So, I would love nothing more than to be able to hire someone to design, maintain my website and handle my social media, especially since I have a full time career as a RN. At this time, I can not afford it though, so I have to handle all these things myself.
I use a Word Press website and Bluehost was my original host. I built my site myself, even though I had no flipping freaking clue as to WTH I was doing. Elementor made it much easier for me though.
When I added my online store several months ago, I used the Next Gen Gallery Pro Plug in. It was simple and easy to get set up. However, it had imitations for me. It is geared more for photographers to sell their portrait prints to their clients. It s a great plug in and I would recommend it to photographers that do solely portraits. For me though, a tog that sells fine art prints and functional art, it just didn’t provide me all that I needed. So I decided to switch over to WooCommerce.
I started working on my Woo Store about 2 months ago and thought I would only take me like a week to finish it. Nope–that is not what happened. Little did I know that it would lead me down one rabbit hole after another…
I fell victim to all these flashy fancy plug ins. I loved them and they looked great…but…after COMPLETELY finishing my store with them, I noticed my site was very slow and that I had all kinds of weird issues.
Ya ll, I ended rebuilding like 3 or 4 times..one. thing. after. another.
In the process of this, I reached out to a friend of mine who is a retired web site designer. She was a God send. I made her an admin of my site so she could get in and look. She was Tiffany, you have too many plug ins and your site is way too slow. Also pointed out other issues that I was not aware of.
I realized she was right. I started doing research on a lot of these plugs and various other things. I deleted a lot and started all over again. I noticed that Bluehost had a “staging option” in my dashboard. This allows you to work on your site, on the back end, if you will, and does not change anything to your actual live site. You make your changes on this “staging site” and then you deploy it over to your live site when you are ready. I thought this was cool cuz I also realized that my theme was no longer supported and I needed to change that too.
So…off I went down the rabbit hole again for the #th attempt. I had completely lost count by that time so I can not honestly say the what the exact number of attempt it was.
I got a new theme and then started a staging site, so that I could not only start my store over AGAIN but also the entire look of my site.
It took me about a week to get my site redone through the staging site. I went through everything so carefully and did not miss one detail. When I was happy with everything, I had such a big sigh of relief!! After I made sure I was happy with everything, I hit the deploy button to transfer over to my live site..and I got an error message……and noticed that not only did the changes not transfer BUT I was also stuck in “staging” and my site disappeared from the blue host dashboard.
So, I reached out to Blue Host. I used them for many years now. Many people complain that the reps are are foreigners blah blah. That is true but I have ALWAYS gotten great service from them. As far as customer service goes, I have aways been very happy with them. I have never been one to care if someone is blue, purple, where they are from, their religion and all that kind of stuff.
In usual fashion, I got great service from my call. However, there was something that I did not like, which the rep had nothing to do with.
Apparently, the “staging site” is only in Beta and they are not recommending people to use it. This info was NOT on the dashboard or ANYWHERE that I saw. I never would have used it if I knew it just was in Beta!!!!
My site was all screwed up. On the Word Press dashboard, it showed that I was stuck in “staging” and could not access my Live Site, even though my live site showed some of the changes I made but the format was messed up.
The Bluehost rep had to put in a ticket. After the 3rd day of waiting for them to fix it, I had become just “so over it.” My thoughts were to just get a new domain and start it all over with a new host. I reached out to my friend Karen again to get her thoughts. She told me about a local company. It s a local dude that started his own hosting company and she worked with him a lot. This guy is “so local” that I can pick up my phone and call him myself if I have a problem.
I purchased “tmatt photography. com”. (My previous domain was TMatt Photography.biz)……..and started ALL.OVER.AGAIN. from complete scratch.
and now here we are…..FINALLY done.
I am happy with how my site is and very happy about finding a local host. Using local, is always so much better in my own personal opinion.
The day after I made my switch over, Bluehost was able to fix my site. However, I lost a lot of stuff so I would have had to start over again anyway. Thankfully, I was able to import all my old blog posts but I did lose a lot of the pics…but I can add those back later. I just did a redirect from my old domain to my new domain for the time being, until the old domain expires next month.
So, I learned a lot of stuff in this whole process and thought I d share some of it. I am NOT an expert in web design or anything like that so I am not qualified to give advice or anything like that. I am just sharing my experience to fellow small biz owners that were like me starting–not knowing anything about any of this. I m passing this on and leaving it up to the reader to do their own research and make their own decisions.
BlueHost. From You Tube vids I saw, made by “tekkies”, their servers are outdated, hence their websites are slower. I do not know these people, nor am I saying they are right or wrong. Just passing info. I can say that my new site is a whole lot faster than my Bluehost was. I do not know enough to say if that can be directly attributed to my host though or if it is due to other factors.
Plug Ins. It s much better to keep these to an absolute min. They can cause conflicts with each, conflicts with your site and slow your site down. Do not get carried away and get caught up in all the flashy stuff. Simple is better. It s also better to have a simple site with great images and graphics then to have the “fancy stuff” with pics that look like crap. Before you download a plug in, make sure that it compatible to your vision of Word Press, that it is reputable and consistently being kept up.
Jetpack. This is the plug in that Word Press pushes. I read a lot of things saying that it is a “bloat”, meaning it greatly slows you site down. It contains a lot of stuff and you may not need the majority of the stuff it has. I also read other people say that it is not the bloat people claim it to be?? I do not know enough to comment about all that. However, I turned off a lot of features that I do not need and noticed that my site speed did increase.
Host providers. Ask around about any local hosting companies. If my friend would not have told me about our local, I never would have known. If, by chance, I would have come across their website, I would have been turned off cuz it needs updating and there are no bells and whistles. I am actually paying less then what I was with Bluehost and my site is much faster. As I mentioned already, I can pick up my phone and call the owner with any problem that I have.
Whew, there you go. I hope I mentioned something that may be useful to someone. I am looking forward to using my new host and new site, as well as my new store. The below are some things from my store. I added both my prints and sublimated items that have my images on them.
Ya ll let me know what ya ll think of my new site!
~Tiffany