Editing your website’s code can be tempting, with such easy access to the backend. These websites were created to make editing foolproof, you think to yourself. Right? Fast forward to 5 hours later. You’ve spent the whole afternoon on WordPress forums, trying to figure out how to undo huge mistakes caused by one single line of code that you typed into the backend of your site.
It seems easy to search “how to edit a website’s code” and make your changes in minutes. What you don’t expect, are the hours or days of problems that one coding mistake can cause.
The Age of No Code
WordPress created a revolution in 2003. Business owners, bloggers, and everyone who needed a website, finally had the ability to create one with no code. Now there are endless website builder options including Wix, WordPress, SquareSpace, Shopify, GoDaddy, and Hubspot to name a few. We’re going to focus mainly on WordPress and Shopify when discussing why you shouldn’t touch your website’s code unless you know what you’re doing.
WordPress Code
There are many ways to edit WordPress code, making it easy and accessible but also opening the door for potential trouble. Editing code for a single page or through the block editor isn’t overly risky. You may be making unwanted changes to a single page but you don’t break the whole website.
What you want to avoid is editing the source code. If you do decide to take this route to make changes, make sure to backup your whole website first because there is always a risk of failure.
Shopify Code
Editing your theme’s code can make it ineligible for automatic upgrades and necessary updates. There is a way to roll back your theme code to its original version, but you may lose other changes that have been made. Shopify themes can be complicated because they don’t just use one coding language. The templating language is liquid but Shopify themes also use HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This makes the UX great on the front end but requires caution on the backend.
Still not convinced? Let’s not forget how one person deleting a small piece of code in 2016, crashed the internet worldwide. Many times when you edit just one piece of code and cause a problem (no matter the website builder), it takes experience to diagnose the bigger issue rather than just delete the new code. If you don’t want to deal with the time and frustration, consider confiding in an expert.
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