EP359 – Common WordPress Misconceptions

Episode Transcription

Jason Tucker (00:01):
Hey, what’s up everyone? This is Jason Tucker and this is WPwatercooler episode number 359 Common WordPress Misconceptions. That’s right folks. We’re going for the link bait title this week before we go around the room and get everyone introduced. I want to let you know about ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. They make local WordPress development easy. Go check them out over at serverpress.com and they also do another thing called the WP SiteSync. It works with a whole bunch of different things and clean WooCommerce and BeaverBuilder. So for free, go take a look at that as well. All the information can be found over at serverpress.com.

Sé Reed (00:40):
Oh, I was gonna eat it. And one thing I love about ServerPress is I went to their website, scroll down to the very bottom at their footer and there’s a photo of WPwatercooler at the bottom of it, which is pretty cool. I love that advertiser who wants to make sure those link backs happen. Second safe?

Steve Zehngut (01:02):
I said round trip.

Sem (01:04):
Yeah, round trip. Exactly. All right, let’s go around the room real quick and get everyone introduced. Let’s go with Cosper for, how about that? Cosper, tell us about your self.

Jason Cosper (01:17):
Hey everybody, Jason Cosper AKA Fat Mullenweg here to talk some WordPress talks, misconceptions, deal with it.

Sem (01:31):
Cosper is making us all look bad

Sé Reed (01:34):
On the, on the audio only he’s doing some serious tricks. The snap cam,

He sure is. Sé, how about you tell us about yourself. Sé

Sé Reed (01:42):
All I’ve got is a filter that we’re all happy. My name is Sé Reed. I am a small business advocate and today I’m feeling that a lot, but I make WordPress, preach WordPress, teach WordPress at sereadmedia on all the things. Let’s talk on the Twitter cause there’s not enough dialogue on there.

Woo. Steve, how about you? Tell us about yourself.

Hi, I’m Steve Zengut of Zeek Interactive and I run the OC WordPress meetup.

Sé Reed (02:11):
Is that still a thing?

It is this, we’re meeting online now on zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.

Sé Reed (02:26):
While it’s here for a long haired hippie host.

I know, right? It’s getting crazy, dude to go change my hairstyle from being spiky to like not being spiky. And now it’s like, it’s going nuts. I’m Jason Tucker. You can find me over at Jason Tucker. I’m on Twitter and my website is Jason Tucker. Dot. Blog. I do this shows was another show called WP Blab. And today we talked about landing pages. So if you want to learn about landing pages and how they all work and all that fun stuff, go take a look at that. If you want to go check out the land, yeah. And if you want to check out a landing page and your day, WPwatercooler.com/subscribe or you can learn how to subscribe to this content and all this stuff that we got going on over there.

Sé Reed (03:05):
So the dedicated?

It is his dedicated landing page. We’ll love it in action. So let’s talk about at WordPress misconceptions. I know there’s a ton of them and so I thought it might be a good idea for us to kind of go through the ones that people are going to be Googling where they’re going to go.

Like, is WordPress better than Wix?

Sé Reed (03:27):
Yes.

Yes,

yes.

Sem (03:29):
Why is WordPress better than Wix?

It’s a misconception.

Sé Reed (03:37):
Yeah, I know. Everyone knows that right? There’s not a lot of wicks. People think that Wix is easier cause they can just get like get up online in two seconds and whatever. But the main misconception there is that a plug, plug it all in template is going to make your life easier in the long run. It is, if you’re making a brochure..

I think you have to define better, right? In w in terms of work context.

Sé Reed (04:08):
Yeah. If you’re making a short term one page thing for like one, maybe it is fine. Yeah.

If you need a quick brochure site, Wix, Wix is fine for you.

Sé Reed (04:18):
That does nothing. That just, yeah. That has a link out to something else. I, I do consistently the most consistent conversions I get are Wix to WordPress still to this day.

Oh really? What is, what does that look like? Sé like, how easy is it to export content from Wix and a WordPress?

Sé Reed (04:43):
That’s a cut and paste job. This day we’re cutting and we’re pasting. And they introduced a new export or yet I don’t think so. I, I’ll check.

God, I would not want to have to export from Wix.

Oh, so they, so they lock you down to their platform.

Sé Reed (05:00):
No, it literally says in there support specifically it is not possible to export or embed files created using the Wix editor to another external destination or host. So yay. Ain’t going nowhere.

Sé Reed (05:15):
Yup, that’s lock-in baby.

Oh yeah. I love that lock in. Hey wait, that’s very topical because we’re all locked-in….

Okay, got it.

Got it.

Got it. Got it.

Sé Reed (05:28):
Okay. There it goes. Our evergreen content.

So what about, what about Squarespace? So you know, this, this, this is probably one of the only podcasts that isn’t sponsored by Squarespace. I even tried and you know, it just, it, it just didn’t happen. But why, why is WordPress better than Squarespace?

Sé Reed (05:48):
How about you gotta define better, more, better, more, better. That Squarespace is the only website builder exists. Because if you listen to podcasts, that is basically what you think at this point. It is on literally everything. So I think the common misconception is that Squarespace is everything. I think that most,

Well I may and they have Superbowl ads so it’s automatically better.

Sé Reed (06:14):
Yeah. I want to talk about misconceptions about Squarespace. Like that their designs are better, their designs are not better. They’re boring. You get like a couple of them and that’s it.

I’d be like if you were to sign up for a web host and you only used one of the basic I remember, I think you were the one that posted about this recently. Sé about how like a web host had a whole bunch of whole, whole bunch of like basic standard installed themes and that just had like five gazillion of them in there.

Sé Reed (06:49):
That’s not the greatest example of when WordPress is being used. Well, Dreamhost install maybe a misconception about WordPress is the deluxe is better cause honestly the out of the box strip down WordPress works real good. And it’s real nice. And adding plugins as you go is the way to do it. Not starting off with 20 plugins that all need to be updated and are really terrible. So that’s a different set of misconception. The misconception there is that all builders themes and all builder plugins are created equal cause they ain’t and they’re not as, they’re not all the same and not all of them are good. That is not a Squarespace related thing that’s about,

So our favorite one, my favorite one to talk about is the five minute install. Does that still exist

It never did. It never existed.

Sé Reed (07:44):
It’s true. It would be like had your FTP hooked up already and you like, you know, knew what you were doing.

Yeah. And that’s, that’s why it never existed because before there was managed WordPress hosting, right before you could just buy the hosting and it was already set up for you. You had to figure out how to get the files. Well first of all, I had to set a server, right? Then you had to get the files to the server and make sure that all that worked. And then once all that stuff was done, clicking the button was actually, I argue it was less than five minutes. Right. So it’s, it’s actually even five minutes wasn’t an accurate you know, estimate of time. They just clicked a button before him.

Sé Reed (08:22):
The quick install from the cpanels. Yeah. Yeah.

Quick install from the seat panels. A DreamHost who got derided for their docs installs. Is that a one click installer for like 15 years? They were one of the first hosts to offer it. I mean, you know, gotta give respect for respect is due.

Sé Reed (08:42):
I love her and sign up all my clients there. So honestly trying to throw shade, I just don’t click that deluxe button.

No, absolutely not.

Sé Reed (08:50):
I click that button. Sorry, go ahead. I just wanted to say they’re doing it right.

Yeah. Those those things are like th those kind of obliterated the five minute install. The, the second that it turned into a thing that a hobbyist could do in five minutes and turned into something that you could just one, click your way into. Whether that’s through managed, whether that’s through a a C panel or just a panel installer. Then five minute install has kind of, I mean it’s, it’s just marketing at this point.

Sé Reed (09:28):
I think a common misconception is that you still have to install WordPress anywhere or that you have to download anything. I know in the some of the, I don’t know which Meta Make WordPress group was in, but some of the conversation that was happening is getting rid of the download button on WordPress.org because ain’t nobody downloading anything anymore to do that. Right? Like you don’t have to do that. So a common misconception is that you have to set anything up because you really do not, you just really should get a managed host, which we’ve all talked about here a million times and this is obviously super noob stuff. So for new people,

To go to go back to the still have to install WordPress. I worry about hearing that they wanted to get rid of the download button only because if I go to a project that is supposed to be open source and I cannot download the source and look at it, I’m like, okay, why the hell am I going to trust this project to do what I need it to do? So

Sé Reed (10:33):
Getting rid of the download button as so much as like, cause it’s still there just as the main, as the main call to action that that was a very scary word as opposed to what is now change two, which is get get WordPress as opposed to download a download button, which people would download and they’d be like, now what? So it goes to an actual landing page that tells you how to get WordPress in addition to being of giant download button that you can still download. So this point won’t speak to a future, but at this point still holding that open source project.

It’s not being rejected to WordPress.com just yet. So what about this one? A WordPress gets hacked all the time.

I deal with this every single time I bid on something every single time. Yeah, you’re the first. I’ll go second on this one. Cosper.

No, no, I was going to say you know, to be fair, a WordPress does get hacked. It’s not, I mean, it has 36% of the internet is running on it. I believe that’s the the, the number. So just over a third of the internet runs on it, you have a target that big that’s like saying internet Explorer, which, you know, rest in peace gets hacked all the time. You know, yeah. Internet Explorer got hacked all the time because it was the biggest target. However, if a WordPress site is set up correctly, it can be Bulletproof or damn near Bulletproof.

Now I want to say, here’s, here’s how I address that issue, right? Every platform that’s open source is going to, is hackable because the source code is out there. Right? And so you can say this about WordPress, but you can say this about every other single open source platform or even close source platforms, right? And so every, every platform is hackable.

Sé Reed (12:39):
Turns out, anything connected to the internet , hackable smart refrigerator, hackable.

But where I think where I think this, this reputation came from is I absolutely agree with everything Casper said, but it’s also people that didn’t keep their code up to date, right? And so if you don’t keep your code up to date, if you let your, your, you, if you don’t run those, those core updates, if you don’t keep your plugins up to date, those things are important, right? Those security security patches are important for this reason. And if you don’t keep it up to date, then yes, it’s hackable. And that frankly that’s on you.

Sé Reed (13:20):
So is your phone, so is your computer. So is your car everything with old software,

If you think about it, where, what’s the direction that the WordPress project is going? And we already have core updates for security patches back to three, seven still when a security release happens. So all of those old installs, hopefully they kind of narrow that gap a little bit and force people up onto something more modern since we’re, you know, already at 5.4, But what’s coming in 5.5? The the automatic plugin updates, the you know, eventually we’ll have automatic theme updates as well. So these are things that basically we’re taking that, those security problems that we’re seeing in the community and we’re saying, okay, it’s, it’s not a problem anymore. We’re, we’re trying to make sure, and I know that there are some people out there who are concerned about, “Oh man, something might break if something automatically updates.” Okay. If you have the worry about that, you’re not who these automatic security updates are for.

Yeah. Onto the next one, WordPress themes or plugins are expensive.

Oh my God,

I am literally typing into Google. “Why does WordPress..”, And these are all the ones that are coming up.

Sé Reed (14:44):
Oh, alright..

Tell me the most, tell me the most you’ve ever played paid for a premium plugin or a premium theme. Right. right. Even a lifetime account for gravity forms is what, $300?

Sé Reed (14:58):
The events calendar, if you buy all of the plugins for TRO and community updates and everything, that can get a little pricey. But you’re also, you, if you need all of those things, you’re building out something that has a ton of features. So

Premium themes are typically sub $100, right? Most premium plugins are less than a hundred dollars. Most of them are around 50 bucks, right? There’s a couple things to think about. Here is, first of all, think about the time it takes you to create a theme, right? What’s your time worth, right? If a theme, let’s say theme costs $300 and you borrow $100 an hour, is it going to take you more than three hours to build that theme? Probably yes. And so that’s not expensive in my mind. These are not only these, these things inexpensive, but they’re major time savers. But also compare this to any other software. Go buy an Adobe license and then see if, if WordPress stuff is expensive, I’m off. I’m off my soapbox there.

The way, the way that I frame this with people and I, I work in a woo commerce primarily nowadays is how much money do you plan on making off of your site?

Yes.

Sé Reed (16:13):
Well then there is a, there is a correlating version. So if you’re only going to make a little bit of money, you can use a much lighter, less expensive plugin. Like you don’t have to have a full woo commerce install if you’re only going to, you know, sell a couple things.

Absolutely you can.

Sé Reed (16:28):
But if you’re going to do a full thing and you need, you know, the taxes to stay updated and a lot of shipping options and all this stuff, it means you probably want to sell a lot of stuff or you’re at least trying to, so

Let’s say, let’s, let’s say, let’s say you buy five WooCommerce add ons, right? And that’s $500 I’m just cause they’re about at 99 bucks a piece, right? Yeah. If you’re setting up a business where you’re going to be selling stuff and you can invest $500 Yeah. This is not worth it.

Sé Reed (16:58):
No, no. It’s $500 a year. It’s not like it’s $500 a month subscription or something.

Go compare that to Shopify and then come back and tell me if WordPress is expensive.

Sé Reed (17:10):
How is it that Shopify has like, people think that Shopify is not expensive. Is it because their base version for like 10 10 times or whatever,

Even their base version is frightfully expensive. But once you start adding on not only the ad-ons costs you money, but some of them take a percentage of your sales. I know that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen in the whole commerce world.

Sé Reed (17:32):
That is Brutal actually. I think that people are like totally fine with that because they’re like, Oh yeah, well whatever. But like that is like the commission model of software. I actually had a, so someone I’m working with had a another person who she was talking to you about doing her website and he offered to build the website. He’s like, I won’t even charge you for it. I just want to cut up your sales. And I was like,

No, if any, if anybody watches shark tank, right. As much as I watch, I watch shark tank. It’s the reason you don’t take a deal from Mr. Wonderful. Doug’s is a royalty deal. You don’t take that deal.

but it’s only a quarter. It’s only,…

no, no, no, no!!!

Sé Reed (18:24):
Not that passive income.

On to the next one.

Sé Reed (18:27):
I wanted to talk about that smart but that’s all right.

Oh I’m sorry. I was just trying to blow through a bunch of these cause it’s, well.

Sé Reed (18:32):
I was just wanting to rant. I wanted to rant about thinking commission and that people think that..

Let Sé rant! Let Sé rant!

Sé Reed (18:38):
it’s fine. It’s not a, it’s not a theoretical thing. Like Shopify really does that and like you think about Mr Wonderful and that’s like, Oh someone will take a commission. This is a real person with like that. I am really working with that. I actually know who another real person offered to build this on a commission basis and I like like is that something that’s happening? Are people doing that? Like you know I other than that,

Yes, yes. I’m like what? What are you doing? if I went to any of my clients and said, Hey, listen, we’re, we’re going to build this for you, but we’re going to take a percentage of your sales. They would laugh at me.

Sé Reed (19:20):
I know.

I look at the register. If the register at the store, like the POS machine actually said, Oh, by the way, in 3% of it is going to the register company.

Sé Reed (19:33):
I didn’t even calculate it out that, does that mean you’re sharing your, like they’re monitoring your sales from the back end in order to take that number, right. Because how is it reported? You’re like, Oh, I made 10 looking at your sales and taking that amount. Like that means they’re managing.

Oh good. You know, going back to shark tank, shark tank, if you wanted to be on shark tank, I think it changed this, but shark tank used to be, they’d get, they’d take 1% of of the cut. They became an instant investor of 1%. You know, they would get their money from it. So yeah. Interesting. Yeah, they changed that. They changed that because the Mark Cuban’s super pissed about that cause it was like

Sé Reed (20:12):
We’re close to watching shark tank is seeing frays. Frankie and grace go on shark tank on.

Yeah, I saw that.

Sé Reed (20:24):
That’s the closest I’ve been to see shark tank. But I know how I know what you’re talking about.

Yeah. So why does WordPress look different from the demo?

Because the demo, excuse me. Are we talking about, so we’re talking about, so [inaudible] company is created equally, right. And most of them they just ship you the Theme and, and they don’t ship you the content or they ship you the theme and they ship you the content separately and you have to marry them. But that’s why you’re installing the theme and it’s got no content or, or, or any settings in it. So when you’re installing it and bare bones,

Sé Reed (21:02):
It’s like, why don’t my clothes look the same when they’re folded on the bed as they do when they’re on my body? Wow. That’s weird to be good. There’s nothing, there’s no content there. There’s only the potential for the clothes to be on your body. They’re not. It’s not the same thing without stuff in it.

That’s true.

Sé Reed (21:29):
Dummy like dummy content, then you could kind of get, that’s why I went there are mannequins at clothing stores because the clothes look different on with something in it.

Why don’t the clothes look as good on me or they do on the mannequin.

Sé Reed (21:42):
Same question is why not? What does it, my website look as good as the demo website. Same question.

Give it to a 2020. I’m not sure how much time any of y’all have spent playing with it. But I, yeah. So a, a default install of 2020, at least on the, the past handful of sites that I’ve, I’ve worked with it on has this kind of like fake museums sort of brochure-ey site that gets kind of like popped into place for you. And it’s, it’s sort of a like replace this with your content sort of thing. It’s, it’s a little bit easier to deal with. It’s a little bit more user friendly and I appreciate that. I wish more themes would do it. But the majority of them don’t. And it just, sucks.

Sé Reed (22:31):
Well I think it’s because they’re trying to be so many things to all the people who might possibly build the theme and show people an example of something. Sometimes it’s hard for like you show people an example with the museum and they’re like, Oh, this is for a museum because this is not for me. You know what I mean? Because they can’t necessarily like mentally replace their content into that. So you know, but unless you show them a museum version and a restaurant version and a retail version, they’re not necessarily going to be able to envision what that site looks like. And I think that is actually a lot of the reasons there aren’t demos that come with that is because people would be like, Oh, that’s not for me. That’s why it’s still weird when you look for themes in the repo or whatever or around a general and they’re like, this is a theme for this type of business. And I’m like, what do you mean anything? Like that’s like saying like, here’s a house for this type of person. Like it does it, you know, what you put in the house and how you decorate the house. That’s what makes it specific to that type of thing, not the wall.

Yep. Excellent. Here, why does my WordPress site have ads?

Sé Reed (23:43):
It’s actually, it makes me angry.

Why does my, why would your WordPress has ads?

Sé Reed (23:47):
WordPress.com free version. Second to free version, I think still has ads. They’re, they’re not doing anybody a favor. I suppose they’re, they’re basically supplementing their income on those free sites with advertising. So it does really ugly ads though. They’re like toenail ads and stuff. They’re not good.

Oh yeah. Like actual or toenail fungus ads.

Sé Reed (24:16):
yeah yeah yeah.

Those are the same through Jetpack too. So if you want those on your own, on your own website, you can also turn those on too.

Sé Reed (24:22):
That’s the no, I love, I do, honestly, I love me some WordPress.com I think it can actually be a really good tool for a lot of people, but I, and I want people to be able to onboard through the free version. But those ads, like if there were better ads, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But like they’re not good ads. It’s not good.

I was going to say a also a year, almost about a year ago there were some performance around third party file hosts and the WordPress ad service was one of the worst as far as content served from the, the .com stuff. You know, like your, your jet pack, like your photon hosting for, for media files and stuff like that was fine. It was kind of middle of the road, but WordAds sucked. I think they made some improvements around that, but still like just don’t try, try to have a better business.

Sé Reed (25:19):
It’s so high priority.

Yeah. Try to have a better business model than showing toenail ads to your visitors.

Sé Reed (25:29):
Yeah. Well, I think the, the thing about the WordPress.com is you really gotta you can start there, but you have to upgrade. And you know, the idea that you can have, I mean, it’s beautiful, the idea that you can have a free website on the internet, but like if you’re doing anything that is, you know, related to business, you have to at least get the next level up. You have to at least get the baseline cheapy level if you want to, if you want to scale it all, if it’s not just like, even if it’s a hobby site and you want to be known in that hobby world, it’s not great to have that happening. So there shouldn’t basically, there should only be ads on your WordPress until you’re ready to launch and then you gotta upgrade.

So under the next one, why does my WordPress site look bad on mobile?

Sé Reed (26:15):
That’s your own fault.

It, because you’re, you think because you’re using a theme that’s not responsive, you need it. You need it. You need a newer theme.

Sé Reed (26:24):
It doesn’t even exist anymore. Not really. Like, I don’t know how, how old does a theme have to be to not be built responsibly? What was that like 10 years ago?

Pretty damn old.

Sé Reed (26:34):
Like when was her, when did responsive design come in a long time ago.

Or you’re using a plugin that forces people to that weird iOS early iOS and mobile view than a lot of sites. Or you’re using amp and a lot of amp sites look fucking ugly.

Wow. Is that a technical term? Fugly they look Fugly.

Sé Reed (27:04):
I don’t know that Google has ever really been super concerned with design as much as everyone else has been. They’re really like, you know, text is fine for you. You’re good. So I think that’s why, you know, it’s, it’s lightweight, right? It’ll serve up fast. So

It has the of which, why does my WordPress site load slowly [inaudible]

Sé Reed (27:25):
Cause you’re not optimizing your images. Duh.

And you’re not caching.

Sé Reed (27:30):
Ask me another one. That one

Your on a and you’re on a slow host. I mean there’s so many, there’s so many answers to that question.

I could, I could spend half an hour on this. This is a topic, all that stuff

Sé Reed (27:41):
In our audit, our week, we do a half an hour, we spend a couple of those half an hours on this very question. But like the, in terms of like that WordPress load slowly, that is definite misconception because that, that is not, has nothing to do with the software whatsoever.

And it, this could be true of any content management system, right? And there’s two, there’s two parts to this or two main parts. There’s the server, but there’s also the client, right? So if you’ve got too much stuff, if you voted your site up with plugins and third party scripts, you’re going to have a slow website on any platform.

And, and, and also, I mean, if you look at it you know, just a cheap web hosts there’s like a dime a dozen web host. You know, people think, I, I’ve talked to multiple people who are like, Oh man, I can get a hosting for five bucks a month and have a WordPress website up and online. And then they come around to me and go, Oh man, my performance is bad. It’s slow. It’s, and I look at it, I’m like, Oh, you’re on shared hosting with a thousand of your closest people you don’t know. But basically you’re, you’re, you’ve shoved yourself in an apartment building was overloaded and you’re all trying to use the elevator at the same time and it’s just not gonna work for ya.

Here’s the last one. Why does my WordPress site say not secure

Get SSL dummy? Nothing to do with WordPress

Sé Reed (29:14):
Once of these misconceptions aren’t about WordPress at all. And I think the reason that they become WordPress misconceptions is because WordPress is just the gateway to the web. And so WordPress becomes synonymous with website as opposed to it being a separate thing, which I think on one hand is actually, you know, speaks highly speaks well for WordPress because they’re so closely related that it’s like interchangeable as opposed to thinking of WordPress as something separate from website. So you either basically think that a website is all a website are the same, or you think only Squarespace hosts, host website, or you know what you’re doing. Those are the three categories that you can be.

Well, that’s it folks. I want to say thank you very much for all of you for coming and hanging out with us. We appreciate it. Make sure you go on Google and do some searches cause a couple of years about to come back around here and redo this entire episode and go through all of the other misconceptions of WordPress. Go to our website over a day, WPwatercooler.com/subscribe to learn how to subscribe to this content here. We appreciate all that you do for us watching this stuff and hopefully we’re helping you out as well. Talk to y’all later.

Sé Reed (30:22):
Bye bye.

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EP359 – Common WordPress Misconceptions

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