WordPress has gain an unstoppable power nowadays. This has become the first choice of every business owner who wants a platform where they can manage everything on hand. This is the best content management system for any kind of website, small-scale systems. Yet, when it comes to real-world business applications, WordPress is my go-to in nearly every situation because it almost always makes the most sense for businesses.<\/p>\n
When it comes to choosing a platform, you have an incredible amount of choice. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace are some of the most popular. For the most part, these platforms are designed for you to be able to quickly launch something in a few clicks and have it look good enough. They usually do that job well.<\/p>\n
The problem comes into place when inevitably you need to do something that should be simple and straightforward, but the platform itself doesn\u2019t support it. In order to make things easy, a lot of code editing abilities have to be restricted. As a result, you have limitations on what you can do.<\/p>\n
The other issue is that when you\u2019re using a paid platform, you\u2019re married to it. What you\u2019re allowed to do is tied to the monthly fee you pay and critical business features usually require a higher monthly subscription. Plus, most platforms make it hard to get your data (content) out of the site, so switching is expensive and time-consuming.<\/p>\n
To top it all off you don\u2019t own the platform you\u2019re using, so if you unintentionally violate their terms of service, your website can be taken down and removed completely and there\u2019s nothing you can do about it. The cost of convenience is enormous.<\/p>\n
Similar: 2020 WordPress Developer Hiring Guide: Salaries, Freelance Rates, and More<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The problem with custom development<\/h3>\n
With custom development, you have no restrictions at all. But the problem is that it\u2019s easily expensive to create and expensive to maintain because you have to build everything from scratch. For most small businesses it\u2019s simply not a viable or affordable option.<\/p>\n
If you want to make it easy for a non-technical content editor to post content, you either have to pay a license for another program, write something yourself or hope you can find an open-source program that fits your needs well enough to implement. All of that takes valuable time.<\/p>\n
Most small businesses don\u2019t have the budget for even a small-sized development team to create something in house or hire a competent IT agency<\/a>. Plus, managing a project like this isn\u2019t easy. If you don\u2019t have experience doing it or understand the common roadblocks, then it\u2019s going to be incredibly frustrating for you.<\/p>\n
When you create something custom you have to have a full-fledged developer to make changes. Even with popular frameworks, finding people who can jump into your project, make the changes and fix the bugs usually cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars more. For example, when I debug or add on features to a Django project, I can easily charge 10 times more for the work.<\/p>\n
WordPress enables you to get the custom features you want without reinventing the wheel. If one of the 50,000 plugins available doesn\u2019t help you, you can do any custom coding you want to it without restrictions.<\/p>\n
Read more: What Is WordPress Multisite and Who Should Use It?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Advantages of WordPress\u2019s massive adoption across the internet<\/h3>\n
WordPress powers such a high percentage of websites on the internet that it\u2019s the de-facto standard. That means pretty much every software builds an integration with WordPress<\/a> directly because they don\u2019t want to exclude 40% of all the websites out there from using their services.<\/p>\n
This also means it\u2019s incredibly easy and affordable to find courses, training and professionals to manage your site. Websites are constantly evolving as your business evolves. Eventually, you\u2019re going to need someone to help you scale it up or manage it. The majority of professional designers, developers, content managers, social media strategists and admin assistants are at least acquainted with WordPress and in plentiful supply.<\/p>\n
One of the drawbacks of such an open and accessible platform with such a low barrier to entry is that it\u2019s easy to hire someone cheap who does shoddy work that needs to then be fixed later. We\u2019ve had to fix quite a few of these situations and they\u2019re usually not pretty.<\/p>\n
Related: How to Hire Right WordPress Developer?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Open source means you have control of your site<\/h3>\n
WordPress comes in two versions. WordPress.org is typically what most people want: It\u2019s completely independent and open source. That means, when you download a copy of WordPress and install it on your server (which every host usually has a one-click install option for WordPress), you can do literally anything you want with it and nobody can take your site away from you. This is called “self-hosted” WordPress in the technical community. You have zero costs to run WordPress outside of whatever your host charges you for your website server.<\/p>\n
WordPress.com is owned by Automattic (founded by the co-founder of WordPress). It is a paid platform like Wix or Shopify. While it is powered by WordPress, there are limitations to what you are allowed to do. For example, you can only use approved plugins and custom coding is restricted for just about anything other than CSS.<\/p>\n
Improvements to WordPress are all done by independent contributors who volunteer to improve the code, debug it and make the platform better, which means you\u2019ve got a collection of some of the world\u2019s best developers working to make the platform that powers your website better without having to pay a dime for it.<\/p>\n
Related: Four Reasons You Should Hire Best WordPress Development Company in India<\/a><\/p>\n
WordPress is adopted to modern tech and is easy to optimize<\/h3>\n
While there is the “WordPress way” of doing things, new additions like the Block Editor (also called Gutenberg) uses ReactJS to power everything, which enables the advantages of more modern web tech. The majority of new features are all JavaScript, while also using the classic PHP.<\/p>\n
Optimizations are incredibly easy to implement and in any way you can imagine, from SEO<\/a> to hosting, where most of the time there\u2019s a “one-click” install and configuration option.<\/p>\n
WordPress certainly has flaws and it\u2019s always a work in progress like any major tech project. Like anything else, it\u2019s not a perfect fit for every situation but it\u2019s the most powerful and flexible option for the vast majority. It does this without high monthly fees, development costs or limitations to what you can add with some of the world’s best developers supporting it, while being extremely easy to train and find people who know how to use it.<\/p>\n
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