Frequently Asked Questions about Enterprise WordPress

One interesting thing about leaving a job and looking for a new job and reconnecting with old colleagues from other companies and talking to new people when networking is that you end up talking about the job you just left quite a bit to explain what you’ve been doing for the past seven years.

I’m definitely not out of practice talking about Enterprise WordPress, so this is all rather fresh in my mind, but just the same, I thought I would write down some handy talking points for myself, written in the way I’ve been talking about them for a bunch of years that may or may not reflect exactly the value drivers and product marketing language visible in any particular website or content marketing collateral.

The answers below are most, most definitely, my personal opinions, but I assure you they are informed by working with many large companies with complicated WordPress rigs.

None of this intended to be super spicy, though a few of these takes might be perceived as hot in some corners. If you have a way of doing things that you like, and it works for you and your customers, keep up the good work.

Questions and Answers

What the heck does Enterprise mean in this context?
It means really big companies and organizations. Think: NASA, News Corp, Salesforce, Capgemini. Fortune 500 companies, large news publishers, US government agencies, and a bunch of others that I can’t mention by name in regulated industries like Financial Services (aka banks) and Life Sciences (aka pharma). You’ll often see it mentioned that WordPress runs 43% of the Web. This is a simplification; the caveat goes something like this: for all known websites, WordPress is detected in 43% of the domains. Does that track to the Enterprise? Almost! Last time I counted, WordPress was in use by at least 30% of the Fortune 100, somewhere in their online business.

I thought WordPress was for blogs, mostly?
Ha ha, yes. I am writing a blog post in WordPress right now. It turns out the best CMS is the one everyone already knows how to use. WordPress has been making its way into Enterprise-sized companies and big organizations for a long time, because people were familiar to it, and it solved problems that legacy (aka old) CMS platforms didn’t tackle in easy or pleasant ways. Sometimes an Enterprise company starts using WordPress for their “blog” or “newsroom” or other content marketing, and ends up enjoying it so much they move the whole darn website to WordPress.

OK, but what about security?
There are a lot of things you can do to make sure WordPress is secure. In some cases, one is answer is “find a secure platform that can help you stop yourself from making too many security mistakes.” In many cases, the answer is also “write good clean efficient code,” but that takes extra work. Some people don’t want to do extra work, so the next best thing is “find someone you trust to write good clean efficient code.” And escape and/or sanitize your form fields. And keep your plugins updated. About that…

When I used WordPress, the plugins were a pain in the neck to keep updated?
Ha ha, yes. They were. Things have generally been better since automated plugin and theme updates became a thing in 2020. I can’t believe they weren’t a thing before 2020, but there we were, and now here we are. All of which is to say, it’s easier to keep your third-party plugins updated nowadays. But how many third-party plugins should you be using for Enterprise WordPress? Not that many! I worked on Technology Partnerships for a few years at an Enterprise WordPress provider, and I am here to tell you that there are more than 59,000 plugins in the open source project library, but there are probably closer to 79 that I would even consider using on an Enterprise WordPress site. The concept of “plugins” is super-useful, though, even if it’s not for third-party stuff you download from the library for free, or buy from a website for a few hundred bucks a year. Writing your own plugins for custom functionality is A Very Enterprise WordPress Thing To Do, as long as you’re willing to maintain them.

I use this page builder on all my WordPress sites. Is it good for Enterprise?
Ha ha, no. Seriously. Well, I mean, look. If performance (aka make website go fast) is important to you, I do not recommend using any “page builder” other than the native Gutenberg Block Editor, which is quite serviceable and still getting better, despite what you might’ve read on Reddit. It’s good, and fast, and getting better with every release. The others will all, without fail, slow down your website more than necessary. (Prove me wrong, kids.) That might be fine if performance isn’t important, and you want a quicker route to a drag-and-drop experience for your end users, but I would make the case that unless you have already built that experience for other customers and everyone loves it, you are better off with Gutenberg.

What about developers? How easy is it to find someone who knows how to work on an Enterprise WordPress site?
Easy enough. But, it’s kinda like what I said about plugins: The community of WordPress enthusiasts, professionals, and experts is vast. You might not want to navigate it alone. It might be better to choose a development agency from a curated list that an Enterprise WordPress platform recommends. They are not recommending them because they make a lot of money from them; they are recommending them because they want customers to succeed at using WordPress in the Enterprise. I mean, look, your cousin/intern/marketer might know how to do some WordPress development, but for the most part, you wouldn’t want them personally authoring code that’s supposed to run on a high-traffic, high-availability business critical website. There are experts for that. You can pay them. Sometimes, you can even hire them.

Isn’t WordPress free, though? How does anyone make money selling free software?
Lots of open source software is free, but you need to run it on a computer somewhere, and if you’re doing that in an Enterprise way (aka performant and secure), you’re going to need computers that are always on, with automatic scaling, in a secure facility, that are very fast, etc., etc., so you’re probably going to want some sort of Managed WordPress Platform. Or if you prefer DIY approaches, you can choose your own adventure on a public cloud provider like AWS, GCP, or Azure. Some assembly required. (Quite a bit of assembly and maintenance required, really.) So, like any other free open-source software, you’re not buying a license to use WordPress, you’re paying someone to host it for you, and in most cases for some degree of support and/or professional services to help get things done.

Any Questions?

Feel free to fill out this quick form to submit another Enterprise WordPress question, and I’ll answer by email and/or add them to this post, or maybe a future post, etc.