Leading Web Studio Blog

Who needs WordPress!?

WordPress is overkill for many websites out there.

Who needs WordPress? I do! Lots of people & companies do too. But, there is a small but growing revolution out there of website building, developers, and techies who are building “static flat file” websites these days. Before I explain why and what the heck I’m talking about – a little history:

Way back in the day, say, 1995-ish, there were very few websites out there…about a hundred. Wait, what? Seems like 100 new websites are created every day in our world today…out of the millions out there…so why is that a big deal? The technology was young and building a large website was a pain. Most websites at the time, especially for the “regular developer” were coded all by hand and limited functionality. If you made a change to your tagline or added a page, you had to manually update each page by hand. Ugg. I’m tired just thinking about that again. – Dinos Papoulias March, 2018

People got really excited when CGI (common gateway interface) came around and we could write web pages that have wrappers (templates) around them. Then, databases were connected and information started being stored in a database that was connected to the website. It was very, very exciting and opened up a world where we could store anything on a website – products to sell, membership databases, things of that nature. There are now an incredible amount of ways (different programming languages, databases, frameworks, entire software packages like WordPress for example) to build a website.

So now the “go to” is to build a website using WordPress with thousands of lines of code, 10+ plugins with hundreds/thousands of lines of code from many many different people. It’s too much.

I get a lot of people who approach me and my company to build a website on WordPress. I love WP, I use it on a large number of websites and have developed over 50 of them. Many of these websites, though, don’t change that much. WordPress, to really do it correctly, requires a lot of maintenance (especially if you have members logging are, are allowing people to buy stuff etc) and if not done properly, can ruin your website.

Many people are just building on WP because everyone else is and because they think they can get a “better” or “good enough” website through a theme. Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible, but build a website on software that meets your requirements. Don’t do something just because it’s what everyone else is doing it.

If you have a simple website that contains information about your company, a blog and a contact form or two, make it easy and use a flat-file cms. Avoid using complicated cms software. – Dinos Papoulias March, 2018

So my question is this: given your business requirements, why build a complex website on WordPress, and spend time & money on maintaining it when you could build your website in software that doesn’t require anything fancy on your server? I’ve come to the realization that for 80% of small business owners, you don’t need WordPress. You need a website design that looks great on all devices while allows your website visitor to accomplish their goal.

Don’t get me wrong here, you might think that I’m against WP. I’m not at all – just using it as an example since it’s so popular. I LOVE WP and have been working with it for over 10 years. I’m simply making a business case to use the “right” software for your business website.