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Ross Henderson

I feel the need, the need for speed!

With the current climate and challenges facing all businesses, the ability to act fast and have a flexible and scalable website is crucial.  One of the key factors underpinning this is the CMS your website is built on.  At Coast Digital we develop principally on WordPress CMS as it stands out in terms of flexibility, scalability and speed.  It also excels from an organic search perspective.

However, WordPress historically suffers from a couple of main stigmas, particularly for larger businesses:

  1. It is ‘just’ a blogging platform
  2. Security

The reality is that these are mostly unfounded concerns, and there are many articles talking around WordPress’s ability as a CMS and the fact that security is a consideration for all CMS’s, not just WordPress.  If it is built well, up to date and well hosted then you have taken the reasonable steps – that same steps which you would take for any CMS.

But those topics are not the focus of this blog – here we are looking more at speed and the ability to affect change when you need to… tomorrow, or next week rather than next month or next year, and cost effectively too.

While some of the assertions made here might not be applicable to all they are all common frustrations that I’ve heard numerous times from CMO’s, Heads of Digital and Marketing Managers.

Slow website changes are a barrier to success

The theme running through is that of being held back when they want to execute changes on their current site.  Ranging from a change to a call to action, a new landing page layout or a new section within the site.  The thing holding them back; their fancy enterprise CMS!

The four main issues we often see being:

  • The lack of access to a knowledgeable developer skill set
  • the cost if they can access developers
  • The time it takes to get projects scheduled
  • The fact that they can’t make any changes themselves.

For those reasons we are seeing more and more businesses of all sizes shifting to WordPress, either as their primary CMS, or as a secondary CMS for campaign activity / microsites.

WordPress as a platform gives you access to a huge developer community via agencies such as ourselves, or through literally millions of freelancers.  The rates are reasonable and all of the money you invest is on site experience, not a licence fee (the cost of which gives precisely no benefit to you as an end user).

There are also 54,000+ plugins available on WordPress; there is a good chance that what you want to achieve has been either done before, or you will have a good starting point.  And finally, you can make a whole heap of changes yourself – WordPress CMS is intuitive and flexible.

In the current climate, speed is more important than ever

Recent business pressure means getting things done quickly is paramount, and so I’m expecting to see more and more briefs coming our way in which we are transitioning clients off enterprise CMS’s and onto WordPress.  Fortunately, this is something which we’ve got great experience in and we’re ready for the challenge.  Recently with WordPress we have delivered sites with the following key attributes within new site launches:

  • Various CRM Integrations
  • Multisite / Multi-Language / Multi-Region
  • Personalisation
  • Ecommerce (WooCommerce & WordPress)
  • Fully responsive

So if you are struggling with any of the points discussed, get in touch – you may just find that you can use next year’s licence fee from your enterprise platform to take you most of the way through a rebuild giving you a new, fast, flexible and scalable CMS to carry you through the economic recovery.

Get in touch with us today and find out if WordPress could be the solution to your website problems.

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