From your business's first WordPress website to evolving into alternatives

An imaginary story of the beginning of a digital marketer

The time has come to make a new website. Whether it's for a new product, a new business or renewing the existing one. And here begins a journey of delving into new things, looking for references in acquaintances and obtaining information.

During this trip, the undeniable name of WordPress comes up, in my opinion, the first web tool that a digital marketer usually faces at the beginning of their career, just as they should know Google Analytics, Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

In this way, a preconceived misconception is formed that to have a website is to have a WordPress.

The popularity of WordPress is deserved and earned by two principles: cheap and easy to use.

WordPress is cheap because it's free software. And it's easy to use because its creators sought to keep the effort to learn how to use it and expand it as little as possible. And they succeeded.

WordPress is also versatile, since the wide variety of free and paid plugins allow you to add e-commerce features, lead collection, event publishing, product catalog and a host of options. Another very positive point is the large number of templates available for purchase that also make it possible to reduce the visual aspect and organization of information when creating a website with WordPress.

A WordPress well run by expert professionals who carefully select the templates (or build them from scratch like the Novicell front team) and the plugins, while running on managed hosting (that is, it does not depend on manual actions) is a good option.

WordPress, the myth falls away

The difficulties with WordPress begin precisely when you mature as a professional with regard to what your website offers and you have not relied on expert WordPress professionals. In this case It becomes an extremely fragile tool. The possibility of installing plugins that may be incompatible or break the design of your website is very high. Knowing the damage that a plugin can do to your WordPress requires that a professional first test it in an isolated environment and make their conclusions about it. This is a costly operation that could take hours or days, depending on the complexity of the functionality or the volume of pages that the new plugin will affect.

The reality is that many companies do without it and hire at a low cost, obtaining over the years an unstable website, with visual inconsistencies and, most seriously, vulnerable to attacks.

And this is an unfair part about WordPress, because a WordPress hosted on serious hosting, such as Flywheel and whose plugins have been selected and tested by professionals, is robust.

WordPress, very affordable

Often choosing WordPress is also an economic issue, and unlike other options (Umbraco, Drupal, etc.) where the base cost is higher, you can make a WordPress with a very low cost, so low that anyone who is not an expert can create it.

WordPress is tremendously popular and open source, and therefore Hackers search for security flaws and exploit them. That's why that professionalism is crucial, and professionalism pays off. It's not free. So it's no longer as economical as originally thought.

WordPress authors protect against this by frequently publishing new versions that plug security holes. This helps to keep the website protected if you keep it up to date, this is crucial. And here comes the risk of having installed many plugins or having purchased a template that does not adapt to the new version. If the site isn't updated, it's vulnerable. If it is updated, the relationship with the plugins and the design can be broken.

Cheap is expensive

This is when paying cheaply for them to build a WordPress becomes high-risk. Normally, when you pay very cheaply for something, it's because it's built by professionals who don't yet have the experience, context or caution that experts have, but whose cost-hour work is so low that it's hard to resist. The counterpart is the risk of obtaining a fragile product in return.

Let's add to this, that the WordPress philosophy allows web managers to add plugins, without them having the skills or being prepared to have backup copies and perform tests before publishing. In addition, they may not be able to understand the vulnerabilities or implications of installing security patches.

Because contrary to what it seems, It's not enough to press the update button. After doing so, a lot can happen.

There's light at the end of the tunnel

How do you avoid it? In the case of Flywheel, greatly reducing flexibility over sensitive files and preventing server administration from being left in inexperienced hands or being neglected. Kinsta recently fell into my hands as an alternative to Flywheel, we haven't tried it, but any self-managed hosting is better than an old-school server. For a much more demanding WordPress, our expert Jorge Martínez says he is against Flywheel because it makes it difficult to wrap it with working methods such as continuous integration and deployment. In my opinion this is true, but speaking of low costs, a site on Flywheel is more secure than a site with all the deployment methodologies on a neglected server because you don't pay for the necessary actions and the continuous monitoring to maintain it, something that Flywheel gives you as standard.

The future of your WordPress

This leads us to a problem of digital maturity. You want more features, a different user experience. Integrate the web with pricing providers, third-party services, check stock or availability, protect certain areas for premium users, email marketing. And here you start to need technicians to do this to measure. Because you come to a point where you think that you can't fit more into your WordPress. That there is water everywhere. And I repeat, it's unfair to the fame of WordPress, but it ends up happening.

The bad reputation of WordPress among programmers

Anyone who knows very little about PHP can become a WordPress programmer. But if you want to do something very advanced you will need very good PHP programmers and they no longer want to work with WordPress, since they prefer another type of web software that allows them more flexibility in the code and that are built with fewer basic rules imposed. What makes WordPress tremendously flexible for the user, makes it muddy for technicians. In the world of programmers, it is reputed to be for first-timers, so in some ways, for many programmers, WordPress was at an early stage in their career and doing something on WordPress could be a step backwards in their careers. Although some of them have good arguments about it, it would be unfair to confirm it for good WordPress programmers, such as those we have at Novicell.

The challenge lies in trying to use WordPress for what it isn't, and this is where WordPress reaps that bad reputation. Because WordPress is a CMS, a content management system, and that does it wonderfully well. When these technicians are forced by you, by the customer, to turn WordPress into an App, an ecommerce, a Marketplace, a product information managed system, a property information system, a system for booking events or booking services subject to availability such as apartments, hotels, rural houses, private classes or coworking rooms, it's when these types of programmers have a bad experience with WordPress and don't want to work with it again, except as a blog for news about the company they are part of.

What about the server?

Any solution based on self-managed hosting such as Platform as a Service such as AWS, Azure, Heroku, Digital Ocean (not their virtual machines), even better than all of them, Flywheel or Kinsta are very good options at a high price. However, solutions other than these, despite being of a lower annual cost, end up being expensive. They are cheap in terms of what you pay for hosting the website and its databases. But because WordPress is a target of attacks, it's expensive in two important ways:

• You need someone dedicated to monitoring attacks and reacting.. Either by putting barriers to attacks (with actions on the server, such as firewall rules), or by plugging security holes (installing patches, uninstalling plugins).
• The anxiety caused by not knowing when you need to take urgent action to solve a security issue. You don't know if the website will go down on a weekend. Whether user data will be accessible to hackers. If your website is pirated and placed unwanted content in the middle of a marketing campaign or if they install harmful software on WordPress that makes it go extremely slow.

Both points are mitigated with self-managed WordPress hosting and with extreme care when installing plugins and WordPress updates.

Do you do WordPress on Novicell?

Yes, but not the cheap one, to get out of the step that ends up being expensive. We treat WordPress with all the respect in the world and don't use it as a minor and cheap tool. But like the great content manager that is. In addition, we vitamin it and improve it in aspects where it naturally shines, such as SEO. Here's our WordPress success story of AGM lawyers which is on the first page of search results for “Abogados Barcelona” and very soon Revlon Professional's new WordPress with premium content for beauty salon owners.

I understood that you are more of Umbraco.

Our strong strength for many years has been to make websites with our favorite technology, which is .Net, because of its high productivity and its great support at the business level and the C# language; this has led us to favor the options of Umbraco and Sitecore.

Apart from this, we must bear in mind that first of all we are Digital Business Agency and that means that, if a WordPress, a Drupal or a Shopify better fit the client's strategy and the requirements of their technology department than an Umbraco or a Sitecore, we also have professionals and collaborators to carry them out.

Because choosing web software has many more ingredients than we think.

Choose web software

Choose web software for a corporate, product or service site.

It's cheaper to produce WordPress than any other software such as Umbraco CMS, Drupal, Django, Orchard CMS, Joomla! , etc., as long as the marketer accepts the limitations of WordPress and the templates they select. In addition, technicians who can develop WordPress do not need as much experience or knowledge of architecture or design patterns as with other software because, accepting what WordPress offers and some of its plugins, a priori you don't need to build anything from scratch.

The difference between producing a simple WordPress and another simple CMS can vary by up to 50%. Mainly because other solutions require technicians with a lot of experience and knowledge to expand, customize or add functionality to the CMS. However, WordPress was born as a blog software until it became a CMS and this evolution has been given by plugins, but on the contrary, its internal skeleton makes it difficult to do any enlargement other than through plugins, for which you have to comply with countless rules or break so many rules that you could break WordPress. If you want to make an advanced website with WordPress, either you can't because you can't find technicians who want to do it, or it ends up being much more expensive than having chosen another technology.

Knowing right from the start what you want from your website is extremely important to initially choose the software with which to do it.

Choosing web software for an ecommerce.

If what you have in hand is an electronic store (a.k.a e-commerce), meaning that you will have a list of products or services that can be contracted and paid for online, you have several options, but without a doubt the one we like the most is Shopify. La The cost-price-flexibility ratio is enormous. It is equipped with everything necessary for online payment, to comply with personal data protection regulations such as the GDPR, you practically don't have to think about anything other than selling your products. It's important to mention Prestashop and Magento here. Even though we don't work directly with him, he deserves a mention for his popularity. There are other options other than specific software, such as how to add specific ecommerce plugins or modules to your CMS: WooCommerce for WordPress, Vendr for Umbraco CMS or commerce for Drupal, commerce for Sitecore as well.

But speaking of budget, the one that shines is Shopify. Normally the amount of configurations and customizations you need to make to your CMS to turn it into an ecommerce are not worth it. The only thing we could put against Shopify is that you have to maintain two systems, your website and Shopify. But it can be worth it.

Choose web software for an online booking site.

Although you can initially add a plugin to your CMS, other than their initial purpose, you may find that the plugins lack many features that you like from reference websites. But these websites are not a WordPress. Many of these websites are tailor-made, designed from the first line of code to their ultimate goal, which is to sell availability. You often have the product in software such as Redtiger, Kigo.net, Parity Rate, etc., which centralize the availability offer and you have to integrate your website against them.

This is where you can rely on an Umbraco CMS (like our client) Constance Hoteller) or a Drupal is a good idea, because they are designed in such a way that when you expand them in functionality you are not limited to rules that you have to break, but rather that their architecture is already designed for this purpose. In addition, it's a good idea, since much of digital marketing revolves around content production, and creating a content manager from scratch is a prohibitive cost.

Enterprise Digital Experience Platform

Here we are already talking about bigger words. Here we are talking about the fact that a web-based platform centralizes the digital activity of your brand, the production of analytics and personalization and automation.

A WordPress with SEO optimization plugins or campaign tracking and analytics fields falls short. We also want capture leads, segment them, send them automatic emails that invite them to learn about the services or buy the products. Or even obtain inputs from the monitoring and participation of people on social networks in relation to our brand and their interests, provided that the GDPR and the user's acceptance of cookies allow it.

For this we have some solutions such as Drupal Acquia, Optimizely, Liferay and the ones we like the most at Novicell: Umbraco CMS + Hubspot, on the one hand and Sitecore on the other. Of all those mentioned here, the only one that was born from the start as a digital experience platform is Sitecore. Everything else is added to content managers that in some cases will require a lot of specific programming.

However, Sitecore is such a robust and well-equipped tool that its costs, such as acquiring licenses alone, have to be studied in digital marketing with great ambitions in personalization and automation.

These tools usually bring together conversion flows of buyers or users, from the moment they are leads to the purchase of products and services. Segmentation according to demographic groups and activity with the brand. Customization based on geographical areas or segment membership. Email marketing, chat, interaction with social networks. And a great endless number.

Choice based on your IT department.

Your technology department will have a lot to say if at any point the website project has to end up in their hands, either maintaining the site or managing the servers or hosting. In this way, their decision will go more in the direction of how much autonomy they will have to carry out their tasks and, on the other hand, how much effort it might take them to intervene on the web or its server.

If you have a technology department that usually uses pure C, C++ or PHP tools, they will always be more in favor of a WordPress, which is PHP and can be hosted on Linux than an Umbraco, which is .Net and is hosted on Windows (although from version 9 it can be expected to be hosted on Linux as well). If your technology department has had previous experience with WordPress, both as programmers and as system administrators, surely they will opt for any PHP alternative other than WordPress and here the one I like the most is Drupal.

If you have a technology department that works with Microsoft tools, they will surely be in favor of an Umbraco CMS, an Orchard CMS, and if the marketing department's ambitions go in the direction of automation and customization, they will surely welcome Sitecore because of its robustness and how well equipped it is.

If you have a technology department that works with Java tools, you don't want anything from PHP or .Net, they will surely want Liferay, and if there is no other choice, they will be more in favor of .Net and here is the decision It will depend on how much they have to learn or adapt to provide the service.

If your team works with Python primarily, they'll be looking for something like Django or they'll prefer to ignore each other. Like a team that works with Ruby, they will be looking for CMS that are based on Ruby on Rails.

As for the person responsible for digital marketing, choosing one or the other platform will have a lot to do with what the future of the website will be like after it is released into production.

If it is not expected to be updated for a long time (which is not recommended) and small updates could be committed by the internal technology department, then this department will condition decisions above the preferences of the marketing team. Therefore, hiring the agency that did the website to maintain (retainer) is interesting to have more autonomy and less internal friction.

On the contrary, if the website is going to be updated frequently or an evolutionary phase is expected where a lot of attention will be required, then it could be that the IT department will lead the decision to ensure that it is chosen a technology with which you can work with guarantees or, that it be unchecked and given absolute freedom to the marketing department.

On the contrary, many marketing departments decide to be completely independent of their company's technology department, as they are completely oblivious to digital marketing and rely on partners such as Novicell who can accompany them in their web project.

To top it off, you've heard of Wix, 1and1... What does Novicell think of this?

These tools are known as Sitebuilders. The options they offer are extremely limited and are perfect for businesses that are launching into the digital world for the first time at a minimum cost. We could say it that way, like the business card in web format. Although they offer a few more possibilities and deserve to be treated with respect.

We don't work with them, since our specialists are overqualified for such solutions, and they shine in more tailored, more ambitious and mature solutions.

Here we will make an exception for a spectacular sitebuilder, Webflow, for which you require advanced knowledge of web design and usability. It's a tool that greatly speeds up the production of a website and brings the distance between your expectations and the final product we deliver closer. If you accept the limitations in exchange for having a very valid economic result, we can consider it.

What does Novicell recommend to us?

We are moving away from the battle of technologies (PHP, .Net, Java, Python, Ruby) and we focus on you, our customers. We try to understand what your objectives are, the reality of your company, your future projection, dialogue with your technology department, we analyze the budget you want to dedicate, your past experiences in creating websites and/or apps. Based on that, we would make different recommendations to you.

Do you want us to get a little wet?

1. Enterprise Digital Experience Platform, Sitecore
2. CMS Enterprise, Umbraco and Drupal
3. CMS Website, Umbraco and WordPress
4. eCommerce, Shopify

How can we help you?

If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.