WordPress for SMEs and High-Scale Platforms

WordPress powers 30.5% of the web - leading the charts for the most popular CMS out there. Building proprietary CMS platforms was quite common back in the day - primarily due to the lack of viable alternatives. Here's why custom CMS platforms are far less popular nowadays - due to problems such as vendor lock-in, expensive add-ons, and a long period of QA.

Visual editing in WordPress isn't trivial - the more your platform grows, the more performance issues you'll end up facing. There are different ways to craft and manage content in WordPress - and they don't necessarily involve builders like Visual Composer. Also, we touch on the future of Gutenberg and what will change in WordPress.

You can see maintenance offers for WordPress platforms that ask for anywhere between $20/mo and $10,000/mo. How come there's such a gap between different offerings? I've covered the pricing process of most companies, what goes into maintenance plans, how to come up with your own ballpark or predict some areas that will eat up more time.

WordPress is written in PHP and JavaScript, but is PHP a reliable engine for high-scale websites? Well, it seems to work for Facebook and Wikipedia (built almost exclusively in PHP). Solving complex scaling problems is hard for any technical stack out there - PHP's being no different. Listen in and see what PHP can and cannot do and how to design your stack accordingly.

Is WordPress a suitable platform for running an online store? Yes, it's simply great more often than not. And there are specific things you need to understand upfront. Listen to the backstory of EDD and WooCommerce, their business models, how they differ and what could be done with them.

Software as a Service lets you charge your customers on a monthly basis, generating passive revenue through recurring payments. WordPress is a great engine for SaaS - but you need to approach that carefully. Installing a poor set of plugins will add up based on the number of subsites, which gets increasingly challenging over time. Here's what you need to plan for.

What sort of hosting options are available? From shared and VPS through dedicated and cloud to managed instances. What is the best option for a scalable and large platform?

The number of active plugins doesn't matter. You can run 100 lightweight plugins and do just fine, or activate one that would mess everything up. Premium plugins are no different - in fact, authors have a really hard time producing outstanding quality at a low cost. Listen in and learn what to look for in a premium WordPress plugin and how to identify the right solutions for your high-scale websit...

Purchasing a $49 theme may seem like a good investment for a large website. But is it worth it? Learn the caveats of using multipurpose WordPress themes and possible caveats you need to consider for a large WP platform.

What is WordPress Expert and why isn't it a real title? This episode discusses different job titles in the WordPress industry, what should you describe in your job description, how to separate theme and back-end plugin developers and the caveats with generic WordPress titles.

The difference between building a custom platform on top of WordPress vs. setting up LEGO with dozens of plugins. Best practices are crucial while scaling. The cost difference is significant, but you don't want to end up relying on a toy for a high-scale platform generating tens of millions in revenue.

WordPress History for SMEs