There are many business owners being taken advantage of with the WordPress Platform being sold as a complete web and marketing solution.

WordPress was created to be a blogging and article solution. It is a CMS (content management system) that had its merits in the beginning as a platform to make sharing information in an easy to edit and organize dashboard accessible for anyone, without any knowledge of code or html.

As more and more widgets were created for the platform it went from being an enriched article sharing platform to a solution that was "tricked" into appearing as a fully functioning website.

What it has become is an insecure wasteland of widget puzzles that take hours of maintenance, updates, and headaches to maintain something that looks like a website but can NEVER perform in the way you need your business web presence to. Not to mention the cost of these pieced together widgets as they nickel and dime you to a cost that is astronomical.

Let's look at the dangers and myths of WordPress

Security

Security with this platform is a NIGHTMARE. In the last two years we have had to assist business owners over and over get out of this solution sold to them at the highest dollar by other firms because they had been hacked to a point their business was unable to function on the web. These hacks range from conditional hacks that steal their listing in Google and hijacked the click to horrific products you would never want associated with your business to stealing every link in their website to lead back to scary entities that if left alone would have ended in their domains being blacklisted on Google. This would make their domain disappear forever, never to return.

Once hacked your domain now has a bright, flashing, neon sign letting all know you use WordPress. It will happen over and over unless you move away from WordPress all together. You could also pay companies to clean it up and stay on guard to do so every time it occurs again, but this will end up costing you more than having a real website built and you still won't have a solution that will ever perform the way it is meant to.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a group of things done to your website and online presence and tools that will make your company more visible when people search for your products or services on Google or other search platforms.

The ONLY way to provide any type of SEO to a WordPress solution is a widget. These widgets are very limiting and don't provide even a fraction of what you will need to be successful in any SEO campaign. This requires LARGE transactional budgets to have any success in SEO and means nothing you do here will be sustainable. Once you stop paying the transactional (pay per click or pay to play marketing) costs your SEO is gone.

The widget is also an extra cost. You are actually paying for something that should come standard with a website. The ability to add tags and titles to your website.

If you are paying for SEO on your site now and you have WordPress, do you pay more than $59 - $69 a month for that? If you do contact your provider now!

That is the basic cost of the widgets used to do what little SEO you can do here. I would also ask for metrics and analytics to prove what you are spending is actually bringing you anything in return. Most likely it isn't. You are just paying for the maintenance needed to keep these widget puzzles working in their most basic form.

Price Gouging

I am always amazed and honestly a little disgusted by what I see happening with business owners and the prices associated with WordPress solutions. At its best a WordPress website is a template (premade web solution) made to look a little different for you and your company.

A firm charging thousands of dollars for these solutions is not a business model with much integrity. These solutions lead to monthly charges as well and those add up quickly and will continue to stack up as you try to grow your business at all. Each new bell and whistle you add will be a widget, a monthly charge. Maintenance issues grow as you are live, more monthly costs. Security issues grow as you gain audience, more monthly costs. Are you seeing the pattern? If you are a business owner in a solution powered by WordPress, I bet you are already starting to recognize some of the things mentioned here. These costs aren't even touching marketing, product sales, service offerings, scheduling needs, lead generation. Guess what, every single one of these things will require another widget and, yep, you've got it, another monthly charge. Do you hear the cha-ching of the cash register yet?

There are better solutions for you and your business. If you need to have editing capabilities, there are much better CMS platforms out there that will usually even work hand in hand with your marketing efforts without widgets.

Security issues with WordPress are going to be something you start hearing a lot about. It will be a hot topic for the development community this year as it is finally being made public what a danger this can be to your entire business once hacked. We don't even recommend it for the blogging section of your website as of 2023.

The best practice for your web presence and digital footprint is to do your research for your business goals and outcomes and then research again to find a professional you trust. As the digital sphere becomes more congested it is even more important to have an advocate for you and your business who understands what your specific needs are. There is no one size fits all solution for businesses and what is needed to have a successful digital presence and marketing. There are the basics, but even those may change depending on what your goal is.

We are always here for any questions you may have.