This month, WordPress turns 22 years old. And as artificial intelligence and the term vibe coding has taken over the conversation in the tech space, this author feels that WordPress may be the smartest choice for local business. Leveraging WordPress for business after being in the arena for 22 years, gives local business owners unbelievable flexibility and ownership of their digital content. Let’s dive further.

Over the last few years, there has been a whirlwind in the tech space and a lot of flashy marketing telling business owners- and potential business owners-that getting your message on the Internet is easy. There are multiple platforms with commercials stating that you can build your business website, equipped for ecommerce, in as little as 15 minutes. Let’s get to brass tacks… The web is not “easy”.

Sure, you can build the infrastructure of a simple website in minutes, but copywriting takes strategy, evaluation, action, patience, and budget. The idea that you can whip out a website to promote your business and become magically financially solvent is not only insulting to people in the web development world, but to you as a business owner with the assumption that you have no discernment for logic.

Vibe-coding

So, let’s take a look at an idea of vibe coding. Vibe coding is tremendously exciting in the web space. The idea that you can launch an online tool, type in a paragraph and 10 minutes later see a fully functioning website is remarkable. This author is not denying the technical miracle that we are currently seeing in the space. However, when you look closely at these miracles, you begin to recognize that these are the starting points for projects with no end.

The copy on the website is placeholder copy added by artificial intelligence. That means every word on this generated website is basically made-up. The descriptions of your business, your services, your customers, and your community are mostly wrong and will need to be edited. When you attempt to edit these artificially generated websites you bump into all other types of obstacles. Now comes the function… What do you need the website to do?

If your business is based in ecommerce, this website now needs to list all your products attached to a shopping cart and checkout platform that allows payment online and order fulfillment. Since AI vibe-coded this new platform for you, how do you plan to add your products or modify the descriptions of your products or even track your inventory through the database that this vibe coded website may or may not have?

This vibe-coded website kicked out some good basic content, but now you want to add a first in first out file like A blog to keep your local customers up to date on the activities of your business. This AI generated website doesn’t have a blog, so now what are you going to do?

This is what I am seeing in this space. Developers and business owners are attempting to use new technologies to serve the business marketplace. That sounds great on the surface. But the next thing you know, your business needs more functionality online. So instead of having one website with flexibility to serve all your business needs, you see businesses leveraging four to five different websites to try to meet their goals, the obstacle here is that consumers do not appreciate the extra friction of multiple web sites with a single business.

So, if your business has a marketing website, blogging website, online store website, community website, and uses a third party scheduling website… You are greatly disorienting your customers and creating friction that does not need to be there.

What if you don’t need this stuff- yet?

This is why I lean so heavily on WordPress when working with clients. WordPress having now been online for 22 years, has not only the time in service, but also over 43% of the Internet. That is an unbelievably huge market share and implies its function along with its dominance.

When a startup launches a website, they most likely don’t need all the bells and whistles. They simply need to get their basic message online and searchable. They want new customers to be able to find them and be able to do business with them. As business grows, they start to realize they need to add more messaging to their site.

This is where WordPress shines. You can take a basic WordPress website- what we would call a brochure style website in the development space-and add all kinds of functionality to it. There are scheduling tools, that allow you to automate not only your schedule with clients, but allow your clients to prepay for appointments as they schedule. There are shopping carts to sell hard goods that will include shipping and taxes for a complete purchase experience. There are learning management systems (LMS) so companies can educate their customers, or onboard their internal staff. There are community tools so that business can be interactive with its people without having to depend on big tech, like Facebook or X.

Our agency, serving the Hutchinson area, has a dependable tech stack that we lean on to add the tools that each client requires. This means that we can use WordPress to launch our clients as startups and serve them long term without having to migrate them from one platform to another as their business grows and morphs with its needs.

But what about the cool stuff?

New stuff is great. New stuff lets you know what you are up against and what people might want. New stuff also can reinvigorate the established leader. I believe that is what AI and vibe coding is doing to the WordPress space.

As new tools and expectations, especially via AI, infect our workspace… I continually see WordPress and the contributions to WordPress fill the gap and give us a competitive product to represent to our local businesses.

WordPress is great for DIY

A lot of what I wrote above is in relation to using an agency to get your message online. Part of my issue with other SAAS platforms is there messaging to other business owners. When they say something like “in only 15 minutes you can build your website for your business”, that is horribly misleading because the ad implies a DIY perspective and the simplicity and budget that is non consequential. If you’ve been down this path before as a business, you recognize the path as extended frustration and possible cost, as hiring a consultant for a project that is half done can actually cost more than hiring one to build from scratch.

WordPress is a different kind of DIY. WordPress itself is open source, which in general Means free and available to everybody. At 43% of the Internet, there is an unbelievable amount of free resources online to educate oneself in using it. Hutchinson also hosts the monthly WordPress Meetup Hutchinson… A free, no strings-attached meeting, to teach people how WordPress works. That meet up is held on the second Tuesday of every month at Sandhills brewery.

As Open Source, you have the freedom to host your site with any host and you own the site and its content. SAAS platforms are more comparable to renting a space than owning. In some cases, there is no way to retrieve your content should you choose to locate to another source.

So, with WordPress, and its 22 years of legacy, you have the option of building something yourself or hiring a professional from the beginning. There are multiple agencies in town, and a couple of them specialize in WordPress.

So, if you’re thinking of something new, think 22.