Why I build customized websites on WordPress

WordPress has a strange reputation among some of the population. Often people associate it with cheap template websites that someone “clicked” in a weekend and then struggles with them. But I build the vast majority of custom websites on it – and it’s certainly not because it’s the easiest or cheapest solution.

In this article, I want to explain why I’ve long preferred WordPress, what it brings to you as a client, and why I think it’s a very good choice for most business websites. If you’re considering a new website or redesign, this may help you better understand why I often suggest WordPress and what you’ll get out of it.

WordPress as a proven foundation

WordPress powers a huge number of websites today – from small corporate presentations to the big brands and projects you know from everyday life. For example, it runs the US space agency NASA’s website, The Walt Disney Company’s corporate website, technology magazine TechCrunch, BBC America’s website, and news server Seznam Zpravy.

When you build a house, you want to make sure it’s on a solid foundation. It’s the same with the web.

For you as a client, this means one simple thing: we don’t build anything experimental. We’re building on a system that has been proven for a long time, has a clear roadmap, an active community, and will very likely be around for many years to come.

WordPress in numbers: the technology that runs much of the internet

WordPress is the most widely used content management system in the world today. According to long-term statistics, approximately 43% of all websites on the Internet run on WordPress. If we look only at sites that use a content management system, WordPress has a share of around 60-65%. Practically speaking, this means that almost every second website runs on WordPress.

Its ecosystem extends into e-commerce. The WooCommerce plugin, which turns WordPress into a full-fledged e-shop, is one of the most used solutions for online sales and serves an estimated 12% of all e-shops in the world.

What matters to you is that you are building on a technology that is massively distributed, well documented and has a huge community. This greatly increases the chances that a proven solution to your problem already exists and that your site can be developed for the long term.

WordPress can be used in many ways

Today, almost anyone can install WordPress. The typical scenario is that a person chooses a template from the marketplace, deploys it on hosting and tries to catch up by installing other plugins. For a simple personal blog this may be enough, but for a corporate website this approach often ends up with a slow, unreliable and hard to maintain solution.

At the other end of the spectrum are sites where WordPress runs as a foundation for more complex projects – for example:

• e-shop built on WooCommerce,
• travel agency selling tours,
• magazine or content portal,
• member section or closed community,
• discussion forum or database catalogue.

Most of the time, it’s a combination of core WordPress, a few well-chosen plugins and custom development. Plugins are a great servant, but a bad master – if there are too many of them, or if they are not well maintained, it will affect the speed, stability and security of the site.

For most projects I prefer custom theme development on WordPress. I use it as a robust foundation for managing content, users and rights, but the graphics, templates, blocks and features are all tailored to your business. I choose plugins judiciously and only where they make long-term sense.

The advantage for you is simple: you don’t rely on an anonymous marketplace template or dozens of random plugins. You have a website that matches your goals, yet is based on a stable and easy to understand system.

WordPress administration is the de facto industry standard

WordPress administration is something that a lot of people in marketing or e-commerce have come across. One of the things that clients love about WordPress is the clear content management. Plus, it’s fully in English – you don’t need to deal with English terms or worry about someone in the company “accidentally breaking something” because they don’t understand the interface.

When I design a website, I always think about making the administration as easy as possible for you:

• clearly named menu items,
• clear templates for recurring page types,
• minimum steps for routine adjustments.

The result? You can do most of the content editing yourself – without having to call a developer every time.

Gutenberg: blocks instead of fear of every change

WordPress is no longer just a text box and one big WYSIWYG. The modern version builds on the Gutenberg block editor, which allows you to assemble content from individual blocks – much like you’d build a building block.

This has several advantages for you:

• easily create a new landing page from the prepared sections,
• you can combine different types of content (text, images, videos, forms),
• you can see right away what the page will look like.

My role is to prepare the blocks and patterning for your website to match your design while having clear boundaries. You can then compose the content as needed.

The practical experience is simple: most clients can get to grips with Gutenberg in one short training session. And from that moment on, they can prepare a landing page or a new article on their own.

Openness, freedom and independence from suppliers

WordPress is an open-source project distributed under the GNU GPL license. In practice, this means two important things for you:

1. Your data is really yours.
   Content, images, orders, contacts – everything is stored in a standard database that you can access. You don’t rely on a closed platform where it’s hard to transfer anything elsewhere.
2. You are not tied to one vendor.
   If you ever need to change developers or agencies, a WordPress website is portable. There are plenty of developers and teams that can work with it. This is a big deal for long term projects.

For me, this is one of the strongest arguments to build on WordPress: investing in a website is not an investment in a “box” of one vendor, but in an open system that can grow with you.

Plugin ecosystem as a smart acceleration of development

Part of the power of WordPress is the huge ecosystem of plugins. These are the “plugins” that add specific functionality to a website – from contact forms, to booking systems and members’ sections, to the e-shop or integrations with other tools.

Plugins make sense especially where it would be pointless to develop everything from scratch. Typically:

• connection of payment gateways,
• basic e-commerce functionality,
• SEO tools,
• safety layers.

My job is not to “install as many plugins as possible”, but to carefully select the ones that are long-lasting, safe and suitable for your project. This allows us to focus on what is truly unique to your business, without wasting budget reinventing what already exists and works well.

WordPress is not the only right solution

WordPress is a great choice for content and presentation websites – typically corporate websites, blogs, magazines, portals or smaller e-shops where it makes sense to build on a ready-made content management system and focus mainly on content, design and marketing.

But at the same time, not all projects are the same. For very specific web applications, internal systems, large SaaS platforms or solutions with extreme performance requirements and non-standard logic, it may be more appropriate to build the entire system as a custom application.

The goal of this article is not to claim that WordPress is the only correct solution. It’s a tool that makes a lot of sense for most of the presentation and content sites I encounter in practice. It is for these types of projects that it can offer you the best balance between speed of development, convenient content management and long-term sustainability.

Why I choose WordPress for my clients

In summary, WordPress is not a “shortcut” or a cheap substitute for me. It’s a robust platform that I build custom sites on because:

• offers a proven foundation that even the big brands use,
• has an administration that your people can quickly navigate,
• Gutenberg makes it easy to manage content,
• is open, portable and doesn’t tie you to one supplier,
• has an ecosystem of plugins that cleverly accelerates development where it makes sense.

If you’re considering a new website and aren’t sure if WordPress is the right choice for you, we can look at your specific brief and go through the options together. Often, it turns out that WordPress is a great foundation – and the main thing that will set your site apart will be built on top of it as part of a bespoke development.