9 WordPress Woes - Vertical Motion

Some of the most common WordPress woes are:

Core WordPress is Minimal: WordPress core website has minimal functionality. It’s meant to only be a simple website and blog. If you’re doing anything other than images and text, plugins aren’t optional.
Security Vulnerabilities: Because it’s so popular and widely used, WordPress is prone to hacks and spam bots. Plugins that aren’t updated or left disabled are vulnerable, so maintenance is required to keep security patches in place.
Debugging the 500 Internal Error (and more): It’s very common to run into the “white screen of death” or the 500 internal server error with your website – particularly if you’re trying to update a big theme or change a plugin. Sometimes the error codes and descriptions aren’t clear and you will need a developer’s help to work through the back-end FTP instead of the browser interface to figure out the problem and apply a fix.
Slow Page Speed: Plugins and themes can use a lot of resources on your server, and you can run into the issue of your server not being able to handle the requests, slowing it down. Here’s an example of a list of plugins that slow down your website: https://onlinemediamasters.com/slow-wordpress-plugins/
Maintenance: Some plugins & themes are not regularly maintained and when the core WordPress is updated, they become obsolete and can break your website. When looking for a theme or plugin, you need to ensure the plugin & theme are being updated regularly. And conversely, when a plugin or theme is updated, they can alter the site enough to create conflicts within other installed plugins. We recommend a test site for implementing updates in a safe space before going live.
Plugin Risks: Free plugins are readily available, but if you want their extended functionality you have to pay for the pro version. A lot of plugin sites don’t have a proper demo, so you aren’t 100% sure this plugin will work for your website. This cost can also add up really quickly. Since it’s an open source community, you can easily find similar free plugins with the same functionality. But what which one do you choose? Not to mention, some of these plugins can be incompatible with your theme or other plugins.
Website URLs: Some URLs are saved in the database and can be hard to update. When you change the sites URL or migrate to a different server, you run into the issue of URLs not getting updated to the proper home URL. You either have to install another plugin to fix the URLs, or update the set the default URLs in the config file. If not fixed, your site will end up with a bunch of broken links, which can affect your SEO ratings.
E-mail Spam: Automatic e-mails generated through WordPress have a higher chance of being marked as spam. For example, the Forgot Password e-mail generated by the system has a URL embedded with a token, and quite a few email providers mark this as spam, so it’s recommend to use a SMTP plugin to help improve your email rating.
No Automatic Backups: Most users don’t backup their website and WordPress doesn’t have a default system. So if a site is hacked or a user makes a critical error, they are out of luck. The free backup plugins are very bloated and CPU heavy. A paid service or their hosting back-ups are recommended.

Vertical Motion WordPress Best Practises:

Back-ups Daily: We back-up the website every evening to ensure we have you covered. You’re never more than a day out of date if you need to revert.
Monthly regular routine updates: We regularly update our websites to ensure plugins aren’t open for security threats. We monitor new plugin releases to make sure they still fit with the current website. If a plugin update fail, our team can resolve the issue and revert to the previous version of the plugin.
Code tweaks & changes: We can help make code changes if they’re above and beyond the content management system’s capabilities – menu updates, blog post layouts, and any other design element you need.
Content & graphics updates: If you want Vertical Motion to handle your posting and imagery changes, we are happy to do so! Because WordPress is easy to update, the hourly cost is low.
Training: Want to be able to do updates yourself? We can teach you the ropes!
Security: We monitor & block suspicious IP address attempting to enter your site, security vulnerabilities with plugins & themes, and suspicious file changes. In tandem with our backups, your site is always safe and secure.