Why You Cannot Edit Your Own WordPress Site

The most common call I get from a Hull business is not about a new website. It is somebody who already has one, paid a decent amount for it, and cannot change the opening hours on the contact page without ringing someone.

They usually apologise when they tell me. They assume they are the problem, that they are not technical enough. They are almost never the problem. The site was built so that only the builder can edit it, and nobody said that out loud at the time.

So here is what I do differently when I build a WordPress site for someone who is going to have to live with it.

Why you cannot edit your own site

It is rarely one big thing. It is usually four small ones stacked up.

• The homepage is hard coded in the theme, so there is nothing in the editor to change

• The text you want to change lives in a plugin setting three menus deep, not on the page

• There are fourteen plugins and none of them are labelled in a way a normal person understands

• Nobody ever showed you, so the first time you opened it you closed it again

Sometimes it is deliberate. If you can only change things by asking, you keep paying for small changes. I would like to think that is rare, but I have inherited enough sites to know it happens.

More often it is just laziness at handover. Building it is the interesting part. Making it editable is not, so it gets skipped.

I build the pages the way you will edit them

The first decision is that everything you are likely to change should be visible on the page in the editor, in roughly the place it appears on the site.

That means opening hours are on the contact page as text, not in a settings panel. The homepage headline is on the homepage. Your prices are in a table on the prices page. If you can see it on the site, you should be able to find it in the editor in under ten seconds.

It sounds obvious. Plenty of sites do not work like this, because it is quicker for the developer to put things in a config screen.

Fewer places to click

A stock WordPress admin has a lot in it that you will never touch. On a small business site I strip the menu back to the things that matter to you: pages, posts, whatever custom bits you actually use, and media.

Same with plugins. Every plugin adds a menu item, a settings page and a notification. Fifteen plugins is fifteen things shouting at you when you log in. I keep the list short, and I name things in plain English rather than leaving them as the developer shorthand.

This is one of the arguments for hand building rather than dropping a builder over the top of a theme, which I have gone into properly in page builders versus hand built WordPress.

Real content goes in before launch

If you hand a site over with placeholder text in half the pages, the client learns that the editor is where the confusing stuff lives. If you hand it over with their real words in it, the first edit they make is changing a sentence they wrote, which is a much gentler start.

I would rather launch a week later with proper content than launch on time with lorem ipsum and a promise.

The half hour that saves six months

Every build ends with a short recorded walkthrough. Not a manual. Nobody reads manuals. Just me screen sharing for twenty five minutes, doing the four things you are actually going to do:

• Change a bit of text on a page

• Swap a photo

• Add a new post or a new job

• Update your phone number or hours

You get the recording, and you get it again in six months when the person who was on the call has left. That video has saved more support hours than anything else I do.

It sits alongside the rest of the handover, which I have written about in how a web project works start to finish.

A safety net so you are not scared of it

Most people are not nervous about clicking the wrong thing. They are nervous about breaking something they cannot undo.

So there is a real backup running and, on anything more than a very small site, a staging copy to try things on. I have covered backups and staging separately, but the short version is that if you can undo it, you will have a go, and if you cannot, you will ring someone.

Confidence is the actual deliverable here. The technical bits are just what makes it possible.

Where a page builder genuinely helps

I am not against builders. If you are a business that wants to add new landing pages regularly and does not want to ring anyone to do it, a well set up builder is the right answer and I will happily use one.

The trade offs are real though, and I have been honest about them in when a page builder is genuinely fine.

What this does not fix

Being able to edit your site does not mean you should redesign it yourself. Layout, spacing and structure are still work, and a site that has been fiddled with for two years usually looks it.

The line I draw with clients is: text, images, prices, hours, posts and pages are yours. Anything that changes how the site is built is a conversation. That is not me protecting my invoice, it is the difference between a site you maintain and a site that slowly falls apart.

If you are stuck with a site you cannot touch

You do not necessarily need a rebuild. A fair amount of the time I can go into an existing WordPress site, move the content out of wherever it is hiding, tidy the admin and record you a walkthrough, and you are running it yourself by the end of the week.

Sometimes the underlying build is bad enough that it is not worth it, and I will tell you that rather than take the money.

If you are in Hull, Beverley or anywhere in East Yorkshire and you are fed up of asking permission to change your own opening hours, book a free thirty minute surgery and I will have a look at what you have got. No charge, and no pitch if it turns out you do not need me.