Item: WordPress
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with WordPress

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use WordPress for a lot of our smaller clients' websites. [It's] usually companies with website spends of less than 10k. It fits the smaller companies well, as it is easy for them to use once we build out their site and allows us to do most of the builds without any real heavy lifting in regard to coding.

Pros and Cons

Pros

WordPress is free, first of all. Of course, if you are building out a custom site, you may need to purchase a Bootstrap template or build your own in-house, but otherwise, the CMS is open source.
WordPress makes it easy for our client to do basic updates or post to a blog or news feed. Not all take advantage of this, of course, but WordPress provides a simple dashboard that is easily navigated with very little training on our part.
The breadth of plugins has grown immensely over the past few years. For anything you need to be able to do with WordPress, you can usually find a plugin to solve your problem.

Cons

The text editor leaves a little to be desired but is easy to work around once you know its limitations.
SEO is a bit tricky with WordPress. Some of the plugins that are available don't seem to help you a lot with SEO, and may actually hurt, in my opinion.

Return on Investment

We sell websites. Whether we like it or not sometimes. We are a marketing firm, but we seem to always have a website in the product mix when a client comes to us. WordPress is a good goto for our smaller clients. The sites build out fast, and, although there is not a ton of money in WP sites, they still pay OK.

Alternatives Considered

Joomla and Drupal

WordPress is a bit easier to use than Joomla and Drupal, but lacks some features of these competitors. If you want to build out a truly custom site, Drupal is a strong choice, but you better have some coding experience. Whereas with WordPress, you can pretty much drop and drag a majority of your site and still end up with something nice.

Other Software Used

Drupal, Joomla!, Shopify, Salesforce.com, Marketo, RainKing, Basecamp

Likelihood to Recommend

WordPress can be used by anyone to build a basic website. The marketplace for custom templates is absolutely massive. You should be able to find a template to suit your needs for any site. If you are looking for a bunch of custom functionality, such as customer portals, you may be better off with a .NET build out. But if you're on a budget, and don't have super high standards, WordPress can suit that sort of need as well.

WordPress Feature Ratings

Comments

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WordPress works for most smaller clients