wordpress mistakes Archives

Shouldn’t I try to save money on hosting?

Everyone wants to keep costs low but the most frustrating part of a crummy host is that you will think that there’s something wrong with your site. It’s like driving a sports car on a dirt road. If you are starting from scratch it will likely take a lot of time and frustration to figure out that the problem is actually your host. The more content you add to your site, the more you will notice the inadequacies of the server. And a phone call to a center in India with a customer service agent named “Brittany” will make you value your time more than you ever have before.

Your site is often the first point of contact for your clients, representing your business, your brand, your portfolio and all that you have to offer. It doesn’t help you if your host has a slow loading time- people will move on to the next shiny object.

How to fix it:

Get a host that specializes in WordPress. Make sure that they offer services for caching, uptime, security, amazing customer support, and more.

We recommend:

	I personally use WPEngine and highly recommend them for all my clients for running their business sites. They have tech experts on hand 24/7 who will go in and repair mistakes, restore your db, just all kinds of help. Support response for me personally has never been over 3 minutes wait. They scale their pricing too, so if your business becomes as well known as the New York Times, you won’t have to switch companies- just pay by volume.
	Flywheel is perfect for bloggers, agencies, and small business. Flywheel has a ton of unique features such as billing transfer, demo site, and a content creation tool.
	Much like the other two, it’s great for beginners- because WordPress is already installed and it and comes with a fantastic support. Support response is usually under 10 or 15 minutes.Here is a comparison of SiteGround and WPEngine

But They All Look Great!

Do you feel like a kid in a candy store when you browse the plugin directory? Do you have more than one plugin that puts different popups on your pages?

Even though there are more than 40,000 plugins, you should minimize what you have installed on your site. Many plugins run with javascript- almost all of them incorporate it somehow. If you have a group of employees (like the code) and the French employees are getting instructions in French while the Japanese employees are getting instructions in Japanese, everything should work fine. But if there is a group of workers getting English instructions for all the departments at the same time on the same loudspeaker, there would be a lot of confusion.

That’s exactly what can happen with too many plugins. If your site breaks or is just behaving badly, the first thing to do is to deactivate all your plugins. If you have more than one screen-full of plugins, that’s likely the problem right there.

HOW TO FIX IT

Be discriminating about the plugins you install, and be sure to deactivate or uninstall the ones not in use.

Which ones should you install? Look at the info provided:

Is is compatible with your current version of wordpress?
How many installs are listed on the counter?
How long ago was it updated?
- (pro tip- AVOID plugins with last update 2 years ago or more!)

As soon as you install a new plugin, really investigate it and make sure that it does what you want it to in the way that you think it should.

Plugins are an awesome tool that can add important functionality to your site and give you a shortcut to a problem you just can’t solve. If not kept updated though, they are the #1 security vulnerability of any wordpress site!