"Help I broke my WordPress site!" That is a call our web design team often receives from small businesses who have a site developed on the WordPress platform. While there can be many reasons for the issue the underlying cause is generally the same; the technology is constantly changing which means your WordPress themes and plugins need to change as well and updating them (or not updating them!) can cause problems. Without a true partner in the web business you could be left with a website that doesn’t function properly leading to a wasted investment.
Over the past several weeks our team received two inquiries from customers with broken WordPress sites. The first business is a wine maker whose website was built on the WordPress platform. They moved on from the company that originally designed the site and were told “anyone can update a WordPress site it’s easy!”
Unfortunately that just isn’t true. WordPress does make some updates very easy but not all. The website hadn’t been updated for over a year events were missing and more importantly online orders were being missed. Our team was able to make the updates modify the homepage popup add images export all orders and fix the SSL certificate that had expired. We also updated all plugins as most of them were out of date.
The second company received a message on their admin access that they had to update their platform for security reasons. They did the updates but it broke the theme and they lost everything but the home page. The original theme was not responsive and was outdated and the customer ended up designing a new website from the ground up. They needed to be up quickly since their existing website was no longer functional.
The two examples above highlight the primary issue we see with the WordPress platform which is web designers create a website and then hand it off to the client with no ongoing maintenance or updates. While this may seem cheap it ends up costing a customer more in the long run in lost revenue and sales due to website issues. A successful website is a frequently changing marketing tool.
The internet landscape is in constantly evolving. From business changes to recent developments and critical technology changes having a partner in marketing for your website will not only keep your site up to date it will make your marketing investment dollars go farther.
