WordPress Outsourcing | What and Where to Outsource?

WordPress is a popular and ever-expanding content management system. It’s become the go-to platform for many businesses and bloggers. While it’s easy to get a website on this system, it isn’t always easy to make and maintain a high-quality website on WordPress. It’s not as difficult as buying your own web domain and starting from scratch but it still takes skill and plenty of expertise about WordPress itself.

In response to the popularity of WordPress and the demand that comes with it, WordPress development and maintenance agencies have been founded. If you’re thinking about outsourcing your website, you might be wondering what tasks an independent agency can take on. That’s exactly what we’re going to take a look at here.

A to Z WordPress Development

Designing and developing a WordPress based website takes a lot of thought and skill. You need to think about the purpose of the website which can be difficult in and of itself. Then, you need to think about the journey you want your customer to take through your website. The most common purpose is to have them purchase a product or service.

Once you settle into what you want, though, you have to figure out how to get there. This step is where the business and marketing skills you’ve been using meet with the IT skills to start building the website.

These skills can be difficult to master and even if you have those skills. So, it might be a job you consider outsourcing. This will help make sure that your website looks clean and professional with no large technical problems that would ruin a customer’s experience.

PSD to WordPress Conversion

PSD stands for Photoshop Document. This is a file that lets you edit different parts of an image and save any changes you make. Adobe Photoshop was the first image editor that allowed its users to create custom designs for their websites.

Though, having design stuff done on your own or a professional designer isn’t the last step in WordPress theme development. There are quite a few steps to consider if you want to turn your  PSD file into a great WordPress theme.

First, you’re going to need to slice your PSD into separate files. This can be difficult in its own right. If you use a lot of images on one page, it’s going to slow things down. This, in turn, damages your ranking on search engines. Even incorrectly sized images can negatively impact the appearance.

The next steps move away from graphic design and into programming. This includes creating index.html, style.ccs, and a host of other files. Then, you’ll need to worry about adding functionalities.

This is a task that you can easily outsource to a WordPress maintenance service. Just like the other tasks we’ve looked at here, it’ll save you time and give you expert results.

WordPress Theme Development

A big part of web design on WordPress is the concept of theme development. Many refer to WordPress themes as an aesthetic term that changes the look of your website. While this is fundamentally true, a WordPress theme helps to customize customer experience and sets your website apart from a default WordPress website.

These can be especially helpful in breaking your website up into different sections rather than using a one-size-fits-all design. For example, if you have a section of your website for purchasing products and a separate blog section, you can ensure those pages look different and clean.

When you get started, there are three default themes. These standard choices are pretty straight forward but they also aren’t going to set your website apart from competitors’ websites. If you want a more personalized page, you’re going to be faced with a list of about 2,900 themes. Needless to say, this can be pretty intimidating.

You can outsource your WordPress theme development to an agency to narrow down your options by putting the choice in expert hands.

This isn’t necessarily a one-time task either. As your website grows and changes, you might find that different themes work for you. Continuing the example before, if you’re dedicating your own website to purchasing products, you might find that a single, uniform theme works best for you. Later on, when you add a blog section, you’re going to want to handle WordPress themes to fit this additional section.

This is why working with a long-term agency that offers custom WordPress theme development that you can contact about these changes is a good idea. Then, you can have these changes done quickly enough that there isn’t a lag in development that could cause a problem for customers.

WordPress Plugin Development

If there’s one thing that’s constantly changing about WordPress, it’s the plugins that users can use on their website. They cover almost everything you might need and WordPress describes them as ways to add functionality to your website that’s already available through WordPress.

Take a look at selling products through your website again. To exchange payments, you’ll want to use WordPress e-commerce plugins. This could include accounting software, support for payments, or customer relationship management – or CRM – plugins.

The reason that WordPress plugins are constantly evolving is that WordPress is a popular platform with a thriving, active community. WordPress as a company doesn’t make most of these plugins. Instead, they’re shared by other users for you and other WordPress members to use.

For example, some popular plugins include WordPress online support through Live Chat, the Cense AI Chatbot, and WooCommerce Product Wishlist.

The biggest downfall to WordPress plugins is actually the concept’s greatest asset: there are a countless number of plugins. The conundrum this creates is that new options that can potentially improve your website are coming out every day but you don’t have time to look through them all.

A lot of WordPress agencies include WordPress plugin development in their WordPress maintenance plans. So, they take a look at new plugins regularly and evaluate if they’ll fit with your website. This saves you hours of work and it makes sure you aren’t missing out on or misusing the plugins available to you. Some business owners are also concerned about the balance of using too many or not enough plugins on their websites. An expert analysis of these plugins can go a long way.

Error Troubleshooting

We mentioned earlier that part of a professional website is to make sure that it works smoothly on all fronts. However, checking for mistakes and errors shouldn’t be a one-time affair. You’ll want to keep this up as regular maintenance to keep your website in top shape.

There are some common errors that a WordPress maintenance agency can help you keep an eye out for. Not to mention, they can help you fix these errors which can be complicated in its own right.

Take one of the most common errors for instance – an Internal Server Error or 500 Internal Server Error. This is pretty generic and simply means that there was an error but your server can’t identify the issue. To fix this error, you’d have to go through a lot of different steps including checking .htaccess, increasing your PHP memory limit, deactivate plugins, re-upload core files and more.

Needless to say, this is going to take you a while – especially if you aren’t sure how to take these steps. A WordPress maintenance service can help you regularly comb through your website to not only identify errors like these but to fix them as well.

An essential part of this is that an agency will address this quickly. WPDandy has a 24-hour turnaround time for all website edits. This will help ensure that no corner of your website will stay down for too long. This is important when you’re trying to retain new traffic. If something on your site is broken for a long period, you risk turning away new traffic. So, having an agency on hand to respond quickly makes this a great task to outsource.

WordPress Security

Website security is absolutely crucial. Security issues can be a problem for anyone who interacts with your site. Solely your end, a security issue could mean an unwanted party could make changes to your website.

However, this problem can seep through to visitors of your website. This could include planting viruses into your website or even using malware to collect data. If you handle payments through your website, this can be a particularly severe problem because even if no one’s data is taken, a breach like this can still break consumer trust.

Of course, there are some average things you can do to protect your site. Strong usernames and passwords help to limit brute force attacks. Even then, WordPress doesn’t limit password attempts, so trial and error still has a chance of success.

Then, there are more technical attacks such as malicious redirects, drive-by downloads, pharma hacks, cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and a variety of other threats.

A WordPress maintenance service can help you out by checking your website for these types of threats regularly and defend against them. It’s a similar concept to the anti-malware software you may have installed to your computer but more responsive and more in-depth than simply flagging the malicious sites you visit and weeding out viruses.

Website Optimization

Having a well designed website has its advantages, but it isn’t nearly the same as having a well optimized website. To have your website being visited requires more than a great design. This task is known as search engine optimization (SEO) and the goal is to get your website as high as possible in search engine results when a related term is searched.

This is important because the lower you are in a search, the less traffic your site is going to get. The first two results in a Google search get about half of all traffic. By the tenth result, though, this number drops from 50% of traffic to a measly 2.4%. If you aren’t on the first page in the results, it’s unlikely you’ll gain a substantial amount of traffic.

Optimizing your site is a rather hefty task – especially if you neglect it from the beginning. A website’s design, loading speeds, cross-platform capabilities, and navigation difficulty can all play a role. Even keeping visitors on your website past their original purpose there can help your ranking.

You can outsource this job to a WordPress agency to ensure that everything is done correctly and that your website gets the clicks it needs.

Content Management Tasks

Aside from managing the technical aspects of building a website, the content of your website matters too. A website with no quality content isn’t going to hold any inherent value.

A WordPress outsourcing agency can help you by offering a unique content management system or CMS. These systems help to create, edit, organize, and publish content for your website.

You can usually decide which of these tasks you want to delegate and which ones you want to handle on your own. For instance, if you want to retain the task of creating content and outsource the task of correctly and efficiently publishing that content, you can personalize WordPress maintenance plans to fit those needs.

The content of a website also helps with search engine optimization. Factors such as using certain keywords and using internal links play a big role in helping increase and retain traffic. A WordPress expert can work with you to incorporate these ideas into your content.

Concluding Thoughts

Creating and maintaining a WordPress website is a time-consuming endeavor that takes a lot of skill. As a business owner, you might be interested in delegating this task to another party. However, hiring an in-house team can cost a lot of money. To save both time and money, it can help to work with an independent WordPress development agency. They can help with any and all of the tasks we’ve looked at here and any other unique problem you might run into.