Why We Built FluentPlayer

We never planned to build a video player. 

Why didn’t we? What stopped us? Why wasn’t it in our plans?

Answer: Because we thought it wouldn’t align with our vision of developing interconnected tools that’d make lives easier for SMEs.

But for a very long time, we have seen how WordPress users struggle with video, and at some point, frustration turns into a question: why hasn’t anyone fixed this?

Dear WordPress user, 

I need to tell you something that’s been bothering me for a while.

Video on WordPress is often broken. Not the playback part. That works fine. What’s broken is everything that should happen around the playback. The analytics. The engagement data. The connection between your video content and your business outcomes.

I am Md Shahjahan (most of you know me from my previous social handle – Shahjahan Jewel), leading the team at WPManageNinja. We built your favourite WordPress solutions like FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, FluentSMTP, FluentCommunity, FluentCart, and a dozen other plugins for small businesses. 

Over the past decade, we’ve worked with hundreds of thousands of WordPress site owners to build their online presence. Every single one of them uses video. And almost none of them know if that video is actually working.

FluentPlayer is our solution to this problem. But before I tell you what it is, let me explain why it exists.

The moment it clicked

We built FluentPlayer to solve a crucial problem that almost every content creator, course provider, and membership site owner faces: a lack of insight into video engagement.

We spoke to numerous creators who had invested significant time and resources into creating high-quality video content, tutorials, product demos, course lessons, and more. Despite tracking email engagement and conversions meticulously, a complete mystery remained around the performance of their actual video content. Their existing video players offered no data beyond a simple “play” button.

This fundamental gap in tracking and analytics, the ability to connect video consumption directly to user profiles and understand individual watch patterns, was the core motivation for developing FluentPlayer. We needed a solution that could provide deep, actionable video engagement data, just like FluentCRM does for email.

The visibility gap

Think about what you can measure on your WordPress site right now.

Forms. You know exactly how many people started filling out your contact form. You know where they dropped off. You know which fields confused them. Fluent Forms shows you all of this.

Email. You know open rates, click rates, which links people clicked, and which automations convert. FluentCRM tracks every interaction.

Pages. Google Analytics tells you time on page, scroll depth, and bounce rate. You can A/B test headlines. You can see heatmaps.

But video? The content format that dominates modern communication? You get a view count. Maybe.

A “view” could mean someone watched 3 seconds and bounced. It could mean they watched the whole thing twice. You have no idea. You’re flying blind.

I call this the visibility gap. Your most engaging content is your least measurable content.

And it’s holding small businesses back in ways they don’t even realize.

The visibility gap in action

Here’s how the visibility gap hurts you. Say you’re a course creator with a 10-lesson course priced at $297.

You have 200 students enrolled. Your completion rate feels low, but you don’t know exactly how low, because you can’t see where people stop watching. Maybe lesson 4 has a confusing section. Maybe lesson 7 is too long. Maybe the audio quality drops in lesson 9. You have no idea.

So you can’t fix it. You can’t improve. You just hope people finish.

Now imagine you have an e-commerce store with product demo videos. You embedded them on your product pages. They play. But do they convert? Are people who watch the demo more likely to buy? Which products have demos that actually work? You’re guessing.

Or you’re a service business with an explainer video on your homepage. It cost $3,000 to produce. Is it working? You have a view count. Cool. Does watching it correlate with contact form submissions? No idea.

The visibility gap means video is always an act of faith. You create it, publish it, and hope for the best. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure.

Meanwhile, every other marketing channel gives you data you can act on.

That asymmetry is what we’re building FluentPlayer to fix.

What we already knew

We didn’t come to this problem as outsiders. WPManageNinja has been building analytics-first tools for WordPress for over a decade.

Fluent Forms: Form analytics that show you exactly where people drop off. Partial submissions. Field-level conversion tracking. We built this because we believe you can’t improve what you can’t see.

FluentCRM: Email marketing with engagement tracking built into the core. Open rates, click tracking, automation analytics, and contact scoring. Every interaction is measured.

FluentCommunity: Course progress tracking, lesson completion data, engagement metrics. We built this because educators need to know if their content is landing.

FluentSMTP: We integrated with every major email provider. We saw how they all handle deliverability, analytics, and reporting. We learned what good infrastructure looks like.

FluentCart: Store analytics analyzes your revenue, customer behavior, and product stats that help to grow your business.

Across all these products, we learned something: WordPress users don’t just want tools that work. They want tools that show them if they’re working.

That philosophy shaped everything we’ve built. And it’s been completely absent from video players.

Every video player we looked at answered the same question: how do I make a video play on my site? None of them asked: how do I know if this video is helping my business?

We knew the technology. We knew the audience. We knew the gap.

The decision

In 2025, we started asking ourselves a simple question: what if we just built it?

Not another playback utility. A video infrastructure layer for WordPress. Something that treats video like we treat forms, emails, and community engagement. Measurable. Analyzable. Connected to your business outcomes.

We’re building FluentPlayer on the same principles that guide everything in the Fluent ecosystem: 

• Ownership: Your videos, your data, your experience. No YouTube recommendations hijacking your visitors. No third-party branding. No dependency on platforms that can change their terms tomorrow. 
• Performance: Video shouldn’t tank your Core Web Vitals. We’re building this with WordPress performance in mind from day one. Lazy loading, efficient rendering, minimal JavaScript footprint. 
• Insight: Real analytics. Watch time. Completion rates. Drop-off points. Engagement graphs. The same depth of data you expect from your forms and emails, applied to video. 
• Interaction: Chapters. Calls-to-action. Forms embedded at the right moment. Progress tracking that syncs with your LMS or membership system. Video that responds to your audience. 
• Extensibility: Hooks for developers. Integration with FluentCRM for tagging. Connection to your marketing automation. The Fluent ecosystem is working together.

What FluentPlayer aims to become

I’m not going to pretend everything is built. FluentPlayer is a journey, and we’re at the beginning.

But I can share where we’re headed.

Imagine video analytics that tie directly to conversions. Not just “this video got 500 views” but “viewers who watched past the 2-minute mark converted at 3x the rate.” Insight you can act on.

Imagine you can customise playlist, courser layout, progress tracking, sub-section or locked content?

Imagine course creators seeing exactly where students struggle. Lesson 4 has a 40% drop-off at the 6-minute mark? Now you know exactly what to fix.

Imagine making data-driven decisions about your most important content.

This is the direction. Not promises. A roadmap we’re committed to walking.

Who we’re building it for

FluentPlayer isn’t for everyone. It’s for people who see video as more than decoration.

• If you’re a course creator who cares about student outcomes and wants to know if your lessons are actually being watched, we’re building this for you.
• If you’re a small business owner using video to explain your services and you’re frustrated that video is the one thing you can’t measure, we’re building this for you.
• If you’re a marketer who knows video is your most powerful content but also your weakest data source, we’re building this for you.
• If you’re a developer tired of CSS hacks to customize players and embed codes that slow down your sites, we’re building this for you.

You shouldn’t have to choose between simple and powerful. FluentPlayer is being built to be both.

The philosophy behind the product

I want to explain something that might sound obvious. But I believe it deeply.

At WPManageNinja, we believe every piece of content you create should give you insight. Not just views. Insight. Understanding. Data you can act on.

We built that philosophy into forms. We built it into email. We built it into community engagement.

Video was the missing piece.

The web communicates through video now. Product demos, course lessons, sales presentations, support tutorials, testimonials. Video is everywhere. But the tools haven’t caught up. They’re still stuck in “playback utility” mode.

Here’s the thing most plugin companies can’t say: we don’t need FluentPlayer to pay our bills. WPManageNinja is already a profitable, sustainable company. FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, FluentCommunity, Ninja Tables. Over a million WordPress installations. We’re building FluentPlayer because it needs to exist, not because we need another revenue stream.

We don’t have investors demanding 10x returns. Nobody is pressuring us to rush features or cut corners. We can afford to build this right because our company doesn’t depend on shipping something half-baked.

FluentPlayer won’t exist in isolation. It’ll connect to FluentCRM, FluentCommunity, Fluent Forms. Video engagement flowing into your marketing automation. Course progress synced with your community. Forms triggered by video completion. An ecosystem where everything talks to everything else.

That’s not a marketing pitch. That’s the architecture.

I believe that more small businesses succeeding is better for everyone. Including us. Every course creator who finally understands why students drop off. Every business owner who can measure their video ROI. Every marketer who connects video engagement to conversions. That’s what we’re building toward.

You shouldn’t have to guess if your videos are working.

You should be able to see exactly where people stop watching, what content resonates, and how video engagement connects to your business outcomes. Then get back to the thing you actually care about. Teaching. Selling. Creating. Building.

Video is how the web communicates now. It’s time WordPress had a tool that treats it that way.

Join the journey

FluentPlayer is in the last stage of development. We’re building it in the open, and we want your input.

Join the waitlist, and you’re not just signing up for updates. You’re becoming part of how FluentPlayer takes shape. Early users will influence features. Your feedback will steer decisions. When we launch, you’ll have early access and benefits that won’t be available later.

We’re not asking you to trust our marketing. We’re asking you to help us build the video player WordPress should have had years ago.

Join the Waitlist

→ Early access when we launch

→ Influence the features we build

→ Exclusive benefits for founding users

With excitement and a bit of impatience,

Shahjahan Jewel

Founder, WPManageNinja 🚀