Mitali Purkait GhoshIf you are planning to scale up your old business website (which has started to appear dated) the choice of platform is crucial. In today’s world, a website represents your brand’s image in front of the customers who’d invariably visit your website before buying your product or subscribing to your service. Thus you have to make a strong impression at the very first glimpse. Though you have many platforms, domains, and tools to choose from, WordPress remains your best choice.
While you may or may not be using WordPress, you are unlikely to find a better Content Management System when it comes to scaling up your business website. 30% of all websites (there are nearly 1.8 billion websites) are powered by WordPress and among the Content Management Systems, it enjoys nearly 60% market share.
Redefining Innovation
The stats we have mentioned above stand testimony to the fact that WordPress is the most popular platform when it comes to creating and managing a website. But you may disagree to this notion if you have done your research on WordPress web development where you might have come across ‘expert opinion’ where it is often mentioned that WordPress is primarily a blogging platform.
Hence when you wish to add new functionalities such as an online store or tons of interactive content, according to them WordPress isn’t simply good enough. These experts also stress that WordPress development services can’t meet the technical and security challenges for a business website.
Bursting This Myth
This is perhaps the most popular myth in the world of technology. Before going into the technological possibilities and the full-proof security that WordPress web development promises, let us mention to you a few names. TechCrunch, The New Yorker, Sony Music, Time Inc., and many others successfully run their websites powered by WordPress. If at all there was a scalability issue or WordPress would merely have been a blogging platform you could trust these people to abandoned ship.
The reason many experts term it as a blogging platform is due to the fact that it began as one. While it has evolved along the way and become the first-choice enterprise content management system the tag remains. As the most popular web development tool in the world, it has been at the forefront of evolution and set standards for others to follow.
If you have complex plans with your website you can leverage WordPress’ latest offering called the WordPress VIP. It is a managed WordPress hosting platform that offers you access to the latest tools and services such as data centers, easy eCommerce integrations, rapid development, and deployment solutions, workflow management among others.
Why WordPress for Scaling Up Websites?
To come back to our real debate of this write-up on scaling up your websites WordPress is a winner on many counts. It is easy to use, expedites development time and most importantly it addresses your growing needs as and when you need. From the increase in traffic to the need for adding an e-commerce module and using interactive content you will never experience limitations or restrictions if you hire a top-rated WordPress development company for your project.
Things to Focus On
If you are undertaking a project to scale up your business website here are a few things you should focus upon –
Opt for Flexible Architecture
You are scaling up your website to meet the upcoming challenges but you’ll need to scale it up again in the future and this is where you need to choose a flexible architecture that allows for upgrades in the future. Also if your website is expected to see a surge in traffic seasonally you must keep the infrastructure ready for such events. For instance, if you run a Deals and Discount Coupons website you will witness a surge in traffic during the holiday season and you should be prepared to handle the additional traffic.
Don’t Ignore Caching
You know the benefits of caching and the biggest of them is that it lessens the load on your server by doing away with the need for fetching data with every query. Cached pages render fast on web browsers and hence improve the user experience. A business that host websites using budget hosting plans can benefit the most from this.
However caching alone won’t improve the overall speed and performance of your website and you need to complement it with other measures that optimize your site’s performance.
Work on Queries and Search
WordPress’ inbuilt search features have always been seen as one of its biggest limitations. As you increase content, pages, posts etc. on your website (which you’d do while scaling up your website) the search system tends to get slower. You can bypass this using a search index plugin which improves the performance of your site’s search feature significantly.
These plugins offer support for automatic indexing, voice searches and also custom taxonomy all of which helps in improving the experience for your user. However, you shouldn’t try out too many features on your search functionality as this can generate more trouble for the user while searching.
WordPress isn’t merely a ‘blogging platform’ as some so-called experts would like you to believe. It lets you develop the most visually appealing and functionally dynamic websites. It has been the flag bearer of the open source revolution for years and meets the needs of business websites that wish to scale up. As the largest open source web development platform in the world, it also boasts of having the largest development community.
New plugins are being launched almost on a daily basis and this allows you to harness the potential of new technologies that improve the UX and UI of your business website.
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