It’s interesting to watch the Enterprise world grab ahold of WordPress.
In some respects they’re rediscovering the things we’ve known for years. For example, how anyone in the marketing department can make changes, create new landing pages, earn a loyal following, and so on. WordPress makes all this possible with less technical effort than before.
But there are other factors unique to the Enterprise, and that’s where their adoption of WordPress gets even more interesting.
Historically, the enterprise Marketing Department (with a capital ‘M’ and ‘D’!) has been hamstrung by proprietary and static tools, and been at the mercy of the IT Department (more capital letters!) to decide what technology to use or make changes to the system. And if you’re a technical service provider, you know that when you read “proprietary,” “Enterprise,” and “Departments,” you should also think “expensive.”
WordPress changes all that. WordPress can be hosted outside the company’s firewall, because it doesn’t hold any company secrets. That means simultaneously skipping the tyrannical IT department and saving money. Then, with those same benefits, the Marketing Department can create landing pages, run A/B tests, and easily publish a stream of content that feeds their various social media efforts. They can still have their departmental requirements with multiple users being able to edit, review, publish, and configure the system, but you can do all that without a PhD in PHP.
On top of that, 23,000 plugins make it easy to integrate with a plethora of tools and services that the Marketing Department always wanted to use but that couldn’t be shoe-horned into closed, old-school systems. Google Analytics, KISS Metrics, Clicky, SnapEngage, and hundreds of other tools are literally just a few clicks away from the plugin repository.
Finally, for special customization and to build enterprise-grade solutions, there are more WordPress design and development firms than ever before, like WebDevStudios, Human Made, and 10up. These firms provide the white-glove treatment the enterprise is accustomed to from top-tier marketing agencies, but on a platform that they can actually understand, control, and use. Freely.
To those of us outside the world of EnterpriseMarketing, it can be hard to appreciate just how liberating this is. The freedom that WordPress creates extends not just to the millions of individuals who now have a voice on the Internet, but also those historically shackled to bureaucracy and politics.
Enterprise marketing departments are figuring this out right now, and thinking about WordPress not just as a way to “have a website that Marketing can edit without opening a Change Request with IT,” but rather as a focal point of their brand’s existence.
We’re excited to see what they come up with on the platform.
I have about half a dozen enterprise clients, and I don’t buy the 23k plugins argument, because most of them aren’t great.. Or enterprise standard.. Otherwise pretty much spot on.
We’ve got around a dozen enterprise clients like you guys do and pretty much all of our new leads are enterprise. I feel that’s because WordPress has made amazing ground in Australia breaking the stigma of it being ‘just for blogs’.
The only real hurdles are usually enterprises internal IT teams still thinking that WordPress is purely a blogging platform because they’ve used it on a blog years ago and haven’t been following the development release cycle. Usually a few demo’s of some highly customised WordPress installs will quickly hange their minds though.
I’m 100% with you on many of the plugins not being enterprise standard but thanks to the GPL you and I will find a plugin that does nearly does something well then recode it to be more efficient. Gotta love the GPL! 🙂
Totally agree. Enterprise internal IT teams can be a real pain as well… they’re like brick-walls that block everything.
In terms of enterprise-level plugins, there are many that are getting better and better. A few that come to mind as being at enterprise level:
• Advanced Custom Fields (and the paid add-ons)
• Gravity Forms
• Simple Page Ordering
• Wordpress SEO by Yoast
• WP Pagenavi
• Quick Cache
• WP Socialite
I use these on almost every site. They’re regularly updated and very well built.
Gravity Forms is great, but once you get into enterprise-level large forms with lots of calculations, the form’s performance can tank especially with lots of empty fields (think: multiple paths through the form, hiding/revealing different fields). But they know about this issue and are working on it.
To echo what Ben said ‘spot on’ (and a nice summary of what I’m always explaining to people!)
This is exactly true. We had a recent higher education client come to us and we built their site in WordPress. Has worked out perfectly.
For the Plugins, yes… they’re pretty much all crap. I only use non mission critical plugins for SEO or other add-on features.
The IT department is typically our biggest enemy in a new project. Many times they believe wordpress is nothing more than an insecure and limited system.
We love to prove them wrong. 🙂
Nice article, Jason. Couldn’t agree more about the cost savings you mentioned.
I do think the one-click plugin installs and WordPress upgrades shouldn’t even be enabled for enterprise clients anyway. No responsible enterprise IT/infrastructure department would ever allow one-click plugin installs on a production environment.
Enterprise clients (especially) need testing environments and all of their code sourced in version control. If a plugin needs to be added, it should be added to the project codebase by a developer then tested on up the environment chain: local, dev, staging, prod.
It’s more like: “Hundreds of other tools that can potentially break your enterprise site are literally just a few clicks away from the plugin repository.”
This is at least my experience with our enterprise clients.
+1 on 23k+ plugins (actually, that’s just what’s on wordpress.org) with many of them being rubbish. Even many of the “premium” plugins are rubbish, or worse — written to be islands that only vaguely interact with WordPress.
But there are some really good ones in there too, it’s just a matter of researching what your client wants, and either picking something that fits (or can be made to fit), or writing it yourself. The good plugins use templates that can be overridden in the site’s theme, and provide action and filter hooks to let you customise them.
I truly empathize with those dealing with internal IT push back. To help build the case for WordPress, I created a separate marketing community site using BuddyPress and related plugins.
Training/educating enough users around the organization to adopt WordPress for their internal projects created a group of advocates who spread the word to management. The trick for me was to demonstrate the productivity benefits of being self-sufficient. This is for people’s sake, not technology!
It’s unfortunate that so many have had such bad experiences working with IT. I strongly believe that IT should be a strategic partner and trusted advisor with, and to, the business it supports. Delivering this value on a consistent basis is something I and my team pursue on a daily basis.
At Enterasys, we are in the process of moving our www site to WordPress, hosted on WP Engine. We had similar hesitations about WordPress as our Enterprise CMS, but in working with two incredible partners, Fresh Tilled Soil & Convertiv, we easily moved past those concerns and are incredibly excited about our transition to the new platform and all the benefits that have been well documented above.