WordPress has become a popular choice for real estate website development. However, is it the best content manager (CMS) for your real estate website? We will examine why it may not be the best option for website owners.
Why Real Estate Website Designers Use WordPress
Since WordPress is a free and open source platform, it has become the popular choice for website providers and developers. Whether you’re building a community website or a store with a shopping cart, the availability of third-party themes and plugins allows you to achieve almost anything you want.
WordPress provides website developers with a great starting point and tools for building a website. In the early years of our company, our website developers built websites from scratch with code using NotePad. WordPress now allows people to build websites even if they don’t have any coding knowledge. In fact, many of those who know how to build websites using WordPress now call themselves “website developers” even though they have no knowledge of actual website coding.
Do It Yourself: The WordPress Learning Curve
If you have little to no knowledge of website development, the WordPress learning curve is going to be steep. Hosting and installing WordPress can be an intimidating and daunting task. Even with the availability of installation guides, WordPress-only installation can be a nightmare if you have no knowledge of hosting lingo. When you install WordPress, you have a generic website that requires the installation of third-party themes and plugins. This is where we see most users throw in the towel and get in touch with us. They have a project they wish they had never started, and the time they spent trying to launch their website could have been spent growing their business and getting more customers.
Have someone build your WordPress real estate website
Even if you have someone build your website for you using WordPress, we still see a lot of users come to us for help. They still feel that their website content is difficult to manage and changing their design is almost impossible. The main reason is that since WordPress was designed for all industries, there is so much going on in the backend that it becomes overwhelming. Most website owners only require a small percentage of the features available in WordPress.
Design
WordPress can create beautiful and attractive real estate websites with many real estate themes available to install. Themes give you a great starting point, but still require customization to achieve the website you really want. A WordPress theme comes generic, which requires a bit of customization to customize it for your business. In our experience, a WordPress theme will only get you about 50% of where you really want to be with your website. The other 50% requires stripping the uploaded theme to just the things you want, adding your own relevant content and images, installing plugins, and customizing the layout.
WordPress Vulnerability
With the popularity of WordPress comes many struggles for real estate website owners. One such important and vital struggle is website security. Once a hacker finds a vulnerability in WordPress, all WordPress websites are open to attack. In November 2014, a vulnerability was discovered that left nearly 86 percent of WordPress’ 75 million websites open to attack. Just a month earlier, 800,000 bank credentials were stolen from hacked WordPress websites.
If your website is built on WordPress, you are most likely using third-party plugins. These third-party plugins may also contain vulnerabilities that make your website open to attack. If a vulnerability is found in plugins, you are at the mercy of the third-party developer to fix the security issue.
Now, it is up to you whether you are going to use WordPress as your platform for your business or not. It is also your choice whether you will do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.