Choose the Right WordPress for Your Website

Many small to medium-sized non­prof­its need an easy, inex­pen­sive option for their web­sites. A com­mon bit of advice is often dis­pensed in those sit­u­a­tions: try WordPress.

Depend­ing on the organization’s needs, that advice might be spot-on. Unfor­tu­nately those giv­ing the advice some­times don’t delve into an impor­tant ques­tion: which WordPress?

Because there’s not just one kind of WordPress.

In fact, there are four.

What kinds of Word­Press are there?

I think of Word­Press in terms of donuts. (I think of many things in terms of donuts.)

Just because a donut is twice as fancy doesn’t mean it’s twice as right for you. Sure, that choco­late frost­ing and whipped cream is deli­cious, but it costs more, has a lot more calo­ries, and it might be way more stuff than you care to eat.

So going with a donut anal­ogy, here’s how I see the space of Word­Press options. I’ll describe each in more detail in a moment.

Plain: WordPress.com

WordPress’s shared, free offer­ing at WordPress.com is very impressive.

The upside

Just pick a name for your blog, sign up, and in min­utes you can have a basic web­site up and run­ning. For exam­ple, it lets you:

• Pick from a large selec­tion of design themes (web­site for­mats), nearly 180 as of this writing.
• Cus­tomize the header and the back­ground image.
• Cre­ate a blog with a run­ning list of posts, or cre­ate a web­site with menus and pages, or do some of both.
• Cre­ate polls and post their results.
• And much, much more.

The down­side

So what’s the cost? In a word, lim­its. For example:

• You can’t pick any themes beyond the stan­dard list.
• Besides head­ers and back­grounds, you can’t change your site’s design.
• Occa­sion­ally ads may appear on your site, albeit unob­tru­sive ones.
• Your site’s address will be [your-name-here].wordpress.com.
• There’s a uni­verse of very cool plu­g­ins (add-ons) for Word­Press. Some of them do amaz­ing things. You can’t use any of them.
• Gen­er­ous but lim­ited stor­age space.

And you know what? For a whole lot of orga­ni­za­tions those are per­fectly accept­able compromises.

Don’t like com­pro­mis­ing? Don’t worry. It’s noth­ing a lit­tle cash won’t fix. Which brings us to…

Pow­dered plain: WordPress.com Pro

The upside

WordPress.com offers an a la carte menu of lim­its that you can remove. For example:

• Want more space? 20 bucks a year will add a gen­er­ous 10 gigabytes.
• Want your own domain instead of [your-name-here].wordpress.com? Pay $12/year. Done.
• Want to elim­i­nate any pos­si­bil­ity of ads appear­ing? You can de-ad your­self for just $30/year.

And while you’re still lim­ited to a list of Word­Press approved themes, for $30/year you can have a lit­tle more con­trol over your fonts and the site’s design, or for $45-$100 you can buy a higher-end pre­mium theme.

The down­side

But:

• You still can’t use Word­Press themes beyond the stan­dard list, and there are thou­sands avail­able around the web.
• You still can’t touch the enor­mous library of cool and use­ful Word­Press plugins.
• You can’t have a com­pletely cus­tom theme that’s spe­cific to your organization.

If you want any those things, then WordPress.com has stopped being cozy and started feel­ing a lit­tle snug.

It’s time for a more adven­tur­ous donut.

Frosted: self-hosted WordPress

Fun­da­men­tally, WordPress.com gives you two things: soft­ware to build a web­site, and a place for you to store your website.

With self-hosted Word­Press, aka WordPress.org, you’ll stop using Word­Press to store your web­site. Instead, you’ll pay a sep­a­rate web host­ing com­pany to store your files, and you’ll install Word­Press soft­ware on that web host as a way to cre­ate your site.

The upside

Once you have your own copy of Word­Press installed on a sep­a­rate web host, the lim­i­ta­tions of WordPress.com go away.

• No ads unless you want some.
• You can use any Word­Press plu­gin you’d like.
• You can use any themes you find or buy on the web.

The down­side

Some trade­offs:

• Some cool fea­tures from WordPress.com, for exam­ple Polls, dis­ap­pear, though you can add them back with plugins.
• You have to choose and pay a web host (more below).
• You have to update your Word­Press soft­ware (also see below).
• Some of the cool themes and plu­g­ins you choose might not work as you expect, or might con­flict with each other.
• Depend­ing on what you want to do, you might need to find a highly-skilled vol­un­teer or pay some­one to help you.

In other words, with added oppor­tu­nity comes added cost and complexity.

But it might be worth it. That added oppor­tu­nity lets you do some truly boda­cious things.

Pick­ing a web host

There are thou­sands and thou­sands of web hosts. I’ve had good expe­ri­ence with InMo­tion and Host­Ga­tor, and WordPress.org has some rec­om­men­da­tions, but there are many other good ones.

How you install Word­Press soft­ware will vary from host to host, but most mod­ern web hosts will make it easy for you. Often you just need to click a but­ton or two and answer a few questions.

If you have an exist­ing WordPress.com site, for $119 Word­Press staff will trans­fer your site to a self-hosted model, so long as you’re up for using one of their selected web host­ing partners.

Soft­ware updates

When you use the shared WordPress.com plat­form for your site, the nice folks WordPress.com will mag­i­cally patch and update their Word­Press soft­ware for you. When new bug fixes are avail­able, *poof*, your web­site is patched. When new fea­tures are avail­able, *poof*, they just appear in your account.

Not so with self-hosted Word­Press. Since you’re using your very own copy of Word­Press, you need to update your soft­ware your­self. And if you don’t ever update your soft­ware, not only will you not get cool new fea­tures, but your site will be vul­ner­a­ble to a grow­ing num­ber of evil hack­ing schemes.

Worth not­ing: it’s really, really easy to update Word­Press. You just need to click a cou­ple of but­tons. But the risk comes in that not every theme, and not every plu­gin, will be com­pat­i­ble with every new Word­Press release. So even though a Word­Press update is easy to do, and even though the vast major­ity of the time every­thing will go just fine, it’s some­thing you want to do carefully.

Frosted with sprin­kles: cus­tom self-hosted WordPress

An amaz­ing num­ber of themes and plu­g­ins are avail­able for free or for a license fee, and you can do some won­der­ful things with them.

We move to our final kind of donut when those just aren’t enough. Maybe there’s some spe­cial fea­ture that exist­ing tools don’t pro­vide, or that they don’t pro­vide in the way you’d like. Maybe you want a design that really looks like it was cre­ated just for your orga­ni­za­tion, some­thing that matches your mis­sion and your branding.

You can do all that in the self-hosted Word­Press model, but at this point we move to the world of cus­tom Word­Press pro­gram­ming. The trade­offs are pretty sim­ple here.

The upside

• Nearly any­thing you can imag­ine for your web­site is possible.

The down­side

• To make the magic hap­pen you either need to find a highly-skilled staff mem­ber or vol­un­teer, or you need to pay some­one to do the work for you. And you might need to find mul­ti­ple some­ones: a mar­ket­ing team, a graphic designer, a web pro­gram­mer, a search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) expert…

How to choose a donut WordPress

Choose the sim­plest prac­ti­cal option.

How? Well, start with the most basic one and ask some questions.

• Will it obvi­ously not work? Then go to the next fancier option and ask the same question.
• Are you unsure whether it’ll work? Try it out. See what you think. If it won’t do what you need, move to the next fancier option and ask the same question.

In the absence of evi­dence that a sim­ple solu­tion won’t work, use a sim­ple solution.

Though each upgrade gets you valu­able new oppor­tu­ni­ties, it also brings costs. Some are dol­lar costs, and some time costs; some are ini­tial costs, and some are ongoing.

You get to decide how much those oppor­tu­ni­ties are worth to you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I really need to go get a donut.