Is WordPress the best choice for your business website?

Many people will tell you WordPress is the best choice to build your business website. But in this article, we’ll give you some reasons why it might not be. If you’re considering using WordPress for your business website, there are some things you need to know.

1. Costs

When you’re engaging a WordPress designer to develop your website, make sure you ask about ongoing costs.

WordPress is set up is as a framework with a range of themes and plugins to choose from. This means is there are a lot of options for your developer. Some plugins are free of charge, and some are paid premium plugins with annual subscriptions.

So you need to find out which plugins are being used and how much they are, and make sure someone from your business is responsible for the renewal. We’ve heard stories where a plugin needs to be renewed and the email reminder hasn’t made it to the business owner. As a result, plugin doesn't work any more (in this example no potential customers could contact the business) and the business owner may be totally unaware.

Using zStudio there are no hidden, ongoing costs for plugins. Everything you need is built into the system and available from the time of build. Which is great because who needs the hassle of paying extra bills and keeping on top of subscriptions for plugins just to keep their website working?

2. SEO

WordPress has some good SEO plugins, the best of which are usually paid (an extra cost… refer to point 1 above). And your designer or developer might tell you that WordPress is the only way to go for SEO.

But using zStudio CMS the SEO features are all built in. No need to purchase a plugin and pay for a consultant, or the training to learn how to use it. We work with SEO professionals to build the latest features into the core of our CMS to give you the edge with SEO.

If you’re looking for proof, many of The Internet Platform’s clients have achieved coveted page one results on Google for their businesses using zStudio alone… with no extra plugins, consultants or extra SEO training. Who wouldn’t want to be on page 1 without the hassle?

3. Support and Training

WordPress offers a range of themes (design templates) and plugins to use when building your business website.

This may look like a good thing, but what happens if you need to make changes to your website and the person who was trained has left your business?

The point is: each WordPress theme has different navigation, and with the buffet of plugins available, even if you hire or engage someone who is experienced using WordPress, they may not have used your particular theme or suite of plugins before.

So even if training is provided with your website handover, with the changes in WordPress’ themes and plugins, you might need to spend more time and money on training to get your site updated.

Using zStudio CMS, full training is provided, with access to a catalogue of online help topics and our friendly team available to answer your questions. Our platform’s structure is integrated so there are no ‘moving parts’ that will change significantly, saving you time, money and hassle on training.

4. Security

WordPress is one of the most common web platforms in the world. But this is a double-sided sword because the code used in the platform is open source, which means it’s available to anyone. As a result, hackers can find holes in WordPress’ code and exploit them and do this pretty frequently.

There are a lot of security plugins available for WordPress. So if your website is built using them, you need to make sure that they are working, updated, and the most secure option available in the market. And make sure you ask about backups just in case things go wrong. Especially: how often is a backup of your site performed and where are the backups stored?

Don’t take a risk of losing your entire site with unknown security plugins and non-existent backups. The time and money it costs to restore a hacked site cause extra headaches to a business owner.

zStudio CMS isn't a not open source system, that means hackers do not have access to it. Also, backups are done behind the scenes daily and stored securely off-site, so there’s no need for you to add backup tools or schedule reminders to do them. It’s one less thing you’ll have to worry about, which is what every business owner wants.

5. Upgrades and Maintenance

All the resources available in WordPress including plugins and themes require regular updates.

The problem with this is that sometimes updates between these elements can cause conflicts. Which doesn’t sound like a big problem, but that means that the updated versions don’t match which can cause elements of your site to fall down.

As an owner of the business, the problem is that if someone in your team is updating your WordPress software, are they checking to see that all elements of your site are still working as they should be? Let’s say your plugin for your customer enquiry form stopped working. In effect, customers can’t contact you via your site.

Using zStudio CMS, any updates are carried out by our team in the background across all elements of the platform. So you can get on with managing your business instead of checking over your whole site to make sure it’s still working.