“I don’t even turn the thing on. Too many commercial charter captains yammering on about nothing” my uncle said, motioning toward the CB radio tucked under the dash of his fishing boat.
That day, we caught 5 Mahi-mahi, the longest of which clocked in at over 45 inches.
<img class="wp-image-347011458 size-full" src="https://benandjacq.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/16110000/Featured-image-benandjacq-8.png" alt="That was a fun day on the water. Yes, I really caught those fish." width="500" height="500" srcset="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/benandjacq/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/16110000/Featured-image-benandjacq-8 try here.png 500w, https://benandjacq.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/16110000/Featured-image-benandjacq-8-150×150.png 150w, https://benandjacq.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/16110000/Featured-image-benandjacq-8-300×300.png 300w, https://benandjacq.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/16110000/Featured-image-benandjacq-8-50×50.png 50w” sizes=”(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px” />That was a fun day on the water. Yes, I really caught those fish.
Fast forward two days. My uncle decided to pay a professional to take us out fishing for Cobia. “That’s how you learn” he said to me, winking.
On the charter boat the CB radio was featured prominently, with our captain contributing to the banter about where the good spots were, and where to avoid. Much of the back-and-forth was punctuated by our captain telling us—off-air—how full of sh** the guy on the other end of the radio was.
We went on to catch exactly zero Cobia that day, with a pro. An insider.
There are insiders and outsiders in every field.
I’ll take being a CB radio outsider with a cooler full of Mahi-mahi any day.
As a old-enough-to-know-better WordPress developer, I find myself approaching communities like the core development Slack channel and the Advanced WordPress Facebook group with a certain level of intimidation, knowing that my piping up there is akin to the rookie fisherman weighing in over the marine radio on the best brand of spinning reel–marginally helpful at best.
So I mostly just keep my head down, and keep reeling in the Mahi-mahi of engaged, happy users and raving five-star reviews.
There’s a place for contributing and collaborating, some day. But until I’ve got a few more fish in the cooler, it’s best for me to focus on fishing.
Which WordPress theme you choose has the ability to make or break you.
A good theme can’t help you nearly as much as a bad theme will hurt you.
A good theme makes WordPress a stable, scalable, and cost-effective way to run your business.
A bad theme makes WordPress a slow-loading joke in the developer community, full of security holes and inefficient code.
So have I convinced you yet that picking the right theme is not just window dressing?
If so, keep reading for how to pick a good theme.
Where most novices go wrong is picking the theme using two broken yardsticks: Looks and Popularity.
The first broken yardstick is looks. Like a supermodel with no ability to carry on a conversation, people will leave a website that loads too slowly or doesn’t look right on their device.
“It’s pretty, buuuut…“
The second and more tragic yardstick beginners use is popularity. Novice users flock to cheap prices, and to more features. It sounds great to say “160 color options” or “drag and drop customization,” but if those “features” are adding bloat to your website, making it load slowly or confusing your readers, they are not worth the price, no matter how cheap.
Repeat after me: just because 9,000,000 others have downloaded the theme doesn’t mean you should too. Your mother’s advice about jumping off of a bridge works well here.
This is not an indictment of cheap themes, or even popular themes. I recently recommended and installed a $100 theme on a client site. (yes, $100 is cheap) There are great themes out there for $50-$100, but the most popular ones out there are often the ones so loaded with “features” that you can forget about performance.
So, apart from a personal recommendation of a developer, how does a newbie pick a good theme?
For starters, that personal recommendation is not out of the question. It might be worth asking a developer you respect for their opinion. I am more than happy to make a recommendation before you spend $50 and commit to a theme that doesn’t do what you want in an efficient way. I’ve yet to find a theme I didn’t like officially recommended by the folks at StudioPress. They use the Genesis framework, which is a clean, lean way to build a WordPress site. If you are looking for my affiliate link, that would be http://benlikes.us/genesis (but read the rest of this article before you go buy even a StudioPress theme.)
I’ve spent too many hours trying to fix bad code on slow, bloated themes. I’d rather you not have to pay me $100 per hour to fix your $50 theme.
Second, if a theme is seeking to be one-size-fits-all, it’s probably a red flag. Look for a theme designed specifically for the niche you are in. Real estate professionals need different things from their website than do video game reviewers. Their themes should reflect that.
This is so important I probably should have led with it: Before you purchase a theme, you should have a clearly defined primary goal of the website. Then find a theme that does that one thing really well. Some example of primary goals would be
Increasing brand awareness
Getting people to sign up for your product emails
Behind-the-scenes looks at your business
Communicating with existing customers
Providing support
Doing product reviews
Create a digital scrapbook of family memories
There are other great reasons to have a website. Here’s a bad one: because you just feel like you need a site that looks cool.
Nope. Just nope. I will no longer make a site for someone who can’t tell me their primary goal.
Finally, if all of the promo material for a theme stresses how customizable it is, and no mention is made of how lightweight, or fast loading, or efficient it is, that’s also a red flag. Good developers are very proud of how fast their designs are. They’ll likely tell you about it in the promo material.
The best marketers out there will tell you that content is king on the web. High quality content is the only thing that will keep people (and uncle Google) coming back to your site. But even if you put $10K per month into content, a slow-loading website will slow your traffic to a trickle.
So those marketers are correct, it’s the content that keeps them. Is your theme making that content consumption easier or harder? Focus on the user experience, and showcasing the content as quickly and effectively as possible.
Whatever you do, don’t focus on looks and popularity. That’s a shortcut to picking a theme that will break your heart and your wallet.
I love the smell of freshly baked plugin updates. Recently my most popular WordPress plugin got a sweet little update for which the changelog simply says
“added the ability to specify a custom URL as a shortcode parameter.”
Allow me to expound on that.
This change to the plugin is HUGE for power users, because now you can put any link you’d like in a proposed tweet.
Every other similar plugin gives you the ability to link back to the post you are on (and only to that post). Now with Better Click To Tweet you can add a link to anywhere in a tweet for users to click and share!
So, if for example I want to promote (and provide a way for my readers to promote) my favorite YouTube comedy duo, now I can make a box that looks like this:
…and gone is the link back to the post you are currently reading!
The shortcode I used to created that box looks like this:
[bctt tweet="Easily some of the most ridiculous stuff you'll see on the 'net." url="http://rhettandlink.com"]
Easy-peasy! A few things to note:
URLs with non-ascii characters (éåø and the like) are not currently supported. This is a limitation of PHP, and something I’m working to fix in a future release. For now, you can shorten those urls using bit.ly and that’ll solve the problem.
You must include the http:// or https:// at the beginning of the url parameter.
If your URL has the & symbol in it, it’ll confuse Twitter, and things will go badly. To avoid this issue, manually shorten your custom URLs that have that symbol in them using a service like bit.ly before inserting it in the shortcode.
Happy blogging. Don’t be scared to donate if my plugin has helped make your life easier. That’s how you keep good freelance developers in business.
That’s not exactly how he looks. His hat’s different, maybe. Creative Commons Image AttributionIn the spring every year, my dad becomes a full-time scarecrow. At daybreak during gardening season he assumes his position in a strategically located chair in the yard, fending off wildlife that would render his garden a 24-hour furry buffet.
He takes a book, a cup of coffee (with water bottle chaser for once it gets warmer), and sits guard over his domain.
Even with such vigilance, last year the deer began winning. He’d wake up early, and get out to see tracks and nibbles alerting him to their wiles.
Not to be outsmarted (he has a distinct prefrontal cortex advantage over the deer in that area), he purchased and installed a motion sensor sprinkler system that stands guard in his absence.
As a sidenote, it never gets old sending my 4- and 6-year-old into the garden without reminding them that the sprinkler is on.
See, even the best attention is not critter-proof when it comes to gardens. It’s a full-time job.
The same goes for your WordPress install. You might as well plan on having “critters.” Malicious code, hackers, and spammers. They are coming. What are you going to do to ward them off? A solid maintenance plan is critical. Keeping your site up to date is a digital sprinkler spraying would-be buffet visitors.
With a range of services from $5 a month up to $300, where is the sensible guide to how much you should pay for WordPress maintenance?
Get more developer for your money. Original Image Creative Commons AttributionIt depends on what level of service you want. Here’s the simple method to calculate (roughly) how much value you’re getting.
A good WordPress developer* charges at least $100 per hour for their services. Anyone charging less than that either doesn’t take themselves seriously or is just a hobbyist coder, doing this for fun.
For a good developer, routine maintenance will take 15 or 20 minutes per week on most WordPress installs. To estimate on the higher end, that puts us at just over an hour per month, on average, for weekly maintenance.
Those of you who are good at math have already beat me to my punchline (three paragraphs from now): $133 per month. Stick with me, though. There are some ways to bring that cost down without hiring a lesser developer. In fact, your functional cost goes UP as you higher lower end developers.
Most simple sites don’t need plugins to be updated weekly, for starters. Barring major security patches (which good developers will know about because they are plugged into the WordPress community and hear about them hours after they are released. Put a checkmark in the “worth hiring a better developer” column) the average site will be fine with monthly software updates or even quarterly updates. A good developer will be able to tell you in 5 minutes how often your site needs maintenance, based on your size, frequency of posting, and subject matter.
A good developer needs to prepare for the worst case, with regard to those security patches mentioned above. If she is managing 15 sites with maintenance, updating an emergency security bug can take hours, if all of the sites are running the offending plugin or theme. So that cost is going to be baked into her monthly fees.
There are some great systems out there to help developers to manage multiple sites, but even with the best systems, they’ve still got to manually check to make sure updates don’t break things. That’s a non-scalable moment of developer attention, per site. In the world of open source software, security issues and bugs are inevitable.
So, here’s a relatively basic monthly price breakdown:
Weekly maintenance: $100-$150 per site
Monthly maintenance: $25-$30 per site
Quarterly maintenance: $7-$15 per site
So, if you want top-tier maintenance for your WordPress website, expect to pay about $150 per month. That gets you a little over an hour of focused attention from a top-notch developer.
Lesser developers take longer to do tasks, and make more mistakes. That’s not a slam, that’s how we learn. But know that if you are not paying in the $100 per hour range (based on how long I’ve said it takes to update most installs–if your situation is more complex, use the appropriate multiplier), no matter if you are paying a big company or a solo developer, you are probably not dealing with a top-shelf developer.
Some things scale so that costs are covered (like invoicing, administrative work, etc.) As the developers scale the business, the costs (not the taxes, to be sure) can spead over multiple clients, and bring down overall expenses.
The one thing that doesn’t scale in the whole operation is the focused attention of a top-notch developer. And it still takes time to maintain your site.
If you don’t need an hour per month of that focused attention (and you probably don’t), scale your price accordingly.
Also, note that the best developers are not going to tell you how many hours a task takes them. They charge per project, or per task, which is fair, because penalizing for efficiency is twisted.
Paying for maintenance is well worth your time. Paying for subpar maintenance is OK, just be aware of what you are paying for.
I’d welcome feedback here: is there something I’m missing? That’s why comments are enabled!
*My working definition of “good” goes beyond someone who can install plugins and themes, and tweak some CSS/HTML. If your developer can’t at least understand PHP and JavaScript, they are still a hobbyist. Pros can (and should) charge at least $100/hr.
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