If you’re like most site owners, even thinking about site maintenance can be overwhelming. You have plugins to update, errors to fix, links to change, and so much more. Plus, since many of these tasks are small and don’t seem pressing, it becomes easy to put them off. This is especially true for smaller teams or solopreneurs, where most tasks fall onto a single person. This is where Progress Planner could help.
For this review, we’ll look at this new plugin that looks to solve the issue of procrastinating over your website maintenance tasks. This plugin helps you organize and manage your tasks, and gives you an easy way to visualize your progress. Think of it as a virtual project manager for all of your site maintenance and management tasks.
Throughout this Progress Planner review, we’ll explore the plugin’s features and benefits to see if it’s the right fit. Also, we’ll see whether it could potentially make your life easier by simplifying and streamlining your WordPress site maintenance workflow.
Introducing Progress Planner: Gamifying the Site Maintenance Experience
Progress Planner is an easy-to-use plugin that helps you to simplify and organize all of the tasks that make up your website management. The goal is to help motivate you and remove procrastination when it comes to business critical tasks.
Let’s face it, the tasks that make up managing your site aren’t often the most exciting. As such, Progress Planner offers a experience using ‘gamification’ to help you earn achievements and badges. In turn, this will help you to continue working on your site.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the core features:
- Activity tracking. View statistics on the the most recent actions on your site, such as the number of pages and posts you publish.
- Gamification. You’ll have the motivation to continue ticking items off of your to-do list, with badges and other rewards.
- Plugin monitoring. There’s the option to quickly see which WordPress plugins you have updates for that still need your input.
- Progress reports. You’re able to get regular email reports to see which tasks are still sticking around to complete.
- To-do list. This is central to your experience, and will let you stay on top of your tasks in a straightforward way.
With Progress Planner, you get access to a single intuitive dashboard that lets you create tasks and see your progress over time. Let’s take a look at this further over the next few sections.
How Progress Planner Helps You Accomplish Tasks
Before we get into how the Progress Planner plugin works, it’s important to highlight two things the plugin does to help you get more done:
- Gamification of tasks.
- Exposure for tasks that need your attention.
The gamification element lets you earn badges with every task you complete. This is more of a psychological boost and impact rather than a redeemable feature.
Consider it similar to fitness trackers such as Fitbit or apps such as Apple Fitness+. You get badges and awards throughout the day for hitting fitness milestones that you set. Constant tracking and working to hit these goals helps to make movement and fitness fun.
This can also be true for your website maintenance tasks. Instead of letting your to-do list grow, you get incentives for taking consistent action towards it. You can even see how your performance improves over time. The net positive is a potential improvement to how your site runs—and might even make working a bit more fun.
The second thing Progress Planner does well is to showcase the tasks you need to get done. For instance, once you log into WordPress your to-do list will stare you down. It’s much harder to ignore it when it’s virtual eyes follow you around your dashboard!
We’ll show you how the plugin works next, which will highlight both of these elements—and more.
Progress Planner Review: How to Start Managing Maintenance Tasks
Progress Planner is simple to set up. Downloading, installing, and activating the plugin is the same as any other WordPress plugin. Best of all, there are no settings for you to configure. After activation, you’ll see the plugin dashboard, where you can begin to add tasks and see your site maintenance at a glance.
The Progress Planner Dashboard
Progress Planner’s dashboard is gorgeous, and gives you a complete progress overview of your current maintenance tasks.
Inside this dashboard, the main ‘widget’ shows your website activity score. Essentially, this score represents the number of website tasks you’ve completed over the past month. The higher the score, the more work you’ve accomplished on your site.
There’s also a long-term activity score to help you see your trends over time. You can view reports either per week or per month, and see your progress across three, six, 12, 18, and 24 months:
It’s a straightforward way to check out your progress, but of course, clearing those tasks should be a priority.
Your Website’s To-Do List
Progress Planner has a built-in to-do list that lets you create a simple list of tasks. Once you finish a task, the plugin automates its completion, which can be satisfying! You can view your to-do list inside the plugin’s own dashboard and on the home screen of your WordPress dashboard, which is handy:
It would be nice to see due dates, reminders, subtasks, and more robust categorization here. However, it’s a solid foundation for you to start with. After all, there are more analytics to discover within the plugin.
Content Management
Your website and its content needs regular attention. You may need to update home page copy, review old blog posts to make them more relevant, publish new posts, rework your About page, and much more.
Progress Planner gives you a set of analytics as a quick overview of any new pages and posts you publish, a running word count total, and more. This is a great way to keep tabs on your content efforts.
You’ll also earn badges based on the amount you write. We’ll talk more about this shortly.
Plugin Updates
Keeping your WordPress plugins up to date is one of the most important maintenance tasks. Having out of date plugins can cause security issues and major errors with your site. Even so, updating plugins can easily fall by the wayside if you’re busy.
Inside the Progress Planner dashboard, you can see the total number of active plugins, along with the number of plugins that you need to update. From there, you can click the links to go to the Plugins screen and carry out any updates.
Built-in motivation
As we mention, the dashboard shows you badges and achievements that you unlock as you complete more tasks. The more content you add, the greater number of badges you’ll unlock. You can also earn badges through consistently achieving tasks and keeping your streak alive:
While relying on these badges can be a quick way to gauge your progress, reports and analytics can go even further.
Weekly Website Progress Reports
Imagine starting work for the week and knowing exactly which website tasks that you need to accomplish. No more guesswork—you know what you achieved last week, and what still needs doing this week.
Progress Planner can send you a report straight to your inbox that show the current state of your task list. This report gives you a bird’s eye view of your activity score from the past week. You can also view this data directly within your WordPress dashboard.
Progress Planner Support and Documentation
Something that might be concerning is that there isn’t any existing documentation available. However, once you install and activate the plugin, there’s no other set up. After that, the only real action to take is to add tasks to your to-do list. So, there’s little need for documentation.
Even so, you can always email the team by filling out a contact form on their website, or submit a support request on the plugin listing page in the WordPress Plugin Directory.
However, there’s going to be a premium version of the plugin in the future, which will bring in more advanced goal setting, reminders, and mini-courses that provide practical guidance on important site maintenance and update tasks. We’d expect in-depth documentation and tutorials to be introduced at this point.
How Much Does Progress Planner Cost?
Progress Planner is a free plugin with no current premium tier. However, Progress Planner Pro is in the pipeline, which will come with a premium price.
There’s no pricing available yet, but the goal of the premium version is on guidance towards your next tasks. There will be features such as expert tips, exclusive training and webinars, advanced goal setting, reminders, and more.
What Real Users Say About Progress Planner
Given that Progress Planner is a fledging WordPress plugin, there are no third-party reviews online as yet. However, the plugin does have a great pedigree—it’s created by the founders and former owners of Yoast. Of course, this is one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time, and the leading SEO plugin in the world. While it doesn’t speak to this plugin specifically, Yoast has over 25,000 five-star reviews for its free version.
We can only assume the team will bring the same passion and skillset to this plugin, especially since it solves a personal need for the founders. Since Progress Planner has the same core team behind the development of the plugin, you can expect excellent usability with a fantastic set of features that solves the problem of task management overwhelm and procrastination.
Closing Thoughts: Is Progress Planner the Cure for Maintenance Procrastination?
Overall, Progress Planner stands out in the site management space. Currently, the feature set is pretty simple, but knowing the team behind the plugin, the future is very exciting. It’ll be a good fit for smaller teams or single site owners who don’t want to hire a project manager or rely on a third-party service.
The gamification features are very unique and can help you stay motivated during routine site management tasks. The to-do list is helpful, but it would be nice to see more advanced functionality here. Basically, anyone who struggles with site management should give this plugin a try to see if it improves productivity.
What do you find most exciting about the Progress Planner plugin? Share your thoughts and experience in the comments below!
