Last week, we kicked off our “WordPress for the Enterprise” series to shatter preconceived notions about a WordPress website as an unacceptable solution for large, enterprise companies. That post covered the commitment from WordPress with proper security precautions and the processes we’ve implemented as a partner committed to the success and security of our clients’ websites.

If you missed it, shame on you but you can still catch it here: Think WordPress Isn’t for the Enterprise? Think Again.

Today, let’s cover the benefits of a WordPress website from a scalability standpoint.

WordPress is built to scale

A WordPress website’s ability to handle high volumes of traffic and plenty of web pages makes it a great CMS for companies who anticipate driving a lot of traffic to their website (who doesn’t have that goal?) and for companies who have several products, solutions, business units and divisions.

Supporting an enterprise level of growth and global reach is a must-have. A growing, global company typically translates to a complex website in terms of site architecture, overall size and functionality. But, can WordPress handle it? Yes. The answer is yes.

Let’s look at each factor independently.

Site architecture

We’re dealing with several products across several business units operating within various (and sometimes overlapping) markets. Say that ten times fast! Plus, they all need to be organized and presented in a way that makes sense for the end user visiting your website. To grow with the company, the website should be built according to today’s business structure and for the anticipated future structure.  Which brings us to the next point…

Site Size

A large company is naturally going to have a large website. Size includes the number of pages, custom post types, downloadable content in a resource center, products and product pages and service and solution pages. For a growing company who is updating the website regularly (which you should be), it’s inevitable that it will get larger over time and negatively affect performance without proper configuration.

Technically, a WordPress website isn’t limited by how many pages or posts you can have. You can have 60 or 1,500. But, that depends heavily on how your website and server are configured for load and performance. Host your website with well-respected providers in the industry like WPEngine or Pagely if you have high traffic or page volume.

Functionality

This is where things can get tricky because ‘functionality’ presents a wide array of options. Here are just a few common functionality requirements that can be included in a website project:

•  Product database integration and product portfolio
•  Enhanced search to reduce time and improve quality of results
•  Foreign language sites with WordPress Multisite Network
•  LiveChat
•  Advertising tracking to report across multiple live campaigns
•  Integration with marketing automation and CRM

Building a WordPress website for a business with so many complexities offline can result is an online experience that is unintuitive for users to navigate and find the information they need. With this, more attention needs to be given to maintaining performance. Providing a website that lives up to the expectations of your audience while remaining easy to use is critical. It may be a complex website after factors like size, functionality and integrations are assessed, but it shouldn’t feel that way to a user visiting your website.

As your business and WordPress website grows, here are just few ways to keep it up to par with user expectations without sacrificing performance:

•  Optimize database configuration – Reduce the time it takes users to land on the product (or service, document, download) they want to find, for example. Optimizing your database(s) properly can provide a better user experience, increased performance and quicker searches.
•  Optimize search – Elastic search helps to scale search queries, speed up searches and improve usability. It includes familiar functionality we’ve become accustomed to (and even expect) like “Did you mean” and fuzzy matching.
•  Leverage WordPress Multisite Network – Create a network of multiple websites. Manage them all in one place including the number of site, features and user roles. This especially helps global companies who need a foreign language instance of their website.

All is possible with WordPress

With the right technical talent, you can be prepared to scale your WordPress website.

If you’ve been itching to use WordPress, but haven’t been able to build the business case reach out to us today so we can help you get there.