WordPress can help reduce the cost of your website development. One reason for WordPress websites’ cost-effectiveness is the abundant availability of WordPress developers.
Yes, you can easily find and hire an affordable WordPress developer and get your website built without making a hole in your pocket.
But every great thing comes with some responsibilities. This is the case with a WordPress developer, too.
Before you engage a WordPress designer to build your website, you must know what to expect from them. In other words, you must know the responsibilities of your website developer.
If this is your first time creating a website, this blog post may help you.
Here, I have shared six of the responsibilities of a WordPress developer that you must know.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Security
WordPress is the most preferred CMS not only for webmasters and developers but also for hackers. Yes, WordPress websites are always the targets of hackers.
Therefore, your WordPress developer must take responsibility for protecting your website from various security threats.
Although there is no 100% foolproof way to secure a website, your developer must follow all the possible norms to protect your WordPress website.
How can your WordPress developer secure your website?
- Install a security plugin on 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
- By customizing the default database prefix.
- By hiding the WordPress version details.
Recommended post: 5 Reasons for you to secure your WordPress website
#2 Support
Website development is not a one-time thing. You can’t set it, shut it, and forget it. You need your website developer’s continuous support to assist you when required.
Even after making your website live, you may notice a few errors or bugs your developer must address. Your WordPress developer is responsible for providing you with the required support.
At Innomedia, we always provide our clients with a service warranty period of 3 months after we launch their websites. During these three months, we assist our clients in fixing any bugs 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 them. You may be unable to make changes to your website yourself because of the shortage of time & resources.
Therefore, your website developer is responsible for ongoing maintenance and support if you need this additional service.
#3 Testing
Of course, you must also put some time into testing your website, but primarily, it’s the responsibility of your WordPress designer to do the initial testing 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.
#4 SEO
The primary objective of creating a website is to grow business revenue. SEO (search engine optimization) is a practical and affordable medium for attracting quality website traffic and increasing business.
More traffic (quality traffic) means more business.
Your WordPress developer must 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.
- Ensure that each website page has a provision for adding 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.
- I am generating necessary files like robots.txt, sitemap.xml, etc.
Recommended post: 5 Ways in which your WordPress developer can ensure that your website is SEO-friendly
#5 Coss-platform compatibility
Your website may look good to you and your developer, but what about other users who use browsers different from yours or your developer’s?
Without testing a website for all the major browsers’ compatibility, it may show weirdness for some 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, your WordPress developer is responsible for ensuring your website works as expected on all the major browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.
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 least, the handover of your WordPress website is one of the crucial stages of its development.
After completing your website development, your WordPress website maker should provide you with all the necessary information/material so that it is easy for you to make the required changes to 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 website’s contents, sections, links, and images).
- FTP details
- Database access details
- Any other login information for them, such as Google Analytics, etc.
- Control panel details of the server.
- Admin backend credentials of the website.