Wordpress - isn’t that just for blogs?

Digital Strategy
Mobile Usability
User Experience (UX)

Firstly apologies to the agency I stole the idea for this post from, it resonated well because of a recent conversation with a potential client over platform usage for a new venture. Why Wordpress? 

So to put it into context, out of the 3-4 new web project leads we receive each week, every single one of them specifically requests that we develop with Wordpress as the base content management platform. We have had one single conversation with a new prospect in over 12 months as to using an alternative e-commerce platform for their needs and even then due to the scale and future plans, we still recommended Wordpress as the go-to.

In our opinion it’s gone past industry standard and has become simply ‘the’ platform that websites from agencies are built on. 
 

It’s not to say other things don’t exist, Squarespace are spending millions currently advertising their build your own website platform, Wix did that previously, Shopify is starting to take over from the very low end up. But when a client gets to a level where they recognise that the time they spend trying to do it themselves, is less than the rate they will pay that agency who does it day in day out, and can actually make the design exactly what the client wants, then Wordpress comes into its own. 

It’s not to say that we are blinkered as you’re it’s potential downsides. 

Wordpress isn’t secure! - Well, not quite. Typically the cheap unsupported web hosting that low end Wordpress sites are hosted on has a lot to be desired in the way of security but with a proper hosting provider and a support and maintenance program with your developer agency in place, it’s as secure as anything else out there.

It breaks when it gets upgraded. Does it really though? As an agency we do routine patching and support on 400 clients websites and maybe 1 plugin in 400 can cause an issue from time to time. That’s why when our developers do the updates for clients they can check and remedy any issues as they arise causing no client disruption.

It’s not scalable. Again, most of this conversion can be put down to hosting arrangements and the scalability of that. We have Wordpress sites running now with millions of entries in the database, heavy on the design, and they still run lightning fast. Because the hosting is appropriate to the clients requirements. In 2020 technologies like content delivery networks and other caching and optimisation tools take load off servers to further improve site efficient and lower running costs at the same time. Wordpress is amazing for this.

I’m stuck with the company that built this for me. This is one of the best things about Wordpress being so popular. Every agency has Wordpress developers on tap, so they can take over your existing site to work on it and support it.

Overall, we made the decision some years ago to only support and work with Wordpress sites where possible! Since then judging by the specific requests we get for it, we made the right decisions and whilst creating bespoke sites that involve design and development can be time consuming and costly, we have produced some extraordinary results using Wordpress as the base platform for clients to edit themselves. 

You can see our past projects at www.somarketing.com/projects