As a WordPress expert and general “tech person,” I’m often asked by friends, colleagues, and random people why, in 2020, is WordPress still the best option for building sites in my view. Now, I could go down many roads in my response to this question. I could ramble for hours, spouting technical jargon nobody understands, about issues few care about, so I will keep my answer(s) confined to five, generally essential, and valid areas where WordPress is the king of the hill.
Long Term Cost
This is not 1995; we live in a day and time where websites are best conceptualized as going concerns more akin to a piece of real estate than one-off circumstances more akin to a food item. What I mean is that when one constructs a website, one has to consider not just how it will look and function the day its punched live, but how it will scale to meet future demands, how it will work on future devices, how long will it last?.
WordPress, since it’s been adopted by the broader internet community of developers the world over, has support. With WP, it’s guaranteed that patches, updates, add-ons, and new solutions will be developed and rolled out on an ongoing basis – it’s not even a concern, maintain it, and its OK.
This is not so with other systems; in particular, it’s not so with SaaS based systems which are developed by small businesses, with short development budgets and a small user base. History of the last 20 years is littered with companies who developed various SaaS website platforms and garnered substantial user bases, only to fold up and leave those with sites up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
All of this boils down costly and destructive obsolescence and the need for subsequent re-development of the buyer’s website – often from scratch. Oh, and all of this ignores the fact most SaaS platforms charge an arm and a leg for hosting when compared to the conventional hosting most often used for WordPress sites.
Security
Many platforms tout their security as being rock-solid, they point at WordPress and say, “Hah! Look at ALL THOSE PATCHES, it must be so insecure!” – not so. The fact is all platforms have inherent insecurity online, WordPress being open source means that there are collectively hundreds of thousands of eyeballs scanning it for vulnerabilities and developing fixes and updates. The next time you see someone point the finger at WP and accuse it of being insecure because it has active patches for its flaws, ask them how come the other platforms don’t? The answer is indeed not because they are more secure and maybe it’s because nobody is checking.
Features
WordPress has been adopted by nearly 34% of the internet, and while this may sound like a small number, it represents the single most successful content management system in history. The most significant consequence of being adopted by so many individuals and businesses is that there is an entire cottage industry of developers who make plugins and add-ons for WordPress, making it the most feature-rich and adaptable platform used to develop websites. You don’t have to take this author’s word for it; a simple search on Google for “WordPress Plugin” will showcase an enormous amount of results.
Beautiful
Being popular has its advantages aesthetically when it comes to WordPress because there are more themes for it than any other platform of its type. Sure, you may recoil at the word “Theme” with vague memories of canned websites of the 1990’s springing to mind, but that was then, and this is now. Themes for WP are beautiful, extensible, flexible, and will cut development costs to the bone due to the head-start they represent for developers. In 2020, most developers use themes as a starting point and recycle code and other elements contained within them to get sites done quickly, on-time, and on-budget with end-results the average site owner could only dream of in the past.
SEO
What is a website? Well, if no one visits it, its kind of like a secret diary online, and none of us want that. No, we want our sites as heavily trafficked as possible, so we get our message out as far and wide as we can, and that’s why WordPress is king. WordPress is perhaps the most SEO-friendly platform every developed; there are voluminous numbers of free tools and add-ons to help get sites built in its ranking. This may seem like something trivial to the uninitiated, but it’s not; its the most critical factor in site development – or at least it should be. With WordPress, you can be confident that, if you get it set up right and follow a decent content strategy, given time, you will see results – your business competition notwithstanding.
Final Thoughts
This post could easily be thousands of words and dozens of pages long because the evidence as to why WordPress is fantastic is everywhere – just like the evidence that SaaS website platforms are often problematic for buyers is around.
If you are someone looking to have a site developed and don’t want to spend an arm and a leg, want something quality constructed that will afford visitors on all devices a trouble-free viewing experience, take it from us, go with WordPress