WordPress web design in Newcastle, NSW: a site you can update yourself.

Software that runs on your hosting and lets you edit your own website through a login screen. Its add-ons, called plugins, are what let it do things it was never built to do.

The appeal is straightforward. Somebody who is not a developer can log in, change the words on a page, add a photograph and publish it. That single feature is why so many small business sites run on it.

What it is made of

• The core software. Installed on your hosting. It updates several times a year and the updates matter.
• A theme. What decides the look. Either bought, or built for the business.
• Plugins. Add-ons for forms, bookings, shops, galleries. Each one is somebody else's code running on your site.
• Your content. The pages, posts and pictures, kept in a database. That is a separate thing to copy, and the copy is a backup, which is a saved copy you can put back when something goes wrong.

The last three are where both the flexibility and the trouble come from. A site with a handful of plugins is straightforward. A site with thirty is a small software project nobody agreed to run.

Sites with a lot of pages that somebody edits often. If a business publishes weekly and wants to do it without ringing anyone, this is what that looks like.

There is a real case for it and it is worth stating clearly before the costs.

Where it fits

• A site somebody edits weekly. Publishing, price changes, new services. Nothing beats being able to do it yourself at nine at night.
• A lot of pages. Once a site is past a few dozen pages, having a system managing them is worth the overhead.
• Something it already does. Shops, memberships, bookings and events all have well travelled add-ons. Building those from scratch is a much bigger job.
• Finding somebody to work on it. It is common enough that another developer can pick it up, which is worth more than it sounds.

Updates, backups and somebody watching. Those are not optional on software that is installed on your hosting and reachable from the internet, and they are the part quoted least often.

The build price is the visible number. The running cost is the one that gets discovered, and it is the same shape on every site of this kind.

What the upkeep is

• Updates. The core software, the theme and every plugin. Left alone, this is the route most break ins take.
• Backups kept off the machine. Both the files and the database, restorable without a support queue.
• Somebody watching. An update occasionally breaks a page, and a site nobody checks stays broken until a customer says so.
• Plugin sprawl. Add-ons collect over the years and each one loads on every page, whether it is used or not.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre puts updates and backups at the top of its small business basics for the same reason: they are the cheap things that stop the expensive ones.

When a site is a handful of pages that rarely change. A site built as plain files has nothing installed to update, nothing to break in, and it loads quicker, which is what we build now.

Most Newcastle service businesses have a site of ten or fifteen pages that changes a few times a year. For that shape of site, running a piece of software to serve it is work without a return.

The alternative is a site built as plain files. There is no login to break into, nothing installed that needs updating, and pages arrive faster because nothing is being assembled when somebody asks for one.

That is what we build now, and it is worth saying plainly on a page about WordPress. We still work on WordPress sites, and we still move businesses off it when the upkeep is buying them nothing.

The trade is real and it goes both ways. A site built as files means asking us for a wording change rather than logging in, so a business that publishes every week is better off where it is.

Count your pages, count how often you change them, count your plugins, and find out who is applying the updates. Those four answers settle it without anybody's opinion.

1. Count the pages

Under twenty and rarely changing is one answer. Fifty and growing is a different one.

2. Count how often you change them

Honestly, over the last year. Owners overestimate this, and it is the number that decides whether the login is worth its upkeep.

3. Count the plugins

In the admin screen. A long list is not automatically a problem and it is always worth reading, because half of them are usually unused.

4. Find out who applies the updates

If the answer is nobody, that is the finding. It is also the most common answer on the sites we are asked to look at.

5. Check when the last backup ran

And whether anybody has ever restored one. A backup nobody has tested is a belief rather than a backup.

6. Then decide

Keep it and pay for the upkeep, or move to something with no upkeep in it. Both are reasonable. Keeping it and paying for nothing is the one that goes wrong.

Tidying an existing WordPress site is quick. Moving off one takes longer, and most of that is rebuilding pages and pointing every old address at its replacement.

The order it happens in

• The site is inventoried. Pages, plugins, updates and backups. This is where the decision gets made rather than argued.
• Either it gets tidied, or it gets rebuilt. Tidying is removing what is unused and getting the updates and backups running. Rebuilding is the longer road.
• It launches and gets watched. Old addresses pointed at new ones, forms tested, then a fortnight of checking nothing quietly stopped working.

The part that stretches a move out is always the content, not the building. Every page has to end up somewhere, including the ones nobody remembers.

Ask who applies the updates, where the backups go, what happens when an update breaks a page, and whether you can take the site elsewhere. The update question is the one with a bill behind it.

We do this work in Newcastle, so we are not neutral. These are the questions we would want asked of us.

• Who applies the updates, and how often? A name and a frequency. On the WordPress sites we still look after, it is us and it is monthly.
• Where do the backups go? Somewhere other than the same machine, restorable without a support ticket.
• What happens when an update breaks a page? Somebody notices before a customer does, which means something is checking.
• Can I take the site elsewhere? A full copy, files and database, without a fee for asking.
• Am I locked in? Ours runs month to month and always has. Any arrangement you cannot leave at the end of a month is worth a second look.

Plenty of Newcastle businesses run their own WordPress site well, and the part worth handing over is usually the updates and the backups rather than the editing.