Obstacles I encountered while building a WordPress website
Starting is hard.
I have been working on my new freelance copywriting website for over a month now and was getting discouraged.
First, I had the grand idea to create a WordPress website after building a Squarespace website. I thought, “How hard could it be?”
BAD idea.
I struggled to access my paid theme, so I abandoned it for a free Astra theme after three weeks.
I steadily made progress and hoped to finish my portfolio website last week.
Then the unthinkable happened.
An email popped up in my inbox:
“While conducting our regular server security audit, we detected that the application hosted on your site has become vulnerable to exploits and creates a serious threat to the integrity of the shared server.”
The hosting provider instructed me to:
“Clean and secure the site by yourself. After that, you should reopen the ticket about this case so that we can confirm the issue is resolved.”
Now, I have zero coding experience and have no idea how to clean a website! I spent hours that night figuring out how to do that while being locked out of my website.
They also suggested that I have someone else perform the cleaning for me. The next day, I purchased a security and cleaning package, hoping they could fix my problem.
Once again, my positive attitude was deflated when the host banned the security software from my site.
So, I messaged my hosting platform and asked them how I could fix this new problem. At this point, I’m pretty sure tech guys were sick of talking to me and were probably wondering why someone with zero coding experience was building a WordPress website.
They graciously allowed me to access my site so I could add the plugin and start fixing my problem.
It STILL didn’t work!
I messaged the security software company and asked them what I should do. They gave me IP addresses to add to my site.
It was Friday evening by this time, and since I wouldn’t get any more help over the weekend, I stopped working before I drove myself totally crazy.
Monday morning rolled around, and I received an email saying that the IP addresses were STILL blocked and that I needed to send my FTP info.
Because of my completed research the week before, I had my FTP login information ready to send.
That afternoon, I received an email saying to check my site and see if it was clean.
It WAS clean!
I could have cried tears of joy!!
I jumped onto my site and quickly messaged my host, and they allowed full access to my site!
I quickly added the security plugin to make sure that this does not happen again.
The moral of this long story: if you are building a WordPress website, get a security plugin ASAP if you don’t know how to code and clean websites!
I am so thankful that this happened before I published my website.
This unfortunate experience taught me that this business will be complicated with many more obstacles.
I learned that while the circumstance may seem terrible at that moment, to take a break and then view it from a different perspective.
It may not seem as scary or impossible anymore.
“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”
- Michael Jordan.
