I have been an advocate of WordPress for over a decade. For our business, WordPress is the perfect blend between ease of use, technical simplicity, and a content driven CMS that just works.
We’ve built sites or migrated sites with millions of active users, tens of millions of visitors a month, and parallel that effort with intelligent content strategy to actually make a migration exciting.
Simply stated, I love WordPress. With a content & SEO focus, WordPress is unmatched in my humble opinion — especially with the flexibility of Gutenberg.
All of that said — WordPress can certainly be a lot to wrangle in and keep running efficiently.
In order to use WordPress effectively, you have to consider the following:
- Hosting — While it’s not necessarily hard to host a WordPress site, you can easily compromise performance if you opt for a shared hosting plan. Or, the cost could be significantly higher for a managed service.
- Updates — When working with larger organizations updates happen regularly. Code is being pushed, its version controlled, and you have staff continuously upgrading plugins, WordPress core, and generally paying more attention to the site. For smaller orgs & local businesses, none of that is cost-efficient – or sometimes even approachable.
- Security — WordPress’s popularity makes it a target for hackers. Without proper setup, or without attention applied to updates and patching outdated plugins, a vulnerability isn’t really and “if” its a “when”.
I’ve seen countless local business sites over the years unknowingly selling Viagra over the years. I’ve actually built a sales process targeting sites like this — and most compromised sites are local business WordPress sites left dormant for years.
- Version Control — If your local business is running WordPress, you can almost guarantee that there isn’t proper version control strategy put in place. One wrong click from someone using FileZilla for the first time, and goodbye website.
In a bigger organization WordPress can makes more sense as a team or at least an individual is dedicated toward mitigating these challenges.
For local businesses, this is almost never the case – and so in turn things can go wrong very quickly, or the potential of optimizing your website for local customers is never fully realized.
Duda Is A Better Option
Enter Duda. I’ve known about Duda for some time. In the early 2010s I remember they would build you a mobile site with a few clicks before responsive websites or mobile first design was a thing.
When I say they are a better option than WordPress, I only mean this for Local Businesses that want to run their own sites, keep the cost low, and never worry about any technical aspect of a website.
For a local organization, Duda covers all of the previous concerns and more.
Hosting — Duda has this built into their platform. When you are ready to launch a website, you simply need to adjust some name server settings for your domain – or if you purchase your domain through Duda’s platform this is handled for you.
Updates — Duda’s engineering team is constantly making updates to the platform. As a Duda user you will not have to worry about updating to the latest version. Additionally they are improving the platform for crucial SEO aspects that many business owners wouldn’t even be aware are happening (talking about Core Web Vitals here).
Security — While I cannot speak as in depth regarding Duda’s security offerings as compared to WordPress, it certainly does not have the target on its back that WordPress does. Additionally, a one click SSL certificate is available right away.
Version Control — Duda doesn’t have what I would consider “Version Control”, although you are able to quickly undo or redo edits on your site while editing and before Publishing or Republishing.
Overall, Duda’s system is set up to be much more manageable compared to some of the technical aspects that WordPress users can encounter.
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