#27 - WordPress Won't Save You

WordPress powers more than 60% of the internet—but that doesn’t mean your site is safe, stable, or even well-built. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the most common mistakes made by DIY site builders and inexperienced developers: outdated plugins, bloated themes, security gaps, and more. You’ll learn why that “beautiful” theme might be a house of cards, why regular updates aren’t optional, and how to spot the warning signs of a WordPress site built to fail. Whether you’re a business owner or a designer, this episode will help you separate good builds from bad—and make smarter decisions about who you trust with your site.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Let's talk about WordPress on this episode of Over the Bull. Hi, I'm Ken. I'm with Integrous Design. And, you know, this podcast is based on real-world experiences that our agency has week in and week out. And one of the things that's really popped up on the radar of late is WordPress development. Now, we've been developing in WordPress, got for over 20 years now, I guess. And the thing is, is that WordPress can be a powerful tool for your business, or it can be an incredibly frustrating part of your business. Now, WordPress, what I'd like to do is kind of talk to you about what WordPress is. And if you've had a negative experience with it, I want to share maybe why you've had that negative experience and kind of walk you through exactly the nuances of WordPress. Now, WordPress being the most popular content management system on the planet, in my opinion, is the best solution for most businesses out there today. Period. Now, the reason that I say that is because it gives you unparalleled freedom and it also gives you unparalleled control of your website if done the right way. Now, there is a cost to working with WordPress correctly, and there's a lot of dangers associated with WordPress when it comes to your business, your time, and frankly, your sanity. So we're big believers in WordPress. So first, well, what is WordPress? Well, if you could imagine, WordPress is, well, basically what's known as a content management system. Content management system means you can manage your content on your website. What it does is give you like an easy interface where you can make changes, additions, or deletions to your website without having to know a lot of coding. Pretty much that's what WordPress is. Now, within WordPress, there is a ton of things that you can do. So, as you can imagine, being Being the most popular content management system on the planet, it will attract really solid development solutions, and it's also going to attract not-so-good practices. So I really couldn't believe, to be honest with you, some of the stuff that I have seen lately when it comes to WordPress. It's kind of staggering to believe that there are people out there who are actually building websites that are, frankly, they're volatile. I mean, it almost feels like you're playing pickup sticks. So when we analyze them, it's hard to even touch them because of some of the practices that are going on. And so it's understandable, especially in this crazy world we live in. And when something is readily available like WordPress, you can definitely see more than ever the that unqualified people are building WordPress sites that are just outright bad. Now, this doesn't mean WordPress is the problem. It means that the developers and the tools that are going into WordPress are the issues. So let's kind of talk about WordPress for a little bit. There are really two main flavors of WordPress. There's one at wordpress.com. And there's another one at WordPress.org. So WordPress.com is kind of like a controlled version of WordPress. And WordPress.org is what we call open source. That's where you can download all the code natively and have everything at your disposal or your design team or developer's disposal. So think of it like this. If you develop at WordPress It's kind of like leasing a vehicle and not being able to see under the hood of the vehicle. If you get WordPress.org, then you have full control over everything. And to my knowledge, every developer that we've ever worked with prefers to use WordPress.org. Now, the reason being is it's good for the business because you have all of your code natively. And it's also good for the developer because we can literally get to anything. But this is also the rub with WordPress because since it's open source and it's really easy to install and then you tie in development strategies, this is where really things can get off the rails really quick. So, for example, if we were to equate it to, say, building a deck, you You know, you could build a deck using the exact same tools and exact same, you know, wood or whatever. And that deck could either be really well built or it could be extremely poorly built based upon the decisions and the people that are putting it together. And this is exactly what's going on for us worse than ever. OK, it is absolutely staggering. The stuff that I am seeing from WordPress developers these days. I don't even know if I'd call them developers, to be honest with you. So let me justify the statement. So let's peer into WordPress a little bit. So when you get into WordPress, because you can get into all the code and all the stuff in it, there are really two main groups of elements that impact WordPress other than your hosting. Matter of fact, let's talk about hosting just for a second. So when you look at hosting, you can get hosting really cheap. I mean, really, really cheap. I'm talking probably under five bucks a month. Now, with cheap hosting, there comes a lot of issues that are associated with it. And the price tag is very appealing because as far as you as an owner of a business, you see websites in one location, website in another location. But there are a lot of nuances that go into high-quality hosting that impact how well a WordPress environment is. Everything from the security of that website to being able to update that website to being able to do certain things like make duplicates of that website, work on the duplicate, and then push it to the live environment. And so one of the most common mistakes people make, and especially certain freelancers, is they go get really cheap hosting. Now, on the good end, they recommend that you get cheap hosting, which when I'm saying good, not good for you, but it's like the best of the worst. And then you basically pay for it. But the other thing is that they may buy cheap hosting and then sell that to you for a premium cost. Now, this happens, believe it or not, this happens with big agencies. You will see them buy some really bad hosting and then sell it as proprietary hosting or internal hosting or something like that. In reality, they're just really making a lot more margin by just selling it to you as that. And so if you've not looked into it, I would definitely look into asking your developer exactly where you're being hosted at. And I wouldn't accept proprietary or internal or stuff like that. I'd ask, well, where is it? And then once you find that answer, then what you want to do is cross-reference it. And I really recommend you look into something called EIG hosting. You'll be surprised at the number of companies that are actually under the umbrella of this larger organization. It's kind of like the same product sold under different labels that they had acquired from my understanding over the years. So you want to look into that when it comes to hosting. But the idea is that people who buy premium hosting are not just Fortune 500 companies and these larger companies. There are people that take their business seriously and want to make sure that they have a strong foundation for their website. And so if you're using cheap hosting, I would strongly recommend you take a strong second look at that. Now, let's dive back into WordPress. So, WordPress, there are two main areas that most people deal with with WordPress. One of them is called the themes area, and another one is called the plugins area. So, a theme is basically a design, so to speak. Plugins are features. Now, when some people develop a website, you really need, let me say this, you really need to start thinking about the developers and designers as a business and not as a friend or a technical group that's doing everything correctly. You need to look at them as a business and you need to assess what their business is like. So let me give you a for instance. When it comes to themes, you can go through and you can find a WordPress theme. Remember, this is the most popular content management system on the planet. So you're going to have a lot of people developing all these themes and plugins, some reputable, some not. But a lot of agencies, they will download a theme, say for, you know,$29,$39, and then they'll resell it to you as a custom development for of thousands of dollars. Now, if you're using WordPress, one way you could find out what theme you're using is if you go to the homepage of your website and right-click on the homepage itself and then go to View and Source, you'll see a bunch of code come up. Now, don't stress out about the code. Just know it's a bunch of gobbledygook, but it's the gobbledygook that makes up your website. And if you're on a PC, you can hit Control F as in Frank. And if you're on a Mac, you can hit Command F as in Frank. And then just look for the word theme, T-H-E-M-E. And then after that slash, you're going to see the name of a theme. And then you can Google that theme. And in a lot of cases, you're going to find out that you were charged a lot of money for something that was quickly downloaded, applied to your website and used. So you may say, well, what's the big deal? Well, there's a lot of big deals when it comes to that. The first big deal is, remember, our second bucket is called plugins. Now, people who develop themes, most of those themes, well, let's just say a large portion of those themes, are using those plugins or features that are developed by other people. So just because the theme is pretty and you buy that for$29 or$59, it doesn't mean all the plugins were developed by the same person. And remember, they're trying to sell you eye candy, not function, because they want you to buy their theme. And so the problem is when you install those themes, a lot of times those features or plugins are maybe not maintained or developed with the best practices possible. So what that means is those themes could break. Those plugins could break. And what that would mean is that your website has a limited shelf life. Now, I'm not saying that's true with all of them, but I am saying I do see it quite frequently where these themes are not using plugins that are the best built. They've not been researched the most. They're actually out there for eye candy purposes. Now, from an agency perspective, It's kind of the best world when you do that because they can buy it for$29, put a little bit of design work into it, add some content, and then they can sell that to you at a premium price. Now, when you look at that, you go, you know, well, consider if you're an agency and you go, well, would I rather build a website with cheap hosting and market up a whole lot by a cheap theme that looks good, install it on it, have a few bucks a month, and then charge premium process for that. Most agencies do that. I keep using the word most, but there's a lot of agencies who do that. Now, when you look at themes and you look at plugins, the thing is that you want to control exactly how much of that or what you use or how you use it. So pretty themes will get you in trouble. Having someone who just installs a WordPress site, which literally can be done in probably five minutes, some hosting companies have push-button WordPress, and that opens a whole other series of issues. We're working with a site that was a push-button WordPress site, and when you look under the hood of that site, site after transferring it over, it is a nightmare. Um, so the push button WordPress stuff, I'm not real crazy on unless it's a company that really understands it. There's a couple of them that are out there. Uh, unfortunately, a couple of the real big WordPress hosting platforms, um, have failed a lot of our test and, and, uh, they're, they're not that great. Um, from my opinion, uh, But anyway, let's move on here. So you have your theme, and you need to go look at your theme and cross-reference it. And then understand that if a cheap theme is being used, you're actually having a poor process developed, and you're paying a premium price for it. And looking at cheap themes, or I'm not going to tell you where to get them, because frankly, I don't want to get into any kind of weird issues with it. But when you look at them and you see where they are and how much they cost. It gives you an idea of really how serious that agency is when it comes to building your website. Now, let's move to plugins for a second. So if you use a theme that's canned, then it's going to come with some required plugins or features like maybe a gallery or maybe things for social media or something, you know, blog posts or whatever. There's just a ton of plugins that do different Now, some of them are aesthetic and some of them are technical. And those plug-ins, you can imagine it's like packing your car up to go on vacation. You know, you put one bag in the car, you got plenty of room, your gas mileage is going to be better and all that jazz. Why, if you completely pack up your car with everything and tow a bunch of stuff behind it, your gas mileage is going to be much worse. Well, the more plug-ins that you incorporate into a WordPress site, the more Technically, most of the time, there's more overhead associated with it. So it'll get more and more sluggish. And also, if you could imagine that each feature that's installed on a WordPress site, they can also create conflicts because they're developed by different entities. And if some of those entities are not using best practice, then it's setting itself up to be a disaster. So just like you have really cheap themes, you also have free plugins. Now, free plugins, there are some out there that are fantastic. They have a great history. There are others that are absolutely disastrous. But if you go back to the mentality of the agency, remember, they want to make money. And so the idea is, do they make money where they're investing in really high quality plugins that go into the site, coupled with a high quality design process? And do they couple that with really good hosting? Or are they just trying to install whatever they can install for free in order to get over the goal and collect a paycheck? And this is a very, very serious thing when it comes to WordPress. And you will be surprised at not only the number of free plugins that are on a lot of websites that really could be problematic. And I'm not saying free is bad. Okay, so there are some out there that are good. But, you know, like everything else, if you're a hacker, are you going to try to hack a free one or a premium plug-in that costs? You know, there's all these little things that go into it. But you can imagine that if they conflict and then they have problems and then maybe the developer quits supporting those plug-ins, you can imagine that things go sideways quick. Now, there's another thing about plugins and themes that's really important. And that is they have to be updated on a regular basis. And so the challenge in that is that if you have a designer that turns your WordPress site over to you and they say, well, just hit the update button periodically or something like that, they're really oversimplifying something that's much more complicated. complicated, especially if poor practices were introduced. So, for example, I have had an energy company come to me and they had a problem because they hit that update button and it blew their site up. It just stopped functioning. And the reason being was that the update, basically their plugins were causing some conflicts and there needed to be a little troubleshooting to get that thing back live. And so the idea is when you have a a competent WordPress developer, typically they will also have a process where they're updating plugins and the themes and the overall infrastructure. Even WordPress itself needs to be updated. And they'll typically include that in a regular monthly subscription. That way you truly are on autopilot in the best way. The worst thing that could happen is you install WordPress yourself or have a A freelancer do it. They install a bunch of this stuff, build your website, give you the keys to the castle, and then they leave you. And then they leave you with some very basic fundamental instructions. This is horrible. Now, the next step up is they have really cheap hosting and a lot of bad processes. And then they do, you know, a little bit of maintenance. So as you can imagine, you can kind of see where WordPress can can go sideways pretty quick. On one end of the spectrum, you could have a team that uses premium processes, premium strategies, and they build the website where it works. On the other end, it doesn't work. And so now you can kind of see if you've had a problem with WordPress historically, you can kind of see maybe why you've gotten that. Now, there's another thing that we need to talk about as well. And I get it. I get it. I mean, you own a business and you're trying to save money. And the next temptation is to outsource work. Now, at Integris, we don't outsource anything to another country. We're actually pretty much solely in-house with how we design and develop. We're more of a boutique-style agency that gives personal, you know, we talk to our customers personally. We don't run them through a bunch of AI systems and things like that. And we just feel that that's necessary in order to be successful to truly understand their business. But a lot of businesses will think, well, if I outsource it, they work for less money an hour and I can have a website that does this. So you can imagine that what you've just done was you've opened the floodgate for some of the worst practices in WordPress development. And what happens then is things can go sideways quick. So we have a couple of situations where we've worked with people and they're really kind of jaded and are really serious. We have one person right now who's asking us a lot of questions about, you know, where we develop and how we develop because the burn, I think, was bad. And that's a real problem. And, you know, I go back even, this was years ago, but unfortunately, this is a years ago thing, but actually the WordPress, from what I'm seeing, it looks like it's gotten more worse. But I'll never forget, I was sitting at a Denny's. There was one open on Patton Avenue in Asheville, and a friend of mine invited me to go meet this person. And I'll never forget him sharing the story of how he said he would do this exact same process. Use cheap hosting, throw up a bunch of stock photographs on a website, throw in a And I remember I was just stunned even then. And I said, you know, this is actually the worst thing that you could do for a business. And without missing a beat, he looked at me and said, yeah, but how else can you make a couple thousand bucks this easy? And I was shocked at the time. But now I've seen so much that it's like, well, it's just general practice. So you really need to have a developer. or a designer that works in at least your country. And really, they should understand your demographics and a lot about your geo so that your product resonates with your customers. And so if you're trying to cheat and you think you've got some kind of ways to sidestep proper development, you really haven't. All you've done is set yourself up to either be not successful or have a problematic website or worse, both. But that's a real problem in this world of WordPress, where you have your pros and you have your cons. So when it comes to features, features can be enticing, like that slideshow or that gallery or one of those things that just really just scratches that proverbial itch. But when you look at those features, there's a lot more that goes into it. into it, like how well is it managed? Is it supported? Is it a premium? Is it not a premium? Those kind of things. And so when you're looking at the factor, believe it or not, when we develop WordPress, we have a system that we've been using for a long time and it's been really successful for us. It gives like really unparalleled stability, security, an easy way for customers to edit their websites and And it's just been a really nice experience for our customers. But it's taken a long time to kind of iron out all the details. And we're constantly moving things around. Like, for example, we've had to switch hosting with a lot of websites several times in the last five to six years. And it's because even the hosting companies, they start off sometimes really good. But then what happened is when they start to move to go public, you know, their IPO or something, they start worrying more about margins and less about their customers. At least that's my opinion. And so then what happens is as they grow, they start cheating, in my opinion. Now it could be called whatever, you know, cutting things back or whatever. But then what you find is that things go not so well with their hosting platform. And so we're constantly adjusting and fine-tuning our process as we go. And this is kind of part of the equation. So if I shared you with some of the places we've hosted, you would probably be surprised. And I think I want to do one. I'm going to send a letter to our current host and basically just inform them of what I'm going to talk about. And then I'll make a decision about sharing that with you in the future. So the idea is that proper WordPress development I'll see you next time. Well, this is exactly the same thing. If you're serious about your business, then get serious about it. If it's a side gig, then use the, you know, even then, gosh, those do-it-yourself systems. And you know the ones I'm talking about. Most of those systems are just so problematic and so limited in scope. They exaggerate what they're capable of doing, and they make you think that somehow you're you're cheating the system. Well, one of the big things about the do-it-yourself systems versus WordPress, because this might be where you're thinking, is, well, why not just go to the do-it-yourself systems then and just let them manage it? Well, there's a real big problem with that. One of those is limited growth, and they're not as flexible as you may think. Remember that car analogy that I shared earlier. You want to have that freedom. Now, here's the other thing. Even if you started it And you grow your business using those systems. At some point, you're going to outgrow them. And it's going to be extremely painful because their systems are proprietary. So once you learn their systems but ready to go to something that's full-fledged like WordPress, you're going to have to relearn all that stuff. And you have to take all that content you put into it and then put it into another solution. Now, we've quoted out projects where the main part of the project– is just moving stuff from one place to the other. And so the moving process can be very cumbersome and very costly, which makes you feel stuck with it. And then if you've got the education or the learning curve on top of it, and you have people in your team already used to using it, you can imagine how difficult that would be to go away from it. While if you start off with something like WordPress, you can learn WordPress, and then you don't have to go through that relearning phase. And if you get tired of your developer, the pro side is that you can find other WordPress developers that can assume the project, assuming that they're competent. Now, again, competency is absolutely the biggest issue with WordPress. So let me give you an idea of this. I remember years ago, there was either a roofer or something. I forget what he used to do, but then what he did was he got into the WordPress, and he started selling these webinars where you could become a selling WordPress websites after about a week's worth of training. Now, it may have been a little bit longer than that. And then I had a client of mine who was in holistic medicine, and he wanted to get into WordPress. He took a six-week course and says, okay, I'm ready to go. Now, I've been at WordPress for over 20 years, and I can tell you there are still things that you learn. Now, we get under the hood. We get into a lot of the stuff behind the scenes to make it work out. But a person who goes to a six-week course or a week course or, you know, whatever, and then they start promoting themselves as a professional, you could imagine the amount of problems you could get into by simply using poor practices or lack the experience to make proper decisions. And so all this kind of bundles up. And so it's kind of like when you look at WordPress, it could be the most powerful, strong thing that you could have that could grow with your business. And you may never grow out of it. Like I've never had a client grow out of WordPress. And that could be your home base moving forward. Or it could be an absolute disaster where you're jumping from person to person to person. Now, I can tell you that I've seen both poor practices and and poor development. And I want to share one other thing with you. I've run across this lately. I was doing some coaching with a really, really good business, well-meaning business. And there were some things that I was able to show this company in just a few steps. And one of the questions as we're doing this was, well, why didn't the other person tell me this? And to pair They said, are they incompetent or were they just trying to cheat us? And, you know, my gut instinct was incompetence. You know, they got something that works for them. They're kind of just, you know, that company's just kind of, you know, they're stymied in limited knowledge. But it could be both. Now, when it comes to WordPress, the other thing, too, is, you know, we have white glove experience. but we also teach our clients how to use our system. And we do that really on a case-by-case basis. So if you could imagine, maybe this person wasn't teaching that company what to do because they wanted to charge for that service. And sometimes those charges are crazy. I mean, like$85 to change a phone number on a contact page or something like that. And then, of course, the other side of the scenario is they give you complete access to everything, and then it creates a whole other set of issues, as you can imagine. But as you look at when these people develop, it could just be that they're trying to pocket the money and want you to be completely dependent upon them. So there's a lot of those nuances. Now, for us, we have a hybrid solution. We can white glove it, but we prefer to teach you how to do it because we want our customers with us long term. So what we do is we teach them, but if they need us, we're here. So there's a lot that simply goes into even the admin of the website. So WordPress is not WordPress always. It's not because you find somebody who's going to do cheap and you think, you know, because, you know, I keep going back to the idea of how business thinks. Why am I paying this much for hosting when I should be paying that much? And, you know, why should I pay you to develop this when I can do this. It all sounds really good. On a topical level, it sounds really, really good. But when you get into the weeds of it and you understand that using premium licenses for a server and then managing those premium licenses for the client and then just charging them a percentage of what that server-wide license is, is good for everyone. And it increases the stability. So I think one thing I want to do is circle back around on security and let's talk a little bit about marketing. So security, as you could imagine, the bad guys are constantly trying to break into your website. Now, if you're not doing financial transactions on your website, that does not mean they don't want your website. They love to hack your website and send spammy emails from your website rather than their own resources. And so that's just one reason that they'll do it. They'll kill your reputation to protect their reputation. So you want to make sure that your website is secure if you care about your business reputation. They love to get in there. They love to cause problems. And in the world of artificial intelligence, that's becoming more and more of a challenge. And so you can imagine that if your developer is using a cheap theme with plugins and they're not being updated on a the security issues that you would run into just from that practice alone. You're basically opening the door up and you're becoming low hanging fruit for the bad guys. I mean, just think like, you know, you got one home that's got a security system and everything's set up. You got another home that's got the front door wide open and says, welcome, come in and take my stuff. You know, they're going to go for the low hanging fruit. And there's so much low hanging fruit in the world of WordPress that a lot of times they'll just bypass you up unless they have some kind of grudge against you or your calls if you're in a polarizing sector or something like that. So by using best practices, you also solve a lot of the security. And there's advanced security systems you could put into. And for some of our clients, we put more advanced security in those websites. So going back to it, and if you look at agencies Let's talk about agencies for a second. I've seen quotes from some of our competitors, and there are four or five X while we charge. Now, I'll argue that we're one of the most accredited web design creative agencies in the state of North Carolina. Now, I may be exaggerating that, but I've not seen one yet that holds more credentials than we hold. And so the idea is that a lot of these agencies, even though they look polished on the outside with their particular situation. Internally, they're using amateurs. I remember this nonprofit. They were a nonprofit. We actually started helping them out pro bono years ago because we believed in their calls. And I remember at one point they got suckered in. They went to a trade show and got suckered in with this agency that claimed to be a specialist in their market. And oh my goodness, the logos, the creative I mean I can still remember them labeling the colors in this weird way like for example when you use colors professionally you typically use something called a Pantone book and it has a numeric system that references different colors and that's kind of how you look at it and there's a whole technical thing into colors and all that and I still remember them choosing names and they were They were giving this to our client, and they were using words like soothing salmon. I wish I was lying to you. And it was the most horrible logo. Oh, my gosh. It was a disaster. And I'll never forget how actually horrible that was. But the point is, this was an agency that served a lot of businesses in the sector of what this company was. And they They just kind of rode that storm and just assumed that they were whatever. And anyway, it was an interesting situation. So the idea is that when you see stuff like this or you see agencies that are claiming to be marketing companies like the one out of Nashville I run into, and they're basically using a product on autopilot, you even see that the marketing is kind of squirrely. So the point is this. You can't go with an agency based on the size of the agency. You can't really go based on the smallness of an agency. You can't take it under your own wing. And so the idea is you've got to be very careful with who you put on your team and who you trust and don't go by price and definitely don't go based on just on if someone gives you a referral. I mean, because then you're trusting that that company is not just liking that person or whatever, but they could still be incompetent. So you've got to to really think through that, and especially when it goes full circle to WordPress, it is a very strong discipline. Now, the reality is WordPress is likely where you need to be. You go in and look at the different sites that are there, but you need to find a really good person to develop it. And you need to probably have an independent party audit your website. And so part of what you could do is you hire an independent party to do a couple high-level questions you could ask them to investigate is, one, where is this website hosted? Number two, are they using any free or cheap plug-ins or plug-ins that don't have a strong history of regular updates? Three, are they installing multiple plug-ins that perform the same function that could overlap and cause issues? The next one is, well, what theme are they using and where did they get it? And why did they choose that? And then you could have some performance metrics perform too. Now, of course, if you hire an independent party, you got to remember that they have a dog in the fight because they want to find the worst possible things wrong with your website and make the best possible calls if they're in the business. So you got to weigh all that stuff. But that would be some of the very high level things you could do. We do that all the time for customers where they want us just to audit and just find out if the website's healthy or not. And that's part of what we do here at Integris. So I do recommend that you do that at the very least. I would recommend also you look at credentials, how long they've been in business. Are they a true business? Are they a DBA? What's their infrastructure look like? Ask them to walk you through their development processes. If you're concerned that they outsource, ask them to put it in the contract that they don't outsource to anyone. You know, you going to have to get really tough with this and serious about it if you're serious about running your business. Because again, WordPress can absolutely be the strongest tool and asset for your company, or it could be the biggest anchor for your company. So hopefully this will help you navigate the world of WordPress a little bit and help you understand exactly what goes on behind the scenes of WordPress and understand why you see things that are So, I don't know the word. They vary so much is what I'm trying to say from agency to agency and freelancer to freelancer. And, you know, talking a good game versus being able to deliver something. Oh, marketing. That's what I was going to talk to you about real quick. You can also set up your WordPress site in a really good way for marketing, like the words like search engine optimization, paid advertising, landing pages. conversions, things like that, you can also really blow it up. And so here's a quick tip. If you're interested in SEO when you have a website developed, the first thing that you should be talking about is not picking out a theme and not picking out plugins and not doing all that. You really should be doing planning on the front end. Like, what are you trying to do and what are your goals? And then the whole infrastructure of your website should be built around that premise. If you've had your website developer, they say, hey, send me your about page info, send me your contact page info, send me a list of services for your business, and hey, don't worry about it, we'll use clip art for what we don't have. Not that Adobe Photo and stuff isn't, because we use that stuff, but it's like it still has to be used in the right portions, just like not putting too much salt in a a soup or something like that. But when you look at marketing, there are certain things that have to be set up correctly. And again, that's a whole other level that we focus on before we ever start development. So if you want to really zoom out and you want to really look at if your person has done their homework, ask yourself this. Did they run a competitive analysis? Did they ask you specific questions about what you're trying to accomplish? Did they show you actual keywords that are defined by Google as being effective keywords, and then they build your website around those effective keywords? Or did they just put things together with links to basic pages and basic content based on what you fed them? So as you can see, that's dramatically different. And so you never want to have a website developed and then go hire an SEO person. I mean, because a good SEO person is going to say it's built wrong and you've got to change all this stuff. Now, of course, there's tons of in and outs with that because, you know, I won awards on SEO and there's a lot of nuanced stuff that goes into search engine optimization. But this is absolutely the best practice. And so that's another clue to where if you just hired someone who installed a theme or was serious about building you a plan that's going to be successful. So in essence, maybe Make sure you get the right person. Make sure that they team up with you. Make sure you got a plan where they manage it and keep things updated. Make sure they got a plan to work with you and grow your business and massage that WordPress site as you go. And then make sure that what they're using is not a cheap way of building WordPress, but an effective way of building WordPress. And that's going to be your first steps in making sure that you have a tool that's going to help you grow. Thanks so much for attending Over the Bull. I look forward to seeing you again. Why I said attending, I don't know. Thank you for listening, and you have a blessed day, and good luck.