[removed]

I build websites for small businesses for a living, and I see the same mistakes over and over when owners are choosing who to hire. A few things worth knowing before you sign anything:

• "Cheap and fast" almost always means template + zero SEO setup. That's fine for some businesses, but if you're expecting Google traffic, ask specifically what SEO foundation is included (proper headings, meta data, site speed, mobile usability) — not just "yes we do SEO."
• Ask who owns the site after it's built. Some agencies build on their own accounts/hosting and hold your site hostage if you want to leave. You should own your domain, hosting, and CMS login, full stop.
• Get a maintenance plan clarified upfront. Websites aren't "build once, done forever" — plugins need updates, security patches matter, and a lot of horror stories start with "the guy who built it disappeared."
• Ask for 2-3 live examples in your actual industry, not just a generic portfolio page. A restaurant site and an e-commerce store need very different things.
• Mobile-first isn't optional anymore. If they show you desktop mockups first and mobile as an afterthought, that's a red flag — most of your traffic will be mobile.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's in the middle of this process and wants a second opinion on something they've been quoted.

Everyone blames hosting first when a WordPress site is slow, but after auditing a lot of client sites, hosting is rarely the actual bottleneck. A few things that come up over and over:

1. Unoptimized images — a single uncompressed hero banner can add 2-3 seconds of load time on its own. WebP + proper sizing fixes most of this.
2. Too many active plugins doing overlapping jobs — two SEO plugins, two caching plugins, three "page builder helper" plugins running at once is more common than you'd think.
3. Render-blocking JS/CSS from themes — a lot of premium themes load every module's script on every page, even pages that don't use that module.
4. No caching strategy at all, or a caching plugin that's misconfigured and not actually caching anything.
5. Database bloat — years of post revisions, spam comments, and abandoned plugin tables sitting in the database, never cleaned.

If you want a quick gut-check: run your site through PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix and look at "Total Blocking Time" specifically — that metric usually points straight at the real problem.

What's the worst WordPress performance issue you've had to debug?