In this post, you will learn how to integrate WordPress Websites and the Salesforce CRM using free WordPress plugins and following the plugins’ documentation.
WordPress and Salesforce
As of today, the CMS WordPress is being used in 43% of the Websites worldwide, and Salesforce is one of the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.
Learn more about Salesforce
Learn more about WordPress
Why integrate WordPress and Salesforce
You can use your WordPress website to collect information from your customers like, donations, account registrations, subscriptions to newsletter, and that information can be sent to Salesforce automatically.
Your WordPress website can also pull and display data stored in Salesforce. Lists of members, chapters, events. Assign WordPress roles to the users based on badges they have on Salesforce, and accordingly set permissions to the content in the website.
You will have better data quality, consistency and your staff will spend less time on data administration.
The required ingredients to do the integration
The two main plugins needed are:
- ### Object Sync for Salesforce:
- This plugin will allow us to connect the WordPress website with Salesforce and do the mapping between their objects and the corresponding fields.
-
Download it from here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/object-sync-for-salesforce/
- ### Action Scheduler:
This plugin will help us to make sure that the scheduled tasks created by the object sync for salesforce plugin are running, and also you will be able to see all these scheduled tasks from https:// my-nice-site.ddev.site /wp-admin/tools.php?page=action-scheduler
Download it from here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/action-scheduler/
As of today, the following patch needs to be applied to the Object Sync for Salesforce plugin to make its configuration page to work: https://github.com/woocommerce/action-scheduler/pull/883/files
I also recommend to do the integration in a local site. You can follow the instruction to setup a local site using ddev in this link.
Working directly in a Production Salesforce instance is never a good idea, so you should have a sandbox instance setup, so you can use it to test the integration. You can read the documentation in the following link to understand the different types of sandboxes and their corresponding licenses.
What one needs to know to do the integration
- Install the Object Sync for Salesforce and Action Scheduler plugins.
- Follow the steps from this link to create a new App in salesforce and connect the plugin Object Sync for Salesforce to Salesforce.
- You will need to create the mapping from a post type in WordPress to an Object in Salesforce following the instructions from this link
- If you need to re-sync all the mapped objects, you can go to https:// my-nice-site.ddev.site /wp-admin/options.php, find the variables that start with object_sync_for_salesforce_pull_last_sync and update its value with a timestamp in the past. You can use this site to get a timestamp from a human readable date.
Top comments (1)
David, thank you for sharing this informative post! 🙌 Integrating two platforms has become an essential need in every business, and you have explained how to use free WordPress plugins to integrate with Salesforce, which is incredibly helpful. Your step-by-step guidance and resources are commendable. Good job!!👍
👉🏼 Along with that, I also read a similar article at How to connect gravity forms to Salesforce which provides a detailed guide 📝, including best practices 👍🏼, limitations ⚠️, and cost considerations 💰. It would be very helpful for those looking to use Gravity Forms with Salesforce. 🤝