WordPress powers over a third of the web and more than 38% of the top 10K websites. What began as a blogging platform is now the most widely-used content management system in the world, and a wise choice for site owners looking to scale for years to come.
In addition to the benefits of using open source software, using WordPress means having access to an entire ecosystem of developers, designers, and WordPress-specialized agencies. The WordPress community is a large and knowing group of experts who are willing to share and collaborate. Read more about WordPress for developers, WordPress Multisite, and how to make the most of Gutenberg for WordPress.
By the Numbers:
- There are 16K WordPress meetups across the globe with a combined membership of over 800,000 people
- 37% of the web runs on WordPress
As WordPress grows and evolves, more big brands are jumping on board—Sony, TechCrunch, Microsoft, and Facebook all run sites using the CMS. Its size in the market makes WordPress a leader in innovative digital experiences, and the scale of its developer ecosystem continues to drive innovation and adoption. WordPress, combined with enterprise WordPress hosting, is more than capable of running the biggest, most important sites on the internet.
WordPress is becoming the CMS of choice for more and more of the enterprise and big publishing sectors. People came to WordPress for its speed of deployment and publishing experience, they’ve stayed because of its unparalleled focus on backwards compatibility, the robust security of the core CMS, and its proven flexibility to meet the diverse requirements of some of the world’s largest enterprises.- Tom Willmot, Co-Founder & CEO, Human Made
1. Ongoing Support via WordPress Open Source
The world is moving away from proprietary, closed-off systems in favor of open and connected tools and services. As an open-source project, WordPress offers complete freedom, flexibility, and customizability. Using WordPress means having access to an entire ecosystem of developers, designers, and WordPress-specialized agencies.
There are really two parts to the WordPress ecosystem: those who are actively involved in core development, and those who use WordPress because it’s a great CMS for their project. The latter hugely outweigh the former. But, as more people become professionally involved with WordPress, the project is working hard to make contribution more accessible to newcomers, so it can benefit from a greater diversity of professional opinions, backgrounds, and experiences.- Daniel Bachhuber, Principal, Hand Built
Choosing an open-source CMS brings many benefits, including peace of mind. The software has been tested extensively, and there is a developer community willing to engage going forward. Other benefits such as flexibility and customizability are explained further below:
Increased Freedom
Proprietary solutions often complicate updates and integrations, while open source solutions eliminate the risk of vendor lock in. Using a closed system? What happens if business relationships sour? Time for a new technology. With open source, you’re no longer at the mercy of a particular vendor’s roadmap, pricing structure, or business decisions.
Heightened Flexibility
Open-source solutions allow your company to make decisions on upgrades and innovate at your own pace. React to market trends and handle issues with agility—without having to rely on a vendor. Plus, you’re never stuck with WordPress; if you ever decide to switch solutions, it’s easy to get your data out.
Easy Customization
Take the software and tweak it however you want. Need a customization? No problem—there’s likely already a plugin to fit your needs. If not, WordPress freely offers a robust set of APIs your team or agency can use to develop custom plugins for just about any use case.
As an open-source project, WordPress offers complete freedom to take the software and do what you’d like. The core philosophy behind WordPress development, including being designed for the majority, an emphasis on simplicity and efficiency, and a commitment to clearly defined development cycles makes WordPress predictable and reliable, two values prized for enterprise-level sites.- Jonathan Wold, Community Lead for WooCommerce at Automattic
2. Extensive Content Capabilities
WordPress offers a beautiful, user-friendly content editor out of the box.
Built for Editing
WordPress was built with the content editor in mind. While offering a wonderful experience for the end user is imperative, having a simple and seamless interface for adding and editing content can have a profound impact on the quality of your content. Your website will have more value if this process works well, and WordPress offers a best-in-class content editing experience.
WordPress Gutenberg
WordPress’s ambitious Gutenberg Project continues to evolve and enhance the WordPress editing experience. A range of innovative new features empower editors to do more and make better decisions regarding content lay out, user experience, SEO, and calls to action.
Accessibility Standards
WordPress’s commitment to accessibility and inclusion means your messaging is sure to reach the widest audience possible. Using a CMS that works “regardless of device or ability” allows you to focus on optimizing the user experience without worrying about auditing and updating a proprietary system. WordPress is working to ensure their Admin and bundled themes are WCAG 2.0 AA compliant where possible.
3. Enterprise-Level Security
Running 37% of the web makes WordPress a natural target for security exploits, but it also means it is the most vetted and tested CMS available. In fact, WordPress core is so secure, that an updated version has never had a major exploit. The real risk lies in plugins and themes, but this is easily mitigated by doing your due diligence, using a professional, and having a hardened environment to negate common vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
Navigating the Plugin Minefield
The barrier of entrance to plugin development is low, so a best practice selection strategy is key to ensuring your site remains secure. It’s important to understand bad plugins do exist and to use a professional to review any plugins you want implemented on your site. There are simple indicators of trust and ways to vet plugins and themes (e.g. number of sites using a plugin, support, documentation, etc.) Reach out to the community and trusted maintainers for advice on what to use.
Popular plugins like Yoast or WooCommerce are safely relied on by millions of sites to provide critical functionality like SEO or ecommerce. As with any code, keeping plugins up to date will ensure your site stays safe.
"Like any piece of software, it’s important to ensure you’re following best practices when it comes to deploying WordPress at enterprise scale," Willmot of Human Made says.
"Done right, you can absolutely have the benefits of WordPress’s great content editing experience, it’s large ecosystem of open-source plugins and themes, and its speed of delivery, without having to compromise one bit on scalability, security, or enterprise systems integration. The key is ensuring you are working with a team who understands the unique strengths of WordPress and how to best match those with existing best practises around security, scaling, deployment etc."
Pantheon Website Security Services: Gain built-in hardened security features, secure infrastructure, end-to-end encryption, and least-privilege user access by hosting with Pantheon.
4. Unlimited Scalability on WordPress
As a site owner, you must be prepared for whatever may come, and a reliable platform is critical to scaling your site effectively. With the right infrastructure and development practices in place, WordPress can push hundreds of millions, even billions, of pageviews a month.
WordPress Scalability Best Practices
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Plugins & Themes: Use quality plugins and themes to keep your site running smoothly. Be sure to vet all code for efficiency and performance before installing.
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Performance Monitoring: Your development team should employ a method for monitoring code in production; quality code is the foundation of a performant site.
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Caching: Most things performance-related in computing come down to cache optimization. Be sure to employ a high performance persistent object cache alongside a full page cache.
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Elastic Hosting: With elastic hosting, your site can scale to match whatever your resource needs are without migrations or downtime. Automated load balancers shift resources across a distributed platform and, if your site’s traffic grows, your site doesn’t need to be migrated to a new architecture.
Scalable infrastructure is all about handling (or eliminating) variables and unknowns. If you’re running large, enterprise-level sites, a consistent software platform is critical. WordPress is a great choice here. There are endless theme frameworks and plugins and many have been well vetted, proven to stand up during large, taxing operations.- Mason James, Chief of Operations at Valet Health
Pantheon’s Scalable WordPress Hosting: Serverless infrastructure allows you to forget about servers, and scale to millions of visits without affecting performance.
5. WordPress is Built for Longevity
WordPress is the ideal choice for a future-proof publishing platform because of its steadfast commitment to backwards compatibility. This means the code you write today isn’t going to break when you update to the latest version tomorrow. In fact, the vision for WordPress is that, much like many browsers and mobile apps, you shouldn’t have to think about which version you’re running—you’re just using WordPress.-Daniel Bachhuber, Principal, Hand Built
Backwards Compatibility
The code you implement today isn’t going to break in the future. Dedicated to ensuring backwards compatibility, WordPress is going to make sure you aren’t backtracking with each update.
Growing Talent Pool
The large and growing community of WordPress professionals is another sign the CMS is here to stay. You have a community to rely on, and can attend a WordCamp near you to meet members of the core team and bask in the knowledge of the community.
6. Make the Most of WordPress on Pantheon
Pantheon’s WebOps (Website Operations) Platform empowers your marketing and development teams to take control of your websites. Achieve confidence and agility with the tools you need to deliver digital marketing results.
With a Serverless CMS approach to WordPress, multiple contributors can create and publish engaging, high speed, always-on web content—without IT overhead. We give you limitless site scalability and enable a high-quality customer experience across desktop and mobile.
Use Structured Agile Workflows to drive cross-functional collaboration and increase productivity across your WordPress site. This allows your team to change your website in any way needed, without ever breaking it.
Whether you’re optimizing a single WordPress website, or wrangling hundreds across regions, brands, and channels, the overhead of keeping everything up-to-date and secure can be daunting. Website Portfolio Management standardizes operations and gives you a handle on governance, freeing your teams from routine tasks, so they can focus on innovation and your digital roadmap.
