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
-
Unsolved How much time does it take for Google to read the Sitemap?
Hi there, I could use your help with something. Last week, I submitted my sitemap in the search console to improve my website's visibility on Google. Unfortunately, I got an error message saying that Google is not reading my sitemap. I'm not sure what went wrong. Could you take a look at my site (OceanXD.org) and let me know if there's anything I can do to fix the issue? I would appreciate your help. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OceanXD1 -
Robots.txt blocked internal resources Wordpress
Hi all, We've recently migrated a Wordpress website from staging to live, but the robots.txt was deleted. I've created the following new one: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php However, in the site audit on SemRush, I now get the mention that a lot of pages have issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt file. These blocked internal resources are all cached and minified css elements: links, images and scripts. Does this mean that Google won't crawl some parts of these pages with blocked resources correctly and thus won't be able to follow these links and index the images? In other words, is this any cause for concern regarding SEO? Of course I can change the robots.txt again, but will urls like https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js end up in the index? Thanks for your thoughts!2 -
Migrate site from HTML to Wordpress and retain SEO
Hi guys this is a 2 part question so hoping someone is able to assist! 🙂 I own the www.industrytix.com.au/ website which ive been updating manually in Dreamweaver for last 6+ years, it has very high Organic Rankings for most of my targeted keywords which are: industry tix
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
Industry tickets
breakfest tickets
Stereosonic tickets
CUban Club tickets
etc etc - essentially names of events Im currently about 90% of the way through replicating/improving the content of the website using a Wordpress Theme which is located at www.industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/ so all the URLs/Sites are currently running concurrently. Im using Eventum Theme for hosting events and Woocommerce plugin for products so there is a slighy disconnect between the 'Event Page' and 'Buy tickets/Product page" **For example:
Event page: **http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/ Ticket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Next step is to kill off the old outdated homepage and recirrect all the event pages to the new ones - for retaining SEO value is there a best practices for completing this? (I am planning to move the New WP Installation into the root folder from the /buy-tickets/ folder where its currently staged. For example of OLD to NEW redirrection requirements:
OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/cuban-club-perth-tickets.php
NEW http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/cuban-club-perth-nyd/ OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/breakfest-tickets.php
NEW EVENT PAGE http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/
Nicket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Any other feedback improvements as far as retaining SEO and not keyword stuffing etc? Thanking you all in advance for taking the time to read this 🙂0 -
Google not taking Meta...
Hello all, So I understand that Google may sometimes take content from the page as a snippet to display on SERPs rather than the meta description, but my problem goes a little beyond that. I have a section on my site which updates everyday so a lot of the content is dynamics (products for a shop, every morning unique stock is added or removed), and despite having a meta description, title and receiving an 'A' grade in the MOZ on page grader, these pages never show up in Google. After a little research I did a 'site:www.mysite.com/productpage' in Google and this indeed listed all my products, but interestingly for every single one Google had taken the copyright notice at the bottom of the page as the snippet instead of the meta or any H1, H2 or P text on the page... Does anyone have any idea why Google is doing this? It would explain a lot to me in terms of overall traffic, I'm just out of ideas... Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Town and County pages taking months to index.
Hi, At http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/regional-hypnotherapy-directory/ we have a load of town and county pages for all of the hypnotherapists on the site a) I have checked all of these links and they are spiderable. b) About a month back I noticed after the site changes, not entirely sure why, but the site was generating rogue pages, eg http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists/page/5/?town=barnsley instead of http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists/?town=barnsley We have added meta no index, no follow to these rogue pages around 4 weeks ago..however these pages still have a google cache date of Oct 4th predating these meta changes c) There are examples of the pages we do want, indexed, and ranking too on page 1, site:www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists eg http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists/?town=ockham however these pages are few and far between, these have a recent google cache date of Nov 1 **d) **The xml sitemap has all of the correct URLS, but in webmaster tools, the amount of pages indexed has been stubbornly flat at 2800 out of 4400 for 4 weeks now e) Query Paramaters: for ?town and ?county in webmaster tools, are set to Yes/Specifies Would love any suggestions, Thanks. Mark.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Advantec0 -
How complex or what to consider when moving from a .aspx webdeveloper to my own wordpress.org website?
Basically my current web developer is not providing me with what a modern website should need to fully utilize online marketing and SEO in terms of blogging, social media widgets, e-commerce and so on. Because of this I have thought of moving to a wordpress.org website run and built by myself. Is this a good idea? What is the best way to migrate and save existing authority (Re-directs etc)? Is there any potential risks or problems that I could encounter that aren't immediate obvious? Many thanks! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
Redirecting site from html/php to wordpress
I've never come across this and haven't been able to really find anything that explains it very well. I want to get opinions before we make a definitive decision. Here's the scenario... I am working on a site that was built in HTML/PHP and some of the pages are ranking pretty well. (some page 1, but not number 1) We are going to start using the Wordpress platform by year's end. The pages that were built in html have been built a little spammy but they still rank. I just think they are keyword stuffed a little and not very "reader friendly" (I think the last person was spinning content). So, we've built completely new content on our new pages and we've commissioned really good content writers for them. I will be handling the on-page SEO going forward so I know what to do there. My questions are this.... Should I 301 the old pages to the new pages with the better content? (old pages have the .html or .php extensions so www.example.com/keyword.php will become www.example.com/keyword-keyword Is there any negative side to doing this since the content will be completely different then the old pages that are being 301 from. (Keywords are pretty much staying the same with the exception of minor variations. ie, www.example.com/red-cashmere-sweater.php to www.example.com/cashmere-sweater) I ask this because I've moved sites before where I've just changed the location of the same content. I've never done it where the content is changing and so is the URL extension. Thank you in advance for your help and guidance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Should I remove the ?replytocom variables in wordpress?
I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it. Here's the site if you need to see it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0