I’ve heard and been told the following so many times and it drives me up the wall. A developer, associate, friend, uncle, brother, cousin told me that real websites don’t use WordPress or that a real developer doesn’t use WordPress. They are simply ill-informed or are not experienced enough to know why they are wrong.
Built in Support
While there are many developers who build from scratch platforms and do a very good job at doing so they are either a single developer or a small team of developers. What they are not is a company of approximately 500 employees backed by a community that contributes to a significant portion of the code base which WordPress is. This means constant testing, feedback, improvements, security patching and modernization. Is your single developer or small team of developers going to deliver the same level of work and fast enough to keep up with today’s level of cyber threats?
Industry Adoption
According to BuiltWith.com https://trends.builtwith.com/cms WordPress makes up 52% of the content management sites on the internet making WordPress the most widely adopted platform.
Beyond saying there is a widespread adoption of WordPress and more specifically there are several Fortune 500 websites that trust in WordPress as a platform. Among these Fortune 500 companies are Sony Music https://www.sonymusic.com/, The Walt Disney Company https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/, the PlayStation Blog https://blog.us.playstation.com/, Target Pulse Blog https://pulse.target.com/, TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/, The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/, BBC America http://www.bbcamerica.com/, The Star Wars blog http://www.starwars.com/news, AMC’s The Walking Dead site http://www.amc.com/shows/the-walking-dead and Beyonce’s website http://www.beyonce.com/ uses WordPress to name a few. Source: WordPress.org and we verified each of the ones listed here.
What does WordPress offer?
- The WordPress platform is free
- WordPress empowers everyday users to edit and create their own content
- A well designed intuitive Administration and Authoring User Interface or UI
- In addition to Blogging WordPress is great for a Simple Web Presence
- An enormous library of Plugins https://wordpress.org/plugins/ and Themes https://wordpress.org/themes/
- An E-Commerce solution with the use of plugins
- A Podcasting platform with the use of plugins
- An automation platform for Social Media or to enable Marketing
- Scalability
- An extensive taxonomy
- An API for those that want to create mobile or data as a service driven apps
Final Words
All that said you may have an ongoing relationship with a developer or a development team in which a heavy investment and/or other needs in some way outweigh or prevents the use of WordPress but it couldn’t hurt to sit down and have the discussion.
If you are interested in having a new website or updating an old one we can help. We offer design, custom WordPress plugins, hosting and desktop application development. Use the contact form below to find out more.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic
https://trends.builtwith.com/cms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
https://wptavern.com/sixty-three-percent-of-wordpress-core-committers-are-not-employed-by-automattic