A few weeks ago our website began to position itself in the first position for “renew website”, and a wave of clients with two different profiles has come to us, which follow two different patterns.
Those who have a web page of the year of María Castaña developed when all the webs had to be made to measure , and they come to you with the idea of replacing the design with a more modern one and making the web responsive (adaptable to mobile devices).
Those who have considered themselves capable of designing their own website with professional WordPress templates, thinking that web development Anyone can do it and then they find out that it doesn’t suit their business, and they don’t know how to make the changes they need. Some are even clients who had asked us for a quote, found it expensive and decided to try their luck on their own.
This second group is the most numerous and follows very similar patterns, and it is the one that has motivated us to publish this article.
Professional WordPress templates ignore the particularities of each company or online store
Websites made with professional WordPress templates often do not make things easier for a person who has an online business (be it a store or a corporate website of a company), unlike what many think. Templates are, by definition, standard models that seek to make very different businesses fit into the same pattern. No matter how well developed they are and how customizable they claim to be, they present a preconceived structure of how the developer (usually from the United States, China or India, with a conception of commerce and online commerce specific to where they are from) believes it works. your business, which is thousands of miles away from that place. And no business is the same as another no matter how similar they may seem. Therefore, it does not need the same as another.
Even if two people agree to have a restaurant each, they will rarely need the same thing : they will not buy the same type and quantity of chairs, nor will they hire the same staff, nor will they rent the same type of premises or in the same place, neither will they air-condition it in the same way, nor will they offer the same kitchen or the same services or offers, for example.
The same thing happens with the webs. A web page is the extension of the business on the internet, and therefore it also needs different things than another business, even if it is similar. If we care that our business attracts customers, we will not use an inappropriate venue, an inappropriate location, or an inappropriate website. Because a website serves, precisely, to attract internet customers.
This template is fine but… do I need all the functions it has?
If we look at a professional WordPress template download website for a store or company, we can see why they are not suitable for someone who is interested in making their business work. On the one hand, there are the specific templates dedicated to a type of business, for example this one from a furniture store, which is very complete and attractive:
Let’s imagine that we are a modest furniture business, selling 30 different products. What do we need, for example …
- … a product finder? If the products are correctly classified by type, a product finder is not necessary. A search engine greatly recharges the performance of the web, and is only suitable for large stores, with dozens or hundreds of products, of which you already know the name of the model and it takes more time searching for it by categories than searching for it by name. In a small business, it takes longer to search for “chairs” in the search engine than choosing the “chairs” tab.
- … product score? The product scorecard is useful when you want to create a community of users, who participate and discuss the problems and advantages they see in the products. However, if the product catalog is small, it is difficult to achieve that community: few users will participate, and among these few those who comment the most are those who have had a problem with the product and want to express their discontent, and that can generate a negative impression of the products on new users who visit the page (without necessarily being bad products, but because there are few users to make a reliable average). There are sellers who try to counteract possible bad opinions by generating positive opinions themselves, but the deceptions They are always discovered, and for that it is better to do without this function on the web.
- … a comparer? Implementing a comparer in an online store only makes sense if it sells very similar products and files are filled in of very complete products to be able to compare them. It is absurd to compare a chair with a sofa.
- … several filters? Filters by price are not useful if you sell products with very similar prices, or by colors if the color of the products is not a purchase variable, or if few products are sold.
- … a user registry? A user registry is only useful for very specific types of business, especially recurring purchases, in which the user sees an advantage in registering to retrieve their shipping data , for example, and not have to enter them every time. In any case, some templates also have mandatory registration implemented, which is not recommended in almost any case. The client must always have the freedom of not having to think of one more password out of the thousands that he is forced to remember, and of not thinking of our business that we are going to use his email to send him spam. The more requirements we put on the customer to buy our products or services, the easier it will be for him to abandon the purchase halfway.
- … a live chat? A tool of this type commits you to an immediate response, so you must have to a person watching over her all the time. It is useful in large stores of considerable complexity, such as department stores or businesses with immediate shipping, such as food delivery. In other types of businesses it will only complicate things.
- … a portfolio? A portfolio in a store of this type, for example, is useful to present decoration ideas But if we don’t have the time or resources for a window dresser and photographer to take care of it, we won’t need it at all.
- … a blog? Generating periodic content in a blog is very interesting because it fills the network with references to our sector and our products, and therefore, it contributes to better position our products and our page. But it requires the time necessary to produce unpublished content, interesting for users, extensive and varied to fulfill its function, or to commission a specialized agency to do so. If you do not have the resources to do so, it does not make sense to integrate a blog to the page.
- … a newsletter? Having a newsletter has become a fad among new companies, despite being somewhat which is not always recommended. Let’s think about all the newsletters that we delete directly from our email inbox without even reading them. Only companies that offer periodic services such as supermarkets, beauty and waxing centers or bookstores among users who buy books periodically, for example, will attract sales through their newsletter. For the rest, it will surely not be profitable to dedicate a person to write it for the return on the investment that they will obtain.
From the decision on what is needed and what is not needed in the store, the user will have to dedicate a few hours to investigate how to incorporate and discard concepts on the web, where to place them and how to customize them according to aesthetics of the web and different usability criteria. And still, the deprecated features will continue to clutter the WordPress dashboard.
But if you have to be a web developer to customize this multipurpose template!
This problem is accentuated when choosing professional multipurpose WordPress templates (multipurpose in English). These are templates that contain multiple design options for each one to adapt to your store or company. Take, for example, this multipurpose template for 59 euros, which is supposed to be used for any type of online business:
These types of templates have even more options in the control panel, to personalize the web, although they are “intuitive” as they claim. They have different ways of customizing the top menu, the header, the distribution of the products or sections, the contact section, etc. To understand how the template works, you have to invest many hours , and in fact some are used directly by web developers, and customize them for their clients.
Once the template has been fiddled with for hours and the functions that interest us installed, we will continue to have all the customization functions permanently in the control panel, when surely we will not need them anymore and in a while we will forget how they work.
And that, when we manage to customize it more or less to our liking. Sometimes for our business we will like the home page of one template and the product page of another, for example. As we said at the beginning, no business is the same as another or needs exactly what someone preconceived for us. Recently an interior designer called us who had chosen a restaurant WordPress template because she liked the home page, and how the portfolio was displayed, but that meant a lot of problems for her to modify the texts and photos of the portfolio, since They were intended as a presentation of products from the restaurant’s menu. The template’s control panel also offered her a lot of options that she, as an interior designer, will never use, such as “events”, “menu”, or “prices and service”.
The SEO problem in WordPress templates
All these functionalities to customize the templates, in addition, are not free in terms of positioning in Google. Many templated websites have to process all the code for the functions they offer that are not being used. That is, if we are that owner of a furniture business who has bought the attractive template that we have shown above and we have decided that, indeed, we do not need a user registry, implement a newsletter or live chat, our website with all probability (there are some that have systems to not process all the code) will still have to process the code of all those functions even if they are not displayed.
For this reason, many will notice that WordPress templates take a long time to load , and that is one reason why Google penalizes the positioning of a website: loading time is essential for a good user experience, which is what the search engine values to position a website higher in its search ranking.
Many WordPress templates advertise with great fanfare that they are optimized for SEO, but they can never be as optimized as one web as you only use the code you need (which is what optimizing means, in short).
This template resists me … How much will it cost me for a developer to help me?
Given this, and going back to the beginning, many clients come to us to help them with their template, and some find that the budget is practically the same as that of making their website again . Why? Well, some of the reasons have already been outlined in our post.
When you go to a professional developer to retouch a WordPress template, you have to bear in mind that every day infinite templates are released on the market, all of them designed in very different ways, and with very different possibilities. You have to spend hours researching how that template works, how the code is made, and pray that the user or developer who designed the template hasn’t done some botch that requires extra set-up time.
Some changes also require remaking the page, like turning a house upside down and re-cleaning and tidying up. And that’s a lot of work. Furthermore, if the website is already up and running, it is sometimes necessary to develop a parallel model to make and test the changes without interfering with the functioning of the website. And that affects the final price.
Don’t leave the profitability of your company or online store in the hands of a WordPress template designer from California, Beijing or New Delhi
If to start a business we look for the right place, the right staff, the right location and the right product, and we invest what is necessary for it, it does not make sense that we settle for a website (which has the same importance for our business than everything else) that is not exactly what we need to win customers.
If someone really wants customers to reach their internet business, they have to put themselves in the hands of a web developer who makes the code and design available for an online marketing strategy , who studies well the specific peculiarities of that business to make it profitable on the internet. No help from a California WordPress template developer or single user will do that, no matter how many hours you spend trying to do what others have learned in years, as it took him years to learn his profession.
If you don’t use templates, then how does a good developer develop a useful WordPress website to attract customers?
Good WordPress developers work with their own template or framework or made to measure from a highly customizable external, clean code. From this base, the developer will implement the functions that the marketing strategy team considers most appropriate for the online store or company, after an exhaustive investigation of the operation of the business and its potential on the Internet.