WordPress is growing in the enterprise, used across every primary industry nowadays. Unfortunately, major businesses still bypass WordPress because of its reputation as a small business or independent blogging platform. In recent years, dedicated WordPress-managed hosting platforms have evolved. We migrated to Flywheel for Martech Zone and have been ecstatic with the results.
There are pros and cons of utilizing WordPress in the Enterprise. I’d liken the WordPress experience to racing. You have a car (WordPress), a driver (your staff), an engine (themes and plugins), and a racetrack (your infrastructure). If any one of these elements is lacking, you lose the race. We have watched many large companies fail with a WordPress migration and blame WordPress; however, we’ve never seen the issue be WordPress.
The Pros of WordPress for Enterprise
- Training – If you need assistance, WordPress.org has a ton of resources, YouTube has many videos and training programs throughout the web, and Google results in millions of articles. Not to mention our WordPress articles, of course.
- Ease of Use – While it may not be simple for customization at first, producing content WordPress is a snap. Their editor is incredibly robust (although it bothers me that h1, h2, and h3 headings and subheadings still haven’t made it into the code).
- Access to Resources – Searching for other CMS development resources can be a real challenge, but with WordPress, they’re everywhere. Warning: That can also be a problem… there are a lot of developers and agencies that develop very poor solutions out there for WordPress.
- Integrations – If you’re trying to add forms or integrate virtually anything, you’ll typically find the productized integration in WordPress first. Search the authorized plugin directory or a site like Code Canyon, there’s not much you won’t find!
- Customization – WordPress themes, plugins, widgets, and custom post types offer infinite flexibility. WordPress works hard to have a series of APIs encompassing every platform aspect.
And let’s not forget that WordPress does offer an Enterprise-hosted and supported version of their platform, VIP.
The Cons of WordPress for Enterprise
I’ve shared some of my frustrations with using WordPress overall, but specific to enterprise and internationalization, there are challenges:
- Optimization – WordPress is suitable for search engine optimization, but it’s not great. They’ve recently added sitemaps to their Jetpack plugin, but it’s not as robust as Rank Math’s SEO plugins.
- Performance – WordPress lacks database optimization and page caching, but you can easily make this up by utilizing a Managed WordPress Host. I would require any solution to have automated backups, page caching, database tools, error logs, and virtualization to ensure your success.
- Internationalization (I18N) – WordPress documents how to internationalize your themes and plugins but cannot integrate localized content into the system. We’ve implemented WPML for this and had success.
- Security – When you’re powering 25% of the web, you’re a massive target for hacking. Again, some managed hosting offers automated plugin and theme updates when security issues arise. I’d highly recommend building child themes so you can continue to update your supported parent theme to avoid putting your site at risk with a theme that can’t be updated.
- Code Base – Themes are often developed for a great design but lack sophisticated development for speed, optimization, and customization. It can be downright aggravating how poorly both plugins and themes are developed. We often rewrite themes’ functionality (another reason to use child themes).
- Backups – WordPress offers a paid solution, VaultPress, for offsite backups. Still, I’m surprised that many companies don’t realize that it’s not a feature out of the box and needs to be provided by your host or an additional service.
WordPress is making strides with medium and large-sized businesses, here are some stats from Pantheon.
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