It may have started out as a popular blogging platform, but WordPress has grown to become one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) in the world.
Image Credit
The most popular website-building platform
The Most Popular Website Building Platform
According to statistics published by W3Techs, WordPress has a market share of 60%, powering around a third of websites worldwide, so this is a platform that’s widely endorsed by companies both large and small.
And one of its key features is that it can be almost endlessly customised, which means that it can grow in line with your business. Unlike some other platforms, which require a complete website rebuild eventually, a WordPress website has the scope to grow and develop, allowing you to add new pages and features whenever you require them.
Why WordPress being open source matters
Open Source
WordPress is an open-source web building platform, which means that it’s free to download, with an active online community of developers who are constantly adding new features. Themes and plugins are constantly being added and updated, with many of them being free to use too.
It’s also not a difficult platform to master either, meaning that some business owners decide to create and build their own websites. Whilst this is relatively easy for those who simply want to blog or who only need a simple brochure website, for best results it’s desirable to use a dedicated web designer who specialises in WordPress. Whether you live in Glastonbury, Guildford or Gloucester WordPress websites can be built by skilled developers according to your exact specifications. Many web designers, such as http://digi-tel.co.uk/gloucestershire-website-design/wordpress-web-design/, actually specialise in the platform, so you’re guaranteed to benefit from a website that meets your needs and that allows you to update your site content at your leisure, thanks to its intuitive interface.
Image Credit
With the online community tackling aspects of the platform that could cause concern for larger businesses, there are more reasons than ever before to adopt WordPress as your CMS of choice. Even the formerly worrying speeds involved in searches using the platform have recently been addressed, with new search index plugins now featuring a slew of useful features, including automatic indexing, voice search and even custom taxonomy.
Developers are also creating useful new caching features that allow visitors to view static versions of the previously visited site, leading to faster loading times and improved website performance.
Choosing hosting that can grow with you
A WordPress site can only scale as far as the hosting underneath it allows. Security comes first: an SSL certificate protects visitors and is also a small ranking signal, and keeping the site’s software and plugins updated closes the gaps attackers look for.
Cheap shared hosting has hidden costs. If another site on the same server is breached or suddenly busy, your site can slow down, become vulnerable or even go offline. A managed or dedicated plan keeps you separate from other people’s problems.
Speed and reliability matter as the business grows. Faster pages keep visitors from leaving, and a good host should commit to uptime of at least 99.5% and cope with spikes in traffic without the site falling over. Check that support and backups are included before you sign up.
How WordPress organises content
Part of what makes WordPress easy to scale is the way it organises content behind the scenes. Almost everything is stored as a post of some kind. Blog posts, pages and media attachments are all post types, and developers can add custom post types for things like products, case studies or team members, each with its own fields and layout.
Taxonomies sort that content. Categories are hierarchical, so they can have parents and children, while tags are flat labels, and custom taxonomies can be created to group custom post types in useful ways. Users are assigned roles such as administrator, editor, author and contributor, each with set permissions, so a growing team can share the work without everyone having full control. Comments sit alongside posts. Themes control how all of this looks and plugins add features, which means the site can grow in new directions without rebuilding it.
Choosing hosting for a growing WordPress site
WordPress itself can grow with a business, but the hosting underneath has to keep up. Most new sites start on shared hosting, where many websites share one server. It is cheap and easy to set up, and fine for modest traffic, but performance can suffer if other sites on the server get busy.
As a business grows, managed WordPress hosting is often the next step. The host takes care of updates, security, backups and caching, and the servers are tuned specifically for WordPress, which usually makes sites faster and more reliable. For larger or busier sites, a virtual private server or dedicated server offers guaranteed resources and more control, but needs more technical knowledge to manage. Whatever the level, look for daily backups, free security certificates, staging sites for testing changes and responsive support. Moving up a tier is usually straightforward, so start with what you need now.
Keeping a growing WordPress site secure
As a company grows on WordPress, keeping the site secure becomes more important, particularly if it collects customer data. A breach can damage your credibility as well as your website. Many sites run on outdated versions, and hackers target exactly those known weaknesses.
Always run the latest version of WordPress, which is regularly updated to fix vulnerabilities, and turn on automatic updates if you can. Update plugins and themes as soon as new versions are released, avoid plugins that have not been updated for a long time, and favour developers with good ratings and reviews. A child theme makes updating easier, because your customisations are not lost when the parent theme changes.
A security plugin can alert you when a plugin or theme is out of date and scan for other weak points, so run regular checks. Finally, use long passwords mixing letters, numbers and special characters, change them regularly, and always change them after giving someone temporary access or when a person with access leaves the business.
Summary
Explains why WordPress, now powering around a third of websites worldwide, suits growing businesses: it’s highly customisable so a site can be expanded with new pages and features rather than rebuilt, it’s open-source with free themes and plugins from an active developer community, and newer tools address older concerns about speed, including automatic indexing, voice search and caching for faster load times.
Questions this article raises
- At what point does a growing business need a dedicated WordPress developer rather than DIY?
- How much has WordPress’s search speed actually improved with these new plugins?
- What are the risks of relying on free themes and plugins for a business site?
