Unpopular Opinion: You didn’t hire a WordPress Developer

Here’s the cold hard reality, anyone with a 6th grade education can sign up for a “Managed Hosting” account (another lie), install WordPress, buy and install a theme from Envato, and add some copy in a WYSIWYG editor. That does not make them a WordPress Developer.

We see this all the time, clients come to us because a site has poor performance and they want to speed it up, after taking a look we find the site has 50+ plugins installed, most of them don’t work well with others, and about 2/3 of them are unnecessary. Not only does this cause the site to run slow and make it difficult to maintain, it’s also a MASSIVE security vulnerability.

Another common scenario we see is a site that won’t rank or convert well, and we find that they are using a common theme with no customization and/or lack any type of a funnel. It’s just text puked onto a page dressed up to look nice.

It is the developer’s job to ensure not only that the site meets your needs, but that it is built properly. It should be efficient, stable, responsive, and able to scale up. A sudden influx of traffic shouldn’t slow down your site, because let’s be honest, most of these sites are low volume until your ad campaign kicks in. A good developer will build you a site that will run forever, until you decide to change it. Does it work on all browsers, does it work on mobile, does it work during a stress test, what happens when the server goes offline? Clients should be asking these questions in 2019.

TL;DR: As a developer, I cannot stress this message enough. DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Get multiple bids, ask the right questions, don’t be afraid to shop around. This is your hard-earned money and going the cheap route will not only cost you double the money, it will cost you 3x the time as well.