Is WordPress Critical For Your Business?
We keep your site working for good
so you can focus on doing good work.
Dear Online Ethical Entrepreneur,
If your website is critical to your business, then I’ve written this letter for you.
If anything happens to your site, your business would, at best, slow down or, at worst, grind to a halt.
If your site goes down for even a day, you could miss bookings and sales and lose the trust of your customers who might then go elsewhere.
Having an online business gives you so much freedom – you can live and work from anywhere – but it also makes you incredibly vulnerable.
You’re in business to do good, but you can’t do good unless your WordPress website is around for good.
Like a fit, healthy body that’s running like clockwork, it will quickly start having problems if not constantly given the attention and nourishment it needs to not only survive, but to thrive.
Four common problems you might
have noticed with your WordPress website
Maybe you just have this general sense that there are probably ‘things’ you should be doing but you have no idea what they are or how you’d find out. And you have a lot better things you could be spending your time on than struggling with your tech skills.
Maybe it’s just an ageing website that is slowing down and affecting your visitors’ experience and your Google rankings.
Things that used to work don’t work anymore (mysteriously and for no reason you can point to). Maybe it’s a plugin not working as you expected, an error message you don’t understand. Maybe your site is giving errors when you try to configure something and you have no idea what those errors mean. Maybe you’ve been getting occasional warning emails about site problems from Google/Wordfence/ABC company. Are those emails important?
Doesn’t it seem as if there’s always something that needs your time and attention? It’s not simple to figure out why a plugin won’t do what it should or to get all the parts of a website to work nicely together.
An absolute life line … and a true gentleman
Thank you for all of your support. You were an absolute life line … and a true gentleman to work… Read more “An absolute life line … and a true gentleman”
Tremendous approach to customer service
I’m not his client; he spent time helping me because that’s just the kind of person he is. I learned all I needed to know about his tremendous approach to customer service. I would not hesitate to recommend him!
Mastery …
Sean takes professionalism to a level of mastery without intimidating or getting into jargon. If you are high on knowing about your business and your best customers and low on interest in learning the IT side of your website, Sean takes care of everything like the best concierge in a resort setting. He anticipates your… Read more “Mastery …”
Super responsive, thoughtful and never shies away from a challenge
Seán and the WordPressforGood team take time to understand what we need and to break it down for us in ways that we (as non-tech savvy therapists) can understand. Seán is super responsive, thoughtful and never shies away from a challenge. We truly appreciate the support that he has provided for our organization over the… Read more “Super responsive, thoughtful and never shies away from a challenge”
An incredible support
WordPressforGood has been an incredible support to our organisation. Their team increased our website speed exponentially, solved many day-to-day issues we dealt with and were available for other queries as they came up. Working with Seán and his team has been a pleasure; we’d recommend them to any organisation looking for support in developing and… Read more “An incredible support”
We couldn’t have hoped for a better partner
Seán is a constant support and fixer on our site and a relentless optimiser of our web needs. He’s in it for the long-haul, clear in communication and patient with our questions and requests – I really feel we couldn’t have hoped for a better partner. He led the recent rebuild of our website too… Read more “We couldn’t have hoped for a better partner”
Above and beyond the service I expected …
I first heard of Sean and Wordpress for Good through Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies. That meant a high recommendation in my book, and I wasn’t disappointed. Old issues on my website were quickly cleaned up and any questions that I had for Sean were quickly and thoroughly answered and taken care of. He… Read more “Above and beyond the service I expected …”
Stands out in every way
Seán went out of his way to be helpful even though what I contacted him about was not really his central business. Not only did he take the time to reply and to look at my website, but he made suggestions and followed up. In a world of endless advertising hype and off-shore pseudo-service folk,… Read more “Stands out in every way”
I am thrilled!
A big THANK YOU to Seán O’Connell who increased my website speed!! I want to recommend Seán O’Connell to everyone who has troubles with their website speed. Even though I am on a shared hosting with Godaddy, Seán and his team were able to speed up my site drastically. I am thrilled! — Dr. Katharina… Read more “I am thrilled!”
Always there, prompt, enthusiastic, creative and generous
Seán is an amazing professional. He is so knowledgeable about his domain that whatever odd problem I send him on either of my websites, he finds a solution. I am so busy with my businesses that I don’t have time to master the IT side of things, and yet I’m a perfectionist – that’s why… Read more “Always there, prompt, enthusiastic, creative and generous”
Spontaneously went the extra mile
Wow, awesome! I open my website and it flows. Just flows. Everything is smooth and fluid. Even me who knows this website inside out, I experience it like never before: I rediscover and enjoy how texts and images dynamically complement each other to deliver messages and convey the personality of my brand; nothing hinders anymore… Read more “Spontaneously went the extra mile”
More time and energy to spend on the running of my business
When I first launched my WordPress website for my business I had no idea of the need for ongoing website maintenance. Luckily I came across Seán. Seán lets me know when something on my site has been updated/changed. I’m not technical, so I often forget to check on things such as this and it is… Read more “More time and energy to spend on the running of my business”
Incredible, trustworthy and invaluable
Seán has been such a relief to me in the past year! He was incredible in explaining anything I wanted to know about my website, quickly proving trustworthy and invaluable. At this point I don’t even care what he’s doing behind the scenes anymore, all I know is that I no longer worry about my… Read more “Incredible, trustworthy and invaluable”
Amazing support!
As a busy small business owner with no technical knowledge (or interest!), I was so happy to have been recommended Seán! Séan has been an amazing support, taking over all things tech with my site, which has allowed me the time to spend on what brings my clients the most value. He’s increased the speed… Read more “Amazing support!”
He made all my problems go away
For years, my website needed someone to take a look under the hood. It had become very slow. Not that I noticed but a few colleagues pointed it out to me. I shrugged my shoulders, “meh” I thought. And then certain widgets weren’t working. I asked a friend who knows about these things what I… Read more “He made all my problems go away”
The world needs more of this
I feel so great about the decision to work with you, Seán! Your intention to serve people beyond the important work you do to make their websites safe and efficient – really connecting human to human – is clear and impactful. The world needs more of this. I especially appreciate the document you’ve made for… Read more “The world needs more of this”
And then there are all those technical changes
Change is happening in the online industry at an ever increasing rate and it's hard to keep up. More than that, you’re not even sure which changes you should pay attention to.
You've read that “you really should have XYZ on your site” but you aren’t sure if you should do it or not. Who can you ask?
Google/WordPress/Someone else is making a big change to the way they do something online; do you need to change something on your site?
You're never quite sure if you’ve done things right, like installing an SSL certificate (or you have no idea what SSL even means). Should you buy one or use one of those free ones you've heard about?
The bottom line:
your website is a living creation
that needs constant attention
Until now you may have managed to do it all (or most of it) by yourself …
But your business is growing and your website needs to reflect that. You find it more and more difficult to make the changes you need on your site to keep up with what you are doing in your business.Get some help Get some help
It’s not just the problems you’re noticing, it’s realising that you don’t know how to do the things you need to do.
Many entrepreneurs I meet are, like you, generally overwhelmed and frustrated with the whole thing.
You might come to me when you start to have knots in your stomach because you're starting to get frightened of this overwhelm. The scary news is that you should be scared; just check some of these all-too-real statistics below:
The three big (and totally justified)
website fears
Fear #1: My cobbled together website will hurt my credibility.
Your prospective customers will not have a favourable impression of your business because it’s slow to load and to respond, forms don’t work or the site doesn’t look well on their mobile device.
- 52% of your visitors will leave your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load and Google uses speed as a ranking factor
- Every 1 second it takes your site to load means a 12% drop in conversions, according to Google
"Faster sites create happy users ... when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there." -- Google Webmaster Central Blog
Fear #2: My current visitors will have so many problems using my website that they will just stop coming back.
Things just aren't working the way they should, for example:
- Your visitors aren’t getting their emails from your site and you aren’t sure you’re getting all theirs
- Or a widget on your website isn’t working for them and you have no idea why
- Or they bought your online product a week ago and they still haven’t got access to it
Fear #3: My site will crash or be hacked .
You just aren’t sure that you're doing all you should be doing to keep your site safe. If it goes down or gets hacked you’d be helpless - you could lose it all!
- WordPress vulnerabilities soared by 30% in 2018
- Hacking rose 32% in 2017 according to Google
- Google finds 30,000 new hacked sites every DAY
- 98% of WordPress vulnerabilities are related to plugins, some of them from the official WordPress plugin library
- Many websites are still running old insecure versions of PHP (the language WordPress is written in) and there will be no more fixes for problems in those versions
It's all Much more complex Than you first imagined
You’re sure there’s a bunch of free YouTube tutorials you could watch that would teach you how to fix it all but you don’t even know where to look (or what to look for). Where do you even start? And do you have time to learn it all?
Instead of hoping nothing bad happens, you wish you had someone you could call or email to do some troubleshooting, to handle your website maintenance and to problem-solve any online technical problems.
What might take you three hours might take someone who knows what they’re doing just five minutes.
And so, you’ve come here to my website. For that I thank you.
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