There was a time when WordPress was just a lightweight blogging platform – then it became the flexible and powerful engine for an estimated quarter of all sites on the Internet. Nearly twenty years after its creation, WordPress continues to be the best content management system for many websites, but faces new competition from managed platforms such as Squarespace, and some of the old questions about customizability and scalability that have always faced website managers. Here’s a guide, updated for 2020, to help identify the key decisions and trade-offs.
Is your website a ‘brochure site,’ primarily for marketing and brand presentation?
If so, WordPress may no longer be your best option in 2020. While WordPress can, of course, be used as an engine for these sites, if what you need is just a handful of pages to present a portfolio of work and promote yourself or your organization, there are options now that can more easily help you reach this goal without dealing with the variables of hosting, themes, and theme design that WordPress requires. These all-in-one platforms include Squarespace, Wix, Weebly and PageCloud and can offer a non-technical or less-technical website owner or manager nice-looking templates that can make a brochure site look good in very little time. Even for seasoned web designers and coders, WordPress has fallen off in popularity for small brochure sites, as lightweight static site generators like Jekyll simplify hosting while giving them a lighter base of code to manage. However, before going with one of the well known all-in-one platforms above, take a look at WordPress.com, which unlike a self-hosted site using WordPress (see our post clearing up any confusion between the two here) offers both much of the simplicity of something like Squarespace, with the power and room to grow of WordPress.
Is your website primarily for publishing content – from an informal blog, semi-formal webzine, or professional online news magazine?
If yes, WordPress will be hard to beat. WordPress remains a great choice for publishers of all kinds, for many reasons beginning with this: from the start, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that has prioritized a great user experience for website managers and content authors – something that continues with the arrival of the Gutenberg editor in 2019. Additions to WordPress architecture such as custom post types and custom fields have made WordPress both as powerful and flexible as competing CMS’s with the critical advantage of being easy to use and manage for writers and editors. WordPress offers the right balance of features for publishers, with a huge library of plugins and themes offering most of what most publishers need; not for no reason is it the engine driving recent publisher-tailored platforms like The News Project. In 2020, it looks like WordPress will continue to target the (large) niche of content publishers even if it falls off in popularity as an every-website Swiss army knife.
Is your website mainly for e-commerce, running your own online shop?
If the answer is yes – it depends. As with brochure and portfolio sites, there are now so many dedicated platforms for e-commerce that are doing nothing but optimizing for that, for example Shopify. For small-to-midsize users, the WordPress ecosystem has a solid plugin system that can support e-commerce, called WooCommerce. See this comparison of Shopify vs. WooCommerce for one example of a breakdown of the trade-offs, which are many. To summarize: using WordPress to drive e-commerce on your website makes a lot more sense if you need your website to do more than just e-commerce.
Is your website a mix-and-match of a little bit of everything – marketing, publishing, a little e-commerce, and the occasional event?
This is another case where WordPress shines. As mentioned, WordPress continues to be the best choice for many publishers of content of all kinds. Robust plugins exist for e-commerce (WooCommerce), events, and many other things. WordPress is an amazing Swiss Army Knife of web solutions, with one big caveat: it can’t do everything. It’s worth looking ahead at what your website will need and making an inventory, then doing research in advance to see if the functions and abilities important to your website have solutions available in WordPress. This kind of assessment will avoid frustration down the road. Because if your website is not so much a mix-and-match, multi-purpose site that still has more or less standard functionality, but a custom platform tailored to a highly specific set of needs (see question below) you’d be better off not with WordPress, but with a custom web application development framework.
Is your website an online community, with controls for site managers to moderate discussions?
If so, WordPress isn’t what I’d recommend in 2020, with dedicated, forward-looking platforms like Discourse available (not to be confused with Discord, though that’s cool too). While there are plugins such as bbpress that allow you to add a forum to a WordPress site, they will be limited and probably, labor intensive to integrate into a custom WordPress design – and I speak from experience. If what you really need is a modest forum to add to a multifunctional site – WordPress could be worth it but you’d want to carefully assess. If the main purpose of the website is to foster a large, active community built from the ground up for peer-to-peer communication, with the ability to moderate those discussions – look elsewhere.
Is your website a hub for digital activism or organizing work?
In this case you’ll need something beyond WordPress for much of what you need to do: action pages, signup pages, petitions, events, fundraising. The WordPress ecosystem has no all-in-one solution and only offers plugins for certain of these functions. WordPress might still be part of the solution, say for a main website for your organization’s identity and messaging, but for action pages and CRM-type functionality look at other platforms, like Action Network or NationBuilder. These have limitations, but also offer easy entry. For more power and flexibility, toolkits like Action Kit are out there, and come with a steep learning curve and cost that only make sense for organizations with the expertise or budget.
Is your website a custom platform, with highly custom types of content or data, unique abilities and roles for users, and website interactions that aren’t like any website that exists?
There’s a good chance the answer is no. WordPress and its plugins and customizations are extremely flexible, so depending on the situation, the answer may be: yes, you could in WordPress, but you shouldn’t. It can be less than obvious to make this decision about the trade-offs involved, because WordPress has become, with the addition of custom post types, custom fields, and the evolution of the plugin ecosystem, flexible enough to be the engine for highly custom sites. But the structures and mechanisms that make things fast and easy in WordPress can eventually get in the way of creating something totally suited to your needs, so there are a great many cases where the right answer is using a web application development framework like Ruby on Rails, Django, or Laravel.
