It’s better than NoDaddy, slimespace, wick and all the other wanna-bes.
No, we’re just deliberately winding up other web developers. We can already hear the expensive, mechanical keyboards snapping under the cramping hands of programmers the world over as they read that title.
At a lower price, it CAN be worth ten times what a “fresh code” site is.
“Fresh/full stack” sites are better websites, but wordpress is a FAR superior business tool for some options. At the end of the day, that’s what your site is supposed to be – a tool for your business and not just a fancy, electronic poster.
Why use a fancier, expensive car when your company needs a van?
“But wordpress needs updates!”
Updates and maintenance
WordPress has regular updates to keep it secure, the other’s don’t. WordPress needs a bit of care that others don’t.
I like coding, I love creating all that complex matrix looking stuff that works and makes the site work. It’s a cool feeling making all the components click together.
But I cannot justify doing it for the entire site when wordpress is an option IF the client needs any sort of functionality or there is scope for expansion in the business (a client taking on other responsibilities that may need social media stuff or bookings)
Why?
A fresh, full-stack website coded with HTML, CSS, javascript, PHP, MySQL and lots of other alphabet soup things will cost you an arm and both legs if the developer is any good.
To which the company or developer will say “yeah but it’s faster and better or something!”
Nah, not anymore it ain’t. WordPress is just a full stack application with all those things anyway. Only difference is it’s such a standardised and refined “out of the box” package that it has plenty of plugins available that you, the user can avail of to your company’s benefit and therefore, your profits.
“WordPress needs updates constantly”
Yeah, they’re fairly frequent and for those of you new to this game, wordpress “updates” are prompts on the dashboard, it says “there’s an update for this thing in your site, wanna do it now?”. You click “yep” and it sorts itself in ten seconds usually.
Hardly a drama…….
What website agencies will reluctantly tell you is that their full-stack sites will need updates for the language version and other things eventually.
Good luck doing that yourself, whereas wordpress and all it’s aspects will update by themselves or make it very user-friendly to do so. I seriously doubt there are any fresh full-stack sites that can boast this. By the time there is a major update for the main code language, all the other parts of your wordpress site will be up to speed with it, not the case with a fresh full-stack custom code site. Guess who you will have to go to and pay to update it? You guessed it, the developer that told you their sites are better than wordpress…..
They’re probably already thinking about the money you’re going to pay them to update it, whether this is before or after your site is malfunctioning and costing you profits and google rankings is immaterial to them, you’ll have no choice but to pay them. Although generally for a website development agency to become successful, their sites should never have these problems but we’ve been surprised before by what clients come to us with after paying thousands for a site.
Self-hosted website businesses that say “pay this small amount, choose a template and hit publish” will just set the updates to automatic and this can be fatal for your business when(not if) it goes wrong (as it has many times already), because good luck getting them to fix it in a rush. A company who shall remain nameless – let’s call them “NoDaddy”, are the cheapest on the market for a very good reason……. The same reason that makes many programmers and developers say “no chance” when asked to deal with one of their sites.
Meanwhile your site’s ranking on google suffers, and therefore so will your profits. Assuming you have any left by the time the site is back up and running…… (Oh and they bump up the renewal fees each year because you can’t take the site elsewhere, enjoy!)
But of course this doesn’t affect the hosting company’s bottom line, so they won’t worry about it until you have to pay them to fix it.
So we’ve debunked the update nonsense, let’s talk about the real reason wordpress is fantastic for your business.
Plugins and adaptability
WordPress has a CMS (a dashboard/control panel in plain English) that allows you to add pages and do lots of other things. This is most often present in fresh code sites, wordpress has a difference though: the plugins.
With a little bit of training and time you can become quite proficient using this, and even learn how to install and use plugins yourself. A fresh full-stack company won’t tell you this caveat of wordpress because if you need a calendar installed, or a social media interface well then it’s another juicy payday for the developer to code it into your site.
Whereas it’s a fifteen minute youtube tutorial and a cup of coffee for you to install a wordpress plugin. The most code you will have to deal with is a copy and paste job as per instructions though this is rare.
Even if you do want a developer to install a plugin for you, it will be far cheaper than a fresh coded solution. Our clients get access to our services at half price if they have us host their sites and care for them in one of our care plans
The flexibility and massive eco-system of wordpress means the money you save yourself in the long run (you WILL want changes to your site at some point) far outweighs the potential – very manageable – downsides of wordpress.
One last thing, there’s always a youtuber posting a video heralding the death of wordpress for the sake of having a video to post. These videos either end with them contradicting themselves or saying some doom and gloom which only precedes wordpress getting more popular, as it always does. I’m not saying they don’t have any interesting points, just that the titles are a bit “click-baitey” and there’s no reason to think wordpress is going anywhere.
Like many agencies already doing so, I would happily make my sites with fresh code and take the well-earned extra money.
Unlike other agencies though, I won’t lead you into thinking it’s a better option for your business than wordpress. This is why we use wordpress and focus on a wider business approach for you rather than keep our skills to a few things and avail of all the people online willing to pay us a small fortune for tweaking some code we will copy and paste
There is definitely a market and a need for fresh code websites, but wordpress is as popular as it is because it works and does the job the best for most in my opinion.
If you want some specific examples of what solution is best suited to what platform click here for more information
If you’re having difficulty or just don’t have the time to maintain your wordpress site, get in touch and we will arrange a very affordable care plan where we will take care of as much or as little as you want.
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