Running a successful online business can be tough. Growing a successful online business can be even tougher.

Unfortunately, many business owners don’t realize how difficult it can be to scale their companies in this competitive online world.

While a DIY approach can work when you’re just starting out, whether you’re a blogger, eCommerce shop owner, or a business owner with clients, as your company grows, managing the business side of things and the technical website side of things can become challenging.

Many WordPress agency developers deal with large businesses trying to scale their own WordPress sites all the time. And today, we’re sharing with you the biggest blunders developers see people making while trying to grow their own WordPress website so you can avoid making the same mistakes.

But first, let’s take a look at why so many WordPress businesses fail to grow in the first place.

Why Many WordPress Business Are Doomed From the Start

WordPress offers people of all skill levels an affordable opportunity to start a business and make money online. And while this idea is very appealing to the masses, the truth is, not everyone is going to be successful.

Here are the most common reasons why people running WordPress businesses will never be successful , according to WP Buffs:

  • Lack of Experience: just because someone launches a WordPress website doesn’t mean they have the experience to be a successful business owner or understand what KPIs to monitor to gauge performance.
  • Isolation: many online business owners are solopreneurs and rely solely on their skills to make it. This lack of diversity shows in their business management and can negatively affect their success.
  • Oversaturation: because it’s so easy to launch a startup using WordPress, the market is full of people trying to achieve the same thing as you. You have to know how to stand out if you want to make it.
  • Lack of Vision: wanting it all is a common problem businesses owners have. Not being able to key in on your strengths can hurt you in the long run.
  • No Diversification: focusing too narrowly and not opening yourself up to outside opportunities can hurt you as well.

As you can see, there are many reasons why online business owners never make it to a point where than can scale in the first place.

However, if you do reach a point where your online business begins to grow, make sure to avoid these common blunders WordPress agency developers see all the time.

Biggest Blunders WordPress Business Owners

1. Not Knowing the Problems That Come with Growing

When someone is at the beginning stages of business ownership, they may not realize everything that will affect their site’s speed, performance, and user experience as they continue to grow.

These things include:

  • Huge amounts of data that accumulate
  • Increased traffic numbers
  • Third-party services and integrations requiring resources
  • Custom built plugins and themes
  • eCommerce platforms with thousands of products and orders
  • Membership platforms streaming data
  • Custom landing pages handling thousands of visitors a day

Of course, these are not all the factors that may cause a dip in site speed, performance, or user experience satisfaction. But you better believe at least some of them will affect your growing business at one point.

2. Failing to Understand the Effect WordPress Themes & Plugins Have

WordPress business owners that launch their own website may not have a clue what they’re doing when they choose a theme or decide which plugins to use.

Here’s a list of the most common WordPress theme and plugin problems developers see on growing sites:

  • Bloated multipurpose themes with features that never get used but drag down site speed
  • Complex slider plugins that aren’t user friendly or accessible
  • Visual builders that create inconsistent content, affect loading times, or reverse content as it updates
  • Multilingual plugins that don’t meet the needs of a particular global audience
  • eCommerce platforms that don’t have the feature set needed to scale
  • Incompatible plugins working against each other

If you wait to hire a WordPress agency until your business has grown and you begin noticing a drop in site speed, performance, and user satisfaction, it might be too late.

3. Overusing AJAX

In general, using AJAX on your website is a good thing. It helps create dynamic, user friendly, and responsive websites that people love to visit.

That said, a common problem seen in WordPress websites is the overuse of AJAX. Overusing this advanced technology can harm the user experience, slow page loading times, and make it harder for your business to grow.

Sliders, parallax, galleries, lazy loading, and even dynamically populated eCommerce inventory can create too many AJAX requests on your website. This is where intelligent caching, request monitoring, and an expert developer come in handy.

4. Using the Default Content Management for Post Types/Taxonomies

Storing data in WordPress is okay until your business grows. Then you risk creating huge postmeta tables that strain your server’s resources, clutter up the database, and again slow your site down. This is usually seen on growing eCommerce sites that process tons of customer orders every day.  

Although there are database optimization plugins in the market designed to help delete unnecessary data, unless a website owner knows to do this, they’ll continue to store large amounts of information on their website. Then, by the time they realize something is wrong, and enlist the help of a professional developer, the backend of their site is a total mess.

5. Loading Fonts Offsite

These days it’s easy to add any number of custom fonts to a website. People are no longer required to use the fonts their WordPress theme comes with. However, what developers are seeing is a large number of growing websites that are using way too many font types.

When there are too many different font types, especially from offsite font services such as Google Fonts or Typekit, it takes a long time for all the fonts to load site wide when a site visitor arrives. This makes for slow loading times and a poor user experience that has the potential to drive people away.

Plus, if the external source that is supplying your website with its font type has an outage, your website is going to suffer until that problem is resolved.  

6. Using Lackluster Web Hosting

When a business owner is just starting out, their budget is usually slim. That means there’s not a lot of money for investing a highly reputable hosting provider meant to scale.

Developers helping WordPress business owners scale understand the benefits of using a web hosting provider that offers features such as:

  • Automatic scaling across multiple servers for handling traffic spikes
  • Intelligent caching, even of dynamic websites such as eCommerce shops
  • WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates
  • Automated backups stored offsite
  • Enterprise level security
  • Certified expert support available 24/7
  • Global CDN for instant content delivery

Don’t make the mistake of using a cheap hosting provider if your long term goal is to grow into a large online business. Instead, use our managed WooCommerce services or enterprise WordPress services to give your business room to grow.

We can handle all the growth your business experiences. And to top it off, we can help you optimize your growing website and avoid many of the mistakes people scaling their businesses on their own commit.