Frequently asked questions

WordPress 5.8 or newer and PHP 8.0 or newer, plus the pdo_sqlite extension (or pdo_mysql if you would rather use your own MySQL/MariaDB database), mbstring and openssl. All of those are standard on mainstream WordPress hosting. WooCommerce is only needed if you want the ecommerce suite, and the imap extension is optional — it is required only for reading email in the built-in inbox.

No. Stillpoint CRM creates its own database automatically on first load — a single SQLite file in a protected folder on your server, at wp-content/uploads/stillpoint-crm/crm.sqlite. No database setup, no configuration: there is no database name, user or password to create, and no schema to import. If you'd rather use your own MySQL or MariaDB database, you can point the CRM at one you control, and STILLPOINT_CRM_DATA_DIR moves the file outside your web root entirely.

The CRM mounts its admin interface on a WordPress route, and WordPress only picks up new rewrite rules when the rewrite rules are flushed. Going to Settings → Permalinks and clicking Save Changes flushes them — you do not need to change anything on that screen. Pretty permalinks must be enabled (anything other than 'Plain'). If the CRM page 404s after activation, this is almost always the reason.

Install and activation take a couple of minutes, and the database builds itself on first load. Realistically, budget half an hour to get genuinely useful: a few minutes to install and activate the licence, ten minutes to shape your pipeline stages and win probabilities, five for finance settings if you will send quotes, and ten to import a contact CSV. Connecting a mailbox and running the WooCommerce backfill add a little more.

On your own server, inside your WordPress installation. By default everything lives in a single SQLite database file at wp-content/uploads/stillpoint-crm/crm.sqlite, with attachments stored on your server alongside it. Optionally you can use your own MySQL or MariaDB database. No copy of your CRM data is sent anywhere else, because there is no service of ours to send it to.

Yes, and on hosts that allow it we recommend it. Define the STILLPOINT_CRM_DATA_DIR constant in wp-config.php and point it at a directory above your web root; the CRM stores its database and attachments there instead. The default location is already protected by a deny-all .htaccess rule and a blank index file, so this is extra hardening rather than a fix for a gap.

No, and there is no mechanism that would allow it. The plugin never transmits CRM records to us and we operate no service that could receive them. The only outbound communication is licence activation and update checking through Freemius, which carries licence metadata such as your site URL, plugin version and licence status — never contacts, deals, invoices or email content.

Architecturally it helps a great deal: because the data sits on your own server in your chosen jurisdiction, you remain the data controller, we are not a processor of your business data, data residency follows your hosting, and there is a per-contact GDPR export for subject access requests plus full CSV export and deletion. That said, this is architectural help and not legal advice — compliance still depends on your lawful basis, notices, retention practice and how you handle requests.

Because the whole CRM is one SQLite file inside wp-content/uploads, your existing WordPress backup almost certainly already includes it. You can also copy that single file before a risky import, keep dated snapshots, or move hosts by moving the file. If you run on MySQL instead, your normal database dump covers it.

Deactivating the plugin leaves your data untouched on disk, so you can deactivate to troubleshoot a conflict and reactivate with everything intact. Because the database is a file you control, deleting your data is a deliberate act you perform — nothing is silently destroyed by removing the plugin. Take a copy of the database file first if there is any chance you will want it back.

One activation is one production WordPress installation, tracked by site URL. Starter includes 1 site, Pro up to 5, and Agency up to 20. You can deactivate a site to release its slot when migrating hosts or retiring a client site. Local and staging copies of a licensed production site do not consume an activation, provided they are not public.

Yes. Every tier includes unlimited CRM users, on every plan, with no per-seat billing at any point. Add the whole sales team, your support staff and your managers and the price does not change. There is no contact-count tier either — your bill does not grow because your database did.

A soft gate, never a lockout. The core CRM keeps working on your existing data and export stays available, so you are never shut out of your own records. What pauses is premium and ecommerce (WooCommerce) features, automatic updates, and support entitlement. Renewing restores everything immediately.

Yes. Upgrades are handled through Freemius, which prorates the change against the unused portion of your current term, so you pay the difference rather than starting over. Upgrading from Starter to Pro is the common one, because that is what unlocks the WooCommerce suite.

Yes — a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first purchase, no interrogation required. Request it through your Freemius customer portal or email us and we will raise it for you. Full detail is on our refund policy page.

Automatically. Your licence key connects to the update server through Freemius, so new versions appear on your WordPress plugins screen and update like any other plugin. Updates continue while your subscription is active.

Not in the bulk-broadcast sense, and that is a deliberate design decision rather than a gap. Stillpoint is a sales CRM: it gives every team member their own IMAP/SMTP mailbox inside the CRM, reusable templates with merge placeholders, and a full sent log against each contact. It is built for one-to-one selling conversations. If you need newsletters, drip campaigns, list segmentation for broadcasts and open/click analytics at scale, a dedicated marketing tool like FluentCRM does that job better — and many businesses happily run both, using Stillpoint for the pipeline and a marketing tool for campaigns.

Reading your inbox does, yes. Most hosts enable imap, but some do not, so it is worth checking before you buy if the inbox is your main reason for buying. Without it everything on the sending side still works: composing, SMTP sending, signatures, templates and the sent log against each contact. Only inbox reading is unavailable.

Yes. Every contact, company and deal has an owner, and agent scoping limits a rep to their own book of business while administrators keep full visibility for reporting, coaching and cover. Access itself is granted through the manage_stillpoint_crm WordPress capability, so your team signs in with their normal WordPress account — no second login.

Yes. Choose a default from more than 35 world currencies in Finance settings, then set a currency per deal where it differs. That keeps an international pipeline honest, because the deal records what the customer will actually be billed rather than a converted estimate.

Yes. A token-authenticated read-only JSON API exposes deals, contacts and companies for your own dashboards and tooling, outbound webhooks fire on CRM events to any URL you specify, and a token-protected intake endpoint accepts leads from any website form. There is also a PHP helper function for direct integration from theme or plugin code.

By default processing and completed. It is configurable, so if your workflow treats on-hold orders as real revenue — bank transfers awaiting clearance, for example — you can include them. Whatever you choose feeds consistently into paid revenue, average order value, customer lifetime value and the RFM segments, so the numbers agree with each other.

No, and it is built so that it cannot break checkout. The sync work is wrapped so that an error inside the CRM is caught rather than surfaced: if something goes wrong syncing an order, the customer's checkout still completes and the store carries on. The per-order work is small, and bulk work such as importing your order history runs in batches rather than in one blocking request.

Yes — one-click backfill imports your entire existing order history in batches, so lifetime value, repeat rate, RFM segments and revenue-by-month are accurate from day one rather than starting empty. Sync is idempotent, so running it again never creates duplicates.

Yes, through a token-protected JSON intake endpoint that accepts a normalised order payload from any source — a headless storefront, Shopify via a middleware step, or a bespoke checkout. The orders ledger, customer matching, lifetime value and segments all behave the same way as they do for native WooCommerce orders.

For a lot of teams, yes — workspaces, boards, custom statuses, projects, templates, dependencies, milestones, a timeline view, recurring items, approvals, time tracking and workload all ship today, and it lives inside the same install as the CRM so a deal can create a project automatically. It is not a feature-for-feature clone of either tool, though, so it is worth reading the honest limits below before you switch off something you rely on.

Three things worth knowing before you buy: the timeline view is a read view of dates set on an item, not a Gantt chart you drag to reschedule; boards save and refresh normally rather than updating live between people editing at the same moment, so there is no real-time collaborative co-editing; and there is no guest or client portal — everyone with access to a board is a full CRM user under one of the five roles, not a scoped external viewer. All three are on the roadmap as things we are investigating, not things that exist today.

No. Stillpoint builds the segments, journeys and campaigns, but the actual sending happens through a provider you connect over SMTP — SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark or Amazon SES, a capped direct SMTP connection for small lists, or a handoff to FluentCRM. We do not operate outbound bulk mail infrastructure ourselves, because reliable deliverability at scale depends on sending reputation and infrastructure that a single WordPress install cannot credibly provide.

Bulk marketing mail behaves very differently from the odd notification email a WordPress install sends. Mailbox providers judge sending domains on authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and complaint rate, and a shared host's default mail setup rarely has either in order. Routing through a real provider, with your domain properly authenticated and your spam-complaint rate kept under roughly 0.3%, is what keeps journeys and campaigns landing in the inbox rather than spam.

Provider webhooks report bounces and spam complaints back to Stillpoint automatically, and those addresses are added to the suppression list so they stop receiving future sends without anyone having to comb through a report by hand. Every send includes a one-click unsubscribe, and a preference centre lets a contact opt down to specific topics instead of opting out of everything, both of which also update the suppression and consent record.

No — Stillpoint's marketing automation and FluentCRM are built to work alongside each other, not to replace one another. A shipped bridge syncs contacts and tags, applies tags on deal won/lost and RFM segment changes so a FluentCRM journey can react to real pipeline and store behaviour, and syncs engagement back onto the CRM contact. If you already run FluentCRM, the bridge is the fastest way to connect it; if you don't, Stillpoint's own segments, journeys and campaigns cover the same ground natively.

Some metrics can only be calculated once a particular kind of data has actually been recorded — a target needs a target to be set, a comparison needs a prior period to compare against, and anything cost-based needs cost data that Stillpoint does not have unless you enter it. Rather than showing a zero or a misleading blank, the report tells you plainly that the metric needs more input, so you are never looking at a number that quietly means something different from what it appears to.

Not every metric moving in the same direction means the same thing. A rising figure is good for revenue and bad for refund rate, so the up/down arrow and its colour are set per metric to reflect whether more is actually better for that particular number, rather than applying one blanket rule that would be wrong half the time.

Gross profit needs cost data — cost of goods sold, landed cost, whatever your business uses — and Stillpoint does not capture that today. WooCommerce order and revenue data does not include cost, so reporting gross profit or margin without it would mean guessing or silently assuming a number nobody entered. We would rather leave it out than show you a profit figure that isn't real. It's an item we're tracking for the future once cost capture exists.

No. Stillpoint's reporting is built from CRM and store data it actually has — pipeline, revenue, orders, work and marketing engagement — not from ad platform spend or website analytics. There is no cart-abandonment or on-site conversion tracking, no return-on-ad-spend or customer-acquisition-cost calculation, and no multi-touch attribution model, because none of the underlying spend or traffic data exists inside Stillpoint to calculate them honestly.

It's designed not to. Automation runs across CRM, work and marketing events carry an idempotency key tied to the triggering event, so if the same event is delivered more than once — a retried webhook, a duplicate sync, a page reload — the automation recognises it as already handled and does not repeat the action. That's what stops a "deal won" trigger from creating two onboarding projects, or a segment-change trigger from re-tagging a contact on every retry.

For most WordPress and WooCommerce businesses, yes. The Service Desk gives you email-to-ticket, an SLA engine, a customer portal, a versioned knowledge base and CSAT, and — because it lives in the same database as the CRM and store — every ticket already carries the customer's order history, lifetime value and open deals. It is not a like-for-like clone of every enterprise helpdesk feature, so it is worth reading the honest limits below before you switch off something you rely on.

Yes. Connect a mailbox over IMAP, Gmail or Microsoft 365 OAuth, secure forwarding, or inbound webhooks for SendGrid, Mailgun and Postmark. Replies thread back onto the original ticket using a signed reply token first, then RFC headers, then the provider thread, and duplicate delivery is prevented by a database constraint rather than a code path that could fail.

Pro ($299/yr, up to 5 sites) and Agency ($499/yr, up to 20 sites) both include the full Service Desk with unlimited agents. Starter is core CRM only and does not include the Service Desk.

No, ever. The Service Desk is covered by the same unlimited-user licence as the rest of the CRM, so adding support agents — including a seasonal team for a busy period — never changes your bill.

Yes. Connect it over IMAP, Gmail or Microsoft 365 OAuth, or forward it to a secure opaque address that Stillpoint generates. You can connect several mailboxes, each with its own team, brand, SLA policy, signature and ticket number prefix.

Yes, over OAuth. Both require an OAuth application registered in your own Google or Microsoft tenant, which is a one-time administrative step you control. IMAP works immediately with no setup if you would rather skip that step.

No. Email, the customer portal, web forms and the API are the channels that work today. The channel architecture is in place, but nothing is claimed until it is actually integrated — see the roadmap page for what is planned.

No. There are no summaries, no auto-drafted replies and no sentiment scoring, and no AI button appears anywhere in the product.

Not yet. There is no importer from SupportCandy, Zendesk or Freshdesk today, and we will not claim a migration path until it has been tested against real export data across versions.

Your data remains on your server and readable — tickets, messages, attachments and SLA history stay exactly where they are, in your own database, with nothing locked or deleted. What pauses is automatic updates and support entitlement, not access to your own records.