Website problems can totally stress you out. One big issue is, where do you turn when you have problems with your site?
When your website is the home of your online business there are a lot of parts and pieces that can require you to seek help:
- an update to either WordPress or a plug-in can break EVERYTHING
- a theme change can cause issues
- you may be new to having a website and wonder what plugins you really need & should have
When a problem occurs with your site, do you have someone to turn to that you trust to not make the problem worse than it was to begin with?
Sure, there are places online where you can hire an independent website designer to build you a site from scratch or help you troubleshoot problems……….BUT do you really want to hand your business website over to a total stranger and give them administrator rights?
Some background..
I’ve been taking care of & building my own sites for years. Twenty years ago, the site for our software biz was originally all hardcoded (which means we wrote each page with html code – not fun!). When it got too big to physically write and/or update each page, I switched to a content management system called Joomla for everything to do with our software and moved the QuickBooks related training information into WordPress.
So, you could say that “I know enough to be dangerous”. And honestly, that’s really the way I feel. Web design is not my specialty, but I’ve learned enough over the years to get by.
A couple of months ago I did a theme change here on the YarnyBookkeeper site. It was super easy and went well. The new theme gave me a lot of the layout options on the Home Page that the other theme lacked. I thought the new theme (Total) was a step in the right direction in providing a better, more understandable flow of what this site was all about.
After the theme update, I checked out how fast the site loaded with a different theme with PageSpeed Insights and while it did load faster, it was still very slow. The site also seemed slow to work with, when I was typing up a new blog post.
I knew I had to do something! But the information that PageSpeed Insights provides just made my head want to explode! And I knew I needed to find someone to help me understand all that gooble-de-goop!
The problem was WHO could I turn to?
I didn’t just want to hand over login credentials to someone I didn’t know…..
Ling Ryan of Hooked on Patterns, belongs to one of the Facebook groups that I do. She posted that her husband, Samuel, did website design and provided help.
I checked out Samuel’s site – Web, Blog, Life and decided to contact him.
While I don’t personally know Ling (meaning we don’t have private chats over coffee, or anything like that). She is someone I know (of) from several Facebook communities. In this internet based world we live in, sometimes that makes strangers feel like someone we know.
So, what did Samuel do to help me with my website problems?
Samuel gave this site a pretty thorough going over. He told me about:
- plugins that weren’t really doing anything to help me, except slow down the site
- ways to improve the load time for mobile devices
- some plugins that I really should have to help notify me & prevent potential hackers
- what I needed to do to reduce the size & load time of the images here on the site
- lots of other things, too
So, if you’re like me and don’t want to turn your business site over to a complete stranger when you run into website problems that you can’t deal with yourself, I would highly recommend that you reach out to Samuel at Web, Blog, Life.
He was super nice to work with and explained the gooble-de-goop on PageSpeed Insights in terms that I can understand. Now I know how to read the results and what I need to do about most (if not all of it).
