Future-proof your website

Transcript

On this episode, we’re going to be answering a few key questions that we’ve had from a few clients recently talking about how easy it is to scale a WordPress website, concerns around the future proofing of it, and just what support and ongoing updates we’ll help them with.
So today, we’re gonna be talking about how WordPress can be quite future proofing for a client. So take a scenario, where we’ve got a client who’s got a standard brochure website. And as time goes on their business changes, and they need to add additional functionality. Typically, we see this in circumstances where clients need to add ecommerce into an existing website. Typically with other platforms, this is actually quite difficult to do and requires a whole replatforming exercise. However, with WordPress, the best thing about it is that we can actually add that into the existing clients website. This enables the client then to take advantage of the platform that they’ve already got keep intact, all the functionality they’ve already built into the site, but also add more functionality, which basically makes their investment in WordPress from the outset, a really great one in terms of ROI, because it means that we’re never going to turn around and say to the client, you need a whole new website, we just sort of say, we can then add additional functionality or change what you’ve already got with WordPress. And this makes it much more future proof. A good example of this is we’ve got WordPress websites right now that go back five or six years were right back to when responsive web design was becoming a really big thing to make websites fit onto mobiles, tablets and other devices like that. And the great thing is that these websites are still in existence today. So we’ve kept the platform’s up to date, we’ve added new functionality to these clients sites, quite a lot of them, especially over the COVID period have actually gone ecommerce when they will not previously ecommerce. And the best thing is a very minimal investment, they’ve managed to take advantage of the platform they’ve already got and grow it and still stick with the same WordPress core base that they’ve already had. This is absolutely brilliant for clients who want who were looking at cost overall, over a longer period of time. And we can realistically say that customers that move to WordPress from other platforms can expect a good three months three to five year lifespan out of their website, at the very least as long as the time has been put into the exercise right up front. And yeah, so it’s a design that’s going to be timeless. And quite often we don’t even go back and revisit the designs because they stood the test of time.
That’s really good to know about the future proofing of WordPress websites. So what if clients are wanting to be quite agile in the business strategy and introduce new products or introduce new types of content? How would WordPress enable that?
That’s a great question. So apart from adding functionality, WordPress has the ability to categorise content in different ways. And quite typically, everyone that’s ever logged into a WordPress website will see posts and pages. But this isn’t restricted to posts and pages. And quite often we create custom post types and custom content groups, which could be team members, or it could be products, even if they’re not selling ecommerce. And these can be added into existing WordPress websites and then follow the same structure from an admin perspective, to ensure that the client that the client’s website works the same way they’re familiar with it from how to edit it. But the existing WordPress platform can then live with what they’ve they sort of add in afterwards. So it really is a great platform for growing things as time goes on. And yet the number of times that we’ve added big areas of content into websites to grow the site significantly since it was built, it’s been quite considerable, really. And yeah, sometimes you can end up with a website that is nothing like how it was originally designed. So it was originally designed to one brief then as time goes on, pages get added new sections get added. And you can get a bit of site bloat with all websites as this goes on. So it’s always worth having the agency go back over that and just sort of tidy up every now and then to make sure that it’s not growing out of hand, or it’s actually got a real purpose for why why are you doing that? But obviously, we appreciate that everybody’s businesses do change over time. And, you know, needs change from a functionality and content perspective. And being able to stick with the same web platform is one of those certainties that that business can then have, where they know exactly what they get Have a guess how they’re going to work it. And they know that it can be adapted based on on what they need to do going forwards.
So with that adaptability, you mentioned earlier about the COVID period and how you’ve helped certain clients to kind of adapt their strategy so that they can continue with their business goals throughout a period that ultimately disrupted the market for quite a few different people. How in regards to the dynamism of WordPress, does it help people to make those changes really quickly? And essentially help support them through, like trying times? And how do we offer support around that as well?
No, exactly. Right. I mean, you know, taking the COVID period, as a great example, a lot of businesses were looking at changing their focus of how they work. So traditional bricks and mortar retailers, who never even looked at doing online very quickly had to realise that that was what was going on. Existing online retailers had to quickly adapt to a new delivery processes like clicking collect, and things like that. And that’s exactly where we come in, where clients typically come to us with a challenge where they say, for example, our website currently does this. But we really have got to very quickly adapt it to be able to fit with the new regulations that we’ve been told to adhere to. And that’s where we, as an agency, use our experience to say, Okay, well, we know we built your website, so we know exactly how to change that for you. We can then implement changes to the site very quickly, we’re staying enable them to continue trading or in the cases of websites that weren’t directly trading previously, start trading during the especially during this lockdown period that we’ve just been gone through. It actually over the period, all the clients that we implemented ecommerce for the first time for have actually grown phenomenally well. And a lot of them have now kept that as a business process going forward. So it’s been really beneficial to quite a few clients, and those clients who were very stuck with sort of your bricks and mortar and didn’t really adapt, I think I’ve seen that they’re still struggling. I think this change to buying online ecommerce has been accelerated and during 2020 is only going to continue.
Thank you for your time, James. So I guess the key takeaways on this episode are that WordPress is really responsive, it can adapt to your business change. It’s really good in Agile times for disrupting the marketplace in terms of helping you change strategy and releasing new content. So yeah, if you have any questions on what we’ve been talking about today, please get in touch on Hello at so marketing.com