20 Critical Problems Your WordPress Website Probably Has Right Now

20 Critical Problems Your WordPress Website Probably Has Right Now

These are the most common and dire problems that I find on existing client websites that I work on for the first time. Check your website for these issues today, or contact a web developer to do a site audit!

1. Your site is not getting backed up regularly

Many non-web developers (and web “designers”) often forget about setting up a backup strategy after their sites have launched. This is like walking a tightrope with no net. After investing thousands of dollars, a hack, server failure, or admin error could bring your site down for days, if not permanently if you have no backups.

I like to set up at least two backup methods: one automated (at the server level if possible), and one manual, which I do using a plugin.

2. Your backups were never verified

Backups are no good if you can’t restore the site from them. Whenever I work on a new site, I make a backup and bring it up on my local computer to confirm the integrity of the backup archive files. You don’t want to find out that your backups are flawed during an emergency.

3. Your site’s plugins / theme are grossly out of date

When I start looking at a new site that’s been around for a while, it’s not uncommon to find that the plugins and theme haven’t been updated for years. This is one of the most common ways sites get hacked.

4. Your PHP software is out of date

PHP is the server-side language that WordPress is written in. Most non-web developers don’t know anything about PHP, but it needs to be updated every year or two for security reasons. If left un-updated for long enough, things will start to break when you update your plugins and theme.

Actually updating your server is easy; often it’s a button in your hosting control panel. The harder part is testing and fixing issues that come up due to version incompatibilities.

5. Your Page sizes are huge due to unnecessarily large images files

Oh boy, I see this SO often. The user has uploaded 5MB photos straight from their camera or phone. The landing page struggles to load due to the bloat. A simple site uses multiple gigabytes of server space.

I manually resize photos before I upload them. For clients, I install a plugin that automatically shrinks down large photos.

If you switch themes, you should regenerate thumbnails so that they are properly sized for the theme; otherwise, the theme might grab the huge un-resized versions.

6. Transactional email not getting sent or delivered reliably

Another super common mistake is not testing a site’s contact form regularly. I commonly find email broken on sites… meaning: no contact form submissions have been received, sometimes for years. The whole purpose of the site has been defeated!!

The most reliable way to send transactional email from a website is to use an SMTP plugin to send email using a real email account (Microsoft, Google, or another third party). Here’s how to set up transactional emailing using a Microsoft or Google mail account.

7. Your Contact form email addresses are out of date

Another common problem I find is that the contact form submissions are being sent to someone who left the organization years ago. Another reason for regular testing of your website’s forms!

8. Your site violates web accessibility laws

This is the case for the vast majority of websites out there, and can lead to lawsuits and legal nightmares. The problem is real: trolls are targeting sites (real estate sites at the moment) that don’t meet legal accessibility standards and shaking them down for money.

Check out my web accessibility checklist for more information about this.

9. Your site violates online privacy laws

Does your site display a privacy policy? Is it up to date? Is your site compliant with privacy laws in California and Europe? When I look at sites, many times, the answer to these questions is “no”.

See more information about website privacy here.

10. Your web server is hosting video instead of using a third-party service

Similar to large images, sometimes folks plop a 50MB video file above the fold in their site’s landing page and wonder why it takes forever to load (especially on mobile).

You should upload our videos to a third party like YouTube or Vimeo, and let them stream the video from their servers, not yours.

11. Your site has layout or functional problems on mobile

Despite the mantra of “mobile first”, so many folks (including web designers) seem to only test their sites on desktop. Most sites get the majority of their traffic from mobile devices.

I often find broken functionality or layout problems when testing sites on mobile.

12. You don’t have control over your site’s domain name

This can have catastrophic results, and I’ve seen it more than a few times. Someone in your organization purchased your domain name years ago using their login and credit card. They’re long gone now and no one has access or knows anything about the domain name. One day, the site just disappears and you’ve lost the domain unless you go through a long and painful process to prove that you really do own it.

If your organization has left your domain name ownership in the hands of a third party like your marketing agency… well, here’s what I have to say about that.

13. You don’t have control over your site’s web hosting account

Same deal as the previous item, but for your web hosting.

14. One WordPress login is shared between all users

This is pretty common. All of your employees use the same login to get into website. This includes ex-employees who no longer work there! Imagine what damage a disgruntled employee who was fired could do to your site!

Give each user thier OWN login, and DELETE it when they leave! Do NOT share one login for everyone!

15. Your password / username are weak

Building on the previous issue, I still see “admin” as the username often, with an insanely weak password that could be guessed in a few tries. You know what to do.

16. Your database is bloated and hasn’t been optimized recently (or ever)

Sometimes I come across an older but simple, non-e-commerce site where the database is multiple GB in size due to out-of-control log entries or other reason. This slows down the site and makes backups tedious. There are plugins that will optimize your database, but make a backup first!

17. Your site/server has no security software installed

Sometimes I come across a site that has no security plugin or server software installed and by some miracle is not hacked yet (often times they are already hacked).

Security software is not a substitute for keeping your plugins, theme, and server updated, but it is a weapon in your battle against hackers.

18. Your site is using unlicensed images or fonts

I used to see this all of the time: whoever made your site just copied images from the first Google search they did. I know someone who did this and got a threatening letter for Getty Images and ended up paying almost $2000 to make the problem go away.

There are lots of sources of legal free stock images. Or, you can pay a little for better-quality images. Do not just copy any images you like on the web!

Ditto all of this for fonts. Just because you own the font on your desktop computer does not mean you have a license to use it on a website. Most of the time, they are different licenses requiring separate payment. More on web fonts.

19. Your site is missing SSL

If you don’t see the lock icon in the browser after your site loads (or if the web address begins with “http” instead of “https”), it means your site doesn’t have SSL (secure socket layer) security. Often, this is a pretty easy fix if you have access to the server. If you are GoDaddy, however, you’ll have to pay for the SSL certificate.

20. You haven’t set up analytics / GA 4

Wait, why is this a “critical” issue? Let’s say your boss wants to know the ROI of the website and asks you for the traffic over the last year. If you didn’t have an analytics service already installed on the site, you’re out of luck. Installing analytics now only gets you data starting from today; you can’t get it from the past.

Even if you were diligent and installed Google Analytics, the bad news is that it is going away in July 2023, to be replaced by Google Analytics 4. Now is the time to install GA4 so that you have some data going back in time because your old Google Analytics data will eventually go away.

Conclusion

I hope this list has raised some red flags and prompted you to at least look into some of these issues. Some are easy to do, like testing your contact form today. Some will require research, such as tracking down who actually owns your organization’s domain name. But, you’ll be glad you got these issues squared away now before they become disasters.

Please leave your questions or comments below! – Brian

What You Need to Know About Privacy Laws and Your Website

What You Need to Know About Privacy Laws and Your Website

There has been an avalanche of legislation in the United States and Europe regarding online privacy since the rise of the Internet. Today, publishing anything on the web requires familiarity and compliance with privacy laws to avoid the possibility of legal action or fines.

Before I continue, I need to stress that I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE! Please consult a lawyer for legal advice for your particular situation.

This article contains some rough guidelines I found in my research on privacy compliance for small business websites. This is an extremely complex legal issue spanning many pieces of legislation on multiple continents, and I am by no means an expert! Please see the links at the end of this article for more information on online privacy.

Why Privacy Is Relevant to Your Website

You may be thinking, “my website doesn’t collect any private information, so I don’t need to worry about any of this.”

Well, if your website has Google Analytics installed on it (or any analytics service for that matter), you’ll need to worry about privacy compliance.

If you have target users in Europe and you use Google Fonts, you’ll need to worry about privacy compliance.

Any time your website collects an email address, that’s private information. So that may include comment forms, contact forms, and blog subscription forms. If you have any of these, you need to worry about privacy compliance.

Every Website Needs a Privacy Policy

Every public-facing website needs a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, what you do with it, how users can control their data, and possibly much more depending on what information your site collects, where its customers reside, and how big your company is. Termly.io has a good explanation of what needs to be in a privacy policy for a small business.

If your company is big enough to have in-house counsel or counsel on retainer, you should definitely use them for guidance on your website’s privacy policy. If your company collects sensitive information or sells personal information as part of its business model, you should also contact a lawyer.

Otherwise, you may be able to use one of the many privacy policy generators online. Two examples are Termsfeed.com and Termly.io. Termsfeed has a free privacy policy template at the end of this article.

For a more robust policy, I would recommend purchasing a privacy policy subscription from Termageddon, the industry standard for privacy policies. When you purchase their service, they’ll help you generate a policy specifically geared for your site, and they’ll make sure it is always updated to comply with current laws.

Whatever you do, do not just copy another company’s privacy policy. The privacy policy reflects your website’s particular features, as well as your company’s particular policies for handling personal information. Therefore, the privacy policy must be customized for your site and organization.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I test or research each service before endorsing it. I own this site and the opinions expressed here are mine.

California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA)

The CCPA is further legislation aimed at protecting user privacy online. It can apply to any site with visitors in California, no matter where your company or organization is based.

The CCPA applies to for-profit entities which meet at least one of the following conditions:

  • Over $25 million in annual gross revenue
  • Receives information for 100,000 or more consumers (up from 50K due to the CPRA going into effect in 2023)
  • Derives 50% or more of its annual revenue from selling consumer personal information

Note that nonprofits and California state and local government entities are exempt!

Note that 100,000 annual visitors translates into 274 daily visitors, which is not that high a threshold.

For information on how to comply with CCPA, check out this Termly.io article on the CCPA.

One hallmark of the CCPA is the requirement for a “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” option if your organization sells personal information collected by the site. While you may not think you sell personal information, the law applies even if there is no monetary exchange. For example, you might get some free services from a CRM company if you use them to manage your email list. Thus you might still need to provide a way for users to opt out.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

GDPR is a privacy law created in the European Union, but it affects businesses located anywhere in the world that have users in the EU. Termly.io has a great summary of GDPR for dummies.

You may still be wondering if the GDPR applies to your organization. I’ve found somewhat conflicting information on this. Some sources say that if your site has even one visitor from the EU it does apply. But, I found this blurb on the official European Commission Website:

When the [GDPR] regulation does not apply

Your company is service provider based outside the EU. It provides services to customers outside the EU. Its clients can use its services when they travel to other countries, including within the EU. Provided your company doesn’t specifically target its services at individuals in the EU, it is not subject to the rules of the GDPR.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who-does-data-protection-law-apply_en

In any case, I would think that a local-focused brochure website for Joe’s Barber Shop in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, would not be a high-priority target for European regulators.

Many of the requirements of the GDPR are good privacy practices and can be handled in your privacy policy and your organization’s operational policies (i.e., having someone assigned to remove a person’s data upon request, for example).

Probably one of the most painful parts of GDPR compliance for a small business website that doesn’t collect names or email addresses is making Google Analytics compliant. Google Analytics tracks users so it is not compliant by default. To make it compliant, you need to get permission from the user before activating Google Analytics on your site. That means an annoying popup. Furthermore, a good number of folks will choose not to be tracked, so you’ll lose some valuable analytics data.

You’ll just have to make the risk analysis for your organization. How valuable is having complete analytics data and not annoying visitors with a popup vs. strict compliance with GDPR?

You’re Not Done Yet

Let’s say you’ve gone through the work of constructing a good privacy policy and maybe even a privacy compliance popup. You’re not done yet.

In fact, you’re never done, because privacy compliance is an ongoing thing. It’s not enough just to say that you’ll remove someone’s personal information upon request in your privacy policy. You have to have someone in your organization available to receive that request who can remove the info in a timely manner.

This is where privacy trolls come in. They make a request to a site to remove their info. If they don’t get a response in the time specified by law, they may threaten legal action.

So, it’s important that your organization has policies to deal with these privacy requests on an ongoing basis.

Furthermore, new laws are always being passed. That’s why some services like Termly.io provide a subscription service with ongoing updates.

More Information

I’ve barely scratched the surface of website privacy compliance, but I hope I’ve pointed you in the right direction. Here’s where to get more info:

Termageddon Data Privacy agency partner
Official Termageddon Data Privacy agency partner
What You Need to Know About Using Contact Forms on your Website

What You Need to Know About Using Contact Forms on your Website

A contact form is a common feature of many business websites. After all, you want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to get in touch with you to purchase your goods or services.

However, contact forms have several important pitfalls that you may not know about. There are solutions, but they come at a cost. In the end, you may prefer to just list your phone number and email address rather than dealing with the hassles of a contact form.

Common Problems with Web Forms


1. Flaky Email Deliverability from Shared Hosting

Once a visitor fills out a contact form, your site has to email it to you. If you are just relying on your shared web host to send your email, then it may not be sending you email reliably. Worst of all, you’ll never know how many emails you missed unless you are logging submissions (which has privacy implications, see below).

The fact is, web hosts are optimized for serving up webpages, not sending email. Most VPS’s like Cloudways or Gridpane can’t even send email by themselves.

2. Flaky contact form functionality

Even if you do set up your contact form to use a reliable SMTP email account, your contact form might not work for other reasons.

For example, a while ago I noticed that my Divi contact form was not submitting properly on mobile devices. It was working fine on desktop. I traced the problem to my caching plugin.

Contact form problems can also occur due to your security plugin or your server’s security settings.

To rule these out, you need to thoroughly test your contact forms on desktop AND mobile on a regular basis!

The only reason I discovered this problem is that a friend tried to contact me through the form and told me about the failure. If it wasn’t for him, I could have gone years without knowing because I only tested on desktop up to that point!

3. Submissions going to your junk folder

When you get a lead from your website, the last thing you want is for it to sit for a few days before anyone responds! But, oftentimes, email sent from shared web servers ends up in your spam folder. This can happen even if you use an SMTP email service! You might need to try several before finding one that sends email reliably to your inbox rather than your junk box.

4. Overwhelming Spam

Website contact forms tend to attract huge amounts of spam. I’ve seen sites completely overwhelmed with spam from contact forms, rendering them useless. CAPTCHAs are effective but create extra hoops that users have to jump through, decreasing your conversion rates.

5. Organizational Problems: Who is getting the form submissions?

Unlike a phone number or email address printed on your website, it may not be clear who the form is going to just by looking at the site. You may need a web developer to tell you who the form is going to.

The question is, what happens when the recipient of the contact form submissions leaves your organization? Will anyone remember to go into the website and change the contact form to email someone else? Do you know how to do this? You could go for a long period of time before anyone thinks to do this. In the meantime, you’re losing sales and leads.

6. Privacy Issues

Modern online privacy laws are extremely stringent. Website contact forms are definitely covered by these laws. When anyone fills out a contact form, they have the right to know what their information is going to be used for, how to view it, and how to delete it.

The last one may be tricky. If your site logs submissions, you’ll have to delete their submissions in your website database, and also in your website backups, technically. You’ll also need to delete their submissions in the receiving email accounts and their backups!

Unless you know exactly how to deal with these issues, you could be opening yourself up to legal issues.

7. User Skepticism

Because of these problems, some users have come to expect web forms not to work at all. I know that whenever I submit a web form, I often don’t get a response. If a user of your website sees a web form and no other way to contact you, they may go to a competitor that does provide other means of contact.

Solutions


If you still need to use a contact form, here are some ways to mitigate the issues above.

1. Use an SMTP Email Service

Whenever a website needs to send email (like from a contact form), you should use an SMTP email service to send that email rather than rely on your shared web host to send.

If you don’t have a large volume of contact form submissions, you can use your Gmail or Outlook account to send email from your site. But note, your email address will be shown as the sender to all email your site sends. You may not want this.

For larger volumes, you’ll need to sign up for an SMTP email service like Mailgun, Sendgrid, Sendinblue, or Amazon SES and have your site use that service to send email. Of course this comes with additional cost and setup required.

If the submissions are going to your junk folder, you might have to try a different SMTP service.

2. Test thoroughly and regularly

Because contact forms are so critical and yet have multiple points of failure, you should test them thoroughly on desktop and mobile, and regularly. I recommend once a month or at least every time you update your site. This will also remind you who the submissions are going to, so you’ll be more likely to remember to change the recipient if they leave.

3. Take Anti-Spam Measures

Some of the older WordPress contact form plugins do nothing to mitigate spam or rely on third-party solutions like Google CAPTCHA, which are not ideal because they make your users do more work to contact you (and sometimes they block legitimate users!)

One contact form plugin with spam mitigation built-in without the need for CAPTCHAs is Fluent Forms. I use it on all of my new sites.

4. Use a shared email address (maybe)

One solution, if you are part of a company or organization, is to have the contact form go to a generic email address, like contact@yourcompany.com, where multiple people are copied, or you’re more likely to remember to forward it to a new person when the old person leaves.

5. Take Privacy Seriously

Privacy is going to become a bigger and bigger issue as time goes on. You should find a developer who is versed in the latest privacy laws, and you might want to consult your in-house counsel as well.

6. Provide alternate means of contact

If your form doesn’t work, or if someone just doesn’t want to fill out a form, be sure to provide some other way for your website visitors to contact you… unless you purposely don’t want to be bothered.

Conclusion

I am not saying that you should never use web forms. But, after knowing these issues, you may find that they are not worth the hassle. Just having your phone number and email address on your site might be enough.

You may be concerned about getting spam if your email address is printed on the site. There is no way to prevent humans from spamming you, but there are steps that can be taken to obfuscate your email address to bots, which should prevent the majority of the email spam if your email address is printed on your site.

I hope this has been helpful! Please leave your questions or comments below. – Brian

What You Need to Know About Using Fonts on Your Website

What You Need to Know About Using Fonts on Your Website

Often designers will hand me a website design that uses custom fonts (i.e., not the free ones available online). And just as often, they and the client are unaware of the costs and implications of using these fonts on the web.

Web Font Licensing Costs

Unfortunately, just having a font on your desktop (or laptop) computer does not automatically give you permission to use that font on a website. Many fonts have licensing fees specifically for use on the web. And even worse, these fees are often dependent on your web traffic and require recurring payment. It’s not a one-time purchase!

These fees can range from $20 to $85 per font version per year or for a set number of visitors (i.e., 250,000 visits). If you need italic, bold, and extra bold versions of a font, you pay for each of those as if they were completely separate fonts. So, just two fonts on your low-traffic website could cost $300-$400 per year in licensing fees! That’s more than the cost of most shared web hosting plans!

If your web traffic goes up, your font cost could as well.

Paid web fonts also usually require a web developer to install on your site.

And, clients who go this route often call me a year after their site launches saying the fonts on their site are broken. It’s because they disregarded the font renewal email because they forgot what it was for, or because it went to their spam folder. So the site looks like crap and everyone panics until it’s sorted out. This happens ALL OF THE TIME!!!!!

Welcome to the world of web font licensing!

Web Font Loading Time

Another problem with using esoteric fonts is that they’re probably not already in the users’ browser cache, so they need to be fetched when your site loads. This can be hundreds of kilobytes of data and can cause a noticeable flash of unstyled text or a noticeable delay for your text to show up at all.

Free Google Fonts

Fortunately, Google provides hundreds of fonts that you can use on your website with no licensing fees! Most WordPress themes have Google Fonts built in, so no web developer is needed to use them.

These fonts are commonly used so there’s a good chance that your visitor already has at least some of these in their browser cache, so they might not need to be loaded again.

The problem is that many print designers don’t know about these and instead use fonts from their computers which often have those nasty licensing fees. By the time the client approves the design, everyone has fallen in love with the non-free fonts and no one wants to switch to a different font.

Adobe Creative Cloud fonts

If your organization is already paying for a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, you have access to a ton of web fonts as part of your subscription. That could be a good solution at no extra cost as long as no one cancels the subscription without knowing the website needs it.

Bootleg Fonts

Of course, there are ways to use licensed fonts for free, either by finding a disreputable source online or by using a tool to convert a desktop font to a web font format. What will happen if you go that route?

Let’s put aside the moral implications of doing that for a second.

If your company is large and in the public eye, then someone could easily notice and blow the whistle, possibly leading to a cease-and-desist letter or a lawsuit and big-time financial penalties. Here are some examples.

Let’s say you’re a small company or organization whose website gets ten hits a day. Probably no one would notice, right? Well, a disgruntled employee could easily rat you out if they want to cause you some pain (that often happens with companies that use pirated software).

Is this really a headache that you want to risk having? Needless to say, I don’t condone using fonts illegally.

What To Do

If you’re a multimillion-dollar corporation with healthy profits, sure go ahead and pay for font licensing if you want!

If you have a famous brand with a style guide that specifies certain fonts, go for it!

If you’re a design firm, or a famous artist, or an organization that has anything to do with visual arts or fashion, then yeah, I totally get using kick-ass fonts. You probably should!

But, if you’re a small company or organization with a small budget, and not in the design or visual arts field, my advice is to use free Google fonts.

It’s a matter of return on investment. What will be the return of spending $3000 over a period of ten years for a slightly better-looking font on your website? That doesn’t include the overhead of billing and a possible fire drill due to the fonts on your site breaking because the bill wasn’t paid, as well as the resulting online embarrassment of having a broken site. For many small or medium-sized companies (and even large ones), it’s not a good use of time and resources.

But ultimately, it’s your responsibility to do the cost/benefit analysis and make the call! – Brian

Addendum: One Caveat About Google Fonts

If you do choose to use Google Fonts, and your site targets users in Europe, you should make sure to source the font files locally, on your server, as opposed to from Google’s CDN. The reason is that Google tracks IP addresses of users of sites that source their font files, which can result in fines due to GDPR privacy law violations.

On the Kadence theme (which I use), it’s easy to source your Google font files locally; literally press a button in the options. For Divi (which I also use), you have to manually download the font files and add some CSS.

How to Set Up Your Domain Name, Custom Email, and Web Hosting

How to Set Up Your Domain Name, Custom Email, and Web Hosting

Sometimes I get a client who is starting from scratch and needs to get a domain name, branded email accounts, and web hosting (or sometimes they have the domain name already).

Here’s my process to get that all set up, along with some tips and tricks. Note, the order is important to minimize the amount of work you need to do.

Domain Name Hosting

Often my clients already have a domain name on GoDaddy. For clients who don’t have a domain name, I recommend getting it on Namecheap because they are cheaper and include privacy (i.e., not listing your name, phone number, and address in the whois info) at no extra cost, whereas GoDaddy charges for that “luxury”.

I strongly recommend that my clients own their own domain names and not let a developer own them. Your domain name is a valuable asset to your business or organization. You need to control it!

I do, however, need access in order to set everything up. Registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap offer delegated access, where you can grant your developer revokable access to your account. This is a good way to grant user access to your domain name host.

In any case, get your domain name first. It will make your life easier for the rest of the steps.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I test or research each service before endorsing it. I own this site and the opinions expressed here are mine.

Custom Email Accounts

Next, I set up email. For custom email accounts, I usually use Google Workspace because it’s low-cost ($6/month) and most people are familiar with Gmail. You could also use Microsoft 360 or one of many other alternatives though.

During the setup process, Google can automatically interface with registrars like GoDaddy to make your DNS settings for you as long as you are logged into your domain name host. That’s why it’s best to get your domain name first, and stay logged in for this part.

Once my email account is set up, I can add my client’s email users one at a time. There is a provision in Google Workspace to add accounts and simultaneously send an invitation to people’s existing email addresses, which is a great feature.

Google Workspace also lets each user have an alternate email address. For example, if you want “info@yourorganization.com” to go to an existing user, you can make that an alternate address for that user (but you can’t assign the same alternate address to multiple users)

If you need an email address that forwards to multiple users, you can create a Group. If you want people outside your organization to be able to email to that address (for an info@ address for example), be sure to set “Who can post” to that group to include “External” in the Access Type settings for that group.

Next, I give my clients Super Admin privileges to the account so they can completely manage it themselves without me.

Web Hosting

Now that we have a domain name and emails, it’s time to set up web hosting. I have a separate article on choosing web hosting, but for most of my clients, I use Siteground because their servers are reliable and fast.

I sign up using the email I just created or ask my client to sign up and give me delegated access. Once I have access, I get the IP address of the webserver and copy that to the A-record of the domain name DNS record. If you’re not a web developer, this probably sounds like Greek, but you can find tutorials online on how to do this.

Once I have verified that I can get into the account with my delegated access, I change the contact email to my client’s email address so they will be informed when the hosting needs to be renewed.

An Easier Way?

There is actually an easier way to do all of this. Namely, you could get your domain name, email, and web hosting all from the same company, like GoDaddy or Siteground for instance.

But any seasoned web developer will advise you not to be tempted by the convenience of “one-stop” shopping. Rather, it’s best to use the best providers of each individual service. In other words, use the best domain name provider, the best email provider, and the best web host, even if they are not all the same company. That is because migrating any one of these later is a pretty big pain in the a**.

Let’s say you have all three services at Siteground and want to migrate your web hosting. You won’t want to leave your email there and pay for full price web hosting just to get the email account; you’ll want to move that to a cheaper dedicated service. Same for your domain name. So now you have to migrate three services instead of one. And like I said, migrating any of one these is a hassle.

So, that’s why I use three different services for domain name, email, and web hosting. I use the best so I don’t have to migrate later, or if I do want to change one service, I only need to migrate that one service instead of all three.

Conclusion

I hope this was helpful. Please leave your questions in the comments! – Brian

Why I Use the WordPress Divi Theme

Why I Use the WordPress Divi Theme

If you ask a WordPress developer what their favorite builder theme is, you’ll get a very opinionated answer, kind of like asking a photographer what brand of camera is best, or a gamer what console is best. The truth is, there are a lot of great themes out there. Many of them can be used to create great sites in the hands of an experienced developer.

These are the reasons that I use the Divi Builder theme for many of my client WordPress sites.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I test or research each service before endorsing it. I own this site and the opinions expressed here are mine.

What I Love About Divi

1. It’s easy for clients to Learn

Every WordPress builder has its learning curve, but I think Divi is one of the easier ones to learn. The Divi Visual Builder lets you edit in WYSIWYG mode, which is great for beginners.

The reason why ease of use is so important to me is that I like to empower my clients to edit their own sites. I wouldn’t dare expect my clients to learn how to use some of the other builders out there. The whole point of WordPress is to let people edit their sites without hiring a developer!

2. It Looks Great Out of the Box

Elegant Themes has always had a reputation for making really great-looking themes. Divi is no different. Most of the modules look great out of the box.

3. It Has the Right Amount of Adjustability

There is a tradeoff between how much adjustability a theme has vs. how cluttered and overwhelming the user interface is. You could make every single thing adjustable, but then the theme would be a bloated mess. The perfect theme makes the items that need to be adjustable, adjustable while leaving the rest fixed.

I’d say that Divi strikes a pretty good balance between adjustability and keeping the user interface manageable. Sure, there are a few things that I would love to have more control over (like feeds), but for many of those, I can adjust using CSS or custom code in a pinch.

The Divi Theme Builder lets you build completely custom blog templates (or any other type of template). This is a huge deal.

4. I Can Develop Polished Sites Using Divi Really Fast

Because of many of the reasons I’ve mentioned, I can develop polished sites using Divi really fast. My clients are often amazed at how quickly I can get their sites done – and they really appreciate it.

5. It Has Great Documentation and Support

Divi is one of the most popular WordPress themes around, so it has tons of documentation, informational blog posts, videos, and third-party plugins. If you need to make Divi do something, you can usually just Google it, and someone has found a solution or created a plugin to do it.

6. It Doesn’t Break When Updating

Because Divi has been around for so long, a lot of the bugs have been ironed out. Some of the newer themes have some great features, but I’ve found some to be buggy. Divi just works and is reliable.

Probably the biggest problem I’ve encountered is that some older Divi sites can’t use the latest version of the Divi Builder editor (called “The Latest Divi Experience”). This is not really a show-stopper though, because the Visual Builder still works, and it’s only happened in a few cases for me.

Other than that, I’ve rarely had a site break after a Divi theme update. With certain other themes (i.e., WP Bakery), I dread pressing the “update” button.

7. You Pay For It Once (Lifetime Deal)

I love software that you pay for once, as opposed to having to pony up more cash every year for a subscription, even though Divi would be well worth paying for every year. Although there is no free version, Divi has a lifetime deal which is a steal if you use it on multiple sites.

What Detractors Say

Probably the biggest complaint you’ll hear from some developers about Divi is that it is “bloated”. It’s true that full-featured builder themes like Divi and Elementor generate lots of levels of div tags. Detractors will also point to poor website speed test grades for builders like Divi and Elementor.

It’s true that Divi isn’t the fastest-loading theme around by any means, but you can get really fast Divi site load times (i.e., around one second) if you use caching and premium-quality hosting. You can also get an “A” score on GTmetrix, an industry-standard measurement tool for website performance.

Here are the GTmetrix scores for this site’s home page, done in Divi showing an “A” grade and 1.1 second paint time to prove it!

GTmetrix scores for this site's home page
GTmetrix scores for this site’s home page showing an “A” score

UPDATE: Here’s an updated report after Divi’s version 4.9 performance update, which speeds things up even more!

GTMetrix report for brianshim.com after Divi’s version 4.9 performance update
GTMetrix report for brianshim.com after Divi’s version 4.9 performance update

When Divi Might Not Be the Best Choice

If you need to create a very customized site with unorthodox design elements, Divi might not be the right choice. You may need to with a builder with more customizability like Oxygen or perhaps a full-custom theme made from scratch.

Divi specifically lags behind Elementor and Oxygen when it comes to the customizability of feeds. There is no built-in blog feed layout with the image on the left and the excerpt on the right; there’s only full-width and masonry-style. I compensate for this by using CSS or by writing my own feed plugins in PHP. If you’re not a programmer and need really customized feeds, then you might want to go with a different builder.

Finally, if your client is obsessed with site load time, then you should probably look for a solution other than Divi (or Elementor). Check out some of my other recommended themes below, or code your theme from scratch, or consider using WordPress as a static site generator; you’ll get insanely fast load times.

Other Recommended Themes

If you are creating a really simple personal blog or WooCommerce store, I like GeneratePress. It’s easy to use, blazing-fast and has accessibility built-in. It’s not nearly as customizable as Divi though, even with the paid add-ons.

If you need more customizability than GeneratePress offers, I’d recommend Kadence. It’s also super fast and accessible. It’s a great theme to use with Gutenberg when you don’t need the full customizability of Divi.

A Word About Elementor

No discussion on WordPress builders would be complete without mentioning the other industry-standard builder out there, Elementor, which is used by many WordPress professionals.

I actually like Elementor. If Divi didn’t exist, I’d probably be using Elementor. In some ways, it has more adjustability than Divi and in other ways, Divi is more adjustable. But, I find Divi to be easier to learn and use, which enables some of my clients to update their own sites. I like the fact that Divi is a theme rather than a plugin like Elementor. With Elementor, you have to choose a theme to use it with. Also, Elementor Pro has an annual fee; there is no lifetime deal like Divi has.

Conclusion

So, I’ve tried to give the pros and cons of the Divi Builder, along with honest comparisons to other builders, and the reasons I ultimately chose Divi. If you’re interested in a super-powerful drag-and-drop WordPress builder that is relatively easy to learn and has lots of support and add-ons available, check out Divi!

My Website Accessibility Checklist

My Website Accessibility Checklist

Before I begin, let me stress that I am not a lawyer and this article is for informational purposes only. It is not legal advice!

Per United States and European law, odds are that your website needs to be designed so that folks with various types of physical or cognitive disabilities will be able to access the information or perform the functions offered on your website. Not complying could result in litigation and fines, not to mention losing out on a segment of potential users. (Note that religious entities are exempted from the legal requirement).

Accessibility Guidelines

While there is no formal government set of rules to determine exactly what “compliance” means, the closest thing we have is the WCAG 2.1 guidelines. These are industry-accepted and litigation-tested rules to define how accessibility-compliant websites should be designed.

As you can imagine, there are a huge number of rules to follow. Through research and lots of seminars and classes, I’ve distilled the rules to the most important items in the list below. These are areas where I strive for accessibility compliance in my sites.

Often there are exceptions that are not compliant for various reasons, that are signed off by the client. Accessibility compliance for most real websites is usually not a “yes” or “no” but somewhere on a continuum.

The Checklist

This list is by no means a complete list of requirements for WCAG compliance, but it does include the most important items to make your website accessible to people with disabilities and to avoid litigation (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer!)

Appearance

  • Text at least 16 px in size. (There is no standard, but 16 px is generally agreed to be a safe minimum size. )
  • Minimum color contrast rules are followed (see below for links to tools to help you do this)
  • States are not communicated just by color

Keyboard Access

  • All links are keyboard-accessible (usually by using the tab key)
  • All navigation (menus) are keyboard-accessible
  • All dynamic elements (i.e., accordions, tabs, etc.) can be operated by keyboard
  • All other functionality is operable by keyboard (i.e., doesn’t require a mouse)
  • All of the above have visible focus indicator (usually an outline)
  • <a> tag is used for links
  • Links in body are distinguished from surrounding text (usually by underlining)
  • Link text (or aria-label text) is descriptive
  • Links that open a new tab or window have some indication this will happen, such as adding “(opens in a new tab)” to the link text or area-label.

Structure

  • Only one h1 per page
  • Headings should be in sequence
  • Heading levels should not be skipped

Images

  • Images have relevant alt text or captions unless purely cosmetic
  • Images do not have title attributes
  • Background images should be avoided unless purely decorative. If they can’t be avoided, then add “role=’img’ aria-label=’description of image'” to the enclosing div unless it contains other elements.
  • Sliders and carousels are not accessible

Videos

  • Video does not auto-play
  • Video can be paused
  • Video has accurate transcript or captions (read how to edit YouTube captions)

Forms

  • Fields have label tags, not placeholders
  • Required fields are labeled “required” in words, not just an asterisk
  • Submit button clearly states what submitting the form does, i.e., “subscribe to email list”
  • Fields are keyboard-accessible

PDFs

Embeds

  • iframes should have a title attribute describing the iframe’s purpose

As I mentioned, this is not a comprehensive list, but rather some of the “biggies” that can have a really obvious effect on your site’s accessibility.

Resources

Tools

Color Contrast Analyzer from TGPi
Color Contrast Analyzer from TGPi. Click the eye dropper buttons to pick colors from your screen.

Some Common Website Features that Are Not ADA Compliant

I don’t know of a third-party slider carousel that meets WCAG guidelines. The accessibility professionals who I’ve asked have told me not to use carousels on sites that need strict accessibility compliance.

Most social embeds and embedded ads are not accessible. Animation effects may not accessible.

Auto-playing videos are not allowed. In fact, most video players are not accessible, including YouTube. Here’s an article on how embedded YouTube videos and Google Maps are not completely accessible, strictly speaking (though most of my website clients are satisfied with using them on otherwise accessible sites).

Any linked PDFs need to be re-generated with accessibility in mind, and all embedded videos need captions or transcripts.

A Note About Overlays and Instant Compliance

You might have heard of services that claim to make your website “100% accessibility compliant” instantly by adding a button or “overlay”. The vast majority of accessibility experts see these services as snake oil. Worse, they may make your site an even bigger target for accessibility litigation:

nearly all of the functionality provided by these tools has no impact on your level of WCAG conformance whatsoever. Furthermore, these overlays provide little or no additional legal protection for your website. In fact, in recent lawsuit filings, screenshots of these tools are being used to build the claim against websites that are not also seeking a holistic approach to ADA compliance. It is also a common belief that these tools may increase your risk with regards to security, and many company’s security policies prohibit the installation of widgets like these.

Michele Landis, Kelly Heikkila, Jason Webb, Accessible360

So obviously, I don’t advocate using services, whether free or paid, that promise instant accessibility simply by installing a plugin or code snippet. As the quote says, it takes a holistic approach to many aspects of the website itself, as well as offline resources like videos, embeds, and PDFs.

Here’s an even more damning article from NBC News about website accessibility overlays. Finally, here’s a pretty convincing fact sheet about whether overlays are legit or not. More references:

Staying in Compliance

Unfortunately, the work of keeping a website in compliance is never done. It’s an ongoing process throughout the life of the site.

It is very easy for a website to drift out of compliance as people add content, features get added, and plugins get updated. New font colors are added that don’t meet the minimum contrast guidelines, for example. Or, someone adds new images without adding alt tags. Accessibility compliance is not a one-time deal; any updates to the site must be made with accessibility in mind if you want to stay compliant.

My Conversation with an Accessibility Attorney

In March 2023, I had a great conversation with a California attorney who specializes in defending website owners against litigation. She confirmed so much of what I’ve said above. In a nutshell:

  • Accessibility lawsuits against websites are real and ubiquitous. Her full-time job as a lawyer is dealing with them.
  • Accessibility violations cost owners tens of thousands of dollars, usually to settle to avoid litigation. That does not count additional tens of thousands to get the site into compliance.
  • The states with the most accessibility litigation are California, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
  • The number one tool used by litigators to find violating websites is WAVE, even though it is not a comprehensive indication of accessibility. If you want to avoid lawsuits, get your site to pass WAVE.
  • Although overlays do not attract litigation, they do nothing to actually improve the accessibility of your site, and many handicapped people say they harm accessibility! Usually, these services provide no indemnification against legal action.

Case Study

A colleague of mine had a prospective client who got hit with an accessibility lawsuit for their retirement home. In that case, the litigator used a report straight from Accessibe. All of the flagged items are in my checklist above.

Conclusion

There is actually no formal government certification process you can go through to have your website definitively declared “100% compliant”. There are just a set of industry-accepted guidelines such as WCAG 2.1. Website compliance is usually not “yes or no” but rather a continuum.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about this topic! Need help fixing accessibility violations on your site? I can help!

Why You Should Own Your Own Domain Name and Web Hosting Accounts

Why You Should Own Your Own Domain Name and Web Hosting Accounts

I always tell my clients to set up their own domain name and web hosting accounts and pay for with their own credit card. I do not provide hosting. Here’s why I think you should not let your web developer, agency, or any third party own your web and domain name accounts.

1. You could get held hostage by your web developer

Your domain name and web hosting are too important to be in the hands of a third party. Your domain name is an important part of your brand’s identity, with SEO value that can’t easily be replaced. You might have put a lot of work into your website. Unless you’re doing offsite backups, all of that resides on your hosting. You or your business needs to control these, not a third party that can hold you hostage if you have a disagreement over payment terms or services.

2. Your web developer might go M.I.A.

Maybe you get along with your developer fine, but you never know what could happen to them. He or she could quit web development and become a monk and move to Tibet. They could get hit by a bus. You could lose control of your domain and website if any of these happen.

3. You might want to move your web business elsewhere

I’ve seen the awkward situation where a client wants to move away from a previous web developer or agency that owns their web hosting and domain name. It’s a delicate situation. Will the developer happily provide you with a backup so you can move the site? Will they take the steps necessary to unlock the domain name and transfer it? Will they resist, delay, or even sabotage the process? Moving these resources from an existing developer is always a stressful process. Plus, it costs time and money to transfer the domain and hosting.

If you own the hosting and domain, you can do whatever you want with them, whenever you want. You don’t need to ask for permission from anyone and pray that they comply. And switching web developers is FREE.

4. You’re paying for a middleman

When you pay someone to host your domain and site for you, you’re paying for a middleman who will go out and purchase these from a third-party hosting company, probably with a markup. They might provide additional maintenance and help, and that’s fine, but you should pay for those services separately and not mix these with hosting.

Conclusion

In all fairness, I do know situations where developers control the web and domain name hosting and their clients are completely happy with them. That’s great. If you’re looking to launch a website though, you should consider the reasons above before deciding on your web and domain name hosting. – Brian

My Website Project Kickoff Questionnaire

My Website Project Kickoff Questionnaire

These are some questions I think about before starting a new website project. It’s a great checklist to go through before starting to help you scope out your project.

1. Audience and Purpose

  1. Who is the target audience of the website?
  2. What is the site tagline, in non-marketing speak?
  3. What is the number one thing you want your visitors to accomplish on the site?
  4. What are the next two most important goals of the website?
  5. What is the criteria for success for this website?
  6. Will the site visitors be mainly new visitors (for example, for a sales funnel) or repeat visitors (for example, for an association website)?

For more information on this section, see “Three Basic Questions You Should Answer Before Building Your New Website“.

2. For Site Revisions / Migrations

  1. Is this a brand new site or a revision of an existing site? If new site, skip to next section.
  2. Do you see this as a complete re-do of your current site, or just a cosmetic makeover?
  3. What things do you hate about your current site?
  4. What things do you like about your current site?
  5. How will the old site be backed up before we replace it? (Let’s discuss).
  6. How much content will be re-used from the old site vs. new content?
  7. What is the plan to migrate data from the old site to the new one? (Let’s discuss).
  8. What is the plan to update the new site with new content while it is in development?
  9. Do we need to redirect old URLs?

3. Structure

  1. Do you have a site map for the new site? Do you need help coming up with one?
  2. How many pages will it have?
  3. Do you have an outline for each page?

4. Written Content

  1. Do you need help creating the site content?
  2. Do you have all of the text content for the site ready?
  3. Will the text be completely proofread and approved, or are changes / corrections likely during development?
  4. Would you like me to do the content entry? (Some clients like to do it on their own, some don’t).

5. Image Content

  1. Do you have the final logos and icons for the site?
  2. Do you have all of the images for the site? Do you need help with photography or procuring stock images?
  3. Are the existing images original images? Stock? Original photography?
  4. Will the images need to be cropped, adjusted for brightness or edited in any way?

6. Video Content

  1. Will there be video on the site?
  2. What format will be video be in? (I highly recommend hosting embedded videos on YouTube or Vimeo, not serving video files from your webserver!)
  3. Will there be video backgrounds? (There are accessibility implications of this).

7. Features

What features do you want on the site?

  1. Blog?
  2. Commenting?
  3. Events management?
  4. Contact forms?
  5. Other forms? With logging and Thank You page? (Recommended)
  6. Popups? Searchable, linkable, shareable? (Don’t over-use popups!)
  7. Social sharing buttons?
  8. Social follow buttons?
  9. Custom post types and Custom fields?
  10. Custom search/filtering?
  11. Google maps?
  12. Ability to upload documents?
  13. AJAX (elements of the page loading without a full page reload)?
  14. Third-party plugins, widgets, APIs?
  15. Will the site be sending email?

8. Design

  1. Has the new site already been designed by another designer?
  2. If not, are we creating a brand new design concept, or are we adhering to an established design language?
  3. Is there a style guide?
  4. What fonts are we going to use? Paid or free?
  5. How many different types of page designs will there be?
  6. What percentage of your users will be on mobile vs. desktop?
  7. Does the site need to work on Internet Explorer or any other non-modern browsers?
  8. Do you want any special hover effects? (Note that hover is not good for ADA compliance and that there is no hover on mobile devices).

9. Compliance

  1. Do you have a GDPR / CCPA compatible privacy policy?
  2. What user information do you intend to collect? (contact forms, email addresses, email list signup forms)
  3. Are you prepared to comply with the requirements of GDPR and CCPA if a user makes a request for their data?
  4. Does the site need to be ADA (WCAG2.0) compliant? (Unless you are a religious institution, the answer is “yes” in most cases).
  5. Are you prepared to create a Terms of Use document for the site? (I can supply an example).

10. Search Engine Optimization

  1. Do you need help with SEO?
  2. Do you need help optimizing your content for SEO?
  3. What is the geographical target of your business? Local? The United States? Worldwide?

11. Analytics

  1. Do you have analytics data for your current website (if there is one) that we can analyze?
  2. Have you updated to Google Analytics 4?
  3. Do you need to track any other events on the site other than simple page loads? (i.e., button clicks, form submits, downloads, etc.)
  4. Do you need any other tracking services on the site?

12. Security

All sites get SSL by default.

  1. Do you want to do eCommerce on this website?
  2. Are there known individuals or parties who might target your website for attack (such as DDOS attack). Examples include disgruntled ex-employees, activists, political enemies, etc.

13. Logistics

  1. What hosting service will we use? (I can offer suggestions)
  2. What is the URL for this website?
  3. Do you have control over your domain name?
  4. Do you have an SMTP email account that we can use to send email from the site?
  5. What is the estimated traffic of the site?
  6. How much storage (in GB) will be needed for the site?

14. Testing and Approvals

  1. Who will help test the website before launch?
  2. Who needs to approve the website before launch?
  3. Who are the stakeholders for the website?

15. Schedule

  1. What is the desired launch date?
  2. Is this a hard deadline (such as a trade show, event, etc.)?
  3. How long will it take to create and gather your content?
  4. How long will the approval process take? (Is your boss easy to reach? Are they responsive?)

16. Cost

  1. What is your budget for the site?
  2. Do you want to pay hourly for the site, or have a fixed price?
  3. If fixed, it is a “not-to-exceed” or is an estimate OK?

17. Post-Launch

  1. Who will be updating the site content after launch? What is their technical experience?
  2. Do you need training on how to update the site?
  3. Who will do maintenance on the site? (WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates)
  4. How often will the site content be updated?
  5. What is the backup strategy?
  6. Do you need a staging site? (i.e., a copy of the site that you can play around without affecting the production site).

18. Metrics

  1. What is your criteria for success for the new website?

Conclusion

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions! – Brian

Nine Things You Should Do Before Updating Your WordPress Core, Plugins, or Theme

Nine Things You Should Do Before Updating Your WordPress Core, Plugins, or Theme

WordPress makes it very easy to update your website to the latest versions of the WordPress core, plugins, and theme. Just click a few buttons, right?

Well, anyone who’s worked with WordPress for a while knows that simply pressing “update” without some serious preparation can be a recipie for disaster.

Here is a list of things you should do BEFORE updating your WordPress site!

1. Make a Backup

If you do nothing else on this list, please do this one thing: make a backup of your site. I like to use the Duplicator plugin to do this. Some web hosts like WP Engine have one-click backups in their admin panels (in addition to daily automatic backups).

Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I test or research each service before endorsing it. I own this site and the opinions expressed here are mine.

2. Test the Live Site Before Updating

It might seem strange to test something that is supposed to be working before you even touch it, but I’ve had cases where a site wasn’t working properly after an update, and it turned out to be a pre-existing problem that had nothing to do with the update.

Make sure the live production site is working properly BEFORE you do anything to it, or else the update could lead you on a wild goose chase while you try to figure out why your update “broke” the site (when it had nothing to do with it). Not to mention, this way you won’t be wrongly blamed for a site that was broken before you did your updates!

3. Take Screenshots of Important Pages Before Updating

I’ve had situations where I’ve updated a site, then wondered, “hmmm… was the space between the header and the body really that big before the update??” (In this particular case, nothing changed after the update; I was just paranoid).

Taking a screenshot of the Home page and any other key pages can calm your fears if you start to get paranoid and think something changed after the update. Or, it can confirm that the update did indeed break something.

A variation of this is to load some of the pages of the website in a separate browser window, leave them there, then open a new window to do the updates. Then, you can compare the new site to the old (just don’t accidentally refresh the windows with the pre-updated site!)

4. Keep a Log of Changes

When I update a site, I keep a log of every change I make. I note the old and new versions of everything I update. To make that easier, I copy the plugins section of the WordPress Updates page and paste it into Evernote. That gives me the old and new versions of every plugin that needs to be updated.

If something goes wrong, I have a list of plugins that could have caused the problem!

5. Check for Major Version Updates

Before updating, I scan the plugin version numbers to see if any are jumping to a new major version, like going from V2.9.2 to V3.0.5. If any are, I read the plugin notes to check for any compatibility problems with the new version. Same goes for themes, and the WP core.

6. Check for Recent Updates

Building on the previous point, if there has been a major update to a plugin or theme, I check to see when that update happened. If it was very recently, like yesterday, I will sometimes hold off on the update for a while and let other people be the guinea pigs to test the new version, rather than having it break my site.

7. Test Updates On a Staging Copy

Now that you’ve done a lot of the preliminary work, it’s time to test the updates on a staging site, i.e., a non-public copy of your site.

This can be a site hosted locally on your computer using a program like MAMP (kind of advanced), or a copy of your site online that your web developer can create for you. (Just make sure the staging site is running on the same version of PHP that your production site is).

WP Engine provides a free one-click staging copy for this purpose. Siteground offers staging copies, but you have to set up the subdomains in your DNS records first. Whatever way you do it, if you want to avoid downtime after a botched update, test on staging first!

8. Have FTP and Database Access

Sometimes, even when you do everything “right”, things go wrong. That’s why I make sure that I have FTP access to the website’s server and phpMyAdmin access to the database (or SSH access) BEFORE I update anything. That way, I know I have a way to restore the site if anything should go horribly wrong.

If you’re not a developer, then you should have a developer “on call” in case something goes south.

9. After the Update – Do Not Skip This!

OK, so you’ve done everything on this list, and clicked “update”, so now you’re done, right? Not quite. You need to test the production site thoroughly for any issues. Remember to clear all caches!

The one thing folks always forget to test is the contact form! Do a test submission and make sure the person at the other end receives the email. Do not skip this step!

Oh, and don’t forget to make another backup of your site, so you have a nice clean updated copy!

A Final Note

The steps I’ve outlined above should be considered the minimum you should do before updating a WordPress website. If you’re running an e-commerce site that brings in thousands of dollars per day for example, I would go over and above the steps I’ve outlined here.

Please leave questions and comments below! – Brian

What Is the Difference Between SiteGround Web Hosting vs. SiteGround WordPress Hosting?

What Is the Difference Between SiteGround Web Hosting vs. SiteGround WordPress Hosting?

I personally use and recommend SiteGround shared web hosting for WordPress sites because their servers are fast and reliable, the cost is reasonable, and their support is good.

But, if you go on their website to pick web hosting for your WordPress site, you’ll find “Web Hosting” and “WordPress Hosting”. What’s the difference?

I was wondering that too so I messaged them. The answer is pretty simple and less than what you’d think.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I test or research each service before endorsing it. I own this site and the opinions expressed here are mine.

The Answer

SiteGround’s “WordPress Hosting” comes with WordPress pre-installed. That’s it.

Since you can easily install WordPress on their regular Web Hosting Plan, the two plans are pretty much the same.

I suspect they have the two plans for marketing reasons, to compete with other providers’ “WordPress Hosting” plans. But the truth is that you can install WordPress on either plan (or not). – Brian

How to Clear Your Browser Cache to See the Latest Version of a Website

How to Clear Your Browser Cache to See the Latest Version of a Website

When your web developer makes changes to a website, you might not see those changes in your browser because of something called “browser caching”.

Basically, that means that the browser keeps old copies of parts of the website locally so it doesn’t have to re-load them each time you visit a new page on the site.

That’s great for making pages load fast, but it could mean that you’re viewing an old version of the site, especially if your developer has made changes recently.

Here’s how to do a “hard refresh” to clear your desktop computer’s browser cache:

Windows Chrome and Edge

Hold the CTRL key, then click the “Reload” button on your browser.

Windows Firefox

Hold the CTRL key down and press F5

Mac Chrome, Firefox, and Safari

Hold the SHIFT key, then click the “Reload” button on your browser.
On Chrome, you can also hold down COMMAND SHIFT and press the R key.

Mobile Browsers


On mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, you need to completely clear the browser history to see the latest version of a website.

iOS Chrome

  1. Open the Chrome app.
  2. Tap the three dots at the bottom to get to the main options
  3. Tap History
  4. Tap “Clear Browsing Data” in red at the bottom of the screen
  5. Confirm all of the types of data are checked off, then tap the red “Clear Browsing Data” at the bottom of the screen again.
  6. In the popup, tap “Clear Browsing Data” yet again!
  7. Tap “Done”.
  8. Tap “Done” again.

iOS Safari

  1. Go to the Settings app and find Safari. I find it easiest to type “Safari” in the search field.
  2. Tap “Clear History and Website Data”.
  3. Tap “Clear History and Website Data” again.

Android Chrome

  1. Open the Chrome app.
  2. Tap the three dots in the upper right corner of the browser.
  3. Tap History
  4. Tap “Clear browsing data…”
  5. Tap the “Clear data” button at the bottom.
  6. Tap X to close the window.

Conclusion

If you do this, you should be able to see the latest version of the website. The browser cache will clear itself naturally over time, so your visitors will eventually be able to see the latest changes as well without having to do a hard refresh. – Brian

Three Basic Questions You Should Answer Before Building Your New Website

Three Basic Questions You Should Answer Before Building Your New Website

Knowing the answers to these three questions will help your site’s messaging stay focused and clear.

Before thinking about your site’s colors, fonts, images, and content, you should answer these three basic questions about your website’s messaging and goals. The answers will guide you throughout your site design process and help insure your site is focused and will get the results you want.

1. Who is your target audience?

Sometimes the answer to this question is obvious, but in many cases it’s not. Often companies and organizations will offer a variety of goods or services which target different markets. It might be best to split your site into two very targeted sites rather than having one aimed at two separate markets, which would be confusing.

2. What is your tagline, in non-marketing speak?

Have you ever visited a corporate website, studied their home page, and still had no clue about what their product or service was? I see this all of the time. Often, there are two reasons for this.

  1. The website didn’t bother to mention it succinctly. Companies can be so wrapped up in the minute details of their products or services that they forget to mention, in basic language, what they actually do on a fundamental level. Or…
  2. Their tagline consists of marketing gibberish which is virtually meaningless, i.e., “Enterprise solutions that adapt to your business needs” or something like that. Don’t try to sound fancy. Explain your product or service in one sentence of plain English and make that your tagline! It’s what everyone will be seeing on your home page and in Google search results. (You should include search keywords in that tagline, but that is an entirely different conversation about SEO).

Your visitors should be able to tell what your company offers within ten seconds of visiting your site.

3. What is the number one thing you want your visitors to do on your site?

This is another seemingly obvious consideration that is often overlooked. Folks want their site to have the latest widgets and animation effects, but don’t consider the fundamental purpose of the site. Perhaps you want people to:

  • fill out a contact form
  • give you their email addresses for future communications
  • purchase your product or service via your online store
  • donate to your organization
  • sign up to volunteer
  • call your business’ land-line
  • come to your physical store

Make sure your call-to-action is clear, and that your site clearly guides people to that goal.

The End Goal

The goal of these questions is to make your site FOCUSED and CLEAR.  The message has to be really dumbed down. I’m not saying that your visitors are dumb, but they are busy and don’t have patience to decipher vague websites and messaging, and they’ll move to competitors who can communicate clearly.

So, stay laser-focused on keeping your messaging clear and your call-to-action prominent and simple on your website! – Brian

Which Web Hosting Company Should You Use?

Which Web Hosting Company Should You Use?

If you want to put your content on the Internet, you’ll have to choose a web hosting provider. This is the company that will store your website on a computer which is connected to the Internet and can serve it up to visitors.

If research hosting companies on the Internet, you’ll find so many conflicting opinions about hosting companies it will make your head spin. I’ve used all of the large hosting companies on dozens and dozens of websites.  Here are the companies that have the reliability, speed, and cost in my experience.

Budget Hosting: Namecheap

Namecheap has a good reputation in the industry for domain name hosting at really low prices, but they’re only starting to become known for great low-cost web hosting. I tried their ludicrously cheap $2.88/month Stellar web hosting plan for a client with a rock-bottom budget and was impressed. It had good speed on a WordPress blog I installed, scoring of 84 out of 100 on Pingdom with under 2s load time for a heavy 6.3MB page… out of the box with no speed optimizations!

SSL is extra after the first year (so add a buck per month), but even with that, it’s still a great deal for hobby sites, personal blogs, or small business websites. Email with 10GB storage is included.

An added convenience is that Namecheap offers great domain name prices, so you can get your domain and web hosting all from the same company.

So what’s the catch? In my experience, I’ve noticed a short period of downtime every couple of months, usually lasting fewer than five minutes (probably for a server reboot). Still, that’s not bad at all!

Another low-cost host that I’ve heard good things about is NameHero. They offer Lightspeed cache, SSD storage, and free SSL included. I’ve also been hearing folks recommend A2 Hosting and MechanicWeb, both of which also offer Lightspeed and SSD.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I test or research each service before endorsing it. I own this site and the opinions expressed here are mine.

Professional Hosting: SiteGround

For reliable shared hosting suitable for most small businesses and nonprofits, I recommend SiteGround. When I migrated all of my personal WordPress blogs from a big-name web hosting company to SiteGround (I used the “GoGeek” shared hosting plan), on average, the load times were cut in half from around 5 seconds to a little over 2 seconds with SiteGround! After that, my sites were a joy to use and maintain. Click below for more details:

They also offer some perks like powerful caching (which makes your site even faster), and free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, which provide additional security for your sites. They also offer easy staging site generation and backups, and email accounts!

Another important factor is customer service. Last time I had to talk to them, I was able to get a real person on chat in about a minute. She was able to solve one of my problems right away. She created a ticket for my other one, which was solved in about ten minutes.

These are the reasons why I’m a huge fan of SiteGround! They are perfect for small to medium traffic sites (100,000 visitors per month of fewer).

Premium Managed WordPress Hosting: WP Engine

If you need a more premium WordPress hosting solution, I would recommend WP Engine. Yes, they’re more expensive, but their servers are insanely fast and they offer really easy staging sites, backups, along with all of the amenities that SiteGround offers. Click below for more details:

WP Engine is based in Austin, TX. I’ve visited their headquarters and spoken with their employees there. I recommend them for high-end WordPress hosting, if you have the means.

WordPress Cloud Hosting: Gridpane with Vultr

If you need more powerful, scalable, hosting, you’ll probably look to a cloud hosting solution like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Digital Ocean. However, these companies provide unmanaged servers, meaning you’ll need sysadmin expertise (or an IT person) to set up and maintain your servers.

One solution is to use a hosting control panel service on top of your cloud hosting. This provides a slick interface to your server with simple controls to create servers, install WordPress, set up SSL, and so forth, so you don’t need to do any command-line work to set up your servers. Unless you’re a server expert, these are worth every penny!

Gridpane is my recommended WordPress control panel. Gridpane is specifically geared to WordPress hosting only, so they’ll take good care of your sites.

I use them along with servers from Vultr, which provides super-fast cloud hosting (check out this speed comparison). Click below for more details:

Probably the most popular hosting panel company is Cloudways, also worth checking out. Cloudways allows you to scale up OR down your CPU if you use it with AWS or Google Cloud, which is a nice feature. Another highly-regarded cloud hosting company is Runcloud.

Domain Name Hosting

If you’re creating a new website, you’ll need a domain name. I recommend Namecheap. They have great prices (about half the cost of GoDaddy) but they’re also highly regarded in the industry. Don’t be put off by the name – they’re a good deal for domain names. Click below for more details:

Do not purchase your domain name from your web hosting company unless they are also known for their domains (like Namecheap is). Someday, you might want to move your web hosting and you’ll have to go through the painful process of moving your domain name as well if you want to be free of them.

Companies to Avoid

I don’t want to mention any hosting companies by name, but many of the most well-known hosting companies cram so many users on a single server that the sites on them are as slow as molasses. If you message me privately I can steer you clear of these. Unfortunately, some of the largest, most popular hosting companies are now among the worst.

I hope this has helped! – Brian

How to Set Up Your Domain Name, Custom Email, and Web Hosting

WordPress vs. Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace

One question I sometimes get from clients is whether they should use WordPress or one of the online website builder services like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace. Unlike some web developers (and designers), I believe those services can be the right choice in some situations.

Just to be clear though, when I mention “WordPress” in this article, I’m talking about hosting it on your own hosting, not at WordPress.com. WordPress.com is a all-in-one hosting service similar to Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace.  More on this in my article, What is WordPress?

When I mention “website builder services”, I’m talking about services like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace.

When a Website Builder Service (Wix, Weebly or Squarespace) Can Be the Right Choice

Some web designers and developers like to disparage services like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace. But honestly, the quality of the templates provided by these services has risen dramatically, to the point where sites based on these services look very modern and are mobile-friendly. So, the previous argument that these sites didn’t look good just isn’t true anymore.

Here are some situations where using a website builder service might be a good choice:

  • You have limited budget and web development experience
    Unless you create your WordPress site yourself, these builders will get your site up and running for very low cost compared to hiring a web developer to set up a WordPress site.
  • Your site is purely informational without unusual functionality. 
    If you are a small business that just needs an informational website, hiring a web developer to create a site might be overkill. There’s nothing wrong with using a website builder service in this case.
  • You don’t want to worry about site maintenance
    WordPress sites require maintenance in the way of updates to the core, theme, and plugins. Plus, you’re responsible for backing up your site and restoring it if it gets hacked. If you use a builder service, they will do all of these functions for you.

When Site Builder Services Are Not the Right Choice

Here are cases where site builder services probably won’t cut it:

  • You want a full custom design
    Site builder services are limited in how much you can modify the design of the site. If you want full control over your site’s appearance, don’t use a site builder service.
  • You need special functionality not offered by the website builder services
    If you need to interface with an API or have some feature on your site not offered by the builder services, you’ll have to look elsewhere. WordPress has tons of plugins to do almost anything under the sun.  If you can’t find what you need in a plugin, a programmer can probably do it for you.
  • You want to save on monthly fees
    While site builder services don’t have an up-front development cost (except for your time), they do charge monthly fees.  Hosting a WordPress site has fees as well, but they are slightly less for the equivalent hosting.
  • You want to tinker
    If you enjoy tinkering with the nuts and bolts of your site, a self-hosted solution like WordPress will give you much more freedom.

If any of these are true in your situation, WordPress might be a better alternative than one of the online website builders.

My other caveat about “do-it-yourself” builder services is that although they are marketed as being easy to use, they actually do have a significant learning curve. If your time is very valuable or scarce, you might be better off hiring a developer than spending your time learning how to use these builders.

I hope this has helped you understand when site builder services might work for you, and when they won’t.  Please leave your questions below in the comments! – Brian

What Is WordPress? A Guide For Absolute Beginners

What Is WordPress? A Guide For Absolute Beginners

WordPress is free software that lets you create a website using pre-made templates and plugins, and it allows you to update content by logging into the site and typing in a text editor. This allows you to create professional-looking sites and update the content yourself, without writing code (as long as the features you need are not too specialized).

In technical terms, WordPress is a “content management system” (CMS).

WordPress started out as blogging software but is now used in many other kinds of websites. It is the most widely-used website content management system in the world.  It has been estimated (as of 2017) that WordPress powers 20% of the websites in existence.

WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com

Before I go any further, I want to sort out one of the most confusing things about WordPress: the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

WordPress.org is where you can get the free WordPress software, but you need to have a place to put it, namely, web hosting from a provider such as WP Engine, SiteGround, Namecheap, or many others.  You’ll need to get a domain name (URL) as well.

WordPress.com is a fully hosted service.  You can sign up for a WordPress site there, and you don’t need to worry about hosting it or getting a domain name (you can get one in the “wordpress.com” domain).  It’s kinda like Squarespace or Wix, where you just sign up and instantly you have a live website.  The downside is that your choices of themes are limited, and there are many other limitations to what you can do on your site. If you’re doing a personal blog though, it’s probably fine.

On this site, when I say “WordPress”, I’m usually referring to the first case, namely, WordPress software hosted on your hosting provider, not on WordPress.com.  When most people talk about WordPress, that’s usually what they are talking about, not the hosting service.

The Benefits of Using WordPress

OK, back to the fun stuff. Here are some of the reasons why so many people, companies, and organizations use WordPress for their sites:

  • Tons of themes available. Themes determine the “look” of your site.  There are themes specifically for restaurants, churches, photographers, design firms, corporations, and many other niches.
  • Tons of plugins available.  Plugins add functionality to your site, such as e-commerce, photo galleries, events management, forums, membership, and much more.
  • Ability to edit without writing or understanding HTML code. Text editor is similar to Microsoft Word.  No need to hire a programmer every time you want to change the content of your site.
  • Huge installed base means lots of support in the form of online help (just Google the problem you’re having), meetup groups, freelance contractors, training programs and annual WordPress gatherings called Word Camps.
  • It’s a mature, stable, platform that is constantly being updated with new features and security fixes.
  • It’s flexible, enabling programmers to create custom themes and plugins suited to your specific needs.

The Downsides of WordPress

No content management system is perfect for all applications. Here are some of the downsides of WordPress:

  • Because WordPress is so popular means it’s a target of hackers and bots.
  • It requires maintenance. The WordPress core, themes, and plugins require regular updates for security fixes.
  • You need to have a backup strategy, in the form of manual backups, an automatic backup plugin, or automatic server backups provided by your host.  Otherwise, if your site is hacked or your server drive dies, your site could be lost forever.
  • The fact that there is a database means that a WordPress site will load slightly slower than a pure HTML site (but there are some things you can do to mitigate this issue, like installing a caching plugin).

There are many other pros and cons which require a greater understanding of how websites work, but I believe these are the biggest issues.

What WordPress Is Good For

WordPress can be used to create almost any kind of site.  Here are a few categories that it is especially well suited for:

  • Corporate or nonprofit informational sites
  • Portfolio sites
  • e-Commerce sites
  • Events management sites
  • Membership sites
  • Sites that store information in the form of custom post types and taxonomies (for example, if you have an dog rescue service and you want to display the name, breed, color, age, etc. for a large number of dogs).
  • Blogs

WordPress can be used for many other types of sites!

What WordPress Isn’t Good For

  • Super high-security websites like banking sites
  • Super high-performance websites, where there are extremely high numbers of visitors at the same time (i.e., like the NFL website during the Superbowl).
  • “One page websites”, i.e., web apps where the whole site loads at once instead of having individual pages loaded from the server as they are visited.

I hope this short introduction has helped you understand what WordPress is, and its strengths and weaknesses. Please leave any questions in the comments! – Brian

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