WordPress Digital Agency – What’s In-Store For Future?

Look into some of the success stories of a few WordPress Digital Agencies and you will notice a striking similarity between them.

The founders initially begin with freelance designing or developing works, building websites while simultaneously running their small businesses. As soon as they realize they are missing out on bigger opportunities, they take the next step forward, i.e., to start a Digital Agency.

You may or may not be familiar but this is precisely how ColorWhistle’s founder started out. Sankar’s passion for web designing and online marketing urged him to make his freelance gig more scalable and sustainable. And that’s also the stage where many WordPress freelancers and small business owners get to at some point in time.

If you find yourself in a similar position where you’re feeling okay with the work you do but don’t feel as though you’re maximizing your impact or your profit, scroll down further.

In this blog, we’ll showcase new opportunities in bringing about the online business revolution using WordPress. Furthermore, we’ll be discussing the future roadmap of WordPress and look at how partnership with a fellow WordPress Digital Agency is scalable.

WordPress Agency – The Base Structure Of Online Business Growth

WordPress is the first open-source CMS that was developed and thus gained a beginner’s advantage. With the likes of BBC America, Sony Music, Mercedes-Benz, TechCrunch, PlayStation Blogs to small business owners, everyone uses WordPress to get their business online!

“But WordPress is not only for blogging – nearly 28% of all e-commerce goes through WooCommerce.”

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress acquired WooCommerce in 2015.

WordPress Ecosystem

Remember why Microsoft couldn’t scale-up its expertise in building Operating Systems for Desktops/Laptops to Smartphone devices and how Android Operating Systems took a giant leap over it as it was developed as an open-source platform.

Once WordPress is up and running, you can also begin leveraging its robust community of open source developers, who provide regular updates, security patches, and other helpful forms of collaboration to the growing ranks of WordPress users.

“WordPress is nothing but a marketplace for themes, plugins, Tutorials, Developer forums, APIs.”

That same community is also renowned for its regular contributions to the growing list of plugins and themes that offer users endless ways to customize and add new features to their websites.

This ability to continuously contribute to the functionality is a polar opposite of other paid software pricing models, which can seriously diminish an agency’s bottom line.

How Can Digital Agencies Utilize WordPress Better?

From domain to hosting, marketing to sales, branding to customer retention, digital agencies can do anything & everything using WordPress!

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg said it himself back in 2014, “when you think about it, we’re kind of building a web operating system.”

Let’s now compare WordPress functionalities with other popular products available in the market.

#1 Building Web Applications

WordPress is not a framework but offers pre-built, customizable themes. It’s plugin architecture offers a rich user experience and enhances content management.

On the other hand, Laravel is an open-source PHP framework. It provides various features, mainly for complex tasks that arise during the website development process, such as authentication, verification, data management, and others.

Building Web Applications

WordPress

WordPress could be used if you are:

  • Creating a content-based website – blog, media portal, online portfolio, etc.
  • Developing a quality website within a short time period
  • Building a custom-made website for someone who does not possess strong technical skills
  • Making an online shop for smaller or medium-sized companies
Laravel

Laravel might be helpful in:

  • Building a data-based website – booking service, project management app, payment gateway, etc.
  • Developing a custom-made web application with complex features
  • Creating a large-scale e-commerce solution

For a detailed comparison, visit this resource.

#2 Building an eCommerce Site

  • If you have a WordPress website already, just install WooCommerce and launch an e-commerce store as an element of that existing website.
  • If you don’t have a website yet, launch your ecommerce store with Shopify.

#3 Enhancing UI/UX

WordPress has pre-built themes for building a website. However, adequate knowledge of HTML, JavaScript (JS), CSS is required to customize these themes.

React, Angular, Vue are some popular JavaScript frameworks for frontend customization of your website. These flexible libraries/frameworks help in easy site creation, simple integration, two-way communication, etc.

In simple words, a developer could use these frameworks to edit and customize the pre-built themes so as to enhance UI/UX of any website.

#4 WordPress with headless CMS development

Traditional CMS was designed to manage content for a single channel. However, with the growth of mobile devices/voice search devices/social media, businesses require the same content to be published across different channels.

Here is where headless CMS comes into play.

Any headless CMS de-links your front-end and back-end applications to manage it independently, which is not the case with traditional CMS.

WordPress by default is not a Headless CMS but thanks to the bundled REST API, you can turn it into a Headless CMS. This would now allow you to publish your website’s content to your Facebook page, Google My Business listing, or your company’s wiki simultaneously. This approach is useful if you want to publish your content to mobile applications, static websites, or advanced web applications.

Watch the video to learn through a real-world example:

Follow this resource for a complete guide on creating headless CMS for your Web Application.

White-label outsourcing in areas like web app development, eCommerce website development, React JS / Vue JS User Enhancement are suitable for agencies that are looking for extra designing/development/marketing resources to share their workload.

ColorWhistle is well-equipped to off-load the needs of such agencies. While we work behind the scenes, you can look great in front of your clients!

WordPress Road Map For The Future

WordPress is always a work-in-progress.

Currently, Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project is underway. The Gutenberg project or ‘WordPress 5.0’ aims to broaden access to web presence. In the past, we have written about how you could prepare your business website for ‘WordPress 5.0’? Click to read.

Throughout 2020, WordPress continued to focus on:

  • Creating a block for navigation menus. WPTavern, the official site for WordPress related news opinionated that the Block Editor is here to stay.
  • Build a WordPress.org directory for discovering blocks, and a way to seamlessly install them.
  • Provide a way for users to opt-in to automatic plugin and theme updates.
  • Provide a way for themes to visually register content areas, and expose them in Gutenberg.
  • Upgrade the widgets-editing areas and the Customizer to support blocks.
  • Provide a way for users to opt-in to automatic updates of major core releases. Automatic updates of core WordPress are slated to officially land in version 5.6.

Version (future releases)

5.6 (Trac)

5.7

5.8

5.9

6.0

Planned

December 2020

March 2021

June 2021

September 2021

December 2021

Here is an opinion article on the WordPress 5.6 wishlist.

Now shifting our focus to WordPress’s parent company – Automattic.

Over these years the company has expanded to include brands like Tumblr, Jetpack, WooCommerce, WordPress.com VIP, Simplenote, Longreads, and more. The company wants to make the web a better place. By releasing a new Spearhead theme targeted at Podcasters and Content Creators, experts imagine it to be the springboard of many upcoming themes, whether in the form of building child themes or using it as a starter.

“Spearhead is not just a theme for WordPress.com users. Self-hosted WordPress users can expect availability in the future.”

Wrapping Up

WordPress powers 35% of the internet in 2020 and digital agencies simply can’t just ignore its importance. With the inclusion of the REST API, WordPress is placed in a better position to capture the next 25% of the web.

Let’s recollect why Digital Agencies should invest their resources in WordPress in the coming future:

  1. Developers find website building easy, marketers get a ready template to implement SEO strategies.
  2. The open-source script lowers the risk of proprietary systems.
  3. WordPress is so widely spread and used offering extensive open-source contributions and community support.
  4. Digital agencies will find it easier to find and hire WordPress developers compared to any other proprietary CMS.

Most digital agencies, including ColorWhistle, are happy to use WordPress CMS for developing, marketing & branding needs. They are even open to partner with a fellow Agency for White-label outsourcing requirements. Consult us today for the details with our WordPress development company services.

Comment down below to let us know if we have missed out on anything.

Best WordPress Resources To Checkout

Wordpress Development Company - Colorwhistle
Pavithra Samuel
About the Author - Pavithra Samuel

I'm a word-aholic copywriter at ColorWhistle sharing a special bond with digital marketing. I always love to write unique and creative content. For this, my research & consistent reading habits are bolstering me a lot. I always search for unique inspirations and write them all down to use in my blogs & content. And, few content writing tools serve as my big pillars of support. Other than reading & writing, my other two beloved pals are food & music. I do post blogs & articles frequently. To get regular updates, stay tuned with us!

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