Justyna Dorsz

Squarespace vs WordPress – The Costs

I manage two websites:

I will be moving manichyena.com to WordPress in the upcoming days. The main reason is the financial one. Let’s look at the costs.

This website runs on WordPress, which is free. And is hosted on DigitalOcean, which costs $5 per month. I also pay $1 per month for automatic backups. To sum up, I pay $78.56 per year, including taxes.

On the other hand, manichyena.com runs on Squarespace. There are a few price plans and we needed the Business Plan which costs $216 per year. Including taxes, it’s $265.68. There are no automatic backups.

So, Squarespace costs $187 more per year than WordPress + DigitalOcean. It’s not that much if you consider just one year. But we plan to keep our website for years. It’s possible we will still have it in 10 or more years and the savings add up. In 10 years we will have saved $1870 by moving from Squarespace to WordPress on DigitalOcean.

By the way, here’s a referral link for DigitalOcean. If you use it then we both get some hosting credit.

Store Maintenance CHECKLIST

I have a few stores with my designs. My main store is on Threadless but I also have my Teepublic store and a few smaller ones. I could leave them as they are and I would earn some passive income from them. But my stores would decline in popularity if I didn’t maintain them properly.

Here’s a list of things that I do regularly so that my stores are always up to date.

  • Tags
    I go through all the designs and make sure all the relevant tags are added. When I know of a new phrase that people search for, I check my designs to see if I can add it to the tags. E.g. recently, due to the pandemic, people searched for “social distancing” designs. So I added it to those designs where it fit.
  • New Products
    Every time Threadless, Teepublic, Redbubble add new products I go through my designs and enable them on those new products. Or if they are enabled by default, then I make sure the designs look good on them: that the image size is correct and that the best background color is selected.
  • Descriptions
    Most of my designs have descriptions. But when I have time I try to come up with something better.
  • New Variants
    If I have a white design on black background added to my shop, but it would look good as a black design on a white background then I add it too.
  • Collections/Albums
    Most stores allow you to create collections of your designs. Whenever I add a new design I make sure to add it to relevant collections. And when I have enough designs that have a common theme, then I make a new collection for them. I have my Ridiculous Cat Collection, Dogs, Space, Best Face Masks, Forest, a collection with Best Gift Ideas, and also my collection with Black and White Cat Designs.

What do people buy?

I’ve written a lot about why you should open your own apparel store and sell your designs. But opening a store and uploading your art is just the first step.

When I started, I rarely got any sales. Once or twice a month someone bought a t-shirt with my design. The more designs I uploaded, the more sales I got. But there’s one thing that you can do from the start to increase your sales: enable your designs on all available products.

I checked the recent 40 orders in my Fox Shiver Threadless Shop. Do you know what people bought? Here’s a list:

  • Most people bought t-shirts and long sleeve t-shirts. You probably have those enabled in your store, so that’s good.
  • Leggings – did you add them to your store? They require more work as you need to submit a specific file. But it’s worth it. I sell a lot of leggings.
  • Face Masks
  • Stickers!
  • Cut&Sew – again, a specific template is required. Not all of my patterns are added on Cut&Sew but I intend to change that because people do like them.
  • Magnets
  • Hoodies – they are as easy to add as t-shirts so no reason not to have them in your store.
  • Beach Towels

As you can see, if I only had t-shirts in my store, I would miss out on all those other sales. It takes time to add designs on all those products, but you do the work once and then you don’t have to worry about it. You are most likely going to have your store active for years, and now and then someone will want to buy a beach towel or a blanket or another of those less popular products. Give your customers that opportunity.

WordPress on DigitalOcean – Error establishing a database connection

Today this website wasn’t working for a few hours.

My website is built with WordPress and is hosted on DigitalOcean. They were doing server maintenance — usually, that does not cause any issues but this time it did.

When I tried to access my website, I got this error:

Wo
Error establishing a database connection

I found out that the issue might be that the MySQL server was turned of.

To fix that I logged in to my droplet web console and ran:

sudo netstat -plt

It showed me programs listening for connections. However, MySQL was not on the list:

WordPress - MySQL is not working

Since MySQL was not listed, it was not running. I needed to start MySQL:

sudo systemctl start mysql

To check if MySQL started I ran the netstat command again. And this time MySQL was on the list:

WordPress - MySQL is running

That fixed the issue for me.

February is the worst month and that’s okay

If you are a freelancer, your income is often unstable. When I was starting there have been months when I didn’t earn anything, and when I did earn something, it was less than $5 a month. Now, that I have a lot of designs in my online stores, I get regular royalty payments each month, but the amounts vary wildly.

The best months are November and December when people buy gifts. Black Friday, too, has a massive impact on sales, of course. That makes up for the months when sales are lower. At the start of a new year people spent less, many probably need to rebuild their depleted savings after Christmas.

It might be scary for new designers when, in some months, they are only paid a fraction of their regular earnings. I remember it was for me. When I saw how my sales dropped in January and February I worried that it would continue. But sales always pick up in March, or April at the latest. After that, the income is fairly regular till October, when it picks up again for the next two months. And the cycle continues.

How funny are you?

What the worst that could happen…

Overall, funny t-shirts sell better. It’s not only my experience. Just recently I watched Michael Essek’s videos where he shares advice on designing and selling and marketing and he said pretty much the same thing. He said about 90% of his t-shirts are funny.

It’s difficult to think of a funny design on the spot. At least for me. So whenever I hear someone says something funny I note it down on my phone or my reMarkable, and then I put it on a t-shirt. It’s one of my habits — collecting snippets that I can later combine, rearrange, and use.

Disruptions

Joshua Waitzkin is a chess master, he wrote the book “The Art of Learning”. I was reminded about it today when my neighbors were listening to music too loudly. Joshua wrote that you are supposed to be able to concentrate even if something is distracting you. As an example: there was someone mowing the grass, and Joshua deliberately left the window open even though the noise was disturbing.

I have never achieved that kind of ability — I can’t work when something is bothering me. Too loud music, neighbors arguing and throwing bottles, someone drunkenly yelling, people smoking in the corridors and cigarette smoke getting inside my apartment — all this stuff distracts me so much that I feel I have not been productive these past few days.

I plan to find a new apartment and move this week even though I will lose some money this way.