Yoast has a new plugin, the Progress Planner. It gamifies keeping your website up to date. Here it is right out of the box:
You can see an initial score of 5. We have not seen anything lower than that. You can also see right away how many plugins you have and whether any need updating. Scroll down a bit and you will see how many pieces of content you published last week, but otherwise it’s a blank slate.
Everybody starts out with a Wonderful Writer badge:
Once you agree to accept emails from Progress Planner, give it a few minutes to digest your data and you will see your score:
Your score
The top left block shows your overall score. This is based on regularly producing and updating content, keeping your WordPress version and your plugins up to date, and either updating or deleting themes when there’s a new version. Do these three things and you will receive a score of 100.
Reading from left to right, you can then see your scores over past months. You can view this block as weekly or monthly scores.
More information
There is a to-do list where you can type in the things you want to do to keep your site in trim. That’s handy!
Then you can see the average number of words per post and the number of words you’ve written in the preceding week. Scroll down and see six months of word counts, your progress toward your next badges, and how many weeks you’ve been keeping up.
You can also see a quick summary on your main dashboard screen.
Finally, Progress Planner will send you a very encouraging email listing the unfinished items on your to-do list as well as a score for the preceding week. Mostly we’re seeing “Great job! Keep up the good work!” but even if you’ve been ignoring your site, you’ll get a cheery message:
What to do with the Progress Planner
You only improve what you measure, right? Tracking your website maintenance can be just like tracking your activity on your Apple Watch — when you see what you’re doing, you will feel motivated to keep it up. The interface is bright and fun and it’s all in one place. The gamification and motivation are probably the biggest benefit for most of us.
Certainly, if you collaborate on your website with other people, the Progress Planner allows you to keep track of them and encourages them as well as you. If you are a competitive person, you could swap stats with friends and see who gets their badges faster.
Either way, you can get granular with goals for the number of words written and pieces of content posted, or you can just set your sights on keeping your score at 100.
The plugin is free at the moment, though we hear that there will be a premium version in the future. It’s easy to install and requires no setup, beyond agreeing to receive emails. We’d say everyone should try this out. Let us know whether it helps you keep your site up to date!
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