Even though I have way more experience than a year before, and much more than two years ago, I feel I struggle more.
The more I know, the more difficult it becomes to run a WordPress business as a sole proprietor. I am not seeing myself as a freelancer but more like a one-person company offering WordPress services (mostly website relaunches, but also maintenance, correct technical implementation for SEO, WooCommerce.. there is just a ton of knowledge I have but I can’t control it anymore. It is just too much.
There are so many plugins and solutions and frameworks and techniques and best practices out there that change almost daily. From fonts, colors, design, to CSS frameworks, to integrations with external solutions, accessible code and much more.
How to keep up?
On top of that, plugin compatibility is just crazy difficult as soon as your sites become a bit larger or more complex. It’s a full-time job when you also report issues to the plugin developer and troubleshoot it with them. Once you found a combination of plugins that play nicely with each other, you can’t just streamline and update all previous sites.
Streamlining and getting a smooth process and plugin stack seems so important, but on the other hand impossible as the pace of development is so fast.
I could just not watch what’s going on in the WordPress community for some time, but the feeling of FOMO is quite strong. There is also the fear that I missed something and can’t jump on it easily at a later stage when things grow.
If I add all the knowledge and all I would like to take care of in a website relaunch project into the project calculation, the projects would become unaffordable
So in the end, I feel like I only work 15% on client projects, and charge only 5% of it, but I give 100% every single day, just to keep up with everything
How are you dealing with all this?
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Plugin compatibility shouldn’t be difficult at all unless you’re using a horrendous amount of plugins to accomplish incredibly simple things. Sure, there are situations where many plugins are required. For instance, there’s a website I work on which has 20+ plugins which is way more than I like to have, but for the functionality they bring to the sites it wouldn’t be beneficial to develop myself, and I experience no compatibility issues on that particular site.
Perhaps what you need to be doing is learning the development side of WordPress a bit more (it comes across like you’re probably not doing much development & perhaps utilise page builders a fair bit?), to reduce your reliance on plugins?
In terms of frameworks etc… why not just find one you prefer working with and focus on that? You don’t need to be switching to the latest and greatest thing just because everyone else is.
Build a starter theme, based on some other theme (e.g. Underscores), and create a solid base for each of your projects. Something that can be easily tweaked, in terms of design, functionality etc… Most websites, if you’re focussing on just regular information-based sites or ecommerce sites, are going to be incredibly similar in terms of their setup & shouldn’t be that different (at least in my experience).
Sure, some might require being connected to external platforms (e.g. a CRM) or might require some additional features, but it sounds like you’re stressing over many things that really don’t need to be stressed over.