Let’s face it. WordPress development is not for the faint of heart. Wages aren’t as strong as they are for other types of developers, competition is fierce, and you’re expected to work miracles in minutes — after all, it’s just a simple WordPress website, right?
One way to address this conundrum is to simplify your development process by pre-making routine development decisions.
Here’s what I mean: while every WordPress website you build is unique, they all have certain things in common — core factors, you might say. One way to simplify your life as a WordPress developer is to develop a system that knocks out the core needs of every WordPress website the exact same way, every single time, in one fell swoop.
That way, you can focus on the things that make each site unique rather than spending time redefining the wheel.
And we’ve got exactly what you need at WPMU DEV.
Keep It Simple, Stupid: Simplifying WordPress Development
If you’re going to simplify, you have to target the issues that come up again and again on every single site. We’ve identified five such targets — core factors — that come into play every single time, whether you’re building a site for yourself or for a client.
These five core factors apply to every single site you touch and will play a large part in determining the long-term success of every WordPress-powered project. They include performance, monitoring, security, backups, and SEO.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered each of these core needs in-depth. We’ve shown you:
- How to make a WordPress website fly.
- How to automate website monitoring.
- How to harden your WordPress website in eight steps.
- How to implement a comprehensive backup system.
- How to get on-page SEO right in four steps.
If all five core factors will need to be addressed every time you build a WordPress website, then it only makes sense to systematize your approach to addressing them. That way, you can set up a solid foundation for every WordPress website on autopilot and then build out the custom aspects of each project.
The Alternative to Simplification
Do you like dealing with different licensing for a half-dozen (or more) premium plugins and services? How about keeping track of the number of sites each different plugin is licensed for and which sites each plugin is activated on?
If you’re breaking out in hives thinking about trying to track all of this confusion, then you’re doing a good job of envisioning the alternative to simplification.
Rather than deal with that stress, make your life easier by implementing a single system that knocks out all five core needs in a way that is:
- Duplicatable: use the same system on an unlimited number of sites without worrying about licensing.
- Centralized: forget licensing each plugin for each site. License the entire system at once and call it a day.
- Affordable: don’t worry about the cost of rolling out the system on one — or a dozen — new site(s).
WPMU DEV vs Jetpack Premium vs iThemes
The good news is that there are a few different premium WordPress companies that offer a lot of the different pieces you need to put this puzzle together.
With this in mind, over the past few weeks, we’ve taken a look at how WPMU DEV compares to two leading competitors: Jetpack Premium and iThemes.
In this post, I want to take everything we’ve covered over the past few weeks and summarize it by looking at two things:
- The cost of using one of these services to power one site, five sites, 10 sites, and 100 sites.
- The extra pieces you would need to put together to fully address all five core factors with each of these three options.
To make things easy to compare, I’ve combined all of the data from our previous posts in this series into a single table so you can see how it all works out: us versus the competition.
