A few years ago, updating a website was a laborious, highly technical affair. Adding a news story or details of a new product was something that needed to be done by the experts in your web department (if you were a big company) or by your freelance web designer (if you were an SME).
These days, website content management systems such as WordPress make it quick and easy to update your website yourself. In fact, the ability to update your site yourself is probably one of the biggest reasons you’ve got a WordPress website. It’s really easy to add new content and images and updating plugins and widgets to keep your site secure can be a matter of a simple click. In short, you can quickly feel you’re one of the world’s WordPress experts.
But when something goes wrong, that sense of being in the ranks of the WordPress experts quickly runs out. You might have just updated a plugin and discovered that it no longer works. You might just have updated the version of WordPress your site uses and found that the new version isn’t compatible with one of your widgets.
The chances are that with knowledge, patience and confidence, you could probably figure out and fix the problem yourself. If you do, you’ll have a huge sense of achievement. Your sense of yourself as one of the world’s WordPress experts will – rightly – increase.
But what if you can’t? What if you make the problem worse? Or what if you can, but it takes you a day to sort it?
Sometimes, the most important part of being an expert is about knowing when to quit.
My advice is to become a WordPress expert to the level that adds most value to your business – this is probably keeping the site content engaging and up-to-date. But when it comes to the technical stuff, turn to the real WordPress experts. They will keep your site running smoothly far more easily than you could or should. And they’ll save you time, money and frustration in the long run too.