The Benefits of Using Managed WordPress Hosting for Your Enterprise Site
You’ve heard the rumors and seen the stats. WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites, easily making it the most popular CMS today. Beyond a large percentage of market share, it’s also useful as a solution for any type of website, from personal blogs to professional businesses.
But, is it right for your enterprise site?
Switching your brand’s site to a new CMS isn’t an easy decision to make. But WordPress offers some incredible benefits, making it the ideal solution for large-scale brands and enterprise marketing teams.
So, why is WordPress the best CMS for enterprise sites?
- It’s much more than a blogging platform, capable of handling millions of site visitors, eCommerce products, and security concerns.
- It includes a bunch of benefits, like SEO assistance, nearly endless customization options, and a helpful community.
- With the right hosting partner, it can free up your marketing team to work on what they do best (instead of handling hosting tasks).
Let’s dive into each of these a little more!
The Evolution of WordPress, from Blogging Platform to Full-Blown CMS
It’s true, WordPress originally launched in 2003 for people publishing content, like bloggers. Since then, however, it’s evolved to include a whole host features that make it possible for creators and business owners to build any type of site on the CMS! This is largely due to the incredible WordPress community and the wide variety of themes and plugins available to help you customize your site. We’ll go into more details about that in a minute.
Today, all types of sites use WordPress. You’ll find:
- Online stores and eCommerce sites
- Enterprise brands
- Large-scale publications
- Creative portfolio sites
- Personal blogs
- Review sites
Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s a look at some big-name brands using WordPress for their enterprise sites.
Examples of Large Brands Using WordPress
The Washington Post
As you probably guessed, WordPress naturally evolved to support large publications. The CMS makes it easy for publishers to produce lots of articles (especially with the Gutenberg editor), readers to consume lots of content, and search engines to index it all.
Even if you’re not running a major daily publication, this is helpful for your enterprise site because you can trust in the SEO benefits of WordPress. (Think about it – an organization like The Washington Post would not leave that to chance!) Tech Crunch is another great example of an enterprise WordPress publication.
Sony Music
Yep, this leader of the entertainment industry uses WordPress to power its website. From featuring artists to sharing the latest Sony news, WordPress makes it easy to share different categories of content. No matter what your marketing team is after, WordPress probably has a way to do it.
The Walt Disney Company
One of the world’s most magical studios uses WordPress to tell its digital story. It’s a reliable way to bring your brand to consumers and keep your content up to date! And thanks to the ease of WordPress, your marketing team can focus on updating pages with the latest information, instead of fumbling with servers.
AMC
I’ve talked a lot about written content, but WordPress can masterfully display visual content also, as seen on AMC’s website. The entertainment channel uses its site to promote its TV shows, so it leverages photographs and videos to share those stories.
Harvard
If you’re at all worried about professionalism, don’t be—even prestigious organizations like Harvard use WordPress. One of the reasons is that it’s a reliable platform, so you can trust that your organization’s online presence will always be accessible for web visitors.
No matter what content type your enterprise business is focused on, WordPress will help you show it off easily and beautifully, while also keeping your site secure and speedy.
Now that you’ve seen some examples of enterprise brands using WordPress, let’s talk more about the benefits!
Benefits of WordPress for Enterprise Sites
International Capabilities
It’s exciting when your business starts to stretch into new markets, but preparing your website to meet the needs of your new customers can be a huge and highly technical undertaking. With WordPress, the basics are already in place so you’re ready to reach even the furthest international customers in meaningful and effective ways.
Out-of-the-box, WordPress is available in more than 100 languages, and plugins can be used to localize your checkout and shipping options based on region.
Globalizing your content to appear in the native language of your international consumers makes them feel valued and helps you build rapport no matter where in the world they come across your brand.
Easily Optimize for SEO
WordPress makes it easy for anyone on your team to optimize every single post and page for SEO! With just the built-in functionality of the CMS, you’ll be able to optimize your permalink structure, create meaningful meta descriptions, generate XML sitemaps, and so much more.
As far as written content goes, not only do you have full control over things like heading tags and URLs, but you can easily assign categories and tags to help group content together. (This is very helpful if you’re following Hubspot’s topic cluster methodology.)
WordPress also gives you quite a bit of control over images, including the ability to easily add alt text and relevant titles. It may not sound like much, but the little things like this can make a big difference when it comes to SEO.
Under the hood of WordPress, you’ll find that even the code is set up for SEO success, because there’s not a lot of extra fluff. It’s simple, which makes it easier for search engines to index your site. And if you’re ever looking for more control (whether it’s related to content, images, or the build of your site) there are tons of WordPress plugins that can extend functionality to improve SEO.
As you can see, WordPress offers a bunch of benefits for SEO. Now, let’s talk about the benefits of using open-source software for your enterprise site!
Open-source Software Means Endless Customization Options
WordPress is entirely open-source, which means it’s free to use and modify as you see fit. So beyond the basic options built into WordPress, you’ll find thousands of plugins and themes to extend the functionality of what it can do for your business.
This is great for your enterprise site, because there’s really no limit to what you’re looking to create. Whether you need a publishing platform to release new content every hour or scalable infrastructure to handle millions of pageviews, you’ll find a WordPress set up that can do it.
And since WordPress is open-source, there’s a collaborative community surrounding it. Which brings us to our next point…
Flexibility Meets Scalability
Because of the open-source nature of WordPress, flexibility is inherent to the CMS. Anyone can make or modify a new tool, theme, or plugin that can help you meet the needs of your site and its visitors.
That flexibility also ushers in a certain level of scalability that enterprises require. As you grow, your site traffic will keep pace, and WordPress will continue to perform whether you’ve got one visitor or one million. Make sure to choose a WordPress host that places an emphasis on scalability by including tools and features specific to the needs of enterprises, such caching tools to improve your page load speeds.
The WordPress Community is a Valuable Resource
WordPress powers more than 43% of the web, which means there are a lot of people working with it every single day. That’s beneficial for your enterprise business because you’ll always have plenty of people to turn to if you need help. Whether it’s hiring a WordPress developer, finding a WordPress agency to partner with, working with the support team of a managed WordPress host, or browsing forums for answers, there are people who base their entire careers on WordPress, and they’re beyond willing to help you find solutions.
Even though WordPress is an online CMS, there is a real-life community built around it. Users get together in cities around the world for WordPress meetups, and even put on conferences called WordCamps with speakers, breakout sessions, and workshops.
If you’re nervous about making the switch to WordPress, just know that there’s an entire community waiting and willing to help you join.
Bonus: Get Even More Benefits with a Managed WordPress Host
The benefits we’ve covered so far are great, and apply pretty broadly to any site running on WordPress. To really take advantage of everything the platform has to offer, however, we recommend pairing it with a managed WordPress hosting partner running a cloud environment, like WP Engine.
There’s a lot to cover here, so let’s break it down to the benefits of a managed WordPress host and the benefits of a cloud hosting environment.
Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting for Enterprise Sites
When you use a managed WordPress hosting provider, you can offload tasks that your team is probably currently handling in-house, freeing them up to focus on more important things.
One example is nightly backups. When you host your site on WP Engine, we’ll automatically take a backup of your site every single night, and store it for 30 days. Should you ever need to rollback to a previous version, you can quickly do that with a few clicks right within the WP Engine dashboard. No need to manually download, upload, export, or import anything!
A managed WordPress host will also offer benefits in security and performance, because they optimize your site on the server level.
Take WP Engine, for example. As your hosting provider, we make sure the server your site runs on is up to date with the latest security practices, fully-optimized for WordPress-specific performance, and taking advantage of things like caching.
This means your team doesn’t need to worry about optimizing anything on the back-end of WordPress – it’s all handled for you.
With WP Engine, you’ll also get to take advantage of features like free SSL certificates, WordPress core updates, and 24/7/365 support (should anything go awry).
Now, let’s talk about cloud hosting.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting for Enterprise Sites
So, what is cloud hosting? With traditional hosting setups, your site would be hosted on a single server somewhere around the world. That works fine, but it’s a little limiting in terms of configuration. With cloud hosting, on the other hand, your site is hosted on a network of servers. This allows for advanced configurations that give your site better uptime, better security, and a better overall experience for your site visitors.
With a cloud platform like WP Engine’s, your site will be hosted on a finely-tuned architecture that’s scalable, resilient, and faster than ever. (With no work from your team required!) Thanks to a partnership with Google Cloud Platform, you really never have to worry about the technical side of your site. And if you ever have questions, again, you can turn to WP Engine’s expert support team.
WP Engine for Enterprise Teams
WP Engine is on a mission to help creative teams do their best work. That’s why we created a powerful platform that enables you to reliably scale your most mission-critical websites without a worry in the world…and we didn’t stop there.
Our enterprise products and services are custom-built to provide in-house marketing teams with the independence, agility, and support they need to create their best work on the WordPress platform. Learn more when you speak to an expert or explore our enterprise WordPress plans!
