When looking at content management systems (CMS), scalability refers to the ability to expand and grow your site with more content, capabilities, features, and functionality.

Your CMS is a long-term investment, and its scalability will have a strong influence on whether or not that investment is successful.

“When sustainable business growth is a top strategic objective, you need full confidence that your web presence can seamlessly scale and evolve to support that growth.”

This requires a platform that allows you to quickly and easily create new features and functionality. Ideally, you should be able to do this without having to invest significant time and resources into additional costly development work.

WordPress is One of the Most Scalable Platforms Around

Evidence of WordPress’s great scalability can be found in the fact that almost 45% of the world’s websites are built on the platform. That includes global enterprises such as investment firm Blackstone, research and advisory leader Forrester, the NHS England, and leading pharmaceutical company Hutch Med.

This is because WordPress websites can seamlessly scale as your needs change and your business grows. You can easily add a high volume of new content to your site at speed without compromising on quality. 

WordPress is also renowned for how easily you, or your development partner, can build bespoke features and functionality, so your site can keep evolving with new capabilities to support more advanced requirements. 

“No matter the size or complexity of your site, WordPress can provide fast, intuitive development capabilities with ongoing growth acting as a natural outcome.”

Using WordPress at Scale 

Developing, managing, and maintaining a high-performance website at scale is a complex challenge. For that reason, it’s important to work with an experienced web design and development agency who can enable continual growth and support you through it.

Part of your agency’s services will include configuring your platform, and building your site in the back-end, in a way that encourages long-term scalability. We’ll explain our own approach to this in more detail in the next section. But first, let’s look at some of the fundamental ways to use WordPress at scale: 

Bespoke Features and Functionality

If you want to build out your website with new capabilities, WordPress stands above all its competitors thanks to its ability to develop bespoke features that are unique to your site. 

WordPress is built on PHP, which is the most popular development language around, as it’s currently used by over three quarters (77.5%) of all websites with a known server-side programming language. With PHP, WordPress has a significant advantage over other CMSs, because it allows you to create virtually anything and integrate it with the platform.

Selecting an agency partner with WordPress-specific skills provides you with the opportunity to leverage the platform for almost limitless scalability, among other benefits. 

WordPress Plugins 

WordPress also comes with a vast range of plugins, which can help with adding to, and enhancing, the existing functionality of your site. Plugins are an essential aspect of WordPress development, but it’s crucial that you only choose the most reputable, tested, and proven plugins. 

Your agency partner should be experienced in this plugin selection and use their past experience to recommend the best ones to use for your specific requirements. Your agency partner should also be able to advise you on how plugins will scale with increases in website size or traffic volume to help preserve your site’s performance.

Using plugins that are not regularly updated, or that come from unknown development owners, could harm your site by making it heavier, slowing down your page loading times, and possibly even creating security vulnerabilities. 

Using a particularly large number of plugins is another situation that could result in slower loading speeds or other performance issues. Be mindful that use of plugins can reduce the bespoke development time needed to build your site, and the use of too many plugins could cause performance issues. If you find yourself in this situation, it could be an indication that your development partner might actually be taking shortcuts.

The Importance of a Trusted Partner 

Whether you’re using plugins or building new bespoke features, your agency will be able to take care of all of these crucial aspects of your development for you. Their support and guidance will ensure you can expand your site freely without running into any technical issues. 

Once you have everything you need in place, your agency will then be able to accelerate the speed at which you can scale moving forward. A great agency partner will also provide you with ongoing education and support, allowing you and your team to build your site out easily and efficiently by yourself too, whenever you want or need to.

Taking a More Scalable Approach – Building with Blocks 

While many agencies still use a more traditional method of developing sites with WordPress, taking a block-based approach provides even greater opportunities for dynamic scalability. 

As an alternative to the time-consuming practice of inputting text and images into a rich text editor in your CMS, the block-based approach allows you to create each page on your site more easily with a set of pre-built components. 

Components are blocks of code with pre-defined style and input types. You can use and re-use these components across multiple pages of your site to scale it at a much faster pace. Any time you want to create a high volume of new content, you simply pick your already-built components and place them in the correct positions. 

This is an approach that enables virtually limitless growth of your website at speed with a high level of quality and accuracy. Building components that can be reused across your site will also deliver added benefits like increased efficiency and reduced costs. This in turn provides you with more time to focus on developing better services and experiences for your site visitors. 

The block-based approach to building websites is another way to make your WordPress platform leaner for better performance as well, because it removes the need for a bloated library of unnecessary plugins and features. 

You can read a more in-depth explanation of how to use this block-based approach for your own benefit in our related article here. 

An Enterprise-Grade CMS 

Scalability should be a key aspect of your criteria when selecting a CMS to build a website. Rapid growth and flexibility are crucial for your platform of choice.

Despite some still mistakenly thinking it might not be up to the task, you can use WordPress to build large, robust, high-performance sites at speed, and easily adapt them as your requirements change. 

This arguably makes WordPress one of – if not the – best CMS options available today. When you look at some of the world’s leading businesses currently using the platform to great success, that argument becomes much easier to appreciate.

Like with any CMS, though, the key to successful scalability is having the support of an experienced, trusted agency partner behind you, ensuring you’re leveraging the platform to its full potential. 

If you’d like more support in selecting the right CMS for your business, read our in-depth guide to understanding and evaluating the enterprise options for bespoke development.

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If you’re responsible for marketing, you’ll be well aware of the importance of a great content management system (CMS) for digital products like your website, mobile apps, staff portals, and so on. You may even need to create bespoke digital processes or systems unique to your business, such as internal training platforms or communications channels.

WordPress is the most popular CMS available today, powering almost 45% of the world’s websites. That popularity is on the rise, too, as more and more businesses realise the vast potential of the platform and the benefits it can deliver.

However, there’s still a misconception that WordPress isn’t suitable for large businesses. That’s no more than a myth, though. In fact, some of the biggest companies in the world use WordPress for their CMS.

But what are the specific reasons why that popularity has spread into the enterprise market over the past decade or so? To answer that question, let’s take a detailed look at the benefits and advantages WordPress offers large businesses:

1 – Scalability and Agility

WordPress is famous for its high level of scalability. However large your company, or the size and complexity of your site – as well as the amount of traffic passing through it – WordPress won’t have any problem managing that load.

Scalability is one of its most prominent advantages for large businesses, because it’s also agile enough to easily evolve and grow alongside your changing requirements.

The platform is more robust than most realise as well, with enterprise-grade performance and speed. This great performance also means user adoption and retention will always be high, helping you drive strong return on investment (ROI) on all the digital products you build.

2 – Flexibility and Customisation

WordPress is equally renowned for its flexibility and customisation, which are particularly useful for complex or bespoke development projects. You can use its flexibility to build bespoke features and functionality into your website or create an entirely unique system from scratch.

In large organisations where company-specific processes and workflows are common within your sites, this makes WordPress a highly beneficial option.

3 – Fast Time-to-Market

Thanks to its simplicity and intuitive usability, WordPress is a very efficient platform to build with. That gives you the advantage of delivering development projects with a very fast time-to-market. This is a significant benefit of any CMS, as it helps you save time, reduce costs, and provides more opportunity to test, iterate, and innovate.

4 – Integration

WordPress is very easy to integrate with other systems. Because most large enterprises have a lot of legacy technology to consider when implementing new systems, this is a huge benefit WordPress has over more cumbersome CMSs.

WordPress also integrates very well with back-end systems that are vital to your daily operations, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, PowerBi, and so on. This minimises disruption to your business while integrating WordPress into your existing tech stack.

5 – Low TCO and Strong ROI 

WordPress comes with a very low total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to other options. Unlike most CMSs, you won’t need to invest heavily in adding new features or capabilities, and you won’t need to worry about expensive extra work to manage upgrades or updates from the platform.

Because WordPress is so agile and rich with dynamic capabilities and features, it’s also proven to deliver strong ROI in both the short and long-term.

From a long-term value perspective, your initial projects won’t just stop at initial implementation, either. As your project or requirements evolve and your business grows, WordPress can seamlessly adapt and grow with you.  

Other Points to Consider

It’s important to remember that every business, and every project, is different. While the benefits listed here do make WordPress an excellent CMS, you should still carefully evaluate how well it aligns with your specific objectives, requirements, budget, and other needs.

It’s also important to understand that most businesses will need the support of an agency with platform-specific skills and expertise to help you leverage a CMS to its full potential. As is the case with all platforms, it will be vastly easier to achieve your objectives and gain greater ROI, if you have the support of an experienced specialist partner to guide you.

If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, or need help deciding whether it’s a suitable option for your own requirements, we have a comprehensive guide to evaluating and selecting the enterprise options for a CMS 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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In a recent article, we explored the topic of scalability, specifically how much scalability the WordPress platform offers. In this case, scalability refers to how WordPress allows you to expand and grow your website with more content, capabilities, features, and functionality.

Scalability is a key influence on whether your investment in your content management system (CMS) of choice will be successful, whether that’s WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, or any other platform. 

When long-term, sustainable business growth is a top priority for your business, you need total confidence that your website can scale to support that growth as your requirements evolve.

WordPress is renowned for its scalability, as it allows you to easily create new features and functionality at will, without the need to invest further time and resources into more development work. 

If you do select WordPress as the CMS to build your website, and are able to leverage its industry-leading scalability, this will provide you with a range of benefits and advantages. 

1 – Efficiency and Ease-of-Use 

With WordPress, it’s extremely quick and efficient to build your website and subsequently add a high volume of new content whenever you need to, without losing any accuracy or quality. 

Whether it’s your team or your agency partner managing your site, WordPress is convenient and easy-to-use.

This ease-of-use also applies when it comes to building bespoke features and functionality, so you can keep adding new capabilities as your requirements become more advanced. 

2 – Flexibility and Creativity

The WordPress platform is built on the most popular development language in the world, PHP. This language is currently used by more than three quarters (77.5%) of all websites with a known server-side programming language. 

This provides tremendous opportunity for creativity, as you and your agency partner can build virtually anything your site needs and integrate it with the platform. That gives WordPress a significant advantage over CMSs built on other less popular development languages. 

WordPress also comes with a vast range of plugins which add new functionality, or enhance existing functionality, for your site. Plugins are an essential aspect of WordPress development, because it’s simply not practical or cost-effective to build absolutely everything bespoke. 

However, it’s important to note there are some potential drawbacks with plugins that we’ve detailed in a related article, which you can read here.

Ultimately, the support of a trusted agency partner will help you ensure your use of plugins is well advised and risk-free..

3 – Low TCO 

This dynamic scalability and great ease-of-use mean that you can use WordPress with a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than most other CMS options. 

Working with a platform as intuitive and agile as WordPress will prevent you from having to pay for costly extra work to build out new features and functionality for your site. 

When you have a new requirement, you can simply use a quality plugin or ask your agency partner to create something bespoke. Both approaches will be quick and cost-effective. 

Either way, when compared to other platforms, WordPress delivers unprecedented value for money. This provides you with more budget available to reinvest in improving your site with further innovations.

4 – Fast Time-to-Market 

Similar to the above point, WordPress allows you to achieve a much faster time-to-market with your site than most other platforms when developing new sites, features, or capabilities.

From a long-term perspective, as your business grows and new requirements emerge, WordPress can continue to quickly expand and grow easily with useful new features. 

This allows you to execute on tactical and strategic requirements as quickly as possible, keeping up with user demands and market trends.  

5 – Competitive Differentiation 

The aforementioned advantages WordPress has over other CMSs allow you to create innovative bespoke features for your site at scale, at speed, and within a reasonable budget. 

This naturally begins to help you gain a competitive edge over your competitors. A high-performance web presence that is dynamic enough to scale with speed and efficiency is a point of differentiation in today’s fast-moving digital business landscape. 

Platform Selection is a Key Decision

Scalability should always be an important part of your criteria when selecting a CMS to build your website. WordPress’s scalability, and the resulting advantages discussed in this article, make it one of the best platforms available today. 

When you also consider that some of the world’s biggest businesses have websites built on WordPress, that argument becomes even more easy to get behind.

If you’d like to learn more about how some of the world’s leading businesses use the WordPress platform at scale, read our related article here. We also provide useful tips and advice to make creating sophisticated new features and functionality easy for you.

Of course, building, managing, and scaling a high-performance website is a complex challenge. As with any CMS, it’s crucial to find the support and guidance of an experienced agency partner to ensure you’re leveraging the platform to its full potential.

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When developing a high-performance website with WordPress, certain requirements will demand that your agency partner goes beyond the “out-the-box” functionality of the platform. 

There are two main ways your agency partner may work with you to build out custom functionality:

1. Plugins 
2. Bespoke development.  

While plugins are the go-to option for many small and medium-sized businesses, it shouldn’t always be such a quick decision between those two options. If you’re working on an enterprise-grade website, your agency should always give careful consideration when determining the best approach in every scenario. 

In this article, we’ll help you understand how to determine the right option between plugins and bespoke development for your own WordPress website. 

Why Are WordPress Plugins so Popular? 

Since WordPress is an open-source platform with a very active global community of web developers, there are tens of thousands of plugins readily available. For almost any use case you can think of, there’s almost certainly a plugin for it; probably even several. 

Plugins serve so many businesses so well because they’re pre-built functionality that quite literally plugs into your platform.

One of the main reasons plugins are so popular, especially for smaller businesses, is because they’re usually free. This provides a great cost benefit over bespoke development, on top of the obvious benefits in the speed of attaining the new functionality as well. 

Why You Should be Careful with Plugins 

Despite their popularity, there are downsides to plugins too. 

Relying on too many plugins, or using low quality plugins, may slow the speed of your site down significantly. A good WordPress development agency will try to keep the use of plugins at a minimum to ensure the speed and performance of your site isn’t compromised. 

Poorly built plugins, or ones that aren’t maintained sufficiently, could also cause glitches and errors to occur with the functionality they’re adding to your site. 

Security is another concern with certain plugins. If a plugin isn’t maintained and updated regularly, this will create vulnerabilities in your platform that could be exploited by malware or cyber security attacks. These vulnerabilities could also creep in if your plugins are auto-updated and left untested by your agency partner. 

Some less experienced agencies often fall into the trap of using too many plugins, while others are simply unaware of the risks associated with plugins from untrusted sources. This has given a bad impression of plugins in some circles. The missing ingredient there, however, isn’t the value of plugins, it’s the agency’s best practices. 

When to Use WordPress Plugins

If there’s a feature you need to add to your site that’s already been built perfectly in a trustworthy plugin, it’s worth considering that approach instead of building something from scratch. 

However, here at SoBold, we ensure a strict set of best practices are followed, and due diligence conducted, every time we’re considering using a plugin.

We’ll always make thorough checks to ensure any plugin we use is best-in-class, aligned with our high-performance standards, and so should any other agency you work with. 

This will include asking questions like:

• Does it have a large number of positive reviews?
• Is it built by an author with a good reputation?
• How active and trusted is the author in the WordPress community?
• When was the last date the plugin was updated? 
• Has it been updated regularly enough in the past? 
• Does the code quality meet our standards?
• Does the code align with modern WordPress development best practices?
• Is the plugin compatible with the WordPress block editor? 

Before implementing a plugin on your platform, your agency should also use it in a local testing environment to ensure it functions as expected.

The majority of plugins are reliable, offering a quicker and easier approach than building something bespoke. However, there are many cases where bespoke development is the more suitable option. 

When it’s Better to Use Bespoke Development 

When it comes to sophisticated, dynamic websites, plugins may not be capable of delivering the required level of performance, security compliance, or functionality. 

In these cases, your agency will turn to bespoke development to deliver what you need. This is often the necessary approach, because high-performance websites do require some complexity behind the scenes. And WordPress is arguably the best platform available today for bespoke web development. 

Building out your platform by creating new features completely from scratch, tailored to your exact need, brings with it a wealth of advantages over using plugins. 

This is particularly beneficial in terms of flexibility and customisation, giving you something entirely unique to your website. You’ll have complete control and ownership of your bespoke features, which provides greater security and seamless integrations with the rest of your technology systems. 

Performance will almost always be superior with bespoke development, delivering a far greater user experience (UX) and improving your customer engagement as a result. 

Bespoke development could even be more cost-effective in the long-run too, when compared to plugins that turn out to be problematic or aren’t updated past a certain point. 

Rely on Your Agency’s Expertise 

Determining whether to use a plugin or build something bespoke will be a decision your agency should guide you to make correctly. 

Each website and each business are different, so the right option will be unique to your own requirements and circumstances. Therefore, it’s also worth mentioning that this must be specific to each individual requirement as well, rather than taking a blanket approach.

The decision shouldl be based on the most straightforward way to give you the capability you’re looking for. It will also involve ensuring that your site’s security, performance, and UX are maintained. Another important factor to consider are your circumstances, such as your budget, timeframes, the amount of traffic your website is likely to encounter, and so on.

For example, if your agency knows that one of your top priorities for your website is excellent performance, they’ll make different decisions in that case than they would if you were more concerned with the fastest possible time-to-market. 

Some businesses even use plugins in the first phase of their website, then look to rebuild their plugin-based functionality with bespoke development when their business grows, or when they have more time and resources available.

It’s important to trust your agency partner with this decision and rely on their advice. This is why it’s so valuable to work with an experienced agency who understands your needs, so they can help you make the right choices and take the best possible option. 

Finding the Right Balance for Your Website

Plugins can be very useful, and it must be said that many WordPress plugins are outstanding in their capability and quality. However, if your specific requirements demand more than a plugin can deliver, bespoke development will be the correct approach.

Regardless, it’s crucial to find the right balance to ensure your site’s performance, speed, and security are maintained. 

Ultimately, your agency partner should always consider the specific requirements and circumstances of your project before deciding whether to use plugins or build bespoke functionality for your site. This makes it even more important to work with an experienced agency you can trust to guide you. 

Discover more about the scalability and flexibility of the WordPress platform, and its ability to deliver complex requirements for enterprise websites, in our related article here: Just How Scalable is WordPress?

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