One of the biggest challenges of building a website as a business owner and learning WordPress in the process is that everybody is trying to sell you a new shiny object or super important thing that you need to invest in. But only a small fraction of those things actually matter to you until you reach certain inflection points in your business. 

So when you're just starting out building your own site bootstrapping, getting things off to a start, intentionally not investing a huge amount of time and money in the process at this point, there is a lot of stuff that just doesn't add up. But marketers, developers, designers sell this stuff. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but often times you'll get advice that is not in your best interest or advice that is not really in line with reality. 

A lot of the stuff that you hear from the blogosphere is gonna conflict with what I say today, this is based on my experience building hundreds of sites and working with a lot of new business owners but also as a new business owner. There's a lot of stuff that seems really cool, you may wanna do it eventually, but right now it just doesn't matter. I want you to just completely take it outta your head and not think about it at all. 

The first and biggest thing, search engine optimization or SEO. Everybody wishes that they could have a site that gets thousands of visitors for free because I'm ranking first for this awesome keyword. The truth is I have clients who rock at SEO, they spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to get there, sometimes more than that. It is not an area where you can compete for any useful keyword in the short term. You should just stop thinking about it. I'll talk about some very simple way that we can make your site fit best practices for SEO. You should really not be building a business at this stage that relies on people finding you through organic google search or being searched or anything else. There are many ways to set yourself for success for this in the long term, but the fact of the matter is that anything that you do for SEO is gonna take many, many months to work and a good project is gonna cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long term. So just don't go there yet. It's not gonna be the core of your business at this stage of the game, so I'm gonna show you how to think about the absolute basics and then stop. If you feel yourself asking, "Well how is this gonna "affect SEO?" Stop don't think about that right now. If somebody tries to sell you an SEO package, just politely say no for right now. There's a time for that, it is not right now. 

The second and related item is anything around speed, caching, performance, content delivery. There are elements of WordPress and elements of web development that have a substantial effect on how fast your site lives. They don't matter if you're not getting thousands of daily visitors because pretty much any site is gonna be good enough up to that point. We're gonna talk about web hosting recommendations as part of our WordPress development course. We'll dig into sort of, again, the best practices and the simplest possible solutions here. Those are all gonna be good enough for you, for right now. So someone saying, "You need to have this content delivery network with a data center in Singapore for your Asian visitors, otherwise are gonna take ten seconds to load." Again, there are legitimate concerns there when you have hundreds of thousands of millions of visitors. They do not matter right now. And I want you to really focus on the things that do count and put this stuff out of your mind. There are so many blog posts written on these topics. There's so much marketing on these topics. Don't go there right now. 

The third one that I'll talk about is split testing. This is another one that is a huge shiny object in Silicon Valley. Is a red button or a blue button gonna have a better conversion rate into my mailing list? Can I run these tests and then all of a sudden double my rates of opting in? Yeah, there is a possibility that there are better ways to do things but again these things do not matter to you until you have a critical mass of traffic that makes them worth while. In the case of split testing, first of all, you need to be able to generate enough traffic that is legitimately people who should be coming to your site rather than paid traffic for the purpose of a split test. You need to then have thousands upon thousands of data points to make your tests statistically significant and then you have to actually run tests that make difference. So, if you think about the time and energy and investment that's gonna go into that, even if you're not paying somebody else to do it, it's a huge time suck and a huge energy suck and it doesn't really get you anywhere because if you're getting a hundred visitor a month, the difference between a 40% conversion rate and a 60% conversion, it's just not that big of a deal in a lot of numbers for you right now. Eventually, you can make this a part of your business but it's not gonna be for a long time. 

And that brings us to the big question here. When should I actually care about these advanced topics? My advice is, you should not touch SEO, caching, performance, content delivery or split testing until you are earning $100,000 per year directly from your website. That means, you are earning money because of your website exclusively. They're not like other clients who know you elsewhere and just looked at your site. That's the point at which I think you cross over into having a business reason to invest in these bigger things. 

It might seem like a huge number. I actually consider making it an even higher number, to be honest. Because even my clients that come to me with $50,000 to $100,000 a year budgets, I actually push them away from these ideas because they're just not that useful in most cases. Unless you are building a business that is all SEO, it's not really that useful for you to invest $5,000 or $10,000 a month in SEO, which is what you need to do to do something useful or to get results. In other words, for the vast majority of people who are going to build their own WordPress developer, you're not gonna be at this point yet, and that's fine. You should focus on the stuff that matters for you today. Throw these other ideas onto the back burner and intentionally tell yourself, "I'm just not gonna touch this and I'm not gonna answer "this question until I'm at $100,000 per year." At that point, I sit down and I start thinking about can I get more advanced and do I wanna get more advanced.