Member-only story

Why I’m ditching Wordpress for Squarespace

It’s 4am. My phone buzzes as an email arrives from WebGazer Alerts with the subject, “Heads up: Barnard.co is down”.

James Barnard
8 min readAug 16, 2020
I spent way too long making this gif

I visit wp-admin, the Wordpress backend, and the favicon in my browser tab just spins. I’ve got no way into my own site. I drop a message to a friend of mine, a back-end developer and ask for help. When he wakes up, he tells me, “Hmm, I’m struggling to connect to your box via SSH”.

U wot m8?

This happens all. The. Time.

Someone has hacked into my site either via an outdated Wordpress plugin, or is trying to brute force my Wordpress password and has subsequently crashed my site by overloading it with traffic.

I once logged onto the homepages of all of my client’s websites to receive the creative ditty in the top left-hand corner, “Site hacked by hacker”.

I don’t have a clue how to fix issues like this. So, flustered (usually with clients screaming at me) I go pleading to my back-end mate to help me fix it. It is a nightmare.

--

--

James Barnard
James Barnard

Written by James Barnard

Award-Winning Logo Designer / Design Educator / Dad

No responses yet