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WP Webhooks Review: The most powerful WordPress Automation Plugin in 2024

By James LePage
 on July 13, 2022

WP Webhooks Review: The most powerful WordPress Automation Plugin in 2024

By James LePage
 on July 13, 2022

WP Webhooks is a do-all automation plugin for WordPress that's easy enough for beginners to use, while also powerful enough to be a developers best friend. In this review, we're going to take a deep dive into this awesome tool, take a look at what it can do, and how it can simplify your life.

The goal of WP Webhooks is to act as the glue between your many WordPress plugins, from a form builder (WSForm is our go-to), to a CRM (FluentCRM is great), to a LMS (LearnDash), to an ecommerce solution (WooCommerce).

You can choose to send data between the plugins and/or between WordPress (and associated integrations), external services, integration tools, and even APIs.

Integrations

Before diving into the specific features and usage of WP Webhooks, let's take a look into the vast number of native integrations that it comes with.

There's native support for the majority of tools that somebody will use on a WordPress site build:

A few of our favorites are WPAmelia, an awesome appointment booking tool, BBPress, the standard for WP based forums, Learndash, the leading CMS, WooCommerce, Fluent Support, and Zapier.

Within each of these integrations, there are custom triggers and actions. Each has many combinations (so many it would be impossible to list them here), but here are two examples which offer some great use case examples.

To view every single integration click here. To get some use case examples (there must be millions of permutations between all integrations), click into the specific example.

It's also worth noting, as we'll cover in the next section, it's not just a simple "if this happens, than do that". Instead you can add as many actions to a single trigger as you want.

Some of these integrations, specifically the ones to large automation platforms, expand the utility of this plugin even further.

These specific integrations include Zapier, IFTTT, Zoho Flow, Make and and a few others. Each one of these tools boast thousands of integrations which allows you to connect and automate pretty much any single workflow you have in mind. Here are some examples using Zapier.

  • If a user is created in WordPress, make a user in Salesforce CRM
  • If a post is updated in WordPress, update a backup copy in Google Drive
  • If a custom ACF field is updated, text the website owner to verify using SimpleTexting
  • If an affiliate referral is made with AffiliateWP, add that record to Airtable

This is also a two way street - I can receive data from a third party tool, and use WP Webhooks to complete an action within WordPress as well.

Now that we've hopefully covered the theoretical power of WP Webhooks, let's take a look at the plugin and usage. No product is any good if it has a lot of power and promise, but is unusable due to complexity or design. Luckily WP Webhooks Pro gets the UI/UX down perfectly, resulting in a powerful product sited for anybody from a non techie all the way up to a developer.

Flows

Flows is the core feature I find myself using - It's a Zapier-like automation builder that relies on two things, a trigger and an action (or several actions). Showing is better than telling, so let's take a look at a basic example.

I have an important ACF custom field on a multi author blog, and I want to know every single time it's updated. Instead of going to my post every 2 hours and checking to see that it's content has not been changed, I'm going to use WP Webhooks to notify me when it is changed.

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I'll make a new flow, and add a trigger and action. My trigger is when an ACF Post Field is updated. My action is sending an email from WordPress to my admin email.

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I simply select my ACF Field, and set the admin email and message. I can dynamically include the content if need be. It's that simple. Now, when I publish the flow, I'll get a notification email every single time that field is updated.

This is just one example of many. I'm trying to highlight the ease of use when it comes to actually setting up each trigger and action - it's tough to get to specific as each integration (WordPress Core, WooCommerce, third party plugins) all come with their own triggers and actions depending on what they do. For example:

  • If a new user is made (WP core), add them to an Amelia appointment.
  • If an Affiliate WP commission is made, add a tag to a user in FluentCRM.

The list is genuinely endless. For each trigger and action, the inputs also dynamically update. For example, here's the ACF trigger for a comment field being updated.

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Note the helpful tooltips on every single field.

And here's the ACF trigger for a Fluent Form submission:

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Here's the action for creating a WordPress user:

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As mentioned before, you can "stack" actions, meaning that for a trigger event, there can be unlimited actions. As an example if a WordPress user is created, I could generate an email, add them to a CRM, and send them off to Zapier and their 4500+ external integrations.

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A powerful implementation is conditions on actions. For example, if an order contained a product, I could run an action, but if it contained a different product, I could run another one.

Sending Data Out

We can take any data available to us in WordPress or with any of the many integrations, and send it off via webhook to anywhere - including custom apps and most enterprise tools (think Slack, or Teams).

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For example, WSForm is an awesome tool, but has no direct integration with Microsoft Teams. I can easily set up a notification by adding in the Microsoft Teams incoming webhook URL, and passing form data from a WSForm submission:

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If structured properly, my Microsoft Teams channel would notify me every time somebody submists a WSForm (or any other supported action on my site happened).

Receiving Data In

In this situation, we send a webhook from a third party service (something like an application) containing info, and do something with that info. A good example is creating a user with a webhook. To do that, we add a new webhook action to receive data.

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Now, with the given information, we simply build a webhook, send it to our site, and make a new user. This is a great way to integrate something like a custom app with your website. In the user example, our response is:

{ "success":true, "msg":"User successfully created.", "data":{ "user_id":4, "user_data":{ "user_email":"demo3@iso****.co", "user_pass":"**********************nyw4LyLX6", "nickname":"James LePage", "user_login":"demo3iso****-co", "first_name":"James", "last_name":"LePage", "additional_roles":"" } } }

Our Highlight - WooCommerce

I was happily surprised by the WooCommerce integration (in Flow) - for any activity, such as a customer order, coupon creation, or product update, I could trigger whatever event I wanted to.

As our agency builds WooCommerce sites and always has edge-case requests for notifications, or pushing data off to custom apps, WP Webhooks is the perfect "one-size-fits-all" solution for ecommerce sites.

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Because I'm already using Zapier to automate most aspects of my business, and WP Webhooks for several other use cases, I can remove the need for several paid plugins. In this situation, I want to have a Slack channel be notified every time a product is updated - building somewhat of an audit log.

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Doing this is easy. First, I created a WooCommerce product updated trigger. All settings were left to be default.

Then, I made an action, specifically zapier_send_webhook. Here, I send the timestamp of when the product was updated, and the title of the product.

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On Zapier, I went and created a trigger "catch raw hook in webhooks". This constantly listens for my WooCommerce website to blast it with information.

Back on WP Webhooks, I set the Zapier URL to be the one pictured below... this is where my info would be sent.

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Finally, on Zapier, I send the message grabbed from my WooCommerce site off to Slack.

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The whole process of setting this up took under 5 minutes, integrated with my existing systems, and eliminated the need for yet another paid plugin. This is an example of a more complex integration with a third party automation tool

As a side note - I could have also likely just use WP Webhooks to send a JSON payload to Slack itself, removing the need for Zapier. However Zapier is something I already pay for, and it's also no code which saves me a bunch of time in this situation as I don't need to figure out Slacks docs :).

Conclusion

WP Webhooks Pro is a perfect one-size-fits-all automation and data connection plugin for WordPress websites. It's well designed, and easy to use - even a beginner would be able to figure it out after reading it's docs due to it's good UI/UX, and intuitive, Zapier like nature.

And of course, as a developer and agency owner, I love the flexibility and extensibility that this solution offers me.

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Article By
James LePage
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James LePage is the founder of Isotropic, a WordPress education company and digital agency. He is also the founder of CodeWP.ai, a venture backed startup bringing AI to WordPress creators.
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