Introduction
Starting a new business can be a challenging task. As an entrepreneur, you need to consider various factors such as product development, marketing, customer acquisition, and much more. In today’s digital age, one of the most important factors that can help you establish and scale your startup is having an online presence. This brings to the fore the need to have a website and ultimately as an entrepreneur, you will be faced with the question of the tech to be used in developing your startup’s website. While your choice of tech stack largely depends on your specific needs and the services you want to offer your target market, and sometimes your business model, it is the case that for many startups WordPress might be a suitable option.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you are wondering if WordPress is the right choice for your startup, we’ve got you covered. In this article, we’ll explore 10 reasons why WordPress might be a good fit for you. However, before we get into that, let’s take a cursory look at some factors you might consider as a startup founder when deciding on the tech for your startup’s website. These factors are very key when deciding a startup’s tech stack irrespective of the niche, services to be rendered, business model, or target audience. If this is your first time hearing about WordPress, do not worry, we have a perfect introduction for you.
Things to Consider When Choosing a Stack for Your Startup’s Website
1. Cost:
One of the top considerations when deciding on a startup’s tech stack is costs as it is usually very important for startups to minimize costs as much as possible. Therefore when it comes to having a website, you should give preference to the most cost-effective solutions.
2. Scalability:
Every startup looks to start small and as time goes on, expand its offerings and operations. It is therefore important that the choice of the tech stack is one that accommodates such future plans to scale without necessarily spending a fortune or radically changing the stack to accommodate scalability needs.
3. Ease of Setup and Deployment:
As a startup, time is of the essence in getting your target audience acquainted with your brand. You therefore need a stack that can get you up and running in a few months, in fact, in a few weeks while you work on other aspects of building your startup.
4. Ease of Use & Maintenance:
Startups by their very nature are most times characterized by a low number of operational staff due to a lack of funds to recruit many hands. It is important that you give preference to technologies that are easy to manage and maintain by just about anyone on your team, even someone with little to no technical expertise, without having to recruit a whole team of dedicated staff for that purpose.
5. Flexibility & Customization:
Being able to customize your website to fit your needs is a dream for any startup. You should look to technologies or stacks that are not restrictive or limited in terms of customization. As a startup, it is important you don’t only think short term, but also long term and that’s why you need a stack that you can keep iterating versions of your website as much as you like and with the lowest possible cost for customization.
6. Security:
While you might think that a startup does not need to think about security at the early stages of its operations, it actually should be a top priority when choosing a tech stack. Being aware of security threats that your startup’s website might face, makes you very equipped with the knowledge required to prevent and combat these threats whenever they occur. It is therefore advisable that thought is given to how secure a stack is before the decision to use it is made.
7. SEO-friendliness:
The importance of SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) to any website cannot be over-emphasized. Every business, irrespective of the scale, looks to have a website that is well optimized for search engines as this is a very viable way to get their business to their target audience. As a startup, this should be at the very core of your considerations when choosing a stack for your website, because you want to be found by anyone and everyone who is your target audience.
8. Speed:
Time is money as it is usually said. Many times, your ability to convert strangers to your brand into potentially profitable customers depends on how quickly you can convince them that you are the right brand for them. Therefore it is very important that when visitors come to your website, it feels snappy and you are able to sell your brand to them quickly by ensuring optimal load times for your website because site visitors usually have a low attention span. You therefore risk losing potential customers if you have a slow website, irrespective of how aesthetically pleasing it is.
9. User-friendliness:
Let’s face it, everyone hates a website that isn’t user-friendly. Whether you enjoy surfing the internet on your PC, or catching up with your favourite articles on your mobile phone or tablet, we all love a nice, smooth user experience. As a startup, it is important that you pay attention to how user-friendly your website is, as one way to lose potential customers is having a very website that is painful to use.
10. Reputable and Futureproof:
It is important that you consider the reputation of a stack before you decide to use it. Important questions at this point should be,
- How many brands currently use it?
- Who are the creators of the technology?
- How constantly is it updated?
- Is it being used by medium to large businesses?
- How long has it been around?
- What are people saying about it?
By answering these questions you get a sense of whether or not the stack is great for your startup. You definitely don’t want a stack that can become outdated or discontinued in a couple of months or even years after you have used it to deploy your website. You also don’t want a stack that is not being used by medium to large companies since as a startup, you one day have plans to scale into being a medium or large company. The longevity of a stack might also be an indication that the stack is doing well and is enjoying continued usage from members of the general public, that’s the stack you need.
With these considerations in mind, let’s look at some features of WordPress that make it a perfect solution to these issues you might have as a startup founder.
Why WordPress Might Be Suitable for Your StartUp
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Affordability:
One of the best selling points of WordPress is that it is free. While you will need to pay for your hosting and domain, the WordPress software itself is free to use which makes it a very suitable choice for startups as they don’t need to break the bank to have a website up and running thereby saving money for other important aspects of building the business. WordPress also gives you access to themes and plugins to further help you build the look and feel of your website and add various functionalities, yet again, these are available for free. Therefore if budget is one of your top considerations, which usually is the case, WordPress might just be a suitable solution for you.
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Scalability:
As your startup grows, your website will need to scale with it. You need to ensure that your website can accommodate the increasing traffic and demands of your customers. WordPress is a scalable platform that can handle large amounts of traffic and content without compromising the website’s performance. You can add new pages, posts, and products to your website as needed, and there are many plugins available that can help you manage your site more efficiently and optimize your website’s performance and speed.
Additionally, WordPress is compatible with many third-party tools and services, including email marketing platforms, CRM software, and e-commerce platforms. This means that you can integrate your website with other tools and services to streamline your business operations and scale your business more effectively. It is however important to note that for you to take advantage of WordPress’s ability to scale efficiently, you need to invest in good hosting. You can check out our guide to help you understand what type of hosting might be appropriate for you.
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Easy to Get Started and Deploy
With WordPress, you can have a website up and running in days due to its simplicity and beginner-friendly installation and setup process. Many hosting providers, provide one-click installation methods to have WordPress installed on a server in less than two minutes.
Asides from the easy installation process, it usually takes a relatively short amount of time ( compared to coding ), to build and deploy a WordPress website. This is largely due to the fact that you are already provided with thousands of themes and plugins, both free and premium to make the process easier. As a startup, this is a very crucial advantage as it means you can quickly get your brand the awareness it needs in no time.
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Easy to Use and Maintain
As mentioned earlier, choosing a stack that is easy to use and does not require many hands to maintain is a must for a startup. WordPress affords startups these benefits with its easy-to-use interface and beginner-friendly workflow. Simply put, you don’t need to be a tech expert or have any coding knowledge to create a website using WordPress. With its user-friendly interface, anyone can find it easy to navigate and create a website. You can also choose from various pre-designed templates and customize them to fit your brand’s style and tone. WordPress is also easy to maintain as it boasts thousands of plugins that can help improve several core aspects of your website such as speed, security, SEO, and so on.
It is important to state that this should not in any way be taken to mean that you do not need professionals to build and manage your startup’s website. It only emphasizes one of the features that make WordPress a perfect fit for startups, which is that you might not need to spend a lot of your startup’s lean finance on recruiting many very highly experienced developers to develop a website because thanks to an active community and many platforms, like WP Learnonline, that provide support and guidance to users who are new to WordPress, you may be able to create and manage your startup’s website yourself.
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Flexible and Customizable
One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is that it is highly flexible and customizable. At this point, we have mentioned many times that you have access to thousands of plugins and themes that can help you customize the look and feel of your website. This feature of WordPress set’s it apart from other content management systems like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace.
WordPress owes its ability to be customizable to the fact that it is open-source. Being open-source means that anyone, with the right amount of expertise, can contribute to the growth of WordPress as a content management system by creating plugins and themes to work with it. With WordPress, you are also not confined or restricted when it comes to choosing any of these plugins or themes to use in building your website or also platforms to use in hosting your website.
This is in contra-distinction to many other content management systems like Wix or Squarespace that operate a closed and controlled system where you are basically stuck with what they offer and customization options are limited compared to WordPress. You also, do not have a choice as to hosting service as you are confined to hosting your website with them.
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Security
Security is another aspect where WordPress really does shine. As mentioned earlier, security should be taken very seriously from the onset of your website development as a startup. The cost of failing to take this into consideration very early might be very dear.
While it should be noted that no system can be said to be 100% secure and that WordPress being popular is a major target for hackers, it is relatively easy to keep your WordPress website safe.
There are several tips and plugins that can be used to keep your website safe from malicious attacks. WordPress also integrates very well with Content Delivery Networks like Cloudflare which can further boost your website’s security by protecting it from attacks such as DDOS ( Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. You also have access to plugins like WordFence, Sucuri Security to name a few, that can help you secure your website from attacks.
Furthermore, the WordPress core software is constantly updated to make improvements where necessary and is also monitored by the very proactive team at WordPress to ensure that security vulnerabilities that might arise are promptly attended to. It is also the case that plugins and themes are well scrutinized before they can be allowed to be available for downloads on the WordPress repository.
In conclusion, if security is a consideration, which should be, then look no further than WordPress as a very good option for your startup’s website.
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SEO-Ready
WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform, therefore being SEO-friendly has always been at the very essence of the platform. Fast-forward to today, that assertion is still very true as it is very easy to optimize a website built with WordPress, for SEO.
You have access to plugins like Yoast, All-in-one SEO, and RankMath that can make it easy to generate your site’s sitemap for submission to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex, to name a few. These plugins also offer wonderful insights and tips on how to improve your website’s SEO and when combined with the right SEO strategy, you can improve your website’s visibility and drive more traffic to your website.
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WordPress is Fast:
Another reason you might want to use WordPress for your startup’s website is its speed. WordPress is built to be very lightweight and fast and this ensures that you enjoy the best load times when you build your website with WordPress. It is important to state that while many factors such as the quality of your hosting, the number of plugins used on your site, and the type of theme used on your site can affect the speed of your website, WordPress provides tons of plugins to help boost your website’s speed. Plugins such as WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, Litespeed Cache can help speed up your website by caching.
WordPress can also be used seamlessly with a CDN like CloudFlare to improve the speed of your website.
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WordPress is User-Friendly
A user-friendly website is a must-have for any business or brand. WordPress can be used to create websites that are very intuitive and user-friendly. Most WordPress themes are built to support a user-friendly experience on any browser or device. Therefore your visitors will have no issue visiting your website from their favorite devices. This can improve the user experience for your visitors and increase your website’s engagement and conversion rates.
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WordPress is Widely Used and Future-Proof
WordPress has been around for about 20 years having been founded in 2003 and has a proven track record of adapting to new technologies and trends. The platform is constantly evolving, with regular updates and new features being added. This means that your website will be future-proofed, and you won’t have to worry about it becoming outdated or obsolete. Additionally, WordPress is flexible enough to adapt to your changing business needs, so you can easily add new features and functionality as your startup grows.
WordPress is also being used by many big and notable brands such as The New York Times, CNN, Forbes, Best Buy, and Sony. You can find more notable users of WordPress here.
In Addition to this, it is worth noting that WordPress powers about 43% of the websites on the internet today. You definitely would not be making a wrong decision by choosing to pitch your tent with WordPress as your Startup’s website’s tech stack.
In conclusion, WordPress is a versatile and powerful platform that can help startups build a website that’s tailored to their specific needs. Its ease of use, cost-effectiveness, customizability, SEO-friendliness, scalability, mobile-friendliness, security, community support, integrations, and future-proofing make it a great choice for entrepreneurs who want to scale their business online.
Conclusion
In conclusion, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, although your choice of the stack will be greatly influenced by your specific needs, the services you want to offer your target audience, and your business model, WordPress is a versatile and powerful platform that you can take into consideration as it can help you build a website that’s tailored to your specific needs. Its ease of use, cost-effectiveness, customizability, SEO-friendliness, scalability, user-friendliness, security, speed, and future-proofing among other things, are reasons you should consider using it for your startup.
Nee things learnt from Mr Chef.