WordPress can definitely help to reduce your website development cost. One of the reasons for the cost-effectiveness of WordPress websites is the abundant availability of WordPress developers.
But every great thing comes with some responsibilities. So is the case with a WordPress developer too.
Before you engage a WordPress designer to build your website, you must know what you should expect from them. In other words, you must know the responsibilities of your website developer.
If this is the first time that you are creating a website, this blog post may help you.
Here, I have shared 6 responsibilities of a WordPress developer that you must know.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Security
WordPress is the most preferred CMS not only for all the webmasters and web developers but also for hackers. Yes, WordPress websites are always the target of hackers.
Therefore, your WordPress developer must take the responsibility to secure your website and protect it from different kinds of security threats.
Although there is no 100% foolproof way to secure a website, your developer must follow all the possible norms in order to protect your WordPress website.
How can your WordPress developer secure your website?
By installing a security plugin with your website.
By using only reliable plugins & themes.
By changing the conventional ways to access the admin area.
By restricting the access to the crucial files such as wp-config.php
Website development is not a one-time thing. You can’t set it, shut it and forget it. You do need the continuous support of your website developer to assist you when required.
Even after making your website live, you may notice a few errors or bugs that need to be addressed by your developer. It is therefore the responsibility of your WordPress developer to provide you with the required support.
At Innomedia, we always provide all of our clients with a service warranty period of 3 months after we launch their websites. During these 3 months, we assist our clients to fix any kind of bugs that they may notice, without charging them any money.
Other than the support, your developer must also be able to provide web maintenance services if you need it. You may not be able to make changes to your website yourself because of the shortage of time & resources.
Therefore, it’s the responsibility of your website developer to provide ongoing maintenance & support to you if you need this additional service.
#3 Testing
Of course, you must also put some time into the testing of your website, but primarily it’s the responsibility of your WordPress designer to do the initial testing of your website before making it live.
Below are a few things that your WordPress developer must check your website for:
All the functional testing of your website.
The loading speed of your website.
All the tracking scripts such as Google Analytics are in place.
The cosmetic aspects of your website.
All the images are loading fine on your website.
There are no broken links on your website.
There are no warnings or PHP errors on your website.
Validation of all the forms on your WordPress website.
Functioning of all the forms on your website to ensure that you receive an email when any visitor fills the form on your site.
The primary objective to create a website is to grow business revenue. SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the effective & affordable mediums to get quality traffic on any website and thereby growing your business.
More traffic (quality traffic) means more business.
It is the duty of your WordPress developer to ensure the SEO-friendliness of your website.
How can your web developer make your website SEO-friendly?
Installing an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO.
Ensuring that each page of your website has a provision to add meta tags such as title and description tags.
Ensuring that the theme of your website is SEO-friendly.
Optimizing your webpages for their loading speed.
Ensuring that there are no broken links on your website.
Installing a plugin for inter-linking among webpages.
Optimizing all the images on your website for their loading speed.
Generating necessary files like robots.txt, sitemap.xml, etc.
Your website may look good to you and your developer but what about other uses who use different browsers than you or your developer?
Without testing a website for all the major browsers’ compatibility, it may show weird for some of your visitors.
As a result of browser incompatibility, you could be losing out on sales or inquiries if some visitors can’t access some or all of the features of your website.
Therefore, it’s the responsibility of your WordPress developer to ensure that your website works as expected on all the major browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.
The websites that are not compatible with the major browsers may face not only a bad user experience but also a drop in the number of conversions.
#6 Handover
Last but not the least, the handover of your WordPress website is one of the crucial stages of your website development.
After completing your website development, it should be the responsibility of your WordPress website maker to handover all the necessary information/material to you so that it becomes easy for you to make required changes on your website in the future.
At Innomedia, we always make sure to provide our clients with the below information/material after completing their website:
Instruction manual (to manage the contents, sections, links, and images on the website).
FTP details
Database access details
Any other login information that we created for them such as Google Analytics etc.
