I have been programming web applications for almost two decades and I can tell you building a website was a lot of work back then.
Although web development has changed significantly in the past 10 years, getting into a development project in order to build yourself a website should be the last thing you should consider as a business owner.
Before building a website from scratch, there are many solutions to consider and at the top of the list is WordPress.
WordPress started as a blogging platform but became so much more.
Out of peoples’ needs, it became the most beloved and used solution for creating a website today. According to wordpress.org WordPress is today used in 38% of the websites on the internet.
WordPress today comes with great and easy to use themes, page builders and tons of plugins, many of which are free to use. It can answer many various needs for when you build your website.
Many people with no experience and knowledge in website building try to create something on their own.
Many companies that have convincing solutions like Elementor page builder for instance, try to give people the false sense of confidence in creating a website by themselves although they have no knowledge in this area.
Although it is not impossible to learn all there is to know about websites online today, it requires some time and commitment and most people are just easily convinced that all you need to know to build a WordPress website is to know how to use a drag & drop system in a page builder. But nothing can be further from the truth.
I never tried to stop a customer who decided to create a new website with a purchased theme and a page builder but things always ended badly in those projects and I had a few like that already over the years.
Why is that really?
Well, building a website is not about counting pages or design. Building a website has nothing to do with design. Building a good website that people will actually use is an expert task for two people: A professional website builder and a professional marketing person.
Those two go hand in hand and many considerations overlap between them but eventually, when combined together, they provide the perfect solution for a website building project.
Considerations like broken code, website speed, website indexing, website security, good caching solutions are only part of the reason a WordPress website should be only created by professionals.
I know people enjoy examples so let’s talk about two examples I had with my customers:
- A customer who already had a working WordPress website built professionally, decided to create a new website. He is a marketing person and decided he will use Elementor page builder to create his new one page homepage. This customer’s website enjoys a lot of traffic and shortly after he published the new homepage, he found out, the hard way, that this idea was only good on paper. When the website started to get many visitors, the website would go down, no matter the strength of the web server. He asked me for help and the first thing I did was to compare page builder performance here https://gobarrelroll.com/wordpress-page-builder-performance-comparison/ and here https://pagely.com/blog/wordpress-page-builders/ to find out something I suspected before, Elementor page builder is not the solution for a high traffic one page homepage. I recreated his homepage with WPBakery page builder and the problem was solved.
- Another customer decided to save on the budget of building his new WordPress website. As in my first example, he already had a WordPress website working. He bought a good theme and bought 5 working hours from a website developer thinking that he can have it published only in a few days. The old website is still working and the new website never aired at all. That was 5 months ago.
Here is what I say:
Let a professional WordPress developer build your website, not a professional designer, not a professional branding company, not a professional marketing person, but a professional WordPress developer. I know I wrote before that a marketing person should be a part of the process, but there are many concerns, some of which I specified above, that should be addressed by a professional WordPress developer.
If you choose wisely, the website will serve your business’s every purpose for many years. If you find yourself investing too much time on rebuilding your website with no end, start the journey from scratch with someone who knows what they’re doing.
