Inheriting something really really bad.

WE LOVE WordPress and have built 100s of sites all needing their own special features and bespoke functions. The last couple of months pushed us to the limit, the world shut down, our team was spread across the UK and you couldn’t get hold of toilet paper for love nor money. Yet a bad website that had been abused and mismanaged, was hit with a rush of traffic that effected or process and how we deliver our high level of work. Like us , WordPress has it’s limits and those we’re reached!

For the sake of clarity, this blog post is talking about websites that are predominately ecommerce and receive a significant number of orders (50+ orders a week or more).

WordPress as a platform is great. WooCommerce as an ecommerce ‘plugin’ is great to launch a website quickly and efficiently.But, all that glitters on this platform is not gold.

Anyone can write a plugin that alleges it can do anything.

One of the major risks, is how third-party developers or WooCommerce addons work with the data structure. Meaning, that using one poorly written plugin has the potential to significantly degrade performance across the site. This has a massive impact on a site that goes unnoticed by less experienced users: installing too many plugins will slow down your site and affect overall performance. This is because the majority of plugins take up a lot of memory.

Various plugins when used at the same time, can result in unexpected conflicts and often very hard to debug a root cause. Testing is complicated and requires large amounts of manual testing, just to resolve conflicts that are created as a result of the additions. Many plugins don’t work well in a staging environment, so some testing has to be done in production which isn’t typically advisable.

In our experience it’s best to implement the desired functions through CSS, jQuery or HTML codes. If this is not possible then you need a good web developer like us!

Crowded under the hood.

The main reasons of a slow website speed, the installation of plugins and a crowded databases. You have to install plugins to turn a WordPress site into an ecommerce store. Good or bad, only a plugin can get you an eCommerce website with WordPress.

When a site owner or a web developer adds an image, page, retail product or plugin that is added to a sites database, over time that database needs looking after. If that doesn’t happen then the files start adding up and getting busy, this creates issues. During the life of your site, your database is going to store a lot of information. In the beginning, this isn’t a big deal. After several months of existence on the web, it may become an issue because the size of your database can affect your website performance.

There is nothing wrong with user managed websites, that’s why we have CMS for ease of use. But a well run website will always require a professional to manage and keep up to date to make sure that the the issues don’t keep mounting.