When you build a website, especially when you spend money to have a website professionally built, you want it to last.
You don't want to spend thousands of dollars just to turn around and spend the money again in just a couple of years and do it all over again.
In today's episode, you'll learn how to future-proof your website by using the best platform you can possibly use for that purpose.
Mentioned Resources:
Yoast SEO
WP Engine
When you build a website, especially when you spend money to have a website professionally built, you want it to last.
You don't want to spend thousands of dollars just to turn around and spend the money again in just a couple of years and do it all over again.
In today's episode, you'll learn how to future-proof your website by using the best platform you can possibly use for that purpose.
Mentioned Resources:
Yoast SEO
WP Engine
When you build a website, especially when you spend money to have a website professionally built, you want it to last, you're not gonna spend two, three, $5,000, $10,000. Sometimes there are companies that are spending 30 and $50,000 on their websites. They're not spending that money to wanna go and turn around and spend the money again in just a couple of years and do it all over again. In today's episode, I wanna talk to you about how to Futureproof your website by using the best platform you can possibly use for that purpose. Now, if you've been following me for more than just a couple episodes, you probably know this answer, but let's dive in. You're listening to the captain coder podcast each week. I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Marisa VanSkiver, AKA captain coder. The first website I ever built that I charged someone money for. Well, I'm pretty, I am like 95% sure. I took a check for this website. I was 17. I was a senior in high school, and I remember telling them that this website would probably live for about two to three years. And for a long time, the shelf life of a website, because technology was changing all of the time. And because this was in the wild west before there were a lot of options. We were hand coding things, a lot of websites. They lived about two to three years. That was the shelf life. But you know what? It doesn't have to be that way anymore. I wanna tell you a secret. I work on client websites that have been around for 4, 5, 7 years, seven years. That's an incredibly long time for a website to live online. And what do all of these websites have in common? They were all built on the same platform that allowed for flexibility that allowed for their business growth that allowed for changes over time without need the need to completely Recode. Now I mentioned at the intro, if you've been listening to me for longer than two seconds, you probably know the answer, but this answer is WordPress. I've been coding it exclusively in WordPress for almost 10 years. So there's, there's a reason. There is a reason that I like it. There's a reason that I've stuck here. Whenever I have someone who comes to me and they wonder why WordPress is the right answer, why I'm not giving them a quote for square space or Wix or web flow, or even some of the newer things like show it. They're gonna get an answer longer than they'd really meant to. So if you ever have somebody who comes to you and they say, say, I don't understand why I need WordPress, send them this episode. If you are arguing with a business partner or you're trying to decide whether or not you need to have your website professionally built or where to build your website, listen to this episode. And if you have a friend who you know, is struggling with this option, listen to this episode and share it with them. Look, WordPress is the right solution for most businesses. Now, there are five main reasons that I'm gonna go through today, but I wanna talk through the one occasion. When I think that WordPress may not be the right answer. Let's just get that one out of the way about the only time that I do not recommend a WordPress website is about the first year to two years of your business. If you are a brand new in business and you have to just have an online presence and you need to be able to DIY this yourself, you're not particularly tech savvy, or you just like the drag and drop interface, and you're doing this alone and you need to save time. That is when a solution like Squarespace can be the right answer. I, I wanna tell you just right now, I'm, I'm not sponsored by anyone. I really wish that would <laugh>. That would help me monetize things a little bit better. Squarespace is inevitably better than Ws. There's a lot. It's a, it's not even a competition. There's a lot of reasons. One of which is because Squarespace works better on mobile devices then Wix does. But if you're looking for a professional opinion and you just wanna know, okay, I'm choosing between these two platforms, cuz that's what I can afford. And I have to do this myself. Squarespace is okay, don't go with Wix and then come and ask me to help you with it because I will cry just a little bit inside <laugh> you know, and here's the thing with these platforms. And let's talk about that really quick. The platforms like Squarespace and wigs are real are meant to be easy to use, but I still talk to a lot of people who don't feel like they're actually easy to use. I have lots of customers that actually find WordPress using a theme like hello Elementor and the Elementor plugin, um, a whole lot easier to create a website with on their own. It doesn't matter how you create a website. The reason you're going to these more let's call them user friendly solutions where you don't need a professional is because your business is gonna change. I have had captain coder for let's see, we've been in operation now for two years.<laugh> I cannot tell you how much my business has changed over the last two years. And I am still going through changes. I rewrote my website and I started putting my website together, my new revamped website. And it will still be accurate when I eventually launch it because I am too busy with other client stuff right now to work on my own. And isn't that just, you know, the whole problem with this being a service provider is everybody else comes first before you <laugh> different episode, but it is totally normal for your business to change in that first couple of years, you're gonna have a setup that you think is right for you. And especially as a service provider and then things are going to change when you're just getting off the ground. You may only need a simple one page website to build trust and to kind of mark and lay claim to your quarter of the internet. However, when you're ready for your business to grow and when you're ready for it to thrive and you're ready to really invest in your online presence and trying to get leads. And you're trying to build your email list and you're trying to get discovery calls and all of these other things through your website, it is worth the investment to go with a solution like WordPress. Now here's why number one, WordPress can live anywhere. Now what I'm talking about WordPress today, I'm talking about wordpress.org. So WordPress itself is an open source platform. That means anyone can make changes to it and it can live on almost any hosting platform available out there in the world. When you select a platform builder like Ws and Squarespace, you are stuck with them for as long as you want to have that website. And it is almost impossible to export your content out of the Ws website, especially, but out of both of them, they're not meant to move. They're meant to stay there. So if you don't like Wickes customer service, that's too damn bad. You're stuck. If you don't like something and how Squarespace does something, but you like your layouts and the way that your website looks too bad, you have to rebuild that somewhere else. If you wanna move. So keep that in mind when you're deciding what you like, if you would like, don't like being tied down. I have problems with authority. Don't tell me what to do.<laugh> the irony of me telling you what to do throughout this entire episode. Look, do what I say, know what I do. Um, but you know, I don't love being stuck with someone. And when somebody mentions that they're whi Squarespace or they're with WICS, that is literally the number one thing that gives my goat every single time, but a WordPress website, it can move anywhere if you're not happy with your hosting company or if your website's loading slowly and you need it to load faster, or if you are something, getting more visitors to your website, so you need to beef up what your website can do. So it works because if it doesn't work, you will lose customers. That is unfortunately just the reality. You can move it. You can literally move it anywhere else. There was a time that I used to host with a very specific company that shall not be named, but you know, you've probably seen lots of commercials for them. They used to have decent hosting packages and they used to have decent servers. They do not anymore. And a couple years ago, I finally started shopping around and settled with WP engine. That's actually who I host all of my clients' website through and wanna drop a link for you guys in today's show notes. So you can go check it out. It is a little bit prier than, you know, some of those other daddy companies, but really not that much. And the quality that you get in return is incredible as well as the customer service. But you know, what, if they stopped providing me the quality and the customer service and the speed and everything else that I like I can take, not only my own website, but all of my clients' websites and we can move, we have the flexibility to choose the right host for us. And that is the number one reason why I love WordPress. Now the number two, okay. This is also,<laugh> maybe one of the most overwhelming things and where people get lost, but WordPress is incredibly flexible. It's simply one of its best features that you can do almost anything with WordPress. Now this can make it a little harder to understand upfront and I totally get it. You will also be able to recognize a Squarespace website from a mile away. If you look at too many Squarespace websites, WordPress, not so much, you can build. I, you know, I can build custom websites, countless websites that look nothing like each other, that function, nothing like each other. My head is currently buried in a website that is not how I would typically build it. I'm coming in. I'm their secondary coder. You know, they've the new developer on this project and it's done differently and I'm loving learning how they did it and, and diving into it and changing it a little bit. And my other clients have simpler websites and some clients have more complex websites. They're truly customized to my clients and their brands and their needs. Cuz here's the thing. Do you need an eCommerce website? WordPress can do that. In fact, WooCommerce is one of the top eCommerce platforms in the world and it runs on WordPress. Do you need your website to host a membership platform? Do you need a site? That's a powerful SEO tool. Okay. So you get the picture like it can do pretty much everything and it has far better built in SEO features just FYI than anything else on the market. WordPress started as a blogging platform. Blogs really are really good for SEO. Do you kind of see, I mean, they, they just, they knew this was important from the start. There's a lot of problems with trying to do proper SEO with some of the other platform builders that shall not be named. Now the great thing about WordPress and it's flexibility is that there's a huge library of plugins, of themes, of additional features that you can add into it and do almost anything for a lot lower cost than you could if you were building this all custom without it. And sometimes almost for really honestly, for a lower cost than some of the platform builders. I know it's cheaper to build and maintain a eCommerce site than it is through Shopify for instance, but that's the thing. You have options. And it is so incredibly flexible that as your business grows, which is point number three, your website can grow. There is no other content management system out there that is flexible like WordPress, and that can grow with your business like WordPress for one of my clients, I, I fixed her eCommerce and we've added a few features to her website that she didn't have before. And we were able to do that all with a lot of the same stuff that she had before, without completely starting from scratch. We then added a blog to her website because she was ready to, to write blogs. And we've looked at adding other features along the way as her business grows and changes. There's a lot of things that you can do with a WordPress website that makes it really easy. When you wanna grow, when you're growing your business, when you're growing your online service offerings, when you wanna add new products, certain services members, only content, maybe you're adding 'em in an online course. You can do all of that without redesigning and rebuilding your entire website. Thanks to WordPress and its flexibility. Now I am completely redesigning and rebuilding my website because my business has changed a lot, but also because how I code websites has changed a, a lot in the last two years <laugh> and that will probably always be the case for me, but that doesn't have to be the case for you. You're not as, um, you know, mental about it like I am. And honestly, the flexibility of WordPress saves you money in the long run because you're not having to pay for a whole new website every time you wanna add some features to it. Honestly, the number one reason that a lot of my customers come to me to begin with is because they've outgrown the website they have. And we have to look at moving them off of WICS and Squarespace and getting them onto a platform that can continue to grow with them and their business. Now, number four, <laugh> WordPress is so great for your SEO. As I mentioned, it's started as a blogging platform and honestly, blocking and writing articles on your website is still one of the best ways to build up your organic SEO because WordPress started in that world. It's had some of the best built in SEO features of any content management system on the planet. Seriously, like I have not seen a single one of these compare out of the box. WordPress makes adding things like alt tags to your images, creating the correct URL, structure, categorizing things, and even creating internal links, a breeze. Now you can use additional plugins like Yost SEO, which I will link to in today's show notes where you can take real control of your OnPage SEO and make finding your website on Google as cinch. There's not a single website that I build for my clients that is not SEO optimized. And that's because it is so incredibly easy things that I can do in WordPress in seconds to improve on page SEO and to improve somebody's search rankings can take me 10 times longer in other website platforms, or they just aren't possible. Believe me, I've run audits. I have tried nothing handles SEO like WordPress does when your site is built correctly from the get go, it goes a long way to making your site compete in search engines and number five. My last reason, um, this episode could easily be an hour long if you guys let me, but I know that nobody will listen to it. So number five, WordPress powers, 43% of the internet. This number keeps going up. This was 42% just last year. So we're only growing by a percent. Um, my guess honestly, why we're only growing a percent is because it, because a lot of people or have started new businesses on their own. So they are using things like Squarespace and Ws, but nothing can touch the market. Share of WordPress. Now that tells you that huge number should tell you how powerful WordPress is in and of itself because web developers like myself have chosen it over and over again for like 20 years. Now. Here's the other thing that makes this and this number is really important for you and your business. Finding someone who can work on your WordPress website is really damn easy when there's 43% of the internet powered by WordPress. That means there's a lot more WordPress developers out there on the market to service and help you. Now, if you're looking at doing something slightly custom with Shopify or Squarespace or WICS, I can tell you right now that I see people searching in groups for these kinds of people who specialize in these platform builders. And it's really, really hard to find them and the new platforms when you have a web developer or an agency come to you and they say, oh yeah, we're gonna build on this new platform like web flow. Um, and some others, I'm not laughing at web flow in particular, but when you're building on something like this, that's new and it's not tested and it doesn't have a lot of user bases on it. You're taking a risk. That one, your website's gonna work in a year because what if they run out of funding, but two, you're taking a risk because how many people really know how to work on that website. But then when you choose something like WordPress, you have people like me who have literally been working in WordPress for 10 years, doing things is really easy and really fast for us. There are definitely levels of WordPress developers out there. Not everybody is like me who custom codes. Some people literally just know how to work with the plugins and the drag and drop themes, especially recently. So make sure that when you're looking for somebody, you, depending on what you need, that you're looking for somebody who has actual coding experience. If you need something a little bit more custom, so that you're not just in selling 50 plugins into your website and causing other problems that we can talk about at a different day, if you guys are interested. However, with that much internet bandwidth, finding a qualified developer is going to be a whole lot easier than if you try to use anything else. I help you understand that the point of today's episode is all about investment, getting the most out of your website build. So you're not chasing your tail and doing this every two years, you should not have to rebuild your website from two years ago. I mean, unless there's a hundred things wrong with it, but if you invest in something like WordPress into a business website that can automate your processes, get you found on Google can be an actual marketing machine. It can last four years as it grows with your business. I'm gonna be a hundred percent honest. There may come a day when this episode topic would change and maybe WordPress isn't the right solution anymore. Right now, I can't even tell you of anything on the horizon that I could tell that I would think would overtake WordPress and what it does. WordPress is the best answer out there currently for you to save money, have a content management system. So it's easy for you as a business owner, as a marketing manager, as somebody who's taking care of a website, to be able to update it without a developer. Now you can always hire us to help, and we're more than happy to help, but just keep that in mind. There's nothing out there like this on the market. Yes, it may cost you more upfront and it should, it should a hundred percent cost you more to build a WordPress website than it would on Ws or Squarespace, but it will save you so much time long term that this investment really isn't even something you have to think about twice. Thank you all for tuning into our show this week to catch more captain coder, you can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us on instagram @captaincoder or visit us online at captcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.