It sounds like a great idea. Use WordPress, it’s easily customizable! Hundreds, maybe thousands of plugins you can use to make it work for EXACTLY the way YOU want! And it’s FREE!
Well, that’s the pitch I bought. And I bought a decade of hosting from GoDaddy, so now I feel I have to use it. So let me tell you all the things that can go wrong. Honestly, if you’re starting from scratch, I’m gonna suggest the free website options on something like WIX or paying someone (and no compensation from WIX here). Here’s the long list of problems I’ve had:
Hacked. Yes, my website was hacked. Something was corrupted, and of course, the backup system wasn’t working for some reason. I had to grab what I could salvage and re-build the rest. Yuck.
GODADDY ERASED MY SITE, WITH NO RECOVERY OPTION, NOT EVEN IF I PAID. Yes, GoDaddy sucks for this. Basically, I missed a payment for the site by days, and after 30 days, GoDaddy erased the entire site. There was no backup available from GoDaddy, which is ridiculous, because if you think about it, it costs them almost nothing and very little to hold on to a backup. I offered to pay for recovery. They said nope, not available.
Constant Update Errors. With WordPress, you’re basically setting up a framework with a bunch of plugins to do specific things. Well, no one guarantees assembly is seamless, and in fact, a high percentage of the time, it’s not. Think about it. How many times have you seen errors when updating software on your computer or on your phone? And then, each time there’s an major update, there are always some plugins that are behind and don’t work with the update. And some plugins fade, or go out of business, or get taken over by other entities. It’s like having a car with parts that don’t work.
What’s worse, it can take hours of searching for solutions on the web, or watching videos about how to fix such and such, and of course, the first several videos you watch or articles you read won’t be right for your problem. And in many cases, you’ll have to learn the basics of website programming, something which, in all honesty, I’d totally avoid if I could.
Back when WordPress went from the old text system to the Gutenberg block system, I had spend hours learning what the block system was and how it worked. It’s cool, and I could see why they did it, but I can’t say it’s something I wanted to do – or spend time on – in life. There’s plenty of other things I’d rather do.
Constant Random Errors. It’s almost guaranteed that over time, something will happen on your site, when you haven’t touched it at all, and a friend will tell you, you know, your website isn’t working. That’s just the nature of it, you can do nothing and a problem is almost guaranteed. I moved the photos on my site to Adobe, and let me tell you, it’s so much nicer to have someone else take care of the maintenance.
Forgetting How I Programmed My Website. I don’t look at my website constantly, and honestly, I don’t want to. So when something goes wrong, or there’s something I want to change, I have to figure out how I did it – AGAIN, because I forgot. I started taking notes, but even that’s not great, because how certain things are handled changes. For example, I used to do menus with widgets. Now, with the WordPress changeover to Gutenberg, the menus are in a site editor. And it’s done differently, so my notes were useless. Sigh.
Constantly Testing Plugins To See If They Work on Your Site. It’s great that there are several plugins to do things on your website, but will they work for you? You can’t tell until you try them. And so you have to do that, and learn how each one works. Cause, yeah, they work differently. Take a simple thing like creating an Instagram feed. Well, I had to learn and test 6-7 plugins, and I’m still not happy. In one case, I could get a plugin to access the photos, even though I followed all the instructions. In another, I can access photos, but I can’t get the layout I want, or have to pay up for it. In several cases, I had plugins that worked, but over time, they stopped working, for whatever reason. As you can imagine, this is many, many hours for a simple objective. Grrr…
Every Little Problem Is Yours To Fix, No Matter How Small. I can’t tell you the number of little problems that come up, and there’s no one else to fix it but you. Just now, I tried uploading a quick picture, right? No. I set up a block with and imagine, and instructions said drag and drop photo. Tried it 5-7x and it didn’t work. Looked and at the media library, and the photo was uploaded to the media library but not to the page. So it turns out I had to import from the media library, drag and drop doesn’t work. That was a waste of about 10 minutes.
In the urge to create a catch all system, WordPress created a system with massive problems to fix. Compare this to the Apple system, where there are limited options and limited decisions. Yes, I think I’d rather run the limited In-N-Out menu than the 150 item diner menu. 🙂
Can you tell I’m in one of those periodic re-learn and re-do the website times of my life? Lol. 🙂
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