Do You Go for a WordPress Website or Build from Scratch
Building Your Business: Should You Go WordPress Or Have Your Website Built from Scratch?
In a recent poll, only 53 percent of small businesses currently have a website. Interesting enough is that 19 percent of small to medium business owners chose not to have a website because of the perceived cost to design and build one.
While this was a reality many years ago, it is now possible to setup and launch a website with a budget of under $100. Today many website providers have the ability to help small business owners with a domain name, website hosting and a pre-designed WordPress theme.
WordPress stands as the most popular content management system (CMS) available today. This turn-key software allows you to create, edit, manage and publish content easily without learning to program. It is far from a platform for bloggers. WordPress for business includes eCommerce, professional portfolio, and more. A few more advantages of building your business website using WordPress follow below:
Cost savings
Hiring a full team to build your website from scratch using developers will cost anywhere between $2,000 to $25,000. If you include hosting, updates, and maintenance fees, it won’t be hard to blow a significant portion of your marketing budget just on your website.
If you are a large company, it is logical to build a custom website. That much makes sense.
WordPress, however, is the best first choice for small business and startups. It is both affordable and quick to setup without any web design experience necessary.
Less effort involved in the long run
Keeping a custom website running annually to comply with the latest standards, optimized for new mobile market devices, updating security to prevent hacker attacks and adding or changing content any time can be a challenge in both cost and labor.
Developers are not cheap to hire or ask to do minor changes. WordPress, on the other hand, allows for updates to easily be installed with a couple of clicks using security plugins that update automatically for example. New content and changing content can be done anytime on your schedule.
Scaling the website to meet demand
The value of WordPress plugins is at its best here. Plugins can be used to create contact pages, adding an eCommerce checkout system, SEO or extra layers of security to name just a few.
Rather than having developers build a custom application for you to use on a scratch-built website, WordPress maintains a 43,000-plugin database with their CodeCanyon partner. Scaling your website is not a problem.
WordPress also includes the ability to handle a variety of media files including images, audio and video.
WordPress also supports media enabled websites, allowing for you to embed YouTube videos, photos, Tweets and audio from Soundcloud simply by pasting a URL link in the WordPress page editor.
Easy SEO
WordPress is designed to be SEO friendly. Search engines recognize the platform for its compliance to programming and ‘clean coding.’
SEO plugins will also do most of the work for you with setup and analysis of your website and offering suggestions to implement in order to rank higher with all major search engines.
All the meta descriptions, headlines and keywords are ready for you to incorporate with each page created.
Final thoughts
When it comes to making your debut online presence made, nobody wishes to spend their entire annual budget on a custom-built design in hopes that it will work properly right from the start and continue to make updates using the same developers (hopefully) that had built the site.
Or perhaps choosing the lower cost, responsive design, secure and highly customizable WordPress website would be the better option as a great quick win while cultivating an excellent customer experience.