There are many different options when it comes to website CMS and platforms nowadays, it can be hard to know what to choose. And to be honest, it often depends very much on factors like budget, diy or hiring, requirements, editability, environmental impact and more. If you’d like to see a rundown of different options and my thoughts on each then you can go to the blog post ‘What website builder to choose for your eco-friendly small business’.
However I do have a soft spot for WordPress myself! WordPress is a CMS which means Content Management System, it’s free and open source. I’ve been building with it for around ten years now and if you are wondering why then let’s go into why I love it so much, especially for creating highly bespoke websites.
WordPress has been established a long time and has built a huge community around it. It has been around since 2003 (wow!) and is used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet (W3Techs, 2022). This means that there is a lot of support and services based on WordPress. Potentially a huge plus is in fact the ability to easily find someone that will be able to work on your website at any point.
These are the benefits of using WordPress for your website:
WordPress is powerful and flexible
If you want a membership, courses, bookings, e-commerce, directories and so much more it’s all entirely possible with WordPress and a well chosen plugin or some custom code. If we think of an e-commerce website there are often requirements needed beyond the basics of listing a product and selling it, luckily there are a huge number of plugins that can offer features like wishlists, wholesale, shipping and quote building for example. Often the costs for these plugins are a lot lower than on other platforms like Shopify where costs can quickly add up for business owners.
A huge number of integrations
WordPress and WooCommerce will integrate with so many other services that you might use such as email marketing or payment processors. As it has been around so long and is so widely used it will be a high priority for businesses that need to integrate with websites to be supportive of.
Budget Friendly potential
If budget is a concern then you might not ideally want to spend your money on platform fees especially to have the plan with e-commerce functions and potential add-on costs as well. At a minimum with WordPress you could just be paying for a budget hosting plan until you needed more. You could use free or one-off fee plugins to add functionality and avoid the cost of ongoing subscriptions.
Completely customisable
Sometimes I’ve heard people talk about a WordPress look in the past and I think that is long gone because you can make WordPress look however you would like. There are templates that can be used as is or customised lightly or extensively. But WordPress is actually theme based and many themes now have page builders that allow a designer/developer to do a design exactly as intended. I have in fact in the past created my own custom themes as well and because I’ve worked with WordPress for so long I’m able to edit the themes to ensure they look and work exactly how I envision!
Page builders are awesome, and there is also Advanced Custom Fields
The cool thing here too is that using page builders enables a client to be able to edit where needed too. However if the project needed to not have that much flexibility in editing maybe to avoid it being messed up if a more technophobe client a custom editing panel can be made with something called Advanced Custom Fields allowing very specific edits in a controlled way.
Using advanced custom fields can also be used to extend possibilities on page such as the typical WooCommerce product page.
Your website is yours
In the admittedly unlikely event of a platform going out of business or having an outage your website would be gone or down and that would be that. With WordPress because it is self-hosted you can move hosting any time and take full back-ups allowing for peace of mind.
There are some ‘cons’ depending on your viewpoint
One thing I always find important to note with WordPress is that due to the nature of it being self-hosted it does need to be updated and maintained. This keeps things like the WordPress software, plugins and themes up to date and secure. Unfortunately this is something that could go wrong if not done properly which is something that isn’t an issue with Squarespace, Shopify, Wix etc. Many website designers/developers will offer a WordPress Care Plan if it’s not something you would be able to manage in house.
The other factor is indeed a websites security which again is handled when your website is on a platform but with WordPress it needs to be considered and monitored. This is partly because it is so widely used that it does get targeted unfortunately. But there are ways to mitigate those risks.
Hey, I’m Kirsty McGill the creative behind Elm Leaf Studio. I’ve been a designer for 13 years now and building websites for most of them.
Elm Leaf Studio is a creative studio that exists to help small, ethically-minded businesses grow and thrive.
When I’m not designing I mostly spend my time running around after a toddler nowadays, and if I get a spare moment I enjoy reading, learning and making art.
