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Yes, remote employees are where the world is heading. Here are 40 Work Stats to Know in 2020. If you are looking to become a remote employee, after doing it for 10+ years, I can be a great resource. Let’s talk.

Remote Employees Workforce Size

• In the U.S., 4.7 million employees (3.4% of the workforce) work from home at least half the week. (Global Workplace Analytics)
• Roughly 62% of employees between 22 and 65 say they work remotely at least occasionally, (Owl Labs)
• 44% of employees say that part of their team is full-time remote. (Buffer)
• While 30% of people report working remotely full-time, 18% work remotely one to three times per week. (Owl Labs)

Job Types of Remote Workers

• 18% of executives work remotely more than on-site. (Owl Labs)
• 35% of remote workers are individual contributors. (Owl Labs)
• 30% of people report working for a company that’s fully remote. (Buffer)
• 46% of C-suite members work remotely at least part-time. (Owl Labs)
• 55% of VPs work remotely at least part-time. (Owl Labs)
• New employees might work remotely less often at their company. Roughly 75% more on-site workers have worked in their positions for less than a year, (Owl Labs)

Remote Employees Work Growth

• The amount of people who work remotely at least once per week has grown by 400% since 2010. (GetApp)
• 42% of employees with a remote work option plan to work remotely more often in the next five years. (Owl Labs)
• Between 2017 and 2018, telecommuting increased by 22% (FlexJobs)
• If they could, 99% of people would choose to work remotely, at least part-time, for the rest of their careers. (Buffer)

Source

• More than half of full-time in-office employees want to work remotely. (Owl Labs)
• 95% of people would encourage their friends or family to work remotely. (Buffer)

Recruiting and Job Retention

• 72% of talent professionals agree that work flexibility (which includes remote work options) will be very important for the future of HR and recruiting. (LinkedIn)
• 83% of workers, remote or on-site, say that a remote work opportunity would make them feel happier at their job. (Owl Labs)
• 40% of people say that a flexible schedule would be the best perk of working remotely. (Buffer)

Source

• 81% of employees say that the option to work remotely would make them more likely to recommend their company to job candidates and prospects. (Owl Labs)
• 74% of employees say that a remote work option would make them less likely to leave their company. (Owl Labs)

Remote Employees — Productivity and Behaviors

• 77% of remote employees say they’re more productive when working from home. (CoSo Cloud)
• 76% prefer to avoid their office completely when they need to concentrate on a project. (Atlassian)
• 23% of remote workers say they work longer hours than they would on-site. (CoSo Cloud)
• 53% of remote workers say they’re less likely to take time off than they would be if they worked at their business’s location. (CoSo Cloud)
• 43% of remote employees take three weeks or less of paid vacation per year. (Buffer)
• Those with highly complex jobs that require little interaction with stakeholders are more productive when remote than in an office. (Springer)
• Email is the primary method of communication for remote workers, followed by instant messaging, and video chat. (CoSo Cloud)
• Although remote work enables employees to work anywhere, 84% of remote employees prefer to work from home. (Buffer)

Earnings and Benefits for Remote Work

• 74% of remote employees earn less than $100,000 annually. (Owl Labs)
• Despite the perk of remote work, less than 34% would take a pay cut of 5% to work remote fulltime while just 24% would take a pay cut of 10% for the same option. (Owl Labs)
• 69% of millennials will trade other benefits for flexible work options including remote work. (IWG)
• 75% of people say their companies will not compensate for the internet if they work remotely. (Buffer)
• 30% of remote employees say they save upwards of $5,000 annually without on-site work expenses and work travel. (CoSo Cloud)
• 71% of companies also do not compensate for the coworking spaces of remote employees. (Buffer)
• Businesses would save an average of $11,000 annually per half-time telecommuter. (Global Workplace Analytics)

Remote Work Challenges

• More than half of remote employees say they feel disconnected from in-office employees (CoSo Cloud)
• 22% of remote workers report that unplugging after work is their biggest challenge. (Buffer)
• 19% of remote workers report loneliness as their biggest challenge. (Buffer)
• Despite receiving confidential business data to their remote location regularly, less than half of remote employees say they receive proper internet security training. (GetApp)

This blog was written by Pamela Bump (@PamelaBump) for Hubspot. See her full blog post here.

In a continuation from WordPress Mistakes And How to Fix Them — Part 1, where I talked about the things that are the most common WordPress Mistakes, here is part 2 that covers the more advanced issues and fixes. I highly recommend that you hire a competent WordPress developer to address these issues and common WordPress mistakes.

Not resizing images for web upload

The issue: Images are often the culprit to a slow site and you should seriously consider preparing your images for upload by reducing their size. This can be done either by using an editor like Photoshop, or a plugin to resize images so they’re not taking up a huge chunk of space and causing your site to run super slow.

The fix: If you’re working in Photoshop, go to Image -> Image Size. Make sure the resolution is set to 72. You’ll then want to reduce the width of the image if applicable. 2,500 pixels on the wide side is ideal for displaying images as large on the screen—you can decrease this size to around 600 to 1,000 pixels on the wide side for regular site display.

This will reduce the file size drastically, resulting in less bandwidth required to upload images whenever someone visits your client’s site. Always set the resolution to 72 pixels/inch for web upload. If “Resample” is checked, the image’s dimensions will automatically be reduced when you adjust the resolution. Another fix is to use a WordPress plugin that optimizes images for you, like WP Smush.

Adding customizations to a parent theme

The issue: If you’re looking to customize a theme, doing so could result in a whole lot of headache if you modify the theme directly. Changing a theme’s code can create unwanted changes and potentially cause downtime for your site.

The fix: The safest way to edit a theme is with a child theme, which takes the functionality of the parent theme. A child theme allows you to make changes without ruining your original theme’s code, ensuring your modifications aren’t lost. See here for a useful tutorial on creating a child theme.

Failure to use a staging environment

The issue: Say you want to test a theme, plugin, or custom code on your site? It would be unwise to make these changes directly to the live site—you won’t be too happy if your website crashes because you’re tweaking things on the back end.

The fix: Before deploying changes to a live site, the best practice is to use a staging environment to test any changes before going public. Quality hosting providers like WP Engine offer free staging environments. Every site hosted on WP Engine has three different environments: development, staging, and production, providing customers with the needed flexibility to build and test new projects. There are also a number of plugins that enable testing environments, or you can set one up yourself from scratch.

Using the default admin username

The issue: This is a BIG no-no since about 2015, so you’ve had 5 years to correct your bad habits. By default, after WordPress is installed the username is “admin,” which is troublesome in terms of security. Hackers can easily guess that name and take control of your website.

The fix: During installation, you’ll be given the opportunity to change the admin name to something unique. If you’re already past the point of installation and need to change your default username, see here for some tips on removing the admin account in WordPress.

Using a weak password is one of the biggest WordPress mistakes

The issue: People usually create a weak password because they don’t want to forget it. However, a good password should be random and complex, not predictable or simple. Remember, the easier your password is for you to remember, the easier it will be for hackers to perform brute-force attacks and guess your password.

The fix: A strong password should include a minimum of eight characters, an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, and a special character. Try using a strong password generator if you need help coming up with a hack-proof password. To protect your passwords even further, try enabling two-factor authentication.

To keep track of all passwords, I use Dashlane Online Wallet – Check it out here!

Failing to be selective about who gets admin privileges

The issue: Giving admin rights to just anybody is like giving a kid the keys to your car. It’s extremely important that you don’t give admin rights to the wrong person. You should only give admin rights to site owners and developers who work with the back end of the website.

The fix: To change user roles and permissions, you can use a plugin like a User Role Editor or see here for additional information: User Roles on WordPress.

Accidently blocking search engines

The issue: Certain WordPress settings can impair your site’s ability to be found by search engines. If you’re ready for your site to be found by a larger audience, you’ll want to ensure that a certain box isn’t checked within your Settings to make it SEO-friendly.

The fix: To find out if you’ve made this mistake, look in your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings -> Reading. Make sure the box next to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not checked. When this selection is checked, it suppresses the site’s page-rank, telling search engines not to inspect the site’s content. (You’ll want it checked if your site is still under development).

Using poor/cheap web hosting

The issue: You might want to keep costs low, but choosing a generic
web host to power WordPress site is like buying cheap fuel
for a Ferrari. Your WordPress site represents your business,
your brand, your portfolio, and so on. Poor performance and
downtime reflect poorly on you and your brand and could end
up costing you more money in the long run.

The fix: Find a hosting provider that specializes in building digital
experiences on WordPress. Make sure your provider offers
services for caching, uptime, security, amazing customer
support, and expertise when it comes to building future-proof
WordPress sites. Thousands of brands and agencies rely on
WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform for WordPress to power
amazing websites for them and their clients. WP Engine also
offers the largest Agency Partner Progam for WordPress, which
means agencies can leverage amazing tools and partnerships to
grow their customer base and delight current clients.

The bottom line to all this is that outside of a custom-coded website, a  WordPress website is an incredible and powerful extensible framework that allows businesses of all sizes to build and manage a website that can serve all their needs. However, if as a business owner you plan on doing this yourself, unless you are a WordPress website developer,  like any business-level solution, you should hire a professional to ensure you are not making the most common WordPress mistakes.

So, if you have a website that is built, or you need full website development Let’s have a no-obligation/no-cost phone chat about your ideas.