Wordpress is a great content management system. It’s fully supported by a huge open source community. There are tens of thousands of plug-ins that help extend the functionality of the platform. There’s no doubt Wordpress was one of the first pieces of software that  allowed small development projects to contain the same functionally of much larger budgeted enterprise level websites.  We love Wordpress and continue to choose it to deploy a number of projects because of how easy it is to scale the platform.

Wordpress allows you to quickly launch an open sourced framework backend; it’s fully customizable so in the matter of a couple of hours you’ve got a fully content managed website. Once it’s installed and running, there are hundreds of places to find themes & templates. So really quickly with almost no skills you can deploy a Wordpress website that looks pretty good.  This has led to a huge growth of companies who don’t really know how to design a website, nor develop a website.. To start selling & creating websites for companies built from Wordpress.

Trust me; I understand hustling and working hard to sell a product. But this isn’t about those who are selling the prefabricated websites, it’s about *you* and understanding why saving a little up front, can cost you big time in the end.

4 reasons why using a premade solution or a Wordpress template shop to deliver your website can hurt your business.  You’ll meet many “internet marketing companies” , “Search engine optimization companies” , and social media experts claiming to be able to launch you a fully blown Wordpress site, here are some things to think about :

#4 Security.

Building a website and building a website securely are two completely different games.  What your internet marketing company won’t tell you is Wordpress by nature is very insecure.  The same components that make the platform so easy to work with also make for a security nightmare. The plug-ins can be exploited, and when they are hackers spread the word quickly. Without explaining too much about it, if you Google “Wordpress 0 day exploits” you’ll find out that just as there’s a community helping Wordpress developers, there’s also an entire community ready to take advantage of an insecure install.  Any true web development company, with system administration experience will be able to secure your website, and keep it backed up.

#3 Speed & Performance

Many folks out there have heard about godaddy.com, and their “awesomely cheap webhosting” service. These hosing services are great for simple HTML built sites, but the demands of Wordpress require CPU cycles, and these are extremely hard to come by for $6.99 a month.  Because of the way Wordpress works, every time a page is called up the server chugs to turn out a page. It calls up server side scripts that yank out the content from the database. Without the right experience you’ll notice you’re Wordpress page can take up to 10 seconds to load.

#2   Search Engine Optimization

This is true about allowing anyone to handle any web development project without a fundamental understanding of SEO.  Wordpress out of the box ( as of this publication ) is hardly the SEO engine many think it is. Yes it allows non developers to create a ton of relevant content, and that’s great. But the without the proper setup Google’s going to penalize you. Wordpress defaults to non dynamic page titles; it defaults to producing way too many links to the same article getting certain pages dinged for duplicate content.   It’s not terribly complicated to really build Wordpress in such a way that it provides tons of SEO benefits but out of the box it’s not. Sadly that’s the way many Wordpress developers leave them

#1 Originality.

Pre-made Wordpress themes can make a website look amazing; you can spend 50 bucks and get a great looking site. Hands down, I’m not going to tell you differently, but this creates some high level problems. The web “design” is simply a vehicle for the content of the website. Rather it be video, text, animations or blogs its all about the content.  Buying a prebuilt template is like paint by number web design. There’s a hole for content and you need to fill it.  The hole is 400 pixels wide, and 100 pixels tall, I guess you can stick in a company slogan… But what if you need a contact form there?  You absolutely must consider CONTENT before the first pixel is thought about. You must design around the content.  Buying prebuilt sites, is working completely against this idea.

The next major problem is you’ve hired someone to build your website , then a week later, you find someone else in town using the same template, I’ve seen this more times than I can count. The bigger problems are when companies pass off prebuilt templates as custom work, so you end up paying $3500 dollars for a website that someone else bought for 50 dollars.

In conclusion, talk to your web development company. If they are talking about the design long before they bring up content, you might want to ask about making sure they can offer fully custom solutions.