*Updated on 11/14/23
WordPress began as a simple, open-source blog publisher. Over the past two decades, however, it has grown into the internet’s most popular content management system (CMS). It is estimated that WordPress is used in over 40% of the world’s websites. Mirroring its prolific growth in usage throughout its existence, WordPress has made equally substantial advancements in both capabilities and features.
So, is WordPress a viable enterprise website solution?
To help us get to that answer, let’s first identify what this enterprise business question is really asking. Business structures commonly fall into two types, LLCs or enterprises. Enterprises can be sole proprietorships, partnerships, corporations, or cooperatives. Regardless of the business structure of an enterprise or LLC, this question could be rephrased to what many businesses really want to know, “Can WordPress capably serve the digital solution needs of a large, complex business?”
Does WordPress offer what big businesses demand regarding capability, performance, quality, scalability, security, agility, accessibility, privacy, dependability, customer service, and more?
The answer is “yes.” We’d like to share more about that answer with you. WordPress can, indeed, be a viable choice for today’s enterprise website solutions.
We invite you to visit our enterprise WordPress development services page to learn more about the award-winning WordPress team at Americaneagle.com.
Common Myths and Misconceptions About WordPress
Let’s get a few of the common myths and misconceptions out of the way before we dive deeper into the modern capabilities of an enterprise WordPress solution.
“WordPress is just for blogs and small sites.”
If the year was 2003, or shortly thereafter, this would be almost true. At the birth of WordPress, it was a blog publisher. The platform, led by contributions from Matt Mullenweg, Mike Little, and Automattic Inc., quickly evolved to become a way to build websites. In the years that followed, open-source developer communities grew quickly and introduced business-focused plug-ins, themes, and updates. Today, WordPress CMS, and the enterprise WordPress hosting partners that provide advanced capabilities, security, and performance, are capably serving many of the world’s largest corporate enterprises.
“WordPress is not secure.”
This concern stems, primarily, from the extensive and mostly unvetted array of options for WordPress plugins. There are over 60,000 plug-ins available in the WordPress directory. Plugins can enable excellent digital capabilities and add functionality. Some of them have also introduced security vulnerabilities. Enterprise businesses should implement solutions with a recognized WordPress agency partner to help recommend and test the most trusted, reliable, and performant WordPress plugins. WordPress annually releases three to four core updates and adds prompt security updates as needed in between those core updates.
“Being open source is a negative, not a positive.”
This is another misconception that seems to be dated. In a recent report from Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM, 82% of IT leaders were more likely to select a vendor that contributes to the open-source community. WordPress enables free access, modification, and distribution of its code. Businesses opting for open-source solutions have greater control and ownership of their codebase and ability to chart and navigate their own technical roadmap. They don’t have to worry about the many uncertainties that proprietary digital products add.
“WordPress is free.”
WordPress has often been considered free because it has no license costs and is open source. However, the platform does require skilled implementation, business integration, upkeep, and maintenance. Those necessities do have a cost. For example, all WordPress sites need to consistently update plugins and security patches. Website performance should also be continuously tuned and optimized. For an enterprise website, that support will require significant budget resources, depending upon business scale and complexities.
“WordPress doesn’t offer good support.”
Documentation for WordPress is as extensive as any modern digital platform. Discussion boards, help forums, and expert blogs are countless. WordPress boasts an abundant ecosystem of developers and resources. Leading enterprise businesses that utilize WordPress count on two foundational support pillars, their trusted digital agency and their enterprise WordPress hosting provider. Optimally, those two support pillars are working in tandem toward the support and ongoing performance of their shared client’s enterprise WordPress solution.
Essential Features for Enterprise Websites
For any platform to be central to successful enterprise website solutions, it must be highly capable. Digital solutions for enterprise businesses typically require many, if not all, of the following features:
- Omnichannel content delivery
- Multisite capabilities
- Capable scaling to traffic demands
- Ecommerce excellence
- Secure solutions
- User permissions and workflow sophistication
- Developer flexibility
WordPress Benefits and Attributes for Enterprise Websites
When implemented and managed by an experienced development team and hosted by an enterprise-level hosting provider, WordPress can provide the most capable digital solutions available today. Powering many of most well-known enterprise, ecommerce, and corporate brands on the internet, recent reports indicate about 20% of Fortune 500 companies utilize WordPress within their tech stack. Alongside the following WordPress attributes, an experienced and proven enterprise WordPress development agency will maximize enterprise business success by selecting the right enterprise WordPress hosting solutions, deploying the best of well-vetted plugins, making smart regional considerations throughout the business’s global market, and more.
Content Management
WordPress would not have established itself as the world’s number one CMS option without being an excellent platform for content. The easy to learn and use toolset, website SEO benefits, omnichannel capabilities, publishing ease, and customizability of its open-source solutions give enterprise businesses complete control of their digital content within WordPress.
Flexibility, Customization and Scalability
Enterprise businesses typically require a number of database and technology integrations to optimally tie the branded website into overall business operations. Because WordPress is so widely adopted across industries, there are a vast number of pre-built integrations between WordPress and other common business platforms and technology. Each of these add to the implementation efficiency and flexibility of WordPress. Because WordPress is open-source, customization and flexibility is virtually endless.
Enterprise WordPress web hosts, like WordPress VIP, WP Engine, and Pantheon, emphasize ultimate scalability and fast, dependable content performance. These enterprise WordPress hosting partners provide resources to capably serve even the highest spikes in traffic and engagement.
The multisite capabilities of WordPress make it a perfect platform for localized sites for global brands. Enterprises that brand multiple products across separate URLs, subdomains, or microsites can also benefit from WordPress’s shared CMS database of reusable content and resources of many formats.
Security
As the most popular CMS in the world today, hackers have also made WordPress the most targeted platform. The expansive WordPress developer community has proven to be excellent at providing a consistently secure platform on which to build websites. Keeping WordPress up-to-date with releases and patches has proven extremely effective at erasing vulnerabilities. Plugin strategies are also essential for the highest confidence that your enterprise business’s WordPress resources remain secure.
There are not many website projects that would have higher demands for security than the executive branch of the U.S. government. WordPress, with hosting and services from WordPress VIP, has been trusted to power whitehouse.gov.
Commerce Capabilities
Many of the most popular ecommerce platforms, like BigCommerce, Shopify, and Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) have pre-built integrations with WordPress. The most popular ecommerce plugin available within the WordPress plugin directory is WooCommerce. Commerce plans within all of these WordPress options are very diverse. They can capably serve the highest demands of enterprise businesses in regard to online store creation, payment gateways, shipping flexibility, product catalog size, performance, security, and more.
Usability
While the developer community for WordPress is the largest of all CMSs, there is an even larger non-technical community of content contributors and other professional WordPress users. The user-friendliness of WordPress for non-tech users is without parallel. The CMS’s leading usability has put WordPress content contribution, management, and editing among the career experience lists on millions of professional resumes throughout the world. This ubiquitous familiarity with WordPress helps enterprise businesses to confidently scale up human resources for content contribution, as-needed, to match business growth.
Accessibility of both front- and back-end interfaces is another WordPress asset, providing important usability benefits to all businesses.
Developer Access
The WordPress developer community is the largest and most active on the internet. When pursuing a custom integration or solution within WordPress’s open-source environment, developers rarely have to reinvent the wheel. For any challenge that arises, there is typically a solution to a similar challenge that has already been achieved. Skilled developers within the worldwide WordPress developer community learn from the successes of others and consistently advance next-generation capabilities within the CMS.
Examples of Enterprise WordPress Websites
In addition to whitehouse.gov and approximately 20% of Fortune 500 businesses, enterprises across many industries trust the robust capabilities and excellent performance of WordPress.
Widely recognized brands like Microsoft utilize WordPress within their digital solutions tech stack. At Americaneagle.com, an enterprise WordPress agency, WordPress has recently been at the center of high-performing development solutions for enterprise clients like Mecum Auctions, Naf Naf Middle Eastern Grill, and JBT (John Bean Technologies).
Americaneagle.com Enterprise WordPress Hosting Partners
As a trusted enterprise WordPress development agency, Americaneagle.com maintains trusted partnerships with leading providers. These partnerships deliver enterprise businesses success with unmatched performance, reliability, and support for scalable WordPress initiatives.
Americaneagle.com and WordPress VIP
With WordPress VIP, Americaneagle.com provides enterprise hosting solutions built for high-performance, ensuring load times remain low and user engagement soars high. Security is at the forefront of their hosting, including automatic threat assessments, dedicated hardware firewalls, and DDoS mitigation, safeguarding both data and intellectual property. Americaneagle.com is committed to creating custom solutions on WordPress VIP to ensure that the digital strategies for enterprise clients are tailored to advance established business goals.
Americaneagle.com and WP Engine
Together, Americaneagle.com and WP Engine provide high-speed enterprise website experiences that perform even under the heaviest of traffic demands. This partnership emphasizes a fortified defense against cyber threats through daily backups, real time threat detection, immediate security patches, and more. WP Engine’s staging environment allows our agency’s team of highly experienced and skilled developers to test and deploy changes effortlessly, all while ensuring that the live site remains uncompromised. Americaneagle.com and WP Engine have a thorough understanding of the ways in which digital assets and business growth work together. The hosting environment of WP Engine can scale enterprise-level websites seamlessly to accommodate both planned and unplanned spikes in traffic.
Americaneagle.com and Pantheon
Pantheon is scalable hosting provider focused on the open-source WordPress CMS, as well as Drupal. Enterprise WordPress solutions from Pantheon are designed to enable users to build agile workflows, scalable infrastructures, and fast content delivery networks. Pantheon’s elastic architecture is built to scale horizontally on demand, expanding with traffic spikes and reverting when appropriate. This elastic hosting also allows enterprise businesses to run as many instances of a site as needed for development, and includes all the tools needed to deliver new features faster. The partnership between Americaneagle.com and Pantheon provides clients with unrivaled services, performance, and results regardless of size.
Drawbacks of Utilizing WordPress for Enterprise-Level Websites
As with any popular technology tool, WordPress has professional advocates and detractors as well. It is important for enterprise businesses to listen to those detractors and limit any WordPress concerns that would potentially interfere with optimal digital solution performance.
Security Vulnerabilities and Concerns
WordPress has often received criticism for security vulnerabilities. While being the world’s most popular CMS makes WordPress a prime target for hackers, the vulnerability of well-managed websites is extremely low. The ardent testing within the developer community and swiftly-released patches do an excellent job of keeping the core CMS ahead of bad actors.
In recent years, security vulnerabilities have almost exclusively been the result of third-party plugins. Choosing plugins to implement within enterprise website solutions should include meticulous research and testing. Consultation from a recognized WordPress agency partner can help identify and test the most trusted, reliable, and performant WordPress plugins.
Enterprise hosting partners for WordPress sites provide an additional level of confidence with advanced security features, protocols, and processes. Today’s high-performance content delivery networks (CDNs) add a valuable layer of security that thwarts common intrusion attempts as well.
Scalability Concerns
Scalability concerns are typically the result of an inadequate hosting provider selection. The enterprise hosting providers mentioned above, WordPress VIP, WP Engine, and Pantheon are able to scale to effectively serve the highest of enterprise business traffic and engagement demands.
Customization Costs
There will, indeed, be customization costs associated with implementing WordPress to power digital solutions for enterprise business. Experienced agency partners are able to assess and estimate those costs for the enterprise clients they serve.
Standardization Issues
The vast array of available plugins means there are many potential solutions to consider for particular functionalities. Without an enterprise-wide plugin strategy, it is difficult to standardize WordPress solution preferences. Experienced WordPress development agencies like Americaneagle.com have helped many enterprise businesses to effectively standardize their WordPress toolset and plugins.
Yes, WordPress is an Excellent CMS for Enterprise Websites
If the digital solutions for your enterprise businesses are not meeting your expectations, it might be time to consider a WordPress digital transformation. Even if, years ago, you eliminated WordPress from consideration, recent advancements in enterprise hosting services, integrations, and capabilities are worth another look.
WordPress will allow your brand to fully own its codebase. Your digital roadmap will no longer be confined to the guardrails of monolithic platform capabilities and services.
Too often, businesses form relationships with digital agencies that have a skill set that is limited to a very small list of platform and technology solutions. Americaneagle.com is a WordPress agency partner with some of the world's most diversely talented, high performing, and experience team members. Call us at (877) 932-6691 or submit the contact us form to consider advancing the digital success of your enterprise business. We welcome the opportunity to partner with your brand.
Want to learn more about enterprise WordPress support and development? Check out this episode of the WordPress Edge Podcast, brought to you by Americaneagle.com Studios.
For captions, click "CC" within the video player. To read the transcript of this episode, click the transcript link within the description of the video on YouTube.
