This Is Why You Should Never Use Freelancers to Build a Wordpress Site

Facebook a bunch of people discussing how. To have control over clients websites.

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Unscrupulous people are everywhere. Facebook is their Mecca.

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That doesn’t justify staying away from freelancers in general though. Just take a few more minutes and research WHO it is you are hiring and you should be good. Had enough good experiences with freelancers too.

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Paid a painful 5 figure invoice to a freelancer last week, the code is going through another freelancer for a security audit.

There’s nothing wrong with using freelancers; there’s something wrong with using ones from Fiverr for important tasks.

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This.

If you want high quality code, you generally have to pay more. If you’re going with a freelancer, use common sense.

(If you pay me $5, for example, you’re definitely not going to get the same quality of work that I provide when I’m charging 100x that. This is precisely why I don’t sell $5 sites; it’s unsustainable and the quality of work would be well below what I’d like it to be.)

As for that Facebook guy: what a jerk. There’s a reason why you either accept payment upfront or take some form of a deposit. If you’re too dumb to assess risk and follow good business practices, it’s on you for having to use a (poorly written) script to take customer passwords.

Edit: also, his script, being poorly written, probably opens massive security holes. What if someone other than him uses it?

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you mean him having another shot at squizing a few bucks from th eguy that trusted him?
I imagine it would go like this.

Client :Hey Muhammad, can you help me with that site you made for me? you know, the one that was supposed to be $20 but was $500?
Muhammad: Yes, sir. How are you?
Client: It was hacked!!
Muhammad: That’s because of your hosting company, Sir. I told you Sir, you should have hosted with me.
Client: What about now? please can we do something about this?
Muhammad: Yes Sir, I’m very experienced and I can clean your website but it will cost $400. Because I need to see all the code.
Client: Thank you Muhammad! you’re great!

Edit: And this is assuming he snipped the password making it look like it was hacked. I don’t think it would be beneath any of these guys to do it.

As much as I’d like to blame freelancers, there are also plenty of people who abuse freelancers as well.

In short, people are jerks and, therefore, the end is nigh.

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There’s no excuse for a developer that creates backdoors to keep control over his clients websites.
It’s not hard not to setup the website onto the client hosting AFTER getting full payment.

Most of the abuse from clients is scope creeps, and that became normal because freelancers are afraid to death about getting a bad review.
And to add to the above, check the freelancers markets, freelancers take on jobs without making a single question about it.

Virtue gives 404 error in those freelancer deals. I’ve seen buyers demanding to see a fully functional sites (wtih FTP access) before sending money and don’t send the money after downloading.

I’ve also seen freelancers doing all sort of shady things. Some are desperate enough to accept jobs without seeing any payment.

People are jerks.

And I blame the freelancer that gives in to that. First rule, X% down payment.
I’ve also seen freelancers offering to work a milestone for free so that the buyer can assess his quality. It’s crazy…

On the other hand, there’s a group in Facebook made of freelancers and agency owners and some say they even charge for the initial consultation. That feels crazy too… actually feels like a lie but meh, might be true.

Totally! And it’s getting worse over time, I think.

First, the market is too saturated. Too many freelancers who reply on the jobs for a living. When you don’t see a job for a while, the first rule of taking some sort of deposit vanishes.

Second is the nature of these deals: Internet deals. You don’t get to see faces of people you deal with. This makes it a lot easier to pull scam because you feel far less guilty. You don’t know them. You don’t care about them coming back at you since they are likely in a different nation anyway.

I deleted my long reply… and instead I’ll TLDR with…
I agree with what you just said, but these guys are only making it worse.

Well, karma generally finds its ways.

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TLDR, People are jerks.

What goes around comes around, in my experience.

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And watch how quickly they want nothing to do with it when that site gets compromised in 1-2 years and the client comes banging on their door.

Static sites for life. The most future proof investment.

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Yeah static sites are indeed the safest.
But thing is, CMS websites when properly developed and managed, are cheaper to update, content wise.
Depending on the size of the website and features required, they’re also cheaper to develop.

It’s already time consuming to teach people to use the CMS to update small sections of content, teaching some non-techie to edit a file over FTP won’t fly.

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At least until the powers that be decide that LE is no longer viable, and since gohper, http, https, etc are all deprecated and you need a buy-in agreement for amazon:// and google://

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Just got a de-rection.

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apple:// only works with IOS devices and a validated/verified x86 based Mac with any version after High Sierra.

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