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Isn’t strange that when I first started working on WordPress projects years ago, I would dive right into it fearless.
Somehow , I was always able to finish the projects.
However lately, as my knowledge of WordPress has increased exponentially. I now always hesitate and put off work because I have this fear that something will go wrong.
Granted, my skills have also improved and the complexity of the sites that I built have also increased, but there is a lot of truth to the saying that naive people usually get things done while those that are extremely educated and well read, tend to find a million reasons why it can’t be done.
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I have this in almost all aspects of my life.
Best to just put the bad thoughts aside and do your best. And worry about the worst possible outcomes later. Because that’s what they are, worst possible outcomes.
Do the thing.
Just find a good web host, spin up a staging/dev site and test everything there first. WP Engine has a one click backup/restore which saved my ass countless times.
I’ll let you in on a secret, sell websites for others to build, don’t do the building yourself.
>naive people usually get things done while those that are extremely educated and well read, tend to find a million reasons why it can’t be done.
Dunning and Kruger are left you.
I do understand your feeling; I have stopped making e-commerce sites from similar reasons, few years ago.
Spin a local installation and play with it. Test a lot of things, try to break stuff. If it breaks, try to fix it. If you can’t, try to know what broke, and look it up. Then scrap that install and make a new one. Understand why it went wrong, that’s a huge advantage.
And ultimately, but not less important, know how to do manual backups and how to restore them.
Trust yourself, the skills and knowledge you’ve got, and the team behind WordPress. They aim to code it well, in order to be hard to break. “Imposter syndrome is a thing”. But you don’t really have to take it as part of your day.
Plus, you’ve got a community that you can lean into. So take advantage of that and enjoy it!
The longer your practice and test things, you will be confident on what you’re doing. And if you feel that it may surpass your skill or your knowledge, ask for help!
That is a textbook [Dunning-Kruger](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect) experience.
Personally I’ve been through it a couple times. I have come to look at it as a sign to push onward. You’re aware of all the complexities of this field now; so that naturally introduces caution. *Confidence* only comes from practice. You might work a bit slower now, but you will be doing better work than you were before.
lol this has been me ever since i started using bricks. i’ll start a site, then learn some new things about it, decide that the current version of the site is built like crap, then i’ll delete it, and start over using more optimized methods. so far i’m on third or fourth remake. this time i’m doing it with dynamic data and bem.
The other comments written so far are true, though I think there’s another aspect to this as well – it is certainly the case for myself.
The more knowledgable you are in a certain domain, the more aware of problems/risks you are.
Depending on the type of project and your familiarity, you’ll eventually intuit risks and future pain points, and from that be able to make decisions about what you’re willing to do and commit to.
Eg, as a developer who builds more bespoke solutions, I think WP itself is a pretty solid base to build custom behaviour on top of. That said, I would do everything in my power to avoid building and customising on top of a number of popular first-/third- party extensions. I’ve been burned enough times to have basically zero trust in the stability and extensibility of third-party code.
Not to say every third-party dev/extension is poor quality, though it is the case often enough.
> naive people usually get things done while those that are extremely educated and well read, tend to find a million reasons why it can’t be done
The trick for the more experienced is to find the fuzzy space around “over calculation of risk”, so that they can decide whether to commit, and how much.
Failure is learning. You’re gonna fail a lot. If you’re failing something every day you’re probably growing…as long as you’re not doing the same thing over and over lol
This! It’s crazy that we learn through errors and then we try to avoid them and in doing so avoid projects !
If WordPress worked like it was supposed to out of the box and democratized making Websites for anyone, none of us would have jobs homie. Those challenges are your mealticket.
I’m in WordPress development since WP 2.7
Be sure: it will only get worse, try to get used to it ☺️
My situation is also like that but what to do. Sigh…..
I’ve been building sites with WordPress for 13 years and this is actually a solid time to get into it.
Dunning Kruger effect
Was just thinking this last night, some wallet plugin I use has had so many issues recently.
Just better off building everything yourself, it’s not WP that’s the issue, it’s the millions of plugins developed by strangers.
At some point you become more competent to not have to rely on them.
As someone who’s been responsible for a WordPress serving 20 million views a month, I feel your fear. You quickly learn how to reverse stuff if you screw up royally.
Plugins are the biggest problem. Reduce reliance on them as much as possible; code your own plugin that integrates all those little fixes you would otherwise have turned to a plugin for.
Staging sites are also easy nowadays with a good provider. Learn how to use one, learn GitHub.
Bro am new to wordpress web designing, especially very mych stuck in homepage editting, can you recommend some good tutorials please?
>while those that are extremely educated and well read, tend to find a million reasons why it can’t be done.
Get your hand off it and do the work.
WordPress is great to use out of the box. I would suggest using Local WP and use it to do projects. Use GIT to keep track of what changes were made and when. Be careful of what plugins you use and don’t bloat the site and database.
I’ve been working with WordPress for years, building custom themes and I’m finding the AI models that code are very helpful for building blocks of code that I can use. It’s a bit of trial and error when I want to change something in an existing setup (I think because the models sometimes need more context than I think to give them) but the fact that I know what I want and I know roughly how I’d approach building it means I can get a super-fast build of code that works more often than not. And the code is written with security in mind, which is good.
Get out of WP. It’s a shit show.
Use it at its best (blocks and fse) when you reallly need to, aka when the client is a competent designer or if it needs full editing AND is capable of learning the basics, because previews and blocks and being able to manage your site from a phone are really cool for that.
Otherwise, it’s just a lot of wasted time to do even the simplest things with plugins made by others, or building them by yourself. The DX is severely sub optimal (and i’m being very lenient here).
There’s better DX and performance out there for basically every use case that comes to mind.
I think it’s part of the learning curve. Beginners often have the advantage of a fresh perspective and fewer preconceived notions. As experts, we need to balance our caution with the confidence we had as newbies. Maybe the key is finding a middle ground?