Pros & Cons of Using WordPress for a Small Business
WordPress is a powerful tool for building a website, making it easy for nearly anybody to launch a site with little coding knowledge. But depending on the size, scope and purpose of your site, you may run into challenges if you’re hoping to build a truly professional online presence for your small company or brand.
While WordPress makes it easy for businesses to get up and running, building and maintaining a world-class site may require hiring a professional.
Is it right for you? Here are some key pros and cons to consider.
Pros of Using WordPress
Easy to Get Started
One of the most striking benefits of WordPress is how easy it is to get started. It doesn’t take a professional web developer to use WordPress. If you have some basic website-building experience or you’re a quick learner, then you should get the hang of the basics. All you need to do is follow some quick installation guides, choose a theme and get to building! You can start creating pages, adding blog posts, images, contact forms and anything else you want your site to have. But if you have difficulty or need guidance, I highly recommend talking to a WordPress freelancer.
READ: Tips in Hiring WordPress Developer
Plugin Universe
When you use WordPress, you have access to a virtually endless supply of plugins. The platform allows developers all over the world to create their custom plugins and upload them to WordPress. As a user, you get access to all these plugins (and most are free), to help you achieve nearly any design or functionality you want for your site. You’ll find plugins that make SEO simpler, track your site’s analytics, make form-building quick, help you manage your mailing lists and more.
Additionally, many of the best plugins are constantly managed, meaning they get frequent updates to expand their capabilities, fix bugs and eliminate any security vulnerabilities. As long as you stay on top of these updates, they can improve your site’s performance, speed and even security. Similarly, if you’re a newbie, many plugins offer thorough documentation for you to understand the functionality and allow you to easily add them to your site. But for some an error pop up due to plugin update and incompatibility, you will need professional WordPress Help from a reputable company like WP Tangerine.
Endless Customization
When you launch a WordPress site, you have thousands of themes to choose from, including free and paid themes. These themes help you get started designing your website, as they act as a framework to build on. Some themes will be more thorough and rigid in terms of site structure. However, you can also find themes that serve as a more barebones structure to build off and customize as you see fit.
With WordPress themes, you can design your site however you want. If you wanted, you could even create your own custom theme, but that will require far more development work. And given the thousands of existing themes to choose from, making a custom theme is highly unnecessary, especially for beginners.
Simple to Update & Modify
One of the most valuable aspects of WordPress is how easy it is to make updates and additions. So whereas you may want the help of a WordPress expert to develop your site, making changes is something you can do on your own, if you have the time. Whether you need to add weekly blog posts, update your About Us page or even add new pages, you can do so pretty easily. When updating blogs, you can write directly in the text editor, upload images and post them instantly.
What’s more, as a small business, you can allow full access or partial access to other team members. Thus, you can have some team members help you with writing, designing and even building out new pages.
Community Support
WordPress is used by millions of people and businesses worldwide, so there is an endless amount of community support for the most common issues. If you have trouble using a plugin or you’re getting errors, you can search online for the solution. For common issues, you’ll probably find a forum discussing your problem, along with instructions for a fix or need a WordPress consultant.
SEO Foundation
WordPress has several plugins that make basic on-page SEO a lot easier. These plugins provide meaningful documentation and guidelines for ensuring your site has a strong SEO score, which can help your site get found in search results. Check out our WordPress SEO services as we offer a comprehensive plan.
The Cons of Using WordPress
Time Consuming
While WordPress is easy to use, it does have a bit of a learning curve. Before you can use the tool efficiently, you have to get a hang of the platform. The tool is extremely powerful, and that’s a good thing — but it also means there can be lots to learn, especially if you’ve never used content management software before. Plus, to create a well WordPress website design, professional website, you’ll have to learn web design best practices. You need to know what sets a professional site apart from others.
Similarly, when you need to fix something that goes wrong, you have to learn how to do it on your own. While you have strong community support, that still may mean taking hours of searching for solutions to implement.
Most small business owners don’t have the time to mess with their websites all day, which is why it’s usually far more efficient to hire a WordPress expert to manage your site for you.
Hosting Required
Keep in mind that WordPress is not like other website builders, which bundle their platforms with hosting to try to make it as easy as possible for beginners to launch a site. That convenience may seem nice, but it comes at a cost: those website builders are far more limited in terms of what you can do with the look, functionality and control of your site.
With WordPress, you host your site on the servers of your choice (whether your own, a web host or dedicated WordPress hosting). This gives you far more power and control. However, if you’re a beginner who prefers the easiest possible route to getting your site online, even if it means an inferior site, then you could find this hosting requirement to be a disadvantage of using WordPress.
Routine Upkeep
WordPress sites are easy to get up and running, but that’s only part of the work. All websites require maintenance, see our tips in WordPress maintenance. That is especially true with WordPress websites. As we mentioned above, nearly all plugins, themes and WordPress itself need to be updated occasionally. As a website owner, you need to go into WordPress and process those updates manually. Additionally, not all updates are good ones. Sometimes, processing an update will cause something on your site to break, which will require you to spend even more time trying to fix it.
All of this maintenance requires time, which can be a disadvantage for busy business owners. The solution, of course, is using monthly WordPress services like WP Tangerine, which will keep your site updated and working perfectly, so you don’t have to even think about it.
The Right Way to Maximize WordPress and Save Time
Each of the “cons” listed above is easily overcome with expert WordPress services from WP Tangerine.
We offer unlimited WordPress services and support for a flat monthly rate, so you can keep your site up to date and make changes even faster by tasking them to our teams. We have helped more than 3,000 WordPress & WooCommerce sites (WooCommerce Help & Support) for small businesses in numerous industries.
Unlike a traditional WordPress support company, we handle all your WordPress needs. You’ll get a dedicated team of designers, reliable WordPress development agency, site technicians and more — so you can launch and maintain a world-class website (and free up your time for the big picture).
