Help! My website gone?

Two years ago, a new client phoned me in a panic: ‘Lara, my website has gone. How can I get it back?’ Luckily, I was able to recover his website for him.

This client had a website for many years, but had gone offline. When he contacted his website developer, it seemed the web developer ghosted him. The phone number was disconnected and all!

The client was not tech-savvy; he doesn’t really use the Internet, but he has a business, so he knew a website was a must. His past web developer created his website, along with invoices for the digital services that they had done for my client.

So, the web dev handled it all for him. My client knew he was getting leads and work from his website and other platforms, but he couldn’t tell how much was derived from his website’s performance.

Since the ghosting, we have recreated his website and scoured the internet to find where the business was promoted and to gain access to things like the business’s Facebook page and Google Business Profile. It’s a lot of work, but in the end, his company suffered without an online presence, which needed to be changed stat!

I like to empower small businesses, mentor them, and share knowledge. I would never want anyone to go through what my client had gone through. The headache is not worth it.

As the saying goes, Knowledge is Power, so here are some things you can do to safeguard yourself in this stressful situation.

Take Control

Businesses do go out of business, which is one of the many reasons I recommend you have your domain name and hosting account. Check out my recommended website hosting.

With your accounts, you will never lose your access, and I recommend that you gain a basic understanding of the services you have outsourced.

If your website is developed by a professional, you don’t need to learn anything about web design or development—just enough to know what to do if something tragic happens.

A great website is a dynamic website.

Technology is always advancing. As a website owner, you want your site to safe, secure, unhackable and updated using the best options available to you. Maintenance plans save you many headaches that can come with website ownership. At Lara P Digital we include the cost of most software licenses with our care plans which can be quite a saving.

Check out Lara P Digital’s Website Care Plans

Website Owners Manual

I provide a website owner’s manual for all Website projects. Clients are given their logins and a list of themes and plugins used on the website.

If a client is maintaining their own site, I list details of weekly, monthly, and annual tasks, links to training videos, and a list of contacts to contact if an issue occurs.

My basic Website maintenance package is on your hosting, and our higher-priced package includes hosting on our VPS server. You will have full access to your website and full ownership, so even if I did disappear, you could still access it… However, it would take a natural disaster or a life-threatening situation for me to ghost a client.

Small businesses do go out of business, sometimes without giving notice. Whilst I have no intention of ever closing Lara P., you can never know what may happen in life.

As a business owner, the only way you can keep full control of your business is by having your own accounts and learning the basics of the products and services you are using in your business.

Outsourcing is needed in business; however, be involved and aware when doing so.

I am working with another client, a corporate business with 40 staff members. They employed an IT company to provide all their computer services, including email, domains, and hosting.

They are being ridiculously overcharged, but they can’t fire them because the IT company has never provided them with administrator logins. They won’t hand them over because they know they will be fired as soon as they do. It’s a nasty situation, but these things happen, unfortunately.

This company is paying $30,000 a year to this company because they don’t want to lose their websites and emails.

The only way you can control your business is if you have ownership and knowledge in all parts of your business.

When your business relies heavily on the internet, digital marketing, and your website, you want to do your best to ensure that nobody can take these things away from you.

What to do if your website has gone

Restore a website backup

You can restore your last backup if you have your own hosting account.

With most hosting companies these days, restoring a backup is as simple as pressing a button and waiting 10 minutes.

With my maintenance plans, we also take an off-site backup once a month for our clients. This is just an extra precaution.

If you are relying on someone else and can’t get access, a platform deletes your site due to their Terms, and you don’t have backups, you may be very upset!

If only you had taken screenshots of your site….

View the Web Archive

If there is no backup to restore, things get a little harder, but the situation is usually fixable.

Wayback Machine is an internet archive of more than 431 billion web pages. It doesn’t just take screenshots; it stores the entire website, so you can browse through it as if it were still online.

Type in your website’s URL and see what comes up. Hopefully, you will find all of your site pages, which you can download and recreate on a new site.

The Wayback Machine is fun to play with, but also handy if your website disappears.

What next?

You need to either recreate the website or design a new one.

New Website – DIY

Things to Consider

Time

DIY may look like the cheapest option, but is it? There are many ways to create a website, but do you have the time to move through the learning curve and create your own site?

I regularly underestimate how long a task will take, and I have been developing websites for 30 years.

For example, my internet service is super slow on the days it rains. Sometimes, things on the internet go terribly wrong, and I spend hours fixing something I didn’t envisage, like an SSL certificate error or a site needing a CDN that keeps going down.

Do you have 40 or so free hours to devote to creating your site, or is it better to use that time in your zone of genius and outsource the task to a web developer who can create a site that performs well and looks great?

Is your site as awesome as your brand?

Web Design can look easy on all the ads for platforms like Wix, but it can be a little tricky, especially if you don’t have an eye for design. Will your design show your professional business in the correct light, or will your business look second-rate?

Functionality, UX, UI, SEO

Having worked in web for 30+ years, I know I must commit to learning and reading about my work daily to stay current. Website fashions have changed, and the way people use the internet has also changed.

Will your design be what people want to use? The UX (user experience) of a website affects SEO too. If you have an online store and people don’t like it (poor UX) they won’t buy your product, they will go to your competitor instead.

DIY steps

Take a crawl of your website to know what you need to create. I suggest using www.screamingfrog.co.uk on the web archive page to get a list of your needs.

Choose a platform

Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and Weebly are well-known website-building platforms. Some of the newer builders that aren’t quite as well-known are Webflow and ShowIt, which have some gorgeous, feminine templates.

While WordPress.org has the most significant learning curve of all the platforms, it is the best option to scale your business.

The Dreaded Ts & Cs

Check the terms and conditions of Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly, Webflow and ShowIt and double-check if your business is allowed. Some business types are not

If you decide to go with Wix or Squarespace, be aware that they delete sites without warning, so always keep a backup of your content just in case. Sometimes, webarchive.org won’t have the latest version of your site.

I know of someone who was using Shopify to sell cigars; the business is 100% legal, but Shopify removed them.

Squarespace has been in the news lately for deleting a Doctor’s website, and they have pretty bad reviews overall.

Why I use WordPress.org

WordPress.org is open source, allowing all the cool nerd brains in the world to create awesome WordPress things. Some things are in the WordPress Repository, but some aren’t. You can find them on GitHub (a website used by millions of developers)

WordPress is touted as the best for SEO (search engine optimisation), which helps websites rank high on search engines such as Google.

WordPress is also the world’s most popular CMS (content management system). This makes learning to do pretty much anything with WordPress as simple as a Google search away. If you need help, you can hop onto YouTube, which has many channels dedicated to WordPress design and development.

A large percentage of the Internet is websites built with WordPress, including Fortune 500 companies. Billion-dollar businesses use WordPress because it is highly flexible and scalable.

Trusted by the Best.

37% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online.

https://wordpress.org
12/08/2020

I am a WordPress Developer because I come from the era of creating websites by writing code.

WordPress is a CMS that helps you manage all the files, images, and scripts on a website. You don’t have to know how to code or manage all the elements in the backend.

I like to be able to choose my hosting, optimise my server and pages and work on every aspect of my build. I also like having access to all the integrations and plugins using the largest and most popular open-source platform.

WordPress Plugins take your website to a whole new level!

WordPress Themes and Plugins

I have been working a lot lately with workflows, automation, and integrations, and I have also built quite a few WooCommerce stores in the past year.

WordPress gives you limitless possibilities; when you think you have seen it all, someone creates something new for you to WOW.

If you want to add a form of 40 screening questions and conditional logic. No problem!

Want to sell products on your site? Let’s do that!

Want to add a membership area or community forum? Yep, WordPress can do that, too.

Can you see how plugins can take an otherwise basic website and take it to a new level of awesomeness?

Pretty amazing, right?

Perhaps you’ve sifted through the thousands of WordPress plugins and themes out there and are wondering which ones you actually need for your site, overwhelmed by all the choices?

With 1000s of plugins and themes with both free, freemium and paid, it’s easy to be tempted by them all, not knowing what to use or wasting a lot of money on things you don’t need or won’t use.

Although it can be tempting to add many plugins to your site, it’s important to only use what you need. The more plugins you add, the less secure and slower your site will become.

New Website – Professional

Hiring a Professional

Before you hire someone, make a list of what you need. This will help you choose from a massive sea of choices!

There are many web developers, designers, and freelancers on the internet, but if you don’t know what you need, you may end up with a site that you neither need nor want!

As the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

Going offshore

Sites like Fiverr, Freelancer, or Upwork may offer cheap offerings, but sometimes, the cost is far greater than imagined. What you think and what you receive can be very different, and you may not have the ownership you were led to believe.

I had an SEO client spend $ 3,000 on a website on Upwork. When I started my SEO audit, I found that the Upwork seller had created many duplicates of the client’s website. +

Duplicate sites are bad for SEO, but the seller didn’t do anything wrong, as no contract said the site would not be reproduced.

Going offshore can bring many challenges, such as contracts or service agreements being difficult to enforce when buying from a nameless person with nothing more than a PayPal account.

You can pay for work you never receive or that is so poor that you can’t use it.

I outsourced some content creation 2 years ago, and by having my details on a contract, they used it for identity theft, and I lost $2000. I spoke to PayPal and my bank, but they said there was nothing they could do

Australian Web Development

If you are going to go with an Australian, are you happy with remote, or do you want a local office to visit?

These things are all important questions to think of before you decide on which way to go.

From an SEO perspective, it’s best to recreate your site with the same structure and content. Google sees code and content so you could give your site a design refresh without affecting any SEO goodness you may have. If you don’t keep the same site structure, you will have a lot of errors on your website

2020 surge of suppliers

It’s a shame to see the new wave of Digital Agencies, basically just solo salespeople selling offshore services for a profit. In many cases, they do not care about the quality of the work they are providing, selling sites for $4000 that they paid $400 to have created in India.

Since the start of 2020, I have also noticed a massive surge in the number of website creators and SEOs in the industry groups, forums, and communities I am part of. Often, they join so they can ask questions, and people like me can answer them, so they go back to their clients with the answers I gave them.

Unfortunately, many inexperienced newbies charge unsuspecting clients $2000 for a website or $2000 for SEO monthly retainers. SEO takes time, so you can pay thousands before learning it’s doing nothing.

Today, someone rudely contacted me via private message, asking me to review a website. I asked who you were and why I would do that. He said, ‘You are an experienced developer, so I want you to check it before I give it to my client’ …. umm WTF? I was a bit flabbergasted, to be honest, haha.

Quality Assurance

There are good and bad in every industry. Some people are great at selling (my worst skill), and some people do great website development.

I have a few ways you can check the work of a web developer or designer to see if they are skilled or BS.

Builtwith.com—Check out the plugins on the site—if the list is long, it’s not good.

WordPress Theme Detector – Check if they use quality themes or free, outdated junk. A WordPress site must have a theme, which is not the same as the template.

A quality developer will know that site speed is important for conversions. With these 3 sites, you don’t need to know much; look for a good score. A’s, high percentages, and green are good :)

• Tools.pingdom.com
• GTmetrix.com 
• www.webpagetest.org is my personal favourite

Amazon’s calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four-tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day–meaning they’d serve up many millions of fewer online adverts.

www.fastcompany.com – Mar 15, 2012

I hope you found this post helpful. If you are looking for a reputable website designer who can whip you up a website in a day (no jokes!), you can check out my 1-day VIP Intensive.

Until next Time