WP Remote, the free WordPress site monitoring service, has announced they now support Zapier. Zapier is a collection of over 250 web apps that allow you to connect applications to automate tasks. Between WP Remote’s API and Zapier, the company hopes to give users the power to enhance their work day with more automation. The plan includes:
- Free (does not require a paid plan)
- 20 Triggers to choose from
- Your sites will refresh while you’re not logged in
- Zapier will automatically push changes to your connected apps as they come in (15-30 minute delay)
When I asked Noel Tock, Partner and Head of Products for WP Remote, why they allowed Zapier to be free and what distinct advantages does hooking up with the service give the company, he replied:
Just as WP Remote was born out of something we had initially built for ourselves, we wanted to extend some of our newer efficiencies (as a WordPress agency and product company) to our WP Remote end users.
Furthermore, connecting WP Remote and Zapier isn’t a ground breaking feature, but simply a smarter way for your tools to talk to one another. Unless we’re shipping unique or innovative enhancements (or features that have internal expenses associated such as backups), we’re quite happy to spread the love. As developers, freelancers or web designers, we simply use so many tools today that giving web applications the ability to communicate should be the norm, and not a paid upgrade.
Connecting sites to Zapier provides an assortment of opportunities to monitor and log events. For example, you can connect a WP Remote site to Pushover in Zapier and trigger it to send you push notifications on specific items such as failed backups or when new updates are available. Or, you could create an audit log by connecting a site to a Google Docs spreadsheet.
Tock said the company wants to see what types of creative Zaps are created by users, “we’ve shipped this integration with 20 different triggers specifically so we could see what creative ways people come up with to use it.”
WP Remote is not the first WordPress company to take advantage of Zapier. RocketGenius created a commercial add-on to extend the functionality of GravityForms instead of creating 100 separate add-ons. Whether it’s a product or service, tapping into Zapier and its catalog of web apps is a quick and easy way to enhance what a product or service can do.