Why WordPress for Your Enterprise Website?

Aug 30, 2024

4 minutes

Recently, WordPress celebrated its 21st anniversary. That puts it close to the top of a very short list of open source projects that have endured (and grown) for that long. Through that longevity, a community has grown around the software, and a lot of really big problems have been solved at scale. Learn what makes WordPress the perfect choice for your enterprise.

An enduring CMS

Continuity is an important value for any organization. Software that has endured for as long as WordPress while being developed out in the open, has already found solutions for the most common problems that might affect continuity, as well as edge cases that might only be uncovered after years of use.

Over time, WordPress has built a solid and extendable foundation for developers to build with. It has created an informed and flexible interface for managing and editing content and users. It has attracted security experts who monitor potential vulnerabilities and push through patches quickly. It has been through iterations that make its codebase more accessible by default, more performant by default, and more scalable over time.

The WordPress open source ethos has been a huge reason for its success, and it has given it the ability to enter into new markets and address a larger set of common web problems.

In recent years, the most notable expansion of WordPress has been the enterprise market. There has been a lot of dedication and focus put towards the needs of enterprise organizations. Learn more about some of the most prolific brands powered by WordPress in the 2024 Scale Consortium Summer Showcase.

Scaling WordPress

We in the community have combined efforts to create a set of best practices for powering and configuring WordPress at an enterprise scale. We have shared knowledge between agencies and web hosts and built a compendium of proven solutions to problems common only to large organizations and high-traffic sites.

For instance, we have addressed major security issues with high-performance web hosting, SSO, 2FA implementations, and a secure set of coding standards. We have developed servers optimized for WordPress with caching at every level, to improve large WordPress site’s speed and reliability and we have embraced and contributed to a growing WordPress ecosystem of common solutions and plugins that solve some of the most common enterprise problems.

While other solutions might lock you into a specific software or vendor, and make it impossible to retrieve data, the open WordPress ecosystem makes it broadly available and understood by a large developer community.

Perhaps the most significant advantage of WordPress is that it gets out of your way. It works, day in and day out, against any number of problems. It has been proven on some of the world’s biggest websites, in large government organizations, Fortune 500 companies, international media companies, and presidential campaigns.

Working together through best practices, agencies have, in other words, largely solved some of the most pressing questions of operating WordPress at scale. What’s left is what is unique to each enterprise organization, the challenges and use cases that require custom work. All of which will be built on top of a foundation that is stable, reliable, and largely invisible to the end user.

Preparing for the next challenge

WordPress has been used for large-scale websites, application development, intranets, and a host of other solutions. As you prepare for the next phase of your web platform, consider that WordPress, with its decades of development, large community, and proven solutions, can run quietly and unobtrusively in the background, letting your team get to work.

Jay Hoffmann

Jay is Director of Development at Reaktiv, and has been in the WordPress space for almost fifteen years, working across different media and enterprise properties. In addition to contributing to WordPress and other open source projects, he has spoken at several WordCamps and web conferences.

You have questions?
We have answers.

Why are big brands using WordPress?

Leading enterprise brands choose WordPress for its versatility, scalability, and robust ecosystem of plugins. It offers flexibility to create performant, feature-rich websites while providing a user-friendly interface for content management, where businesses can be confident that they have total ownership of their code. Additionally, WordPress has cultivated a vast service provider layer, helping enterprises avoid vendor lock-in through a diverse range of support options.

How is WordPress Free?

WordPress is free to use because it is an open-source platform. This means its source code is freely available for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. Updates are managed by a community of experienced digital professionals who are driven by their belief in open source.

Many of the agencies who work with WordPress are also signatories of Five for the Future, an initiative where organizations contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development to ensure its long-term sustainability.

How scalable is WordPress?

WordPress is highly scalable and capable of handling websites of all sizes, it can easily be scaled vertically and horizontally leveraging either cloud or bare metal infrastructure. WordPress’s adaptable architecture allows developers to easily accommodate increasing traffic and expanding content.

While WordPress is scaleable out of the box, multiple cloud providers and web hosts offer enhanced scalability through leveraging WordPress’s powerful abstraction layers that allow the use of endless possibilities of distributed database servers, distributed memory object caching servers, and all prominent web servers.

Trusted by the World’s Biggest Brands

Distinguished as the CMS of choice by the world’s biggest brands, WordPress stands as a testament to its reliability, versatility, and proven ability to elevate digital experiences.