Meeting with WordPress Professionals

< 1 minute read

At a cafe, I met up with some local folks making their living building sites with WordPress. For me it was especially good getting a bit of a reality check, and hear what was important to them. Besides having a good time socializing (which most of us admitted we rarely do, especially on topics related to WordPress), there were a few interesting takeaways for me.
Listicle, go!

ManageWP is so hot right now. Half of the them swore by it. They much preferred it to developing a site locally and then deploying live. In fact, one of them apparently owed everyone else a coffee because they had promised to start using it a while ago but never did. It helped immensely in keeping sites up-to-date (which is the number one cause of sites getting hacked.)
SiteGround Cloud also sounds pretty handy. You can create a client site and manage it all yourself, and if they want manage and host it themselves (or hire someone else to do it) SiteGround will take care of moving them over to their own account painlessly.
Divi Pagebuilder was also very popular. I know with our team it’s derided because ther are always integration problems with it, but some of our attendees loved it because their documentation is great, and they have videos for everything, which makes it especially friendly to end-users.
Many of them don’t just do websites, but instead prefer to do all the branding services for a company. A website that’s disjointed from the rest of the marketing and branding approach of the company is likely to not be of much use.

I look forward to the next time we get together.