Building WordPress Properly, Not Quickly

Why WordPress still makes sense

It runs a large share of the web, your team can edit it, developers are easy to find, and you own it outright. Those four together are hard to beat for a business site.

The criticism it attracts is mostly about how it is built rather than about the platform.

Four things that decide the outcome

1. Plugin discipline — every plugin is code you did not write and must maintain
2. Theme choice — a bloated multipurpose theme is a permanent tax
3. Content structure — proper post types and fields, not everything in one editor
4. Maintenance ownership — someone updates it, or it becomes a liability

A site with fourteen plugins and a page-builder theme is not a cheaper site. It is a site whose costs arrive later, as slowness, breakage and a rebuild.

Structure your content properly

Services, case studies, team members and locations are different things and should be different post types with their own fields.

Put them all in the page editor and you get inconsistency, poor reuse and content that cannot be listed or filtered sensibly.

Speed is a business property

• Good hosting, which costs less than the traffic a slow site loses
• Images sized and compressed properly
• Caching configured, not just installed
• Fewer scripts, particularly third-party ones

Plan for the person who edits it

The site will be edited by someone in your business who is not a developer. If editing is confusing, it will not be edited, and the site will go stale.

Clear fields, sensible defaults and a short written guide are worth more than another feature.

Frequently asked questions