Wordpress does not meet an SMB's needs

You can easily buy a Wordpress prefabricated template for a few dollars on the Internet and use it to create your website. The template will insert a logo, colors, and content that can be online in minutes. It's easy, fast and incidentally very cheap but what is it really worth?

Does Wordpress really meet the needs of SMEs, associations and public organisms? It’s a fact; Wordpress is the most popular website builder with over 25% of the world's websites using it, but does that necessarily mean that it is the right choice to make?

You think many websites look alike? That’s because of WordPress!

A prefabricated Wordpress template costs between $ 10 and $ 60 on websites like ThemeForest.com and TemplateMonster.com. There are even several dozens that are absolutely free on Wordpress.org. The Avada template alone has been used to design more than 440,000 websites.

Customizing prefabricated templates is a norm in web agencies. Restricting the client's ambitions and creativity to what the template allows is a common practice that prevents businesses from having a website that exactly reflects their brand and strategy, without compromise. A website designed should fit the marketing strategy of a company not impose it.

The high price of free updates.

WordPress; its own popularity is also its biggest flaw. Hackers around the world are focusing on discovering vulnerabilities in Wordpress, pre-made templates, and most popular downloadable modules. Knowing that they will be able to access (and hack) hundreds of thousands of other websites if they detect a security loophole, their hopes of finding the Pandora box then grows exponentially.

The WPScan Vulnerability Database website catalog the thousands of security loopholes of different versions of Wordpress.

To manage this permanent threat, a Wordpress Website must not miss any updates. The time required to perform each of these updates are of course billable and represent unpredictable expenses for the company. Those updates can occur several times a month or once a year, as they are unpredictable, it’s impossible to determine a fixed price.

Also, general updates are used to improve the functionality of modules that the website uses (or not). These updates generate complications since each downloadable module used in the design of the website must be checked to ensure that it is still compatible and that it is still fully functioning. Otherwise, billed hours still add up to fix problems, install updates for the problematic modules, or simply to replace them with compatible ones.

When trying too much to save time…

It is common that designing a Wordpress website using a prefab template takes less time than creating a custom built website from scratch. This remains true as long as the customer’s needs are simple and don’t overflow the template’s scale. In these complex situations, development and related costs explode with Wordpress.

The rigidity established by a prefabricated template makes it difficult to enroot features that are visually spectacular. A competent web agency can modify and remodel features of a preprogrammed platform. It implicates deconstructing portions of what already exists to rebuild them based on the specific needs of the business. This is an exercise that takes much longer and represents a much higher development cost compared to a feature that was custom built from scratch.

Wordpress; a burden to SEO

In Google's SEO algorithm, the speed of the website is a very important criteria. In this subject, Wordpress is a very bad student. Wordpress platforms are among the heaviest and slowest on the market. As soon as posted online, Wordpress websites' SEO is dragged down and obviously, their positioning suffers greatly.

Besides, one of the benefits of the Wordpress platform is that it provides access to thousands of pre-programmed features, but remember that a standard Website only uses a handful. All of these unused features, if not properly cleaned, make the browser work harder and slow down, even more, the websites.

The shabby programming code also hinders the proper SEO of Wordpress hosting. Those behind the programming of prefab templates and downloadable modules often give little importance to the quality of their code and rarely meet the W3C standards.

The W3C, standing for World Wide Web Consortium, is the international organization that dictates programming standards. A well-programmed website will meet W3C requirements and testify the seriousness and expertise of an agency. On the other hand, a website with many programming errors that may hide security loophole, weaknesses in SEO or incompatibilities with certain browsers will definitely highlight the incompetence of that designing web agency.

Our conclusion

Relying on Wordpress and it’s prefabricated templates and downloadable modules are rarely the most effective solution for SMEs, associations and public organism. It exposes the organization in terms of security, design restrictions, the cost and time consuming as for being a liability for the SEO.

Here, at Caméléon Média, we believe that every dollar invested in graphic design, integration and custom programming offers better results and ultimately a way better return on investment.