Misconceptions Touted to WordPress Site Owners
After working in WordPress for several years now, I grow frustrated at the many misconceptions touted to owners of basic WordPress sites.
I want to make clear that this blog post does not regard people with e-commerce sites or any site that needs to adhere to strict standards of privacy and security for whatever reason. Those organizations, though, probably have dedicated IT staff.
This post regards WordPress site owners who have basic pages (About Us, Contact Us, Services, etc) and perhaps their most advanced features are picture sliders or blogs.
1) You need to always have the latest updates
I hate this piece of advice we give to every site we ship out. Nothing has clients calling us back months or years after a site ships than when site owners try to update their site or plugins through the WordPress dashboard and then suddenly find their site inaccessible.
Due to WordPress’s open-source nature, there is no uniform standard dictating when or if a plugin gets updated. Let’s say one obscure little plugin had a developer that stopped updating it several years ago… that could break your whole site if you decide to update the WordPress core or change PHP versions and the obscure little plugin has a piece of deprecated code that throws a fatal error.
For people who have sites low on functionality and heavy on things like content changes in the forms of copy and pictures, you will be fine for years without updating a thing. The only thing that would stop your site from functioning is if your host decides to upgrade web server software that wouldn’t support the version of PHP with which your site was built. The clients who don’t have problems are, amazingly, the ones that leave the plugin updates alone.
2) You Need a Managed WordPress Account
Hosting companies, I’m sure, would love to sell you a managed WordPress account. Hey, you’re using WordPress, gotta have a managed WordPress hosting account, right? I won’t lie, there are some advantages only if the plan is inexpensive. If you are a site that actively receives comments, for instance, I would say the anti-spam measures on managed sites are advantageous because anti-spam is expensive at retail price.
Otherwise, there is very little point because WordPress is extremely robust. Most times, I see managed hosting accounts run extremely slow because all the goodies are activated (Jetpack, Sucuri, etc) when they don’t need to be. Why have Jetpack if comments are closed, for instance?
I also find these hosting accounts to be quite restrictive for developers who need to use features like opening and reading files, or having direct database or file management access. wordpress.org is probably my least favorite. It is too much of a black box, in my opinion, and it’s simply not that easy to everything you need to do through the WordPress admin panel.
So, unless spam is an issue I would avoid it.
3) You Need to Spend a Ton on SEO
Clients with dinky operations somehow convince themselves that spending money on SEO will, in effect, “polish a turd” and have them shoot up the google results page. However, Google and the other search engines are very smart these days and can tell what is truly relevant and what is not. SEO in a competitive market can perhaps give you a slight edge, but it will not substitute having a dynamic website that is updated at healthy intervals and actually has relevant content.
Despite SEO marketing being everywhere, clients are unaware at just how irrelevant SEO is becoming these days. A client’s money is much better spent on Google Adwords and the Bing equivalent because they are much more inclined to feature you prominently if you pay them (surprising, eh?).
However, if you are inclined to spend money on an SEO specialist, I would advise that you try it yourself first by asking yourself “If I were seeking the services my company offers, what terms would I put in the search engine?” Ask people you know what keywords they would put in the Google search bar to find certain services.
Then, see which words and phrases come up the most often and put those in your titles and meta snippets. SEO specialists will do a keyword analysis or whatever, but that process is not that much different than what you’ve just done between yourself and friends.
Again, nothing can substitute for quality content and true outreach if you really want your company to get known.
4) You Can Work on Your Website Yourself
I encourage site owners to delve into their sites and learn the code if they feel so inclined. However, I see so many clients try to make major theme changes and then call us in a panic because their site has gone down. They go to their theme editors and see the advertisements for coding bootcamps that say that “Anyone Can Code” and give it the old college try.
Most clients don’t realize that websites these days are glass castles. One tiny break can crash the whole thing. This is not so much because development has become more complicated. Rather, it’s because development has gotten easier, and developers rely on many outside services. These services are often dynamic themselves and change often in their characteristics or requirements.
If you want to work on your own site, I highly encourage you migrate the site to a subfolder (making sure to non-index it) and have a go. Otherwise, don’t try this yourself on a live site. It’s challenging enough for pro coders to work on a site without making an error that crashes your site. So, imagine how hard it would be to diagnose an unforeseen problem for a non-experienced developer.
When site owners mess something about, it can be like a sick patient going to the doctor and being too embarrassed to admit that their condition was caused some form of dumbassery. So, diagnosis makes it much harder at times. Don’t be one of those people. Make a copy to work on or don’t work on your site at all!