23 Strangers Are Running Your Website. Most of Them Quit Years Ago.

Run this experiment tonight. Open your website’s admin panel — the WordPress one your last web guy handed over like car keys — and count the plugins. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Twenty-three is the number we see most weeks. Twenty-three pieces of software, written by twenty-three strangers in twenty-three bedrooms scattered across the earth, every one of them with a key to the building where your business lives.

Now click into each one and check the fine print: “last updated.” A few say last month. Several say three years ago. At least one says never, because its author moved on to other hobbies during a previous administration and never told you — because he doesn’t know you exist. You never interviewed these employees. You never ran a background check. But they clock in on every single page load, whether they still work or not.

What the absentee payroll costs you

• SPEED: every plugin loads its own scripts on every visit. Six seconds later, the customer with the dead AC is dialing your competitor — the arithmetic is laid out in our load-time autopsy.
• SECURITY: an abandoned plugin is an unlocked side door. Most hacked contractor sites are breached through a plugin nobody remembered installing.
• RANKINGS: Google measures the slowness and the downtime, then quietly seats you in the back row of the map pack while lighter sites take the calls.
• MONEY: the “maintenance plan” you pay monthly is largely a babysitting fee for these twenty-three strangers. You are paying rent on your own liability.

The part nobody tells you

None of this is your fault, and — here is the industry’s quiet secret — none of it is necessary. WordPress made sense in 2009, when custom code was priced like cathedral masonry. It does not make sense for a working HVAC company in 2026. A hand-coded site has no plugins because it needs none: the forms, the booking, the galleries, the speed — all of it built in, by one accountable name, with nothing to update and nothing for a bored stranger to crawl through. That is the whole pitch behind a proper rebuild: keep your brand, your content, and your rankings; retire the twenty-three strangers in a single afternoon.

Want the personnel file on your own site? Run it through the free 21-point Website Grader — it will name the freight, time the load, and grade the damage in about thirty seconds, no login required. If the grade comes back ugly, the fix is ten days of honest work, and the estimate is a phone call. Either way, stop paying twenty-three salaries for one job. That’s not a website. That’s a bureaucracy.