Is my client getting overcharged?
-
My client has medium sized website (15k pages).
They have a company that takes care of everything related to the website.
Recently they decided to put a wordpress blog on the site, with a bought theme that only needed the yoast SEO plugin. On an extension like this www.domain.com/blog I could do this very quickly and I am not a professional programmer.
The company claims it took them 40 hours and charged 40 x 125$ = 5,000 $ for it. That does not make sense to me at all. Can anyone explain to me how a clean wordpress install with a preselected theme can take 40 hours? Especially when the people that are installing it call themselves wordpress experts and make custom themes etc.
Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for your answer.
They did not optimize anything.... But for the rest it is plausible that it took quite some time, yes.
This blog won't need much optimization, Yoast is fine.
-
It is really easy to say... "I could do that in FIVE MINUTES."
What if this site was hand-built with lots of different page formats and huge messy code from one of those old Apple WYSIWYG webpage creators, with lots of images, captions, in-text wrap arounds, etc.
This site has 15,000 pages! So, I could easily imagine a briarpatch site that would take twice that amount of time to do a great job.
And, yes, you can plug in Yoast or any other magic plugin. That will do the SEO, but will it be good SEO, making every page into a finely crafted arrow with KW research, onpage optimization, alt tags.
I am not saying that these people did all of this work. I am just saying if you don't have any idea about what these people did, what they had to start with and what they produced.... then saying "I could do that in five minutes or five hours" could be way off.
-
You are right, I have not thought about that, but it is definitely important!
This is a simple theme, I used it on another domain of mine, it takes 5 minutes to setup.
-
good advice, thanks
-
If they are WordPress experts like you say, they shouldn't stop at only installing Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin - there are security plugins, backup plugins, analytics plugins, cache plugins, social involvement plugins that are on the "essential plugins list" of every WordPress expert and when they care about their work they will add them without doubt.
Also, installing some premium Themes require more work then simply uploading the files to the server and hitting the "Activate" button.
WordPress install alone is a 5 sec job as we all know, but a robust installation of needed plugins and theme settings can take longer.
Even so, 40 hours looks a little too much in my opinion. You should ask for details.
-
It is ridiculous that they charge this kind of money for just installing WP.
I think you can do your client a favor by telling him it usually doesn't take that amount of time and indeed like Martijn says that they need to specify their hours.
I'm in the same situation by the way. Doing some SEO consulting for a client and the webdevelopment company is charging 125 euro's an hour (which is not specifically bad) but counting a lot of hours for small tasks.
What we did.. I made a list of things that needed to be done and we visited them (physically). So I sat next to the developer while he was changing things and suddenly tasks that took 2 hours before were done in 15 minutes
-
Thanks for your response.
All I can think of is some tweaking of the http access? All they did was install the wordpress and install the theme, they did not tweak the theme.
-
Hopefully they specified where they spend their time on? Because as you mention it, it looks like your client was overcharged. However maybe the pulled in some extra improvements which could be really worth the money.
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
-
Client has franchisees on separate sub domains
Hi, a large client of mine has all of his franchisee network on sub domains and on separate wordpress websites (multi-sites). I have advised him that the best way forward is to use the main company .com domain and create sub folders for all of his franchisee areas. Does anyone foresee any problems with this going forward or do you have any advice to offer. I'd be interested in hearing what your verdict is on the subdomain vs subfolder war. Many thanks
Web Design | | johnos-journey0 -
No cache meta tags - does it help Google get back and reindex faster?
I saw these meta tags on a site and am trying to figure out their benefit. These meta tags are on the home page, product pages, every page of the site. Will it cause search engine bots to come back and index pages faster? Will it cause slower page loading in browsers if nothing is cached? http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"/> http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache,no-store,must-revalidate"/> http-equiv="expires" content="0"/>
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Google tag manager on blocked beta site - will it phone home to Google and cause site to get indexed?
We want to develop a beta site, in a directory with the robots.txt blocking bots. We want to include the Google Tag Manager tags and event layer tracking code on this beta site. My question is that by including the Google Tag Manager code, that phones home to Google, will it cause Google to index this beta site when we don't want it indexed?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Sitemap created on client's Joomla site but it is not showing up on site reports as existing? (Thumbs Up To Answers)
I am working with a web developer who built our client's site in Joomla. I seem to have a lot of issues with Joomla based sites. Any how, the site is www.pitgearusa.com and when we run site reports it is showing there is no xml sitemap. However he used a popular Joomla plugin for sitemaps called Xmap. Here is their url: http://www.jooxmap.com/ Can anyone provide any advice on what the website developer needs to do in order for the xml sitemap to function and "show up" on reports? Thanks Mashed Up
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Can only get a few pages indexed on by google
Hi I've touched upon this before on previous questions so apologies for repeating myself. In a nutshell out of the 60 webpages submitted to Google 11 have been indexed and out of the 140 images submitted none have indexed any ideas would be great! Here is a screen shot of what Google Webmaster is showing http://www.tidy-books.com/sitemapshow.png and here is the sitemap - > http://www.tidy-books.com/sitemap/us/sitemap.xml Thanks
Web Design | | tidybooks0 -
How to change the entire contents and design in my site without getting troubles with google?
Hello everyone This is my first post over here. In the next few weeks we going to change the entire content and design in our site. The site has 240 pages with poor contents and design. Except 301 redirects for all the old url’s I wanted to consult with you what is the right way to do it without harm my organic traffic that come from google? How google refers to this kind of changes? Which steps should I need to take to do it properly? Hope to get your help in the issue. Tahnks in advance.
Web Design | | JonsonSwartz0 -
Will launching this site get my E-commerce site penalized?
Hello.. I am wondering if you guys think launching a site like this is a good or a bad idea. All of the links on it go directly to the exact corresponding page on the ecommerce site. Do you think Google will penalize my site for launching sites (i have many other domains that i will be setting up similar to this) like this? Thanks...
Web Design | | Prime850 -
SaaS client portal for sharing files, invoicing, messaging?
For lack of a better way to describe what I'm looking for: Can anyone recommend a SaaS application that provides a secure client portal where a company and its clients can upload and share files, send messages, and that allows invoicing and online bill payment? Security is important as some files contain sensitive information, SSL required. I feel like I'm sort of looking for a CRM or something, but not really; and it's almost like base camp, but not quite. Ideas?
Web Design | | jaysan0