Building Websites

One of the reasons WordPress is used so widely (40% of websites) is because of its extensive plugin library. As I write this post, it has over 55,000 free plugins, and thousands of more premium plugins, all created by skilled (and some not-so-skilled) software developers.

Not all of these plugins are created equal though. Some are great. Some… not so much.

When choosing the plugins to use on your WordPress site, you need to be careful to choose trusted plugins that have a higher number of installations, solid reviews, and are well supported. Otherwise, it’s easy to get in trouble and bog down your site and/or cause security issues.

Here are five of the top five plugins I recommend. We use these on nearly all of our supported websites.

Yoast SEO

This plugin is by-far, the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It’s easy to configure, provides plenty of helpful recommendations, is very well-supported and is very lightweight.

Yoast SEO is installed and running on over 5 million websites as I write this post. It’s definitely a must have if you’re not already using it.

Check it out here – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

WP-Optimize

This plugin is an “all-in-one” performance plugin that handles some of the most impactful web performance best practices in a single plugin. It’s a great 80/20 approach to performance as it handles image optimization, database optimization, caching, minifying, and more.

It also automates most of these processes over time to make performance optimization simple on your website. About 10 minutes of configuring this plugin will have your site running much faster than ever before.

That said, you’ll need to be careful with the database and image portion of this plugin. You can get yourself in trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing. Contact us if you’d like us to set this up for you.

Check it out here – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/

Wordfence

I started using Wordfence a few years ago when I had a request from a client to lock down their website because they had some hacked links. This is a web application firewall that sits on top of WordPress to thwart off would-be attackers from gaining access to a website.

It has several security features, such as IP throttling and blocking, user lockouts, blacklisting, login security, proactive scanning, alerts, and more. Knowing how to configure it properly is a must however, so let us know if we can help you with that. You can get yourself in trouble and even lock yourself out of your own website if you don’t use it correctly.

Check it out here – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/

Really Simple SSL

This plugin is great so making SSL encryption simple on a website. It handles redirects from http files to make them load over https. This ensures all information shared on the site is protected, especially form data. You can configure it in just a few clicks and make sure you get that ever-important padlock in your browser.

Check it out here – https://wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-ssl/

Ninja Forms

We create a lot of forms for our clients, from contact forms to quote forms and even forms that do things such as patient intake. Ninja forms is one of the most popular form softwares out there. It makes creating forms very simple, offers a lot of addons if needed, and is quite lightweight and well supported.

Check it out here – https://wordpress.org/plugins/ninja-forms/

Need WordPress Help?

If you’re looking for someone to help create a new website for you, or manage your existing website, get in touch with us here to let us know your needs.

One of my pet peeves is when web designers, developers, and agencies build a WordPress website for a small business, and then leave it behind to be unsupported.

Think of your website like your house. You can’t just build and then never maintain it. Eventually life will pass it up and it’ll fall apart. Websites work the same way. The Internet is constantly and rapidly evolving. Just in the past 18 months as I write this post, WordPress has completely upgraded to a new editor and made massive strides in how its software operates. Yet, millions of websites have been left behind by careless creators who no longer support their work.

This is one of the largest reasons I started Louisville Web Nerds in the first place. Yes, building websites is important. It’s a large part of our revenue, but maintaining them and making sure they stay up to date is equallty as important. A website does no good if it gets so outdated that it doesn’t work.

Here is a list of 10 things to check on your website this year. This is not an exhaustive list, but it’ll point you in the right direction. If you need help with any of these, check out our monthly support plans to get the ongoing help you need.

Is your software up to date?

This is one of the most critical components of keeping a WordPress website up to date. WordPress evolves quickly. They release upgrades a couple of times a month usually, and plugin developers release software upgrades even more frequently than that.

Every week we upgrade dozens of websites for our clients to make sure they’re on the most recent software and WordPress release. Failing to do so will expose security flaws, cause software to work incorrectly, and could even result in fatal errors, especially if your website uses some of the more highly targeted plugins, like Elementor, etc.

Are you running at least PHP 7?

Another recent upgrade in the WordPress world is the evolution of PHP from version 5 to version 7. As I write this point, version 7.4 is the current, and is incredibly more efficient and secure than its predecessor. If you’re not running at least version 7, you’re leaving money on the table, because your website isn’t as fast or secure as many of your competitors.

If you don’t know how to check this, get in touch and we’ll help you out.

Is there any incorrect or missing information?

Things change over time. Photos get outdated. Prices change. Phone numbers change. Policies change. Services and Products come and go, and more.

Is the content on your website up to date and an accurate reflection of your business? If not, again, you’re leaving money on the table. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called a business and they tell me something that is on their website isn’t offered anymore, or worse, they have other valuable services that aren’t even listed.

Make sure your website reflects the current state of your business.

How quickly does each page load?

Performance optimization for a WordPress website is multi-faceted. There are a dozen or more different variables that affect the speed of a website. Anything from the host, to CDN usage, to image compression, to caching, to CSS and JS, and more, can effect how efficient a website loads.

And when you’re dealing with the short attention spans of web users, if your pages don’t load in a few seconds or less, they’re probably going elsewhere.

We run a full performance optimization on all of the websites we support, and would be happy to help with yours.

Are you missing any images?

Broken images are another common flaw on websites. People delete images without thinking, or databases get lost. Whatever the cause, if you have broken images on your website, it dramatically affects the usability and trust factor of your website.

Would you want to do business with an organization that has dozens of missing images on their website? Let’s get those fixed for you.

Can you find your website in Google?

Have you ever Googled the name of your business or your primary keywords to see what comes up? It’s a good idea to do so from time to time. Not only do search results change by the minute, but this is also a good way to check that your website hasn’t been compromised by break-in attempts.

Often times, a website can have small hacks living in it that are invisible to users and site owners, but search engine crawlers pick up. This will get a website banned from search engines very quickly, and this has a very detrimental effect on business.

Here’s a tip. Go to Google and type “site:yourdomain” and click enter. That’ll show you all of the pages Google has listed for you. For example “site:louisvillewebnerds.com”.

If you’re looking for help with SEO, we help a small number of cilents with SEO on a monthly basis. We only have a few of these spots left, so if you need help with this, get in touch soon.

Are there any SSL warnings?

Look at the top-left of your website. Is there a broken lock icon? Or do some of your pages throw insecure content warnings? SSL encryption is becoming commonplace on the Internet in today’s world. If you’re not running your website over an “https” connection, you’ll be left in the dust by your competitors in search results, as well as security of the transactions on your site.

Do you have any broken or incorrect links?

It’s also a good idea to check your links from time to time. Internal links don’t change often unless you have someone changing your URL structure, but external links change frequently, and not all website owners are kind enough to redirect them when they do. You don’t want to link to broken content.

Links can also be affected by hack attempts. It’s a common practice for hackers to invisibly redirect links to malicious websites without the knowledge of a site owner. This can not only get your website banned from search engines, but your users won’t get where they need to go, and they’ll be gone from your website in seconds.

Are there any other obvious errors?

Click around on your website for a few minutes. Are there any other obvious errors. Are things misspelled, or calendars not updated? Images not appearing correctly or pages not loading right? Does your site load well on a mobile device? Do your contact forms submit. There is a laundry list of things to check to make sure everything on a website works correctly.

Use your website like a customer would from time to time to make sure all is well.

Are you confident in your website security?

Last, but not least is website security. WordPress is used by over 1/3 of websites on the Internet. This makes it a target. However, there are simple ways to secure it that can thwart the vast majority of break-in attemtps that would otherwise compromise a perfectly good site.

If you’re not 100% confident that your site is secure, get in touch and we’ll help out.

Partner With Louisville Web Nerds

Feel free to go through the list above and check out your website to make sure all is working correctly. Or, if you don’t want to do that, get in touch with us to hire a partner who will do it for you. WordPress is what we do each and every day.

A domain name is the address of your website (louisvillewebnerds.com, for example).

You should always own and control your domain name. It’s the #1 asset you need to own to make sure your website is always yours. Not the hosting. Not even the website itself. It all comes down to your domain name.

Here’s why.

Over the course of my 15+ year web career, I’ve run into several situations where website owners lost control of their domain name. They either had to go through a legal hassle and shell out a lot of money to get it back, had to jump through all kinds of hoops to track it down, or had to buy a brand new domain name and start completely from scratch.

This typically happens for a few reasons:

• Someone else buys and sets up your domain for you while building your website and does not provide you account access (thus they completely control it).
• You lose the login credentials to your domain provider
• You let your domain name expire and someone else buys it

Here is why each one of those is a problem.

A Third-Party Buys and Controls Your Domain

If someone else buys and controls your website domain and does not provide you with the necessary credentials to manage it, then you have zero control over the domain if you ever want to do anything like switch web hosts, switch who manages your website, or do anything else that the domain requires.

I’ve seen this result multiple times in the highly unethical practice of agencies holding a domain hostage, and basically not allowing business owners access to do anything with it. This way it’s impossible to switch away from their services unless a brand new domain is purchased, which obviously isn’t ideal.

It’s unfortunate and infuriating when I see this, but it happens from time to time.

Always make sure you own your domain. If you don’t, ask for it to be transferred to you.

You Lose Your Login Credentials

One of the major pains about operating a business online is the vast amount of login credentials you have to remember.

If you forget your login credentials to your domain, when you do want to make changes, or have someone make changes for you, they cannot do anything unless they have the login.

As a best-practice as a business owner, you should ALWAYS keep an accurate record of all of the logins that are important to your business. You don’t want to be in a situation where you need to login to something and you have to ask one of your service providers to help you. They may or may not be available to do so.

You also need to make sure if your contact information such as your name or phone numbers changes, that you update it in anything critical. Otherwise you may not be able to recover your login if you lose it.

TIP: Rather than writing logins down in something that can be easily misplaced or stolen, use a secure third-party service like LastPass to store your logins. It’ll save you a ton of time and hassle. Believe me.

You Let Your Domain Expire

Another common occurence I see with domains is letting them expire. Not only will this cause your website to become unavailable, but you also run the risk of someone else buying your domain in the meantime. You then would have to buy it back from them if you want to regain control of your website.

It’s a very common practice for domain brokers to look for recently expired domains, snatch them up in bulk, and just wait for someone who needs them. For even tiny domains, it can cost thousands of dollars to fix a situation like this.

Always remember to make sure your domain is set up to auto-renew and your payment information is kept up to date. This way you never run into a situation where you lose your domain.

What to do Instead

As a business owner with a website, it’s your responsibility to make sure you own and control your own website domain.

To do this, make sure when you go to set up your website, you purchase your domain from a top domain provider, set it up to auto-renew, keep the payment information up to date, and store the login credentials somewhere safe.

This way if you ever need to make a change to your domain, you can get help with it if you need to, can change the password as needed, and any actions you take on the domain are totally in your control.

If you don’t currently own and control your domain, contact the person to manages your website and ask them to transfer to an account that you own.

They’ll still be able to access it there, and you’ll have the control you need to protect your website and business.

Need Help? Contact Us.

If you need help with any of your domain or website needs, feel free to get in touch with us at any time. We’ll be happy to chat.

When you run a business building and supporting WordPress websites, you see just about every type of website you can imagine, and one thing is almost always the same. The simpler websites are usually the better ones, especially with WordPress.

One of the strengths of WordPress is that is has a powerful plugin library that will allow you to extend the core functionality of the platform far beyond what comes with it.

But that can also be a weakness, because the more pieces of software, addons, plugins, etc that you use, the more complex, insecure, slow, heavy, and difficult to maintain your website becomes, and all of that adds up to headaches and lost business.

I won’t name any names, but every few months I get contacted by a business owner who is in over their head because someone built them an overly complex website with dozens of bloated and unnecessary plugins that bog down their webserver, are security vulnerabilities, and don’t work well when you try to update them. These websites might do some “cool” things, but they rarely create good user experiences, especially if they’re slow. It happens all too often.

Then what happens is the website ends up performing poorly, and those pieces of software have to be unraveled, updated, and replaced with things that will work and can be maintained – and that all takes a lot of time and effort.

A Simple Example of What to Do

Take the Louisville Web Nerds website as an example. It’s less than 20 core pages, but also boasts some very useful business features, such as secure email forms, the ability to accept credit cards, automated backups, Google Reviews access, server-side caching, a grid and block system, image compression, spam and break-in protection, a fully-functional blog, and more, but is built in a very lightweight manner that is easily maintainable. It uses no more than 12 plugins to do all of this and is under 100 MB in size.

It also explains all of our services in simple, plain English, and aims to keep a conversational tone. Text length is long enough for search engines to benefit from, but short enough for users to not become overwhelmed. Content is laid out in a simple and easy-to-digest manner. And the path for the user to find what they need and get in touch with someone is very clear.

Sure, it’s probably not perfect and could be improved, but it’s a very effective website, and is built in an incredibly simple manner.

What Not to Do

Again, I’m not here to call anyone out, so I won’t go into examples, but on the flip side of that, I’ve seen websites that are an equal number of pages and have less functionality, but because a wreckless designer tried to get cute and built things in a poorly optimized manner, they’re 10x the size, slow, bogged down, insecure, and unfriendly to use.

I’ve even seen websites get taken down by web hosts because they were too complex for their servers to support.

This typically happens with inexperienced designers trying to earn quick cash on the side, or people who are learning as they go. It’s fine. That’s how some people start (myself included at one point in time), but before you choose someone to build your website, you should make sure they’re experienced, have skin in the game, and are going to be there to support the website down the road.

On the web, size matters, complexity matters, attention-to-detail matters, and understanding how the Internet works matters. If a website is not friendly to use, it’s not likely to convert into meaningful leads for your business.

The Louisville Web Nerds Approach

When we sit down to create a website, we make sure to discuss the key features needed with the business owner. Then, we build those in the most efficient way possible for the website to run smoothly without using bloated and poorly supported plugins. These are typically things like contact forms, image galleries, slideshows, pricing grids, document downloads, login systems, etc.

From there, we build simple and easy-to-understand content using a secure and professional framework and themes that are easily kept up-to-date. Unless there is a strong need, we aim to build all of the content using only the most current version of the WordPress core editor and native WordPress features such as menus, widgets, and the built-in CSS customizer. This avoids future situations where out-of-date builder software becomes unsupported.

Then we add a few pieces of software in the background that speed up the site, keep it secure, and help to make sure it stays updated easily over time. And if there is ever a problem with any of it, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll be there to help fix it with our monthly support plans.

It’s actually often far easier to build or rebuild a website from scratch because this process is so refined and simple. This is one of the reasons our pricing is kept so competitive because there is no unnecessary bloat in our projects. They are kept very simple.

If you’re looking for a well-built and simple website for your business, get in touch with us. We’d be happy to help.

Since our founding, Louisville Web Nerds has become a trusted partner to dozens of companies in the Louisville, KY area, and even a few in other states.

Here are a few reasons to hire LWN to help with your website project.

We Design and Develop with WordPress

As I write this post, WordPress is used on 34% of websites on the Internet. That’s a full 1/3 of the websites online. For a single software platform, that’s an incredible number.

This is up from about 30% of the web a couple of years ago. Even with competitors spending millions of dollars on advertising and WordPress spending next to nothing, it still grows in popularity. This is a testament to its quality, extendability, support community, cost, and ease of use.

While we will work within other platforms from time to time, we design and develop almost exclusively with WordPress due to this widespread adoption.

We Build Websites for a Variety of Functions

Here are just a few of these functions:

• Online memberships for a fitness coach
• Marketing for law firms, gyms, construction companies, lawn companies, technology companies, travel agencies, heavy equipment resellers, and dozens of other types of small businesses
• Onboarding for a title company and a local veterinarian
• Lead-generation and parent information for Pre-Schools
• E-Commerce for a meal-prep company
• Online donations for non-profits
• Online applications for non-profit grants
• Content marketing for technology blogs
• Online Education websites
• And more…

All of these functions serve the website owners perfectly and specifically for their business and allow them to focus on growth rather than fighting with technology.

We Don’t Lock You Into Long-term Contracts

While some agencies require 6-month or even annual contracts, we operate all of our support plans on a month-to-month basis.

This means if you need to free up cash flow and want to take things into your own hands, it can be done without a major hassle. Just let us know and we’ll simply stop providing services and you’ll stop paying us.

After all, providing a service to a business is about providing value to the customer. If that isn’t true at any time, ending the agreement shouldn’t be a legal situation.

We Support Local and National Charities

Another goal of mine when I started the company was to be able to donate a portion of our profits each year to local charities and to help local families that might be in need. Since our founding, we’ve donated over $1,200 to local and national charities who support all different types of causes.

No, it’s not a lot yet, but maybe someday it will be, and every little bit helps.

We don’t do this to gain recognition or attention. We just do it because these are great organizations that are working to help people and to make the world better for everyone.

We Won’t Go Dark on You

Over half of our business comes from website owners who have been abandoned by the people who built their websites. Trust me, we won’t go dark on you.

This happens all too often. Companies build websites as quickly as possible, then move onto the next job without a trace. They provide no ongoing support when it comes time to keep them up to date and no training to the business owner.

These are often the lowest cost contractors, outsourced overseas developers, agencies that took crash courses, or friends of friends of friends who don’t have time to maintain the websites they build.

This not only results in poorly built websites that are difficult to maintain and break easily, but it also handcuffs the business-owner to not being able to keep their website up-to-date.

While LWN was officially founded in 2017, we’ve been building websites since 2001 and stand behind what we build. It is also a key income stream for our family, so we’re not going anywhere, believe me.

That’s why we developed our WordPress support plans that cover everything a business owner needs to make sure their website stays up to date. As I write this post, we’re currently supporting close to 20 websites with this service.

We’ve Been Building Websites for 18 Years

It’s possible to find folks who will build websites for a few hundred bucks, but in this business, you tend to get what you pay for. Those deals don’t often come with a whole of experience, service, or know-how, and those folks aren’t likely to stick around to help you down the road.

We’ve been building websites since 2001 and have been using WordPress since 2006. We’ve been through every major revolution of the web and understand it on a deep level. It’s hard to find that kind of experience just anywhere.

You’re already in the right place.

We’re a Bootstrapped Business That Keeps Your Costs Low

Since LWN was founded, one of our guiding principles has been that we wanted to save small businesses money by serving clients who don’t quite need the services of a large agency but need better service than a one-off web designer can provide.

To fit into this position, we must keep our own overhead costs low.

We do this by keeping facility costs incredibly low, making use of automation technologies for overhead tasks like accounting and billing, minimizing hosting, software, and hardware costs, keeping personnel costs low, and overall running a lean operation with exactly what we need, not anything more.

This means we aren’t forced to bloat our prices to cover things that customers shouldn’t have to pay for, and we’re able to pass those savings onto you.

We Understand SEO

A common misconception among business owners is if you launch a website, you’ll automatically be flooded with free traffic. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

There are a wide variety of things that must be done correctly on a website, and even outside of the website, in order for it to rank well in search engines and get free traffic.

Louisville Web Nerds has extensive experience with SEO and can work with you to improve your search engine presence over time. We even offer this service at a discount to our monthly support clients.

We Love Helping Small Businesses

If we end up working together, you’ll probably hear me say multiple times that I started this company because I wanted to provide small businesses with the web expertise they need to grow their businesses without the overhead of hiring a huge agency.

Business owners should be focusing on their businesses, not struggling with their websites. Louisville Web Nerds provides these services at reasonable rates, on a month-to-month basis, and with the experience of working with a close friend.

Ready to Start Your Web Project?

If you’re ready to get started with your web project, whether you need a full website design, monthly support, or one of our other services, we’re here to help.

If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to contact us. We’ll be happy to chat about your project.