Do I need to move from WordPress?

Possibly or possibly not!

A large part of our work involves benchmarking existing websites for speed and SEO capabilities and suggesting ways of improvement. The most frequent type of website we encounter is a WordPress site. Not surprising, as over a third of the world's websites are built on this platform. In fact some members of our team are WordPress experts and have spent many years building them. So we know WordPress inside out!

The performance of WordPress sites can be improved to match that of a headless CMS + CDN delivery. Although this ability is not native and it is not built in to the core WordPress architecture, it is possible. Our approach is always to search out better ways of doing things and we have developed the ideal stack of WordPress plugins to ensure we can achieve top performance. Adding plugins and using themes that get abandoned is always an issue. So, from the outset, as a WordPress site is being built, we use the minimum number of Plugins that are required to give the best performance. In WordPress, 'bloat code' is inherent, this means that further work is always required to identify and remove this code that slows down the complete site. But we can do it!

Our Approach

So we have taken a different approach, and researched extensively to find a better way of doing things. For larger companies with complex websites and and large number of content creators, we like CMS's and currently use Netlify CMS. In order to hit the performance nail straight on the head we build static sites using html, css and javascript React. This means we are not chasing our tails trying to improve performance. It is already built in, from the start, although we go the extra mile and carefully engineer our code to ensure there is nothing to slow things down.

For smaller sites WordPress is perfectly suitable, given that we know how to make it perform.

We Do Not Reinvent the Wheel

Many of our customer's WordPress sites are very presentable and well designed, so we would not suggest a re-design if it is not necessary. Although we can always improve the performance of an existing site.

If required we can take an existing theme or design and re-create it in streamlined code that eliminates bloat, runs efficiently with perfect precision.

Functionality

With Netlify CMS, we can add we can add any form of functionality (exactly as is possible with WordPress) that you require using API's.

Netlify CMS or Wordpress, either way we have it covered.