We see this nightmare very often. There are outsource teams or single developers that don’t take the time to learn the WordPress codex and follow simple standards.
Sure things might look like they are working on the front-end but your backend is so bloated with unessecary code that you can’t even make a simple update. What’s worse is, some pages or all pages are so hard-coded that what was the point in using WordPress in the first place?
Other things we commonly see are code in the wrong files. We see CSS hard written in PHP files. We see core functionality written inside of the theme files. We even see media files paths hard written into page templates.
This is because your outsource team does not know what they are doing. If you face challenges updating or maintaining your website or websites, that’s because it was set up wrong.
If a simple text edit requires over half hour to change. It was set up wrong.
There are tons of best practices and examples out there to follow. This sloppiness, which we covered in our Spaghetti code article, hurts productivity. No one wants to deal with this. It just doesn’t have to be.
Bloated websites also under perform. There is additional markup and files than needed. All those requests and additional KB’s slow down your page load. Not to mention, it can make other performance plugins not work properly.
Another nightmare that we commonly see is the wrong use of code. We have seen some website with Bootstrap loaded and then on top of that there is some type of custom CSS file doing things that Bootstrap already handles.
Why load Bootstrap if you are using your own subpar code? Another instance is using classes on elements that it does not belong to.
What are pain points you have experienced in that past?