WordPress is the world's largest open-source website building platform, with a rich variety of themes and plugins. Although it is very powerful, it also brings some burdens to foreign trade people who want to build websites.
1. Technical Barriers and Learning Costs
1. Due to the development of WordPress over several decades, it has a wide range of functions. However, these complex features often lead to high learning costs for beginners, requiring an understanding of various modules and functionalities, which increases the complexity of getting started.
2. WordPress service providers will not tell you that you may need to know some coding knowledge (HTML, CSS, PHP) to better master this website building technology, which is often not possessed by the average foreign trade person.
3. Terms like server, SSL certificate, domain name, CDN acceleration, etc., are unnecessary for someone in a sales position to understand. Additionally, ongoing costs, server maintenance, and other matters further increase the burden on individuals.
2. Cost of Expenses
1. Building a website with WordPress requires you to provide your own domain name, server, SSL certificate, and other technical services. These not only increase the cost but also the understanding cost.
2. Then there are the purchases and updates of themes and plugins, related to SEO, multilingual support, security protection, etc. Before spending money, you need to learn how to choose, but how many people can figure out what they really need?
3. It is common for websites to need content updates after going live, and reselecting themes and plugins incurs additional expenses.
3. Maintenance Costs
1. Foreign trade people who build websites through WordPress almost never have their own software development team (if they did, they would have built it themselves). If problems arise during the website's operation (such as being inaccessible, being attacked, server disk being full, bandwidth being maxed out, etc.), how will you solve them?
2. The website may start with good access speed, but over time it slows down. What should be done? If you can't do it yourself, you have to find someone to do it, which adds to the maintenance cost.
There are often foreign trade clients who want to build websites asking about servers and domains. I know they are asking this because they have watched many marketing videos about WordPress website building, which promote the idea that website ownership must be in their own hands to be considered theirs. This rhetoric can be very appealing to some, but from my perspective, this promotion undoubtedly increases the burden on foreign trade people, forcing them to learn everything about website building that they shouldn't have to worry about, and they end up spending money only to solve problems themselves.
Whether hiring someone to build a website with WordPress or learning it through training, one cannot avoid the three major points listed above. The original goal of clients is simply to spend money to build a website. Website service providers should build the site for clients in exchange for payment. Such a simple demand, after a lot of promotion, leaves clients with no time or energy to focus on their main business, and instead, they end up learning things unrelated to website building. Not to mention whether what you learn is superficial or deep, or how easy it is to pick up again after forgetting. When you realize that your website's performance and cost are not ideal, that is when you will evaluate whether your time and money were well spent.
Finally, I want to ask all foreign trade people a question: Is it really necessary for your website to be deployed on your own server? Deploying website code on a client's server is not difficult, but from our technical perspective, once it is deployed on the client's server, how will the client ensure its security, upgrade the functional code, and maintain the normal operation of the server? In the software industry, there is a specialized position called "operations engineer" to handle these tasks. In the eyes of technical people, the least valuable thing is the code, yet some people promote the idea that you must hold onto it tightly, which is just a burden.