Jan 10, 2022
UPDATED: Dec 17, 2024
WordPress is still one of the most popular content management systems, powering 43% of the internet. However, recent issues in the ecosystem have made current WordPress users consider other options, particularly the ongoing feud between Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic CEO, and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress.
Even though the haymakers are no longer thrown around every other week, the WordPress community continues to discuss them on social media and elsewhere. There’s even a tracker showing how many customers are departing WP Engine.
For enterprise customers looking for a robust platform or headless functionality, solutions like WP VIP and Headless WordPress still fall short of modern composable platforms in terms of consistent maintainability, features, and integrations with other software. This is in addition to the issues found in the core WordPress architecture.
In this article, we’ll explain why enterprises should reconsider WordPress as an enterprise CMS and offer some alternative solutions.
The Problems with WordPress
Several problems with WordPress make it a wrong choice for enterprise customers.
Open Source, But Not Really Open
WordPress is built on open-source software written, maintained, and supported by thousands of independent contributors worldwide. However, Automattic drives WordPress's commercial interests, and the recent dispute between Automattic and WP Engine shows that WordPress isn’t quite as open-source as many would like to believe. For instance, Automattic has even cloned premium plugins owned by WP Engine without crediting them, facing backlash from the wider community.
Also, even though WP Engine won an injunction against Mullenweg and Automattic, using WordPress.org is still questionable as Mullenweg’s lawyers argued that WordPress.org was his to do what he pleased.
Even for customers using WordPress.com, WP VIP, and other Automattic-affiliated services, many of the plugins, themes, hosting options, and other additional features are operated by third parties that follow the open-source concept. For enterprise customers, this might mean building their website and supporting features with several of these tools but changing their plans since Automattic still holds all the keys.
WordPress Security: A Constant Concern
With WordPress’ over-reliance on third-party plugins, it is hard to keep track of everything. If you fail to consistently monitor and secure your WordPress sites and plugins properly, you could be open to attacks or security vulnerabilities. In fact, according to a recent survey, 72% of all WordPress customers had experienced at least one breach.
Of course, WordPress is not vulnerable to all types of attacks, but here are a few of the most common vulnerabilities if you fail to ensure maximum security for your WordPress site:
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Backdoor attacks: This type of attack occurs when hackers install malicious software to bypass standard network security measures and authentication procedures through deception and disguise. WordPress attacks can also happen through unconventional methods like FTP, DFTP, or WP-ADMIN.
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Pharma hacks: In this attack, an attacker exploits vulnerabilities in your site to distribute spam and redirect or return customers to other product listings controlled by the attackers. It is a major attack on traditional CMS like WordPress and Joomla, causing search engines to display results that contain the attacker’s product listings and yours.
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Drive-by download attacks: These attacks occur when a hacker sends a payload that says you need a particular software or antivirus, whereas they intend to gain access to your data, inject scripts into your system, and generally infect your site.
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Malicious redirects: These attacks happen when hackers inject malicious scripts into vulnerable sites to redirect users to questionable links where they can be scammed or infected with malware. If someone attempts to reach your website through this, it will redirect them to a malicious site.
Sadly, these companies usually do not set up adequate security measures to monitor uptime, track bugs within the infrastructure, and report them.
A monitoring service such as Uptime by Oshyn can keep your application secure and available by conducting continuous security scans, conducting SEO scans, monitoring patch updates, and providing reports on system status.
Plugins: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them
Of course, plugins make your life easier. WordPress has a plugin for almost everything you want to do. Do you need a plugin for a subscription form? A payment integration? On-page SEO?
There are plugins for them all. There are currently over 59,000 plugins available on WordPress.
But with plugins comes greater risk. The truth is, the more plugins you use, the more problems you face, and the more bloated your application becomes. If a plugin has a bug or crashes, there may be limited support for resolving them. In other words, you open your application to numerous security risks for every plugin you install.
Enterprise Features Deficit
Enterprises often have unique requirements that a built-in CMS feature or plugin does not cover. For instance, custom workflows and audit trails are vital features of enterprise-level content management systems. Despite its ease of use, WordPress can be unnecessarily complicated and expensive when you want to change something or create something unique.
Features that your enterprise may need include multilingual and multi-device support, headless CMS capabilities, personalization, multivariate testing, engagement analytics, Click-stream tracking, and much more. With WordPress, you can access only a few of these features through plugins that are readily available at a fair price.
On the other hand, enterprise CMSs like Optimizely and Sitecore offer more advanced functionality and ease of use. These include setting up user groups and permission levels, which allow the manager to approve content before publication and track changes to the site back to the appropriate user. This method is ideal for companies with employees in different countries.
For example, consider a scenario where an organization must distribute content to different countries and languages through multiple departments. It may be challenging to use WordPress in this situation. These enterprise CMSs allow users to customize workflows to handle complex requests more efficiently.
In addition, enterprise CMS solutions offer audit trails that allow you to track previous versions and changes in content. These can be helpful to businesses looking for a record of when and how content was published. Unfortunately, WordPress lacks this functionality.
Content Relationship Woes
WordPress is a blogging platform that can be customized to look like a site using themes and plugins. While it's great for blogging, it’s not a robust CMS.
With a strong enterprise CMS, no plugins are required for basic enterprise functionality. Instead, several native features allow you to reuse content across several website areas. This makes updating information across digital touchpoints easier, which is ideal for events and promotions.
WordPress is more limited in these functions and requires you to insert content manually in each location. A purpose-built enterprise CMS is better if you intend to reuse and update content.
Constant Maintenance — All By Your Lonesome
WordPress is renowned as a bloated CMS with plugins, themes, and add-ons that lower its performance and increase page load time. When your WordPress site starts having issues, it’s usually because you neglect proper and adequate maintenance.
With all the additional features, WordPress requires constant maintenance. That means keeping track of all added components, ensuring upgrades and security apps, and monitoring uptime and compatibility issues. Many WordPress users don’t regularly update their websites, themes, or plugins, allowing hackers to exploit vulnerabilities that have been fixed in subsequent versions.
With modern composable digital marketing platforms, security is enhanced by their built-in features. The lack of reliance on plugins or third-party software means that security isn’t compromised. They also provide frequent upgrades, making the platform highly secure.
High Opportunity Cost
Many enterprises opt for WordPress because it is generally easy to set up, find knowledgeable developers who know the platform, and create a simple customer-facing website.
Unfortunately, when you add up the cost of building or integrating enterprise functionality, preventing security issues, maintaining your code and hosting, and dealing with plugin — and theme-related headaches, the actual cost of WordPress can become exorbitant.
Not only do you need to employ a dedicated team to maintain and protect your WordPress-powered ecosystem, but you’ll also spend valuable time preserving your digital experience when that time could go into improving it. The monetary cost can be calculated, but what is the opportunity cost? That’s a trickier and perhaps more concerning calculation.
WordPress vs WordPress Enterprise
Many of the problems we highlighted are common with the free version of WordPress. However, those issues can also plague the enterprise version of WordPress.
WordPress VIP is the enterprise version of WordPress, offering enterprise-grade security and scalability at $25,000 per year and above. It gives enterprises the same WordPress platform with a dedicated staff, resulting in longer uptime and faster response times.
However, while security is a crucial concern for enterprise companies, another problem with WP VIP is that customers will still suffer from the other challenges associated with WordPress. That means plugin and theme issues, content relationship concerns, and lack of personalization, AI integration, experimentation, and other digital marketing features that enterprises need. Not to mention that relying on WordPress.org, particularly given the issues presented at the beginning of this post, seems like a risky bet.
5 Hidden Costs of WordPress VIP
While WordPress VIP might seem like a viable solution for most enterprises, there are several hidden costs.
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You Still Need Plugins: WP VIP still uses the same plugin ecosystem as WordPress. This means that any additional features needed to improve the customer experience, whether personalization, analytics, marketing automation or something else, must be integrated through plugins. Like the free WordPress, these plugins are operated by third parties and, in many cases, lack the additional security or frequent updates enterprises need.
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Built On WordPress: WordPress VIP still relies on the WordPress core. Even with the additional features, WordPress’s foundation as a blogging platform can limit its suitability for the complex needs of enterprise marketing teams.
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Scalability: Although WordPress VIP promises to handle high traffic, its monolithic architecture can pose challenges as businesses grow and want to scale.
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Customizability: WordPress VIP offers plugins to help organizations fill in the gaps of additional features they might need. However, these plugins might not provide the required level of functionality or even security that enterprises need, making WordPress even more challenging to customize.
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Not Keeping Up With Modern Standards: The enterprise version of WordPress doesn’t keep up with modern standards in several ways. For instance, enterprise companies might need to rely on DevOps and containerization to simplify building, deploying, and scaling applications. Unfortunately, overprovisioning and other issues are common challenges associated with WordPress VIP.
Risks of Enterprise WordPress Hosting
WordPress infrastructure must be hosted somewhere, and various providers must offer managed hosting options for enterprise customers. However, these managed hosting providers may expose businesses to a number of risks.
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Cost Escalation: Enterprise WordPress hosting options often include additional charges for high traffic, storage, or customizations. While this is true for many enterprise-grade software solutions, with WordPress, these costs can frequently be unexpected and end up being similar to other enterprise CMS options without the downsides.
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Storage Limits: Enterprise WordPress hosting plans often come with storage limits that may not align with the needs of large enterprises managing extensive media libraries. If you need more storage, this can increase costs.
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More Plugin Challenges: WordPress’s plugin challenges don’t go away with managed hosting providers either. They can even be compounded by some hosting platforms’ refusal to allow certain plugins due to security issues. This offers improved security, but it also means that enterprises might lose the critical functionality they need for their business.
Best WordPress Enterprise Alternative
Given the challenges associated with WordPress and even the hidden costs of WordPress VIP or enterprise hosting providers, WordPress customers need a suitable alternative that offers security, scalability, and the right features to create an engaging digital experience. Here are a few vendors that provide ideal alternatives.
Optimizely
Optimizely CMS and Optimizely SaaS CMS offer modern CMS options that are powerful alternatives to WordPress, particularly for enterprises seeking scalability, flexibility, and advanced features. Additionally, Optimizely’s CMS products are competitively priced compared to WordPress VIP while providing improved personalization, experimentation, and other marketing features.
Sitecore
Sitecore XM Cloud is a modern SaaS headless CMS. It is perfect for those seeking to upgrade to a more robust CMS and scale their business to the next level with cutting-edge front-end frameworks.
Adobe
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a powerful and versatile CMS and digital experience platform that enables enterprises to deliver personalized experiences across websites and other digital channels. It is the ideal option for businesses wanting to control their digital experience and orchestrate global campaigns.
How to Choose a True Enterprise DXP
If you are an enterprise business or ambitious startup using WordPress, you cannot deliver the best digital presence and performance for your end users. It is best to transition away from WordPress as part of a longer-term strategy toward a full-featured digital experience platform.
Regardless of your needs, Oshyn is an experienced Optimizely, Sitecore, and Adobe partner who has worked with several brands and agencies across the globe. Our team offers comprehensive, agile software development services for building, deploying, and maintaining web applications.
We can help medium and large-scale enterprises advance their marketing objectives with a modern DXP. A DXP can help these businesses engage with their customers and improve their bottom line by using the full-featured functionality required by forward-thinking marketing teams.
To learn more about selecting the right enterprise DXP, see our ebook on How to Select the Optimal Digital Platform for Your Business.
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