9 Ways to Protect Users and Clients from Breaking Their WordPress Site

Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. It happens. But when the mistake occurs within a website that you put a lot of time and effort into building, it can be frustrating to go back and re-do your work, no matter how minor the issue.

As a WordPress developer, you know the platform inside and out. You’re also familiar with the types of issues that can arise within it. Because of this, you’ve probably already added some tricks to your overall workflow in order to mitigate and quickly resolve problems if and when they arise.

So, what do you do with the issues that crop up outside of your development process? Do you wash your hands of the website once it’s handed over to a client and wish them luck? As a professional, you know that playing the “it’s not my problem now” card isn’t going to win you any fans. You also know that maintaining relationships with your clients (current and former) is essential to your livelihood in this business.

If something should happen to a client’s website after you’ve completed work, you should be willing to step in and resolve the problem immediately. Or, better yet, you should have additional steps built into your own workflow that will save clients (and yourself) from ever encountering those issues in the first place.

WordPress User Errors and Why They’re Your Problem

Let’s face it: your clients aren’t going to be WordPress pros. That’s why you’re getting paid to develop their website in the first place.

Now, let’s say you are an in-house employee building a website for your own company or that you’ve been given a retainer to manage your client’s website post-launch on an as-needed basis. You’d be pretty annoyed if the president, marketing admin, or anyone else at the company came to you and said, “Whoops! I think I broke something.” Imagine how it would feel if you had completed work on a website, closed out the contract, and the same thing happened.

Some clients won’t understand that if the fault is theirs, that they need to compensate you to fix it. So not only are you left having to fix their mistake, but you have to try not to lose money and time while resolving it.

No matter how this plays out for you as a developer, it’s a tough situation to be in. You don’t want to tell your client (or boss) that they made a mistake and you don’t want to lose time on another project in order to fix it.

But what can you do?

WordPress User Errors: Slips vs. Mistakes
The first thing you need to understand is why the most common types of errors occur with a WordPress website. Most website developers would classify errors into two categories:

Slips: Slips are the type of errors that occur when a WordPress user—usually an expert developer—just forgets to do something or close a loop somewhere. If you think about it, you work on website after website… At some point, they’re all going to blur one into another and eventually something is going to slip through the cracks because you’re working on autopilot. That’s why it’s important to be diligent about working from a checklist to ensure that all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed with every project.

Mistakes: Slips are easy enough to fix since they usually occur somewhere during development. As long as you follow a consistent and thorough process when building a website, it should be easy enough to trace your steps backwards to the error. Mistakes, however, usually stem from WordPress users trying to accomplish a task, but not truly understanding how to execute it. These can be tricky to resolve since the users can explain what they were trying to accomplish, but may not have any idea what they did to cause the problem.

Mistakes occur for a number of reasons:

A user has incomplete knowledge on how to execute a task.
A user has admin (or some other higher level) access to WordPress when they shouldn’t.
A user didn’t double-check his or her work before saving the changes.
A user has too many options to choose from.
What all this comes back to is the fact that your clients are probably not equipped with the knowledge and training in WordPress or website development to fully manage their websites on their own. This also means that they’re definitely not able to fix any errors they cause either, so the onus will ultimately fall on you.

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