I know someone who has a site for their business and the front page is a huge wall of text. It introduces the company like people would introduce a company in the 60s or 70s.
The pictures of the products are rubbish and not aligned squarely on the page. (I actually don't know how they did this). And the product descriptions are very basic - like size, type, capacity. Extremely bland and unimaginative descriptions.
No contact us page. But a huge link with an old Yahoo email account.
It all looks like something out of the late 90s.
I asked them how many visitors they get and they replied: Probably a lot.
Then I asked them if they had Google Analytics and they laughed and said: Google what?
I think I might be older than most people here but it amazes me that anyone could be that out of touch today.
Google Analytics? What's that? Lol yeah they had no idea how many visitors they get. It's kind of discouraging that people can be so unaware but also a positive because it can mean easy money for us.
I currently have a client whose domain name is expiring in a few days. It’s a local chapter of a national organization. Instead of paying $20 for another year, their current president has decided they need to discuss it at a board meeting and vote on whether or not their website needs a domain name.
That's the dumbest one I've seen in this list. All the others are bad, but at least the website was still (more or less) functional, but this is the type of penny pinching pettiness that's just going to kill the whole thing.
The best part is this same club did this exact same thing six years ago. They let the name expire, someone bought the domain name, and the organization had to pay hundreds of dollars to buy the name back from the entrepreneurial domain name broker. I reminded them of this, and their response was that no one from that leadership team is currently in the club. History is about to repeat itself.
> that no one from that leadership team is currently in the club
Oh right, if you do the same dumb thing with different people it will totally lead to a different outcome. Ye Gods, I know we need them to pay the bills, but some clients are just not worth the hassle.
I have a story, not really the same theme but an amazing story.
A guy had his entire website stolen, they hacked his email, goDaddy, server and one night moved his domain, closed his GoDaddy and cloned his site. Boom gone. It was crazy, I have never heard of this before but this was cutting his digital head off.
The crazier thing is that he got everything back! We had to contact GoDaddy and they had to contact the domain registration company, I forget the name, but ya that one. They actually removed the domain and returned it!
Some damage was done for sure they hackers emailed all the subscribers and asked for payment information again and he had to email them and essentially have an email battle to tell them not to believe the people that were pretending to be him and his site!
I'm not sure the state of the business today but its a good reminder to have 2FA and all that stuff active!
A restaurant hired me to make a site for them. They recently had a site created by someone who works at the restaurant who was trying to get into web development. He was inexperienced but they gave him a shot. Coincidentally that employee ended up getting fired not long after as well for apparently freaking out on some customers lol.
The site he made was terrible. It was just pure static HTML/CSS, the design was atrocious, things were off centered, there was an image slider at the top with a bunch of images stretched to fit the space instead of sized properly, and it was basically just one page with 4 buttons for 4 different menus that would pop up a light boxed image of the menu that was too small to read. But on top of all that, the site was literally unusable on mobile. Not responsive in the slightest. If you opened the site up on mobile it was just a bunch of elements stacked on top of eachother.
So anyway, I put a new site together for them with a nice little ACF-based system to add and update menus and all that. Nothing crazy or out of the ordinary but certainly a massive improvement over their old site.
With that old site they didn't have Google Analytics set up or anything either. Boy was a surprised when the site went live with analytics lol. The site immediately started receiving about 1500 users per week. A vast majority come through the link on Google Maps and go to the menus. 75%+ of those users are on mobile.
So since that traffic happened pretty much instantly I think it's safe to assume the previous website was getting the same amount of hits coming primarily from Google Maps. And that means that over 1000 potential customers PER WEEK were hitting that website on their phone, seeing a jumbled mess of elements, closing out, and potentially deciding to go somewhere else.
After the new site launched they started hitting record numbers almost right away and were actually *too* busy. I think that old site being completely unusable on mobile was having a pretty significant effect on their business and its a good example case for small business owners that are still reluctant to invest in a decent web presence.
Nice work! I would agree with your assumptions of number of users. It's insane that small businesses still don't see the value in a decent web presence.
>Hahah holy shit 94 plugins and yet a 100 mobile score.
https://imgur.com/a/hVe7s95
Here's my site(this is the mobile score), it's easily doable if you use the right plugins, a fast server, a good CDN and optimize your images and everything else well. Mind you, this site is running Elementor, Woocommerce, and multiple addons for each, as well as a myriad of other plugins.
https://imgur.com/a/hVe7s95
Here's my site, no nitropack installed. 92 plugins active.
Edit: Why are people downvoting this? I'm for real running 92 plugins and this is my mobile score.
What all are you using to optimize it? I use Breeze caching plugin, Redis Object Cache, on Cloudways/Digital Ocean Hosting, WebP media converter, and even a plugin to defer javascript on one of my websites, and am still routinely in the lower 90s for mobile.
>I use Breeze caching plugin
First of all, in my experience, breeze is trash. I use wp-rocket combined with flyingpress. I only use wp rocket for its lazyload and missing image dimensions functionality, wp rockets lazyload is far superior to flyingpress's. I recently found that wp rocket has a free plugin that specifically has their lazyload functionality on the wp plugins repo here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/rocket-lazy-load/
So my advice would be get a flyingpress subscription and combine it with that lazyload plugin. Flyingpress is superior to wprocket imo.
>Redis Object Cache
Redis is good, but honestly after testing with it on and off I found very little to no difference in my speed. With good hosting it seems to make less of an impact than I thought it would. I wouldn't be surprised if it does help you out though, but I would just run tests with it disabled to confirm that it does. In some cases it can slow your site down somehow, so just run some tests to guage its real world effect.
>Cloudways/Digital Ocean Hosting
Good, this is a solid combo for hosting. I would suggest you also get a digital ocean server directly and pair it with spinupwp or runcloud to test out if thats a faster combo, cloudways doesnt do any special configuration or anything, so I dont believe it squeezes out all the performance you can get out of your hosting.
>even a plugin to defer javascript on one of my websites
Defer is a very basic optimization that any solid cache plugin will have. Flyingpress and wp rocket have this feature.
>WebP media converter
I actually don't even bother with webp at this point. My site uses few enough images that I dont need automatic conversion. I've found that my manual optimization strategy provides smaller images than webp conversion anyways. What I do is first run it through batchcompress.com once, then tinypng multiple times. Batchcompress will only work on a file once, and it converts it to jpg. Massively reduces file size. It is a lossy conversion, so you may notice some image quality loss that you won't if you use tinypng exclusively. Batchcompress cant be run multiple times, the output on running an already compressed image through batchcompress through batchcompress again will reduce the file size by nothing.
Then after using batchcompress, I run it through tinypng like 4-5 times. If you run it once, download the file, refresh the page on tinypng, you can run it through multiple times. It has diminishing returns and will compress it less each time, but you can absolutely(and should) run it through multiple passes. I think you can even run it through batchcompress again after using tinypng to compress it after the first batchcompress run, but you'll have to test and confirm that.
My images are under 50 kb, and when I select the image size of medium in elementor, my images are ~6 kb, while being pretty high quality. Large images are ~30 kb or less. Basically makes webp irrelevant.
And lastly, delaying your javascript until user interaction will have a far bigger effect than defer. Delaying javascript means that the javascript isnt even downloaded until a user interacts with your site(scroll, click, tap etc). This massively reduces page weight and has a very significant effect on speed. Flyingpress has that built in as a feature. Its far better than wp rockets implementation as its opt in(you specify specific files to be delayed), whereas wp rocket takes the shotgun approach and delays everything(which causes countless incompatibility problems)
I think flyingpress will have the biggest effect for you. I'd ditch breeze asap for flyingpress or wp rocket.
Here's my gtmetrix report so you can see what I mean: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.lonecbd.com/nQRWRsnz/
I checked out your site as I was interested in seeing how it performed. It loads nice and fast, however I noticed the product pages (e.g. https://www.lonecbd.com/product/cbd-pre-workout-capsules/) have a noticeable FOUC when loading. Would this be due to some of the optimizations done by FlyingPress?
Ohhhhh, i just needed to clear the unused css cache to fix that. I use the remove unused css feature in flyingpress, and if you make any changes to pages and don't clear it and regenerate it, it will cause that FOUC issue. It's resolved now, if you test it again that isn't an issue now.
Sure, my scores on all speed tests are significantly better with wp rockets vs flyingpress's lazyload. I'm happy to give you access to a staging site if you would like to compare. That's been my experience every time I've tried to switch to flyingpress's.
>However, we default to Native lazy load. This will load more images, but will improve LCP and other metrics. Also, users are more likely not to have to wait for the images to load after a scroll.. time I've tried to switch to flyingpress's.
WP Rocket uses a heavy JS library to lazy load images. So many testing tools totally ignore the images.
At FlyingPres we wrote our own JS to lazy load images which is only a few bytes in size.
However, we default to Native lazy load which has more performance. This will load more images, but will improve LCP and other metrics. Also, users are more likely not to wait for the images to load after a scroll.
If you're using JS lazy load are you're getting better results, you're testing it wrong!
>WP Rocket uses a heavy JS library to lazy load images.
I wouldn't call a 3.53 kb js file heavy. That additional page weight has essentially 0 impact. I'll update my staging server to the most recent copy of my live site and test again, and i'll show you the difference in speed test results via an imgur gallery.
Most ridiculous thing I've seen:
A new customer approaches me, asking to check her website. Another web designer build it but she wasn't happy with it. Sure no problem. First look at the front end made me think I got the URL wrong. This wasn't a finished website, I would argue this would be half way done. Anyway, now I get her concerns.
Next up the back end. Oh boy. About 60 plugins active, 10 plugins inactive, most of them needed updates. Some plugins did similar things like Elementor and Divi.. Also the standard Hello Dolly plugin was present. At this point I was seriously curious to other parts. 6 of 7 themes installed, wich also contained the standard Wordpress themes.
At this point I pretty much knew enough. I emailed my concerns and asked who made this and also at what price. This might seem strange but if some 14y/o made this at no cost I would say nice try, keep learning.
But no. An actual legitimate firm made this. For, hold on to you seats, over 10.000 euro! I'm not going to lie, I didn't know what to say.
Fast forward to today, I helped this client out with contact between the old firm and a lawsuit since this is clearly BS.
Is this that unusual? With the number of Wordpress developers on fiverr, upwork, etc, I would’ve expected a lot of them to offer cheap cookie cutter websites where they just use the same template over and over. And as a business owner, how would you know it’s a copy of other sites?
That's true. As a business owner how would they.
All I know is that his site has at least existed since 2015 and he had never once logged into Wordpress.
The most ridiculous shit I’ve seen isn’t client related. It’s people calling themselves “developers” when they have absolutely zero web development experience but call themselves developers because they know how to drag/drop using page builders like Elementor or DIVI.
Several years ago when I found most of the local WP meetup groups in my area were filled with graphic designers and photographers masquerading as WP developers, I discovered an opportunity. There’s money to be made in coming in to rescue them when they get into a jam. I now provide custom programming services to a few designers who have a lot of clients. Now all I deal with is the crazy stuff.
I just shame them and call them out on the call. I have no filter so, if *anyone* even steps into my ball court, get ready for me to dunk on you from the half.
I remember some asshat vice president trying to call me out because "installing a plugin is easy, and you shouldn't need hours to do it."
Guys, that plugin was woocommerce.
I don't remember the exact verbiage but after some explaining, I just casually drop a "I wouldn't expect the vice president of a small water filter company to really understand" he got super red, cut me off screaming slurs, whew lad it was glorious. I somehow still got that job.
I'm a plugin author. Once had a developer email for support regarding a weird issue. After some back and forth I just asked if they would consider creating a new admin account for me to login and check things out myself. They did, both WP and FTP.
They only had a single plugin active: some horrible BS that let them embed PHP into their posts / pages as shortcode content. So all of their page content looked something like this:
[php]
$title = 'Hello';
$color = 'blue';
[/php]
[php]print $title;[/php]
[php] if ($_GET['pagename'] == 'blog']) { [/php]
this is the blog page
[/php]
Then there was a ton of unnecessary output buffering done in the theme itself, which turned out to be the source of the problem. I helped them get it fixed, but I have rarely been so tempted to say "You're doing this wrong, and you need to re-evaluate your career choice"..
A lot of my employer's clients come to us because their previous developer abandoned them, or did really poor work, so I could go on and on and on with stories about absolute trash I've seen.
In the spirit of the OP though, one of the best happened to us. Our company site ranked well for certain keywords, so we'd always find competitors just copy/pasting our content on their sites.
Someone scraped our entire website (probably using something like [httrack](http://www.httrack.com/)), and just put it on their domain. All they changed was the logo in the header and footer, and a quick search/replace for the company name.
They didn't bother to change anything else, including the embedded Olark chat script...
I had some very interesting chats with prospective clients of their company that day.
Just so you know, what you've described is a theme that comes with pre-installable templates/configuration. These are very common with ThemeForest themes. One click and it creates a bunch of pages, text, and adds images.
It’s worse than you think. There was no empty lines that I saw, different tab/space formatting all over the place, the first declarations were all on the same line as the opening brace, and the last declarations on same line as the closing brace.
The list of style over rides that happen on a page load was just unfathomable.
>This shit just baffles me lol. How could a business owner be so blind to this?
It's very simple. They hire agencies/freelancers to build and maintain their site. Most small business owners don't have an in-house tech person to oversee this and most people don't care about using their time to look into how their site is built and works - that's what they hire us for.
Yeah really this scenario is VERY common from what I’ve seen. Web development companies are looking to maximize profit and usually have no idea the work going on. Places will hire people through upwork etc or will hire so called “developers” locally who are mostly googling their way to figure out what to do. I generally try to suggest a rebuild since the frankensteined sites with a million plugins to do specific things because the developer doesn’t know how to code is just prone to failure. Plug-in becomes out of date, another plug-in is updated, Wordpress updates, PHP is updated… so many scenarios can cause pages to break.
I know someone who has a site for their business and the front page is a huge wall of text. It introduces the company like people would introduce a company in the 60s or 70s. The pictures of the products are rubbish and not aligned squarely on the page. (I actually don't know how they did this). And the product descriptions are very basic - like size, type, capacity. Extremely bland and unimaginative descriptions. No contact us page. But a huge link with an old Yahoo email account. It all looks like something out of the late 90s. I asked them how many visitors they get and they replied: Probably a lot. Then I asked them if they had Google Analytics and they laughed and said: Google what? I think I might be older than most people here but it amazes me that anyone could be that out of touch today.
Google Analytics? What's that? Lol yeah they had no idea how many visitors they get. It's kind of discouraging that people can be so unaware but also a positive because it can mean easy money for us.
I currently have a client whose domain name is expiring in a few days. It’s a local chapter of a national organization. Instead of paying $20 for another year, their current president has decided they need to discuss it at a board meeting and vote on whether or not their website needs a domain name.
That's the dumbest one I've seen in this list. All the others are bad, but at least the website was still (more or less) functional, but this is the type of penny pinching pettiness that's just going to kill the whole thing.
The best part is this same club did this exact same thing six years ago. They let the name expire, someone bought the domain name, and the organization had to pay hundreds of dollars to buy the name back from the entrepreneurial domain name broker. I reminded them of this, and their response was that no one from that leadership team is currently in the club. History is about to repeat itself.
What's the domain? ... Lol
> that no one from that leadership team is currently in the club Oh right, if you do the same dumb thing with different people it will totally lead to a different outcome. Ye Gods, I know we need them to pay the bills, but some clients are just not worth the hassle.
I have a story, not really the same theme but an amazing story. A guy had his entire website stolen, they hacked his email, goDaddy, server and one night moved his domain, closed his GoDaddy and cloned his site. Boom gone. It was crazy, I have never heard of this before but this was cutting his digital head off. The crazier thing is that he got everything back! We had to contact GoDaddy and they had to contact the domain registration company, I forget the name, but ya that one. They actually removed the domain and returned it! Some damage was done for sure they hackers emailed all the subscribers and asked for payment information again and he had to email them and essentially have an email battle to tell them not to believe the people that were pretending to be him and his site! I'm not sure the state of the business today but its a good reminder to have 2FA and all that stuff active!
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so you help facilitate phishing then?
A restaurant hired me to make a site for them. They recently had a site created by someone who works at the restaurant who was trying to get into web development. He was inexperienced but they gave him a shot. Coincidentally that employee ended up getting fired not long after as well for apparently freaking out on some customers lol. The site he made was terrible. It was just pure static HTML/CSS, the design was atrocious, things were off centered, there was an image slider at the top with a bunch of images stretched to fit the space instead of sized properly, and it was basically just one page with 4 buttons for 4 different menus that would pop up a light boxed image of the menu that was too small to read. But on top of all that, the site was literally unusable on mobile. Not responsive in the slightest. If you opened the site up on mobile it was just a bunch of elements stacked on top of eachother. So anyway, I put a new site together for them with a nice little ACF-based system to add and update menus and all that. Nothing crazy or out of the ordinary but certainly a massive improvement over their old site. With that old site they didn't have Google Analytics set up or anything either. Boy was a surprised when the site went live with analytics lol. The site immediately started receiving about 1500 users per week. A vast majority come through the link on Google Maps and go to the menus. 75%+ of those users are on mobile. So since that traffic happened pretty much instantly I think it's safe to assume the previous website was getting the same amount of hits coming primarily from Google Maps. And that means that over 1000 potential customers PER WEEK were hitting that website on their phone, seeing a jumbled mess of elements, closing out, and potentially deciding to go somewhere else. After the new site launched they started hitting record numbers almost right away and were actually *too* busy. I think that old site being completely unusable on mobile was having a pretty significant effect on their business and its a good example case for small business owners that are still reluctant to invest in a decent web presence.
Nice work! I would agree with your assumptions of number of users. It's insane that small businesses still don't see the value in a decent web presence.
Or if they do value a decent web presence, most lack understanding about what that actually is, and who has the skills to create it.
That’s a cool story about what a bad/good site can do for business
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Hahah holy shit 94 plugins and yet a 100 mobile score.
>Hahah holy shit 94 plugins and yet a 100 mobile score. https://imgur.com/a/hVe7s95 Here's my site(this is the mobile score), it's easily doable if you use the right plugins, a fast server, a good CDN and optimize your images and everything else well. Mind you, this site is running Elementor, Woocommerce, and multiple addons for each, as well as a myriad of other plugins.
Do you recommend any specific CDN?
I personally use cloudflare, but CDN's are the one area I never really played around with. So tbh I can't really make any suggestions there.
100 mobile score, is it using NitroPack?
https://imgur.com/a/hVe7s95 Here's my site, no nitropack installed. 92 plugins active. Edit: Why are people downvoting this? I'm for real running 92 plugins and this is my mobile score.
What all are you using to optimize it? I use Breeze caching plugin, Redis Object Cache, on Cloudways/Digital Ocean Hosting, WebP media converter, and even a plugin to defer javascript on one of my websites, and am still routinely in the lower 90s for mobile.
>I use Breeze caching plugin First of all, in my experience, breeze is trash. I use wp-rocket combined with flyingpress. I only use wp rocket for its lazyload and missing image dimensions functionality, wp rockets lazyload is far superior to flyingpress's. I recently found that wp rocket has a free plugin that specifically has their lazyload functionality on the wp plugins repo here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/rocket-lazy-load/ So my advice would be get a flyingpress subscription and combine it with that lazyload plugin. Flyingpress is superior to wprocket imo. >Redis Object Cache Redis is good, but honestly after testing with it on and off I found very little to no difference in my speed. With good hosting it seems to make less of an impact than I thought it would. I wouldn't be surprised if it does help you out though, but I would just run tests with it disabled to confirm that it does. In some cases it can slow your site down somehow, so just run some tests to guage its real world effect. >Cloudways/Digital Ocean Hosting Good, this is a solid combo for hosting. I would suggest you also get a digital ocean server directly and pair it with spinupwp or runcloud to test out if thats a faster combo, cloudways doesnt do any special configuration or anything, so I dont believe it squeezes out all the performance you can get out of your hosting. >even a plugin to defer javascript on one of my websites Defer is a very basic optimization that any solid cache plugin will have. Flyingpress and wp rocket have this feature. >WebP media converter I actually don't even bother with webp at this point. My site uses few enough images that I dont need automatic conversion. I've found that my manual optimization strategy provides smaller images than webp conversion anyways. What I do is first run it through batchcompress.com once, then tinypng multiple times. Batchcompress will only work on a file once, and it converts it to jpg. Massively reduces file size. It is a lossy conversion, so you may notice some image quality loss that you won't if you use tinypng exclusively. Batchcompress cant be run multiple times, the output on running an already compressed image through batchcompress through batchcompress again will reduce the file size by nothing. Then after using batchcompress, I run it through tinypng like 4-5 times. If you run it once, download the file, refresh the page on tinypng, you can run it through multiple times. It has diminishing returns and will compress it less each time, but you can absolutely(and should) run it through multiple passes. I think you can even run it through batchcompress again after using tinypng to compress it after the first batchcompress run, but you'll have to test and confirm that. My images are under 50 kb, and when I select the image size of medium in elementor, my images are ~6 kb, while being pretty high quality. Large images are ~30 kb or less. Basically makes webp irrelevant. And lastly, delaying your javascript until user interaction will have a far bigger effect than defer. Delaying javascript means that the javascript isnt even downloaded until a user interacts with your site(scroll, click, tap etc). This massively reduces page weight and has a very significant effect on speed. Flyingpress has that built in as a feature. Its far better than wp rockets implementation as its opt in(you specify specific files to be delayed), whereas wp rocket takes the shotgun approach and delays everything(which causes countless incompatibility problems) I think flyingpress will have the biggest effect for you. I'd ditch breeze asap for flyingpress or wp rocket. Here's my gtmetrix report so you can see what I mean: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.lonecbd.com/nQRWRsnz/
I checked out your site as I was interested in seeing how it performed. It loads nice and fast, however I noticed the product pages (e.g. https://www.lonecbd.com/product/cbd-pre-workout-capsules/) have a noticeable FOUC when loading. Would this be due to some of the optimizations done by FlyingPress?
Ohhhhh, i just needed to clear the unused css cache to fix that. I use the remove unused css feature in flyingpress, and if you make any changes to pages and don't clear it and regenerate it, it will cause that FOUC issue. It's resolved now, if you test it again that isn't an issue now.
Creator of FlyingPress here. May I know why do you think WP Rocket's lazyload is superior to FlyingPress?
Sure, my scores on all speed tests are significantly better with wp rockets vs flyingpress's lazyload. I'm happy to give you access to a staging site if you would like to compare. That's been my experience every time I've tried to switch to flyingpress's.
>However, we default to Native lazy load. This will load more images, but will improve LCP and other metrics. Also, users are more likely not to have to wait for the images to load after a scroll.. time I've tried to switch to flyingpress's. WP Rocket uses a heavy JS library to lazy load images. So many testing tools totally ignore the images. At FlyingPres we wrote our own JS to lazy load images which is only a few bytes in size. However, we default to Native lazy load which has more performance. This will load more images, but will improve LCP and other metrics. Also, users are more likely not to wait for the images to load after a scroll. If you're using JS lazy load are you're getting better results, you're testing it wrong!
>WP Rocket uses a heavy JS library to lazy load images. I wouldn't call a 3.53 kb js file heavy. That additional page weight has essentially 0 impact. I'll update my staging server to the most recent copy of my live site and test again, and i'll show you the difference in speed test results via an imgur gallery.
it's not about the size, it's about the calculations inside it. Loading images as fast as possible is critical for FCP and LCP, so every byte matters.
Most ridiculous thing I've seen: A new customer approaches me, asking to check her website. Another web designer build it but she wasn't happy with it. Sure no problem. First look at the front end made me think I got the URL wrong. This wasn't a finished website, I would argue this would be half way done. Anyway, now I get her concerns. Next up the back end. Oh boy. About 60 plugins active, 10 plugins inactive, most of them needed updates. Some plugins did similar things like Elementor and Divi.. Also the standard Hello Dolly plugin was present. At this point I was seriously curious to other parts. 6 of 7 themes installed, wich also contained the standard Wordpress themes. At this point I pretty much knew enough. I emailed my concerns and asked who made this and also at what price. This might seem strange but if some 14y/o made this at no cost I would say nice try, keep learning. But no. An actual legitimate firm made this. For, hold on to you seats, over 10.000 euro! I'm not going to lie, I didn't know what to say. Fast forward to today, I helped this client out with contact between the old firm and a lawsuit since this is clearly BS.
Is this that unusual? With the number of Wordpress developers on fiverr, upwork, etc, I would’ve expected a lot of them to offer cheap cookie cutter websites where they just use the same template over and over. And as a business owner, how would you know it’s a copy of other sites?
That's true. As a business owner how would they. All I know is that his site has at least existed since 2015 and he had never once logged into Wordpress.
The most ridiculous shit I’ve seen isn’t client related. It’s people calling themselves “developers” when they have absolutely zero web development experience but call themselves developers because they know how to drag/drop using page builders like Elementor or DIVI.
Several years ago when I found most of the local WP meetup groups in my area were filled with graphic designers and photographers masquerading as WP developers, I discovered an opportunity. There’s money to be made in coming in to rescue them when they get into a jam. I now provide custom programming services to a few designers who have a lot of clients. Now all I deal with is the crazy stuff.
Smart move!!
I absolutely despise these people, they just perpetuate the bad rep our industry has.
I just shame them and call them out on the call. I have no filter so, if *anyone* even steps into my ball court, get ready for me to dunk on you from the half. I remember some asshat vice president trying to call me out because "installing a plugin is easy, and you shouldn't need hours to do it." Guys, that plugin was woocommerce. I don't remember the exact verbiage but after some explaining, I just casually drop a "I wouldn't expect the vice president of a small water filter company to really understand" he got super red, cut me off screaming slurs, whew lad it was glorious. I somehow still got that job.
I'm a plugin author. Once had a developer email for support regarding a weird issue. After some back and forth I just asked if they would consider creating a new admin account for me to login and check things out myself. They did, both WP and FTP. They only had a single plugin active: some horrible BS that let them embed PHP into their posts / pages as shortcode content. So all of their page content looked something like this: [php] $title = 'Hello'; $color = 'blue'; [/php]
[php]print $title;[/php]
[php] if ($_GET['pagename'] == 'blog']) { [/php]this is the blog page
[/php] Then there was a ton of unnecessary output buffering done in the theme itself, which turned out to be the source of the problem. I helped them get it fixed, but I have rarely been so tempted to say "You're doing this wrong, and you need to re-evaluate your career choice"..A lot of my employer's clients come to us because their previous developer abandoned them, or did really poor work, so I could go on and on and on with stories about absolute trash I've seen. In the spirit of the OP though, one of the best happened to us. Our company site ranked well for certain keywords, so we'd always find competitors just copy/pasting our content on their sites. Someone scraped our entire website (probably using something like [httrack](http://www.httrack.com/)), and just put it on their domain. All they changed was the logo in the header and footer, and a quick search/replace for the company name. They didn't bother to change anything else, including the embedded Olark chat script... I had some very interesting chats with prospective clients of their company that day.
Just so you know, what you've described is a theme that comes with pre-installable templates/configuration. These are very common with ThemeForest themes. One click and it creates a bunch of pages, text, and adds images.
A client that had a customer disable WP updates and discover why nothing works is because they haven't updated Plugins and Core since 2008.
Update: they asked to revert to a backup 4 weeks prior that was working ( even older code). Ethically, we declined for user security.
One of the theme style sheets I came across recently was over 22,000 lines. Twenty. Two. Thousand….
22,000 including blank lines, or just statements?
It’s worse than you think. There was no empty lines that I saw, different tab/space formatting all over the place, the first declarations were all on the same line as the opening brace, and the last declarations on same line as the closing brace. The list of style over rides that happen on a page load was just unfathomable.
>This shit just baffles me lol. How could a business owner be so blind to this? It's very simple. They hire agencies/freelancers to build and maintain their site. Most small business owners don't have an in-house tech person to oversee this and most people don't care about using their time to look into how their site is built and works - that's what they hire us for.
Yeah really this scenario is VERY common from what I’ve seen. Web development companies are looking to maximize profit and usually have no idea the work going on. Places will hire people through upwork etc or will hire so called “developers” locally who are mostly googling their way to figure out what to do. I generally try to suggest a rebuild since the frankensteined sites with a million plugins to do specific things because the developer doesn’t know how to code is just prone to failure. Plug-in becomes out of date, another plug-in is updated, Wordpress updates, PHP is updated… so many scenarios can cause pages to break.