--- title: Exploring WordPress Website Development with Laura Bailey date: 2021-05-25T05:00:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-10/wordpress/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)![Laura Bailey](https://website101podcast.com/uploads/hosts/_200x200_crop_center-center_none/laura-bailey-revy-web-design.jpg)Guest Laura Bailey Laura founded Revy Web Design to design and build bespoke WordPress websites for small to medium businesses in Revelstoke, BC. [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/revywebdesign/)[ ](https://facebook.com/revywebdesign) Season 04 Episode 10 – May 25, 2021 54:10 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Exploring WordPress Website Development with Laura Bailey  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-04/S04-E10-wordpress.mp3) We talk to Laura Bailey of Revy Web Design all about Wordpress, her journey from IT technical support in the UK to running a Wordpress agency with employees in a small town in British Columbia Canada. ### Show Notes - Laura, talks about her role as a business owner, website designer, and building bespoke websites for her clients. - The difference between a pre-built theme and a theme builder such as Elementor. - Lauras default plugin stack for WordPress sites. - Rank Math SEO vs Yoast - Optimizing WordPress sites for performance - Updating WordPress and Plugins - Website Maintenance - WordPress Hosting ### Show Links - [Revy Web Design](https://revywebdesign.ca/) - [Elementor](https://elementor.com/) - [Divi](https://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/) - [Oxygen](https://oxygenbuilder.com/) - [Beaver Builder](https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/) - [Classic Editor](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/) - [Gutenberg Editor](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/) - [Deactivate Gutenberg](https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/) - [Crocoblock Suite](https://crocoblock.com/) - [Advanced Custom Fields](https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/) - [The Dangers of Over Reliance on Plugins in Website Builds](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/the-dangers-of-over-reliance-on-plugins-in-website-builds/) - [Rank Math SEO](https://rankmath.com/) - [Yoast](https://yoast.com/) - [Imagify](https://imagify.io/wordpress/) - [WP Rocket](https://wp-rocket.me/) - [Page Speed Insights](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) - [Kinsta (web host)](https://kinsta.com/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Mike:** Hello and welcome to the website 101 Podcast. I'm Mike Mella and Sean Smith is here too. Hey, Sean, how's it going? It's growing great, Mike. How are you doing? I'm doing really well, excited about this episode because we're going to talk about WordPress. Everybody's favorite CMS, right? **\[00:20\]** **Sean:** Yeah, our second episode about WordPress, it's a broad topic, always a good opportunity bring Brad and we have a special guest that you're going to introduce for us. **\[00:30\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so this is Laura Bailey from Revy Web Design and she works out of British Columbia and she actually reached out to us through the show and asked about some kind of contract-related stuff, which we may get into later on a little bit, but we might save that for a different episode. But anyway, we realized that Laura is sort of an expert in WordPress and you and I are not and we thought we'd have a rotted and talk about stuff, so Laura, welcome to the show. **\[00:59\]** **Sean:** Thank you for having me. We're excited to have you on board. Great to meet you both, thank you. So, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Where are you from? How long have you been doing **\[01:11\]** **Laura:** web development? Stuff like that? Sure thing. So, as you can probably tell, I am not Canadian. So, I do live in Canada. I live in a place called Revelstoke BC, which is, I want to say, is on the border of BC and Alberta, but on the border is like, it's probably five hours still to the border. So I'm originally from England, moved here in 2016. I've been doing, kind of like, started building websites in 2013 when I first built my own blog, but I never offered it as like a service to anyone else. **\[01:46\]** **Mike:** What kind of stuff were you doing before you were doing web design then? Or before you're doing word press, the word press work that you do. **\[01:53\]** **Laura:** Oh boy, so I used to work at a university. So I lived over in Kent in the southeast of England. And I worked and lived just by the University of Kent. And I worked on an IT and library support desk. It was part-time job. So all day I would fix computers for the students and that kind of thing. I've always been into computers anyway, and the kind of person that would quite happily spend my entire summer when it's boiling hot outside. and I'm sat in front of a computer, and I'm okay with that. So, yeah. It's not a lot like me. **\[02:25\]** **Mike:** The warm glow of HTML, right? **\[02:28\]** **Laura:** Yeah. It's just that's my happy place, right? A lot of people find that just painfully boring, and especially me living in a mountain town that's very active where people are out climbing and canoeing and whatever not. And I'm sat here in front of a computer with the mountains outside my window. It seems a little bit crazy, but yeah. **\[02:43\]** **Mike:** Well, at least you can see them from your window. That's more than most people can say about mountains. **\[02:48\]** **Sean:** Indeed. So you built your first website for yourself. You said in 2013, what led you to decide that you wanted to do it as a profession to make money? How did you move from doing technical support for computers into web development in in Revelstoke, British Columbia. **\[03:14\]** **Laura:** So one of my coworkers, he worked on this help desk. He also, he had a blog and he was tinkering away so he was on the blog at the same time as trying to help customers. I guess getting paid to just do his own personal hobbies. And I was just took an interest in it and I was like, hey, what are you doing? And he just showed me around, is like how things work? And I was like, oh boy, you're able to edit our websites. something that is on the internet, using something that seems so easy to use. And so, yeah, based on that, that just inspired me to then create. Because the blog that I started it was like, I was trying to document my adventures and kind of thing. It really boring stuff, but I just wanted to have a place where I could store all my photos and just write pretty much. And so that just kind of like I just grew over time. I would post probably like once a week or so and then I started this like following. People actually like reading my stuff. And I was like, wow, it's crazy. And then **\[04:19\]** **Sean:** That's really cool. **\[04:20\]** **Laura:** I'm a rock climbing instructor, little segue. That's something that I do on the side as well. **\[04:26\]** **Sean:** And then living in the Rockies, you're in the right spot. **\[04:29\]** **Laura:** Exactly. And then so I came over to Caledad to teach rock climbing. Nothing to do with websites. And the lady who employed me, he gave me a job here. She knew that I was good with computers, but she was terrible with computers. So she was like, Laura, I've got this website. Do you want to just make it better? And I was like, well, it's not really my thing, but I know about WordPress. And it was already built on WordPress. So I really had that level of familiarity. And then suddenly she was like, how about I pay you to manage my website? And then I was like, well, I just feel like I'm kind of just, just tinkering around. I'm not really doing anything professional. And this was, yeah, this was about five years ago. And then it's just kind of exploded from that. Like she was my first client and outdoor tour operator. And now I have probably pushing about 50 clients. So it grew fast. **\[05:24\]** **Sean:** Wow, 50 clients. **\[05:26\]** **Laura:** Yeah, it's quick. Yeah, so combing to be good to me. **\[05:29\]** **Sean:** All right, so I gotta skip over the whole WordPress thing. I have a question about that. Not how did you get 50 clients? Because I don't think that'd be easy to explain. I wanna know is how do you manage 50 clients and all the tasks or things that they may require? What if you had 40 of them come to you at the same time and look COVID-19 started, I need a little notice bar across the top of my website. **\[05:56\]** **Mike:** Yeah, is it just you doing all of your work or do you have a team? **\[06:00\]** **Laura:** How's that going? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So it used to be me, just me, and actually within the last three weeks or so, I realized that I only have so much capacity to help people, and I'm getting, again, maybe only like 25 emails a day, but they're all like, hey, can you do this, can you do that? And some of them are bigger tasks than others. So my work, life balance, the last year has been pretty abysmal. I have had huge anxiety just trying to leave the house. I'm worried if someone's website is going to go down, which they've never gone down, but it's just a rational thing where I just say, I'm worried that someone's going to need me to update something on the website, like right there and then. So I was like, well, this is not very good for my health. So I was like, well, let's let's me think about sharing my workload. And so I actually, I was part of like a mentorship program that was actually facilitated by the BC government. And through that, I met somebody who is a photographer but also extremely good at admin work. So she was like, hey Laura, I can manage your inbox while you're actually doing your website designing. And then, because I find that my answer emails takes up a huge chunk of my day. So I'm the bottleneck in my own business. If I can't be designing websites, I can't be finishing websites. So she's then helping with that. And then also because she's a photographer, suddenly I have a photographer on my team. And then I'm like, oh boy, I think I'm onto something. Let's go and see if I can find another website designer that can help me build websites. So now I've hired, in the last week, I've hired two website designers and a photographer and an ad, well, he was also a doubles open app admin person. So my business is just suddenly just exploding. And suddenly I can actually manage those 50 clients which I was doing by myself working like 12 hours a day, like seven days a week, not being able to leave the house because I'm being afraid of, you know. So. Good for you. **\[08:06\]** **Sean:** Congratulations to you on the rapid growth and managing that transition from one man shop to having employees. **\[08:14\]** **Laura:** Thank you. Well, it was kind of like, I either go and live on an island in the middle of nowhere and just pretend it's not happening. Or I see this as an opportunity to grow into a business. because it took me a long time to get over the whole imposter syndrome. People want to pay me money to build websites and they actually really like the websites I'm building. So yeah, so I'm like, well, I'm offering a service for my community, I'm actually helping people in my community, businesses grow, businesses get through the whole COVID-19. So like I'm like, well, let's do this, let's make it. Let's stand up to it. **\[08:51\]** **Mike:** So do you consider yourself a developer and a designer or because you mentioned you hired designers? Do you personally do the design actually like look and feel that kind of stuff as well? **\[09:01\]** **Laura:** Yeah, so full disclosure, I am not a developer. I am, you guys, you sit there and you do code all day, presumably, that's actually your happy world that you live in. That is not a world that I want to put my toes into it a little bit, But I don't have the capacity or the interest, I guess, in learning how to code. I'd rather bring in a developer to do that, help me with that. So I think you're referring to one of your previous podcasts. I think you're referring to them as a website assembler where you're taking templates and then you're just moving the elements around. So it kind of does sound like I'm undermining myself there. I guess, but yeah, I'm very much like, I still want to say I'm a website designer. I do build custom bespoke websites using WordPress. **\[09:55\]** **Mike:** Okay. We know a lot of people who use WordPress where the first thing they do is ask a client to find a theme that they want and then that person will install the theme and that's it. It sounds like you're more of a changing things here and there type person. Would that be accurate? **\[10:17\]** **Laura:** Yeah, that's absolutely spot on. When I first started using WordPress, like with my blog, I did absolutely. I purchased a theme. It was like 80 bucks, something like that. And it took me a long time to pay that 80 bucks. Like, it was a lot of money to be back then. And especially because I was in the UK, I was like, oh, 80 dollars. Like, what was that going to look like? But then I was like, oh, this is how it works. And then I saw, for my first client here in Canada, I bought her a theme. But then I was like, well, she runs all these different activities. This theme isn't quite going to necessarily meet her needs. And it had extra functionality that she was just never going to use. So yeah, that's how I started off buying themes and then just implementing them on the websites. **\[11:03\]** **Sean:** Okay. But it sounds like now that you're not just buying the themes, you're taking in an email that we had, I forget, I think you said it was Elementor or like a theme builder that you use, so you're kind of designing the website look inside of WordPress. Is that a fair assessment? **\[11:27\]** **Laura:** Yeah, I'd say that's pretty accurate, so I'm a huge Elementor junkie. That's my go-to for designing WordPress websites. And for anyone who uses WordPress and who uses the other like page builders, I would say like, it's so worth just taking the time just to learn a teeny minute bit about Elementor and you will realize what you're missing out on. **\[11:54\]** **Sean:** Both making myself are not WordPress people as you're probably aware as being a long-term listener of the podcast. How about telling us what you can do with Elementor? Just a rough outline, because what I'm imagining is that you're dragging and dropping pieces around and maybe clicking a couple of things to add some functionality. But honestly, I don't know. So I would love to know more about how you can customize the design and provide functionality for your clients. **\[12:27\]** **Laura:** Yeah, sure thing. So with Elementor, you build all of the pieces the are made up of the website. So you build the header, you build the footer, you build the individual pages. So you're building like the era, you know, a page not found for a full page, you're building that page. Whereas if you're buying a template off the shelf off like an template monster something like that, that's already done for you. So it's giving you that level of like flexibility. So you can actually build a website exactly how you want it to look. But you have to take the time to build those elements out. **\[13:08\]** **Mike:** I've built a few sites on WordPress for clients, and I've used Divi before, which I know is sort of like that where you can sort of actually, you can get really deep into it where you can drag the borders of a box around to change the padding, and it gives you an amazing amount of control. So I assume Elementor is basically like Divi, but I'm getting the feeling you like it better than Divi, right? Is that right? Yeah. Which is fine. **\[13:37\]** **Sean:** Have you tried other theme builders, like Divi or Oxygen, I think, is one, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know the names of them, I used to, I just can't recall them right now. **\[13:48\]** **Laura:** Yeah, so Divi is very popular. There's also a Beaver Builder, there's one called Motopress, which I used a few years ago. I've used them all, and generally, if I get a new client, they already have a page builder that's installed. So I have to have some familiarity with it or to learn quick. And to be honest, I would say if you're, if you're new getting into WordPress, Elemental is probably going to be a little bit intimidating. And that's why Divi is so successful because it makes it easy, but I feel like if you start with Divi, you're very quickly going to realize that you can do more with Elemental. Elemental is like the bigger brother of Divi. **\[14:29\]** **Mike:** I see. **\[14:30\]** **Laura:** a bit stronger, a bit bigger, that kind of thing. You can do more. **\[14:34\]** **Sean:** More of a learning curve, though. **\[14:36\]** **Laura:** Well, there is quite a learning curve because there's so much functionality and widgets built into it. So you're learning how to build all those things, but you've got to learn the basics first. You've got to learn what makes a website like responsive. You have to build it like three times. So you have to build it for a computer screen, you have to build it for a tablet, and then you have to build it for a phone. So you've got to get that stuff right first before you even start learning how to build an accordion or testimonials, that kind of stuff. So there is a huge learning curve and it'll take you a while to realize like what margins, what's padding, what do you do if you do this? But a lot of it's trial and error, but they do have great resources on how to fast track that, they have YouTube video so you can pick it up real quick. **\[15:25\]** **Mike:** Is Elementor, it's not free, is it? **\[15:28\]** **Laura:** So they have a free version. And to be honest, they give you tons of functionality with the free version. But I paid for it real quick. I was like, I'm impressed. So I was like, let's upgrade. Let's go premium. Because for example, they have contact forms that are built in. So you don't have to use a form builder, a different plugin. I mean, forms can get very complicated. So like elemental forms might not necessarily like meet your needs completely. But out of the box, like you get a little bit of a nice wall builder. And then with the premium one, like you're, that's probably going to meet, like, probably 80, 90% of like your needs. **\[16:12\]** **Sean:** So how much is the premium version? Is it, is it per site or can you get like a bulk rate as a developer, like I buy, I buy 20 licenses or something? **\[16:24\]** **Laura:** Yeah, so they actually recently completely restructured their pricing plans. And I got grandfathered it in. Thank goodness, I've been using it for, I guess, like a couple of years now. So yeah, I was on a plan that now is suddenly 1,000 bucks, whereas I paid like 200. So they were really good. They're just like, yep, you can carry on paying the 200, but you're still going to benefit from the $1,000 plan, which is like, yeah, I'll take that. Thank you very much. It was pretty nice, nice little hat tip there. But yeah, I've just got it up on my screen here. And if you can get a single-use license for $50 US dollars a year, and that's absolutely worth it, for what you can get, I mean, in terms of, because they do have their own templates, too. So pre-built templates with Elementor. So it's a good decision just to go for the premium version. **\[17:18\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so it's a subscription-based type thing where you pay so much a year, eh? **\[17:22\]** **Laura:** And that's pretty standard. Like that's the same with DV, same with Bigger Builder, or the other page builders too. **\[17:27\]** **Sean:** I have a question for you. So it's a subscription base. You build a site for your client. And let's say for whatever reason, they decide to not work with you anymore. Hopefully it doesn't happen, but let's just imagine that. And their website gets old and they decide that they're going to fix it themselves or they hire somebody else to fix it. How are they able to update to a later version because you control the licensing, right? Yeah, so how does that work? **\[17:59\]** **Laura:** That's never happened to me. I guess I'm pretty lucky, like I've never lost a client. No one's moved on. But how it would work was I would probably take the license away and they would need to buy their own like one-site use license. But to be honest, I'd probably be really nice let them keep it. It depends on the circumstances entirely, I think. It would probably be less of a headache just to say, hey, just, yeah, get your own license. It's a annual subscription, so it would make more sense if I just said, hey, you should probably get your own license, because I don't want to, like, if they're no longer affiliated with me, I don't want to **\[18:41\]** **Mike:** be necessarily maintaining that. Yeah. Yeah, and you'd swap out the license number in the back end or something like that, I assume is how it would work, right? **\[18:52\]** **Laura:** Well, so it's linked to your account. So like when I activate the license on a website, it would log into my elemental account. So say, for example, I guess, if I change my password, I'm not sure how this would work, but it might boot it out. But I don't think so because, like, if you had tons of websites and you change your password, that would probably be problematic. So I think they're probably tougher enough to realize that you're probably going to be changing your password. But yes, especially with the $1,000 plan, you get a thousand websites on your license. Yeah, can you imagine that we could go in back in. But yeah, and then you can actually go into the elements or you can log into your account, your profile, and you can you can revoke licenses too. So you don't have to be able **\[19:35\]** **Sean:** to gain so much. So what I expect that you maybe don't know the answer to this question because you said you haven't lost a client. What do you know or imagine would happen if you revoke a license, like the client relationship broke down or for whatever reason, does their website stop working or they just don't get updates anymore? **\[19:58\]** **Laura:** They just don't get updates and they can't use the premium plugins. But I don't have it in me just to just pull the carpet underneath someone. I'm going to give them a heads up. **\[20:09\]** **Sean:** I'm going to do some kind of, like, uh, yeah, I wasn't suggesting that you'd be like cold-hearted. I would just, the idea came into my mind, you know, like sometimes a relationship breaks down or for whatever reason, like maybe they're not paying you your monthly retainer anymore and it's come to that point, I was just curious what would happen to them. But if you don't know, you don't know, I totally get that. **\[20:37\]** **Mike:** That makes sense that it would roll back to the free version or something and things that are in the premium you'd stop You wouldn't be able to use anymore or something right? **\[20:44\]** **Laura:** Yeah, but it's not gonna like remove that functionality from the site. It just means you can't build New stuff with the premium plugins, so yeah, okay. Yeah, that's cool **\[20:55\]** **Mike:** So okay, so we've talked about site builders a bit. Let's talk about plugins WordPress as everyone knows is and we skipped ahead we didn't even mention exactly what WordPress, or at least there's what WordPress is, right? It's a content management system that powers most websites on the internet. We can skip through that part. But plugins is sort of like the bread and butter of WordPress, that's how the whole ecosystem is all about all these plugins. So how do you feel about that? What kind of plugins do you use? Do you have advice for website owners about how they should go about finding plugins, **\[21:30\]** **Laura:** anything like that? Yeah, sure thing. So that's one of the things that makes WordPress brilliant is because they have plugins. And these plugins are made by people all around the planet. It just makes a difference from, say, Wix or Squarespace, where it's very much in-house. They're developing the plugins. So yeah, there are a few plugins that might go to ones. I have a plugin stack. So when I'm creating a new website, I'll always install that plugin stack. So do you want me to just go through and just list **\[22:01\]** **Mike:** a few of them? Yeah, sure. That sounds great. A few of your favorite ones. Yeah. Yeah. **\[22:05\]** **Laura:** So number one is the classic editor. So in the last like a few years, WordPress have created like a block editor. Oh, so I just said you're up. This was going to be my later **\[22:19\]** **Mike:** question. I might as well get to it now. This is Gutenberg you're talking about, right? Oh yeah. That's what I thought. Yeah. So you're not a fan of Gutenberg. I just, I don't know, **\[22:28\]** **Laura:** I don't know, I just feel like I've gone too far down the element of past. I feel like I'm walking backwards. You know, yeah. **\[22:36\]** **Mike:** So just to, OK, so in the world of CMSs that Sean and I usually use, they also have, they've had that actually functionality for quite some time now. Expression Engine has something called fluid. Craft has something called matrix. And now WordPress has Gutenberg. So for those who don't use it, the idea is when you're adding copy to your, you know, say a page, there's a little plus button and when you click it it says, you know, you can now add various kind of elements onto your page, whether it's an image with the caption or, I don't know, maybe an accordion or something like that, and it lets you choose them and drop them in amongst all the texts. So that's generally how I understand Gutenberg to work, right? **\[23:22\]** **Laura:** Is that basically the idea? Yeah, let's spot on. It's super accessible. If someone is very new to WordPress, It's really easy to pick up, it's a drag-and-drop block editor. **\[23:32\]** **Mike:** Right, right. I know there's a lot of people, I took on a project recently that was WordPress site and I noticed they had a plugin installed called Deactivate Gutenberg and it just turned the whole thing off back to, you know, just if you want an image you put it in line, right in the sort of paragraph or whatever. So it sounds like you're not too much of a fan of Gutenberg either, is that accurate? **\[23:56\]** **Laura:** And why? I'm just not going to use it because I've got Elementor to do that stuff. **\[24:00\]** **Mike:** Okay, so it sounds like Elementor sort of, it covers a lot of that functionality already. Is that the idea? **\[24:08\]** **Laura:** Absolutely. All of that functionality I'd like to say. **\[24:11\]** **Mike:** Okay. **\[24:12\]** **Sean:** Got it. Let's continue with your plug-in list. **\[24:16\]** **Laura:** My plug-in list. This is Gold Dust, by the way. Everyone's going to steal my ideas. But the classic editor just makes it, so I just prefer the interface, the editor interface. That's probably more personal preference than anything, but that's just one of the first plugins that I install from GetGo. So yeah, so Elementor, Elementor Pro, I also installed something called the Crocker Block Suite, so I just said it again, so I made a mess of that, the Crocker Block Suite or Crocker Block. They extend the functionality of Elementor, even more, so yeah, I'm a huge huge fan of what they do. Just to give you an example, a lot of your WordPress listeners, they'll be familiar with a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields. **\[25:04\]** **Mike:** Sure, yeah, yeah. I've heard of it. **\[25:06\]** **Laura:** Yeah, so Crocker block have created something called Jare Engine, which is an integrates with Elementor. Advanced Custom Fields does integrate Elementor, but it's just not as streamlined or, I guess, user-friendly. Someone like you guys, you'd be fine with that, but someone like me, I want it to be a lot more like, you know, a lot easier to use. Um, so yeah, like Cocker block is, um, yeah. It's just like, it's a suite of different things that just like, like, it's like element on crack pretty much. Like, it takes the pro version and it makes it just so much more. But you can, you won't necessarily always need those extra plugins, the Cocker block ones, you can probably build a perfectly fine website with element or, but I just want those extras. I guess, to give you an example, actually, say an Instagram feed. If you want an Instagram feed on your website, Crocker block has, like, an Instagram, like, as part of their suite, they have an Instagram feed, so it just makes it really easy to set up. So just giving an example. **\[26:09\]** **Mike:** And that's, so that plugin is made by someone other than the, the developers of Elementor. Like this is two different companies that made these, right? Yes, absolutely, it's a plug-in for your theme builder, right? **\[26:22\]** **Laura:** Yeah, it's a plug-in for a plug-in. **\[26:24\]** **Sean:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's specifically for Elementor, it's not for any, it doesn't work with any other theme or theme builder. **\[26:32\]** **Laura:** They do work with Gottenburg, I think in like a month ago, they do just like demand. They did create like a Gottenburg kind of like integration, I guess. Yeah, I really enjoy that plugin. **\[26:50\]** **Mike:** Hi, hope you're enjoying this episode. We're always looking for topics suggestions. So if there's anything you'd like us to discuss on the show, please let us know. **\[26:57\]** **Sean:** We're also looking for guests. If you have a guest that you think would be great for a podcast, please let us know. If there's a guest that you would love to come back, let us know. You can do that by visiting website 101podcast.com slash contact. **\[27:13\]** **Laura:** And I just want to say you probably know already, I don't know, but the more plugins you have, the more bloat you're adding to the website. **\[27:22\]** **Sean:** So I actually have a blog article where I talk about the over reliance of plugins in web development, not specifically WordPress, but in general. **\[27:34\]** **Laura:** Yeah. So you definitely want to, you want your website to be as lightweight as possible. So that's one of the benefits of element all because it has, like you don't need a separate form form plugin. It's all under that one umbrella. But yes, just keep that in mind, like don't get too excited by installing like all these different plugins because your website will just like grind to a whole, and also you have the issue with compatibility, say, if one of them gets updated, then you could end up with bugs showing up on the website if the other plugins have not caught up. **\[28:12\]** **Sean:** Yeah, right, version conflicts and things like that. Exactly, yeah. **\[28:16\]** **Mike:** So this plugin stack that you referenced, how, if you could, like, roughly how many plugins are we talking about that you tend to include on most client sites? **\[28:25\]** **Laura:** I want to say seven or eight. **\[28:28\]** **Mike:** Oh, that's it, hey, okay. Because I've seen sites with like, the one that this site that I've recently rescued had 30 some plugins. I mean, it's not built on a site builder. So I'm getting the feeling that that's the reason all these plugins are required because they're not, you know, the features are not included in whatever it is that produce the website, right? **\[28:47\]** **Laura:** Yeah, and I'm also, if it's like an e-commerce site, they're gonna, there is gonna be more plugins too. So like that, when I say like seven or eight, that's for a non-ecommerce site. Right, yeah. **\[28:59\]** **Mike:** OK, OK, either any plug-ins you wanted to give a shout out to or you think we covered all the coolest. **\[29:07\]** **Laura:** I could keep talking all day. **\[29:09\]** **Sean:** What's going to? I have a question about one of the ones that's specifically listed here. So for listeners, we're looking at a shared Google doc. So that's where I kind of know what Laura's going to talk about first. But you mentioned rank math SEO instead of Yoast. Now, Yoast, if you're not a WordPress user, Yoast is the most common WordPress plug-in. Everybody who uses WordPress as far as I knew used Yoast. I didn't know there was another plug-in. So can you tell us about rank math? Why do you use it? Why do you like it better than Yoast? What are the advantages? And how do they compare, like, is in what way is maybe yours better than rank math, and how is rank math better than yours? **\[29:57\]** **Laura:** That's a big question. I feel like I need to do more research before I give you a thorough answer. But I can give you just, yeah, because I used to use Yost, that was my go-to. That was on all my websites. And then rank math announced integration with Elementor. So just for people who don't know, Yost and rank matter, like they make it so that you can edit the SEO elements, I guess, of the sites. So you can set meta descriptions. You can set keywords. You can, they even do, like, redirections too. So there's tons of stuff that they can do. **\[30:35\]** **Sean:** So things like your Twitter card and your Facebook card and all that stuff, right? **\[30:39\]** **Mike:** And I understand, Yost also, from my experience, has this, it kind of gives you tips on how to make your articles more SEO friendly, right? Where it says like, you didn't use this keyword enough because you've identified this keyword as your main thing for this page, it's stuff like that, right? It gives you a little advice. **\[30:57\]** **Laura:** Yeah, yeah, super user friendly. They've been around for a long time. They actually have written a bunch of articles that are really, really helpful. So it's kind of personal preference for me. I like because it integrates a element or that's why I made the switch. The interface is different and I just prefer the rank math one. So I found that it's very much that kind of like topic, the Rank Math versus Yoast keeps coming up a lot in like the Facebook website groups, and a lot of the time it just come down to personal preference. But I would just say yeah, just give Rank Math a go, or if you don't have either of the two, or experience a view of the two of them, just see which one is easier for you to use. They're both probably as good as each other. Someone's gonna crucify me for saying that, But personally, Bragnath is the one that's my go-to. **\[31:47\]** **Sean:** All right, so for you, it's not a Coke versus Pepsi, Mac versus PC thing. It's like, just use whatever they're both about equal. You just have a preference for one. **\[31:56\]** **Laura:** Yeah, I'd like to say that. I think that's fair to say, yeah. **\[31:59\]** **Sean:** OK, I have a question. And it's maybe kind of similar to the plugins here, because I see you have Image Optimizer and WordPress Rocket, which is a speed optimization. So you're aware of optimizing for performance because of these plugins. In my experience, whenever I visit a website that is slow, it's a WordPress site. Now, that doesn't mean only WordPress sites are slow, but my experience seems to demonstrate that it's very likely to be a WordPress site. How do you optimize your WordPress sites to get, say, a good Google page speed score and a good experience for your visitors. **\[32:47\]** **Laura:** They hire people for that stuff. They seriously do that so much job to optimize your WordPress site. It's quite a big task because there are so many things that contribute to a website speed. It's the hosting, whether you've bought a template, whether you're using a page builder, which page builder it is. So I found the, yes, a lot of the time it comes down to who your hosting provider is. But yeah, I found that with ImageFi and WP Rocket, they do supersize things. They really do, they have helped big time for all of my websites. Because you can do, oh boy, what's it called? Like the Google page speed test, is it called? I was going to Google it quick. **\[33:34\]** **Mike:** Yeah, page speed insights, yeah. **\[33:35\]** **Laura:** Yeah, and they give you like an indication of how fast your website is and they give you a rating, like ABC, kind of thing, and they give you like a numbered rating too. So what I did was, I recently, last that year or so, I got a WP rocket subscription. And then I was like, well, let's see how good it is. So I did the page speed insights test before I installed it and optimized it and then did it afterwards. And I wish I kept the results. I should have kept the results. But yeah, Give us the ruff range. It was like probably 30 to 40 percent faster, like it was significant. Well, when I say significant, two seconds can be significant, right? **\[34:13\]** **Sean:** Sure. Half a second can be significant. **\[34:17\]** **Laura:** Exactly. But I was really impressed. I was sold. I just sold on that and I was like, well, surely my customers won a faster website. So it seems like this product's working. This plug-ins working. So let's give it a try. There are so many image optimizers, website speed optimizers out there that you can choose from. ImageFi WP rocket, they have like a little, I think they're made by the same people, so they have like a little bit of a relationship where you get a discount for buying the other one. And that was the reason why I went with ImageFi because the adverts kept popping up and I was like, well, let's get rid of these adverts. Like it's just paper wrap. They targeted you and it worked. **\[34:52\]** **Sean:** Oh yeah, I'm a sucker there. So a question about this, what kind Is it like a one button push and it just looks through your site and does a bunch of stuff and now it's faster? Or are there settings that you can adjust independently to optimize for what you feel is **\[35:11\]** **Laura:** important? Both. So like, you can just activate it and by doing that, it does things to your side that make it fast from just pressing that just by activating it. But if you do understand the things that that can be changed to make your website faster. You can go into those advanced settings. You can tinker around and change things. I do want to say that I'm not an expert in that area. There are the things that they refer to in some of the tabs for that plugin. They just go straight over my head. But I'd like to think that caching, I know enough about. And yeah, so they also have guides as well. I believe WP Rocket, they take you through what you can do to speed it up, speed up your site, and what you should be touching, or what you shouldn't be touching. **\[36:00\]** **Sean:** So, right. This sounds like a really, really useful plugin for anybody who's got a WordPress site. **\[36:05\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I've never really heard of that. And, and as we mentioned earlier, you know, the more plugins you have, each plugin generally has its own set of JavaScript files and CSS files and all kinds of stuff that it injects into your site in order to run that plugin. So, the more plugins you have, the more, you know, reference calls you have going to your host and that slows things down. So yeah, I didn't realize it was a course. There's a plug-in to make WordPress fast. That's like a lot. Yeah, exactly. **\[36:34\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I didn't think about that either, Mike, but really, it's WordPress. **\[36:38\]** **Mike:** Yeah. **\[36:39\]** **Sean:** If you want to do something, there's a plug-in for it. It's just a matter of what's the quality of that plug-in. **\[36:45\]** **Mike:** Yeah. Sounds pretty valuable, though, based on your experience, eh? **\[36:49\]** **Laura:** Yeah, and I feel like I'm always in the lookout for something that's better. So if WP Rocket isn't the one that's going to meet my needs, and I can come across another one, then I'm going to give it a try. And if it is better, then I'm going to switch. What does it come down to? It comes down to your website loading speed, not necessarily your loyalty towards the plugin. So you know? **\[37:11\]** **Mike:** Right, right. OK. So now in terms of updating these plugins, because I think we alluded to earlier, maybe there's a new update to such and such plugin or even to WordPress itself. And you don't necessarily want to just click update, Or maybe you do, I don't know, but I know that there can be conflicts, maybe some feature that's on the site that's powered by a plugin no longer works because they haven't made it updated it to be compatible with the latest version WordPress. Do you have any kind of like a workflow that you follow when you're updating things on a site? Like do you say, I don't touch any updates until a month after the update has come out, anything like that? How does that work? Or do you have like a staging sort of server where you have a copy of the real site and you you do all the testing over there, how does that go? **\[37:56\]** **Laura:** Yeah, so anyone who's been using WordPress long enough has probably got huge anxiety when they hover over that update button for certain plugins, where they've updated, say, WooCommerce, and then certainly the checkout screen doesn't work. So it depends on what the client site is all about. So if it is an e-commerce site, you need to take a lot more of a careful approach. So you do want to have something called like a staging environment or a staging site where you can test and see if like the latest version of WooCommerce is going, WooCommerce is the number one e-commerce plugin just in case people didn't know that. But yes, you want to make sure that that plugin is going to work in that nice safe environment first before you update it on the live site. But yeah, I do have a little bit of a workflow. So there are certain plugin, so if we just refer back to like, say, rank math or like WP rocket or image file. So those ones are pretty safe. So if you didn't update on that, pretty nice and I'm sure it's going to be okay. But if you get, if the latest version of Elementor comes out, I'm probably going to hold off. I'm not going to update it straight away. I think about eight months ago, they did a massive update and it was pretty catastrophic for some people, especially those who didn't test it in a staging site, or didn't have a readily available backup. So yeah, I spent especially Elementor, especially WooCommerce, you've got to do the other updates first, and then I'd like to do those last, do those two last two last. And then yeah, if it's an eCommerce site, it's going to be on a staging environment where I play around with that first. **\[39:42\]** **Mike:** What about WordPress itself? How often do you, when I seem to get emails all the time? Hey, your WordPress site has been updated. Obviously, these are for not client sites, those ones where I don't have an auto updating. I assume you don't like the idea of auto updating **\[39:55\]** **Laura:** anything, right? Most of them I do auto update. Oh, you do. I never update WordPress, Elementor or WooCommerce because if the latest version of the WordPress, the whole platform comes out. You need to wait for those other plugins to catch up and make up, make their own updates. So I'll tend to wait until WordPress releases the next version. Or wait a week or so for **\[40:26\]** **Sean:** them to iron out the bugs. So you tend to keep your WordPress sites one point version behind? Yeah, so and also. Okay, sounds like a safe plan. Yeah, and then also WordPress, they created a new **\[40:39\]** **Laura:** thing where you can see how compatible it is. So they'll say like 100% compatible with this version of WordPress. So you know it's safe. And then particularly with WooCommerce, like if they say like zero percent or like unknown, I don't think it says zero, but like unknown compatibility, like update with caution, then you probably know that you're putting your risking it a little bit **\[41:00\]** **Sean:** by pressing the update button. I have a question for you. Again, this comes from a guy who did one WordPress site back in 2007. So I, I, no real experience here or recent experience in any case. What happens if you do an update and something goes wrong? Is there an easy way to revert? Like roll back the plugin or roll back to an older version of WordPress? Yeah, there's a plugin for that. So you have a plugin to roll back your plugins and wordpress, but what if the problem is with that play, now I'm going very meta. I'm just **\[41:42\]** **Laura:** going to rate quit and just delete the whole site, set it on fire. So, I've elemental because of that big issue several months ago, they've made it really easy to wind back elemental. You can just click, go back to previous version and everything is fine. It's **\[42:01\]** **Sean:** like, I want to relieve. Well, that is very handy. But other plugins, they might not have **\[42:07\]** **Laura:** that, so say you might need to use that plugin that winds things back. But also, if you have a hosting provider that makes it really easy to do backups, or if you have a backup plugin, then it's easy just to wind it back to the previous day. **\[42:22\]** **Mike:** I guess it's also important, if you're managing a site like this, whenever you do these updates, go through your site and actually test anything that is sort of like a business critical feature to make sure it works, because it's all well and good to hit update, and then you look at the homepage and it's still there and then conclude, oh, I guess it's working, but maybe if the contact form suddenly doesn't work, that's going to be a problem. So you'd have to sort of like pretend you're a visitor that wants to do everything on your site, test it all out, and then decide whether or not, you know, you can keep that version of a rollback, right? **\[42:57\]** **Laura:** Absolutely, yeah, it's so easy just to click update and then walk away. So your contact form doesn't work, or no one can buy anything, or shipping doesn't come up anymore. Yeah, you absolutely, every time you do an update, you want to go in and make sure that functionality is working. So my clients, they have maintenance plans with me, once a month I go in and I'll check their contact forms working. I'll check and make sure people are still able to buy stuff, make sure the payment gateways looking good. Yeah, I won't like sit there on the WordPress site every single day updating plugins I'll try and do it maybe once a week if I'm gone that site quite often if it's a site that doesn't have too many plugins It's just I guess just I guess a landing page. I guess you call it Then it probably doesn't need that much TLC. You can just go in once a month once a quarter even just hit update So yeah, it's when you forget like a year later So then it becomes a bit more of a headache. **\[43:55\]** **Sean:** I generally do quarterly maintenance contracts with my clients. And then once a quarter, I do CMS and plug-in updates. I have a site for a client that I built and we launched it last July. And I've been pushing them for a quarterly maintenance contract. They finally just agreed that it'll start on June. But in the meantime, there's been a major update to one of the plug ins that's gonna make the update a little bit tricky. So it's gonna be a little bit more work than anticipated and it's a little bit dated. So yeah, regular maintenance doesn't matter what semester on. I think it's a very important thing to consider. **\[44:39\]** **Mike:** Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about your business in that sense. So you obviously have some clients on maintenance contracts so maybe talk about that and also I'm curious to know about how you handle hosting for your client's sites. Do you get them, do you point them to a host and say, go sign up for something here and let me know what the login is or do you offer hosting and they pay you per year or whatever, how do you do all that? **\[45:08\]** **Laura:** Yeah, so I do offer hosting. The hosting provider I use is called Kinster. You can just google that, find them that way. But when I first started off, I pretty, very quickly, like, fell in the trap of, like, GoDaddy's the hosting provider that everyone knows, like, to just start you up on GoDaddy. But then I just found that, like, they, GoDaddy just didn't meet even mine all the clients needs. So I was, like, well, I need to offer a better solution. I need, like, a staging site. And I don't, I think GoDaddy now offers staging sites, but they didn't back when I first started using them as a hosting provider. And I wanted, because So I'm not really an expert in the world of hosting either and so I didn't want anything that was too technical, like I didn't want to have a server in my house where the power went out, that's it, like all those websites go down and I didn't want to have to maintain something like that because I just don't know how and I didn't want to have to pay someone to do that either. So I was like well I do need to have a solution. I wanted to get like a Canadian hosting provider but I just couldn't find one that was quite why I needed and I was like, well, is it more important to go with a Canadian provider or is it more important to get hosting provider that actually meets their needs? And the second was why I went with. So I did originally go with, you know, AWS Amazon Web Services. **\[46:29\]** **Sean:** Oh, yes, we do, yeah. Yeah. Familiar with that. So I had quite a few clients on there. I did get **\[46:34\]** **Laura:** quite expensive, quite quick for me. And I realized I was also feeling very out of my depth. And I was like, well, I feel like I'm playing with fire here a little bit. It's not fair on my clients. If something breaks, I just feel like I can't offer the right level support. So then I discovered, I'm part of all these different Facebook groups for website building builders. I discovered Kinster. And Kinster's like a nice little halfway house between, I guess, it pains me to say between GoDaddy and AWS, where you get support from them. So if I go on holiday for like, say I have a go on a canoe trip for like a month and I'm not going to take my cell phone because I'm probably not going to have a cell phone range, then I know that like, Kinster can offer support to my clients. So that was one of the key things. I wanted to be able to sleep at night pretty much and know that if something happened, like my website went down or I don't know, just whatever could happen. I knew I wanted to have somebody on hand all the time to be able to help. And Kinso was the only one I could find that would meet that need. And they are only higher for their support. They're only higher WordPress developers. So you can just go, hey, here's the little chat bubble, you press chat bubble, you say, this is my issue, and they will solve that issue, but they won't only just solve it, they will go like the next step. So I've been so like they are a little more expensive than you would probably, well, when you come from like, something like GoDaddy, they are expensive. But what you get is just, it's worth every penny. Like, I've been so pleased with them as a hosting provider. **\[48:15\]** **Sean:** That is a stellar testimony. And 100% I agree you get what you pay for. And for crucial service like hosting, it's important to get quality and not be looking at the main and most important thing is how much does it cost? No. The most important thing is up time and getting **\[48:37\]** **Mike:** support if you have a problem. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. What's it going to cost if the site goes down for like three days? That's the cost you should be focusing on. Yeah, I don't want want to get sued. So is that to say then that when a client needs your help, they reach out to you. And if they don't get you, they have this means of reaching the host directly. **\[48:59\]** **Laura:** Is that kind of how that goes? Yeah. So generally, they'll reach out to me for everything. But I still have like an account on Kinister for them. They have their own account. They can log into. So if I am not available, they can go to them. Yeah. So like they do have that option for hosting help but because I am always available they will go through me anyway just because it's easier and they know who I am so but generally I'll then go through **\[49:25\]** **Mike:** Kinser support on their behalf so okay so is this I'm trying to figure out if this is shared hosting or if it's like some kind of dedicated VPS thing do you know do you have any information **\[49:38\]** **Laura:** about that yeah so it's how it works is what they should say with Kinser is they're probably not not good if you want to have your own plan. So if you only have one website and you just want to pay just for your hosting and that's it, you know, one's going to help you with that. They probably, they're one site plan doesn't really offer enough resources, I don't think. So what I have is I have like an agency plan. So I pay like, I don't know, like 400 US dollars a month, something like that. And then it means that I then get so many more resources that I can then share to my clients. So if they run like an e-commerce site, I have the power to run that e-commerce site. But if they're from the get-go, they want their own one site, one plan, e-commerce site. They just won't have enough resources on that one, that first plan. But yeah, so how it works is you get like a monthly allocation of resources that you share across your sites. So, yeah, you get in terms of like disk space, you also get like, how they limit it based on how many people go and visit your sites, which I'm not really sure how, I know how they measure that, but I'm not really sure how that relates, I guess in terms of like resources being used, I guess. So, but yeah, as I said, that's not really my kind of like, specialism. So I kind of like definitely fall down a little bit there. **\[51:08\]** **Mike:** Yeah, yeah, just curious, I've never really heard of a hosted company that offers this kind of a service that's specialized or focus only on WordPress and offers this kind of support thing. It's interesting, I'll have to look into that deeper. **\[51:23\]** **Sean:** It does look like a really, really good service plan. So we have actually a lot of other stuff we can talk about, but we've already gone quite long. For like over 50 minutes now. Oh boy. So I was thinking that it might be a good time to wrap up and Laura, we'd love to have you back to talk about Shopify and other CMSs, because you mentioned you have experience with Shopify and I was hoping to spend a little bit of time on that, but I think we can run out for this episode. So at this point, do you have any last thoughts, where can visitors or listeners find you on the web, your websites, any social media that you wanna share, things like that? **\[52:08\]** **Laura:** Yeah, so you can find me and my business, raviwebdesign.ca, that's r-e-v-y, webdesign.ca. Excuse me, I'm also on Facebook, not on Instagram. You can find me on LinkedIn, and I have like a Google My Business profile too. I do tend to help only, not exclusively, but I like to help people in my own community over like someone, hey, I'm in Australia. Can you build me a website? like I'm gonna prefer to help someone a bit more local to me. The time difference alone is one of the main reasons for that. But yeah. Do you have a certain sort of audience that you **\[52:49\]** **Mike:** focus on like a certain industry or a sector that you build sites for? I seem to be gravitating **\[52:55\]** **Laura:** towards like tour operators. So people who do like kind of rock climbing, white water rafting, that kind of thing. But everything like my clients are like lawyers, their hotels, restaurants, cafes, that kind of thing. So it's a bit of everything. Wow, that's great. **\[53:10\]** **Mike:** Well Laura, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This has been super interesting **\[53:16\]** **Laura:** and we really appreciate you being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Definitely an excellent **\[53:20\]** **Sean:** episode and that wraps up WordPress for this season. Thanks for listening. The website 101 Podcast is hosted by me, Sean Smith. You can find me on LinkedIn. My username is caffeine creations or on Twitter, where my username is caffeine creation, C-A-F-F-E-I-M-E-C-R-E-A-T-I-O-M, or at my website, caffeine creations dot C-A. **\[53:51\]** **Mike:** by me, Mike Mello. You can reach me online at beelegwater.ca and also on Twitter and LinkedIn where my username is Mike Mello. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-A. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). [![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 04 - 1 [ 'Click Here' Hurts Your SEO and UX: Why It's Time to Change](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-1/click-here/) - 2 [ How to Talk to Your Web Developer: Communication Tips for Clients](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-2/how-to-talk-to-your-web-developer/) - 3 [ Red Flags](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-3/red-flags/) - 4 [ Content Strategy](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-4/content-strategy/) - 5 [ Accessibility](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-5/accessibility/) - 6 [ Improving Your Website Without a Redesign: Content Audit, Usability Testing & More](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-6/how-to-improve-your-website-without-doing-a-full-redesign/) - 7 [ Content Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-7/content-marketing/) - 8 [ Alternatives to Google Analytics](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-8/alternatives-to-google-analytics/) - Bonus[ Listener Survey - What Topics do you Want to Hear More of?](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-/listener-survey-what-topics-do-you-want-to-hear-more-of/) - 9 [ Website Optimization and Speed](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-9/website-optimization-and-speed/) - 10 [ Exploring WordPress Website Development with Laura Bailey](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-10/wordpress/) - 11 [ From Novice to Bootcamp Instructor](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-11/from-novice-to-bootcamp-instructor/) - 12 [ Pimp Your Typography](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-12/pimp-your-typography/) ### All Seasons - [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/) - [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/) - [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/) - [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/) - [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/) - [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/) - [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/) - [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/) - [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>