The big test

We all know the case in which a company does not have a webmaster or a developer dedicated to administration of its website or in worse case, its e-commerce platform. In such cases it is usual for an inexperienced and unqualified employee of the company to end up being assigned with the task of administering it and this always ends up with mixed results at best and a complete disaster more often. Therefore, we have invited 22 companies to test the efficiency of its employees in making changes, updates, backups and regular development work connected to the administration of WordPress and WooCommerce based websites to see the difference in resources spent by companies, and to find out what could be improved to save both time and budget. In the end we wanted to compare the newly collected data with the data of the same work being done by experienced webmasters and developers within our team.

Each company had selected 1 participant who took part in our little experiment. Every one of them had different knowledge and experience gained solely from managing their respective company’s websites. We have assigned all 22 participants with a list of tasks to do in a WordPress and WooCommerce panel of a test website we have created for them. The list of tasks included:

1. Changing the photos of team members on the “Our team” subpage.
2. Changing the order of the menu in the website’s header.
3. Removing an address in the website’s footer.
4. Creating 2 blog posts and scheduling their automatic publishing date.
5. Setting up SEO titles and meta descriptions for 5 subpages by using Yoast SEO plugin.
6. Changing texts on the homepage and 3 subpages.
7. Adding a Youtube video player in a new blog post.
8. Changing text fonts on the homepage.
9. Setting different headers for the blog posts.
10. Changing the pin location on the interactive Google Maps embed with a specific location.
11. Creating a new subpage with texts and photos.
12. Adding and removing 5 products.
13. Updating CMS WordPress with fixes if necessary.
14. Updating 5 selected plugins (Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7, Classic Editor, Advanced Custom Fields PRO, and WPML) with fixes if necessary.
15. Creating backup of website database and files.

As you can see above the difficulty of the tasks has been purposefully differentiated, so there are tasks that should be very easy to do and there are some that require much more knowledge and experience, however, what they all have in common is that they are all regular tasks in most companies having a WordPress or WooCommerce based website.

The average task completion time

Now let’s compare the average time in which each of these tasks was done by the participants and on the other hand by our in-house development team, experienced with CMS WordPress and WooCommerce. It is extremely important to mention here that the developers within our team who were assigned with these tasks had no prior experience with our test website and were not responsible for creating it, so they did not know the code or the structure prior to being assigned with the tasks.

Results

On average it took 13 hours and 55 minutes for the participants to complete all the tasks, whereas it took only 3 hours and 24 minutes to complete the same tasks for our experienced developers who took part in our test.

The biggest issues our participants had while working on the tasks was when they required more specific knowledge than just using the CMS administration panel to make the changes. The tasks that proved to be the most challenging required to either make a change in the PHP code, debugging, or finding the incompatibility between the version of the CMS system itself or the plugins in order to get them to work properly. That is not surprising at all, as making updates is most often the unintentional cause of critical errors, as they simply require more experience and although pressing the “Update now” button is always very tempting to use, the automatic updates regularly bring unexpected results, and often the whole website completely stops working.

Waste of resources

The above results show that without a dedicated and experienced developer working on your website or e-commerce platform there are a lot of resources being wasted when the right people are not assigned with the right job.

Hourly rate of participant/company employee assigned with web development work: $30.
Cost of completion of 15 web development tasks: 14 hours x $30 = $420.

Hourly rate of Webinity’s developers: $45
Cost of completion of 15 web development tasks: 3,5 hours x $45 = $140.

Using Webinity’s services proved to be 67% cheaper.

Moreover, the above costs are only based on additional works hours but with Webinity’s administration plans apart from update and backups, and depending on the plan you also receive additional hours for web development each month, which saves you even more budget, as our plans include administration & web development services, regular maintenance and protection all in one package optimized to bring the best out of your website.

Therefore, if we made the same estimation for one of our Clients using the Basic plan for $99 (that includes additional 1h for web development monthly) you would most likely pay just for the subscription ($99) and 1 additional hour of development work, so $139 in total, and still have all the other benefits included in our plan for just the same work.

It is clear to us that companies are often wasting valuable internal resources and a lot of time and money by delegating tasks to employees who are not right for the job, leading to frustration of the employees and unhappiness of the employers. Fortunately there is a way out, simply by outsourcing the web development related work to people specializing in it.

If you are interested in finding out how you can benefit from using our service for your WordPress or WooCommerce based website do not hesitate to contact us. We will be happy to answer any questions. You can also find out more about our services by checking our Plans and FAQ.