Yes, WordPress is still a great choice for a small business website – I’d probably recommend it to 9 out of 10 local and small businesses. That’s partly because I’ve developed sites on the WordPress Content Management System (CMS for short) for about ten years now, and I know how flexible and powerful the framework can be. And how accessible it is for editors of all skill levels.
That being said, there are some important factors to consider – a highly flexible, open-source framework like WordPress also means it’s easy to build a bloated frankenstein website which brings a litany of consequences. With a little bit of knowledge on best practices, those pitfalls are easily avoided and WordPress can be a scalable, highly-customizable foundation that grows alongside your business.
For the sake of the enterprising individual thinking about their new website, I’ll cover the essential considerations for what makes WordPress a great choice – as well as a couple of things to try and avoid.
There’s an Increasing Number of Options for Website Frameworks & Services
Over the years, there have been an increasing number of options for any individual to build a simple website. The ever-increasing amount of spam and solicitation for “cheap websites” and “guaranteed SEO” just adds more noise for most businesses.
Most of the clients I’ve worked with start out with a software-as-a-service solution like Wix, SquareSpace, or even a hosting-proprietary site builder (think GoDaddy website builder). The prolific marketing and low barrier to entry for these services make them an appealing place to start. In fact, some businesses choose to forego a website entirely and run everything through their social media profiles.
WordPress is Still an Industry Leader for Website CMS
Despite changes in the web development industry and the proliferation of SaaS companies, WordPress still holds a firm market share for website CMS at around 43.4% of all websites and 62.7% of websites with a known content management system.
The dominance of WordPress in the industry can be attributed to a few reasons:
- WordPress is Open Source and Free to Use
- It’s Been Around for 20 Years
- It’s Designed as a Low-Code/No-Code Editing Solution, Making it Highly Accessible
And it isn’t just used for small, local websites. There are some very large organizations using WordPress at an enterprise level – granted these are often highly customized installations to meet their specific needs.
Key Advantages of WordPress: It’s Open Source, Available for Free, & Highly Cost-Effective
One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is its open-source nature. This means it is inherently free to use, modify, & distribute. It also brings a lot of transparency and oversight into the development of the core framework.
For small businesses, this translates to cost savings pretty much immediately. While you may want to hire a designer or developer for a custom WordPress site, you’re not on the hook for software expenses just for using the CMS.
Unless you purchase premium plugins or themes for specific functionality, that usually means you can get away with web hosting and domain registration as your only real overhead for your website. Depending on your choice of web host, that could run as little as a couple hundred dollars per year.
WordPress is Well Documented & Relatively Easy to Use
WordPress may be the most well documented and strongly supported CMS available, and it’s not even close. Partly due to the open-source nature, there’s an incredible amount of resources available. From video tutorials covering basic setup to comprehensive articles on advanced topics written by professional developers, there’s no shortage of resources.
If you search for a question, it’s probably already been answered for you. You’re rarely, if ever, reinventing the wheel for basic functionality. The back-end is fairly accessible for the average user. Editing content is usually done as part of a page-builder or simple text editor. If you write emails or use Microsoft Word, then the editor will probably feel very familiar.
It’s a Flexible & Scalable Foundation for Growing Your Business
Scalability is a huge benefit of the WordPress CMS. It’s a somewhat hidden capability that becomes more relevant as you seek to customize and grow your website over time. Publishing blog posts on a regular basis or occasionally adding new service and product pages would be relatively simple tasks.
This isn’t just limited to what’s directly on-site. A lot of the value I create for businesses has to do with built-in convenience, automation, and integration with other services. For example, integrating web forms with a marketing platform or CRM like Salesforce or Hubspot. Or in the case of e-commerce, you can integrate with some accounting softwares and payment processors.
A scalable website means it will grow to be a key part of your business and not just a digital “business card”; or, a simple representation of your products and services.
Best Practices for SEO are Usually Baked-In
Let’s forget about what really is SEO right now and recognize that yes, it’s probably important for your business website.
I specialize in technical SEO, so please believe me when I say that there’s a lot of nuance in this area. Touching on everything under this umbrella would not just be a separate article, it could be an entire book.
One of the best things about WordPress is that it has a lot of built-in best practices for search engine optimization when you use a simple free plugin like Yoast SEO or RankMath. So long as you follow the simple set-up instructions, then you should have semi-satisfactory basic SEO for your site. That includes webpage meta data, XML sitemaps, and schema markup for each page on your site.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I’ll reiterate: there’s a lot more to SEO on WordPress than just activating a plugin. But the plugin approach is an easy way to take care of the basics.
Reliability & Security Through the Developer Community
One of the top objections I hear about WordPress is the concern about security and reliability. This argument seems to stem primarily from the open-source nature of the framework combined with the significant number of WordPress sites making WordPress sites an easier target for hackers and other bad actors.
There’s some truth to that concern, except the majority of security issues in WordPress come from out-of-date plugins. In other words, site owners are going months or even years without updating all the plugins they’ve added for specific functionality.
If you limit your plugins to those that are well-known and supported, and you remember to keep these plugins up-to-date as often as possible (even automatically), then these concerns are largely addressed.
Customizing WordPress: Plugin Solutions & Custom Code
With thousands of themes and plugins available, both free and premium, it’s actually quite easy to achieve nearly any design of functionality you’re looking for. From e-commerce to photo galleries, there’s a plugin (or a code snippet) for that.
There are two main pathways to customizing a WordPress website:
Plugin Solutions: The first option is to simply search for, download, and activate one of thousands of freely available plugins that are often professionally developed and supported by the WordPress community. These are very easy to set up to expand functionality, but it leads to more overhead and increased complexity for the website as a whole. Over-reliance on plugins is a real problem that I encounter. It’s a small wonder that your website loads slowly when you have over forty different plugins installed on top of your WordPress site.
Custom Code Solutions: The second option is to edit the PHP, HTML, and CSS code through the installed theme. To be clear, I’d never recommend this approach to somebody who’s never done it before. It is absolutely possible to bring down your entire website with a misplaced semicolon in your PHP templates. This is relatively easy to troubleshoot and fix for a developer, but would prove to be a massive headache for the average non-technical site editor.
Setting Up & Managing Your WordPress Site: DIY vs. Professional Help
I’m willing to back up everything I wrote here about the viability of WordPress, but I’ve also worked with enough sites to know that it’s a lot easier said than done.
Yes, you can set up a basic WordPress website and add a logo and some content over the course of an afternoon. Technically speaking, you could manage the site yourself, update plugins manually, and just add plugins when you need new functionality – like adding a contact form.
While powerful and free to use, the flexibility of WordPress’ open source nature and the ease of installing themes and plugins basically means that no two WordPress sites are the same. Things get complicated very quickly, which means you spend more time trying to manage your site while ultimately delivering a less-than-ideal representation of your business and a lackluster experience for your clients & customers.
Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself what that opportunity cost is for you and whether or not it’s worth it to go it alone at this stage of your business.
Questions or feedback on this article? Send me a message.
