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Just one thing to watch-out for when using an agency's WordPress (I have been burnt by this before). Keep an eye on the implementation, some agencies will just

Just one thing to watch-out for when using an agency's WordPress (I have been burnt by this before). Keep an eye on the implementation, some agencies will just glue together 30 plugins and tweak the themes they have using WYSIWYG kind of tools. This could result to super bloated results, with each page loading 20Mb of useless assets and doing 100+ useless SQL queries to render what should have been a simple landing page. I got assigned to fix that mess, and telling upper-management that the agency they chose basically fucked-them-over was not an easy discussion.

sb25 6y ago
Hey can you elaborate a bit on this? What are the common mistakes that agencies make or what are some bad WP coding practices?
- Raed667 6y ago
  The examples I saw came mostly from agencies shoving as many WordPress plugins as possible and then tweaking them instead of doing some (or any) basic PHP/HTML/JS. This wasn't even about WP coding practices, since there wasn't much coding done by the agency at all. This is usually a sign that they have more "webmasters" than "web-developers". Plugins/Themes are not fundamentally a bad thing, but sometimes it feels like they're fitting a circle into a square. The worst offender I saw was a WP landing page doing 100+ SQL queries to display a basic home-page. What were these queries doing? Getting the color of the header. Then the color of the logo. And then the size of the carrousel, etc.. etc... I'm not sure what a non-technical person can do to keep things sane. However, the minimum is to have a short feedback cycle where you try the website and see if it feels sluggish. Open the browser console and see how many Megabits its downloading. Run it through LightHouse [0] and see how it scores. [0] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
davismwfl 6y ago
I totally agree, you still have to be diligent, and set ground rules on what is acceptable and not. I've sadly had to fix the same issues and have those same discussions. I should probably have said that, but part of outsourcing is setting those types of ground rules and holding the agency to them. Good agencies generally don't have an issue with this, it is the lowest cost ones or the "friends, cousins, kid" type are where you almost always get the bad result.

sb25 6y ago

Hey can you elaborate a bit on this? What are the common mistakes that agencies make or what are some bad WP coding practices?

Raed667 6y ago
The examples I saw came mostly from agencies shoving as many WordPress plugins as possible and then tweaking them instead of doing some (or any) basic PHP/HTML/JS. This wasn't even about WP coding practices, since there wasn't much coding done by the agency at all. This is usually a sign that they have more "webmasters" than "web-developers". Plugins/Themes are not fundamentally a bad thing, but sometimes it feels like they're fitting a circle into a square. The worst offender I saw was a WP landing page doing 100+ SQL queries to display a basic home-page. What were these queries doing? Getting the color of the header. Then the color of the logo. And then the size of the carrousel, etc.. etc... I'm not sure what a non-technical person can do to keep things sane. However, the minimum is to have a short feedback cycle where you try the website and see if it feels sluggish. Open the browser console and see how many Megabits its downloading. Run it through LightHouse [0] and see how it scores. [0] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

davismwfl 6y ago

I totally agree, you still have to be diligent, and set ground rules on what is acceptable and not. I've sadly had to fix the same issues and have those same discussions. I should probably have said that, but part of outsourcing is setting those types of ground rules and holding the agency to them. Good agencies generally don't have an issue with this, it is the lowest cost ones or the "friends, cousins, kid" type are where you almost always get the bad result.