WordPress

Hey All,

Thought I would start a thread on WordPress.
I have an IT background but have never dabbled in web design or blogging.

I have a hobby website and also want to set one up for my wife’s beauty business.

I’ve installed WordPress locally and am playing with a theme so just learning my way around.

This thread is just to ask questions (I’m sure I will have them) and for others to share experience, ideas and maybe some wisdom on what themes and plugins are must haves along with tips for blogging and getting your word out there

 

In my view WordPress has come leaps and bounds the past few years... there are some AMAZING plugins that come free or low cost that you can do all sorts of things with. Drag and drop page builders with templates mean that effectively anyone with a keen eye for design and IT nous can build great looking, responsive websites.

As an IT guy with very little background in development here are some tools I have found helpful.

Hosting to spin up quick dev sites free: Wordify - Managed WordPress Hosting powered by AWS
(sites are password protected while in dev and you can't connect them to a domain until you pay, Australian company & includes FAST Australian / Amazon hosting at very reasonable prices)

General Plugins:
SEO: Rank Math - Best Free WordPress SEO Tools in 2020
Page builder: Elementor: #1 Free WordPress Page Builder | Elementor.com (I use pro for $)
Lightweight theme: Hello – The Best Elementor & WordPress Theme | Elementor.com
Essential Add-ons: Essential Addons for Elementor - Ultimate Elements Library for Elementor (I use pro for $)
Site Kit (analytics): Site Kit by Google
Image heavy sites: Lazy Load – Optimize Images
Templates: Templately – Templates Cloud for Elementor & Gutenberg (handy to have different block types to use with Elementors templates)

Security Plugins:
Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
Change wp-admin login
Disable XML-RPC

I have built a number of sites now with various combinations of plugins, but with the above starting to form the 'core necessities'. I would link to some of the sites I've built, but last time I tried that I got rolled by the moderating team for 'self promotion'

 

I'm a web developer and have used a lot of different platforms for building sites for small businesses. My two recommended platforms are:

1. Squarespace: Really nice imagery & design, easy enough to customise, cloud-based platform with some eCommerce options if needed
2. Shopify: For sites that are primarily designed to sell multiple different products. If you're just selling a couple of products or offering services, I'd still go with Squarespace

Wordpress is also up there but it is more geared towards content publication (blogging). At the end of the day, you want a platform that is...

1. Easy to use - make sure your wife can manage it herself without relying on you for changes
2. Easy to maintain - sounds like you have the skills to host it yourself, but there will be maintenance/upgrades required in the future which can be a pain. I prefer a SaaS option that takes care of everything for me
3. Not heavily customised - there are heaps of plugins and ways to modify each platform, but it's better to start simple and just work within the features that come out of the box where possible. Each customisation makes ease of use and maintenance more complicated. Wait until there is significant demand for a feature before adding it to the site

Good luck with the build, be sure to post some updates!

 

I can definitely see the appeal of using a SaaS option when building for someone else. I used Wix for my wife's business website so we could set and forget (not used actively for attracting business, more so a placeholder for anyone searching her name).

I haven't used Shopify, but when comparing it recently to WordPress + Woocommerce it was around 2-4x the price (e.g. $7-15/month for hosting vs $29/month for Shopify). Not that $10-20/month means that much in the grand scheme of things, but on top of that the plugin support for marketing tools seemed to have much worse reviews fairly consistently (for example compare the Sendinblue plugin reviews for Shopify vs WordPress). I'm going to presume that's because there are far more WordPress sites than Shopify, so it makes sense for service providers to spend more time ensuring the support is there for the larger user base. I can see Shopify being great for a basic online store run by those who aren't that technically inclined, but it may be easy to run into limitations or issues if you are going beyond that... would that reflect your experience @jharrisonau?

 

Personally I prefer to pay a higher monthly fee over spending my time on installing/configuring plugins and then troubleshooting them to work with the chosen theme. I also prefer to have less control if it means increased stability. Shopify is definitely not just for basic stores or people who aren't technical, it's pretty much the industry standard for small to medium businesses and they are making progress in the large/enterprise space.

The pitfalls are definitely in the cost - most plugins you add to Shopify will cost more money each month. Could you provide some more information to help with the right advice?

1. How many SKUs do you have?
2. What type of products are they? E.g. simple, configurable (size/color/etc), digital, subscriptions, appointment bookings, etc
3. How many integrations are you planning and what will they be? E.g. email marketing

There is another option that's half-way between Wordpress and Shopify..Shopify Lite.
This allows you to put Shopify products on any site (even Wordpress) and only costs US$9/month.

 

Fair enough. I was looking at the comparison again recently as I'm aiming to build a multi-vendor marketplace (trialing with an MVP before considering a custom build), but beyond the shortfalls I pointed out above there were additional reasons it didn't suit e.g. the Multi Vendor Marketplace add-in for Shopify was prohibitively more expensive than options available for Woocommerce and with far fewer features (those that I think will be necessary for the vendor / product type we are looking at).

I haven't yet experienced any theme issues building multiple sites using Hello as it's bare bones, I put together everything from scratch with Elementor and keep the use of plugins to a minimum.

 

Wordpress is clunky, and you will find yourself needing add-ons that cost and will need to be renewed annually - making your website far more expensive than you initially thought. That was my experience when I set up a website last year.

 

Which paid add-ons did you find were a necessary for building the website @balwoges?

 

Akismet [stop being hacked], plugins for Contact forms, PDF files, tables, columns and website stats. Also used plugin for forum addon.
Much easier & flexible to use pure HTML and ditch Wordpress.

 

Elementor (Pro, US$49/year) does contact forms with reCaptcha (free) for spam protection. Elementor also does columns and embedded PDF with a free plugin.
TablePress is a free plugin that plays well with Elementor and does tables.
Google Analytics + Site Kit can handle stats for free or I have also used Koko Analytics (less information, but doesn't use cookies so provides more privacy for the visitors).
Maybe some of these wouldn't work if you had very specific needs, but for the average business website: hosting + Elementor Pro, can be the only ongoing website costs for a decent WordPress build.
I can imagine a forum plugin requiring subscription, but I'm not sure you would find that level of functionality in other site builders free and it wouldn't be straight forward to code one yourself.
If someone spent a number of years writing HTML & CSS regularly they might find it easier and more flexible to code the website natively, but for the rest of us?

 

We had the opposite effect with reCaptcha (v3) on some site forms, it was blocking too many genuine users. I think v3 probably needs some tweaking to use effectively based on the site and it's a bit of a black box as far as settings go. We went back to the v2 ("I'm not a robot" checkbox) and it has worked perfectly since.

 

I have a very basic website that I built with Wordpress just over 12 months ago, and whilst it does appear to have an online shopping cart these are actually affiliate shopping carts direct to a couple of overseas manufacturers where I earn a commission on the sales.

I am also researching how to make my own online shopping cart and are narrowing it down to Opencart and Easycart, does anybody have an opinion on either of these shopping carts will be attached to a wordpress site?

For the record I have no IT skills.

 

I haven't used either of those systems to make any comparison, but have started to put together a couple of Woocommerce stores (not yet all the way to a live store though). It seems reasonably intuitive, but also exhibits the typical "clunky" WordPress feeling, as @balwoges put it

WooCommerce seems to be very much the industry standard for WordPress store / shopping cart software. It's free, but you may need some paid add-ons depending on what you want to do with it.

Search volume tells a story...

 

I found Wordpress incredibly frustrating, it was like being given the framework of a house and you had to provide the walls, roof, doors, windows etc yourself, i.e. plugins. You could probably teach yourself html during the time it takes to search for a good plugin, try it out and begin using it and make it work with Wordpress.
It's so much easier to upload and manage your html pages to a good provider in Oz rather than using Wordpress and I think? most hosts these days provide shopping cart facilities with lots of help.

 

Thanks so much for the awesome replies already! Learning so much.

I realized the theme I installed comes with Elementor so have been using that for edits and so far it seems simple enough. For a design novice it can be overwhelming the amount of customization available in every element but trying to focus on bit by bit.

Any tips when creating a site for how to approach the design. The template is great but I’m finding I’m jumping all over the place instead of focusing on section by section. I’m also finding im trying to repurpose the templates sections a bit too much instead of perhaps building from scratch but then that seems too hard haha