10 ways your WordPress agency makes your website 10x more complex than needed?

Does it seem like you get charged a small fortune every time you need to update your site?

Believe it or not, some agencies use shady tactics to build sites that lock their clients into their agency.

As WordPress is itself open source, we think this behaviour is downright dishonest and see it far too often.

How do we know?

WordPress support is a large part of our work: we maintain over 150 websites initially built by other agencies.

As we support the sites, we have logins and can see some of the bizarre things agencies and freelancers do to WordPress sites to try and keep their clients locked into them.

WordPress is free.

Many agencies seem to forget that the CMS itself is open source and free for all to use. When you are making your living from an open-source piece of software, we think the ethical thing to do is not to modify it so that either the client or a new developer can’t access 100% of it.

If you have a WordPress site, and you’re all paid up with your agency, you should be able to do whatever you like without calling the agency or asking permission.

Here are ten shady tactics that unscrupulous WordPress companies use to complicate your website.

Website projects don’t have an end other than getting the site live. There is loads to do on your website post-live, but this is where the agency usually sends in their final invoice, and the site should be yours.

However, some agencies have other ideas.

They don’t want to stop making money from you, so by overcomplicating the build of your site, they can try to ensure that they are the only agency that can work on it.

Here are some of the tactics used (in no particular order):

1. Locking users out of the admin.

This is one of the most common ways agencies complicate website management and make it hard for website owners to edit their sites: they don’t give them administrator access or, even worse, lock the client out altogether.

We’ve even spoken to clients who have not even been told there’s an admin on their site.

Non-admin access to WordPress is only good for editing content. You need administrator-level access to update plugins, themes, and other things.

Agencies might claim they don’t do this to avoid clients breaking their own sites, but the reality is that they don’t want other developers to see the site when the client tries to go elsewhere.

2. Overly complex code.

We think everything in WordPress should be done in the simplest way possible, and that also applies to the code.

Another favourite of unethical developers is to use code that is far more complex than required or undocumented or, in some cases, forcibly minified to make it harder to read.

Sure, some sites have complex functions, but does a small ten-page site for a local business need complex coding when a simple approach would have been leaner, quicker and easier to understand?

Code Obfuscation is another trick designed to prevent site owners from hiring new people to manage or update their websites.

3. Bloated themes and plugins.

This one is particularly tricky. If your developers have created a monster theme for your site or added custom plugins (or changed plugins), there can be no way a new developer can get to grips with the site.

These deliberate tactics include modifying the default WP theme and turning off updates, hacking plugins that break when updated, and a range of other sabotage tactics that mean if someone updates or modifies one thing, it breaks ten other things.

If we are asked to support sites like this, we often have to decline. Sadly, the site is so messy that we can’t help other than start fresh.

4. Unregistered plugins.

This one doesn’t tie you into the agency so much, but it does cause issues on many of the sites we work on. The original developer used premium plugins on the site but only bought the licence for one year, meaning that after 12 months, everything on the site starts to get out of date and break.

This means that you then have to go buy all the licences, and if there are lots of plugins, that can easily add up to over £500 per year.

5. No training or handover.

We often experience this: clients pay a lot of money for a website but are not given any training or handover about using it.

Some WP agencies seem to think this is acceptable and purposely team it up with an overly complex build to confuse everyone.

A developer builds a client a site on Elementor, Divi, or some other overly complex page-builder because they know how to use it, but then when the client takes a look, they have no idea what to do—this process is 100% designed to try and tie you into the developer and make you pay fees for even the smallest of changes.

6. Non-standard development.

Like bulky themes, this tactic involves going outside the core WP code ecosystem and intentionally using custom, non-standard code to build your site.

The simple idea here is to make it as hard as possible for anyone else to understand how the site is built. The original coder is the only person who can efficiently develop it.

We even took on one site where the developer had hand-coded it in the WordPress text editor in code view—one of the most bizarre WP builds we’ve ever encountered.

7. Changing the WordPress admin UI.

Some agencies try to change the WordPress admin using custom code and plugins to make it look like a non-WP site.

This involves changing and hiding menu items, rearranging things and rebranding the admin from WordPress to their own (often shocking) design and layout.

This isn’t just making things difficult; it’s rebranding open-source software to suggest it’s their system.

8. Overcomplicating the CSS.

WordPress themes ship with style.css, the style sheet that WordPress naturally uses for all the theme CSS. However, some developers go to town to make the CSS styling as complex as possible using SCSS and other precompilers to build the site.

There’s nothing strictly wrong with this when the project complexity commands it, but the vanilla WP CSS file is acceptable in 99% of cases.

This is often down to the developer’s working preferences, but if you want a simple site, there’s no need to do this, as the WP ecosystem already has a CSS file ready to use.

9. Hosting the theme on Github or remotely.

We’ve only seen this in a few rarer cases, but this is where the developers host the site’s theme on their external repository, and therefore, only they can edit it.

This is overkill for 99.99% of WP sites and is 100% designed to lock you into the agency.

10. Custom plugins.

There’s nothing wrong with a custom plugin, but some agencies prevent other agencies from using them. What they are doing here is allowing you to use the plugin while you have a relationship with them—if that relationship ends, so does your access to the plugin.

With Premium WP plugins from third parties, you can buy your licence, but if the theme relies on a plugin built by the agency and they won’t share, you are again effectively tied into them unless you can replace the plugin.