When it comes to building your website, there are many platforms available, including Squarespace, Joomla, WordPress, Wix… We wanted to talk about why we chose to work with WordPress 7 years ago, and how we now specialise in this platform only for all of our website builds.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is a very popular platform. According to statistics they provide, 37% of all websites online are now run on WordPress – that’s absolutely huge. Because of that, we can tell you confidently that WordPress isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

Why mention that? Well, with so many ‘site builders’ and platforms around, it’s important to pick ones that aren’t going to be closed down – this actually happened to MrSite in June 2020. It was closed and was no longer supported, leaving many hundreds of businesses across the world facing losing their websites, and only a very short time to sort that out too.

What is it?

WordPress is basically built up of different elements. You have your theme, which controls how the website looks – its design; you also have your structure – the layout of your pages and your content; and you then have your functionality – usually in the form of plugins. Each of these elements, although they work together to provide you with a finished product, are actually very separate to each other. What does that mean then? Well, in simple terms, it’s a brilliant way to future proof your website. If you want a new design (the theme) but you’re happy with the structure and functionality, then you can go ahead and change it. This is an aspect of website design that is becoming more popular we’ve noticed, where we’re able to save starting from scratch, and create a new look, or even, replace functionality to enhance a website that is already there.

And more reasons…

Why else do we use WordPress? There’s a few more reasons. Aside from being hugely popular and basically futureproof, WordPress also lets us:

  • Create a range of user logins for clients, with different permissions. This means you don’t need to approach your website developer for small changes, because you’ll have the permissions to do them yourself. This has been a popular ask for years.
  • It’s relatively low cost – it’s fairly straightforward to add functionality onto the website that doesn’t involve hours of coding (this is how our prices are so competitive). For example, a contact form might take hours to code, but by adding a plugin, most of the work is already done. Plugins are usually free, but you can also really enhance your functionality with premium paid ones.
  • It works great bilingually – over the years we’ve worked on WordPress to ensure we provide bilingual websites to our clients, and we’re completely confident in how it works to help us do that.
  • The “backend” of the website is intuitive, which we feel is important when we hand over a website to a client. We don’t want our clients to feel like we’re handing over something so complicated they’ll never be able to use it, and we often say, if you can use Windows, you can find your way around WordPress on the backend.
  • It’s open source – this means a community of people all around the world is contributing to improving the platform, and ensuring it’s always secure. It also means a huge amount of documentation and tutorials are available online.

WordPress is available as a “build your own” option which we know many people will want to do. There are a huge range of free themes available (although this does make it a tad harder when trying to tweak things to your brand), and also premium plugins. But, just don’t forget to come to us for a fully bespoke design of course.