Why use WordPress for a business website?
February 9, 2021 by Brandon Boo
My entry into Digital Marketing and business in general started with helping local businesses as a freelance web developer and digital marketer during my undergraduate days.
One of the questions clients usually ask is: “Should I build a custom coded website, or should I use WordPress?”
If you haven't built your first business website, or currently stuck with a custom coded website and costly bills to upgrade/extend, you’re at the right place.
Our co-founder’s quick answer to "Why use WordPress for a business website"
It depends on your business needs, and what resources you currently have, or willing is to obtain.
If you want to launch quickly and keep development/website management costs low, start with a WordPress website.
Those who want to sell you expensive coded websites (costly man hours and expertise you cannot access easily) will tell you that self-hosted WordPress is simply a blogging platform.
In fact, 85% of our current clients regretted spending thousands of dollars on developing their custom coded websites and finding out that they have to spend more to add on new features and changes.
If your business is not at the scale and level of these 40 businesses who are using self-hosted WordPress for their websites, my advice is start with WordPress.
You can easily upgrade to a custom-coded website in the future when you really need to.
WordPress is not only a blogging tool
When we are talking about WordPress, we are talking about the self-hosted version of WordPress (wordpress.org), and not WordPress.com.
Today, we’ll share with you 6 important reasons why you should use WordPress as a CMS for your website.
We will also briefly explore the different kinds of websites you can create with WordPress, and let you decide whether WordPress is enough for your business’s needs.
While WordPress started as a blogging platform (quite a while ago), it has transformed into an extremely powerful website builder (drag and drop included) and a strong content management system (CMS).
See a list of famous brands & companies using WordPress for their (huge/successful) businesses.
Here’s 6 reasons why you should use WordPress for a business website
Reason #1: Lower costs to setup and manage in the long term
A) Lower Costs for Self-Hosted WordPress
A WordPress based website will require a developer and UI/UX professionals to setup, and someone who is familiar with WordPress on your team to manage content changes.
WordPress is open-sourced, meaning it doesn’t cost developers any money to use the WordPress CMS as the infrastructure of your website.
Also, due it’s widespread use, WordPress developers are plenty (high supply), thus bringing down the cost of WordPress website development.
For content changes and management, no coding knowledge is required, as drag-and-drop interface is widely available (included on all the WordPress sites we built).
B) Custom coded websites costs more to setup and manage
A custom coded website is ‘better’, in terms of features and functionality, as you get to build anything that you want. You will also need a developer (or developers) and UI/UX professionals to code and launch your website.
For content changes and management, you will require a developer to make changes that goes beyond editing/replacement of text or graphics.
Replacing 1 image with another or changing typo errors can be done by anybody through a CMS (similar to WordPress), but you will need access to the source code and a developer with coding expertise to change things such as page layouts (inserting new rows/forms etc).
Most importantly, please ensure you have access to your source code. As a business, you pay a vendor or developers to build YOUR website, thus the source code belongs to you.
***Write it down in the contract that YOU OWN the source code before you pay a single dollar.***
Many of our clients who had their custom websites built (before engaging us) realised that they didn’t own their website’s source code (which is total rubbish).
They usually find out only when they wanted to upgrade their website with new features and sections, and realise they are stuck.
Stuck in the sense that their ex-developers did not allow them to make new changes without ‘going through them’.
Needless to say, many of these clients felt that they were getting overcharged for the second/third time and ultimately redeveloped a brand-new website at a fraction of the ‘upgrading costs’.
Reason #2: WordPress has a huge ecosystem of well supported plug and play plugins
The best part about WordPress is that due to the large number of websites and businesses using WordPress, there’s an entire ecosystem of plugins (built by thousands of external developers) that supports almost any functionality you can think of.
With this entire ecosystem of plugin developers and users (freemium and paying customers), software plugins that are plugged into your WordPress site will consistently be updated and supported year after year.
A custom website requires developers to build (code) and implement new functionality on your website, as well as maintain it to ensure it works month after month (due to constant updates in programming languages and coding libraries). You are paying for the developers to support your website.
For a WordPress website that purchases a well-developed and supported plugin, the investment is typically around $100 - $200 per year.
In this case, you’re paying a tiny amount annually to get the same support. This is possible due to economies of scale, whereby developers are supporting 1 WordPress plugin that is used by hundreds or thousands of paying customers.
Reason #3: WordPress is easy to customise with Themes and PageBuilders
Yes, Drag and Drop PageBuilders are available on WordPress as well.
This means that you no longer have to get developers to code your new webpage from scratch, or make code revisions whenever you wish to add a new webpage with a different layout, forms or buttons.
Now, your product team can simply prepare the details and materials for a new product launch, while marketing prepares suitable copywriting and images, and then drag/drop in their content onto your new webpage.
Result: Cut down plan to launch cycles, allowing your business more options and much faster execution.
Check out our new support plans
Reason #4: WordPress can be secure with a few simple steps
WordPress is used by around 26 million websites (check out https://trends.builtwith.com/) as of August 2019. Though some would argue that using the same CMS makes your website more vulnerable to hackers/malware etc, it really depends on the security measures your company takes.
For instance, one of the top reasons WordPress sites are compromised is because of outdated plugins and themes.
Updating them can be as simple as clicking on the ‘Update’ button on your admin dashboard, or having an outsourced WordPress Support Team to back up your site before conducting plugin updates every week.
Weak passwords are also one of the reason WordPress (and many other websites) are compromised, and this goes beyond just the password for your WordPress admin area.
Weak passwords to email accounts, hosting accounts etc are all culprits when it comes to security and data losses. (looking at those of you who use your mobile numbers as passwords)
In addition, there are free (freemium) Security plugins that allows for audit logs, file scanning of your CMS files/codes etc.
We use Sucuri on our website to protect against common security threats such as brute force attacks, and log all changes and backend access as well.
Reason #5: Managing a WordPress website is less tedious by yourself, and cost friendly if you outsource
Demand and Supply affects the prices of products and services, that’s basic economics.
WordPress is an extremely popular CMS, and with that, a relatively high supply of companies and developers who are familiar with WordPress (as compared to the less popular CMS out there).
In this case, by using WordPress to build your business website, you can either learn to manage your own Website (lots of resources on the internet).
Or, consider outsourcing to WordPress Support Companies (https://www.aresmarketing.com.sg/product-category/support-plans/) who have the scale and expertise to help you.
Reason #6: It’s easy to implement SEO on WordPress
WordPress was initially targeted built for bloggers, thus its fundamental code is friendly towards Search Engine optimisation.
For one, WordPress comes installed with permalinks, which are human and search engine friendly. You can also control the content and structure of the links.
It’s also easy to create and manage content on WordPress (as a former blogging focused platform).
With a few free/premium plugins, you can also enable drag and drop capability for blog content editing, without the need for an army of designers and developers.
You can use WordPress for many different functions
Besides being used as a blog (personal or business), WordPress can be utilised to create so many types of websites.
*If you have not checked out this list of famous brands & companies using WordPress, you should!*
Function #1: Ecommerce
With well-developed and supported plugins such as WooCommerce, your WordPress can be easily transformed with e-commerce capability.
In addition, other plugins will also enable various features such as additional payment gateways, auto subscription model or even on-demand video learning websites.
Function #2: Business Websites
Building static pages using WordPress is one of the easiest and most cost-effective methods to get your website up and running within 1 – 2 weeks.
It also comes built in with blogging functionality, as well as being SEO friendly.
Extending the functionality of your WordPress Business Website is also possible without being forced to hire the same developers again (custom coded websites or apps can be tricky to transfer).
Function #3: Non-Profit Sites
WordPress is free (in terms of being open source), whereby you don’t have to pay annual license fees for using WordPress.
With plugins such as donation forms, payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe), you can start to accept donations.
However, costs such as webhosting, domain, premium (paid) themes and plugins need to be paid for.
Don't forget about the manhours that developers and designers put in as well (or you could learn and do it yourself if you have the time and patience)!
Function #4: Photography/Portfolio Websites
With WordPress and various Themes/Templates that are centred around photography and portfolio websites, you can easily setup and add your images, captions, slideshows and portfolio.
Or you could opt for a fully customisable theme that is powered with an easy to use and performance optimised pagebuilder.
Conclusion
We hope this article can help you decide whether you should use WordPress for your website or no.
Our co-founder has gone from building his first WordPress website (a personal blog) back in 2013 with nothing but $100 (for domain and hosting) and a bit of patience, to building WordPress sites for over 100 small-medium local businesses.
WordPress is one of the best options for Small Medium businesses, in terms of both short-term setup costs and long-term costs (maintenance and features extension).
For those of you who prefer to focus on their core business, check out our WordPress Website Support Plans for WordPress Websites.
I wonder if wordpress is better that wiz…… Thanks for the info.
Cheers
Thomas