Why These Experts Think WordPress is the Best Choice for Startups

WordPress is one of the best content management systems (CMSs) of the world. There are more than 35% WordPress powered websites available online. It is fast, simple, and most importantly FREE. But is it scalable for new businesses?

We interviewed 20+ startup founders and WordPress experts to ask whether WordPress will suit their business? and Why Startups should choose WordPress

Learn what they all had to say about it.

What Will You Learn From This Article?

It is a fact that WordPress is booming and more people are using it every day for their business and personal activities. The article will provide you with more insights and will help you in making an informed decision about the type of CMS/platform you should use to launch your business website.

To make it clear, here are a few lessons you can probably learn from this expert roundup.

• How scalable WordPress is and how you can use it for your startup?
• What is the most cost-effective website platform for startup websites?
• Plugins and extensions that can help grow your startup’s website with ease.
• Help startup founders make an aware decision.

Let’s get started.

Jeff Weese 

Owner of Joslex Studios

The distinctive advantage of WordPress is undoubtedly the open source community that has created nearly endless functionality in modular form. There is a level of comfort in knowing that whatever the future may hold, the ability to expand the capabilities of the website is often as simple as a plugin install, or is otherwise generally easy to develop.

Ivica Delic 

Owner of FreelancersTools

I believe that most of the startups choose WordPress over other CMSs to create their business website is due to the fantastic WP Community. It’s so accessible and its usage can be expanded further with the help of plugins. I do think its scalable with the startup. Moreover, you can make it even more flexible.

I believe that most of the startups choose WordPress over other CMSs to create their business website is due to the fantastic WP Community

Nicolas Lecocq

Founder of OceanWP

Personally, I have tried some CMS platforms such as Drupal, Joomla, Prestashop, Shopify, etc. The main reason most people use WordPress is that it is very easy to use and you can do many things with – like big or small – customizations for your website. It also has an amazing plugin Elementor. It makes WordPress create any type of website easily. Also, it is very scalable because most of the popular companies are using it without a problem. Even if your company becomes big, it isn’t a major problem.

The main reason most people use WordPress is that it is very easy to use and you can do many things with – like big or small – customizations for your website.

Kyle Van Deusen

Owner of OGAL Web Design

WordPress is a great CMS for businesses because it’s open-source and scalable. A lot of people don’t understand this concept when they choose a hosted platform. Sites like Wix or Weebly are really only renting a website space. You cannot move your website anywhere, so technically it’s not “yours”.

Another major problem with these types of systems is that these closed systems are very limited in your ability to customize them to your needs. That may be fine to start out with, but as your business grows you will quickly begin to be hampered by these limitations. The only option at that point is to completely start over from square one.

With WordPress, you control and own everything. While there is a bit more of a learning curve for beginners, as your business grows you will be thankful that WordPress is able to infinitely scale with your business. You can choose your hosting environment, resources, page size and have complete control over every aspect.

With WordPress, you control and own everything. While there is a bit more of a learning curve for beginners, as your business grows you will be thankful that WordPress is able to infinitely scale with your business.

Muhammad Adnan

Cofounder at WPBrigade

WordPress is easy to get started with. It comes with a lot of themes/plugins to get your site up and running within a few days. This lets it focus on the startup idea. You can also use the same to later showcase something interesting on your website. WordPress is flexible enough to achieve all your desires.

It comes with a lot of themes/plugins to get your site up and running within a few days. This lets it focus on the startup idea.

Michael Short 

CEO & Founder of WaaS-Pro.com

WordPress is the best CMS for startups for several reasons. The open source model makes building a professional website both affordable and attainable. The flexibility for startups is incredible as well. With so many paid and free plugins available in the market, there’s really nothing that you can’t accomplish. And, because WordPress is the most used CMS in the world, it has been adopted by both small and large businesses and has proven to be extremely scalable.

There’s no reason a startup (or any company for that matter) shouldn’t choose WordPress as their CMS of choice.

Connor Gibson 

Startup Founder

It saves so much time having a base to work from. We have wasted so much time developing and securing features that WordPress delivers excellently out-of-the-box – even super simple stuff like account systems, user profiles, a WYSIWYG editor, etc – all take away valuable time and resources from a startup with very little received in the form of pros.

Every time I hire someone, I have to wait for them to learn the framework we have built, understand the PHP super set – we are using – again taking away precious time and resources – we don’t have money to blow on.

Every day at least once, I wish I had chosen WordPress instead. It is faster (in learning and development speed not performance wise) cheaper and easier and with react support being added in the coming months, it’s still quite modern.

WordPress comes with comprehensive documentation and a support system of thousands of developers – again, something we can’t offer our in-house developers, if our devs have a problem or a bug, they have to find the solution all by themselves. There isn’t a Stack Overflow question or open bug report on GitHub that we can take help from. All this again takes away more time and money.

There is also universal support for it – hobbyists can deploy WordPress to shared hosting for $2 to $3 a month, and students can learn it for free so there is an influx of developers who have been exposed to WordPress from an early stage that rather stick to what they know and trust when something as important as their company’s success depends on it.

WordPress is also scalable. It has proven to be secure (to a point) and stable. WordPress powers 30% of the top 10 million websites. That’s a pedigree virtually unrivaled by any other CMS out there.

Noëlie

Frontend Developer at Open Classrooms

WordPress is a really easy solution to start with because it’s cheap (depending on what you really want from it). You just have to pay for the hosting, the hosting name, and for the design (or you can do it by yourself as well). It’s very customizable so you can add whatever plugins or extensions you want in it. And if you don’t have some skills in programming and in web development, it’s easy (like every CMS).

Justin Adelson 

Founder of Perfect Pixel Marketing

WordPress is used by most startups because the platform itself is free/open-source, mobile responsive, and comes packed with hundreds (if not thousands) of available templates that cost around $9 to $59 – a cheap solution for a complete website. A startup has a fully functioning website published in a matter of days and it will only cost him around $100 in total cost.

As a CMS, WordPress can be scalable, which is why it is a popular choice. However, some WordPress sites/templates might require robust hosting packages that can support “heavy” websites and/or a lot of traffic. I have a client who is running a successful e-commerce business on WordPress and WooCommerce. As her business grew, she noticed that her website became very slow. After running some tests, I recommended that we move her website from a low-tier hosting package to a more robust hosting package, which significantly reduced the load times of her website.

Apart from that, WordPress is an SEO-friendly platform, inexpensive compared to other hosted services (e.g. Squarespace, Wix, etc.), and customizable for your needs. For example, if I need a generic informational website for a client, I can pick a template that has basic functionality so the server only loads the functions I need, which makes the website lightning fast. However, if I need a more robust website with e-commerce capabilities and third-party integrations, I can pick a template that has all of those features built-in. I do not have the ability to customize what I want to be included or excluded from hosting platforms like Squarespace and Wix.

WordPress is an SEO-friendly platform, inexpensive compared to other hosted services (e.g. Squarespace, Wix, etc.), and customizable for your needs.

Al Chen

Solutions Architect at Coda.io

I like WordPress because of the number of plugins that are available within it to turn a website into a more dynamic “web app.” Currently, I am working on a real estate platform, and these free plugins have made it a lot easier to develop something more than a static website.

Fred Russias

Co-founder of Sourcing Playground

The reason I love WordPress is that it has loads of templates and cheap plugins that are usually enough to do 80% to 90% of the work. It allows us to create our MVP for cheap, and get enough users to prove the concept and get funds to take our startup to the next level.

We used WordPress for a B2B marketplace, something quite similar to UpWork. We simply bought a plugin for less than $200 which did most of the heavy lifting. We still had to customize the website a little bit, but it was a lot cheaper than doing it from scratch. We attracted more than 1000 users before getting investment and were able to rebuild the platform from scratch once we were funded.

Paul Lacey 

Digital Business Consultant, The Dickiebirds Studio

A startup needs to be flexible, agile and ready to adapt when growth is happening.  From a website’s point of view, WordPress is the obvious choice. It’s a platform that can be quickly scaled and adapted to business needs and challenges.  Furthermore, WordPress is open source, so there is no concern about putting the business’ key online asset into the hands of a proprietary platform (for instance Wix / Squarespace).

From a website’s point of view, WordPress is the obvious choice. It’s a platform that can be quickly scaled and adapted to business needs and challenges.

Craig Murphy

Managing Director, and Web Developer at ALT Agency

WordPress is great for any business, whether a startup or an established business. It’s highly scalable and flexible. The big reason most people go for WordPress is that it’s free. The second reason is that there are millions of templates available, some free, that can be integrated within minutes. The third reason is that the WordPress editor is very very simple to use.

This means that a complete novice can get a beautiful website up and running – without messing with a single line of code – in a very short period of time.

When it comes to scaling, WordPress almost has all of it. If you want to bolt on e-commerce functionality, then there are multiple plugins for that. If you want to make a members-only area then there’s a plugin for that as well. The millions and millions of plugins available for WordPress make it super simple to scale up and add new functionality to a website with minimal fuss.

There can be a downside to WordPress though. It’s not all positive. WordPress is probably not suitable for larger scale e-commerce websites that have thousands of daily shoppers. WooCommerce has its limits, and there are better platforms for that. Another drawback of WordPress is that if it is not secured properly, it can very easily get hacked but there is, of course, a great plugin called Sucuri that can help protect your WordPress website from hackers.

When it comes to scaling, WordPress almost has all of it.

Ben Taylor

Founder of Homeworking Club

WordPress is my platform of choice for all my businesses including my latest project. It provides a very simple and economical way for startups to establish an online presence. Thanks to thousands of themes and plugins, it’s a platform that’s easy to customize, and it’s also very scalable, as you can add more functionality and switch in more advanced components as the company grows.

I have used other CMSs in the past, such as Joomla, but WordPress undoubtedly has the best learning curve.

Jonathan Gorham 

Founder of Engine Scout

WordPress is a great choice for startups for three reasons.

1. It’s super easy to learn. For example, when I built my startup company website, I discovered how to do everything through the incredible free guides and in-depth video tutorials available online.
2. WordPress is highly customizable, meaning that as your company grows, you can quickly update and edit your website to reflect the changes in your business. I also love how simple it is to create a blog so you can start building the authority of your site online.
3. WordPress makes it easy to optimize your website for search engines like Google compared to some other content management systems that are often clunky in comparison. If you’re trying to drive lots of visitors to your new website, then optimizing your website to rank in search engines is a big MUST and WordPress lets you do that easily.

Nate Masterson

CEO of Maple Holistics

There are two major reasons why WordPress is perfect for all types of businesses.

Easy Launch Process

The internet is packed with countless sites pushing all kinds of content and products. Therefore, user experience has taken center stage while companies scatter to find ways to get users to their site and stay there.

However, designing a website isn’t as complex as it used to be. Although sites are faster and more attractive now than ever before, there are plenty of tools and software to help you through every step of the process. Even more, you can use platforms like WordPress which require absolutely no HTML knowledge in order to craft gorgeous and responsive web designs.

Great for Feedback

Startups live off feedback at every opportunity in order to effectively respond to consumer needs. That being the case, WordPress offers an easy and efficient way to receive feedback to help turn your site from a good one into a great one. It has many free plugins that are crucial for managing B2C relations, creating attractive pages, and producing successful inbound marketing campaigns. Furthermore, WordPress makes it easy to establish an email campaign, and build a strong following – something that is a fundamental step for startups.

Ryan O’Neil

Founder of Curate.co

We’d started our company on WordPress. We actually have a full-fledged WordPress SaaS app that we built using this CMS. We did it because it was incredibly easy to build whenever we were tight on funds. So, we built our MVP on WordPress and it has taken us way beyond comparable companies, that were built on Ruby on Rails or other cool frameworks.

I’m the founder of the company, but I built the first version myself using WordPress by tricking out some custom tables.

Ben Sibley

Founder of Compete Themes

There are plenty of strong WordPress competitors for creating blogs and simple e-commerce stores. Squarespace and Weebly do both these things well.

However, when it comes to online marketing and growing a business, WordPress really shines. There are amazing solutions for improving the SEO of your site, growing an email list, decreasing your load times, and do even more.

Getting an attractive site online for your business is great, but when the rubber hits the road, you need a solution that can scale and affect your bottom line.

There are a huge number of plugins available for WordPress that don’t require any coding or technical knowledge to use. Plugins like Yoast SEO help to put your website above the competitors in rankings when it comes to getting search traffic.

While you can get started with any platform you want, I think it makes the most sense to choose WordPress because your business can continue to thrive for years.

Joe Goldstein 

Director of SEO & Operations Contractor Calls

The best reason one should choose WordPress is its sheer flexibility. If you suddenly decide that your website has to have advanced lead capture forms with conditional logic, support for 15 foreign languages, a bug ticketing system, forums, and a social network, then WordPress has enough – free and premium – plugins from 3rd party developers available to handle that.

When it’s time to upgrade to a new site, it’s often much easier to clone an existing WordPress site, change the theme, customize it to your liking, and upgrade the content, than to start a new site from scratch or to try moving between platforms. This is especially true if you have lots of old blog posts worth keeping, strong on-site SEO, or plenty of user accounts.

The best reason one should choose WordPress is its sheer flexibility.

Piccia Neri

Founder of  Piccia Neri (Graphic design studio)

Cutting-edge new startups need their UX to flow smoothly and their design to look sharp: designing with WordPress is great, practically nothing is impossible. Plus, a growth-driven design approach is perfectly applicable to WordPress: a website can be developed over time in a modular way, when funds are available or when organic growth makes it necessary. It’s the most flexible CMS, as well as being cheap, and that’s why I believe it’s the best choice for a startup.

Robby McCullough

Founder of Beaver Builder

I think most startups that choose WordPress today still do it for many of the same reasons we all chose WordPress. It’s free to use, very flexible and extensible, and there’s a wealth of community-created resources available.

I think the performance improvements of the PHP language and the prevalence of top-tier hosts make scaling WordPress far less of a challenge than it was previously.

Nowadays, I think a website is just one piece of a well-rounded internet presence for startups as social media is playing a bigger and bigger role.

WordPress is great because, as a CMS, it’s totally platform agnostic. You can use it to host original content and aggregate content from other platforms.

Johannes silentio

Redditor

I use WordPress because it’s much simpler than Joomla and Drupal. It is also a lot more customizable than Shopify. I don’t think it is free as most people would tell you because you will need hosting and a few plugins that will cost you money. But the cost is manageable and is still a low-cost alternative to many other hosting platforms.

Yc01

Redditor

WordPress is a great choice for startups. It is as simple as that. Don’t listen to people who tell you that you need to spend time (read: money) on the latest and greatest JS framework to build your startup.

Pro tip: No one cares in the beginning. You just need to get paying customers. PERIOD. Nothing else matters first. Once you get enough paying customers and WordPress starts getting in your way, then you can go for a fully customized system. How do I know that? From personal experience running my own startup, WordPress saved me for a long time until the time came to reconsider its utility.

David Alexander

Designer, Developer, SEO Consultant at Mazepress

In 2021 we are going to see WordPress Gutenberg block editor move more towards a full site editing tool rather than just for the content area. This poses the question, what do you do with your old theme? What does this mean for popular page builders like Beaver Builder and Elementor?

I am sure this is going to be an exciting time for the WP community but it won’t be without a fair number of headaches as we all adapt to the new WordPress ecosystem.

The Classic Editor is only going to be supported until December 31st, 2021 giving us all one full year until we all need to adapt to using Gutenberg however I expect this date might change as there’s a large number of developers who wish to continue supporting the original WordPress editor beyond 2021

Final Verdict

Currently, WordPress powers 30% of business websites on the internet. Since it is so popular and scalable, the growth potential for businesses is high for those who choose it. With that said, it is one of the best decisions to choose WordPress as your website’s platform.

Let us know what you think about WordPress and about what these experts have said about the WordPress platform, in the comments below.