Why We Still Build Client Sites on WordPress
By Earl Rennie, Director of Digital Strategy
4 min readFirst published . Rewritten .
We build most client websites on WordPress and WooCommerce for three unglamorous reasons. Clients own their site outright, the ecosystem solves almost any requirement without custom development, and it connects cleanly to local payment gateways through our PowerTranz plugin. It is not the right tool for every project, and we will tell you when it is not, but for most Trinidad and Tobago businesses it remains the smart default.
What started as a simple blogging platform in 2003 grew into the most popular content management system in the world, running around four in every ten websites you visit. Popularity alone proves nothing, plenty of popular things are mediocre. So here is the more useful version of this article, an agency that could build on anything explaining why, most of the time, we still choose WordPress for our clients.
What a CMS Actually Is.
A content management system is the backend that lets non-technical people run their own website. It stores your text, images and videos in an organised way and lets you add, edit and publish without calling a developer. It also handles multiple users with different roles, so your marketing officer can publish articles while the intern can only draft them. A website you cannot update yourself goes stale, and a stale website quietly costs you customers.
Why WordPress Keeps Winning for Client Sites.
Ownership comes first. A WordPress site is yours. Your code, your content, your database, hosted wherever you choose, movable whenever you choose. Website builders rent you a presence on their platform under their rules. That difference feels abstract until the day you want to leave.
The ecosystem comes second. Thousands of themes and plugins mean most requirements, booking systems, member areas, multilingual content, event calendars, are a configuration task rather than a development project. That keeps build costs honest and change requests fast.
Running costs come third. WordPress itself is free and open source. What you pay for is design, setup and upkeep, which is exactly where money belongs, on the things that differentiate you rather than on platform licensing.
The WooCommerce and Payments Advantage.
For Trinidad and Tobago businesses the deciding factor is often simpler than any of the above. Getting paid. WooCommerce, the WordPress ecommerce layer, connects directly to PowerTranz, formerly First Atlantic Commerce, through the plugin we build and maintain. Card payments settle to your local bank account, which foreign platforms still handle awkwardly at best. If your website needs a checkout, this alone usually settles the platform question.
What WordPress Is Not.
Honesty time. WordPress is not the answer to everything, and we know because we regularly build past it. Custom web applications, high-performance platforms and products with unusual requirements deserve purpose-built engineering. This very website is custom-built, because our site is a product we iterate on constantly and we wanted total control of every millisecond of it. That is the point. The platform should follow the job. When a client's job is a professional business site or store that their own team can run for years, WordPress wins that brief far more often than it loses it.
Getting WordPress Right.
The gap between a great WordPress site and a liability is setup and care. Quality hosting, a lean set of well-chosen plugins, proper security hardening and a maintenance routine of updates and backups. Set up well and looked after, a WordPress site is fast, secure and boring in the best possible way. Set up carelessly, it is the platform every horror story is about. If you have a WordPress site nobody is looking after, that is worth fixing this month, not eventually.
