Inside my Hiiv Part 2: Challenges and limitations with the old system

How we migrated our 10 year old legacy media infrastructure to beehiiv in 6 days. A multi-part journey told from the viewpoint of the business owner.

Handmade Seller Magazine
March 12, 2025

Welcome back to the Inside my Hiiv series. Here I share all the details of how we moved the Handmade Seller infrastructure to beehiiv in 6 days. It’s written from the perspective of the business owner. If you missed the first installment, you can read that here: Inside my Hiiv-Part 1: How did we get here?

In the last article, I shared how it took 24 different pieces of tech to run my core magazine functions. It wasn’t fun to put together this post sharing all the places I was struggling. But I think many of you can relate with parts of your business that aren’t working as well as you would like. The good news is that the old infrastructure is gone, and we are safely snuggled into our hiiv over here at beehiiv. Many of your friends have also made it over to our new and improved cozy space.

As I reflect back on what was happening before, I faced seven core challenges with what I had set up in the past. The eighth one I mention is what did me in and necessitated the switch. We all have our breaking points, and that was mine. I’ve created this next list to make it easy to jump around within the article, as this is a LONG conversation.

Poor Advertising Partner

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

Inability to pursue new opportunities

Oh my goodness the WordPress ecosystem

ThriveCart renewal mess

Not everyone loves AI

Turtles outrun my website speed

And one day it just broke

Well that is kind of crappy

This is a pun intended story that demonstrates the larger problem I had. I used Google’s AdSense product to do some monetization of the traffic from my website. I didn’t particularly care for AdSense, but it was the only advertiser I could get due to my levels of website traffic. Many small publishers and content creators face the same problem.

I found the AdSense experience too disruptive. Revenue was never great in the first place and they make you wait until they accumulate $100 in ad revenue to be paid. $100 in ad revenue on the publisher side is a surprising amount of traffic given the payout levels. Literally many months. I had to do a lot of manual controls to make sure AdSense didn’t have unexpected website behavior. If I let Google place the ads, it created an intrusive experience for my users. It would put things in places it shouldn’t, and I was having to constantly tweak it. Eventually I turned most of it off in frustration.

I will never forget the day when I was making some Elementor website updates, and accidentally reactivated an ad. I published everything, and went to look at my website. In the middle where I reactivated the ad was a picture of a giant toilet. A TOILET! That was the quality of the advertising matching going on there. No offense to toilets, but that is not what I wanted for an advertiser.

Other advertising processes caused so much friction for the business. As a small company getting direct advertising should have been a more profitable model. However, most companies wanted substantially higher traffic for far less money. I was straight up told they could not justify moving anything from Google ads because that was part of their process. My processes were very manual with advertisers, but it did generate some revenue. But they were simply too much work to sustain. I tried using a product called Passionfroot to manage my media kit and get advertisers. They were great at first until they did a Venture Capital funding round. After that the quality of the advertisers and the price they would pay dropped significantly. It went from interesting to yuck almost overnight. Unless of course I wanted to advertise crypto or AI tools, which is not typically a fit for my readers. My experience reflects just how much the ad world has changed in just a few years.

From the other side, the artisans I talk with talk about having to spend more and more to get less traffic. Yet as the person hosting I seem to get less and less. The middleman however is doing great.

Lack of meaningful metrics to manage the business

I had metrics all over the place, and none that actually integrated anywhere. We are supposed to talk about best practices and managing customer funnels, right? Managing a funnel? What funnel? I had broken pieces spread across a mess of an ecosystem. It didn’t matter how much knowledge I had about what I should do, I literally couldn’t do it because there were so many incomplete pieces. Have you ever experienced this?

Okay, so let’s paint a picture as that might help. I could see a count of views of website articles in WordPress, who read my newsletter emails in Brevo, how many people looked at the shopping cart in ThriveCart (but not who they were) and traffic in Google Analytics. Nothing tied together anywhere. That is often the crux of the issue in the WordPress ecosystem or any ecosystem where things are just bolted together without being properly integrated. Making use of any traditional marketing, tracking and analysis was literally not possible. Or if it was required skills far beyond what we could do.

People would say to me, “Just do more paid advertising to grow”. I would just give the side eye and try not to laugh. And measure that how? Anyone else relate? Doing paid advertising felt like lighting a pile of money on fire because my tracking was such a mess.

What I wanted for an infrastructure

What I really had for an infrastructure

Spoiler alert: The information I now have in two weeks in beehiiv has surpassed what I had in two years of my previous solution. A lot of it has to be with how you can properly and cleanly get things set up to actually manage them. You can consolidate and measure things by using a number of tools. There are several pieces to how we did this that will be addressed in future posts as this is its own beast. The proper architecture of beehiiv gave us the running start.

Opportunities became impossibilities

Have you ever had opportunities for your business, but you can’t execute on them due to other constraints in your business? Maybe you don’t have processes, maybe you don’t have time. Maybe you don’t have the knowledge. This comes up for a lot of small businesses and requires some pause and deep reflection.

I have lived firsthand the opportunity costs legacy tech cost my business. I have also watched many of the publications in our industry go out of business, losing several publishing friends in just the last year.

So what was my opportunity cost? It shuts down avenues of creative business development - here are two examples:

Referrals/Affiliates- I had ThriveCart for this, but it required its own special set up and processes. Then I had to build it all back in WordPress and then try to roll it out to subscribers via Brevo. Just getting the project done required a surprising amount of work. This should have been a set it and forget it project, but it simply wasn’t. I lost a lot of time trying to build this out for it to result in nothing because it was so clunky.

Gift Subscriptions- a number of times I have had conversations with people that have an artisan business owner in their life they want to support. “Could I buy a gift subscription for them?” they would ask. Sometimes gifting someone help is the best thing we can do when we can’t actually do anything else. Maybe we don’t buy those kinds of products, but we want to be supportive. I thoroughly and creatively explored my tech. You just couldn’t get there from here. Gift subscriptions were off the table- not supported by the tech and too hard to do otherwise. This meant I couldn’t approach non-profits to provide the magazine as part of awards, or let people simply buy them for people they care about. Potential revenue stream dead.

The WordPress ecosystem wobble

For those that are not tech nerds, last fall a war erupted in the WordPress world. Nope, I am not being dramatic- it’s ugly. If you aren’t aware of what happened, see the links below for your reference. Essentially what is happening is that the creator of the ecosystem as at war with one of the largest hosting providers. It is a very public and VERY ugly battle, with the biggest losers being the customers on the ecosystem.

Why WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has gone 'nuclear' against tech investing giant Silver Lake

Matt Mullenweg, who founded WordPress more than two decades ago, finds himself in a legal battle against Silver Lake over the firm's ownership of WP Engine.

www.cnbc.com/2024/10/05/wordpress-ceo-matt-mullenweg-goes-nuclear-on-silver-lake-wp-engine-.html

Federal judge slaps down Automattic, granting temporary injunction to WP Engine in ongoing WordPress squabble

The judge on Tuesday ordered WordPress owner Automattic to reverse its actions against WP Engine.

www.computerworld.com/article/3622658/federal-judge-slaps-down-automattic-granting-temporary-injunction-to-wp-engine-in-ongoing-wordpress-squabble.html

Matt Mullenweg Asks What Drama to Create in 2025, Community Reacts

On Christmas Eve, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg took to Reddit, causing quite a stir by asking what kind of drama he should create in 2025. He posted, “What drama should I create in 2025? I’m…

wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-asks-what-drama-to-create-in-2025-community-reacts

Matt Mullenweg: WordPress developer hours cutback may or may not slow innovation

Automattic CEO said its 99% cutback in development hours may force WP Engine to settle their lawsuit.

www.computerworld.com/article/3801043/matt-mullenweg-wordpress-developer-hours-cutback-may-or-may-not-slow-innovation.html

Ask yourself, how would you feel if saw the underlying tech that you were using had something like this happen? What would you think if the ecosystem creator is soliciting from people asking how to create more drama while embroiled in a bunch of lawsuits? I personally felt queasy about the whole thing. There is not where I want my tech provider focused.

I was not using WP Engine for hosting. However, October after the battle started between Automattic and WP Engine I started seeing more quirky behavior on the WordPress side of things. Things like Plug ins randomly breaking and not emailing me after someone submitted through our Contact Us form. Performance problems just getting worse. I used the phrase burning platform to describe when you have something that is actually falling apart, and I was getting close. My tech spidey senses were on high alert. But this all started around the holidays and I on deadline for getting a magazine out the door, so I soldiered on.

What I can say about my hosting provider is that they were not patching the underlying servers the way they should, which was not good. They had their own mess adding to my unease.

ThriveCart subscription renewal debacle

I used ThriveCart to manage magazine subscriptions. On the whole, I do like the ThriveCart product. I even still recommend it for certain situations. It has its quirks, but it let me get started on monetizing subscriptions for the magazine. It was a key piece of our tech. But then we had a problem- a big one.

Late last year, my first subscription renewals started. I had dunning turned on, so my customers were supposed to get notified that their renewal was going to process ahead of the renewal. I started seeing the first re-bill’s process, and didn’t think anything of it. I’m getting individual emails when things renew and I’m managing the day to day of renewals. In the back of my mind I remember thinking “I wonder what those dunning emails are saying, I don’t seem to be copied on those.” I wasn’t sure if this was normal or not, as this was my first year of renewals.

And then one day I got a very nasty email from a subscriber and that was how I found out the Dunning emails were not working. Most people honestly didn’t seem to care, but here and there people got really mad and took it out on me because they had wanted to cancel. I had no problems issuing refunds, which cost extra due to having to absorb the cost of the fees. I was trying to get to the bottom of what was going on. This is an advertised feature for ThriveCart, and I assumed I must have made a mistake in my set up.

Mr HMS got involved here and started hunting down ThriveCart. They confirmed my set up was correct and should be working. But it wasn’t. We escalated multiple times and “development” was working on it. I knew that was simply a delaying tactic, but I played the game. When you’ve spent 25 years in tech, you know the difference between a delaying tactic and a real answer. You just do.

After a month of escalating and getting no answers or even willingness to help us find a work around, I was pretty frustrated. How would you feel if you got occasional customers getting upset and asking for refunds because something that is supposed to work is just failing and no one will help? Was I supposed to manually email every renewal? That is completely untenable.

We finally took matters into our own hands and Mr HMS built a process to manage the Dunning right within Stripe. At the time of this writing, ThriveCart has never followed up or fixed the problem. The whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth. I completely understand when a product is missing features. That is actually pretty normal, as not every platform can do everything. But when you advertise something should work and then won’t help when it doesn’t, I get a bit grumpy. It would have been so much better if they just told us the truth- we don’t know why it isn’t working but here is a workaround because we are not going to get to it for a while. Instead of “development is working on it”. Which they aren’t.

Chat GPT referral traffic

AI can be incredibly powerful in many cases. There are some AI solutions I genuinely love. I even talk about them in our content from any different perspectives. Let’s just say not all AI has considered that the original content creators might not want their information in the AI. AI is still very much the wild west where regulations have not caught up with what is happening in practice.

Last fall in Google analytics, I started seeing something that alarmed me. Chat GPT was starting to provide referral traffic to Handmade Seller. OH NO! We had tried to do some of the polite things in our set up telling the bots to go away, but it didn’t work. And we didn’t have the greatest options to stop them in their tracks. We do use a product called Cloudflare for our DNS and domain names. Given how our WordPress set up worked, we could not fully utilize this product to protect against bots. And we didn’t find a lot of great solutions to help us with this on WordPress. I felt trapped.

The reality for me is that bots LOVE the niche, specific writing we do. So they want to eat it like a hungry monster for free. I know many artisan businesses also have this problem with AI image scraping as they try to take your work. This is a phenomenon that has been going on for years. And we couldn’t really elegantly stop it back then.

How do I know how bad it was? Early on after our migration to beehiiv with an upgraded Cloudflare configuration to protect against bots, we blocked 650 bot requests in one day. ONE DAY. I’m starting to try to talk about it more publicly as most people are completely shocked when they hear that number.

Plus, we put a lot of our content on beehiiv behind subscriber walls. This is why we require a free subscription with your email address for a lot of content. It keeps the AI bots out. These two pieces appear to be slowing them down, if not outright stopping them.

Performance is just bad on the website

Another common challenge that many have on a WordPress set up is that the old site was just SLOW. I know you probably know this, as so many of you were there and experienced it. Here are some screenshots showing our page speed measurements from Google.

We used all the tools you are supposed to use for performance tuning and tried so hard to fix it. But we could only do so much. The complex nature of the WordPress world limited our options to resolve the problem in ways that worked for our business.

We noticed that every time WordPress would come out with performance improvements, we had to touch every piece of content to implement them. This meant we would have to manually touch around 300+ pieces of content. Nope, not kidding.

I’m not going to share the after results just yet after the switch to beehiiv, but let’s just say I am delighted so far.

The White Screen of Death

Ultimately, this is what did me in. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The 3D Flipbook plug in just stopped working. I call it the white screen of death. Around 20% of my paying customers simply couldn’t read the magazine anymore because this plug in just broke. No obvious errors, it just didn’t work.

I have customers that really rely on what we write about to help them with their businesses. And they would try to open the magazine, but it just wouldn’t open and would give them a white screen and…… nothing.

This was my boil over moment. I might have had a little temper tantrum because I was so mad for my customers that are just trying to read my magazine. How can a magazine be THIS hard? Ever had that moment in your business?

We produce a BEAUTIFUL magazine. Seriously, it is really nice. Artisans love reading it because we are hyper focused on them. There are no other publications in this special little business part of the world for artisans. When print subscribers see me at trade shows, it is wild. They light up and gush about how much they love it! But for my digital readers? Let’s be honest- I was trapped in a garbage user experience that did not meet their needs and was in no way a reflection of the quality of our writing or our work. I knew this had to be affecting everything. I was tired of trying to survive my infrastructure. It was time to blow it up, rebuild it, and begin to thrive.

Here comes the Goblin

As a human, I am a unique combo platter of engineer and artisan. The artisan shows up in the writing and creativity- the engineer is the ruthless let’s get er done goblin. I went full on goblin mode. Ever just been DONE with something? That was me. Mr HMS joined the party, and we went on a hunt for a better solution.

In the next installment I will share more about what tech we looked at and why we chose beehiiv. And this part is where it starts to get really fun!

PS if you are now intrigued and want to try out beehiiv for your newsletter, check out my referral link.

Inside my Hiiv Part 2: Challenges and limitations with the old system

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