iPages vs Wordpress

WordPress is a widely used CMS platform, hosted at your location of choice. Here at iPages, we understand this is a common choice online and have taken some time to list the reasons why our clients choose to use iPages over WordPress.

This is not intended to be exhaustive or even the most common WordPress objections, these just happen to be the common themes we hear from our community. We hope this is helpful and it would be great to get your comments. 

1) Effort

It may seem strange to start with effort, as expending effort building a website is not a bad thing. However, we find at iPages that when our partner designers build on WordPress, there is extensive effort put into activities which seem routine, and fairly standard.

WordPress is at base a blogging platform and so the effort comes when trying to build a web solution, which is more than just a blog, from many component parts and plugins. Sunset Design noted 'even to do decent SEO you have to load a plugin'. For our designers, we have built iPages to ensure that all the functionality needed for a website is built into the platform. This includes customising SEO tags, marketing emails, contact forms, automated emails, and web stats. 

It could be said that this 'effort' is one-off, so what's the problem? From our experience, installing WordPress plugins is not a one-off activity as upgrades are required as the platform moves on, and the effort begins again.  

For individuals without programming experience, it can be hard to manage the website that has been built as there is 'far too much php' for the average web user.

2) E-commerce

E-commerce is enabled through WordPress using a WooCommerce plugin. This effectively gives you a cart, bolted onto your blog. WooCommerce then requires a payment gateway plugin and security certificates to be added, just to get off the ground. 

Once set-up this can work well for many however, as a businesses grow we find that they require more than just a cart, and would like to start gaining insights from their sales information, along with analysing stock and accounting movements. 

iPages presents a complete e-commerce solution, which enables businesses to grow into the extensive functionality. Initial setup is simple as you can get selling without any integrations or plugins. 

3) Security 

Security is probably the most common reason we find clients choose iPages over WordPress. WordPress is an open-source platform, which can be customised through any plugins, and hosted in any location. This can lead to multiple sources of vulnerabilities. iThemes cites a recent report by wpscan.org which shared that of the 3,972 known WordPress security vulnerabilities:

• 52% are from WordPress plugins
• 37% are from core WordPress
• 11% are from WordPress themes

WordPress itself can be made incredibly secure as long as WordPress security best practices are followed. These best practices include regularly updating plugins (more effort), continually monitoring your hosting, and ensuring your WordPress version itself is up to date. 

Sunset Design cited that it was the 'hacking on older versions' that caused many of their clients to move over to iPages.

Being a hosted platform, iPages can assure security from your front-end look all the way through to your hosting. We monitor our servers continually and, when iPages is upgraded, this is done with no security risk to your website. 

4) Speed

It is now old news that site speed affects your rankings. However, there are still many websites which do not consider their page load speeds when building and maintaining their online presence. WordPress websites can be hosted at a location of your choice. This offers flexibility, but it can lead to website owners making expedient hosting decisions based upon cost, not quality. Cheaper hosting tends to be at the cost of your site speed and as the blogger Gregory Ciotti puts it 'without taking the right precautions, you could end up with a sluggish site.'

As iPages is a hosted platform, page load speeds are optimised as part of the package and the development team are constantly working to reduce site speed.

Further information about the impact of website speed on traffic, conversions and revenue can be found in a recent blog here. 

5) Versatility

Typically WordPress websites are built using themes or templated designs. This assures that your chosen look works across all devices and can be a good way to get a quick front-end design. This does however, mean that designing anything out of the ordinary within WordPress can be challenging as the blogging platform is not extensively versatile. 

iPages requires each website to be built and customised, offering a high level of versatility for designers and customers.  

Want to know more? 

There are many reasons why our clients choose WordPress and we understand that this is not a simple choice for some. Should you be looking into WordPress, and would like to know more, our team would be happy to speak to you so do not hesitate to get in touch.