What’s wrong with your Wordpress website
You have this beautiful Wordpress website. It looks good. Your friends and family love it. You feel that it really reflects your brand and your business. The trouble is that no-one can find it on Google. What’s going on?
Wordpress is a platform that really has opened up the world of websites to anyone who wants to take the time to learn how to use it. Most web hosting companies have automated installation buttons for it. There is a legendary amount of themes to make Wordpress sites look pretty. And now there’s a tonne of drag and drop page builders that make the process even easier again to build a website. With just a little learning curve and a community of people, forums and companies that are ready and willing to help you out, it’s a great option. And if you get stuck and just want someone to take over and do it all for you, there’s a tonne of people who are eager to take your money because they know Wordpress enough to work with your site.
And that may be the strongest feature of Wordpress. While there’s maybe 2 or 3 people who offer Drupal or Joomla site building and services in Darwin, for example, or a scattering of hard-to-find Wix and Squarespace folks, there would be at least 200 people who can help you with Wordpress, even in Darwin. It’s why we at Clickstarter have had to bite the bullet and change our primary website building platform from Joomla to Wordpress this year. There just just isn’t enough local backup for Joomla skills.
The downside
But this proliferation of support and use in regional towns like ours does come with its downside. And that tends to come around an over-reliance on the most simple and easy-to-use tools of Wordpress and it’s plugins, and little to no knowledge of basic, fundamental web technology, how websites actually work (as opposed to how Wordpress works) and a giant pink elephant in the room that most Wordpress site building folks try to pretend is not there… SEO.
In the last 12 months, Clickstarter has either built or had to take over just a touch more than 250 websites, over 230 of which are for businesses in Darwin. That’s a lot of websites. Of the ones we’ve taken over, all but one were built in Wordpress.
And every single one of those Wordpress sites, when we got inside them had at least 5 plugin or theme updates to be run. At least 20 of them had malware and malicious code in them that had to be cleaned out, all because of non-updated versions of the Wordpress itself or some obscure plugin the original site builder had used which had a security vulnerability that had been exploited by some script kiddie in Uzbekistan or Iran or Turkey or INSERT COUNTRY HERE.
The trouble with Wordpress is that it’s not only opened up a world of people who can now host and build their own websites, it’s lulled us all into a false sense of security that building a pretty website is all we need to do, and then we can log out of the backend and walk away.
Worse again, is that it’s created literally hundreds of thousands of “Wordpress developers” or “Digital Agencies” that are building a business around building websites for unsuspecting small businesses who have no idea what they are doing because they do not understand the fundamentals of the web, online security, search engine optimisation or what a good, useable website is, outside of whether the client “likes” the design.
The good news
There has been, at least, an ecosystem of plugins in Wordpress that have addressed some of this. Security plugins like Wordfence assist with blocking the bad guys from getting in your site even if you have un-updated software. But while that may save you through a few missed updates to the Wordpress software, it won’t last forever, especially if you’re not updating Wordfence itself, therefore leaving yourself doubly vulnerable with two pieces of outdated software full of security holes.
In terms of SEO, the free Yoast plugin has helped millions of site owners to make their listings in Google look nicer, and provides invaluable advice in your site on how to write your content better for readability and Google indexability. But Yoast only really addresses the one element of search engine optimisation that we call “On Page SEO.” Any it really only covers a few of the points within On Page SEO. There are at least five other elements of SEO that you need to work out yourself that Yoast doesn’t, and can’t, cover for you.
The Jetpack service, a part of the paid Wordpress.com product which has been made to also work on the self-hosted variety of Wordpress (that’s the version of Wordpress that you own yourself, rather than the one that you pay Wordpress to host for you) is an example of Wordpress valiantly trying to plug the security issue with the tendency for unknowing businesses engaging fly-by-night site builders. They provide a notification and monitoring service for free that lets you know when things need updating and even provides a way for your to run backups of your site at a small fee per month. But even with such tools, if you don’t know what you’re doing, or don’t have a website manager who is handling these things for you, you’re either stuck with un-updated software full of vulnerabilities to hackers, or you are faced with spending either time or money to learn or outsource the process to someone else.
And when it comes to design, there are plenty of one-person operations who build you a beautiful website full of graphics and images and gorgeous elements that will delight you. But there’s not so many of them who know how to make that same design work across all devices, like iPhones and tablets. And even fewer again who understand the complexities of the interactions between the Javascript and JQuery code that makes those beautiful effects work and the amount of time it’s taking for each page of your website to grow. They tend to not know, or consider, what the implications of that extra 8 seconds of loading time are on your position on Google or the amount of times a potential customer will give up on waiting for your page to load and return to Google where they will find a competitor whose website will load fast and get them to the info they’re looking for.
What to look for before you get your Wordpress site built
While it may be a little too late to consider the following ten questions if you’ve already engaged someone to build that website… and if you’ve had your Wordpress website for a while now, there are some key questions to ask the next person that builds your website outside of “what will it look like” and “can I update it myself.”
- Will you be updating Wordpress, the theme and all the plugins regularly to keep my site safe from security threats?
- What, if anything, are you doing to make sure that my new website loads as fast as possible?
- Will my website work on all devices, and actually look useable and be easy to navigate on all those devices?
- Are you using Yoast to address on-page SEO on my website? Are you configuring it for me and adjusting the content on each page according to its recommendations?
- Are you including off-page SEO work such as submission of my site to Google’s index, Bing or other search engines and listing sites?
- Do you do technical SEO work on my website such as HTML, PHP & Javascript code minification, page-level caching or delivery of my site via a Content Management Network? (CDN)
- Are you performing Local SEO work on my website by ensuring that my site is referenced in a Google My Business profile?
- Do you provide Reputational SEO advice or setup with places like Google Reviews, Facebook Recommendations and other systems like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare, etc?
- Do you receive alerts from the Google Search Console for issues with my site being indexed on Google? And if you do, do you then address those issues?
- From all the above, what is included in the price you quote, and what are things that I will need to get someone else to look at, or learn for myself?
This may lead to a few awkward silences with around 90% of the Wordpress website builders in Darwin, or even in big cities like Sydney and Melbourne having little to no idea what you’re talking about.
Being a “Wordpress person” isn’t being a “web developer or designer”
The fact is, that being a Wordpress site builder is not necessarily being a web designer. And it’s certainly not the same as being a web developer. We’ve learned from our experience of taking over the websites that other people have built, that people who build websites rarely understand, or even do the most basic work with SEO. And almost none of them are across the many ways that you can work with SEO to help rank a website higher in searches. And that’s not even mentioning those who know how to make sure that the website works in with social networks short of providing a “like button” or “like box.”
A little research goes a long way before you engage someone to build your new website. Don’t assume that the person installing your Wordpress site will do anything other than simply handover your beautiful new site to you. Find out if support is included. Find out if updates and security reviews are included. Find out if SEO is included. And if it’s not, make sure your budget includes the possibility of having to engage other people to do that work for you, outside of the cost of your website on it’s own.
If you’ve got a topic you’d like to see covered on the podcast, Medium feed or blog, drop me a line; darwin@clickstarter.com.au or visit facebook.com/clickstarter.
