he 23. September 2017 was an exceptional day for me. It was the date my partner and I signed the house loan papers to finalize the acquisition of our family home.
I live in Luxembourg, and housing is very expensive. Loans for 30 or even 35 years are the norm. So, considering that you are engaging yourself for the next couple of decades, buying a house is a nerve-wracking experience.
Because you are spending all this money pretty much blindly. I don’t know anything about what it takes to build a quality house. So I’m obliged to trust the professionals who are responsible for the construction.
Not only do I have to rely on the fact that all their work is of quality, and delivered at a fair price. But I also have to trust them to buy quality materials and equipment.
After all, you’ll pay off this house over the next thirty years or more. Therefore you don’t have the budget to replace key items such as the heat pump, which can cost 10,000 EUR or more.
Which is not to mention more fundamental issues like leaking roofs, faulty pipes, or lack of protection against humidity.
What does this have to do with web design?
While not being such a significant expense as a house, a website is still a major investment for any company.
WordPress websites can cost anywhere between $1,000 to $500,000. While most people work around the $5,000 to 30,000 range, which shouldn’t forget that this is still a lot of money.
For example I consider a 5,000 EUR website budget to be small. However, that was how much my first car cost, and I relied on that car for 6 years.
So it’s good to put budgets into perspective like this. Because I find myself sometimes only looking at numbers. And forgetting the magnitude of the investment that these numbers represent.
And much like a house should be built to last, a website should be too. It should serve a business reliably for many, many years. A provide a great return on investment for the client.
So it’s not only on us to deliver quality work. But also to make good choices for the building pieces, meaning plugins and themes, that we rely on.
But there’s a problem. WordPress is guaranteed to be durable. Plugins and themes however are not.
The case of the Cwikly page builder
This week, the Cwikly page builder plugin announced, out of the blue, that it would cease development. This is a sad episode because there are no winners here—not the makers of Cwikly, or the users, and indeed, not the clients who paid for websites that use Cwikly.
Because they are now stranded with what essentially is abandonware, there will be no security or compatibility fixes beyond 2024. This means the plugin will break or have an unresolved security issue sooner or later.
Unfortunately, this is the case for all plugins and themes.
The issue with this is that certain types of plugins, you can replace. Take SEO plugins for example. I switched SEO plugins before, and the process was pretty smooth.
But page builders are different. There really is no “switching” page builders without redoing all the pages that use it.
So why do developers still use page builders? It’s because they seem to be the fast and easy solution.
The lure of easy and fast
All page builders use the same core messaging. WordPress can’t do this. But my plugin can! It will be so much faster and so much easier.
And you know what? It’s not entirely false. You can build certain things way faster with a page builder than using the Site Editor.
But it’s always a deal with the devil. Sure there are issues like bloated markup and other annoyances with certain plugins.
But there is only one key issue: Without the page builder plugin, whatever you have built is just a heap of random data.
For some professionals, that’s fine. In that sense, building with WordPress is the same as building with Wix, Webflow, or any other tool. You buy into a platform, hoping for it to stay around with the same level of quality and pricing in the future.
Now, whenever I write such things, some people accuse me of being a page builder “hater,” Which I’m not. If you want to use a page builder or any other plugin, that’s fine with me.
I’m not here to tell you how you should run your business.
However, I want to alert freelancers and agencies to the inherent danger of relying on a third-party plugin for key website aspects.
Plenty of people are upset at Cwikly because they somehow understood that because they paid $100 once, the plugin would be around for at least a couple of years.
While I can see where they are coming from, we have seen page builders come and go over the past years. It’s just a natural part of the WordPress ecosystem to rise and decline.
It’s also how business works. Unless you have a contract with a business that guarantees delivery, you have no right to getting anything. And even then if the company goes bankrupt, or closes down, such a contract is void.
Heck even if you got your $100 back, it wouldn’t really help you. Because you don’t need the money, you need the foundational piece of your website projects to work.
What to do instead?
What I would recommend that you do is build with Core WordPress as much as possible.
And the best way to learn hybrid and block theme development is my Block Theme Academy course.
You might say, “All this to convince me to buy a course?”
Well, kind of.
You see the Block Theme Academy contains everything I have learned in building client websites with blocks over the last six years.
There is nothing in the course that you couldn’t learn on your own, given enough time and a high tolerance for frustration.
The course saves you time and energy, two things freelancers and agencies greatly value. Every hour spent on non-billable activities hurts their profits and, in the case of solopreneurs, their livelihood.
And unlike certain plugins, I can’t promise you that switching to block theming will be easy and fast. Sure, the course contains a step-by-step classic to blocks transition strategy designed to minimize risks, and it has proven its worth.
But you still have to put in the work to learn all of these tools. And adapt your existing processes to the new realities of building themes.
But that time is well spent because you are building the foundation for your business’s following years. Brian Gardner coined the phrase “Five for your future”: Invest 5% of your time into upskilling.
That’s what I encourage you to do. Put your trust in WordPress. And put trust in yourself that you can continue learning and growing.
