September 2024 Update - Response to businesses profiting on open source Wordpress
A Quick Summary
Creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was quoted on a podcast saying the hosting company WP Engine is violating WordPress' trademarks. The feud has become public on social media and WP Engine customers were outraged when WordPress refused access to websites hosted on WP Engine.
The Verge: The messy WordPress drama, explained
Mett Mullenweg's Blog: WPE & Trademarks
The Point: Using WordPress means WordPress controls your website, not you
Profiting on open-source projects is nothing new - but the proliferation of WordPress makes the issue exponentially different. My main concern with WordPress for businesses is based around the ideas involving an open-source system.
At its core, open-source development promotes the idea that software should be accessible to everyone, allowing individuals to view, modify, and distribute the source code. WordPress includes a GNU public license, and derivative works based on WordPress also (should) inherit this license. This is the legal grey area surrounding recent conflicts.
When starting a business, deciding on a web platform is not heavily scrutinized. Businesses that grow quickly soon realize the ability to switch platforms, or modernize their stack becomes increasingly difficult.
By choosing WordPress as your web platform, you are inheriting the following risks:
Security Vulnerability
As mentioned below, WordPress is the most attacked (CMS software) due to its popularity. Hackers often exploit vulnerabilities in outdated software, plugins, and themes. Open-source means hackers get as much access to the code as developers do.Trusting Third-Party Developers or Software
The WordPress community is massive, and the common solution to any issue is "install X plugin” or start with a "free" theme. Using poorly coded or outdated plugins and themes can introduce security loopholes. If third-party developers do not maintain their plugins, a WordPress update can kill your website.High Maintenance Platform
To maintain security and performance, you must frequently update the WordPress core, themes, and plugins. Failing to do so can take your site down or leave your site vulnerable to attacks. Regular backups are essential to prevent data loss. While plugins can automate this process, it adds another task to your maintenance routine.Dependency on High-Cost Hosting
Hosting is ground zero for performance and stability. Installing too many plugins or using heavy themes can slow down your website, but good (expensive) hosting will be your best chance at keeping your website up during a traffic spike.Customizations Still Require Developers
While WordPress is user-friendly, advanced customization often requires knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This may necessitate hiring a developer. Some themes come with limitations that can hinder design flexibility. Customizing these themes beyond their intended design can be challenging without a developer.
The WordPress ecosystem has many advantages, but it remains my opinion that it is not a suitable business solution.
Original Post Below - Updated
The rise of ecommerce in the modern business landscape has made a company’s website an extremely important resource. Businesses communicate with existing and potential customers through their websites and cannot afford to drive users away with slow or inconsistent performance. A website may only get one chance to convert a prospective customer, so it has to demonstrate its quality every time it’s accessed.
WordPress is a very popular solution for building websites. In some respects, this popularity is justified. WordPress offers a simplified path to building a website that can be attractive to companies developing an ecommerce solution. A large user community is available with recommendations that can be instrumental in helping a business create its website and multiple plugins provide enhanced functionality to the base product.
While WordPress has its place in the world of website development, we believe it is not the optimal solution for businesses. There are many more robust and scalable website platforms that offer numerous advantages over WordPress.
What Are the Most Important Aspects of a Commercial Website?
Business websites are customer-facing portals through which companies communicate with consumers. Issues that hinder this communication can negatively impact a company and drive away potential business. The following are some factors that go into developing a viable commercial website.
Page load speed - The speed with which a website’s page loads has a tremendous impact on its ability to connect with users. A slow load speed can result in reduced traffic and sales conversions. People don’t want to wait for a page to respond, and a difference of a few seconds in load time increases the likelihood of users bouncing by 32%. Most companies cannot afford to lose a third of their users due to slow-loading pages.
Website design - A commercial website should be easy to navigate and highlight a company’s main products or services on its home page. Users may opt for other solutions if the website does not include an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Reliability - Users want to know a trusted site is always available. Inconsistent availability or extended outages may influence customers into finding alternative providers and abandoning a company’s website. Failing to meet customer expectations even once may result in permanently lost business.
Scalability - Growth is an essential component of most businesses. In the world of ecommerce, companies need to be prepared for growth at any time. A viral video, press motion, or other types of unexpected publicity can result in a tremendous increase in the number of website visitors and potential customers. Companies need to build their websites with this in mind so they don’t miss unanticipated opportunities for growth.
“Several times in my career I have seen a news feature or influencer’s post cause a server-based website to be flooded and make it unavailable when they need it the most.” - Jeff Byer
Reasons Why WordPress Might Not be Your Best Choice
Websites built on WordPress share many characteristics that may make the platform unsuitable for a commercial site. Professional developers have the following issues with WordPress that can affect the speed, reliability, and scalability of websites built using the platform. These concerns should be taken seriously when selecting the solution for developing your company’s website.
- WordPress sites are based on legacy code that may be difficult to integrate with the mobile devices and technology that are driving ecommerce. This can result in poor page loading speed which is detrimental to customer retention.
- A lack of flexibility minimizes the customization developers can introduce to a website and may be at odds with the company’s vision for its online presence.
- The open source nature of WordPress is attractive but is not as cost-efficient as it may appear at first glance. More resources are often needed to maintain the website than anticipated. In many cases, front-end and back-end teams are required to keep the website updated. The site may experience outages when it is put into maintenance mode.
- WordPress sites are primarily run from a single server with visitor requests entering through a common gateway. The monolithic nature of this architecture results in a single source of failure as the gateway is susceptible to distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
- WordPress sites are not easily scaled to address sudden increases in traffic and customer volume. This can lead to ill-performing websites and a loss of business such as what happened to J.Crew on Black Friday in 2018.
WordPress was the most attacked (CMS software) in the Americas, APAC (Asia Pacific) and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) despite the fact that nearly half of publicly accessible hosts running WordPress reside in the United States, compared to a smaller usage in other regions.
Better Performing Alternatives to WordPress
We believe that businesses desiring an elite-performing website need to look beyond WordPress to address the previously mentioned issues. That’s why we recommend building Jamstack websites that provide enhanced capabilities over those developed with WordPress. The following are some of the multiple advantages available when developing JavaScript-based websites.
- No server is required as the Jamstack source code and ancillary frameworks are compiled into static website files.
- Serverless static websites can be distributed through cloud networks where they can be accessed closer to users to virtually eliminate latency.
- Instant page loads lead to increased engagement and conversions. Improving the page load time by a tenth of a second has been shown to increase conversion rates by 8%.
- Better SEO and increased traffic is achieved through better Google Core Web Vitals.
- The flexibility possible in headless commerce, headless CMS, and Jamstack solutions result in best-in-class solutions that meet customer demands.
A word about Jamstack
Jamstack is an architectural approach to website development that improves flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability. It achieves these benefits by decoupling the web experience layer from underlying data and business logic. With Jamstack, business logic does not dictate the web experience. Custom login and third-party services are delivered through APIs. Jamstack’s approach is effective to address the needs of commerce where website performance can be a critical differentiating factor among competitors.
“The most popular e-commerce platform on the Internet today is Shopify, and they rebuilt their system from the ground up to provide a Jamstack platform called Shopify 2.0. We are proud to be Shopify’s development partners and provide Shopify 2.0 solutions to our customers.” – Jeff Byer
Specific advantages of adopting the Jamstack approach to website development include:
- Nearly instantaneous page loads - Using Jamstack, the website front-end is prebuilt and stored as optimized static pages. This improves page load speed, boosts conversions, and increased the page’s search rankings, making it more discoverable. The increased speed of a Jamstack site immediately delivers initial content to visitors.
- Unmatched scalability - Without the constraints of server-side code, Jamstack projects are distributed rather than residing on a single server. This provides enhanced resilience and elasticity that enables the site to scale to meet fluctuating demands spurred by a successful ad campaign or Black Friday shoppers.
WordPress Alternatives for an Optimized Website
We support website development using a variety of WordPress alternatives including Sanity, Netlify CMS, Strapi, Contentful, Craft CMS, Tina CMS, Agility CMS, and Prismic. With multiple solutions available, we select the platform that best addresses your website’s business objectives.
Each website programming language and platform has specific advantages that make them suitable for your business. When integrating your internal processes into the website, the choice of platform can be crucial. Rather than trying to work within the constraints of WordPress, we choose a platform that allows us to deliver a great-looking and high-performing website.
We carefully evaluate your website and reduce on-demand server-side processes by rendering data resources to static files. This process enables us to deliver faster and more compatible websites than when using WordPress. Custom applications are built that automate business processes and provide you with analytical data to help grow your business.
What We Can Do For Your Company
At Byer Company, we design, develop, optimize, and promote your website to help you grow your business. We can fix your underperforming website to lead to more conversions and increased customer satisfaction. Byer Company can also design and develop a website based on your company’s unique requirements.
Talk to Byer Company today and learn how we can deliver a website that exceeds customer expectations and allows your business to achieve its true potential.