August 10, 2010 WordPress’ 3.0 Thelonius release is establishing the platform as an enterprise-class content management system, no longer for blogs and small businesses only. Recent core improvements grant users the ability to create unlimited custom content types without the need for an experienced developer. Multisite management is now built into the WordPress core and can be set up with a couple of clicks. These improvements are rapidly shattering previous notions that WordPress was suitable only for smallish sites focused on blogging.
WordPress powers CNN.com blogs like the CNN Political Ticker.
Inspired by Dana Blankenship’s article examining WordPress 3.0’s impact on Drupal CMS’ powerhouse position, I took the challenge to present real world examples of big companies that are successfully powered by WordPress. This post is an answer to 6 Reasons Small Businesses Need WordPress and many other articles like it, which must be expanded now that WordPress 3.0 has opened the doors to more robust CMS capabilities.
1. WordPress is Open Source Which Equals Savings
Your website should be making you money, not costing you more than you’re gaining from it. WordPress is an open source CMS, for which you will never pay a licensing fee. What does this mean for large companies who are exploring the WordPress platform? The cost of development is significantly lower than comparable proprietary platforms. For example, if you want to run an ASP-based website, you’ll have to use IIS and purchase Windows. Custom development costs are also going to be higher. Because of the worldwide popularity of PHP and the WordPress platform, you should easily be able to find developers who can build and maintain your website quite affordably.
Open source means more than just no licensing fees. It’s a community philosophy that allows programmers to work together to improve each others’ code or change it to do something different. That means that the functionality you’ve been looking for has probably already been created and is available for you to use. This can save your business thousands of dollars in long-term custom development costs.
Does WordPress’ GPL licensing remove my ownership of my site’s code and design?
No, it doesn’t, as long as you’re not distributing it. If you pay a designer and developer to create a theme or a plugin for you, it belongs to you and your investment is safe. The GPL is only applicable if you’re distributing the theme or plugin in some way.
2. WordPress is the Most User-Friendly CMS in its Class
WordPress won the Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100, as well as Overall Best Open Source CMS Award for the 2009. One of the reasons it has been so widely adopted is that it has a very easy-to-use, intuitive backend. WordPress’ plugin architecture and templating system are also well-known for being simple to customize and build upon.
TechCrunch, one of the top 10 most linked-to blog in Technorati's top 100, is powered by WordPress.
3. WordPress Has a Thriving Development Community
WordPress 3.0 had 11 million downloads in the first 42 days it became available. This is no fly-by-night CMS. Millions of users are actively using and contributing to WordPress development to make it the best open source CMS available. WordPress is a solid platform for any large or expanding business to build on, and it’s constantly improving. The best part is that improvements to core security, bug fixes, and general upgrades will always be available to you at no cost.
4. The WordPress Platform is Highly Extendable
The WordPress plugin directory recently surpassed 100 million downloads. Want social networking? Want forums? E-commerce? Event management? All of these features are available through the WordPress plugin architecture.
VW TankWars is powered by WordPress and BuddyPress.
Whereas WordPress used to be known as the best blogging platform with the most beautiful themes, you can do virtually anything with it now. WordPress has evolved into a sophisticated CMS that can handle any kind of multimedia, syndication, and social networking features that you see around the web on large sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The New York Times publishes over 50 WordPress powered blogs.
If you’re not fully confident in the free plugins available, there are several premium plugin providers, including WPMU DEV Premium, which houses the largest collection of professionally-supported WordPress plugins. Premium plugin providers usually offer support and a quality guarantee so that you’re able to depend on that functionality for your site. This is very important for both large and small businesses that wish to present a professional image. Whether you utilize free extensions, premium plugins, or a combination of both, you’ll always have options in the WordPress community.
5. E-Commerce Solutions are Available for Any Sized Business
Whether you need a small corporate store or a large-scale international enterprise with complex selling needs, WordPress has the e-commerce solution to suit your business. Want to set up a network of online stores that share the same central code base? You can do this with WordPress multisite and e-commerce. Managing a WordPress e-commerce store is just as user-friendly as managing any other type of content.
DinDins’ site is powered by WordPress and utilizes Shopp, an e-commerce plugin to power the site’s shopping cart.
6. WordPress is SEO-Friendly and Easy to Optimize
Most WordPress development is focused on building websites and web-based applications, which makes SEO a very high priority for the WordPress community. WordPress is built with SEO in mind, but on top of that there are hundreds of plugins available to help promote your site’s content and SEO.
After your business is rocking the search engines and getting loads of traffic, there are many tools available that allow WordPress to scale gracefully. A site such as Edublogs is a great example of a large scale WordPress operation of half a million blogs and 8,000,000 page views per month.
Conclusion:
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. WordPress is open source and many of the features you’ll need have more than likely already been built for you. The cost of implementation is very low and you won’t have to spend thousands of dollars to make the platform SEO-friendly or scalable. Professional WordPress experts can provide you with the tools you need to get your brand powered by the most popular open source CMS available. If you have any questions about what WordPress is capable of, let us know and we’ll do our best to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
Sarah Gooding on Google+
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To me WordPress is still a CMS for a weblog. I can’t get used to the idea using it as a regular CMS. But I believe it will grow more and more towards a widely used CSM. It’s a great system though :-)
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Nice write up. I use WordPress as a CMS to sell to my clients. I hook most of my clients with number 1 and 2 of your write up. Especially number 2. I tell them if they can type an email you can update your website. It’s dead easy.
WordPress 3.0 is more conducive toward building a regular Ecommerce WordPress website. Of course flexibility, support, user and search engine friendly elements and cost makes WordPress the CMS platform to watch out for. Thanks for the post!
Thx for the interesting post. However, I hoped to read something more about the reason to call WP an enterprise-class CMS, which is specifically for large organisations of interest. The arguments written above could also fit without large in the title.
nice post!
about the e-commerce plugins, according u what are the best e-commerce plugins?
Yo, it rules. You know WordPress 3.0 is more conducive toward building a regular Ecommerce WordPress website. Of course flexibility, support, user and search engine friendly elements and cost makes WordPress the CMS platform to watch out for. I lovvveee wordpress !!
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One of the things I am running into is the specialized markets such as CiviCRM that are still wedded to Drupal. (Honestly, I hate the way Drupal can be used to tie people to a single developer. I have seen it repeatedly used as a way to entrap rather than empower customers.)
A little late to the party here, but this is one of the best summations of what I tell clients every day… Good stuff!
I still find (as someone who trains every client at end of project) that while easy as WordPress is to use compared to others, plenty of non-techies find it to be daunting to use at first. If “open-source” and “community” are WP’s biggest strengths, lack of sources for training and documentation is it’s Achilles heel…
I have several clients that use WP as their CMS. I agree with Jerry that docs and training are the harder parts of using WP, but custom themes and simple shopping cart plug-ins have gotten most of clients to the other side. I have two Joomla clients that wish they were on WordPress.