Why I Don't Recommend WordPress to My Clients

It’s Noth­ing Personal

Word­Press (WP) is per­haps the world’s most pop­u­lar web­site and blog­ging plat­form for small busi­ness­es, espe­cial­ly for the DIY crowd. In recent years, Word­Press theme com­pa­nies are a dime a dozen. You want a quick and cheap web­site up in a few hours? Then a Word­Press theme site is for you. So why don’t I per­son­al­ly rec­om­mend them to my cus­tomers if they are that pop­u­lar and that cheap? I am loy­al to my team. I do not like to use one web design­er for Com­pa­ny A and then anoth­er one for Com­pa­ny B. I want to build strong con­nec­tions and rela­tion­ships with peo­ple who do a great job in their line of work: design­ers, pro­gram­mers, writ­ers, print­ers and so on. My #1 web design­er and pro­gram­mer of choice is Pio­neer Design, run by David Guy. I’ve worked with him since 2004, and I could not be any hap­pi­er with his ser­vice and per­for­mance. David Guy has built the major­i­ty of his web­sites on anoth­er con­tent man­age­ment plat­form called Expres­sion Engine (EE). Instead of offer­ing to build on Word­Press, Expres­sion Engine, Dru­pal, etc, he decid­ed to rec­om­mend and use just EE. So it is real­ly noth­ing per­son­al against Word­Press. My team has just decid­ed to be real­ly good at cre­at­ing cus­tom web­sites on a very strong plat­form that is not Word­Press. It also makes it that much eas­i­er for my team to make changes, updates and add ons to a plat­form we used dai­ly.

Should You Switch from WordPress?

If you are run­ning your cur­rent web­site on Word­Press and your own team is com­fort­able on that plat­form, do not switch. Word­Press was built for the DIY con­sumer. It is very easy to install dif­fer­ent plug-ins and do lit­tle changes with very lit­tle or no web pro­gram­ming knowl­edge. Where you some­times run into prob­lems on Word­Press is when you real­ly want to cus­tomize your web­site beyond your own exper­tise. Web­site themes are very lim­it­ed. For exam­ple: If you want to cus­tomize the theme with your own brand­ing, you might need to bring in a Word­Press guru. This is where the cost can begin to rise and in the end, you still might hit a few road­blocks. At the end of the day, Word­Press can do many of the same func­tions as Expres­sion Engine’s CMS (Although my design team would say Expres­sion Engine is way more pow­er­ful!) Also Expres­sion Engine is per­haps the CMS of choice of main­ly cus­tom web design firms (Ford, Dis­ney, Nike use it on a few of their sites). It comes down to the web com­pa­ny you decide to use and their exper­tise on using that plat­form. If you think you are going to save mon­ey on a Word­Press site but you want it 100% cus­tom, you will not. A cus­tom web­site on either WP or EE would cost about the same.

Why Should You Con­sid­er Switching?

The only rea­son I would even con­sid­er switch­ing from Word­Press to Expres­sion Engine or anoth­er plat­form is if you plan on doing more out­sourc­ing of your online mar­ket­ing. So if you used my ser­vices long term, it would be a lot eas­i­er for my team to use EE, because we are very famil­iar with the ins and outs. Also my web­mas­ter, David Guy, is an Expres­sion Engine Wiz­ard. What­ev­er you want to do on your web­site, chances are, he can make it hap­pen. Mak­ing changes on a sys­tem your web­mas­ter and mar­ket­ing team are most famil­iar with will cost you less mon­ey in the long run because it will require less time to make changes. So there you have it. I am a true fan of Word­Press. Do not tell any­one this. I use it for my own web­site! Yet all I do is blog on here and real­ly noth­ing else. I do not do a lot of A / B test­ing, land­ing pages, new lay­outs, etc on this web­site. So for me, Word­Press was what I start­ed on for my blog and it is where I’ll stay. I also do my own blogs and do not out­source it. Yet for all those who are look­ing for some­one to cre­ate a new look and do more for you (and you do less) I’d strong­ly rec­om­mend going with his/​her rec­om­men­da­tions. If you ask me to be involved, you will most like­ly be switched over to Expres­sion Engine!