Many big businesses overlook WordPress when it comes to website design, believing it to be a simple blogging platform. But this couldn’t be further from reality. From its humble beginnings, WordPress has grown astronomically and now provides a software platform for huge businesses around the world. Customers include international print media giants, huge eCommerce stores, and worldwide institutions. The statistics speak for themselves; WordPress is the platform of choice for over 38% of all sites across the web.
WordPress website design offers numerous powerful features and impressive scalability – perfect for big businesses. Over the past 5 years, its usage has increased exponentially and today some of the biggest names, from Bloomberg to The Walt Disney Company, use the platform. The software provides unrivalled content management, excellent security, easy mobile optimisation, as well as countless other features.
With so many options for website design available, choosing can seem overwhelming. A website design agency, like KIJO, can manage the complex elements for you. We are the secure gatekeeper to your design systems, ensuring brand consistency and technical stability. You can focus on growing your business while we manage your digital domain, always moving in step with you.
Back in 2003, WordPress was created to meet the need for an intelligently-designed personal publishing platform. It’s hard to imagine now, in a world full of influencers and travel bloggers, but there wasn’t always an easy way to post content. Enter: WordPress. They revolutionised the blogging field and anyone looking to quickly and easily post new content flocked to it. It swiftly became the software of choice for the vast majority of bloggers and has maintained this standing ever since. Now, even the likes of Trip Advisor and Microsoft use WordPress to power their blogs.
Even so, following frequent software updates, WordPress has grown into something far more advanced. With the introduction of themes and plugins, the potential of the software to become a world-leading content management system for all types of business was realised. Utilising these additional features, you can create everything from an eCommerce site to job board, membership site, or eLearning platform.
The shift to WordPress may seem risky to a large business, but countless others have already made the move, with incredible results. Some of the biggest names in enterprise, eCommerce and education are utilising the platform. Our list of businesses below is evidence of its far-reaching capabilities.
Current enterprise users include:
The list could go on and on. Evidently, WordPress provides the security, flexibility and scalability necessary for big business across all industries. Learn how you can benefit from WordPress website design as we delve into the most important issues for enterprise customers.
Providing a top-notch online experience is essential for a business to thrive. Many believe that opting for expensive, ‘exclusive’ software is the only way to meet these objectives. As such, businesses spend a fortune on software they have no control over and have to install costly updates year on year.
WordPress, however, is open-source, with a vast community of contributors, and the software is completely free to download. The installation process is straightforward and stress-free. WordPress will even keep you informed of future updates from within the Dashboard. Updates can often be downloaded in less than a minute, so no more tedious waiting for big system changes.
You will still need to pay for hosting on quality servers, which is essential if you want a quick- loading site. Spending a little on the best plugins and themes is also money well spent. Similarly, employing a WordPress design agency to manage the more advanced elements for you can be hugely beneficial.
Overall, the costs are significantly lower with WordPress than any other software. Financially, it makes the most sense.
WordPress’s core software is incredibly secure. They have a dedicated team of experts continually working on updating their software to deliver the most up to date security features. Keeping on top of core software updates is the easiest way to keep your protection up to date.
As with any software, there are security best practices including strong login credentials and appropriate user access. WordPress makes it easy to assign user roles and limit administration access to users who require it.
The world of plugins makes tightening up your security even easier. There are over 57,000 plugins listed in the WordPress repository. Every plugin listed has to meet WordPress’s stringent security requirements. Trusted free or low-cost plugins can be downloaded to back up your entire website and provide additional security. This gives you complete control over your website security and allows you to swiftly change security protocols when you choose.
The ability to extend WordPress with themes and plugins is at the heart of its success as a flexible, completely customisable platform. It is remarkably easy to extend the functionality of your website. Whether you want to add a membership portal, feedback form or have a specific layout in mind. Plugins provide endless possibilities; form builders, eCommerce themes and visual design plugins are all available, often for free.
The speed with which themes and plugins are created means that the platform is highly responsive and reactive to consumer demand. You have complete control over the additional software you use. You can use an unlimited number of plugins to adapt, change and edit your website so that it perfectly aligns with your business. If there’s a feature you need, simply search the WordPress repository to find a plugin that does the job for you.
Whilst themes and plugins are often free, larger businesses usually benefit from investing in premium offerings. The WordPress repository makes it easy to compare products and choose software that can withstand your traffic and reliably serve up your site to customers. Similar to functionality, scalability is easily achieved with the right plugins. As seen from the list of Fortune 500 companies using WordPress, it can definitely scale up to manage spikes in traffic.
An industry in itself, SEO has become essential for businesses to succeed online. WordPress’s core software is built with SEO in mind, automatically managing some of the essential elements for you. WordPress generates title tags and meta descriptions for all of your pages, making it easier for crawlers to navigate and index your site.
There are also plugins available that can catapult your site to the top of search engine rankings with more advanced features. Yoast is one of the most popular and incredibly straightforward to use. Prompts to improve alt tags, keyword density, and links are just some of the features that help you organically rank where it counts. They even offer readability scores to improve your copywriting.
Mobile users are accounting for an ever-expanding portion of your online customers. Mobile now accounts for 51.33% of market share. Ensuring a mobile-friendly user experience is an essential element of your WordPress website design and search engine optimisation. With its open-source software, WordPress is always able to quickly adapt to shifting trends. There are multiple ways to make sure your WordPress site is operating at optimal performance on mobile devices.
Caching plugins are a great place to start as they speed up your site loading time and ensure you quickly capture any visitor’s attention. Responsive themes are also a great way to make sure your site layout and functionality is optimised for mobile users.
WordPress started as an innovative blogging platform and has since grown to deliver extensive functionality for businesses of all sizes and across all sectors. The adaptability of open-source software makes this one of the most responsive platforms on which to build your website. WordPress provides large, multinational corporations with the agility usually only afforded to much smaller sites. Large businesses no longer have to compromise on creativity to maintain security, as WordPress provides solutions for them all.
You no longer need to outsource to an expensive software company; with WordPress, you remain in the loop regarding your website design and functionality. However, for large businesses requiring a vast network, employing an agency to do the technical thinking for you can be a great option. The benefit of an agency is the deep industry knowledge, holistic management of every element from security to design and the ongoing systems that ensure continuity for the user and your workforce. If you think WordPress would work for your business and are looking to make the move, contact us at KIJO and we can work through the process with you.
