Hostage Taking by My Wordpress Developer
-
Since 2013 a Wordpress developer has coded my real estate website.
Their hourly rate is $24 but the programmers take too long to perform tasks and the service has become prohibitively expensive. Examples of unreasonable time estimates below:
|
|
1. Change theme settings so posts/pages do not display a date. -> 7 hrs
2.Google search results are displaying the breadcrumb on the top of each page rather than the URL. Please correct so this does not display. -> 3 hrs
3. Install SSL certificate to www.metro-manhattan.com domain -> 8 hrs|
|
The above does not include 5-6 hours for testing.
I am considering changing vendors. Potential programmers have asked how the site was developed and to what extent is it is customized. Ends up several plugins were built from scratch.
My question is whether a new developer is going to be able to pick up a custom coded site. That without understanding how the site was built, any change will break the site. My concern is that current developer has made themselves indispensable, and created a situation where there is no alternative to using them and they can therefore charge any price they want.Any thoughts?
Also below are questions I asked my developer about how the site was built and their answers:
| 1. Was everything coded using a child theme?
No, is a custom theme.2. Did you use any ready made theme or just plugins
We used the theme and and we've used plugins. Third party plugins and plugins builded from scratch3. Can Wordpress and every one of the plugin be updated?
Wordpress can be updated, core files was never modified. If after an update something start to work wrong is due to some radical wordpress change or similarCan't be updated:
- FireStorm Professional Real Estate Plugin
Created at xxx:
- Form Submissions Report
- Miscellaneous Hooks and Filters
- NYC Check memory usage
- NYC SEO listings
- NYC Slider
- Sitemap Updater
4. Were any of the plugins customized and if so, which ones?
Yes, this plugin "FireStorm Professional Real Estate Plugin" | -
Fortunately, I do have full control of the server and backups.
But I should have never agreed to allowing the modification of plugins. At the time I did not understand the implications.
Would it help a new coder if the previous developer provided a detailed description of the modified plugins? What if I agreed to pay the old developer to act a consultant to a new developer?
My developer believes he is in the drivers seat and is charging me 3-5x what is reasonable and fair. Result is that I can't afford to make any meaningful improvements to the site.
-
It can be very difficult to get a new developer to take on a site that has been designed by someone else even if it is on a standard platform like WordPress.
The core files should never be edited and you should only accept updates from the platform provider e.g. WordPress.
Always make sure the domain is in your own name and you have access to the hosting. And make sure you have your own off-line backup of the entire site including content and databases.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do I change HTML title, and add H1 tags with Volusion? and why is it so hard!?!?! wordpress is WAYY better.
So I could go in depth with this and tell you all about the problems I have encountered with Volusion... but i'm not. I just need to help a client change the 7,000 product pages they have that have duplicated title tags, and no H1 tags. (probably one of the worst case of On-Page SEO set ups ever right? Shouldn't Volusion be built to help you do these types of essentials easily? Or (for the price) even better would be to do it automatically based on the product name??)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Plugins to protect Wordpress Blog Posts?
Ive noticed there are quite a few websites copying the content from my site I have in Google news. After speaking to a friend, they told me that there are plugins to help prevent this from happening or leaving some sort of finger print in the copied content. My site uses author tags already. Does anyone have recommendations of plugins to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Google+ Local pages under review. How long does this take?
I have a couple Google+ local pages that have been placed under review. Does anyone have experience regarding the time frame of this reveiw process. Google says to give it a few weeks, but one page has been under review for four weeks now. How long should I wait for Google to review them before I delete the page and start over?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VentaMarketing0 -
Duplicate Content on Wordpress b/c of Pagination
On my recent crawl, there were a great many duplicate content penalties. The site is http://dailyfantasybaseball.org. The issue is: There's only one post per page. Therefore, because of wordpress's (or genesis's) pagination, a page gets created for every post, thereby leaving basically every piece of content i write as a duplicate. I feel like the engines should be smart enough to figure out what's going on, but if not, I will get hammered. What should I do moving forward? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Byron_W0 -
Wordpress site architecture conflicts and how to go about fixing them
I am attempting to figure something out with a site I'm trying to fix. So the problem is that I've got two categories that are basically related keywords. I set this up when I first started doing this work and didn't know what I was doing. So that site at one time was ranking on the first page for a specific term (example: 'project manager salary' and posted in the category 'project manager salary'. But they we added 'project manager salary in Vermont' and all other 50 posts for all states in a different category called, 'project manager salaries and benefits'. So my question is this: Would this cause some kind of keyword rank cannibalization? How do I fix this properly? Thanks! Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtking.us_gmail.com0 -
What is the best way to allow content to be used on other sites for syndication without taking the chance of duplicate content filters
Cookstr appears to be syndicating content to shape.com and mensfitness.com a) They integrate their data into partner sites with an attribution back to their site and skinned it with the partners look. b) they link the image back to their image hosted on cookstr c) The page does not have microformats or as much data as their own page does so their own page is better SEO. Is this the best strategy or is there something better they could be doing to safely allow others to use our content, we don't want to share the content if we're going to get hit for a duplicate content filter or have another site out rank us with our own data. Thanks for your help in advance! their original content page: http://www.cookstr.com/recipes/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta their syndicated content pages: http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta0 -
Duplicate content from development website
Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched. I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Sitemap or Sitemaps for Magento and Wordpress?
I'm trying to figure out what to do with our sitemap situation. We have a magento install for our shopping cart
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrishansen
sdhydroponics.com
and a wordpress install on
sdhydroponics.com/resources In Magento we get the XML sitemap manually by going to Catalog => Google Sitemap => Add Sitemap In wordpress we use Google XML sitemaps plugin. My questions are: Do I need both of these sitemaps? Or can I use one or the other? If I use both, do I make one sitemap1.xml and the other sitemap2.xml and drop them in the root? How do I make sure google knows I have 2 sitemaps? Anything else I should know? Thank You0