Noob mistakes that small business make with WordPress

Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress. But a lot of people use it poorly, and wonder why they don’t like it as much as me.

1. buying theme’s that don’t have good support and updates.
   • all theme’s need updates, to keep theme relevant, keep them working with new versions of WordPress, to keep them safe from hackers.
   • poor theme’s don’t get updates – and then you’re in trouble.
   • or you get hacked via your theme
2. buying a theme based on it having a load of features
   • some features are good, but more features creates problems
   • more features means more things that can go wrong, and get hacked
   • it makes it more confusing to get it to work
   • you end up focusing what the theme does, and not what your website needs to say to customers
   • more complex themes make more support issues
   • more complex themes makes your site slow.
3. adding too many plugins
   • plugins are one of the best things about WordPress
   • more plugins cause more problems, a bit like themes above
   • themes start to interact with each other, and the theme, and then its spiral of support
4. leaving everything in the hands of someone else
   • just leaving it the management of your site to someone without asking questions is trouble. You need to ask at a minimum of :
     • how often will you be backing it up ?
     • are you keeping the backups offsite ?
     • how many backups are you keeping ?
     • how often are you updating plugins/themes ?
     • if my site gets hacked, will you be fixing it
     • if there is any issue with the site working, are you going to take care of it ?
     • be specific, one day you’ll need those answers
5. thinking that once the site is built you don’t need any changes
   • in the real world things change
   • your website needs to keep pace
   • as your business changes, you need to reflect that on your site
6. not asking your hosting provider if they have a plan for a total disaster in the hosting company
   • how long will it take you to start my site on another provider ?
   • what is their disaster recovery plan ?
   • how often to they test their disaster recovery capability
   • read about the biggest UK hosting company disaster here
7. not understanding their WordPress website won’t last forever
   • without maintance it will be hacked
   • technology will move along, and leave your site behind
   • it will eventually break
   • I think WordPress website generally have a lifetime of 3 years, at most 5 years.
   • by then you’ll need to refresh what you are saying, how your saying it.
8. not updating for mobile
   • site older than a year or so perhaps didn’t treat mobile well
   • more than 50% of most visitors are mobile
   • but other technology will come along, users will change, and your site will need to adapt
9. not understanding how the web hosting industry works
   • there are lots of levels of reselling
   • at each level removed, the web hosting company is earning less, and care less about your website
   • at each level add on, the people are less skilled at hosting
   • thinking a web developer with ‘hosting’ on their website knows everything about hosting
10. using WordPress when you don’t need it
    • if your web site is mostly static, if it’s mostly a brochure, WordPress is probably not the best
    • WordPress is a flexibile tool, with lots of capability, if you aren’t using that – it can become a bit of a noose around your neck
    • here is my advice for small business building their first website

By Scott Farrell on February 15th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress