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• They start in the dirt: for gardens, it’s literal soil; for websites, it’s dirt poor rankings and lack of discoverability. 
• The conditions need to be favourable to growth.
• Plant the seeds and give them some time.
• Nurture them.
• Prune the weeds (ie. spam comments and performance issues). 

An abandoned website can pose some liability for the site owner– the business the website represents. It could have outdated information, security exploits, and not adhere to the current legislation. 

I get approached by many website owners and their websites have tell-tale signs of websites in trouble.

Something Major Has Broken

Several years ago, one version of PHP (version 5.6) was in common use. It was replaced by PHP 7 and its sub-versions. That broke a lot of the Internet. Some web hosts have kept support going for the old sites, but that exposes their systems to security exploits. One by one, they’ve been emailing clients with warnings that support for the old system has lapsed. When the support is pulled, some websites will crash entirely. 

The Forms Don’t Work

Website forms are critical to connecting with clients– both current and potential. If the web-based forms no longer work, it’s a sign that something has busted along the way. Some examples of what could have gone wrong: 

• Web forms need spam proofing, often called “Captcha.” if something has changed and the website can no longer connect, the forms won’t work.
• The mail connection may be broken. If the forms need a working mail system, maybe that has broken down. There’s nothing wrong with periodically testing your own forms to make sure the connections are intact.
• The web form license may be out of date. Products like Gravity Forms need to be annually renewed to stay in working order. Did someone renew the licenses?

It’s Not Mobile Ready

This is 2024. The majority of website traffic comes from phones and other mobile devices. Granted: a big screen lets things look their best, but all websites need to look okay on mobile. If a website looks bad on a phone, it didn’t get the mobile readiness (aka responsive) pass. Making the choices required to make a mobile website look great takes work and if it’s not mobile-ready, that was skipped or it fell into disrepair. 

Just another WordPress Website

Remember when people bought VCRs and the clock kept flashing 12:00? They hadn’t finished the set-up. When a site’s slogan or subtitle reads “Just another WordPress Website” it says to the world: 

• We gave up before we were finished
• We launched with the basics, so we likely skipped optimizations and security safeguards.
• We may not know what we’re doing. Don’t take it personally: maybe you hired someone who didn’t know what they were doing.

Copyright 2018… 2017…. 1066….

A copyright, in part, is a legal defence of your web content. More than that, it’s a datestamp that speaks to when your website was last overhauled or updated. I’ve recently seen websites with “Copyright ©2004” A lot has happened with web technology in the last 20 years. An old website may be missing out on many technological advents. At the very least: mobile readiness. An old website may have dodgy security in place. It could have outdated information. A website should have a refresh every three years. If the copyright is much older than that, the site may not have relevant information.

Your Designer Is Gone

Some designers put a link to their website at the bottom of a client’s site. At Web321, we do that unless expressly asked to not include it. Web design is a field where people enter and leave. The low-level skills needed to roll out a website can be adopted by former graphic designers, former writers, and former marketers. If it’s easy to get into the field, it’s easy to get out. Some web designers just pack up. If their site is down, then they are likely gone too. They may be on the beaches of Thailand defending their camera from monkeys, but you’re left with an aging website. Check your footer, if the link goes to a dead page or a hacked page, then maybe your web designer has retired, died or just moved to Chang Mai.

Your Designer’s Copyright

Web designers often have the “Cobblers Shoes Dilemma.” While their client sites look good, their own sites have aged. Maybe your designer’s website is still going through the miracle of automatic updates and recurring billing, but if their copyright is several years out of whack, maybe they did abandon their own website and, by extension, their clients. I tried following up with one designer to see if they were in business still. According to their website and their social media accounts, they dropped off the Internet five years ago. Poof. Guess the quality of support one gets from a phantom. 

What If Your Site Has Been Abandoned?

Get Control Back

Try to get in touch with your former designer. If that fails, get in touch with the service provider that hosts the website. If you don’t know who is hosting your site, ask for help from a web developer to connect the dots.

If you have the login credentials to WordPress or the web hosting: that’s great. If you don’t, get in touch with the service provider and plead your case. It’s not uncommon for this to happen. If your credit card is attached to the hosting account, then it’s possible for them to consider your claims to be valid. If they won’t go for it, see if you can get access to the domain name and its registration. From there, an updated alternative web host can be used. The domain name can be pointed to the new web hosting. If you have an administrator-level WordPress account for your website, you can get into the site and make a complete duplicate of the site. Pick it up, move it to a new host and voila: control.

Worst comes to worst, if you’ve lost hosting and WordPress access, maybe consider building a new website from scratch: crib what you can from the old site and start the new site. 

If you have lost access to the domain registration: that’s more challenging. Domain name registrars have layers of defenses to prevent bad actors from getting control of domain names. The first play for a bad actor is often to impersonate the rightful owner. It can be difficult to convince a registrar. If that’s ultimately impossible, then rebrand: register a similar domain name and re-do all of the marketing material as well as your email addresses. It’s a worst-case scenario, but sometimes it’s the only recourse. 

Get Help

Some of these steps are painful and difficult to navigate. Most business owners are not web developers or web design consultants– they’re anything but. If you’re out of your league on reviving your website, get professional help. No surprise: rescues like this are common for me. Feel free to reach out: shawn@web321.co or 1-844-493-2321

The post Top 7 Signs A Website Is Abandoned appeared first on Web321: Your Best WordPress Support.

Being the most superior CMS in this industry, WordPress stands above its rival brands and constitutes a good amount of market share. The sheer scope and size of the impact of WordPress are huge, which is why we have gathered some shocking stats to help you put into perspective.

The Project Cost Calculator of Open Hub claims that WordPress took approximately 112 person-years to build itself with 423,759 lines of code and an approximate cost of $6 million to fund the size of this project.

The WordPress platform is a simple and free content management system that involves varying levels of technical knowledge to develop impressive and innovative websites and web content. The boundless library of plugins and themes boosts the possibility of this platform.

If you want to make an online appearance today, you can follow the WordPress stats that can help you to gain an online presence. The following are the important WordPress stats in 2020 that you may need to know –

• WordPress powers 35 percent of the internet with a 2 percent surge in contrast with early 2019 and a 4 percent increase compared to 2019.
• If you consider the sites built by only CMS, around 60 percent of the CMS-built sites are WordPress.
• Around 661 WordPress websites pop up every day.
• Back in 2018, non-English WordPress downloads outpaced the English ones.

These numbers are facts that are important since WordPress plays a vital role in the online marketing environment.

The capabilities and contribution of this platform have motivated others to level their playing field and compete. The central determiner of the effectiveness of this platform is not the net worth but their creativity. This is why it is possible for small businesses to compete with global companies who enjoy major marketing budgets.

• 59% of websites using well-known content management systems are using WordPress. There are around 46.2 percent sites globally that do not use a CMS and the rest depend on WordPress.
• There are 64 million websites that employ WordPress in absolute measures. This stat is based on the global count of active sites, according to the Netcraft.
• WordPress is accountable for the added 1.1 million domain registration every half-yearly. This stat is an estimated value from 2015. The actual value is likely to be more since the level of market penetration and domain registration of WordPress have risen.
• Around 34 percent of the 10,000 most famous websites across the world use WordPress. These famous sites are Etsy, Reuters, TED, Whitehouse.gov, Yelp, TechCrunch, The New Yorker, and People. Among international celebrities, Snoop Dogg, Justine Bieber, Katy Perry, Jay Z, and Stephen Fry also use this platform.
• The second most commonly used CMS, Joomla, constitutes 5.7 percent of the market share. This positively skewed market has many competitors but only one of them has been able to take an enormous lead. Drupal, Shopify, and Squarespace follow Joomla with market shares of 3.7%, 2.4%, and 2.5%, respectively.
• WordPress 4.9 version has been downloaded around 159 million times. When you read this article, WordPress downloads would cross 160 million.
• WordPress receives unique monthly visitors the same as Twitter. According to Twitter stats, unique monthly visits are around 152 million in the US but for WordPress, it is around 149 million. Both Amazon (with 199 million visits) and Twitter recently ranked lower than WordPress in terms of unique monthly visitors.
• WordPress users create around 52.1 million comments and 70.5 million new posts every month. This blogging platform encourages a huge population across the world to initiate discussions and add fresh content every month.
• A total of 409 million users view at least 21.1 billion pages every month on the popular WordPress sites. For daily content consumption, a higher count of users views WP blogs.
• WooCommerce constitutes 27.7 percent of the market share among all eCommerce platforms. This is vital information for all online businesses. Online business platforms let merchants build digital stores to allow transactions online. WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform of WordPress that is growing faster than the competitors such as Shopify and Squarespace.
• Around 13.2 percent of all sites use WooCommerce.
• 7.5 million spam comments are blocked by Akismet every hour. Akismet is a famous WordPress plugin that saves its users who deal with spam. Spam is one of the most common nuisances online today.
• In 2017, the 3 best WordPress plugins were WordPress Importer, WooCommerce, and the All in One SEO Pack.

The WordPress usability statistics in 2020 are as follows –

• WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org. These 2 versions can be very confusing. The latter is a free and open-source CMS built for the WP software. Whereas, WordPress.com is the blogging platform that is based on the said software.
• To host an appreciable WordPress site, it costs as low as $60. At this cost, you also get unmetered bandwidth and sufficient storage. In the case of a high-traffic site, you might have to go for expensive versions such as the managed WordPress hosting.
• Being platform-agnostic, WordPress provides native applications for common platforms such as iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Android, and even Blackberry. You can use all the functions regardless of what system you are using.
• WordPress is currently offering 47,350 active plugins out of a sum of 56,311 plugins listed by the Plugin Directory for WordPress.
• Around 80 to 90 percent of the SEO mechanics are taken care of by WordPress. This stat was mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2009 who was the head of Google’s webspam group. The platform is still continuing to make it more SEO-friendly with more plugins to assist its users in getting the SEO right.
• At least 36 percent of WordPress sites are served by HTTPS. This figure denotes an increase of more than double from 2016.
• Being the fastest growing web-publishing platform, WordPress helps you to draw more traffic with higher ranks of WordPress keywords than its competitors.
• Despite issues, Jetpack is the most accepted WordPress plugin for all marketers. It is a free tool, facilitating vital tasks such as social media integration, traffic insight, security, and backups.
• WordPress employs not more than 800 workers worldwide, the majority of which are from the US. They collaborate from their residence and they ensure that the requirements of all countries are met.
• WordPress involves more than 100 contributors. Being the world’s one of the biggest open-source platforms, it has 100 contributors in the developer team, containing more than 430,000 lines of codes.
• Taking 2020 as an exception to the rule, WordPress has helped 128 WordCamps in around 48 countries, involving 1091 sponsors and 2310 speakers in 2017.
• This WP platform has also had 4379 meetups, a surge of 43 percent compared to 2016. Above 99 thousand people attended the meetups which were a whopping rise of 65 percent from 2016. The reason for this upsurge was because of the introduction of the Events widget in the WP 4.8 version.
• Some of the amazing WordPress sites are shown at WordPress.org site. The platform showcases the best sites and the list includes names like the City University of New York, the Obama Foundation, and the Houston Zoo.
• A typical WordPress developer earns an average of $50,365 in the US.
• WordPress has denied around 61 percent of DMCA takedown notices. This has added transparency to functionality, security, and versatility. DMCA notices are filed by individuals or companies if they find any posts on the platform trespassing on intellectual property rights.
• WP has also denied around 65 percent of government information requests. WordPress not only cooperates with the government on important and valid cases but also strongly resists circulating information that puts the blogger’s freedom of expression at stake.
• The major WordPress versions are released after approximately 152 days.
• Most number of downloads on WordPress is done on Wednesdays and least on Fridays.

WordPress is one of the most widely known content management systems and blogging platforms.

The above WordPress stats prove that the popularity of this platform is not only because of its simplicity and low costs but also other factors such as a wide range of themes and plugins, security, SEO-friendliness, and language packs availability.

The popular platform has journeyed a long way. It has evolved from basic and simple blogging too to a global phenomenon, endorsed by some of the biggest brands and popular celebrities. The features of WordPress are particularly helpful for small and medium businesses since it allows the use of high-functioning and attractive websites without having an expert developer or big budget.

The shocking WordPress stats provided in the article prove the capacity of this platform and why it has spread to such a large extent in terms of usability, web standards, security, etc. The WordPress community is flourishing at an increasing rate every day.

References

https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/

https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/#gref

https://digital.com/wordpress-hosting/wordpress-stats/

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