WordPress for Enterprise Companies: A Powerful, Secure, Scalable and Usable Solution
More and more companies are using WordPress and a large number of them are enterprise organizations. WordPress is quickly becoming a secure, scalable and usable solution for enterprise companies.
Security
WordPress is secure for the enterprise
A common concern with WordPress that we’d like to quickly put to rest is that it is not secure. WordPress is an open source platform and free to access and use in any way – which is one of the reasons it has become so popular. Currently, WordPress powers over 74 million of the Internet’s websites, a pretty impressive number. The WordPress community is made up of thousands of developers who work on the platform and continually evaluate its code. Code review is one of the strongest indicators of a platform’s security. As an open source platform, WordPress is extensively reviewed and security issues are typically discovered very quickly and resolved.
In addition, there are a number of security enhancements that can be added to any WordPress website, which are especially important to enterprise clients. These include:
- Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTPS): HTTPS is the secure version of http, which is the protocol over which data is sent between a website’s browser and the website. The ‘S’ in HTTPS stand for secure and lets you know that all communication between the browser and the website is encrypted.
- Two-factor authentication: Also known as 2FA, this is a two-step verification that adds and extra layer of security. It requires not only a password and username but also something that only the user has such as a piece of information only they know or something they have such as a physical token.
- IP white listing: A tool to ensure that the IP address matches for all users who have access to log in to the website.
- Force strong passwords: Makes users create a strong passwords that are hard to replicate or determine for additional security.
- Limit login attempts: Just as it sounds, this feature limits login attempts, which helps to ensure bots don’t hack into the website.
WordPress also offers powerful user roles and permissions in its “off the shelf” installation, including:
- Administrator: Access to all administrative features and options.
- Editor: Ability to manage and publish posts.
- Author: Can publish only their own posts.
- Contributor: Can write but not publish posts; they must be submitted for review.
- Subscriber: Very limited functionality such as changing their profile and leaving comments.
Additional customized roles can be added via WordPress plugins for further security.
Scalability
WordPress built to scale
WordPress is a highly scalable platform, including its ability to handle high loads of traffic. In fact, some of the world’s best known companies with high traffic volume are on WordPress, including:
- Microsoft
- CNN
- Mashable
- The Walt Disney Company
- The Chicago Sun Times
- TIME
- MSNBC
- TED
- Spotify
- TechCrunch
For more companies on WordPress, take a look at the WordPress Showcase.
WordPress’ ability to handle high traffic volume is limited only by the hosting setup, so you’ll want to be sure to select a host whose server stack and architecture are designed for WordPress enterprise website hosting. Two hosts that we highly recommend for enterprise companies are WP Engine and Pagely. Both specialize in WordPress hosting, notably for big brands.
Another important issues with regard to scale is WordPress’ multisite application network, which allows you to create a network of sites all running on a single installation of WordPress. For large enterprise clients this can be very important. It enables them to run multiple “local” WordPress websites that are integrated and driven by a main company WordPress site. To learn more about the multisite feature, read this document in the WordPress Codex on how to create a network.
Additionally, WordPress’ free and premium plugins offer endless possibilities to customize a website and add functionality. There are currently over 46,000 WordPress plugins with 1,360,448,776 total downloads – lots of options to say the least! If you can’t find what you’re looking for with the free and premium plugins, custom plugin development allows the enterprise client even more options.
Usability
WordPress is a highly intuitive content management system (CMS). From its inception, the WordPress community has been committed to creating a platform that has a great user interface that can be used with ease by the non-technical user. It is one of the reasons it has experienced such phenomenal growth.
In today’s era of content marketing as an integral part of any marketing strategy – notably for enterprise companies and big brands – the ability to create and publish content in a structured way across the enterprise is very important.
On the development side, depending on the functionality, it’s fairly easy to get a WordPress website up-and-running. According to one of WordPress’ creators – Matt Mullenweg – 91 percent of all WordPress websites were developed in less than 200 hours. For enterprise clients who need to develop and launch a website quickly, WordPress is often an ideal solution.
Summary
We hope this post has provided some insight on how WordPress can be a solution to enterprise companies. Many times, enterprise companies will build their entire website on WordPress. Other times, they will leverage WordPress to create microsites for various areas of their businesses. We believe the trend to leverage WordPress by large organizations will continue to gain momentum, especially as these companies see that WordPress is a secure, scalable and usable solution to help achieve today’s modern and often complex business goals.
While some enterprise clients use internal resources for WordPress development, many are creating partnerships with WordPress website development experts like Mode Effect for their WordPress enterprise development needs. If you are an enterprise company, we’d welcome the opportunity to connect with you and learn more about your goals.