Deadly Sin #1 - Using the wrong platform
Market leaders who dominate, always dominate for very real reasons. The market has voted, and the results are clear.
Websites are a long term investment and you may end up eventually spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on yours.
The top 3 solutions by market share are WordPress, WIX, and Squarepace.
How does WordPress and WIX compare in market share? WordPress absolutely dominates, and is GAINING on it’s competition.
WIX/Square space are proprietary solutions. Once you build there, you are stuck there, and stuck with only the solutions they offer. They effectively own your website. You can never leave.
WordPress is an open platform and eco-system, full of hundreds and thousands of companies offering thousands solutions for the platform.
The number of solutions available for the wordpress platform are almost limitless. A proprietary solution simply can never compete with an entire marketplace like this.
Sooner or later, you will hit an issue that a proprietary solution simply does not provide. Then you have to rebuild your site from scratch on wordpress. Might as well get it right the first time.
Sin #2 - Using legacy hosting companies
Want a deep understanding of the HIDDEN problems with legacy hosting companies?
Just read their reviews!
Sin #3 - Failing to BACKUP your investment
A client of mine had three websites hosted at BlueHost. One day they were all down. She called BlueHost and they said, “Sorry, due to a hardware failure, all of your files are gone.” Forever, irretrievable, gonzo, later, sayonara, oh, yeah, and sorry about that. Ouch.
Most people assume their website is safe with their hosting company.
Not true.
Most hosting companies do not do backups by default.
Don’t make this assumption.
Your website may represent hundreds of hours of work, or more. Make sure it’s backed up every day!
Make sure it’s backed up securely in a different data center, thousands of miles away, in case of natural disaster.
Sin #4 - No Maintenance & Updates
Just a matter of time before you get hacked
The majority of wordpress websites get hacked because busy people forget, or stop updating their software. Really REALLY embarrassing if your clients website is hacked.
Hackers eventually find flaws in older plugins and themes, and that’s how they eventually get into your site.
Be sure you update your wordpress core every week, and your plugins and themes daily, if you really don’t want to get hacked!
Most hacks occur from out of date plugins
– Wordfence hacked website survey (Image source: Wordfence)
Sin #5 - NO SECURITY
Wait? I'm responsible???
Most hosting providers never bother to tell you, that you are responsible for your sites security.
Owners aware of this will typically install a bunch of security plugins, which can help sometimes.
However, they tend to be bloatware, and slow down the websites performance, which is critical to a great user experience.
WpPods has 8+ levels of security, and slow WP security plugins are no longer necessary.
Why do hackers hack??
- Add spammy links for SEO boosting
- Hijack a site to add spam, porn, gambling, payday loan content, etc
- Steal sensitive information to sell
- Distribute malware to visitors
- User server resources for distributed attacks on other sites
- For fun, and to deface websites
Sin #6 - NO MONITORING
Oh boy - my client just told me my website is down!
Don’t get caught with your pants down. Be sure to install some kind of monitoring tool that checks your website every minute,
Better yet, set it up so it pages or texts your phone the instant your site goes down. Which is not uncommon with cheap hosting providers.
But for the ultimate solution, be sure a website monitor pages a sysadmin to immediately handle issues. WpPods offers this is an add on. We get paged, instead of you getting paged.
Sin #7 - NO SPAM CONTROL
Unless you enjoy via-gra comments everywhere
So you are excited about the new site you built a few weeks ago. You are pumping out great content and can’t wait for the feedback from all the readers.
One day you log into your site and you have comment notifications.
But the comments are links to p*orn sites, and there are THOUSANDS of them.
You spend the next serveral hours deleting thousands of SPAM comments. Frustrated, you turn off OPEN commenting and require approval of all comments.
The next day, you wake up to THOUSANDS of comments about pills, p*rn and other nonsense and have to spend time deleting them, while trying to avoid deleting real comments left by actual readers. What a mess.
No worries… you can add pro SPAM control to any WpPod.
Make all these issues go away - let our team handle it all, and focus on your business
