Why WordPress Makes More Sense for the Enterprise

Digital channels have become the primary means of interaction for audiences around the world, and businesses across every industry now face a growing need to engage these audiences with frictionless digital experiences that amaze and delight. 

Navigating those expectations and responding accordingly can be difficult for any business, but enterprise organizations face specific challenges in this new era of digital acceleration, often due to their traditional reliance on cumbersome, legacy web architecture that prevents teams from moving with needed speed and agility. 

This ebook, co-authored with Box UK, a specialist enterprise development consultancy and WP Engine Strategic Agency Partner, offers a closer look at the challenges today’s enterprise businesses face, and the reasons why more of them are looking at WordPress as a nimble, high-ROI alternative to the proprietary systems of the past.

Download the ebook now to read the full report

The Rise of Enterprise WordPress

WordPress has become the world’s favorite Content Management System (CMS) due to its flexibility, familiarity, and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). But even as a growing number of large-scale organizations realize these benefits, WordPress is not lacking in enterprise detractors. 

Some remain wary of bringing open source software into their technology stacks, while others continue to associate WordPress with independent blogging platforms and other small-scale sites. 

But this is simply no longer the case. 

As part of a comprehensive digital solution, WordPress provides the equivalent, if not superior, capabilities of any other CMS to deliver the scalability, security, and performance an enterprise demands. The vast supporting ecosystem of WordPress technology and development partners is able to deliver far greater value and Return on Investment (ROI) from the platform than other proprietary alternatives. 

To bring this into sharp focus from an enterprise perspective, if a digital project is scoped at $1 million (£750, 000), the WordPress portion of that, because it’s open source (and free from licensing fees), will be 10-20% of the total cost. 

Meanwhile, a proprietary CMS often sucks up 40-60% of the total project cost, sometimes in licensing fees alone. This means with WordPress, up to 90% of the budget can be spent on additional customizations and services that will help grow your business and speed time to market, versus the proprietary model, in which the best-case scenario provides for 60% (and it’s oftentimes far less than that). 

Because WordPress provides room for added value and increased opportunity for ROI, its financial benefits alone have become hard to ignore. 

As a result, WP Engine Agency Partners like Box UK are seeing more and more enterprise organizations turn to WordPress, attracted by its cost-effectiveness, as well as the increased flexibility this open source platform delivers over proprietary, license-based solutions. 

Challenges Facing the Enterprise

Through its work supporting the digital evolution of enterprise organizations including RS Components, Sodexo and Dexerto, Box UK has faced a number of common challenges that can be grouped into a few high-level themes:

Difficulty moving quickly

Large, complex enterprise organizations often lack the flexibility and speed needed to react quickly to new trends, demands, opportunities, and innovations, leaving them behind the curve and making it difficult to realize efficient ROI. This is frequently compounded by sprawling legacy systems that have grown organically over time, which can result in suffocating levels of technical debt and make implementing improvements a challenging and risky process.

Lacking a modern customer experience

These days, consumers don’t only compare the digital experience you provide against others in your industry or the enterprise space. Instead, they take their cues from leaders across the digital landscape, requiring a greater focus on experience and interface design that’s intuitive, engaging, and dynamic. The message for large-scale organizations is clear: the worse the experience for your users, the higher the negative impact on organic rankings and traffic, user trust and satisfaction, and subsequent business performance.

Disparate channels to coordinate

Long gone are the days when a company’s website was the sole source of information about a business. Today a user may interact with your brand across a wide range of touchpoints, both online and offline, in the course of their journey. With each additional touchpoint, the challenge of ensuring a consistent experience—vital to maintaining consumer engagement and trust— intensifies, as does the need to streamline content delivery and reduce the burden on your administrative teams. 

Once again, enterprise organizations may find themselves hindered by disparate legacy systems that don’t support integrations needed for a seamless customer journey and instead present data silos that prevent a personalized and relevant experience.  

With a powerful supporting ecosystem, WordPress provides near limitless flexibility when it comes to adding functionality and joining up systems, with a wide range of implementation options to support multiple delivery channels and data sources. 

WordPress for the Enterprise: FAQs

Why is it important that WordPress is open source?

As an open source solution, WordPress offers a clear cost-benefit over many established enterprise providers, reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by minimizing the percentage of budget invested into licensing, and allowing this to be pumped back into other areas of the project or wider strategy. 

The open source nature of WordPress also means that it can be easily integrated with other solutions, allowing enterprise organizations to spin up full ecosystems in much shorter timescales and bring their offerings to market more quickly, as well as pivot in response to changing requirements.  

WordPress is additionally supported by a significant pool of development talent, further shortening time to market and supporting greater innovation as knowledge and experience are shared among the community. 

Not only this, but the popularity of WordPress means that it’s typically more familiar and usable for content creators and other back-end administrators. In turn, WordPress typically requires less time for onboarding and training, making it even easier to roll out. 

All of these factors result in increased speed, improved agility, and greater value delivered, leading to faster and higher ROI for enterprise organizations.

Is WordPress secure enough for large-scale enterprises?

For enterprise organizations dealing with exceptionally high levels of traffic and extremely sensitive data, ensuring the security of the technology solutions they choose is understandably a priority. 

While WordPress itself is highly secure when it’s properly managed and correctly maintained, an enterprise hosting provider can augment that security posture, meeting the highest standards for security and compliance. 

WP Engine has invested significantly in building its security capabilities to effectively meet the needs of enterprise customers with SOC 2 compliance across its platform, as well as DDoS protection, WAF setup, and more. 

Choosing a managed WordPress hosting partner to take care of your platform further safeguards security, and is a recommended approach for organizations operating at an enterprise scale. Your managed provider should take a proactive approach to monitoring for security issues and vulnerabilities, as well as implementing updates and patches in order to maintain the availability and stability of your platform.

Can WordPress offer enterprise-grade performance and scale?

A common argument in the enterprise space is that WordPress isn’t able to power the large-scale digital footprints demanded by the enterprise. This is a concern that’s been proven to be unfounded time and again, with WordPress powering content-heavy sites serving millions of users each month. 

The right hosting partner again delivers crucial value here, providing access to highly scalable infrastructure built specifically for the enterprise, with networks of dozens of data centers around the world and ultra-fast content delivery over a global edge network (Content Delivery Network or CDN) that ensure the highest levels of performance no matter where or how your users are accessing your services. 

Your hosting partner should also work with you to ensure your installation scales as needed to support long-term growth, and responds to predicted activity spikes, for example, in response to product launches, marketing campaigns, or industry events and announcements.

The Future of WordPress is in the Enterprise

WordPress has fully established itself in the enterprise, delivering the high levels of security, scalability, availability, and analytical insight large-scale organizations require, alongside the established benefits of the platform that provide the flexibility and speed required to drive improved and faster ROI, unleash developer and designer creativity, and reduce Total Cost of Ownership. 

WordPress has also evolved to serve the specific needs of the enterprise as a secondary CMS, or as part of a headless model. These innovative approaches increasingly represent the future of the platform, driving further agility, performance, and value. Perhaps that’s why the WordPress Economy drives more than half a trillion in revenue, according to a first of its kind, global study involving more than 100 companies, including WP Engine and Box UK, that are helping to drive the WordPress ecosystem forward.

In order to realize the value of WordPress, you need to work with partners that specialize in the enterprise space. WP Engine, the #1 platform for WordPress, partners with leading technology vendors to offer highly scalable WordPress hosting solutions, with a suite of supporting tools and services that provide a best-in-class environment to manage and optimize enterprise WordPress sites. 

WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress hosting platform combines the power of open source with performance analytics, creative agility, and enterprise-grade, SOC-2 compliant security. It also includes enterprise infrastructure with burst capacity, high availability and developer flexibility solutions, along with a world-renowned customer success team to drive faster time to market and ongoing optimization.

Together with Atlas, the complete headless solution for WordPress, WP Engine and its Agency Partners like Box UK are well-positioned to support enterprise organizations with multiple approaches to their digital evolution. 

Download the full ebook to find out more!