Fiverr Failure

I hired a web developer on Fiverr to migrate my website. It was a disaster.

If you read my blog then you know that my brother and I make games. I maintain a website about them and about our little studio: manichyena.com. It’s hosted on Squarespace and I’ve wanted to migrate it to WordPress but I was so busy that I’ve been putting it off. Three weeks ago I finally hired someone on Fiverr to do the migration. From the start, it was a disaster — instead of saving time, I wasted more time.

Here’s the story of how it all went down. I found someone who had a good rating and I read all his reviews, seemed legit. I contacted him, he accepted the job. We agreed on payment — $70, and he said he needed 7 days to do the migration.

After 6 days, meaning a day before the deadline, he marked the migration as done and ready for review. So I checked the migrated website. It’s difficult to even describe what a mess it was. I didn’t know how to start explaining to him everything that was wrong or missing. It took me 2 hours to take 38 screenshots and describe all the issues. Some of those issues were: a strange white bar at the top of the pages, a lot of formatting issues, texts that were copied from the original website were not copied in their entirety, stretched images that looked weird, links and buttons not working or in wrong places, 3 pages were not migrated at all (out of 11).

For example, this is how a newsletter sign up section should have looked:

And this is how it looked when he migrated it:

Not only was the image cut from the top and bottom but most importantly the input box and the button needed to be centered. He kept insisting that it looked right on his computer screen. I told him it needed to look good on all computer screens. I don’t think he understood me because he offered to prove to me that it looked right by letting me connect to his computer and see his screen.

There were many issues like the one above. I wasted so much time writing to him about all those problems. I could have just made the migration myself in that time. After another week of him working on it, the website still looked bad but he kept saying that everything was fixed. I canceled the order.

He told me that I wasted his time and he was going to report me to the Fiverr support team. And that was that.

I think I will migrate manichyena.com by myself instead of trying to find someone else. But I am not completely discouraged. Next time I will hire someone on Fiverr Pro instead of the normal Fiverr. I should have done that from the start but all the developers in the Fiverr Pro section had queues of orders already and the developer that I hired had really good reviews. Now I know I should have hired a professional even if it meant waiting a few weeks.