Developers hate WordPress — and so should marketers
Dear marketers, love dev
They’re based on legacy code
About nine years ago, Dominik Angerer, CEO ofStoryblok, was working for various agencies as a consultant and software developer on a wide range of CMS systems, from WordPress and Drupal to enterprise contracts.
When one of the smaller CMS systems a client was using went out of business, Angerer and his co-founder, Alexander Feiglstorfer, built their own headless CMS so they could keep using the same frontend design, without having to rewrite everything.
Lack of flexibility
As marketers know, the best brands out there aren’t simply selling products, they’re telling stories. Your website is the canvas where you can paint a picture of that story by choosing specific colors, images, and layouts that can evoke different emotions in your audience.
Doeke Leeuwis, former developer, founder, and Technical Director atStory of AMS, an agency that builds frontend experiences for ecommerce brands, knows this all too well.
“When you’re selling multiple products you really want to have a different experience. Based on different lines of products you might want to have a slightly different color or feeling but the static nature of traditional CMS systems makes it difficult or impossible to make these changes,” Leeuwis said.
This creates a disconnect between what marketers want and what developers can actually deliver. To put this into perspective, Mitchel van Bever, a full stack developer at Story of AMS, shared one example:
He shared one tip for managers and marketeers working with developers on traditional CMS systems:
They may seem like a cheaper option…
One of the biggest selling points of traditional CMS systems is that they’re usually low to zero cost to begin with. This can be pretty enticing, especially for startups and scaleups that want to put funding towards product development. According to Leeuwis:
Not to mention the fact that these systems and their plugins need to be continuously updated, even if the content on your system hasn’t changed. This means continuous maintenance for your development team. And, if you’re an agency, it means having to explain to clients why they need to pay for updates, even if the website hasn’t changed in months.
Larger updates also mean you have to put the website into maintenance mode. As any growing ecommerce brand knows, having your website down for more than an hour can cost you both potential sales and customers who can easily click over to a competitor.
They’re not built to scale
A lot of traditional CMS systems were originally developed to help small businesses and bloggers set up websites, without the need for a full development team. The problem is, once your company starts to scale, your brand and your team can quickly outgrow the system. In fact, although it has 39% of global market share,only 17.7% of Fortune 500companies use WordPress. As van Bever, explained:
Story byAndrea Hak
Andrea is TNW’s Branded Content Editor and, as a writer, she’s covered a wide range of topics from ClimateTech to AI and gender bias. She’s(show all)Andrea is TNW’s Branded Content Editor and, as a writer, she’s covered a wide range of topics from ClimateTech to AI and gender bias. She’s always on the lookout for stories that explore the social and political impact of emerging technology.
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