡ Kinsta is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Website Hosting
WordPress Dashboard > Settings
For website security, it’s essential to ensure HTTPS (e.g., https://domain.com) is part of the URL rather than HTTP (http://domain.com). Websites that operate over HTTPS also gain significant performance enhancements.
This is the address WordPress will use to send important notifications about your website, so it needs to be monitored. Once you enter an email address, someone with access must check the inbox and confirm the address.
WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings > Set to ‘Post Name.’
WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Media
The sizes specified below will work very well for most use cases.
Suppose you’re working with a website where the settings above were not in place before uploading images. Configure the settings above and then use the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin (free) to resize your existing images.
WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Themes
A WordPress theme is a group of files (graphics, style sheets, and code) that dictates the overall appearance of your website.
As an advanced WordPress user, you can safely remove all themes except the parent theme. You can always use SFTP with a tool like FileZilla (free) to access your website’s file system and upload a new theme if something goes wrong with your website due to the current theme.
However, if you are not an advanced user, leave the latest core WordPress theme (or another super lightweight theme) on your website for troubleshooting.
Maintaining a tight ship is crucial. Avoid introducing unnecessary software on your website, as it can require updates, add bloat to your database, and serve as an additional entry point for hackers.
You can easily delete a WordPress theme by clicking on Theme Details for the particular theme and then clicking Delete.
WordPress Dashboard > Plugins
After you have the MyListing theme in place, you’ll be presented with an option to Begin installing plugins, which is MyListing helping guide you on which core plugins should be installed.
One of the recommended plugins is Contact Form 7, but I advise against installing it because it’s challenging to use, lacks features, and slows down websites. Instead, I recommend using Elementor Pro for any form you add to your MyListing website.
Elementor Pro forms are easy to work with and have a ton of functionality. Furthermore, Elementor Pro forms only load assets when a form is present, unlike Contact Form 7, which loads assets on every single post or page regardless of whether it contains a form.
Lastly, I cannot imagine building a MyListing website without Elementor Pro, so why not eliminate the need for Contact Form 7 from the start?
⚡ Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Replace Contact Form 7 With Elementor Pro
WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Themes
A WordPress child theme is needed when you want to customize or modify the parent theme without losing any changes you make when it is updated. Below are some scenarios where a WordPress child theme is recommended:
MyListing Club Guide – How and When to Install the MyListing Child Theme
WordPress Dashboard > Plugins
Starting on Day 1, plugin usage should be carefully considered.
Every installed plugin impacts your website database, which often remains the case even after removing a plugin. This is because some developers configure their plugins to retain their settings in the database, just in case the plugin is ever reinstalled.
The best practice is not to use your production website as a testing ground. Instead, test plugins in a staging or local dev environment. Only if you determine a plugin passes your tests should it reach your production website.
MyListing Club Guide – Evaluate Plugins Before Adding Them to Your MyListing Website
Color communicates the message behind the design on both visual and psychological levels. It’s one of the most important elements because, when used correctly, color can reflect the niche and even the overall business marketing strategy.
Most of the time, following these steps suffices. If you need to perform more advanced tasks, such as introducing gradients, please refer to the ‘Moderate’ steps.
These steps are for those who want to introduce gradients into their website design (backgrounds, text, etc.) and are likely working with a website professional. If you’re looking for something more advanced, such as secondary or tertiary color schemes, please refer to the ‘Advanced’ steps.
These steps are typically more suited for website professionals.
Typography promotes legibility and helps communicate a website’s messaging, tone, and sentiment. Clean, easy-to-read, and visually attractive typography attracts people.
For the best performance, consider using system fonts before adding Google Fonts, custom fonts, etc. If system fonts are not a fit for your project, choose at most three fonts that complement each other while allowing you to differentiate your headings (H1-H6) and body text.
When looking for fonts to pair with each other, I recommend FontJoy (free). You also want to consider font scaling, and I recommend TypeScale (free) for that.
Implementing fluid typography will save you time and headaches while making your website more scalable and manageable in the future.
Responsive typography in Elementor usually depends on a breakpoint system, which is effective for many design aspects but not ideal for typography.
Traditional breakpoint-based systems cause abrupt changes in text size at specific points. On the other hand, fluid typography ensures smooth, gradual text resizing across different viewport sizes.
Creating a responsive typography framework within Elementor (and the WordPress editor) can simplify and enhance your web design process. With a fluid typography framework, your font sizes automatically adjust, ensuring each text element scales proportionately across all screen sizes.
MyListing Club Guides -Typography
Elementor > Settings > Advanced
I recommend disabling this setting. Otherwise, if WordPress blocks were anywhere other than the content container, this setting would break them. This limitation is not attributable to Elementor; it is simply a result of the capabilities of WordPress filters.
With more and more people building with the WordPress core blocks, this setting will only apply in some cases. It already doesn’t apply if a page is built with Elementor or has even a single WordPress core block in its content.
Elementor is overstepping with some optimization settings and implementing things with tunnel vision. As I’ll continue to say, anything labeled an “experiment,” as this setting is, should be used cautiously.
I recommend disabling this setting. Elementor has been seen improperly adding fetch on images below the fold, creating a problem where the image will load sooner than it should. This configuration essentially breaks lazy loading, which could hurt your site’s performance.
I recommend disabling this setting. Otherwise, Elementor will include additional information that doesn’t belong in your source code. In short, Elementor uses the Generator Tag to gather information about your website while adding additional bloat.
Elementor > Settings > Features
Experiments give Elementor users the opportunity to test and shape new features before they become a “stable” feature for the general public. Any experiment you activate has the potential to conflict with your website or negatively impact its performance. They are called “experiments” for a reason.
Elementor’s experimental features should only be set to ‘Active’ if all of the following conditions are met:
It’s generally safe to activate any of the experiments listed in this section. Again, only enable the experiments you intend to use and deactivate the others. Each feature you turn on loads code on your website, so be sure you’re willing to take a slight performance hit for each feature you activate.
⚡ Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
To access these settings, edit any page or template with Elementor and click on the Site Settings icon at the top of the Elementor editor.
With your color scheme defined, it’s time to set your global colors in Elementor. Below are some benefits of utilizing Elementor’s Global Color feature.
Global Fonts allow you to define font styles that apply to Elementor text-based elements.
Take your time in perfecting these fonts. What you set initially regarding font size, weight, and the font family will likely be adjusted as you build.
Global Fonts ensure consistent, fluid typography across all Elementor-based content (pages, posts, etc.). Any adjustments made to a Global Font automatically get applied to any element (heading, paragraph, etc.), which is an excellent approach for website manageability.
The only settings I adjust in this area are the body font size, which I modify to address an accessibility and responsive font issue with the MyListing theme, and the link color. Global Fonts handles the rest.
MyListing Club Guides -Typography
This comes down to personal preference. I set my width to 1200 px.
By default, those who use the MyListing theme will give their users an undesirable double lightbox experience. For instance, this occurs when a user clicks on a gallery image within a listing.
To prevent this, the Image Lightbox setting needs to be disabled. (Note: This also disables the lightbox experience for areas of a MyListing website that have nothing to do with the theme, such as various Elementor-based image widgets, so you must choose the lessor of two evils.)
⚡ Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
How you add your logo depends on whether you’re adding it using MyListing’s Theme Options or with Elementor Pro.
Let’s discuss the SVG file format since this is the first task; you might need to enable SVG support. SVG files can be scaled up or down without hindering their clarity. They are incredibly lightweight, keeping your website leaner, and they are ideal for illustrations like logos, icons, and graphs.
For security reasons, WordPress won’t let you upload an SVG without some help. That help must come from a plugin that provides SVG support, with the Conditionally Allow SVG Uploads code snippet, or the Elementor trick outlined below.
WordPress Dashboard > Elementor > Tools > Maintenance Mode
Consider putting up a Coming Soon page so that anyone who tries to view your website during the initial building phase sees a well-designed page rather than whatever you’re working on in the background.
There are many solutions for building a Coming Soon page. Still, I recommend using Elementor Pro since that’s a plugin you likely already use. You can implement a Coming Soon page using nothing but the free version of Elementor, but unlike Elementor Pro, you are limited in which widgets you can use.
It is also advisable to capture email addresses while building your website. You can do this by adding a contact form to your Coming Soon page, which connects to an email marketing solution (e.g., MailPoet, FluentCRM, etc.), and for this, you would need Elementor Pro.
⚡ Elementor Pro, MailPoet, and FluentCRM are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Email Marketing
MyListing Club Templates – Coming Soon
The Elementor Coming Soon Bypass Add-on from MyListing Club allows users to bypass Elementor’s Coming Soon feature by simply appending ?bypass_maintenance=1 to a website URL (e.g., mylisting.club/?bypass_maintenance=1)
⚡ Elementor Coming Soon Bypass is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
WordPress > Users > Add New
When creating additional admin accounts for your websites, adhere to the following best practices.
Also known as the blogging account, these users can produce content (i.e., a blog) for your website but don’t necessarily need permissions as an admin account would. After you create this account, you’ll need to edit it again to access some of the settings mentioned below.
WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Reading
You need a page that will serve as our home page. Creating or assigning a page on your website as the home page will make the topics below relevant.
While your website is being built, it’s best to discourage search engines from indexing it. If you are already using Elementor’s Coming Soon mode, you can skip this step. Otherwise, discouraging search engines from the WordPress Reading Settings is an effortless route to take.
If you limit search engine visibility during the development of your website, you need to reverse this approach when it’s time to launch.
WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Discussion
Do you want to allow comments on your website? If so, should you require commenters to log in before commenting? Should comments be approved before they are displayed on your website?
MyListing Note: Listing comments/reviews run off the WordPress comments system, so if you want to use them on your site, be careful with the settings here.
Default Post Settings > Allow People to Submit Comments on New Posts > Uncheck
Regarding user avatars, it is important to note that enabling this feature may negatively impact your website’s performance. While this hit is minimal, every one adds up and might slow down your website. You might want to consider disabling avatars until you determine they are necessary for your use.
WordPress Dashboard > Posts > Categories
Please rename the default Uncategorized category to reflect the main category for your website or business. If you can’t think of a specific category, simply name it to match your website name.
WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Menus
Website navigation is an essential aspect of any website. It helps visitors find what they want and gives your site structure.
When adding external links to your WordPress menu, consider including a nofollow tag. This tag tells search engines not to pass any link authority from your page to the other website that you’re linking to.
WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Customize > Site Identity > Site Icon
A site icon, also known as a favicon, is a unique icon for your website. It is shown on your site visitors’ browser tab and as a bookmark and home screen app icon when saved to a browser or phone.
You can follow my more advanced guide for properly adding a favicon to your website or upload an image of 512 x 512 px that you either design yourself or create using a favicon generator.
MyListing Club Guide – Properly Add a Favicon to Your MyListing Website
You can build custom headers with Elementor Pro if you need to do more than the theme provides.
MyListing Club Templates – Custom Headers
Most sites will need more than the theme offers, so you can use Elementor Pro to create custom footers. I recommend you build a custom Elementor footer each time and not use the default MyListing footer.
MyListing Club Templates – Custom Footers
Website owners need to ensure they can be easily reached, and one of those ways is adding contact forms to places (the Contact Us page, popups, website footer, etc.) where visitors are accustomed to looking for them.
Since a lot of us MyListing theme users are already using Elementor Pro, we should consider using their form solution so as to not add more plugins than are needed to our sites.
MyListing Club Templates – Contact Pages and Forms
Using a chat widget is another easy way to reach website owners, and they provide much more than just a mechanism for communication, as their ability to convert customers is undeniable.
Having a chat widget on your website is a great way to connect with your customers, giving them some comfort knowing you are just a click away from anything related to purchasing, account management, etc.
Understandably, there are concerns about being too accessible, but you can quickly mitigate this by configuring the hours you are available to chat, blocking people with bad intentions, etc. In short, you can be as accessible as you want.
Correctly configuring your website’s transactional email is crucial to avoid it landing in SPAM/Junk folders or not reaching its intended recipient.
MyListing websites rely heavily on transactional email to communicate order confirmations, password resets, and account alerts.
Until your website has a significant number of users, customers, and sales, you don’t need to concern yourself with more complicated email sending services. All you need is MailPoet, which provides all the necessary features for email sending, thereby eliminating the need for additional email services and an SMTP plugin.
⚡ MailPoet is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
If your website ever outgrows MailPoet, it’s time to level up your email sending service to accommodate high-volume email sending.
⚡Amazon SES and FluentSMTP are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Transactional Email
Newsletters are an excellent way to help you stay in constant contact with your community, announcing new content, deals, platform changes, etc.
When you’re just starting out with a newsletter and have few subscribers, all you need is MailPoet.
⚡ MailPoet is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
If your website outgrows MailPoet, it’s time to level up.
⚡ Amazon SES, FluentSMTP, and FluentCRM are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Newsletter
Every website should have a 404 page that displays when users stumble upon content that is no longer available and produces a broken link. This page should be lightweight and have clear/straightforward calls to action to get users back on track, like getting them back to your Home page at a minimum.
Having a lighthearted 404 page is a wonderful way to show the business/brand personality and ease any tensions that may arise from users having difficulty with your website.
The MyListing theme includes a super basic default 404 template. While this template is better than nothing, it should be replaced with a professional-looking custom 404 page.
Want to see what the template looks like? Enter a fake URL (e.g., domain.com/fake-page) for your website into your browser address bar.
Elementor Pro provides a simple way to add a 404 page to your website.
⚡ Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Templates – 404 Pages
Including testimonials throughout your website is a fantastic idea to help you build trust with your potential customers.
While more information from your past customers is beneficial, it’s advisable to establish a baseline for consistency, finding the minimum amount of information that past customers are willing to provide. For instance, you don’t want some testimonials to have images while others don’t, or some to show company names while others don’t.
MyListing Club Templates – Testimonials
Throughout my years of running a WordPress agency and several WordPress-based businesses, I have never needed a separate backup plugin for my sites or my clients’ sites. What’s up for debate is whether you need a separate backup plugin.
Using a separate backup plugin can slow down your website and add unnecessary administrative overhead, so I recommend the following solution stack, which also gives you more recoverability options.
WP Umbrella is a cloud solution I use to manage websites. It has robust backup options, allowing you to back up your website every hour and giving you another restore option to complement your server-level backups for redundancy.
⚡ WP Umbrella is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Easily and Effectively Manage Multiple WordPress Sites With WP Umbrella
Kinsta is a leader in the website hosting industry, and one reason is its powerful yet simple-to-use backup options. Many clients rely solely on Kinsta for their backups, and they have been just fine.
⚡ Kinsta is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Website Hosting
If you don’t have the highest confidence in your web host’s backups, you should find another web host. If your web host’s backups are inadequate but you’re unwilling to switch hosts, I recommend exploring separate WordPress backup plugins.
⚡ WP Umbrella and Kinsta are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Website Backup
Throughout my years of running a WordPress agency and several WordPress-based businesses, I have never needed a separate security plugin for my sites or my clients’ sites. What’s up for debate is whether you need a separate security plugin.
Instead of using a separate security plugin that can slow down your website and add unnecessary administrative overhead, I recommend protecting your website at the perimeter before threats even reach the application level (i.e., WordPress).
Let’s break down some of the different levels of WordPress website security so you can make the best-informed decision.
This solution enhances security at the perimeter, preventing malicious actors from accessing the infrastructure hosting your website. I put Cloudflare (free) in front of every website I manage.
⚡ Cloudflare is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Kinsta is a leader in the website hosting industry. One reason for their popularity is their emphasis on security. Should bad guys sneak into your environment, Kinsta support will fix it for you for no additional cost.
⚡ Kinsta is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Website Hosting
If you don’t have the highest confidence in your web host’s security, you should find another web host. If your web host’s security is inadequate but you’re unwilling to switch hosts, I recommend exploring separate WordPress security plugins.
You’ve probably encountered 2FA before, whether online banking or using some other platform where they take security seriously. In the simplest terms, 2FA is something you have (e.g., your phone) and something you know (e.g., a password).
You can make it almost impossible for users to log into the backend of your website because WordPress supports 2FA. Please make sure to carefully review the feature set and vulnerability history of any 2FA plugin you are considering using.
⚡ Two-Factor (Free) is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
Use good judgment when operating your website or doing anything online that involves credentials, personally identifiable information (PII), etc.
MyListing Club Guides – Security
After activating the WooCommerce plugin, the setup wizard kicks off. We want to disable the wizard and set everything up manually.
At this point, WooCommerce will take you to the WooCommerce home page within your website. We want to jump over to the WooCommerce settings (WordPress Dashboard > WooCommerce > Settings) to run through the various settings tabs.
WooCommerce > Settings > General
Please review and adjust all settings as needed. I’ve outlined some notable mentions.
WooCommerce > Settings > Products
Review and adjust all settings as desired/required. I’ve outlined some notable mentions.
WooCommerce > Settings > Products > General
WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Inventory
WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Approved Download Directories
WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping
Review and adjust all settings as needed.
WooCommerce > Settings > Payments
The way WooCommerce presents the payment options, they want you to install their WooCommerce Payments solution, but be sure to do your homework before you do that.
For example, WooCommerce Payments offers a Stripe integration, but it’s not the same as the standalone Stripe solution (i.e., the Stripe WordPress Plugin). Please ensure you are aware of the differences.
My preferred payment method is Stripe, and I walk you through setting up your Stripe account and the Stripe WordPress plugin below.
The main tasks to concern yourself with are creating your Stripe account, completing the setup wizard, and configuring your branding.
As we proceed into the next section, we’ll refer back to this one as part of the instructions.
MyListing Club Guides – Stripe
WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy
If your website must comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), you will want to pay close attention to this area.
Please review and adjust all settings as needed. I’ve outlined some notable mentions. While every project is different, I’ve provided my general approach here.
Enable all so you don’t have to mess with password complexity generators and their performance/administrative overhead.
Enable all because people should have the right to have this information removed, regardless of whether my website falls under GDPR or not.
Enable all because people should have the right to have this information removed, regardless of whether my website falls under GDPR or not.
To help protect your business from potential fines and lawsuits, I recommend Termageddon.
⚡ Termageddon is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Policies
WooCommerce > Settings > Emails
Please review and adjust all settings as needed. I’ve outlined some notable mentions.
Some WooCommerce emails relate to the website admin(s), and some relate to your customers. You can choose which email notifications are enabled/disabled, who the recipient(s) should be, add additional content to the messages, and more.
Note: Whichever email was entered for WordPress Dashboard > Settings > General > Administration Email Address will automatically be used for email notifications related to WooCommerce. So, be sure to review and adjust as needed.
Pay attention to what your emails say and how they look. Maintaining consistent branding throughout your business is essential to maintaining customer trust. You can style your email template using WooCommerce’s built-in options, with MailPoet, or with FluentCRM.
⚡ MailPoet and FluentCRM are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Transactional Email
WooCommerce > Settings > Integration
This area is only relevant if you wish to automatically populate the customer’s country/region during the checkout process using MaxMind Geolocation Integration.
The cons outweigh the pros of this. The only pro is that it saves the customer minimal time when selecting their country/region. The cons are a.) adds very slight performance overhead, b.) adds to your database, c.) could potentially show the wrong price to the customer (see Geolocate with page caching support), etc.
WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced
WooCommerce should show you that you have all the pages you need, except the Terms and Conditions page. If you still need to do so, create one and specify it here.
Enable Tracking > Uncheck
Show Suggestions > Uncheck
Order Data Storage
Watch my WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) for Scalability and Reliability video if you want to learn more about this, but essentially, you want to use HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) with compatibility mode enabled until you stop seeing orders that need to be synced between the legacy technology (WordPress Posts Storage) and HPOS.
This area concerns WooCommerce Analytics, which provides valuable information to store owners. However, this information is optional for some store owners because online payment platforms like Stripe and PayPal can provide similar data, such as revenue and taxes.
Keeping WooCommerce Analytics enabled (it’s enabled by default) is truly specific to your particular business needs. While it’s more complex than simply balancing convenience against WordPress Dashboard clutter and performance overhead, it’s still quite straightforward.
Keep this option enabled, and once the data starts rolling in, evaluate it and see if it’s worth keeping. By navigating to Analytics > Settings, you can fine-tune the data collection and reporting. That said, if you know right away that you don’t need this information, disable WooCommerce Analytics, which will clean up your WordPress Dashboard and reduce some performance overhead.
When/if you turn this feature off, all WooCommerce Analytics will be removed from your WordPress Dashboard. This is just something to remember for both good and bad.
This lets you know the source (origin) of your orders. Examples are Direct (i.e., your website) and Organic (e.g., Google). If you don’t need this feature for whatever reason (you’re tracking this data another way, you have no interest in the info, etc.), disable it because it adds a performance hit to your website.
Avoid this area unless you know what you’re doing and cannot live without one of the features. They are called “experimental” features for a reason.
WooCommerce > Settings > Subscriptions
This area is only visible and relevant if you use the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin to provide subscriptions for your website.
⚡ WooCommerce Subscriptions is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
This option is disabled by default. Enabling this feature will allow customers to check out without entering their payment details when signing up for subscriptions that don’t require an initial payment.
This option is disabled by default. I recommend enabling it to automatically attempt to recover recurring revenue without manual intervention.
Early Renewal
This option is enabled by default. I recommend disabling it (until users request it) to prevent adding one more button to the customer’s subscription area, which would create new questions and additional administrative overhead.
By default, WooCommerce doesn’t send notification emails to customers for subscription renewals and expirations. I recommend enabling the notifications.
By default, customers cannot switch subscriptions. This should be considered, as it allows customers to upgrade/downgrade their subscriptions easily without your assistance.
For MyListing websites using Listing Subscriptions, I recommend enabling subscription switching ‘Between Grouped Subscriptions’ so customers can easily upgrade/downgrade their subscriptions without requiring your assistance.
This option only appears if you allow subscription switching. I enable this setting for my websites: For Upgrades of All Subscription Products. I don’t adjust other proration settings, but since every business is unique, please consider your options.
This only appears if you allow subscription switching. By default, the buttons are labeled Upgrade or Downgrade, which may or may not be appropriate for your business.
I recommend using Listing Subscription Packages over MyListing’s default Listing Packages for several reasons, including upgrade/downgrade plan options, keeping listings online indefinitely as long as subscriptions are paid, and more.
MyListing Club – MyListing Product Packages
Theme Tools > Theme Options > General
This is the logo that will appear in the default MyListing header. The Header options (within this project template) area, or MyListing, is where you can further control how the Site Logo is displayed.
You can specify an asset (e.g., a site logo) or an animation (e.g., a material spinner) to load as visitors wait for areas of your website to load. However, I recommend not using this feature to avoid additional performance overhead. Also, this feature has no place on a professional website.
This image will appear to the right of the login/register form on devices with a resolution of at least 1200px. I recommend using an image that is 1920 px wide. As with all images you add to your website, optimize this image using an image compression solution before uploading it.
This is the primary color that will appear all over your MyListing website. The theme uses this color in areas that are only sometimes obvious by applying variations of the accent color. I recommend changing the accent color to the color of your scheme that best represents a standout call-to-action, like a button.
This color will apply to the background of every page of your MyListing website. By default, MyListing assigns a hex code of #f4f4f4 and adjusts their designs to fit that background color. I recommend switching this color to white (#ffffff) and using Elementor to assign background colors as desired.
Whenever you’re on a website, click on an image or page element, which enlarges while the rest of the web page greys out behind it; that’s a lightbox. A lightbox is a panel that overlays your website pages, focusing the viewer’s attention on an image or images.
There are areas of a MyListing website (cover images, grid galleries, etc.) where a lightbox is invoked once images are clicked. MyListing has settings that allow you to display an image’s title, description, caption, or alt text.
Unless you have 100% control over the images uploaded to your website, this feature will likely not be helpful because image optimization solutions often strip out image metadata to reduce the overall image size.
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Header
You can skip this if you’re going to build a completely custom header with Elementor Pro. However, replicating all of MyListing’s default header features (if that’s what you’re hoping to do) is challenging and will likely require hiring a developer.
I recommend the default setting. There is an option to set an extended height version of the header, but in my experience, people typically do not use this option, and it also presents design issues.
Typically, people use the default setting of Full Width. However, there is an option to set a Boxed Width height if that fits better with your website’s design plans. If you try the ‘Boxed’ option, I recommend setting the minimum width to 1200 px.
These settings depend entirely on the project, so use what fits with the design plans of your website.
This setting ultimately depends on the project, so use what fits with your website’s design plans. If you want your heading to stay at the top of the page when users scroll your website, you’re likely interested in this setting. I like using this option.
I recommend placing your menu on the right rather than using the default setting of Left. I’ve seen no MyListing website with a menu shown on the left.
These settings depend entirely on the project, so use what fits with your website’s design plans. The main thing to keep in mind here is mobile responsiveness.
MyListing allows you to set a height on desktop, tablet, and mobile screens. Adjust these settings so your logo looks good on all devices.
Specific dimensions don’t apply to those who want to use an SVG-based logo since an SVG will already scale and be performant.
If you are using a format other than SVG, your logo should have a maximum height of 160 px when displayed in MyListing’s built-in header. This is because of MyListing’s maximum header size of 80px, so you double that value to get the maximum image height you need.
The width of the logo comes down to personal preference but can also be impacted by the number of elements you’re trying to fit into the header.
By default, a search form will be added to the header area of your website.
You can set things like the placeholder (e.g., Type your search…) and which categories are featured. Any categories you specify as being featured within Quick Search will be shown before any search text is even entered.
I highly recommend using MyListing Club’s Enhanced Listing Keyword Search add-on because, by default, MyListing can’t find all the content within listings when using the search form. With this add-on, users will have complete freedom to search for and find any content within a listing.
The most common choice here is the default setting, but you don’t always need to show this in your header.
There are always options to get people into your Add Listing Flow without using the call-to-action button in the header. Also, for some projects, the website owner adds all the listings from the backend, so the call-to-action button is a wasted space.
It is common for this option to be set to the Add Listing page, where the Add Listing Form Elementor widget has been added and configured. The button label then aligns with people, often using Add Listing.
The most common choice here is the default setting to show the cart. If you allow people to purchase items from the front end of your website, show the cart in the header so customers can easily access it. You will want to hide the cart if you’re not selling anything.
This places a bar below the header containing the page title and an icon. I’ve never seen this setting turned on, as it presents undesirable aesthetics, and the only way to style this bar is if you know how to work with CSS.
To display a different logo while users are scrolling through your website, specify that logo in this section. If you set nothing here, the system will automatically show the logo you specified under Theme Options > General.
You could set these up to match what you set for the non-scrolling header. On the other hand, it might fit better with your design requirements to show a different look that also flows with your on-scroll logo.
You can’t go wrong here, but you have the chance to show some design flair.
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Footer
You can skip this if you’re going to build a custom footer with Elementor Pro.
I recommend using a custom footer because the standard options for the MyListing footer are extremely limited, more complex to configure, and harder to design unless you are good with CSS.
This one is pretty simple. Enable this, and the entire footer disappears. Implementing a custom footer with Elementor will automatically override the MyListing footer, so you don’t need to worry about this setting.
This is another easy one. Choose the color for your footer background. If you choose to show the footer, this setting will be available.
These global elements, such as column headings and menus, are part of your site’s layout and can accept blocks; however, the options available depend on the theme you are using.
To add widgets to your website, go to WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets and edit the footer widget area. If you do not display any widgets, toggle this setting OFF.
These settings are there for mobile responsiveness. You will want to test your footer on multiple devices to ensure your design looks good. Custom footers with Elementor would be better in this area, as you would have more control over your mobile designs, display conditions, etc.
Suppose you configure a menu under WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Menus and assign it as the Footer Menu in WordPress. In that case, that menu will appear in your MyListing footer when this setting is toggled ON.
This text appears at the bottom of your MyListing footer, and I typically see this area used to display copyright information. As with many areas of MyListing, the text will be added using a black shade, and you will use CSS to style the color further.
If an area on your website is particularly long content-wise, MyListing will display an icon that people can click to return to the top of the content. You will need CSS to style this button further.
You can still use this feature without enabling all the other MyListing footer options, even if you use a custom footer with Elementor.
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Explore
This page will display the results from the header search form and listings by category. The typical steps are to create a page named Explore and then choose that page within this setting. Another section covers building out the Explore page.
This indicates how many listings will be displayed at once for each search. To improve the chances of the map feature being populated, you need to show more listings at once.
You have to find a balance between having your directory display a good amount of data and the potential performance hit your website will have if you try to load and display too many listings at a time. If you want to display a lot of listings at once, you’ll need good hosting, and you’ll also need to pay close attention to any performance-related topics outlined here.
This page will be used whenever someone adds a listing from your website’s front end. The typical steps are to create a page named Add Listing and add the 27 > Add Listing Form Elementor widget.
Building out the Add a Listing page is covered in another section.
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Single Listing
Note: Most settings in this section don’t apply if you’re going to build a custom header with Elementor Pro as part of the Elementor Pro – Custom Header topic.
I typically see the default setting of Normal being used. The Extended option adds padding to the top and bottom of the header.
I typically see the default setting of Full Width being used. However, there is an option to set a Boxed Width height if that fits better with your website’s design plans.
If you try the Boxed Width option, I recommend setting the minimum width to 1140 px. I use the max option that MyListing provides, which is 1200 px.
These settings are self-explanatory. When you set the header text color, consider user accessibility.
The Light setting will force text elements to be displayed in white. Be sure to keep accessibility in mind regarding what you set here and what you set for your header background color.
I’ve tested this option thoroughly, and whatever you choose here has no impact. I go with the default setting.
This adjustment raises the cover area of the listing slightly, positioning it beneath the single listing header. Typically, I use the default setting, but on rare occasions, some projects necessitate alterations.
This setting only applies if you use the Cover Image cover style (Single Page > Cover Style > Cover Background). Set the value here as desired. I typically set the height between 20 and 25. Something to note here is that the Gallery Slider cover style is automatically set to around 21.
This is the color that appears over (i.e., overlays) the cover area of your listings. The opacity setting can darken, lighten, or set complete transparency for the overlay. I’ve listed a few values below to use as a guide, but you can set any value between 0 and 1 (0.1, 0.2, and so on).
This is the color that appears over (i.e., overlays) the cover area of your listing preview cards. It’s the same concept as the Cover Overlay settings above.
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Blog
The ability to set a default post image is an excellent setting that the theme gives you, and it’s beneficial regardless of whether you use the theme’s default single post template or go with Elementor Pro templates.
In short, you could use this setting to set a fallback image for your featured image should you forget to add one. Or, if a unique featured image is not essential to you, you could use this setting to specify your featured image for your entire website. Typically, this same feature would require a plugin or a code snippet.
MyListing Club Templates – Blog
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Custom Code
MyListing provides a place to add code snippets (CSS, JavaScript, and raw code) to your website. NEVER ADD CUSTOM CODE TO THE MYLISTING CUSTOM CODE AREA.
Adding custom code to MyListing websites is a popular topic and I have a guide that’s an up-to-date journal of my approach to this topic, taking into account performance, ease of administration, features, etc.
MyListing Club Guide – Code Snippet Solutions
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Shop Page
MyListing allows you to create a very basic shop page with WooCommerce. This may be a problem for projects that don’t want a shop page.
With this setting, you tell WooCommerce how many products you want to display on the same “line” side by side. You cannot control mobile responsiveness, including the number of columns (i.e., products) displayed on smaller devices. You will also need to be pretty proficient with CSS to have any shot at making the MyListing shop page look professional.
You can build a sidebar (WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets > Shop Page) and assign it using this setting. To make your sidebar appear, you must edit the Shop page with the WordPress editor and set the Template setting to utilize one of the sidebar options.
If you want a beautiful, mobile-responsive, highly functional store, skip the MyListing shop option and build your shop with Elementor Pro.
⚡ Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Templates- Shop
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Typography
If you visit the path MyListing gives you (Appearance > Customize > Typography), you’ll be in the WordPress Customizer and find several typography settings for various areas of MyListing.
I have never used this area and recommend you don’t, either. It’s better to control your typography with a combination of Elementor and CSS to ensure it is responsive, globally set, and more.
Theme Tools > Theme Options > Share Modal
If listings have the Share Quick Action available (configured within the corresponding Listing Type), the Share Modal settings area is used to define which options the user has when sharing a listing. There are 15 sharing options, including all the popular social platforms like Facebook, X/Twitter, and WhatsApp, to name a few.
BUT THE DEFAULT STYLING OF THE LISTING SHARING FEATURE IS HORRIBLE. So, I created the Enhanced Content Sharing Modal add-on to give it a professional user experience.
⚡ MyListing Club’s Enhanced Content Sharing Modal add-on is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
Theme Tools > Performance
Theme Tools > Performance > Preview Cards
This feature creates a cached version of each Listing Preview Card, resulting in significantly faster load times on Explore pages, Listing Feed widgets, and other locations where these cards are present. To enable Preview Card Caching, click Enable Now.
The cards are updated automatically whenever the listing information is changed. However, there are occasions when it might be necessary to regenerate all cards.
To regenerate the cache, choose the Listing Type you altered from the dropdown and click Remove All Existing Cache and Regenerate. If you altered multiple listing types, select All Listing Types from the dropdown to regenerate the cache for all.
The largest container for Preview Card images is likely never to be displayed at more than 600 x 200 px; therefore, the default setting of Medium_Large (768 px x Auto) is overkill and adds unnecessary weight to any pages where Listing Preview Cards are present. I recommend changing this setting. Once you do, be sure to clear your preview card cache for all listing types.
Set how many images to load for Preview Cards that are configured to use the ‘Gallery’ background (Listing Type > Preview Card > Preview Card > Design > Background), and the more images you choose to load, the slower your Explore page will perform as far as loading images goes. Typically, I see the default setting of three images here. This setting strikes a good balance between allowing people to preview the listing’s image gallery and loading only a few images.
Going forward, you will want a solution for optimizing your image, and I recommend ShortPixel for that.
⚡ ShortPixel is part of the solution stack that runs my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Image Optimization
Theme Tools > Performance > Data Updates
Run all tasks until a green checkmark is shown. Going forward, you will want to find an automated solution for optimizing your data, and I recommend Perfmatters for that.
⚡ Perfmatters is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyLIsting Club Guides – Performance
Theme Tools > Listing Stats
I’ve provided my recommended settings because the default settings are not optimal and can create more questions rather than give more answers.
The default setting of 60 minutes is likely fine in most cases. Listing owners will likely be too busy with other things (running their business, life, etc.) to check their stats more than every 60 minutes. If I were to change this setting (I leave the default setting) to anything, it would be to increase the cache rather than lower it.
I recommend lowering this setting only if you have a valid reason, as merely having a few listing owners complain about the frequency of stat updates does not qualify as a good enough reason.
By default, the theme only collects a month’s worth of data, which is not enough for the listing owner to do trend analysis, and this doesn’t match up with the default Visits Chart setting. I recommend setting this to 183 days, giving the listing owner six months of data for trend analysis.
By default, the theme presents and gathers analytics that the listing owner can’t act on, making it unnecessary to display them. Furthermore, why collect that data in the first place when other analytics solutions can report on the same thing without adding to your database bloat?
I recommend disabling the following stat boxes:
By default, the theme collects 12 months’ worth of data, which doesn’t match the default Delete Stats Older Than setting. I recommend setting this to Last 6 months.
Choose colors that match your brand’s overall color scheme. For Color #1-4, depending on the project, I typically like to make these different shades of my accent color (dark to light) and then set the Views Series Color to match Color #1 and the Unique Views Color to match Color #4 for a pleasing contrast.
You can view the statistics for any listing on your website by following the steps outlined below.
Theme Tools > Map Services
If you provide maps and address lookups throughout your website (Explore pages, Single Listing Location Blocks, etc.), you can enable Google Maps, Mapbox, or OpenStreetMap. After weighing the pros and cons of the service provider options mentioned above, I recommend Mapbox for MyListing websites.
MyListing Club Guide – Easily Configure Map Services for Your MyListing Website
Theme Tools > User Roles
Before we dive into what’s available here, you can skip this if you do not need additional user roles and you do not need to allow extra features for user profiles (profile picture, social networks, etc.).
The settings for Enable User Registration, Generate Username Automatically, and Generate Password Automatically are the same as those found in the Accounts & Privacy tab within WooCommerce. So, let’s talk about what’s unique here.
⚡ Cloudflare Turnstile is part of the solution stack that runs my businesses.
This allows you to separate users into two groups. For example, you could have Business Users that can add listings and have special access to listing-related dashboard features such as listing stats, listing management, listing promotions, etc. You could then have Regular Users that get reduced access and, therefore, a simplified dashboard.
Theme Tools > Direct Messages
I don’t recommend using MyListing’s Direct Messaging feature unless you use the Direct Messaging Admin Center add-on from MyListing Club, which addresses the issue below and more.
If enabled, this places a messaging icon within the default MyListing header so logged-in users can message each other.
If this setting is enabled, anyone can find and direct message other users on your website. If this setting is disabled, users must utilize the direct messaging option within Single Listings, which is a great choice if you prefer that others cannot search through all the users on your website.
Theme Tools > Social Login
MyListing includes built-in options for logging in using Facebook or Google accounts.
Due to how often Google and Facebook change things, I no longer maintain guides or tutorials for configuring social login options. In fact, I don’t use this feature myself, for several reasons.
To configure the settings, use the steps below.
Theme Tools > Other > Simple Products
This feature provides a simple way for users to submit their products on your site. I only recommend using this option if you are a.) willing to put in a ton of work to manage all aspects of running a multi-vendor marketplace that would typically be automated for you, and b.) cannot afford a proper product vendor solution.
I recommend implementing a dedicated product vendor solution, like WooCommerce Product Vendors (the only solution officially supported by the official MyListing team), over the built-in Simple Products option for the following reasons:.
MyListing Club Guide – Build a Marketplace with MyListing and WooCommerce Product Vendors
WordPress Dashboard > Products
This is the standard product type for WooCommerce in the MyListing theme, and I don’t recommend using it if you want to have the best shot at monetizing your website and building a sustainable business. Listing packages must be manually renewed when they expire, and they are complicated to upgrade/downgrade.
The better option is to create listing subscription packages using the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.
⚡ WooCommerce Subscriptions is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
Regardless of which listing package type you choose, they share some similarities in terms of settings. Building on top of what’s possible with a typical WooCommerce product, these products add options specific to MyListing.
If you want to build your listing packages faster and with fewer headaches, check out the comprehensive Listing Packages Worksheet or download the pre-built Product Package from MyListing Club.
WordPress Dashboard > Users > Paid Listing Packages.
MyListing allows you to manually assign, manage, and manipulate listing packages. This is useful when doing bulk imports of listings, adjusting package allowances/constraints for particular customers, adding packages manually on behalf of listing owners, and more.
In the steps below, we’ll add and assign paid listing packages, with one series of steps for listing packages and one for listing subscription packages.
MyListing Club – MyListing Product Packages
These steps assume you already have the following items in place:
At this point, you can adjust the Paid Listing Package as desired without involving the listing owner.
If you want to build your listing taxonomies faster and with fewer headaches, check out the comprehensive Listing Taxonomies Worksheet from MyListing Club.
Taxonomies provide a way to group related content, search and filter content, display details within a post (e.g., listings), etc. MyListing includes listing types, categories, regions, and tags (let’s call these the default taxonomies), with the ability to create custom taxonomies.
I’ve repeatedly seen MyListing website owners jump right into their website and start adding taxonomies without thinking about the long-term implications of their decisions. The best advice I can give you here is to be as high-level as possible with your taxonomies—until you can’t.
What do I mean by high-level? Let’s use a city’s water system as an analogy. Imagine a city building its water system with pipes that aren’t all that wide at the beginning of the system, and they keep getting narrower as the system branches out.
What happens when the city realizes it’s not getting the water flowing efficiently? The city can’t simply shut down the entire water system and replace it with bigger, more efficient pipes because people need water. They must either a.) build a completely new system on top of the old system or b.) slowly replace the old system with new system components.
Suppose you relate this to a website that’s been running for some time and has many listings. In that case, you can imagine how painful (and embarrassing) it would be to rebuild your taxonomy structure and ask your listing owners to adjust their listings because of that rebuild.
Furthermore, consider all of the areas of your website where taxonomies come into play (explore pages, listing feeds, category pages, region pages, permalinks, etc.) and would need to be adjusted. If you fix this yourself, it’s taking time away from building your business. If you hire someone to resolve this, that money could have been spent to enhance the business.
These are not absolute rules, but they generally apply.
I have a simple rule for determining when a new listing type is needed. If the questions you’re asking (i.e., listing fields) don’t make sense for every listing published on your website, you need another listing type.
For example, having a price range field wouldn’t make sense when you have listings with nothing to sell. Err on the side of having more listing types rather than too few.
WordPress Dashboard > Listings > Categories
Categories are a default MyListing taxonomy, and they help classify listings further. For example, if you have a MyListing website for a local community, you could create a taxonomy for restaurants (listing type) and a taxonomy for the different types of restaurants (categories).
Looking at the example above, categories could be pizza, Italian, Greek, etc.
WordPress Dashboard > Listings > Regions
Regions are a default MyListing taxonomy, and they help to classify listings further. For example, if you have a MyListing website about a local community, you could create a taxonomy for restaurants (listing types) and a taxonomy for where the restaurants are located (regions).
Looking at the example above, regions could be country, state, city, neighborhood, etc.
WordPress Dashboard > Listings > Tags
Tags are a default MyListing taxonomy, and they help to classify listings further. For example, if you have a MyListing website about a local community, you could create a taxonomy for restaurants (listing types) and a taxonomy for the restaurants’ various amenities (tags).
Looking at the example above, tags could be accepts credit cards, Wi-Fi, public parking, etc.
Unlike other taxonomies, tags don’t have children (i.e., child tags).
WordPress Dashboard > Listings > Taxonomies
Custom taxonomies help to classify listings further, extending the capabilities provided by the default MyListing taxonomies (categories, regions, and tags). The easiest way to tell you when to use a custom taxonomy is when the terms you want to use don’t fit into one of MyListing’s default taxonomies (categories, regions, and tags).
For example, say you have a restaurant listing type. The categories might be for the type of restaurant (Italian, Greek, pizza, etc.), the regions might be for the city, and the tags might be for the amenities (accepts credit cards, Wi-Fi, etc.).
Now, you have another set of terms that must stand independently because they are critical to your community. Let’s use diversity (women-owned, Latinx-owned, etc.) as an example.
The term diversity wouldn’t be a category or region in our restaurant example. Even though these terms could serve as tags, it’s crucial that they stand alone to attract attention.
Drawing attention to the diversity taxonomy is done through a separate listing field (and, therefore, a separate section/question in the add listing/submit form), a special place in the listing preview cards, etc.
Child taxonomies allow you to get more granular with categories, regions, and custom taxonomies.
For example, a restaurant listing type with a category of pizza could include child taxonomies for deep dish, thin crust, and New York style.
If that restaurant listing type has regions for cities, you could have child taxonomies for each neighborhood in those cities to drill down the location further.
WordPress Dashboard > Listing Types
Listing types are the foundation of listings and sit at the top of the taxonomy hierarchy; they govern the types and quantity of data that can be added, the appearance and functionality of the listings, and the process of searching and filtering, among other aspects.
For example, if you have a MyListing website for a local community, you could create a restaurant taxonomy (i.e., listing type).
If you want to build your listing types faster and with fewer headaches, check out the comprehensive Listing Types Worksheet from MyListing Club.
MyListing Club – Pre-built Listing Types
The global listing type serves one purpose: to provide searching and filtering across all listing types on your website. You can take advantage of this in two areas.
MyListing Club – Pre-built Listing Types
WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks > Optional > Listing Base
The default permalink structure for listings is domain.com/listing/listing-name. While the MyListing theme provides some dynamic options for constructing permalinks, it can do too little or too much, depending on the project.
Without using a plugin like Permalink Manager Pro, MyListing does not allow you to get granular with your permalinks.
⚡ Permalink Manager is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
For example, suppose you wanted to show both the parent and child regions in the URL. That’s only possible with a plugin, as MyListing will only show the region selected first when the listing owner builds their listing.
If you look at this listing from MyListing Club’s Canvas Starter Site, you can see an example of a /country/state/city/listing-type/listing-name/ permalink structure created with Permalink Manager Pro. You can get even more granular if desired.
Some website owners want the permalink structure for listings to be domain.com/listing-name, removing the /listing/ portion of the URL. This is only possible with MyListing if you use a plugin like Permalink Manager Pro.
MyListing Club Guides – Permalinks
MyListing Club Code Snippets – Permalinks
MyLIsting Club Add-ons – Permalinks
This can be skipped if you, as the website owner, add all the listings to your MyListing website (i.e., users will not be adding/managing listings).
This will be one of the core pages you must set up with MyListing, as it’s responsible for the add listing flow, including the MyListing pricing tables and the submit form.
One of the settings is for card size, which determines the size of the “flipping boxes” (i.e., listing type boxes). MyListing displays these boxes to enable users to select their preferred listing type during the add listing process.
You can only modify the settings available in the 27 > Add Listing Form Elementor widget unless you use custom CSS or develop a custom solution.
MyListing Club CSS Packages – Pricing
MyListing Club Service – Custom Development
Aside from adding and configuring the required 27 > Add Listing Form widget, I ignore this and build custom get started pages to display the available listing types. This gives you design freedom and the ability to add other functionality to this page easily.
Add an item for each listing type you would like users to be able to choose from when adding their listing.
When this setting is enabled, the submit form sections fade in and out as you scroll. Some like this feature, and some don’t. I prefer to deactivate it.
MyListing provides premade layouts for those with 3 or 4 listing packages to display. This means they have already calculated how things should look based on the selected package layout.
You can, however, completely ignore this setting and use custom CSS for your layout. No matter what, you will likely need some custom CSS.
MyListing Club CSS Packages – Pricing
This feature allows the actual business owner to take ownership of a listing so they can manage it and build it up for monetization purposes.
For example, let’s say you are building a directory for a local town. You might add 20 listings for different pizza shops in town and then later contact each pizza shop and ask them if they would like to claim their listing.
By default, all listings that don’t have a listing package assigned are claimable. This can be overridden case-by-case by assigning a paid listing package to a listing and toggling ON the Is Claimable? setting within the package.
Assigning a package this way allows you to assign a better package to a listing rather than leaving it as a basic listing. This way, you can enhance the listing’s priority, the data shown within it, and a better layout/design overall.
When creating the claim listing page, the only requirements are that it exists and contains the claim listing shortcode.
DO NOT use Elementor to build this page, as it’s not necessary and a waste of time. Instead, use the WordPress default editor (i.e., the WordPress block editor).
[claim_listing]
Like regular listing packages, claim packages can be created as WooCommerce products. Please refer to the listing packages section for more information.
Once a new claim has been submitted, you can review it in WP Dashboard > Listings > Claim Entries. Clicking on an entry will allow you to approve or decline it.
These are on by default but can be adjusted under WP Dashboard > Listings > Settings > Notifications. Users are notified when their claim status has changed, and website admins are notified when a claim has been submitted.
Users can view their claim requests by logging in and navigating to MyListing Dashboard > My Listings > View Claim Requests.
This form can be added to the Claim Listing process, which you can use to gather information about the user attempting to claim the listing. The current fields available are Text, Textarea, Number, and File Upload. These are custom field types, so you have some powerful options.
Typically, this is one of the core pages of a MyListing website, providing searching/filtering of listings, displaying them on a map, etc. The search forms settings of each listing type heavily define this page’s features.
The settings under Theme Options > Explore also impact this:
Some MyListing websites do not use a dedicated explore page and instead place the 27 > Explore widget on strategic pages, like region pages, category pages, etc. Either way, the below applies.
This form appears on the left-hand side of the explore page and is used to find and filter listings based on specific criteria defined within the form.
This functionality is seen at the bottom of the Advanced Search Form and appears as Order By.
These tabs appear above the Advanced Form, and you can use a maximum of three at once. They can provide an alternate (or additional) way of presenting data and filters. For example, instead of a text-based dropdown field for categories, using the categories explore tab with images may be preferable.
Each available template presents a different look and feel, so it’s just a matter of choosing the desired template for your project.
This setting allows you to choose between showing listing results or a map when explore pages are viewed on smaller mobile devices.
This setting defines how the filtered listings are laid out.
By default, listing results show page numbers when there are more listings to view on the results page. You can present a load more button to show more listings. Enabling load more will unlock the ability to use infinite scroll, which allows users to reveal more listings by simply scrolling without making additional clicks.
Masonry is the default layout mode that places elements in optimal positions based on available vertical space, like a mason fitting stones in a wall. The MyListing developers state that disabling isotope masonry will improve loading speed but give no further details about how or why that is the case.
I suggest reloading your Explore page across different device sizes (desktop, mobile, etc.) with and without this setting enabled to see if there are any visual changes. If there are no negative visible changes, then turn off isotope masonry to get any performance benefits.
I recommend leaving this as the default setting to ‘Enable’ this feature. The main reason is that this makes it easy to get the dynamic URL needed to populate other website areas.
This setting should be disabled if you don’t allow people to search by location using map services. If you do, add the location and proximity fields to the Advanced Search Form and configure them as desired.
While it’s not a setting within the explore listings widget, it’s also worth mentioning the option to search the map when dragging it. Users can enable this option by checking the search as I move the map box.
This one is self-explanatory, but I wanted to mention it because it’s an easily overlooked setting that leaves website owners wondering why their listings don’t appear on the explore page. There’s nothing more to say here than to add each listing type you wish to be searchable/filterable on the explore page.
We have two options (navbar and dropdown) here, and this setting only applies when you have more than one listing type to add to your explore page.
This feature is an excellent option if you are building a page (e.g., an explore page, a region page, a category page, etc.) where you want to pre-filter listings based on the page’s topic.
For example, you could add the explore listings widget to a region page for a particular city where you want to show the top pizza places. In this case, you could use a restaurant listing type and a taxonomy (categories, custom taxonomy, etc.) of pizza.
Please refer to the ‘Enable/Disable Live URL Update’ section above for the URL you can use for this setting.
This feature allows you to insert Google Ads between your listings at the interval (‘Ad Interval’) you specify.
While I fully understand the desire to monetize directories, there are other ways to do it that don’t adversely impact the performance and design of your website, as Google Ads do. I recommend not enabling this feature.
This feature allows you to add a skin to your maps to improve the design and usability.
MyListing comes with several pre-installed skins, but if you prefer a custom skin that aligns with your branding, you can easily achieve this with Mapbox or with a bit more effort using Google Maps. OpenStreetMap does not allow you to use map skins within the MyListing theme.
When no listings appear on the map, this will be used as the default location.
This is an important setting, especially if your directory serves a specific geographic region and you want to put coordinates for that region. Finding the desired coordinates is easy using Google Maps:
Once you believe your coordinates are entered correctly, you can quickly test by filtering your explore page until no listings match the criteria.
Since every MyListing project is unique, adjusting these settings primarily involves trial and error. You’ll want to play with these settings until you have the desired outcome. As you add more listings to the map, the preferred settings may change, so it’s important to monitor them over time.
This setting is associated with the explore tabs mentioned above. It dictates how many terms to show under each tab. The balance here is performance vs. user experience.
I don’t know precisely when performance would start degrading, as that depends on your website’s infrastructure, how many users are concurrently utilizing the explore tabs, etc. Since I host all my MyListing websites (mine and those of my clients) on premium website hosting, I start by clearing out the default value and leaving it blank so all terms will show.
This feature adds a color overlay on the taxonomy cards shown within the explore tabs. There is an option to choose any solid color or a pre-configured gradient. Regardless of your choice, the color is shown with a 40% opacity and then a 95.5% opacity (i.e., nearly solid) on hover.
If you don’t like the gradient options as they are currently configured, you can use CSS to adjust the pre-configured options or create new gradients easily.
For example, let’s say you choose gradient7 and you want to alter it slightly. If you inspect one of your taxonomies with the gradient overlay applied, you’ll see the gradient applied to the gradient7 CSS selector.
.gradient7 {background: linear-gradient(270deg,#c644fc 0,#5856d6);}
Adjust the gradient values and add custom CSS to your site to reflect the desired change.
.gradient7 {background: linear-gradient(your-own-gradient values);}
The other option is to target the taxonomies as a whole without specifying a gradient color in the 27 > Explore Listings Elementor widget.
.listing-cat .overlay {background: linear-gradient(your-own-gradient values);}
MyListing Club CSS Packages – Explore Page & Listing Preview Cards
This page serves as a destination for individuals contemplating their initial steps. It provides a comprehensive guide, while the get started page provides a concise and direct approach.
MyListing Club Templates – How It Works Page
The get started page serves as a starting point, primarily for new users of a MyListing website. This page guides new users through the process of signing in or signing up, searching the platform for existing listings they may want to claim, learning how to gain more exposure through listing promotions, and other related activities.
If you look at the demos from the MyListing developers, you’ll notice that without this page, the only starting point for potential listing owners is the add listing call-to-action button in the header area. This leaves MyListing website users needing guidance, and as the website owner, you need to take advantage of critical opportunities to educate and provide more value to potential customers.
Building a get started page with Elementor opens a world of possibilities for design and functionality.
MyListing Club Templates – Get Started Page
This page complements the How It Works and Get Started pages, further educating current and potential users of your MyListing website. Consider this page as part of your sales material, as it provides customers with good reasons to stay on your platform, upgrade their plan, run promotions, and more.
When executed effectively, support pages can save website owners time by providing answers to frequently asked questions. It’s more efficient to answer a question thoroughly once rather than repeatedly.
MyListing Club Tempates – Support Page
These pages are essential for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the overall user experience. They keep users on your website and give them proper pathways to find region-specific content.
While MyListing offers flexibility with the permalink structures and automation of that structure, from an SEO standpoint, there are still shortcomings. For example, if you want to specify a parent/child taxonomy relationship within MyListing URLs, you need a custom solution.
Furthermore, by default, when users click on a region taxonomy within a MyListing website, they are redirected to the explore page. There are better SEO approaches since the explore pages contain extremely thin content and, as a result, very little SEO value.
Permalink Manager Pro and the Enhanced Region Permalinks add-ons for MyListing address these issues.
⚡ Permalink Manager and Enhanced Region Permalinks are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Templates – Region Page
MyListing Club Guides – Permalinks
MyListing Club Code Snippets – Permalinks
MyListing Club Add-ons – Permalinks
By default, the MyListing author pages are very basic and have limited functionality.
Neglecting your author pages could hurt your SEO if they’re vital to your site. When done right, author pages benefit overall SEO by providing valuable content and additional navigation, similar to the value that category and region pages add.
Unfortunately, MyListing doesn’t provide any elegant way to customize author pages, so you will need to edit the code directly (/wp-content/themes/my-listing/author.php), find a plugin that allows you to customize author pages, or use Elementor to build custom pages for your authors.
The good news is I’ve created author page templates that dynamically create/populate all your author pages, and I’ve documented this in the MyListing Starter Site build notes.
MyListing Club Templates – Author Page
Front-facing pricing pages are essential for educating potential customers about your listing packages (pricing, features, etc.) so they know what’s possible before deciding to go through the add listing process. Without a front-facing pricing page, users of your MyListing website are flying blind.
By default, there isn’t an elegant way for MyListing website owners to display multiple payment periods (monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, annual, etc.) within the pricing tables that are part of the add listing process. I solved this by creating a pricing table switcher add-on for MyListing.
⚡ The MyListing Pricing Table Switcher add-on is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Resources – Pricing
Please refer to the MyListing Core Plugins topic to learn why I recommend replacing Contact Form 7 and using Elementor Pro forms for single listing contact forms.
⚡ Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Templates: Single Listing Contact Form
MyLIsting Club Guide – Replace Contact Form 7 With Elementor Pro
MyListing includes the option of enabling reCAPTCHA in multiple areas of your website to help fight spam, but reCAPTCHA is a horrible solution. It slows down your website, creates privacy issues, has no centralized management, etc.
I recommend using Cloudflare Turnstile (free) instead, which is a breeze to set up, and it protects your entire website from spam.
⚡ Cloudflare Turnstile is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
If you still wish to experiment with reCAPTCHA, you can configure it in the specific areas listed below within a MyListing website. Note that vendors offer limited assistance in determining the appropriate reCAPTCHA technology for each area, so use at your own risk.
Introducing caching plugins into your environment can lead to conflicts and complicate the process of clearing all caching levels. The only levels of caching I recommend are edge caching and server caching, which work together beautifully, especially when using a combo like Cloudflare/Kinsta.
⚡ Cloudflare and Kinsta are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
I approach website performance optimization from the outside, looking inward, optimizing at the edge (e.g., CDN), and working my way down to the most granular level, which typically ends at the plugin level, depending on the overall environment.
Edge caching stores website assets on a network (separate from your website’s core infrastructure) to deliver content to users faster while freeing up some of your server’s resources to do other things and reducing page load wait times (TTFB).
If you are not going to use Kinsta, then at a minimum, I recommend you still go with Cloudflare (free). It won’t get you the same robust edge caching that comes when you pair Kinsta and Cloudflare together, but it will still give you a watered-down version of it.
MyListing Club Guides – Caching
Continuing with my approach to website performance optimization from the outside, looking inward, optimizing at the edge (e.g., CDN), and working my way down to the most granular level, server-level caching is next to tackle.
Where edge caching stores website assets on a separate network, server caching stores assets from your website’s core infrastructure to deliver content to your website users faster while freeing up some of your server’s resources to do other things and reducing page load wait times (TTFB).
Ideally, your CDN (i.e., edge caching) should serve your website assets, but it occasionally fails to do so. When that happens, the importance of server caching comes into play. To put it simply, server-level caching adds an additional layer of caching to ensure your assets receive optimal delivery.
MyListing Club Guides – Caching
Typically, those using low-quality hosting will need to install a WordPress caching plugin that offers things like page caching. This is because low-quality hosting providers have an infrastructure that’s not optimally configured and is running on non-premium hardware.
Since I switched my websites and client websites to Kinsta years ago, caching plugins have become obsolete.
MyListing Club Guides – Caching
Image governance establishes a maximum file size limit for images you can upload to your website. If implemented correctly, you can avoid presenting a terrible user experience (slow uploading process), abandonment (uploading timeouts), higher costs (disk space comes with a cost), etc.
I recommend limiting images to a 1MB max file size (even smaller is better). 1MB images are still enormous in terms of file size. Adopt a strict approach, understanding that users will always appreciate an increase in their limits rather than a decrease.
MyListing Club Guide – Image Optimization for MyListing Websites
Image optimization is critical for enhancing your website’s performance. Even after passing the Image Governance stage, you still need to optimize your images for faster content loading.
Those hosting their website with Kinsta have access to an image optimization feature that can help eliminate the need for a third-party image optimization plugin. Even so, if you also need an image optimization plugin, I recommend ShortPixel.
⚡ ShortPixel is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
If either of the following conditions is true, you need an image optimization plugin:
MyListing Club Guide – Image Optimization for MyListing Websites
Revisions, comments, spam, transients, trash, etc., add bloat over time, so databases must be optimized regularly to keep things clean and tidy. To help with this, I recommend Perfmatters.
⚡Perfmatters is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guides – Database Optimization
Your website’s performance can be significantly reduced by unnecessary HTTP requests, code, back-end component loading, etc., so it’s important to manage assets and general optimization to keep it in top condition. To help with this, I recommend Perfmatters.
MyListing Club Guide – Optimize MyListing Websites With Perfmatters
While I talk about using a staging environment to test plugins before installing them into production, sometimes plugins make it to production and are removed later. I also mentioned that removed plugins don’t always clean up after themselves, leaving tables behind in your database.
If you haven’t removed the plugin yet but plan to, check to see if it has a setting for clean uninstalls. If it does, enable that setting before removing the plugin. Enabling this setting should cause the plugin to tidy up after itself when it is removed.
If you’ve already removed the plugin and later find out there is a clean uninstall option, you could install the plugin again, choose the clean uninstall option, and then uninstall the plugin again.
If the plugin doesn’t provide a clean uninstall option or you don’t want to install it again, you can access your database and manually delete the files.
MyListing Club Tutorial – Clean up Your MyListing Website Database for Better Performance
By default, MyListing will store up to 15 revisions of each listing type, and a new revision is created every time you make even the slightest change. While listing type revisions is a beneficial feature, storing so many revisions is unnecessary and adds bloat to your database, so we want to keep revisions to a minimum.
MyListing Club Guide – Optimize Listing Type Revisions for MyListing
Auditing the page weight and complexity for critical areas (if not all areas) of your website with a tool like Yellow Lab Tools Auditor (free) can expose opportunities you can often take advantage of, with or without hiring a web professional.
It often comes down to designing a page differently, stopping resources from loading when they’re not needed, removing solutions not required for the business’s success, etc.
⚡ Perfmatters is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Optimize MyListing Websites With Perfmatters
Internet users are impatient, and they will likely abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The speed at which your website loads significantly influences its success.
There are many tools for testing website performance, and I’ll mention three popular options here. Whichever tools you choose, I recommend testing with at least two because each tool takes a different approach and catches different things.
You should have a Google My Business page to improve visibility in search results. Make sure your profile contains the most complete and accurate information possible.
To optimize your website’s visibility in the world’s largest search engine, set up Google Search Console as soon as possible, even if you won’t be able to look at the data immediately.
MyListing Club Guide – Google Search Console for MyListing Websites
Knowing what content drives engagement, where visitors are coming from, and what devices they use to view it is essential. Set up your analytics solution as soon as possible, even if you won’t be able to look at the data immediately.
Google Analytics (GA) is a free service that provides valuable insights to help website owners shape a successful business strategy.
NOTE: I don’t recommend using Google Analytics due to several factors, including privacy, website performance, and the fact that GA data is difficult to comprehend and is overkill for many website owners. I’m simply listing it here because it’s a free option that many have heard of.
ALTERNATE SOLUTION: I recommend AnalyticsWP and MyListing Club clients get access to this premium plugin at no extra charge.
⚡AnalyticsWP is part of the solution stack that runs my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Google Analytics Management
NOTE: This is only relevant if you’re using Google Analytics.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free service that provides valuable insights to help website owners shape a successful business strategy. Use it for tracking multiple entities, including Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
MyListing Club Guide – Google Tag Manager for MyListing Websites
To optimize your website’s visibility in the world’s second-largest search engine, set up Bing Webmaster Tools as soon as possible, even if you won’t be able to look at the data immediately.
MyListing Club Guide – Bing Webmaster Tools for More WordPress Website Traffic
Whenever someone puts up a “What’s the best SEO plugin?” poll within SEO-based communities, SEOPress is typically the top recommendation, and it is my recommendation as well.
But I always say there is no “best” SEO plugin; their effectiveness depends on the user. You cannot install an SEO plugin and magically rank your website in search engines.
⚡ SEOPress is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Configure SEOPress for MyListing Websites
On-page SEO is optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. The term refers to a page’s content and HTML source code that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO, which refers to links and other external signals.
I recommend SEOPress for optimizing for on-page SEO.
MyListing Club Guide – Successful On-Page SEO for MyListing Websites
MyListing applies meta tags to listings, but you need to take additional steps to ensure proper meta tags are present on your website. You can easily apply the listing meta using SEOPress.
I recommend SEOPress for configuring and applying listing meta.
MyListing Club Guide – Configure SEOPress for MyListing Websites
Whichever crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) you allow to index your website, each has a crawl budget, which is essentially how long they allow their bot to traverse the various areas of your website looking for valuable content.
If a website has a lot of valuable content, we want the bots to have enough time to read it all. Setting content to no-index frees up more time for the bots.
SEOPress provides an easy way to mark pages, posts, listings, etc. as non-indexed using the WordPress Quick Edit feature.
MyListing Club Guide – Configure SEOPress for MyListing Websites
Before advertising your website to the public, I recommend adding at least three SEO-optimized blog posts to it. This shows that you will publish content regularly, giving visitors a reason to return and subscribe to your newsletter.
I recommend Elementor Pro for creating powerful and flexible blog post templates that can be dynamically applied to all posts, posts within a particular category, and more.
⚡ Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Templates – Single Blog Post
To collect newsletter subscribers as part of your single post templates, I recommend MailPoet or FluentCRM. Use MailPoet when you are just starting out and graduate to FluentCRM if needed.
⚡ MailPoet and FluentCRM are part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – MailPoet for Better MyListing & WooCommerce Email Marketing
Adding links on your website that point to your social media profiles helps bring awareness to those online entities. Don’t place these links in the header area of their website, as this incentivizes someone to arrive on your website and then leave right away.
Including this information on your website is essential, especially if you also have a brick-and-mortar store where you serve local customers. If a competitor’s website lacks a properly listed NAP, a website with this information could potentially outrank it.
Your NAP must be consistent across all your online presence entities (website, social media accounts, citations, directory listings, etc.).
After you have completed the online presence topics, I recommend performing an SEO audit of your website. While there is a compelling argument for hiring someone to do the audit, getting some software and running the SEO audits might be more cost-effective.
Another benefit of having your software is that you can run audits on demand for no extra cost, whereas with a consultant, you might have to pay them each time you run an audit.
I recommend SEO PowerSuite as a complete solution for auditing everything related to SEO.
⚡ SEO PowerSuite is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
Once your SEO plugin and any other SEO-related tools are in place, as well as your list of keywords/keyword phrases to target, it’s time to get on a regular schedule for maintaining your SEO.
The schedule can be broken down into weekly tasks to ensure you’re giving equal attention to all the proper areas. Budget around 2 hours to complete each weekly task.
At the beginning of each month, the tasks begin again. Even if you do not perform each phase of the SEO maintenance schedule, it’s still an excellent idea for the website owner to monitor the overall situation.
Review your SEO plugin and Google Search Console. Are there any issues being reported? If so, address those issues. Spend time reviewing your SEO metrics, but don’t get too caught up and lose sight of getting actual SEO-related work done.
Create new content that is relevant to your business and audience. Don’t create content just for the sake of creating content. Ensure this content is optimized with your keywords/keyword phrases.
You should work on several things each week in this area, such as reviewing your content to ensure it’s optimized according to on-page SEO best practices. Your SEO plugin and SEO audit software will help you analyze your progress in this area.
Work on link-building (links to your website from external sources) and citations (listings and mentions from external sources). Focus on relevance, quality, and diversification. For instance, let us consider a hypothetical scenario in which I operate a website that serves as an online directory for locating the finest doughnuts in the United States.
I would want to link up with websites with subject matter related to my website, such as doughnut brands, those that supply baking supplies, those that curate doughnut-related events, etc.
I would need more than just links from relevant sites. The links need to be of high quality. I would contact established, reputable companies that will likely be around for a while.
It wouldn’t be enough for me to have relevant and quality links, although that’s a fantastic start. I would want links that span different types of websites.
For instance, I would want only some of my backlinks to come from one source, like doughnut brands. I would branch out further, getting relevant and quality backlinks from doughnut brands, baking event websites, baking job websites, baking supply websites, etc.
Citations can also play a part in diversifying links. I would list my business within reputable and relevant directories, reputable and relevant newsletters, etc., and non-digital sources (newspapers, mailings, etc.).
Forms are generally one of the most common conversions website owners want visitors to make. It’s tempting to just assume your forms are working as you intended, but testing every form before publishing it live on a website is crucial.
If the website you’re building is for a client, you’ll want to involve them by submitting the form to their email address and ensuring they receive the necessary notifications. Your customer may require assistance in identifying the transactional emails, depending on their setup. It’s important they remain vigilant and identify these emails, as they frequently represent new leads or orders from their website.
Test design, functionality, deliverability, etc.
Run through the entire checkout process from a customer’s perspective, ensuring they can place orders, apply coupons, receive notifications, etc.
Testing your website across multiple screen sizes will help you catch possible errors in layout and user experience.
⚡ Sizzy is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
We all have our favorite browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc.), but your website users could use just about any browser on the market. Each browser handles things like CSS and scripts slightly differently, so you must test your website across multiple browsers to spot any issues before you go live.
The most important browser to test is Google Chrome, which dominates the market, but it’s not the only one.
The most effective (and least expensive) way to test your browser compatibility is to do it manually, using the major browsers installed on your computer.
You don’t have to get highly scientific to perform a decent test. Use the site just like a user would, clicking on buttons, testing popups, examining hover effects, animations, colors, font rendering, etc.
Many products on the market will perform browser compatibility tests for you, such as LambdaTest, which has a limited free plan and paid plans starting at just $15/mo. With automated testing services, you’ll be able to cover much more ground quickly, allowing you to test not only different browsers but also different computers and combinations.
The importance of accessibility has recently exploded with the uptick in lawsuits due to inaccessible websites. Still, you should make your website accessible because it’s the right thing to do, not just to avoid lawsuits.
Making websites accessible requires proper coding and design. Poor coding and design make it difficult for people with disabilities to use websites, if they can at all.
Suppose you’re looking for a quick and easy way to test accessibility that provides straightforward instructions on what improvements you can make. In that case, there’s no better free test on the market than the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool.
Once a website is ready to go live, activating caching will improve speed and performance. Depending on your technology stack, you may need to address different levels of caching.
Websites should be monitored 24/7, and all necessary parties should be notified of any issues. This is a crucial aspect of website care, as it’s essential for providing a positive user experience, keeping website visitors engaged, and maintaining customer trust.
I recommend WP Umbrella for website uptime monitoring.
⚡ WP Umbrella is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Easily and Effectively Manage Multiple WordPress Sites With WP Umbrella
Staging environments are clones of your production website. They should test new themes, plugins, WordPress updates, etc., before rolling them out to your production website.
Nowadays, most website hosting vendors provide a complimentary staging environment. If your website hosting vendor does not provide a staging environment at no extra cost, it’s time to look for another host.
Kinsta hosting simplifies the process of implementing a staging environment, and it’s available for no additional cost. If you’re looking to enhance your staging capabilities even further, Kinsta offers Premium Staging Environments for an extra cost.
⚡ Kinsta is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Kinsta Hosting for MyListing Websites
Keeping your software up-to-date helps protect against security vulnerabilities, prevent software conflicts, enable you to take advantage of performance enhancements, and more. Before updating your production environment, I recommend testing newly released updates in your staging environment. This ensures that updates do not negatively impact your website’s design and functionality.
I recommend WP Umbrella for testing, applying, and managing WordPress updates.
MyListing Club Guide – WordPress Updates
Website backups are crucial in case of any unforeseen incidents such as hacking, server crashes, or data breaches.
It’s not enough to set your backups and forget about them. You must verify that scheduled backups are completed without errors, on time, and are recoverable.
Your backup solution(s) should let you know when your backups fail, but it’s still a good idea to verify this manually occasionally. Furthermore, it’s not just enough to know your backups are completing, but that they are completing without errors. Again, your backup solution(s) and an occasional manual check are advised.
Depending on the overall amount of website data, your backups should finish running relatively quickly. Backups taking several hours to complete could be a sign of an issue with your infrastructure or backup solution. You want to avoid running backups so long that they overlap with the next scheduled backup, which would compound the problem.
It is essential to test backups regularly to ensure they are available and accurate when needed. This should be done at least once a month and after significant website changes, such as major software updates (WordPress core, theme, plugins, etc.) and significant design changes. You can conduct this testing by restoring the backup to a different location, like your staging environment, and confirming that everything appears as expected.
MyListing Club Guides – Website Backup
A website is only as good as its database, which stores posts, comments, revisions, user information, and even spam.
Some of the information your database stores is crucial for your website to function, so removing those elements could cause it to crash or malfunction. Others, like old drafts, bad tables, and spam comments, only weigh down your database and slow your website. That’s where database optimization comes in.
Optimizing your database is one of those things that often gets neglected despite being one of the most critical factors in ensuring fast performance, especially for the long-term health of your site.
The first place to start improving your database is with a superior host. For instance, Kinsta hosting provides a system that automatically fine-tunes your database settings based on the needs of your WordPress site.
This optimization runs once per week and will ensure better performance. When Kinsta’s automated processes identify issues beyond auto-healing, their engineers proactively address them.
If you’re not comfortable working with your database manually, you will need a database optimization plugin to ensure unneeded database tables are not left behind when you uninstall themes/plugins and that data is not unnecessarily autoloaded on post/page refreshes.
I recommend Perfmatters for database optimization.
⚡Perfmatters is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Optimize MyListing Websites With Perfmatters
Broken links are detrimental for your site. They should be monitored and addressed.
There’s a negative effect on your human visitors. If someone clicks a link, they’re doing so because they’re interested in the content they were told the link would take them to.
Sending website visitors to a broken link instead of the content you promised them creates a frustrating experience for your visitors. This is a significant incentive to find and fix broken links on your site.
Broken links aren’t just bad for humans, though; they’re also bad for robots—specifically, the crawler bots used by search engines like Google. Broken links waste your Google crawl equity.
Every 404 page a Googlebot encounters due to broken links is a live page that Google could have crawled instead. Beyond that, broken links are also a waste of link equity—if you have a broken internal link from one blog post to another, you’re not getting the SEO benefit of that internal link, which is a negative for your SEO efforts.
I recommend SEO PowerSuite for broken link monitoring.
⚡ SEO PowerSuite is part of the solution stack that powers my businesses.
If you have forms on your website, you should check them routinely to ensure they reach the destined inboxes, newsletter/email marketing lists, automation solutions, etc.
Routinely check in on your Google Search Console to see if pressing issues need to be addressed.
MyLIsting Club Guide – Google Search Console for MyListing Websites
Routinely verify that you are successfully collecting analytics for your website, as there is always the possibility that something has caused data collection to stop working.
I recommend AnalyticsWP and MyListing Club clients get access to this premium plugin at no extra charge. With AnalyticsWP, you can easily monitor your analytics by looking at the statistics within your WordPress dashboard.
MyListing Club Guide – Google Analytics Management
Limit admin-level access to only yourself, any team members needing admin-level access (most don’t), and those providing ongoing/consistent support for your website.
Review the WordPress administrator accounts on your website from time to time. Once a website has over three administrator accounts, it’s time to examine who has access.
Having an adequately implemented SSL certificate will allow you to enable HTTPS, ensuring information is transmitted encrypted and not over plain text. Every website should consider HTTPS a requirement, as the benefits extend beyond security.
If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate installed properly, security warnings will likely appear in users’ and customers’ browsers. This situation creates a negative impression and undermines customer trust.
While you might have an SSL certificate installed, your website might still serve images and source files with an HTTP:// address (i.e., not a secure URL like HTTPS://). This is called mixed content (i.e., insecure content).
Hosting vendors like Kinsta provide a search and replace tool that’s super easy to use for replacing HTTP:// URLs with HTTPS:// URLs. This solution is recommended over a WordPress plugin.
⚡Kinsta is part of the solution stack that runs my businesses.
MyListing Club Guide – Kinsta Hosting for MyListing Websites
Elementor provides an easy-to-use replace URL tool. This tool performs the same function as the Kinsta tool, but it specifically targets URLs that were added through the Elementor page builder.
⚡Elementor Pro is part of the solution stack that runs my businesses.
You should only go this route if your website host doesn’t provide a tool. As you should do for any plugins you’re researching, look for a search and replace plugin that’s reputable, has favorable reviews, and has an active development cycle.
Starting on Day 1, you should document everything about your business. When forming your exit strategy, you want to avoid scrambling to document your business’s processes while trying to sell it.
Stop using your business email to sign up and log into solutions (websites, apps, etc.) tied to your personal life or other businesses you own, and stop right now!
When selling your business, your email addresses are typically included as well. So, you must assume you will lose access to your business email. A simple way to look at this is to imagine if your business email just disappeared. How much of a hardship would this cause?
Depending on where you host your email, the vendor will have different policies that impact your ability to transition email accounts to the buyer, whether it’s a waiting period for password resets, sending password reset options (links, OTP, etc.) to the old addresses that are no longer accessible by you, and so on.
If a potential buyer asks you where you host your email and learns how complicated the transition process can be with that vendor, it could determine whether they decide to do the deal. This would be an extreme reason not to go through with a deal, but it’s something to consider besides the overall headaches this would cause.
Recurring Revenue is a crucial metric used by subscription-based businesses to measure the predictable income they will generate monthly (MRR), quarterly, annually (ARR), or over some other period.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is a simple calculation of the monthly subscription fee multiplied by the total number of customers subscribed to the service. It includes only the recurring Revenue generated by subscription fees and does not consider any one-time fees, such as setup or installation costs.
This is important for businesses, as it provides a clear picture of their financial health and can help predict future revenue streams. It enables businesses to monitor the success of their subscription model, identify any changes or trends in the subscription rate, and make necessary adjustments. By tracking MRR, companies can identify any ups and downs in Revenue and make informed decisions on increasing their customer base, retaining current customers, and ultimately growing their business.
MRR is also a valuable metric for investors, who use it to evaluate the growth potential of a subscription-based business. Investors look at MRR growth rates to assess whether a company is generating a consistent revenue stream and gauge its potential for future growth. The higher the MRR growth rate, the more attractive the business may be to investors.
MRR is a crucial metric for any subscription-based business, offering helpful information regarding revenue generation and business growth potential. By monitoring MRR, companies can make informed decisions to improve their subscription model, attract new customers, retain current ones, and ultimately achieve long-term success.
A customer I know recently sold her business, and she shared some insights about MRR.
“MRR is everything! All the offers I received for buying my business were based on this metric. It doesn’t matter how many leads I could get organically or my income from building websites; buyers didn’t factor those metrics into the equation.
When researching selling a business, I read that one could expect to sell their business for 3x the annual MRR. The highest offer I received was just over 3x, and what I accepted, in the end, was the equivalent of 2.5x annual MRR. The lowball offer was 1.2x annual MRR.”
The key takeaway here is to work towards a healthy MRR. By healthy, I mean the monetary value and the trends. It’s ideal to show a steady increase in customers while avoiding big dips.
Buyers will want a healthy Google Search Console account with current/valid tracking, indexing, etc., metrics.
Always monitor the health of your Google Search Console, and intensify your efforts 4-6 months prior to listing your business for sale.
Before selling your business, write an honest, clear description. You want to be as transparent as possible, avoiding disclosing too much and too little.
The value of most businesses is based upon the average monthly profit, with the selling price typically being 12 to 36 times that number (i.e., 1-3 years’ worth of income). While there may be exceptions, this serves as the general guideline.
Calculating your average monthly profit means you must account for all your business expenses (see the Business Summary task) by subtracting those expenses from your profit.
As for your website, several free valuation tools are available, including Flippa and Empire Flippers.
These can give you a solid starting point, but they tend to be rough estimates, so use them as part of your overall valuation process rather than taking the results as hard-and-fast answers.
If the majority of the following statements are accurate, it might be more beneficial to sell the business independently instead of collaborating with a professional intermediary.
Selling an online business can be a complex and time-consuming process, and it is crucial to search widely for the right buyer. This means marketing the company to as many potential buyers as possible through online platforms and personal networks.
It’s essential to ensure that the business is presented in the best possible light and that all relevant information, including financial and operational data, is available to interested buyers.
Broadening the scope is crucial, as it enhances the probability of discovering the ideal buyer for the business. The more potential buyers are aware of the sale, the greater the chance of finding someone who is a good fit, has the financial means to purchase the business, and is willing to pay a fair price. By marketing the business widely, sellers can also create competition between potential buyers, driving up the sale price.
Reach out to at least 20 companies. While reaching out to at least 20 companies may seem daunting, it’s important to note that some buyers may own 2-3 of the underlying companies you approach.
If most of the following statements are true, hiring a professional rather than working alone may be the best option.
Professional Intermediaries (business brokers, investment bankers, M&A advisors, etc.) have experience selling online businesses. They can help guide sellers through the process, from valuation and marketing to negotiating the deal and closing the sale.
They also have access to a broad network of potential buyers, which can help sellers find the right buyer for their business.
Aside from the general timing, it would be ideal to avoid additional licensing, hosting, etc. costs. You’ll want to work with the buyer to agree on a final date by which all business assets must be fully transitioned to them, replaced with different solutions, or terminated entirely.
If you’re like many business owners, you care about your clients, and some have become more like friends over the years. Therefore, I suggest drafting and preparing a “company acquired” email prior to finalizing the sale of your business.
You must be the one who reaches out to your customers and clients first rather than the buying company.
When making the deal with the seller, ensure they allow you time to talk to your customers. If there is any pushback, let them know that this is also valuable to them, as you are potentially gathering feedback and concerns, which you can then communicate back to the new owners.
This guide is a structured resource for building a WordPress website using the MyListing theme more intelligently. It covers the major areas involved in running an online directory-based business, including administration, design, infrastructure, marketing, monetization, online presence, performance, security, and more.
Yes. The guide is presented in the same order as the tasks in the MyListing Project Template. This makes it easier to complete work in a logical sequence, rather than jumping between topics.
You can read this guide and follow along, but only users who have obtained the MyListing Project Template receive the full topic details. Those details include checklists, pro tips, and more.
Because there isn’t one best setup for every site. If a setting is not mentioned, the default is considered acceptable, or the options are self-explanatory for most skill levels.
You need an active Club Membership, or you need to be a MyListing Club Client, and you must be logged into your Club account. Access rules should be stated clearly on the page near the top.
Club Guarantee
If you notice an issue with this product, I’ll fix it for free and get you an updated version.
Club Guarantee
If you notice an issue with a Club Product and the problem exists on the corresponding Starter Site, I’ll fix it for free.
