How Web Development Used to Work
My first foray into web design was 25+ years ago (I’m older than I look!), and back then it was common to either code everything manually from scratch, or to use a web development program such as Adobe Dreamweaver.
Once the web developer was satisfied that the project was ready for public consumption, they would connect via FTP to the web server to upload the code for each web page, image, etc., and the newly designed website would then be “live” for the world to visit.
The downside of this was that you would need to talk to your web developer each time you needed to make a change to the website, but the upside was that you didn’t need to be bothered with trying to do this yourself…you simply handed it off and they took care of it for you.
The Rise (And Fall) of Blogging
During the early days of the internet, something called “blogging” became popular. The idea was to carve out your own little corner of the internet and to publish articles (i.e., blog posts) about things that interested you (e.g., pets, recipes, sports, etc.). Hypothetically there would be other people online that discovered you, and if they enjoyed your content they would return to your blog later to check out your future posts (assuming that you actually continued to put the work into posting new articles, more on this below).
If this sounds a lot like social media to you, you’re absolutely correct! Websites like MySpace, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram basically introduced variations of blogging in a centralized manner, and I say “websites” because some of these services existed long before the smartphones that are so ubiquitous today.
The rise of social media also had a negative impact on blogging, because why bother with running your own website if all you want to do is publish content, and you can delegate everything else to a service like Facebook.
WordPress: The Origin Story
Now that I’ve explained what blogging is, we can move on to introducing you to the topic of WordPress.
WordPress was first released in 2003 (more than 20 years ago as I’m writing this!!), and it was a Content Management System (CMS) that was specifically designed for one thing: publishing blogs.
Not the websites with a handful of web pages that every small business needs. Not learning management systems (LMS). Not e-commerce websites to sell stuff on. Just blogs. Just a CMS that you could log into, upload some text and images for each article, and then hit the “publish” button to add a new blog post.
One of the concepts that WordPress also introduced was “themes” (both free and paid), which were an easy way to make your website look pretty, without needing the time and knowledge to do so yourself. And this is where web agencies saw an opportunity.
How Web “Development” Works Now
Web agencies used to have to put a tremendous amount of hard work into designing websites for their clients, which also meant that they charged a lot of money for their services, but they hopefully justified that by delivering a high-quality, handcrafted website for their clients.
Along came WordPress and (more importantly) the online marketplaces for WordPress themes, and many agencies were smart enough to realize that they could basically charge their clients a lot of money for what was actually a purchased theme behind the scenes. “Point-and-click” website builder themes for WordPress also emerged, which allowed non-coders to produce decent looking websites without writing a single line of code.
Purchased themes (i.e., templates) and website builders were key reasons why web agencies pushed WordPress so hard as the “best” option for their clients, not because it necessarily benefited their clients, but because it benefited the agencies. It’s also why agencies are more recently promoting similar approaches, such as Webflow.
As a web developer myself, I make a point of looking at the websites of my competitors (i.e., other web agencies), and it’s extremely rare that I encounter any that have actually coded their websites from scratch. Even fewer use a battle-tested, enterprise-grade web development framework (such as Laravel) as the foundation for their website, as I have with Elevate Your Tech.
WordPress: A Security and Maintenance Nightmare
A couple of key challenges with operating a WordPress-based website is that someone needs to be responsible for the maintenance and security of the website.
Maintenance alone can be a significant burden at times, because WordPress sites tend to be a patchwork of WordPress itself, a theme for the site design, and multiple plugins to handle specific requirements that are not provided out-of-the-box by WordPress. For example, you might have one plugin for forms, another for security, another to make your website more SEO-friendly, etc.
These building blocks tend to be regularly updated over time, and one key risk is that a plugin or a theme that you’ve been relying on for years could suddenly be incompatible with the latest version of WordPress.
Someone also needs to be responsible for things like backing up your website, because it would be super crappy to lose all of that content that you worked on for years because your website got hacked. This also leads us to another important point, which is that the WordPress ecosystem is unfortunately a bit of a dumpster fire from a security perspective.
I’m planning to write a more detailed article about this topic in the near future, but for now I will just highlight that there were over 8,000 security vulnerabilities within the WordPress ecosystem during a single year, according to the 2024 Annual WordPress Security Report that was published by Wordfence.
Those security vulnerabilities ranged in severity from “vulnerable but generally unlikely to be exploited” to “your website is currently super easy to hack if you’re using a specific plugin”…yikes!
WordPress: The Website Performance Tax
One reason for the relatively slower performance of a WordPress-based website is that the content for each web page is stored in a database. This means that when a user visits a page, the web server needs to pause to retrieve information about that page from a database before it can fully construct the web page and then send the code and images required for that page back to the user.
Another reason for slow WordPress sites is that a bunch of the web agencies out there are using bloated website themes or point-and-click site builders, rather than carefully designing each site with optimal performance in mind. For example, I recently wrote an article about how many of my local competitors are missing the mark when it comes to website speed.
The interesting thing about this is that you don’t necessarily need a CMS in order to publish a handful of articles on your website. A web developer who actually knows how to code (such as myself) can easily put together some basic infrastructure for storing and displaying articles, with no database required. 99% of the time spent on this article that you’re currently reading was dedicated to writing the content and preparing the images, and once all of that is ready it only takes a few minutes for me to publish the article.
The Curse of the Abandoned Blog
I have frequently seen business websites with blog functionality, only to discover that they have a sad, neglected blog that solely consists of an article or two from years ago.
This doesn’t entirely surprise me, because writing good content is a lot of work, but why bother having a blog at all if you’re not going to put the resources into regularly posting articles?
When Does a Business Actually Require a CMS?
Now that I’ve devoted quite a few words to why most businesses don’t need a CMS, it’s also important to recognize that some businesses definitely do require a CMS.
Some examples of this include:
- News publications, such as traditional newspapers, sports news, finance news, tech news, etc. These types of businesses may have large content teams and hundreds of thousands of published articles, which makes a CMS essential.
- Organizations that are very intentional about regularly publishing educational content. For example, a non-profit organization that focuses on a specific social issue might make a point of publishing a newsletter about the good work that they are doing, research summaries about relevant academic papers and think tank publications, etc.
- A business with an ambitious SEO strategy (and a significant content creation budget to go with it) that involves publishing large quantities of (hopefully) useful content, with the goal of attracting large volumes of free organic web search traffic.
Conclusion
There are some organizations for which a CMS is clearly an absolute necessity, but for most local businesses a CMS is overkill, and a much better approach is to invest in a carefully engineered, high-performance asset, instead of a slow, high-maintenance security liability.
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About the Author
John is a multi-disciplinary professional who has spent twenty years mastering the intersection of business, finance, and information technology. His technical journey began with building and repairing computers, a foundation that led to him being recruited by a pioneering video alarm monitoring startup as a network administrator and web developer. He subsequently attended the University of Alberta, discovering a passion for finance while completing his Bachelor of Commerce degree, and he later became a CFA charterholder.
He has over a decade of experience in the finance industry, including roles with Canada’s largest independent mortgage finance company, a highly successful private lender, and a boutique private equity firm. John also previously owned and operated a dedicated IT consulting practice, and he was the sole web developer for an online media company that he co-founded.