Four WordPress plugins we built for our own stores — now free for yours

We run a WooCommerce store, a Shopify dealer site, a towing company and a web agency. Over the last few months we wrote a handful of plugins because the paid options were either bloated, licensed in a way that could break our sites (see what happened last week), or just didn’t exist. They’ve been running in production for a while now. Today we’re publishing four of them for anyone to use.

All four are on the Free Plugins page. GPL, plain PHP, each with a readme, nothing phones home, nothing asks for a key.

SWS Site Tag — Google Analytics 4 in one setting

Most “analytics” plugins want an account, a dashboard and an upgrade. This one wants a Measurement ID. It loads Google’s tag on public pages only, and tags logged-in users with an anonymous ID and their role so you can filter your own staff out of reports — or tick one box and not track them at all. That’s it. That’s the plugin.

SWS Live Search for WooCommerce

Amazon-style suggestions as the customer types: products with a thumbnail, price and stock state, matching categories, and matching guides or posts, with keyboard navigation and a “see all results” link. It uses WooCommerce’s own product search so the suggestions match the shop page, makes one cached request per keystroke, and needs no third-party search service. We built it for emaudio.com, where customers search by sub size, ohm rating and kit name; it has replaced a surprising amount of “do you have…” email.

SWS Pre-orders for WooCommerce

Tick “Pre-order” on a product, set a ship date, keep selling. The customer sees Pre-order — ships February 15 instead of the dreaded “Available on backorder”, a badge shows on the shop grid, the date follows the item through the cart, checkout, order and emails, and the order is flagged so the person packing boxes doesn’t ship it early. We wrote it the day a supplier told us the new drivers would be “middle of January, then build time”.

SWS Billing Links — retire the WHMCS Bridge

If you embedded WHMCS in WordPress with a bridge plugin and now want WHMCS to stand on its own — new PHP version, no licence to renew, simpler stack — this keeps every old link working. The bridge’s URLs 301 to the right WHMCS page, and any bridge link still printed by your theme or menus is rewritten on the fly. Install it, flip the switch, deactivate the bridge, and nothing anyone bookmarked breaks.

Why give them away?

Partly because they’re small and it’s the right thing to do with GPL code. Mostly because the plugins aren’t the business — installing, tuning and looking after them is. If you’d rather we set them up on your store, with the abandoned-cart emails designed to match your brand and someone watching the sync, that’s Store Ops. If you’d rather never think about updates, backups and PHP versions again, that’s Site Care. And if you just want the plugins, take them. Tell us if something breaks.