Get your product and updates to your customers
After deploying your product, your customers need to install it on their websites. Here are our recommended ways to make the product available for purchase and download.
Premium Versions
The premium version is distributed directly from the Freemius servers to customers with a valid license. This ensures that only paying customers have access to the premium code, features, and updates.
You can manage the product releases, including versioning, staged rollout, and update distribution, through the Release Management section of the Freemius Developer Dashboard. This allows you to efficiently handle updates and ensure that your customers receive the latest features and fixes in a timely manner.
Who Is Eligible for Software Updates?
Only users within a trial period, or customers holding a valid (and non-expired) license activated on their WordPress site, will get access to premium software updates.
Create Checkout Points
First, you need to set up a place where your customers can make first contact with and purchase your products. This can be through:
- Use the Buy Button JavaScript API on your website.
- A checkout link on any website.
These points of sale can be used in various places, such as your product's website, blog posts, or even within the WordPress admin pages of your plugin or theme, emails, social media, and more.
You can also use the Freemius for WordPress plugin to create checkout points directly within your WordPress website.
Premium Version Updates
Once customers have purchased and installed the premium version of your product, they will receive software updates directly from the Freemius servers. This includes all future updates you release for the premium version.
The WordPress SDK embedded in the product includes a complete software update mechanism for premium products out of the box and is integrated with the Software Licensing engine.
The auto-update mechanism is seamlessly integrated with the WP Core updates mechanism, but it can only work when the product (plugin or theme) is active (otherwise, the custom code can't be executed). Customers will see update notifications via WP Admin.
WordPress has a built-in transient caching mechanism for updates that can cause a delay in the availability of updates for your customers (usually 12 hours) to reduce the load on the server. Therefore, when you release a new version of your product, it may take some time before the update is available to all customers. However, customers can always trigger an immediate check for updates by visiting wp-admin/update-core.php in their WordPress admin dashboard.
Software Updates in a Multisite Network Environment
Since the updates mechanism only runs when the product is active, if a plugin or theme is activated on just one site within a multisite network, only that site can execute the updates logic.
However, because updates are managed at the network level, the updates mechanism is triggered within the Network Admin scope. Simply checking for updates from the Network Admin is not sufficient to initiate the process.
To ensure updates work correctly in this scenario, follow these steps:
- Open the WP Admin of the site where the product is active.
- Navigate to the product's Account page.
- If you're eligible for updates and there's a pending update, you will see the
Install Update Now [<version>]button. You can click that button to perform an immediate update. The network updates transient/cache will be updated with the required data for the product's update. - Now, the update should be available via WP Network Admin → Dashboard → Updates, or the network plugins/themes page.
Only a super-admin can update plugins and themes in a network environment.
Free Versions
For products with a free version, the distribution of the free version is not handled by Freemius. Instead, you can choose to distribute the free version through the WordPress.org repository or your own website.
The free version generated from the deployment process can be downloaded manually from the Freemius Developer Dashboard and uploaded to WordPress.org via SVN.
This option enables you to support the open source community while leveraging the visibility that the repository offers. It also ensures a smooth update process for your customers.
You can also choose to distribute the free version through your own website. This should be a secondary avenue, as it can lead to manual update issues and provides less visibility.
Handling Free Updates
Overall, the best practice is to distribute the free version through the WordPress.org repository to ensure maximum reach and ease of updates for your users.
If you are distributing the free version through your site, use one of the many open-source tools to deliver updates to your users' WordPress admin dashboards.