How much should a website cost?

Posted on by Todd

With online site building tools like Squarespace & Wix getting popular and easier to use, small businesses are choosing to use these DIY solutions more & more. Unfortunately, it also makes the cost of a custom website seem really expensive. Don’t get me wrong. Paying $216 pear year to build & host a pretty decent website on Squarespace is a smaller pill to swallow, but it’s hurting those of us that build sites for a living & muddying the waters of what a website can do.

Services like Squarespace & WIX is a good idea for blog type sites & those needing something very cookie cutter. However, as mentioned in a previous post, once your needs exceed the confines of these DIY solutions, you find out you need a custom site. But just because you own a point-and-shoot camera, doesn’t make you a photographer. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your site will suffer.

A custom website can range from $500 – $20,000 (depending on the clients’ needs) and can take anywhere from from a few weeks to a few months. However, I’m not one to push a client into spending $10,000 on a custom website if these DIY solutions are a better fit. However, when you pay a professional or company to build your site, you’re not just paying for the site, you’re paying for their knowledge & experience.

Knowing the clients’ needs, is paramount. If you’re selling stuff, e-commerce solutions like Squarespace or Shopify is a better choice because there are a lot of things involved in an e-commerce platform (taxes, coupons, discounts, etc.).

Plugin Review: All In One WP Security & Firewall

Posted on by Todd

Recently, I’ve had to deal with a client’s site being attacked by hackers. While the WordPress plugins & themes I write are secure, there are some parts of WordPress that need to be protected. After doing some research, I’ve found a few different plugins. The two main ones I found are Sucuri and Wordfence, but both of those plugins are limited unless you pay for the premium version. The one I recommend is actually neither of those. All-in-One WP Security & Firewall is not limited in favor of a premium version, as well as not being a drag on performance. Features include: failed login log, automatic failed login IP blocking and much more. Rather than me gushing about the plugin, I’ll let their video explain the the features.

 

Plugin Review: Advanced Custom Fields

Posted on by Todd

One widely used plugins, even in professional circles, is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). While I understand the use of it, I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea as a long term solution.

In most cases, if you’re storing extra data with a post, that data is directly used by a plugin or the theme. If a theme or plugin is written properly, it should have an interface to save that data. If there isn’t, to me, that’s a sign of a lazy developer.

Although ACF is highly configurable, it’s a lot of code & server-load for what can be simply replaced with a single function , get_post_meta(). Too much processing on a poorly hosted server will interrupt the loading of the website and show the server message 503 SERVICE UNAVAILABLE.

All I’m saying is, if you’re an experienced WordPress developer, you shouldn’t depend on a plugin like ACF.

Plugin Review: Force Regenerate Thumbnails

Posted on by Todd

Of the plugins I am willing to install, one of them is the Force Regenerate Thumbnails.

If a theme is written properly, it will have image sizing code, that will scale an image for every size when an image is uploaded. When these sizes are added to or removed, it’s handy to have all the images get their various versions regenerated. That’s where this plugin comes in.

To be honest, this is more of a developer’s tool than a content creator’s tool. One main warning: If you have a site with a large amount of images in it’s Media Library, running this plugin will go thru every single one. So if you have a thousand images, it could take a long time to finish going thru them all. Doing so could also put a load on the server that hosts the site and thus slow down the site. If you’re going to run this on a large Media Library, do it when site traffic is slow.

Plugins vs. Custom Theme

Posted on by Todd

Many a time, I’ve come into a project where the previous “developer” downloaded a free or paid theme and used plugins to tweak the site to get the preferred output. The problem with that is how WordPress loads. 

When WordPress loads, it loads all the functions in the code, loads the WordPress functionality, loads plugins, then loads themes. When you have too many active plugins, you can overload the server the site is hosted on & find out how much your hosting is really worth. For the most part, most hosts will not put many resources to WordPress hosting. Thus, you also find out how well your the theme & plugins are wrote. Unfortunately, the worst time you want to find out your WordPress themes & plugins are poorly written, is when your site so popular it’s pushing the resources of the server.

Here’s the thing. You save a lot of time, effort & frustration if you have an experienced WordPress developer to write the theme you way you want it. For example, the site mentioned earlier, among about 40 plugins, had used a plugin to generate a page of posts based on certain category. The issue I have with this, is that this kind of functionality, is built-in functionality. You don’t need a plugin to do this.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-plugins. In fact, there are a few plugins, I recommend. One of them is the “Force Regenerate Thumbnails“. This is a plugin that doesn’t load as part of the site output, but is a tool that is used when needed.

The point of all this is to use plugins sparingly. If you want to change how a theme outputs your content, ask an experienced WordPress developer to do it.

Hello World

Posted on by Todd

Welcome to The WordPress Whisperer.

With over twenty years developing websites and ten years of building WordPress sites, I figured it was time to share my thoughts and tips about building WordPress websites. I’ll be posting tips & tricks, as well as opinions and relaying WordPress announcements

For example, WordPress 5.0 came out the day this blog was put up. The primary change in the new version is the new editor (formally codenamed “Gutenberg”). Personally, while I am glad to see that WordPress has more functionality layout wise, I fear for some content creators this will still be too complicated. 

With most custom WordPress projects I work on, I incorporate the “Classic” editor into more direct interfaces to make it as easy as possible to enter in content.