Things To Consider When Using WordPress For Client Websites
When using WordPress for client websites it’s important to give some additional consideration to how you intend to install and configure the site for them.
You need to think ahead of time to anticipate any issues as they are likely to have little experience with WordPress and may be unsure how to complete even the easiest of tasks.
In this article I want touch of some of the things that you might want to give some thought to if you’re using WordPress to power websites for your clients.
Upgrades
One thing that your clients will almost certainly need to do when using WordPress is upgrade to the latest version. Several new updates are typically released throughout the year (for both WordPress and individual plugins) that contain bug fixes, patches for security holes, and new functionality.
However, there are always risks associated with upgrading – the functionality of a site can be significantly affected and it’s not uncommon for there to be incompatibilities with installed plugins. This can potentially cause a range of issues with a website and as a result it’s usually best to test things locally before upgrading.
This could be an issue though as the vast majority of clients are unlikely to test anything before upgrading. To address this, you may want to consider altering their WordPress installation so that they can’t see update messages for both the WordPress core and individual plugins (check out this article to find out how to remove the WP dashboard message).
By doing this you can ensure that your clients wont take it upon themselves to update without consulting you first. However, it’s probably best to discuss this with your clients first – it’s always worth informing them about the benefits of upgrades and also the associated risks.
Offer Training / Video Tutorials
If you’ve been using WordPress for a while you’ll no doubt find it really easy to use – however, lots of clients will have little technical experience and will find even some of the most basic tasks (e.g. publishing posts, adding categories, etc.) difficult without some basic training.
It’s therefore worth taking the time to tell your clients how to use WordPress – you can do this in a variety of ways – written documentation, in person, over the phone, or a good approach is to record some short videos that show how to do basic things such as adding posts/pages, editing content, adding categories, and deleting posts.
The good thing with this approach is that you can then reuse these videos for each new client that you build a WordPress site for.
Custom Fields
When building a theme for client websites I think it’s best to reduce the amount of custom fields that you use. Whilst they offer lots of potential to extend the core functionality of WordPress, they can also come across as being quite technical and intimidating to clients.
For example, when building a WordPress site that incorporates a portfolio, it’s not uncommon with many themes out there for you to have to create a new post (which actually is supposed to represet a portfolio item) and then associate custom fields with that post that provide details such as an overview of the portfolio item, a URL to an image screenshot, project dates, etc.
This is not intuitive to those who have little experience with WordPress – they just want to click buttons that say “Add New Portfolio” and “Add New Project” which then take them to pages where they can select things from drop-down boxes and enter text into input fields.
With the new custom post type functionality that will be included in the imminent release of WordPress 3.0, it will be much easier to create this type of functionality for users.
Making use of this feature will enable you to reduce your reliance on custom fields and therefore create a more intuitive interaction experience for your clients.
Security
If possible it’s worth taking the time to enable Akismet for your clients to stop them receiving lots of comment spam. It’s also worth taking steps to enhance the security of their site – so, for example, you might want to perform some of the standard security steps for them such as ensuring they use a secure password, deleting the admin user, restricting access to important areas via .htaccess, and hiding the WordPress configuration file (wp-config.php).
I’ve written about each of these before in a previous post (Make Your WordPress Site Hack-Proof) – check it out if you’d like some tips about making WordPress sites more secure.
It may also be worth installing some security plugins as well to enhance security – there are numerous ones out there including WP Security Scan and WordPress Exploit Scanner that help to check your site for any vulnerabilities.
Others aim to protect your site through the use of a firewall (e.g. WordPress Firewall) or through Anti-Virus (e.g. WP AntiVirus).
Database Backups
Another thing that your clients might not give consideration to is the fact that they’ll need to backup their WordPress database.
WordPress Database Backup is a great plugin that will allow clients to easily update their sites and then send the backup to their email account. They can even set it to run daily, weekly, or as frequently as they choose – so they can essentially set and then forget about it.
This is also quick and easy for you to implement, so it doesn’t take up too much of your time – just be sure to run through with your clients how the plugin works and the different functions it provides.
Analytics
It’s likely that your clients will want to monitor traffic to their site, so you’ll want to make this easy for them to do.
There are several approaches you could use here – you could get clients to give you their analytics tracking code and then copy it into the site manually yourself. Or you could provide a theme option that allows them to complete this task themselves.
You could also use a plugin, but that may be overkill – the key thing is to ensure that this is configured for your clients so that they can then easily monitor visits to their site.
Bookmark Important Pages
It’s always worth telling clients to bookmark the WordPress Admin login screen – whilst it’s obvious to those of us who use WordPress on a regular basis where to access this page, those who are relatively new to WordPress wont be aware of the URL they’ll need to visit.
It’s therefore worth ensuring that they bookmark both the login page and the obviously the main URL of their site.
Your Thoughts?
These are just some suggestions about what you need to give consideration to when using WordPress on client websites – obviously this will depend on individual client needs and the nature of the project, but hopefully the areas I’ve discussed cover the main points.
Do you use WordPress for client websites? Leave a comment below if you have any advice or if you think I missed anything out…
June 16th, 2010 at 10:22 am
Overall, I think you’d agree, coding most of your clients’ websites into WordPress is better than worse. Some suggestions that I might advise customers to consider is the time and expense it takes to, for example, make all images editable. That’s not a fun thing to code into a WordPress admin section. Sometimes it’s cheaper and best for the client if they don’t have the freedom to change EVERYTHING!
June 17th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Good point Scott – making things overly customizable can potentially create overload for clients/users as they end up having lots of different things that need tweaking and configuring.
June 24th, 2010 at 7:20 pm
I never thought about creating a video tutorial series for my clients. I really like that idea. I can think of a few off the top of my head that can use that
Great post!
June 30th, 2010 at 2:14 am
The new custom post type capability in 3.0 is going to help me stop confusing and overwhelming my non WordPress savvy clients with too much information and off topic language(Posts?? Whats a Posts?!). Sure I can create a custom template with a query for a category or custom field or tag but in order for it all to work the client has had to remember to use Posts and not Pages and then remember to select the right category, or input the custom field or use the right tag. I haven’t had too much difficulty getting them to use the right category but this way is just so much better.
I try to keep it as simple as possible when I create themes for clients and 3.0 is definitely a huge help.
September 24th, 2010 at 8:32 am
This is really helpful – just one question:
When creating a self-hosted WordPress site for a client is it advisable to use your own WordPress.com account (eg needed to get the API key for installing Plugins) or to use their account, or to create a new account for the project?