Many business startups ask themselves, “Should I use WordPress for my Website?” According to BuiltWith.com, a site that monitors technologies used across the internet, WordPress is used to power more than 19.5 million websites worldwide. But, is WordPress any good for your business?
From Blogging Platform to Content Management System
WordPress is fast approaching 15 and while it’s early days were geared towards the blogging community, development over the last 7 years has made it the world’s most popular CMS is it today. Even so, many believe that it’s incapable of creating anything more than a basic looking static website. Since WordPress integrated plugin architecture, the community has created some amazing tools and libraries that allow WordPress to do almost anything. Often, our agency utilizes or recommends WordPress as a solution for our clients because it’s capable of handling most tasks.
When Should You Not Use WordPress?
Recently, a client of ours wanted to build an entirely data-driven application where they would manage their inventory and thousands of resellers inventories for automatic re-shipments. In addition, they would use the system as a CRM & asset management tool internally among employees. In cases of applications that are data-centric such as our clients, WordPress is not a good solution because it’s database is not optimized for that type of software. But, when the same client wanted to sell their physical products to customers, we recommended WordPress for their public-facing website.
What Types Of Businesses Or Sites Are Good For WordPress?
Our agency has built public-facing websites with WordPress for clients in nearly every conceivable industry. We’ve built sites for medical / dental offices that allow users to schedule and pay for services online, public-facing side for banks, online ecommerce sites for retailers that links up with their POS inventory system, online ordering applications for restaurants and we’ve even built an online hotel room reservation system that’s used by vacation rental properties and privately owned motels.
Should You Hire A Web Developer If You Choose WordPress Or Build It Yourself?
WordPress is a very user friendly content management system but it’s unlikely that a non-user will create a responsive, quick loading and great looking website without spending a significant amount of time learning the entire system. When you start adding functionality like website forms or ecommerce all of a sudden there’s a lot of configuration and setup required. Unless you want to invest significant time learning and debugging WordPress, you should hire a web developer to build your site to specification.
Should You Buy or Build Your WordPress Theme?
A WordPress theme controls how your website looks and sometimes how it operates. The theme provides you settings for changing how your website looks and the content it contains. By default, WordPress comes with a theme called TwentySeventeen that looks geared toward more of a blogging website but with a little work can pass for a multitude of businesses. Still, TwentySeventeen limits you to a single look and a very basic one at that.
Premium themes for WordPress, like ones found on Themeforest, are marketed to save people developing a website time by giving them a specific look and a certain set of features instantly. Some popular examples are Avada and Enfold, who both have various demo sites of what you can build with their themes. Often, non-developers will purchase a premium theme only to learn there’s even more configuration and learning they have to do to piece everything together.
Building a theme can be the best thing for your website yet the hardest to do. There is a lot of custom PHP programming on top of any HTML5, JavaScript, CSS/LESS/SASS used for the front-end that must be programmed. However, building your own theme gives you full control of what programming libraries are loaded on your website making it load faster and even rank higher on organic searches.
What Are Some Sites Built With WordPress?
This one for starters. Our entire public-facing website and our project management system is built and ran on WordPress with a custom theme. Users can browse information related to each of the services we provide on any device, they can fill out a request for more information or provide information about the website they would like to build for a custom quote. Once the user becomes a client they can access our portal which allows them to review project information, messages or files we’ve posted, they can see progress updates, submit tickets, review/pay invoices and sign/accept contracts.
If you’d like to see live eCommerce solutions built with WordPress, check out the sites below.
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