Our Platform of Choice

Not only is WordPress a powerful website management system in its own right, but it is also a specific and sophisticated technical environment, inside which it is possible to build web application software to meet a vast range of needs.  We sometimes talk about these sorts of systems as being a bit like Lego, with lots of pre-manufactured parts from which we can create websites.  At Infotex, our team can also fashion new parts when needed, to work with the pre-existing ones.

For these two fundamental reasons – its popularity and its technology – Infotex has adopted WordPress as our platform of choice.

About WordPress

Starting as a simple tool for bloggers in 2003, it now holds  60% of the content management system market share, powering around 43% of all websites. It offers a feature-rich, user-friendly interface with a flexible page editor called Gutenberg, allowing you to easily add your own content, and many other advantages…

Capable

WordPress is extendable through the use of 3rd party plugins and themes allowing us to reduce the cost of production by providing pre-built functionality rather than reinventing the wheel. In doing so, it allows our development team to instead focus on the functionality & design that is critical to your business.

Being open source it provides us with full access to the source code, empowering our WordPress designers and developers to dive into the core functionality of a site. This can give us crucial insight into any issues we face and provides the ability to take your website in any direction you desire.

Leveraging the above, we can write our own themes and custom WordPress plugins to offer any functionality that you can imagine. We can integrate it with other systems, such as CRMs, and create separate applications that can interact directly with your site and its data.

Importantly, we can host your website in a hosting environment of our choosing. This allows us to ensure that we follow best practice to provide you with a safe, secure, performant and reliable platform that is scalable to your future needs.

Sustainability

The core WordPress code is maintained by a large active team from whom it receives continuous updates to evolve its features and fix issues. When properly maintained, this means your website can enjoy a long lifespan before requiring a significant rebuild.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem is vibrant allowing authors to work with other like-minded developers to publish plugins extending the core functionality. This also leads to diversity – and even competition – between plugins.

Cost-Effectiveness

By taking advantage of the WordPress ecosystem you are not reinventing the wheel. Using the right tooling, it’s possible to update sites in a timely fashion with confidence that the site’s functionality will not be impacted. WordPress is built to host on Apache, PHP & MySQL – some of the most popular technologies helping keep costs down in this regard also.

WordPress & Ecommerce

When combined with WooCommerce, WordPress provides market-leading e-commerce capabilities whilst still leveraging its content management power.

WooCommerce, like WordPress, can be extended further through the use of 3rd-party plugins. It also gains all of the benefits listed above, allowing us to provide the functionality that is right for your business and can evolve with you.

So, when is WordPress the wrong choice?

We have extolled the virtues of WordPress and given reasons for why we recommend it for nearly all of our clients.  However, it’s not always suitable for everyone. For example, WordPress isn’t designed to handle massive volumes of constantly changing data such as a national news website or large scale event ticket vendor.

It is also not a natural fit if you are investing to become a global e-commerce platform nor to run your bricks & mortar EPOS system (till). However, by using its REST API we have proven that WordPress has a vital role to play in modernising the stock control and sales platforms for many “real world” SMBs.

Some of the cases where WordPress might not be suitable:

Intensive Sales

e.g. auctions, ticket sales. WordPress would only handle small-scale ticket sales or auctions, as the database architecture would end up locking out 99% of viewers.

Multiple Contributors / Editors

eg. large news organisations. WordPress could certainly handle a local/town news site. But when the size increases to that of BBC / Dailymail, for instance, the number of posts would become problematic in terms of both database and user interface.

(Really) Big E-commerce

A big e-commerce site that is “properly big” (Asos, Amazon), is probably just too big for WordPress.

B2B features for advanced user account management

WordPress has a powerful user-permissions system, but it doesn’t natively integrate with things like MS Active Directory, so there’s a limit depending on how far you want to go.

Scalability

Static content can scale almost infinitely via Cloudflare. A highly dynamic site with a lot of changing content would be more challenging.

Custom applications requiring custom database architecture

WordPress has a core concept that revolves around posts and pages. Whilst it is possible to extend these by creating custom post types, a complex application requiring a custom database architecture would be better suited to a lightweight coding framework rather than trying to fit custom concepts into WordPress’s opinionated structure.

WordPress Complaints You Shouldn’t Always Believe

“My WordPress site was hacked”

By virtue of its ubiquity WordPress is an attractive target for hackers. However, this also means that WordPress core is one of the most closely scrutinised platforms available. While no site on the Internet is totally immune to hacking, the majority of hacked WordPress sites come about because they have not been kept up-to-date with the latest version, or due to using low quality plugins.

By limiting the number of plugins, and selecting those plugins carefully, when combined with regular updating of WordPress core and providing a rapid response to known vulnerabilities, you can be confident that your WordPress site is actually more secure than the majority of your competitors. We also advocate Cloudflare for additional protection against unknown threats.

“My WordPress site is slow”

Often this due to excessive plugins, poor theme selection, and large images. Sometimes all 3. With careful development work we have turned many slow loading sites around as part of our WordPress Takeover service.

“With great power comes great responsibility”

In terms of admin usability, an admin area with the amount of functionality that WordPress presents to an administrator, complete with a large stack of plugins, could easily be overwhelming. However, the WordPress admin area has seen significant usability improvements over time, and the current iteration, complete with “Gutenberg” block builder, is now amongst the most refined in the industry.