Making the plugins our clients couldn’t find

Most of the websites we build for our clients run on WordPress, and plenty of them sell through WooCommerce. WordPress is brilliant at the everyday things: pages, posts, a shop, a contact form. It’s the slightly unusual jobs where it gets awkward.

A flooring shop that sells by the square metre, in packs. A fabric shop that cuts to the nearest ten centimetres. A blinds company where every blind is made to measure and the price depends on the width and the drop. Shipping that has to match what Royal Mail actually charges. Invoices that look like the rest of the brand, without the bits nobody asked for.

The plugin that nearly does the job

When a client needs something like that, the search tends to end in one of three places. There’s a plugin that does most of it, but not quite. There’s one that does all of it, for a yearly fee that makes you wince, along with a dozen features you’ll never use. Or there’s one that did the job beautifully five years ago and hasn’t been touched since.

So, more and more often, we wrote our own. Steven, who looks after the data and software side of Essence, has replaced paid plugins our clients relied on with code of our own, from a Royal Mail shipping method to invoices laid out the way the client wanted. Each one was written for one client, to solve one problem.

From one client to every shop

It started to feel wasteful to solve the same problems one client at a time. If our clients were struggling to find these things, other shops must be too. So we’ve started turning that work into proper plugins that anyone can install.

The first is Measure and Price for WooCommerce. It lets a shop sell by the metre, square metre, kilogram or litre. The customer types how much they need, and the page tells them how many packs that is, how much it covers and what it costs, before they add it to the basket. It’s free.

For shops that make things to measure there’s Measure and Price Pro. Blinds, glass, rugs and poles are priced from a grid of sizes you type in, bigger orders can cost less per metre, and a whole catalogue can be set up from a spreadsheet.

How we make them

We make them the way we’d want them made for our own clients. Every setting is explained in plain English, right where you set it. There are no nagging banners in your dashboard and nothing is sent anywhere. Each plugin does one job well, rather than twenty jobs badly.

Before anything goes out, it’s tested properly: automatically, on the themes people actually use, and by a real person trying to break it in a real shop. Every plugin comes with guides that walk you through it with pictures, and we answer questions within one working day.

Is there a plugin you wish existed?

If a plugin you rely on is expensive, neglected or just awkward, or the one you need doesn’t exist, tell us about it. The next plugin on our list might well be yours.

Everything we’ve made so far is on our plugins page.