In this article, we detail the top three mistakes designers make on your site that can cost you thousands - and what you can do to avoid them. This is another must-read for any business owner with a website.

​

• Not using managed Wordpress hosting slows down your site no matter how fast

 

WordPress is probably the most used website platform out there. If you are using WordPress on your website, make sure to check if your host is specialized or it’s a managed WordPress hosting service. One of its biggest ranking factors is speed. No matter how much work we can do on a site, if your host is slow, nothing can ever be done to get it as fast as it could be. A managed WordPress hosting platform is very fast. 

​

Some of the biggest hostings are GoDaddy. With GoDaddy, you are paying $6 or $8 a month for hosting and you only get what you pay for. With WordPress managed host services, you can get them for similar pricing and it is not a pricing issue. It is more on if you know about it or not. 

​

A lot of web designers get a GoDaddy account and then resell it. It means, whenever they make a website, they’ll put it under their account. Sometimes they don’t change the ownership of your domain. It can be a problem later on after you cut ties with the web designer. They control where your site is hosted. By hosting using your designer’s reseller account with GoDaddy, you are going to lose. That is definitely something you want to make sure is taken care of. 
 

 

• Your designer doesn’t update the site or teach you how to check every 3 months or so leads to security issues

 

Your web designer does not update the site anymore. There are three components to a WordPress site: there’s the theme that it is built on, the plugins that go with that, and the actual WordPress itself. You have to update those three things. Somebody needs to check on those every three months or your theme, those plugins, and your site will go out of date. What happens is, nine out of ten websites with outdated themes, plugins, and WP gets hacked. Make sure those are taken care of. Your designer should take time to show you how to update those three components. You, as the site owner, or somebody you trust can do it. It is not that big of a deal but it will hurt your business big time.
 

 

• Doesn’t purchase theme leads
   

When your site is built using WordPress, it’s going to use a theme. You can use themes that are free but those are not the best. The reason why those are not the best for you, as a website owner, is because the updates are sporadic. Even if you have a paid theme on your site, there are trial versions of it. It could also be that the web designer only bought a 3-month subscription and after three months, you need to pay to update it or your theme never gets updated. Those themes can cost you $50 - $150. They are not super expensive. 

 

You can go to WordPress and search for that theme. You’ll see a little license code field, if that is empty, that means your theme is not paid. This also means you are not going to have access to further updates. As time goes on, that theme builder updates and changes, adding new things to it. Making a big jump of updating an older version to the newest version of the theme can cause your site issues. You are going to end up having to pay for a brand new website so that $60 for that paid theme at the beginning could have saved you thousands. That is why it is really important to check the theme and make sure that you see that license code next to it. If it doesn’t have that license code, that’s another email to your web designer.

 

These are the three things that can really hurt your business. Make sure to share these things with your web designer if you are getting a new website done. It will definitely help you and your web designer.