WordPress for Business: Why Your Business Should Use WordPress
WordPress for Business: Why Your Business Should Use WordPress
More than most organizations, businesses must maintain a reliable and scalable web presence to stay competitive. To this end, many IT leaders in large organizations have historically turned to expensive web-based solutions that require exclusive support contracts to ensure quality. There is another way, however. Over a decade after its inception and now powering over 43.3% of the web, WordPress is fast becoming a solution catching the attention of the biggest companies.
In this article, we’ll cover the specific needs of large organizations, talk to experts about the platform, and explore why WordPress is the perfect fit for your business. As we move forward, we’ll also address competitors and myths about the forum. Let’s start with brief definitions and a brief history.
What do we mean by business?
The term “enterprise” is a generic term, but when applied to a particular type of business, it generally means a large organization, usually multinational. These teams will typically be made up of individual organizational units with their budgets and goals.
The precise definitions of a business vary greatly from person to person. Still, when it comes to web technology, a business website will usually require the ability to handle a heavy traffic flow – especially if s is a media site.
It’s also often the case that business sites have to accommodate localization, multilingual content, and many smaller microsites. Enterprise solutions also usually come with complex access requirements that require clearly defined roles and permissions.
As the world’s most popular CMS with over a decade of active development behind it (and the birth of a billion-dollar company under the name Automattic ), WordPress is more than mature enough to meet these demands.
We’ve already covered the history of WordPress in depth here at Kinsta so we won’t retrace our steps in that in this article. A glance at the popular enterprise clients served by WordPress.com and WordPress.org should establish the platform’s current benchmarks in this space.
What Do Businesses Know About WordPress?
Kevin Ohashi is a well-known consultant in Washington, DC. As a consultant, he works with his clients on designing, architecture, and constructing websites and software applications. He also runs the popular web hosting review site ReviewSignal. We asked him what enterprise customers know about WordPress.
Q: Whenever an enterprise customer asks your opinion on CMS options, what do they ask you most often? What are their priorities?
The biggest questions I face are: can it do what I want it to do? How much will it cost? Why use X rather than Y or Z?
The biggest concern is always the deliverable and the cost. The third question is if they have used something in the past or heard of someone using something else.
It is also up to the consultant to shape the conversation. The objective of a good consultant is to convince the client that he can bring him something of value. The underlying technology used to get them to their purpose is almost irrelevant. I offer them the tool that best suits their needs.
Q: When businesses question WordPress as a possible CMS solution, what are the initial reactions? What do they know about WordPress, and are they ready to choose WordPress for their projects?
I think almost everyone has heard of WordPress by this point. I rarely need to introduce him. Reactions generally fall into the following categories: “Heard about it,” “I’ve used it before,” and “I didn’t like it.”
If they’ve used it before and liked it, that’s mentioned up front, and they usually want to keep using it. I don’t find that most clients have many opinions on the CMS; it’s really up to the consultant to help them figure out what might be an excellent solution to their problem.
Q: In what aspects do you think WordPress should be improved to be more attractive to the business sector?
I think we have to convince the consultants who deal with corporate clients. In the end, they often make recommendations and decisions on behalf of the clients. There’s also a lingering impression that WordPress is just for blogging. I don’t know how to change that perception.
Despite its fantastic success, WordPress is far from the only CMS solution available for businesses. The two most popular open-source alternatives are Joomla and Drupal, and of the two, Drupal would traditionally have been considered the superior candidate for businesses.
But is this always the case? Although Drupal has powered sites of impressive size, like The Economist, the last few years have not been perfect for the platform.
As an open-source solution, Drupal has suffered its share of relatively major security issues in recent years, but perhaps what has affected it the most has been the glacial progress between significant releases. Update-related problems have also hit many users hard. Looking at the two platforms side by side, it’s clear that the momentum is powerful with WordPress. Check out our in-depth comparison guide to WordPress vs. Drupal – Which is better? (For and against)
Additionally, according to W3Techs, as of March 2017, WordPress held around 65.1% of the CMS market share.
Common myths about WordPress
Unfortunately, misconceptions about WordPress have abounded for a long time, and many of them unnecessarily detract from its suitability as an enterprise solution.
Most of these myths are based on older versions of the software when its overall level of finish and functionality was a far cry from what is offered today. Let’s remove a few more obvious ones before going further.
Myth 1: WordPress is just for blogging
WordPress is proud of its roots in the blogging world, and the platform’s stated goal – to democratize publishing – seeks to build firmly on those beginnings.
It’s an aspect of WordPress’s history that has led some big companies to view the platform as just a bloated blogging engine – a position that is very far from the case these days. WordPress currently powers over 43.3% of all websites. The days of it being primarily a blogging solution are far from over.
Myth 2: WordPress is flawed in security issues
Another myth about WordPress is that it has a poor security track record. WordPress has undoubtedly suffered from a few less-than-stellar years in this regard – 2009 was an evil one – but its recent history is solid, especially considering the size of the target it represents.
Platform lockdown best practices are known to everyone, security releases are prioritized and fast, and the WordPress security team now has over 25 experts, including developers and researchers. Security.
Third-party themes and plugins remain a possible attack vector, but core software has never been safer. For more tips on securing your WordPress site, please see our in-depth guide: The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Security.
Myth 3: Open Source is a crook, not a pro
Our last myth about WordPress will shock many. However, it’s still an unfortunate reality in some sectors of the corporate world – the idea that free software is untrustworthy at the enterprise level.
In 2015, this was an argument that should have been settled long ago, but you’ll still see it from time to time. In addition to powering the vast majority of the web, Linux is steadily increasing its grip on the enterprise space. Big companies like Facebook and Google have an open source at the heart of their tech stacks.
WordPress’ status as an open-source project really shouldn’t be a problem, and its commitment to the GPL is a huge plus, not a problem. This solid open-source foundation has allowed the software to thrive while providing thousands of businesses with a stable platform to deliver services.
Technical Benefits of Using WordPress for Business
We’ve covered some of the myths that stand in the way of business adoption of WordPress. Still, an excellent list of technical reasons makes it a great candidate for rock-solid reliability. Let’s review the main ones.
WordPress is extensible, flexible, and affordable.
WordPress’ quick decision to make the platform extensible through plugins is at the heart of its success. This allowed the core team to keep most of the platform relatively streamlined while paving the way for new industries to emerge by meeting consumer demand in the form of dedicated plugins.
This is good news for enterprise admins as they have complete control over what gets added to the base platform on their installs – plus an easily understood framework to create their custom code if needed. This allows small internal teams to move quickly regarding prototyping and actual deployment.
WordPress supports responsive development.
In a world well past the mobile tipping point, native support for responsive design is simply a necessity.
WordPress admin and default themes are responsive by default. Front-end developers can base their designs on one of the many responsive front-end theme frameworks available for WordPress or deploy their solutions.
WordPress is scalable
Another critical technical selling point for WordPress is that it is scalable. WordPress is built with core web technologies that have been proven over the years and are widely understood.
Want to know how we increased our traffic by over 1000%?
Whether in terms of database optimization, web server optimization, or advanced caching strategies, WordPress sits in the middle of a commonly understood stack, so developers won’t need to reinvent the wheel when working at an enterprise scale.
The success of companies like Automattic and Incsub shows that the platform can handle just about anything you can throw at it when dialed in correctly.
WordPress is SEO Friendly
Another technical advantage of WordPress is that it is SEO ready. Although you need to install a plugin to make on-page SEO management a bit easier (the Yoast SEO plugins and All-In-One SEO Pack are two popular solutions that come to mind), WordPress naturally works well in this. Meaning. This is a significant selling point in the context of enterprise sites with potentially massive amounts of content.
WordPress is constantly updated.
Another significant advantage of WordPress is that it is constantly updated. WordPress has been updated several times this year – an average of almost one update per month.
WordPress supports multisite and multilingual features.
WordPress supports multisite since version 3.0. Enterprise users are free to manage complex requirements from a single WordPress installation, saving time and server resources. Multilingual solutions can also be easily enabled, and specialized plugins such as WPML handle all aspects of content translation and deployment. Check out this multilingual WordPress installation guide.
WordPress’ REST API opens it up to a broader programmatic world.
The WordPress REST API has the potential to change the platform forever and weaves its way into the core of the software.
The REST API allows developers to interact with software in a new way programmatically. In short, WordPress is increasingly becoming an enterprise-ready application framework.
WordPress does not require companies to work with a single vendor.
Another great feature of WordPress is that its open-source nature doesn’t bind companies that adopt hard-to-customize, expensive-to-upgrade black box solutions that force you to work with a single vendor. Enterprise customers can choose from a wide variety of solution providers.
WordPress is user-friendly
One of the most significant selling points of WordPress over time has always been its user-friendly admin interface. Navigating the WordPress back-end is intuitive, even for beginners. This is an important selling point both in the context of internal users (not all of whom are technical) and in presenting the software to enterprise customers.
WordPress offers easy role management for different access levels.
WordPress allows administrators to set different levels of access for users through an easily expandable system of roles and capabilities. IT teams can use the predefined WordPress roles to cover many everyday use cases and have the flexibility to extend them at any time to meet specific needs.
The Current State of WordPress at the Enterprise Level
To better understand why WordPress is a good choice for enterprises, we asked Peter Slutsky, Director of Platform Services at Automattic and WordPress.com VIP, about the current state of WordPress at an enterprise level.
Many popular business websites are hosted on WordPress.com VIP, and they get many customer reviews, so we decided to find out a bit more.
Q: What is the current state of WordPress at the enterprise level?
For the first two years of WordPress, it was seen as just a blogging platform, and it became prominent thanks to this application. However, WordPress has changed and made great strides over the past few years, and now a large majority of users are using WordPress as a full CMS rather than just a blog.
Today, WordPress occupies 43.3% of the Internet, and out of this 43.3%, most users use WordPress as a complete CMS. In this mix, there are many examples of enterprise-level sites across all major industries, including media, finance, higher education, entertainment, politics, government – ​​the list goes on and on.
Q: What are the specific benefits of using WordPress for business?
There are several reasons why WordPress is such an attractive software solution in the enterprise space. WordPress is scalable, flexible, affordable (in most cases, free!), and open source.
WordPress can power your mom’s cat blog or big chunks like Mercedes-Benz, Sony Music, BBC America, The New Yorker, and Time websites. Please look at our article on the 130 WordPress websites dominating the web. WordPress has iterative updates that don’t break previous versions – we call this backward compatibility, which means that, unlike Drupal, you don’t have to rebuild a site from scratch to update the software.
WordPress also offers thousands of plugins and themes, and there is a vast ecosystem and developer/designer community surrounding WordPress, so you can always find great talent to work on your site wherever you are in the world. Here’s how to install a WordPress theme.
We’re past the days of expensive proprietary software, where businesses and organizations are locked into expensive, long-term contracts for content management systems that aren’t great. The future belongs to open source, and, as the numbers show, WordPress dominates this game in almost every area.
Q: More and more popular sites are running on WordPress. To cite just one example among many – The New Yorker has migrated to WordPress. What do you think is the reason for this success?
The New York Times has been using WordPress for a long time – they’ve recently made some significant updates and are using WordPress in a very creative way – it’s been an exciting development to watch. The same goes for The Washington Post.
Although WordPress dominates the vast media space, it is exciting to see it leveraged in independent media’s rise. WordPress also powers sites like FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver’s Re/code.
I have a glimpse of the product roadmap from Automattic and WordPress.com – as well as WordPress.org – and all I can say is that there are some fascinating things to come. I believe I will help move WordPress from a software solution used by 43.3% of the entire web to a software solution used by most of the net in the coming years.
Q: How do you see the future of WordPress at an enterprise level?
Oprah Winfrey said, “When I look into the future, it’s so bright it burns my eyes. Well, that’s kind of how I feel about the future of WordPress, especially in the enterprise and government space.
As I mentioned above, I have seen the product roadmap. I know that my 400+ colleagues here at Automattic are working hard to ensure the longevity and usability of WordPress for many years into the future. And it’s fascinating.
Shortly, we will undoubtedly see the slow demise of expensive proprietary software and, in that transition, the rise of open source and WordPress. It’s exciting; the future is here!
The list of brands cited by Slutsky is just the tip of the iceberg. The Huffington Post, Xerox, Harvard Business Review, TurboTax, and Spotify are just a few of the other big names turning to WordPress as their CMS.
The WordPress Ecosystem
One of the many benefits that WordPress offers businesses is the community of users, developers, and support providers that the platform provides. These elements form a valuable ecosystem that companies can rely on for support.
Enterprise WordPress Hosting
The platform is well-optimized by default but requires a specialized WordPress Enterprise hosting environment to ensure optimal performance.
Enterprise customers would have traditionally taken on much of the heavy lifting, but the growing popularity and power of managed WordPress hosting solutions make outsourcing a real option.
Highly specialized server configurations, caching layers, automated backups, and security arrangements are now standard. World-class support gives enterprise customers the confidence to turn to third-party providers for hosting Managed WordPress.
At Kinsta, we have an infrastructure based on Google Cloud technology and containers to meet the needs of high-traffic websites and enterprise customers.
Specialized WordPress Development Agencies Are Emerging Fast
The last few years have seen the emergence of a new generation of high-profile WordPress development agencies, such as 10up, Westwerk, and HumanMade, all more than capable of handling enterprise clients.
Q: Modern Tribe is a well-known web design and development agency. You create WordPress-based websites for large international companies. Why did you choose WordPress? What are the main advantages of this CMS?
We had been using WordPress and other platforms for several years and just found that we continued to use WordPress on all other media and content management tools. It was the most comprehensive community-driven and used platform we have used.
WordPress has focused on the ease of use of the admin panel, making it a “simple perk” for customers, simple to pick up and understand. What WordPress excelled for us was being an affordable, great platform that didn’t come with all the mess and complexity of custom CMSs and company-built solutions.
Q: Many people know WordPress as a blogging platform, but this has become much more. Do you think it can also impose itself on the business side?
Absolutely. WordPress is a great code base for building unique solutions for customer issues. This is especially true in the business environment; there are countless interactive customer needs in the enterprise space, and with WordPress, we can start with a large platform and build on top of it from there.
This saves the customer time and money by avoiding purchasing an overly expensive server or license to use a single CMS platform, which can lock them into a single lane for years. We haven’t encountered a single customer who disagrees with this idea.
WordPress has the power to accomplish what you need; you need to be willing to accomplish things open-source and with a community spirit.
Q: What do you think of the future of WordPress at the enterprise level?
We believe that WordPress is the ideal solution for enterprise-level clients and projects. The platform already has about 43.3% Internet backing it, showing that it is dedicated to the Internet and the many people who use it.
WordPress allows us to accomplish high-level projects more efficiently, which saves enterprise-level customers the extra money of being on proprietary CMS platforms or hugely expensive servers – a real win-win for all the participants.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the percentage of users on WordPress continue to grow and the rate of enterprise-level customers grow by leaps and bounds in just a few short years.
Even if you don’t take the agency route, finding expert freelance WordPress developers has never been easier. The last five years have also seen the emergence of a new generation of on-demand solution providers specializing in support and maintenance services, such as WP Site Care and WP Buffs.
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WordPress for Business: Why Your Business Should Use WordPress
