WordPress Engineering
At its inception in 2003, WordPress was just a blogging platform, now it is the largest CMS on the market. Powering over 34% of websites!
WordPress has established itself as a leader in the industry. When it comes to choosing a platform to build your website with, we are highly likely to recommend WordPress.
Pros of choosing WordPress
1. User Friendly CMS:
WordPress is a strong content management system because of its origin in blogging. It is very easy for an admin to navigate through the backend of their WordPress site, edit pages and upload new content. WordPress makes it simple to organise content without a lot of website management knowledge.
2. Plugins:
There are over 54,000 mostly free and paid plugins available to WordPress users. These plugins allow you to customise and enhance any WordPress site. If you need to make specific changes to the functionality on your site, chances are there is a plugin to do just that. We wrote a guide on how to assess the quality of these plugins to ensure they don’t hurt your site’s security.
3. SEO:
The importance of SEO best practices are at an all time high. WordPress does a good job of promoting these best practices. There are many SEO plugins available to help optimise content, meta tags, keyword focus and much more! Our plugin of choice here at ArcStone is Yoast SEO.
Having access to free plugins, like Yoast, means each WordPress site is SEO ready. There isn’t a better platform than WordPress when it comes to SEO optimisation.
4. Responsive:
WordPress has thousands of themes available. Generally, these themes are very reliable when it comes to being responsive. With an increasing amount of internet surfing done on mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly site with consistency across all devices is very important to the UX
Now, why WordPress isn’t always the best fit
1. Updates:
Installing updates is important to the health of your WordPress site, but can be a nuisance if not done thoughtfully. Premium WordPress themes are updated and improved often. These updates are important to maintain proper security on WordPress websites. Updates may bring some small problems to a website in which case you may have to revert to an older WordPress state.
2. Speed:
Certain themes contain a lot of unnecessary generic code. This can decrease the speed of the site and cause slow load times. Without prior WordPress experience it can be hard to understand what code you need and what code you can do without. Again, this is something an agency like ArcStone can help you navigate!
3. Customisation:
We all hesitate to invest in customisation, as it can get expensive. WordPress is a very flexible tool unlike many of the other drag and drop web builder tools out there. However, if you aren’t a WordPress expert and you didn’t have one develop your site, then this can be an issue. As mentioned above, updating core WordPress may cause some problems on your site. These updates may break up some of the functionality and if you don’t have best practices employed when designing the site, this can become an issue.
With all these factors to consider, we will always recommend you at least consult with a WordPress expert when building out a WordPress website.
Contact us for any queries about website development if you are interested in a brand new website