Many businesses in the healthcare sector require some form of bespoke web development in order to remain competitive today. But entering into a bespoke development project can be a daunting challenge, with plenty of risks attached to it. 

This article will answer your pressing questions about bespoke web development, and provide you with a step-by-step guide to set yourself up for success when approaching your own project.

In recent years, modern healthcare has been driven forward by great advances in technology. Organisations in the healthcare sector have leveraged cutting-edge digital technology to transform the way healthcare services are delivered for the better. 

But with that positive change comes a shift in expectations to improve technology across the board. 

Whether you’re a practitioner or a healthcare solution provider, you now must deliver your services to your end-users through the latest digital channels if you want to keep up with the rest of the industry. 

If you’re unable to meet modern expectations for an effortless consumer-grade user experience (UX), your clients and partners will be left unsatisfied and may look elsewhere for a more convenient alternative. This can also apply to your internal systems and processes, as your employees also want intuitive digital tools in order to do their work efficiently and effectively.

To achieve this, you need a sophisticated website that serves your users in a way that’s specifically tailored to their needs and preferences, while also supporting your strategic business objectives. Given the complexity of the healthcare sector, that will likely require you to develop a website with bespoke features and functionality. 

Of course, any website you develop also needs to be secure and compliant, and flexible enough to adapt as your business grows or healthcare technology trends continue to evolve. 

Going Beyond the Basics with Bespoke Development 

While a more straightforward, simple website may be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses, such a limited approach will prevent companies in the healthcare sector from retaining clients and staying competitive. 

If you’re struggling to deliver exactly what your clients or other users are looking for, particularly in an industry as technical as healthcare, you may need to build a bespoke website. This could include anything from: 

• A bespoke client-facing website that represents your brand and provides direct access to your products or services 
• An internal web portal, either for training employees or for networking and sharing of information
• A bespoke intelligence platform with powerful data and analytics capabilities 
• A new content management system (CMS) that can provide greater flexibility and scalability for a portfolio of multiple sites 
• A unique tool to transform inefficient manual processes into a simple digital platform
• A bespoke website that integrates directly with a wide range of other back-end tools and technology, such as your CRM system.

With a bespoke development project, the possibilities – and opportunities for innovation and growth – are virtually endless. You can discuss your current business challenges among your team, and then create something purpose-built to solve those specific challenges.

Of course, coming up with an idea for an exciting new site is the easy part. For many businesses, it’s an additional challenge to know where to go next. To make that easier for you, we’ve provided a simple, proven process here to help you plan and launch a bespoke web development project that will set you up for success.

A Process for Approaching Your Bespoke Development Project 

Start with the “why” and think about what you’re trying to achieve 

As touched on above, it’s important to have a specific reason for building a bespoke site. Whether it’s to achieve a strategic business goal, like customer growth, or overcome a prominent challenge, like inefficient processes, you need a clear purpose. 

Determine exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your website and why it’s being developed. A big part of this will also relate to delivering on a specific need or solving a specific problem for your users as well. 

Thinking of how it will help your users in a valuable way will make it easier to understand what sort of features and functionality you’ll require. 

List all your requirements and use them to create a project brief 

Once you’ve completed that first step, you’ll already see a list taking shape, with requirements for design, usability, capabilities, and so on. 

Note down all those things your website needs to do and use that to create a project brief. This is a simple written document containing all the ideas you think are relevant to your site, including both functional and non-functional requirements.

The purpose of this is to make your request as clear as possible for the design and development agencies you speak to. 

The more specific and detailed your brief is, the better, and that includes things like your initial ideas for cost and timelines. This will help ensure your agency will deliver what you’re asking for on time, within your budget, and matching your specifications. Without a clear, specific brief, you could wind up disappointed and maybe even over-spending.

For a comprehensive guide to creating a brief that will set you up for a successful web design and development project, read our useful article here. 

Evaluate the options for a technology platform to build on

Most websites on the Internet are built using a content management system (CMS). This is almost certainly the type of platform you’ll want to use to create, edit, and publish all the content on your website and manage things behind the scenes. 

Every business is unique, and every bespoke development project is different, so you need to use the work you’ve done in the previous two steps to help you select the right CMS. 

By this point, when you’re evaluating platforms, you should already know your objectives, your requirements, your users’ needs, your budget, your existing technology stack, and so on.

Take all these factors and use them to determine which CMS is the best suited to deliver exactly what you want. 

Something that’s important to note is that integrating a new website with other systems can be complex, particularly if you’re building your site on a new platform rather than an existing one. 

When planning a bespoke development project, you’ll need to consider how easily your new platform will integrate with your other systems. 

We recently produced a helpful series of articles comparing some of the leading CMSs for enterprise website development. You can read those here: 

• WordPress vs Sitecore
• WordPress vs Drupal 
• WordPress vs Umbraco 

Find the right agency partner to design and develop your site with you

As mentioned earlier, you’ll likely need to find a design and development agency to partner with in order to create a bespoke website. 

Building, managing, and supporting a high-performance website in the current technology landscape is extremely difficult, especially in a strictly-regulated industry like healthcare. 

Not only should you look for a partner with a proven track record of delivering bespoke websites, you should also try to find one with healthcare sector-specific experience as well. 

Which agency you choose will have a significant impact on whether your development project is successful, but also on whether or not your new website is successful in the long-term as well. It’s a decision that mustn’t be taken lightly. 

Some of the qualities and capabilities that are important to look for when assessing your options for an agency partner include: 

• Experience working with businesses in the healthcare sector
• A strong portfolio of successful bespoke development projects 
• The expertise to guide you and help you make the best decisions for your project
• Certifications and accreditations 
• Compliance with healthcare sector regulations
• Security and data protection built into the core of your project 
• Secure hosting supported by back-up, disaster recovery, and risk mitigation plans
• Ongoing support services to maintain, update, and optimise your site
• Additional advisory services to help you gain as much value from your technology as possible.

What Does a Bespoke Website Require to be Successful? 

Once you’ve found a CMS and an agency you’re comfortable with, the next step will be to design and develop your bespoke website. 

This will involve working to the requirements you noted in your project brief, but there are also some essential qualities and characteristics of a successful website in the current digital business landscape: 

Enterprise-Grade Hosting 

Ensure your agency can provide enterprise-grade, secure hosting, ideally with managed services, from a trustworthy provider. Not only is your hosting environment responsible for the security of your site and protection of your data, but it can also influence the speed and performance of your site. 

If you’re in a position to build a bespoke website, you’re likely going to be dealing with a high volume of data and a large audience of users, so it’s important that you have a hosting service that can manage that without any disruption to your services. 

User Experience 

Whatever services or products you provide to companies in the healthcare sector, a great UX is the foundation of any successful website. People working in almost all industries now expect the same convenient consumer-grade experience they receive from the technology they use in their personal lives. Your website needs to be as quick and easy-to-use for your visitors as apps like LinkedIn and Amazon. 

This also applies if the sites you’re looking to build are internal-facing for employees. Workforces now also demand a seamless experience with company systems, and providing this will create gains in efficiency as well as competitive advantages. 

A great UX usually leads to a strong ROI. 

Performance and Functionality 

Your website connects you directly to your clients. Flip that to your client’s perspective, your website is a direct reflection of the quality and professionalism of your services.

If your website is slow, or doesn’t give your users what they need in terms of performance or functionality, they won’t hesitate to look elsewhere. 

Security 

Businesses today run on data. The data of your clients, partners, and your own critical data will be at risk if any technology attached to your network is not secure. 

As mentioned earlier, you need to make sure your site is hosted in a secure environment with robust data protection measures in place. But security isn’t just about hosting. Security also comes down to a wide range of best practices, like regularly testing your site and updating your platform.

When your clients and partners are working with highly sensitive medical data, all your technology must also be highly secure and compliant with industry regulations. 

Again, these are all critical things that your agency partner should be experienced enough to handle for you. 

Personalisation

Personalised user experiences are becoming increasingly important for businesses to deliver to their clients and employees these days. One of the key advantages to a bespoke website is that you’re able to provide each of your users with personalised content and services, tailored to their needs, at each stage of their user journey. 

Scalability and Agility 

More often than not, a bespoke website is a key point of differentiation and an enabler of business growth. When you begin to achieve that growth, your requirements will evolve and your website will need to be agile enough to adapt easily without disrupting business continuity. 

When planning and building your new site, ensure it’s developed with long-term growth and seamless scalability in mind.

The Benefits and Advantages of Bespoke Development  

If you’re able to follow this process and incorporate some of these qualities into your new bespoke website, you’ll have something completely unique to your business. This should set you on the right path to accelerated business growth. But a bespoke website, once built and deployed, can begin to deliver a range of additional benefits and advantages too. These include: 

• Boosting engagement with customers, with an outstanding UX and personalised services
• Increasing customer retention and loyalty 
• Enabling real-time interactions with data and greater analytics capabilities 
• Higher adoption rates of internal systems and improved business performance 
• Reducing costs by streamlining inefficient processes and removing outdated technology
• Strengthening your corporate network with enterprise-grade security 
• Achieving competitive advantages in a highly competitive market.

The Healthcare Sector Runs on High-Performance Websites 

As technology continues to evolve and drive more disruption, it’s becoming increasingly important to keep up with the resulting trends. A bespoke web development project allows you to reach beyond the limitations of a basic website and give your users exactly what they need from your services.

It also enables you to create a high-performance website that’s entirely unique to your business, differentiating you from your competition. 

In the current healthcare sector, it’s easy to appreciate why this is quickly becoming a necessity, rather than a “nice-to-have” for many leading businesses. 

To continue learning, read our comprehensive guide to understanding and evaluating the enterprise options for bespoke web development here.

Discover how global healthcare group, Clanwilliam, used bespoke design and development to take their brand to a new level and transform the capabilities of their marketing. 

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Providing your website’s visitors with a great user experience (UX) is a challenge. Especially for corporate websites that require sophisticated features and functionality, this can be an ongoing struggle. But it’s a challenge you need to solve if you want to stay relevant and remain competitive in today’s digital business landscape.

Usability is the measurement of how easy or difficult your website is to use for your audience. Good usability makes the experience of using your website as convenient and simple as possible for all your site’s visitors.

Despite the obvious value of this, usability is often neglected by businesses when building a website. That could be because you don’t have the time or budget to follow best practices, you don’t have the in-house design expertise, or you simply aren’t aware of just how important usability is today. Whatever the reason, you can’t afford to take the risk of releasing a site with a poor UX. 

Understanding the Importance of Web Usability 

You’d be amazed by how many websites these days fail to give their users an experience that delivers on their basic expectations. If your website falls in that category, poor usability may have an influence on whether your users adopt or reject your site. This could be the difference between a visitor abandoning a poorly designed page or sticking around and converting to become a customer.

So, how do you ensure your website doesn’t end up on this ever-growing list of failures? 

The key is to focus on your users’ needs, and put yourself in their shoes when planning, designing, and developing your site. 

Even if your site isn’t customer-facing, good usability is also crucial for internal systems. Employees are users too, and their adoption – or rejection – of your technology will also have an impact on your business.

This is easier said than done, we know. That’s why we’ve provided a selection of tips and advice to help you overcome this challenge.

How to Improve the Usability of Your Website

1 – Keep it Simple 

Whenever you’re thinking about UX, always follow the rule that simplicity is best. If a website has a design or functionality that’s complicated, its usability will suffer. Try to keep things as simple as possible at all times.

2 – Nail the Fundamentals 

While some design choices, like colour and font, can be argued as subjective, there are certain aspects of usability that are more objective. Getting the fundamentals right will help you ensure you’re delivering great usability. 

For example, optimising your site to ensure its pages load quickly, organising your pages with proper headings and sub-headings, making sure clickable buttons and links stand out, avoiding making any text or touch-points too small, even providing clear, useful error messages, and so on.

You can read a more extensive list of fundamentals and best practices for UX design in our related article on usability here.

3 – Adhere to Accessibility Guidelines 

Usability shouldn’t be confused with accessibility. Accessibility’s purpose is to make all technology accessible and easy-to-use for everyone, equally, with a significant focus on those with disabilities and other difficulties. 

To ensure your website meets the current requirements for accessibility, you need to follow a set of principles and standards known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), linked here. 

If you’re working with an agency, they should have best practices for accessibility already incorporated into their approach. Make sure you check this anytime you’re evaluating agency partners for a website project. 

4 – Learn from Experience 

We’re all users of websites, and we all know how it feels to encounter a frustrating UX. Use your own experience of this to try and build empathy for your users and what they might like and dislike. Any time you come across a website that gives you a bad experience online, make note of this and ensure you don’t allow similar problems to creep into your own site.

5 – Don’t Make Assumptions 

While the previous point is important, it’s also crucial to realise it’s not enough. Using your own experience will only get you so far and, in some cases, it could even cause additional problems.

Remember that usability is dependent on delivering for your target audience’ personal preferences when interacting with your website. It’s always risky to assume you know how your users think and feel.

Don’t make decisions about design and functionality without considering who the target users are and what they need from their experience. This leads us nicely into the next point.

6 – Test With Real Users

It’s always necessary to test the usability of your site with real people who are part of your target audience. The best way to ensure your website will provide a great UX is by asking real-life users to test it out, collect their input, and put that feedback into the final version. This is known as usability testing, which is a phase of the design and development process that every successful project requires. 

7 – Know When to Ask for Help

All of these tips are helpful to be aware of, but for the average business they can be daunting and difficult to put into practice. That’s why the majority of large businesses with outstanding websites have worked alongside a specialist agency partner with expertise in user-centric design. To ensure your site has great usability, it’s often necessary to find the support of an agency who has proven experience delivering similar projects successfully. 

Usability Should be a Priority 

Usability is crucial to the success of any website, but it’s something most businesses are still struggling to get right. Ultimately, though, your users are the ones who will determine the success or failure of your investment. 

You have to put yourself in their perspective when designing and developing your site, and that includes getting real people’s feedback and approval. Only then will you create something that meets your target audience’s expectations for speed, convenience, and simplicity. 

If your website provides a clunky or frustrating UX, most users today won’t hesitate to go elsewhere rather than waiting around to complete their task on your site. If that task in question is purchasing a product or service, you’ll see that poor usability will eventually begin to have a negative impact on your business.

Following the tips and best practices listed in this article will help you avoid that trap and create a UX that’s better than most websites. Doing that will begin to drive positive outcomes like greater adoption rates, improved customer retention and loyalty, and a stronger return on investment. 

To continue learning with a deeper dive into the topic of web usability, including more insight into its principles, additional guidance on design best practices, and current trends and future predictions, read our related article here. 

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As a business in the financial services industry, you have to navigate a range of sector-specific challenges that make it difficult to meet current user expectations with technology. This article will explain why a bespoke development project is often the most effective way to solve those challenges, and provide guidance on how to approach such a project.

For a long time, apprehension towards cyber security and data protection, alongside challenges with decades-old legacy systems, meant that many businesses in the financial services sector were a bit behind the technology curve. Banks and other financial services companies weren’t typically known for their impressive websites or sleek digital processes, at least not until fairly recently. Those days are long gone now, though, as digital transformation and technology-driven innovation have changed the financial services industry forever. 

Today, both your clients and employees alike expect a seamless digital experience when interacting with your services and processes. And meeting these expectations has become increasingly important over the past 10 years or so, as the more traditional finance businesses have faced disruption from trends like FinTech and digital banking. 

But whether you’re a long-standing financial institution, or an early-stage FinTech start-up, there’s a common priority among businesses in this industry – you simply must keep up with the pace of technology in order to stay relevant with your customers and maintain your competitive edge.

Changing Demands from Your Audience of End-Users 

The technology trends we’ve highlighted there will have caused you to shift large parts of your business model online over the past few years. Consequently, that will have created a range of new challenges for you.

Self-Service 

Whatever services or products you provide, your clients now expect the same convenient, effortless experience they’re used to with the technology they use on their smartphones every day.  

When interacting with businesses, most people want to be able to do everything for themselves online, ideally without having to interact with a sales-person or customer service rep. If you can’t enable this self-service in a simple and efficient way, your customers will be left frustrated. 

Cyber Security and Data Protection

The amount of data passing through your business is mind-blowing. All that data can be placed at risk if any technology attached to your corporate network is not secure. When you’re working with such highly sensitive financial data and strict industry regulations, all your technology must be highly secure.

Responsive Design 

Your digital systems need to be highly intuitive, dynamic, and, perhaps most importantly, simple and easy-to-use. That should ideally be the case for all systems, both client-facing and internal. 

User Retention 

If your current website feels clunky, unintuitive, or difficult to navigate, your clients will not hesitate to go elsewhere. While that may have been acceptable with cumbersome legacy systems in the financial services market 20 years ago, it’s simply not an option today.

People will leave a company’s website forever after one poor experience. This demonstrates just how important an excellent user experience (UX) is in retaining your user base.

Similarly, with internal systems like staff training portals or corporate knowledge bases, a poor UX will stifle adoption and usage of the technology. In turn, that will have a negative impact on your return on investment (ROI). 

Using Bespoke Development to Overcome Business Challenges 

In order to break down those barriers and overcome those challenges, many of the leading financial services companies have developed websites that are entirely bespoke. 

Modern enterprise systems need to be dynamic, intuitive, and user-centric. Delivering on all those attributes often requires bespoke development, especially in an industry as nuanced and complex as financial services. 

Your customers, partners, and clients must be able to interact with your services and access their data online, from anywhere, at any time. Not only that, but they also expect personalised content, tailored to their specific needs or challenges, at every stage of their user journey. 

For that reason, it’s often necessary to take the route of a bespoke development project to ensure that your business gains exactly what it needs – and that your users get exactly what they want – in terms of both functionality and capability. 

This covers all the possibilities and ensures your digital presence is tailored to your specific business objectives, the preferences of your users, and unique requirements, including:

• A bespoke website that differentiates you from your competitors
• An online portal, either for training internal users or providing a more engaging experience for your clients
• A new platform that can better integrate with your legacy systems
• A new content management system (CMS) that can provide greater flexibility and scalability 
• A way to transform time-consuming, inefficient manual processes into a unique, easy-to-use digital tool.

Whatever it is your business requires, you can follow the simple, proven process outlined below to ensure your investment in new technology is a successful one.

How to Approach a Bespoke Development Project for a Financial Services Business 

Understand the Purpose of What You’re Building

The first thing you need to do is reach a clear understanding of exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your website. Whatever you’re looking to build, it should align with, and support, your company’s strategic business objectives. 

It should also meet a specific need or solve a specific challenge for the users it’s aimed at. This will help you begin to determine exactly what you need in terms of design, usability, and any other bespoke functionality. 

Define Your Requirements in a Project Brief 

A brief is a simple written document that lists all the key ideas and details you think are relevant to the website or platform you’re looking to build. Use this to list all your functional and non-functional requirements, as that will make the project as clear as possible for the design and development agencies you speak to. 

Try to be as specific as possible to give yourself the best chance of having the project delivered on time, within your budget, and to your bespoke specifications. Without that specificity, you’ll likely be disappointed and could even end up drastically over-spending.

For a comprehensive guide to creating a brief that will set you up for a successful web design and development project, read our useful article here. 

Evaluate Your Technology Options 

In most cases, you’ll use a content management system (CMS) to build your bespoke site. This is a type of software-based platform that allows you to create, edit, and publish digital content across a range of online channels and devices.

Every bespoke development project will be different, so you should aim to select the CMS that best aligns with your objectives, requirements, budget, and other factors.

For example, WordPress is fast-becoming the platform of choice for many forward-thinking financial services businesses, because of the flexibility and fast time-to-market it offers.

To learn more  about how to understand and evaluate the enterprise CMS options for bespoke development, read our helpful related article here.

Find and Select an Agency Partner 

Building, managing, and maintaining a high-performance website in the current technology landscape can be very complex. It requires a wealth of expertise and experience, and also takes time. For that reason, the vast majority of businesses work with a web design and development agency to bring their vision to life. 

The choice you make about which agency to partner with will have a significant influence on the success or failure of your project, so approach this decision with a great deal of care. 

When you’re dealing with such a high volume of sensitive financial data, you must find an agency that understands and respects the critical nature of the work they’ll deliver for you. 

You should consider the following qualities as non-negotiable for your an agency: 

• Proven financial services sector experience and success 
• A strong track record with complex bespoke development projects 
• A long-term partner who can advise and guide you to make the correct decisions
• Certifications and accreditations 
• Compliance with financial services industry regulations
• Secure hosting, with back-up, disaster recovery, and risk mitigation plans
• Security built into the core of every project 
• Automated monitoring, maintenance, and support services
• Ongoing updates and optimisation for your platform
• Training and learning to help you gain maximum value from your investment. 

What Are the Key Components of a Successful Bespoke Development Project in the Financial Services Sector?

There are some key components of a web development project that you can specifically include in your requirements before you speak to any agencies. These will ensure you minimise your risks and mitigate potential problems, both during and after the delivery of the project. 

You should use these as criteria when assessing your agencies and your technology platform, as they should all be non-negotiable for any business in the financial services sector.

Hosting and Performance 

Hosting refers to the physical and virtual data centres used to house your website. It’s crucial to ensure your site will be hosted in a secure environment, with an experienced, trustworthy provider, because this will have a significant influence on things like security and performance. You’re likely expecting to deal with a high volume of data and a large audience of users, so it’s crucial to ensure your website or platform can handle that. 

Enterprise-Grade Security 

Security is not an after-thought, it’s a critical priority. From your choice of hosting services, to your data back-up and disaster recovery, right through to the frequent testing of your live site. Always place this at the very top of your list of questions when speaking to an agency or a technology provider about developing something bespoke.

Personalisation

Providing your users with personalised services and content is another crucial capability for modern financial services companies, but not all platforms can facilitate this. 

In order to ensure your end-users are having their experiences tailored to each individual, some bespoke functionality could be necessary.

Scalability and Multi-Site Development

As business growth is likely one of your key strategic objectives, your site must be able to support that. A scalable platform will allow you to seamlessly expand your online presence as your business grows and your needs change. 

Integration with Back-End Systems 

Like most financial services companies, your corporate network probably includes a variety of old and new systems and applications across all your different departments. If you’re going to have something new developed, you’ll need to build it on a technology platform that can seamlessly integrate with all those relevant systems. 

Ease-of-Use 

Whether or not a technology solution is a good investment or a bad one often depends on how easy it is to use, both for your team internally and your end-users. Usability is a key criteria 

Time-to-Market

One of the great advantages of developing a bespoke site is that you can continue to iterate and improve it based on user feedback. However, you’ll want to ensure you’re able to do so quickly and efficiently. 

Working with an agency, and a technology platform, that enables a fast time-to-market with your development projects is an important part of the process in terms of achieving positive ROI.

Ongoing Development and Optimisation

Following on from the previous point, your web development project shouldn’t stop at the delivery and deployment of your solution. Once your site is live, measure and analyse its adoption and usage. You can use that feedback to continue optimising its capabilities and functionality for the best possible results.

The Business Benefits of Bespoke Development  

While technology does create its fair share of challenges for businesses that are unprepared or unwilling to adapt, it also presents a vast range of opportunities to those who embrace it. 

A bespoke development project delivers something entirely unique and specific to your business, giving you a range of benefits and advantages, including: 

• Improving your internal UX, creating greater operational efficiency
• Improving your external UX, providing more convenient, intuitive services to customers 
• Streamlining mission-critical processes to reduce costs 
• Building enterprise-grade security into the core of your systems
• Enabling real-time interactions with data 
• Increasing customer retention and loyalty 
• Achieving competitive differentiation
• Accelerating business growth. 

In Summary

Financial services has always been a highly competitive industry, but with recent technology trends and changing consumer behaviour, it’s now more important than ever to have a strong, user-centric digital presence.

Not only do your clients and partners demand their data be handled in a secure, compliant way, they also expect a seamless, consumer-grade performance from all digital processes and services they use. Unexpected down-time, poor UX, or any similar frustrations will leave your customers unsatisfied and may put their loyalty in question.

In order to avoid these challenges and minimise your risks, it’s important to find the right agency, with the right technology, to create a website tailored to meet your strategic objectives and exceed your clients’ expectations.

To learn more, read our comprehensive guide to understanding and evaluating the enterprise options for bespoke development here.

Discover how global private equity advisory firm, Rede Partners LLP, transformed a time-consuming manual process into a game-changing client-facing online portal here.

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Technical Director, Sam Phillips and Managing Director, Will Newland were interviewed by Brent Weaver at Cloudways.

SoBold has been working with Cloudways since 2019 to help host development environments for all of their clients.

You can learn more about Cloudways, Managed Cloud Hosting services by visiting their website here.

See what they had to say in the video below.

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When you’re responsible for managing a new website development process, you’ll have some difficult decisions to make. Two of the most difficult decisions will be finding an agency that you can trust, and finding a content management system (CMS) that will give you the flexibility and performance to drive your business forward online.  

Your CMS will play a significant role in helping you meet your specific website requirements and enabling you to achieve your strategic goals. 

We’ve compared lots of different CMSs in our recent series of articles, and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we’ll compare WordPress and Craft.

Ease-of-Use

It’s vitally important to ensure that the platform you choose is straightforward to manage. You’ll want a platform that’s approachable, with a low barrier for entry, to avoid any challenges in the daily running of your website.

Craft’s Ease-of-Use

Whilst Craft is an open-source CMS, it requires technical development expertise in order to manage the platform once built. Management for non-technical teams will likely be difficult, thus limiting you in your ability to build out content and new features over time. 

If you do have expertise in-house, that will allow you to manage your website more easily, as the CMS itself is efficient for publishing and managing content.

Craft also makes it easy to collaborate and share responsibilities across teams without any interference or complications. For example, you can save draft versions of pages and share them with colleagues – with private links that don’t even require you to be signed in – before publishing live on your site. 

WordPress’s Ease-of-Use

Conversely, WordPress is specifically built so that content can be managed in-house. WordPress provides you with a convenient, intuitive user interface (UI) that allows quick and easy publishing, management, and editing of content on your sites.

Put simply, WordPress is a more traditional CMS that’s suitable for a wider range of users and teams. It allows you to easily manage the content on the front-end, whilst also facilitating a quick time-to-market for the development of your website.

This ease-of-use also helps to share responsibilities throughout your team.

Flexibility

Flexibility will always be high on your list of priorities when looking for a CMS. Tailoring your platform to fit your own unique requirements is a crucial capability in today’s digital business landscape. 

How Flexible is Craft?

Craft is all code-based, which allows you to build virtually any type of website you want, with great flexibility. The only limitations, really, will be with the platform-specific development capabilities of your agency.

How Flexible is WordPress?

WordPress also offers a great deal of flexibility and customisation, but the difference here is that it’s unlikely you’ll need to alter much about WordPress’s pre-existing tools and features to be able to build a website you’re happy with.

With WordPress, you have everything you need to build a high-performance website. But that’s complemented by the flexibility to make enhancements and seamlessly scale the platform with new bespoke features if you wish to. 

Integrations

Before you select a CMS, you’ll need to ensure it can easily integrate with any existing systems your business has in place. Whilst most CMSs will be able to integrate well with a variety of third party systems, it’s important to be aware of any limiting capabilities of the platforms.

Craft’s Integrations

Integrations with the most popular third-party platforms are typically supported in Craft through plugins. However, you may need to integrate manually with platforms using API’s.

While this gives you more control over your CMS’s functionality and security, it’s another area in which you’ll likely have to spend more time and money on agency development work. Those integrations will also need to be maintained and updated manually as well, which may be a financial and time burden on your agency. 

WordPress’s Integrations 

WordPress’s global popularity means that it’s readily compatible with most of the third-party systems you’ll already have within your business. 

You’ll have a wide range of native plugins available that will integrate your WordPress site with virtually any other tool. Even if you have more advanced requirements, it’s usually easier for your agency partner to do this bespoke development work in WordPress than it is with other CMSs. 

Developer Communities 

Investing in a platform that’s supported by a community of developers will provide you with additional benefits and advantages. It’s always helpful to have other users working to continuously create additions and updates to help the CMS grow and improve.

Craft’s Community 

Craft has a passionate community working hard to help enhance the platform, but it’s only a fraction of the size when compared to more mainstream CMSs like WordPress. 

Still, size isn’t all that counts here. Craft’s community is very supportive and highly active on channels like Slack and Discord. Craft also has a StackExchange, which is a Q&A forum that many developers use to share learnings as they work through projects.

The WordPress Community

At 20 years old now, WordPress’s popularity and global market share means it has an enormous community supporting it. 

WordPress’s community consists of millions of users who work tirelessly to offer support, collaboration, knowledge sharing, events, and much more. 

Any questions, problems, or requirements you have are often answered very quickly by members of the WordPress community. This also results in exciting new enhancements and features being released on a near-constant basis to drive the platform forward. 

Being part of the WordPress community will also give you access to free events that help users learn to get as much value as possible from the platform. 

Cost and TCO 

Cost is a key factor when choosing a CMS. It’s also important to remember the up-front costs aren’t the only thing you need to consider here. Since your CMS is a long-term investment, you should be looking for a low total cost of ownership (TCO) for all your related costs over time.

Craft’s Initial Investment and Ongoing Costs

With Craft, you’ll need to purchase either the pro or enterprise plan. Pro comes with a one-time payment of £250 per project, and an additional annual payment to continue receiving updates. The cost of the enterprise plan will vary depending on your requirements and usage.

As mentioned earlier, the costs associated with the platform may also be high. This is due to the need for agency support across many aspects of your project, from setting up your website, to integrations, to ongoing maintenance. 

The actual costs of development with Craft may also be higher than with other CMSs because of the smaller scale and more specialist nature of the platform. 

It’s also worth mentioning that Craft CMS hosting services are more limited than those of WordPress, again likely making them more expensive.

WordPress Cost and TCO 

On the most part, WordPress is a more cost-effective platform than Craft, with a lower TCO.

WordPress is free-to-use, limiting your initial costs to just hosting, development agency fees, and post-deployment support. 

As touched on earlier, achieving a much faster time-to-market will allow you to launch a quality website quickly so you can begin gaining strong ROI right away.

Another cost-related benefit of WordPress’s ease-of-use is that if there’s bespoke development work you need your agency to complete, it will usually come at a reasonable cost. Because Craft is such a niche and technical platform, bespoke development work often comes at a premium in comparison to the more widely-used WordPress.

When the WordPress platform receives updates, it’s often fairly quick and straightforward for your agency partner to test and maintain your site.

These advantages add up to create a lower TCO for WordPress than you’ll have with other enterprise CMSs.

Conclusion 

Both Craft and WordPress are both great CMSs in their own right, and would serve most businesses. Although, it’s difficult to deny that WordPress is a much more approachable platform than Craft for the average user.

If you’re a team with a great selection of existing development skills, Craft can provide you with some innovative capabilities and could be the right platform for you. 

The key thing to remember when making this evaluation is that you should select the platform that directly aligns with your own specific circumstances and requirements. 

Every business, and every web development project, is different. Carefully consider your objectives, budget, users, in-house skills, and any other factors that may come into play. That should allow you to determine which CMS is the right one to deliver what you need. 

If you need more help finding a CMS for your new website project, read our comprehensive guide to understanding and evaluating the options for large businesses here.

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