Dear site owners: the more you save on your platform and your developers, the more you will pay consultants to fix it all afterward.
That can be perfectly fine — it may still pay off. But you should put this variable into your math.
“We’ll save X on the platform and Y on developers, but we’re budgeting Z for consulting on UX, SEO, accessibility, or speed. And we’d rather hire those consultants at the start of the project, so they can keep an eye on it.” Something like that.
The off-the-shelf platform trap
Take a hosted e-commerce platform like Shopify. I think these can be genuinely great platforms — speed included, as long as you don’t mess with them too much. But they’re also very often badly used.
“We’ll build it on the cheap platform. Look how much we save every month…” Okay, but then don’t count on customizing it heavily to your needs. We often see original templates forced into a custom design that, as a result, hurts UX and… breaks performance.
WordPress, the classic
Or WordPress. A classic. I probably don’t even need to write this anymore… But I do, dear readers, I do.
Yes, everything can be done well on WordPress too. But it’s often done, well, you know how… You hire a developer who is cheap and doesn’t get it. Even relatively large sites are often just an unmaintained pile of plugins glued together. A cheap developer is cheap. So they do it badly, don’t communicate, don’t follow up, and happen to be off in the Canary Islands…
At PageSpeed.ONE we see this constantly when consulting on speed. Audits and analysis can be significantly more demanding on cheap solutions than on bespoke ones.
Just put it in the calculation
It may still work out well — economically, for the project, or otherwise. Of course it can. But definitely put it into your calculation. Don’t let it catch you off guard. I told you so.