Five reasons to pick WordPress for your business website

Prospective clients often ask why I favor WordPress as our preferred content management system for business websites. I’ve got five reasons why I love to get our customers started on WordPress:

• It’s easy to publish. You don’t need to be a coder to update and add pages to your WordPress website. In addition to a comfortable, browser-based editor, you can use a variety of third-party word processors, text editors, and mobile apps to publish directly to your WordPress database.
• You can stage and schedule updates. Many of our clients like to review and socialize new blog posts and updated pages before publishing them to their live sites. WordPress makes it very easy to preview those pages and make changes. A simple scheduling tool allows you to embargo your posts so they launch at peak times, or in conjunction with special announcements or press releases.
• You’re not locked in to a single hosting provider. As good as some “small business site builder” services have become, you can never be sure if they’ll stay in business for long. (For instance: Posterous.) Because WordPress operates on most web servers, you can switch providers overnight, with minimal or zero downtime when you have the luxury of advance warning.
• You can build more than just blogs. Although you can easily “bolt on” a WordPress blog to your existing website, your customers and prospects will enjoy a vastly better experience when your blog integrates fully with your entire website. Thanks to WordPress’ posts-and-pages structure, you can interchange “evergreen” pages with your timely posts throughout the site. Updates to your blog can trigger crucial changes to pages that would otherwise start looking stale.
• It plays nice with other platforms. You’re not tied down to a single service provider, or to a small roster of acceptable service partners. If you want to switch your mailing list from MailChimp to AWeber, WordPress lets you do that. If you graduate from PayPal to a dedicated merchant account, your site installation won’t complain.

Thanks to the “famous 5-minute install,” you can get a WordPress blog up and running on most web hosts in less time than it takes to heat up your lunch. However, if you want your site looking and operating great, you’ll have to overcome five hurdles:

• Customization requires care and feeding. WordPress themes look better every year, but they can often appear a little sterile right out of the box. Our clients often combine a WordPress framework and a highly customized “child theme” to achieve a bespoke appearance without paying for a completely original theme. (Think of it as tailoring an off-the-rack blazer for a perfect fit.)
• External widgets can break your design. Plenty of great, third-party web services can streamline your lead generation and e-commerce systems. However, without proper customization, these solutions can look grafted on to your site, distract readers, break your theme design, or raise customer concerns about security.
• Cheap web hosting could clog your customer experience. Although plenty of web hosts offer shared server environments ideal for low-volume WordPress sites, a “bad neighborhood” could result in poor performance or even landing your site on security blacklists.
• Scaling brings delivery challenges. Old school web developers often poke fun at WordPress’ reliance on database code that can get bogged down during a sudden surge in traffic. Preparing for growth means hardening your database, tightening your code, and connecting to stable content delivery network.
• Hackers target outdated themes and plugins. Unless you’re paying for a professional framework or theme that includes regular maintenance, your site could include a security vulnerability that hackers can use to distribute malware.

Fortunately, members of our content marketing and website development programs don’t have to worry about any of those five issues. We help clients deploy WordPress on any of our preferred hosting providers, complete with content delivery systems, UX consulting, workflow automation, automatic backup, and security scanning services. Contact my office today to arrange a complimentary consultation. You’ll learn how our WordPress consulting services can help you improve the user experience on your website or launch your business website.