WordPress for Electric Cooperatives

Why WordPress for Co-ops?

WordPress is easy for you and your employees to learn, no matter how much of a novice you may think you are so that you can just jump in and hit the ground running.

WordPress controls the visuals and written content within your website’s larger design framework. With this user-friendly CMS, you and your team can edit text, swap out or add images, make PDFs and other files available for download, and much more – without the services of a web developer or worrying about breaking the site’s function or design.

Because WordPress is the most popular CMS on the market, it offers the widest range of features available. It’s no surprise then that more and more electric cooperatives are utilizing the power of WordPress.

Powerful, Not Overpowering

In searching for electric co-op content management systems, you will no doubt come across other solid systems that would do the job, but they are often complex, with steep learning curves, created for developers or intrepid techies equipped with lots of experience and time on their hands. Case in point: Drupal, the beast of a CMS that powers a lot of big government agency websites.

WhiteHouse.gov made the switch from Drupal to WordPress in 2017 and the U.S. Department of State followed suit.

As to why the whitehouse.gov site moved from Drupal to WordPress, the primary motivation appears to be money. According to a report in the Washington Examiner, the move to WordPress is all about cost saving, with the relaunched site saving U.S. taxpayers an estimated $3 million a year. – eWeek

Managing your website shouldn’t be hard. Co-op communicators are busy people. Unless you’re staffed to tackle a complicated web project and have deep pockets, WordPress is the obvious platform of choice. The admin dashboard is user-friendly and easy to navigate – plus we offer ongoing support services as much or as little as you need us, and we provide you access to our selection of video tutorials and guides.

What Will My Website’s Future Look Like?

Untethered freedom. There are no long-term contracts, required service tiers, or vendor lock-ins. You are free to go anywhere with your site without substantial switching efforts. Your site is yours: you own it, not us. Of course, we hope you'll keep us around for the long haul to pitch in as needed.

Our clients have access to a wide variety of plugins – battle-tested modules or “apps” that integrate and run on top of the WordPress software and are created to accomplish all sorts of features and forgo many expensive, custom solutions – that allow your website to evolve as needed and grow with you for years to come. The starting point of all our sites is a mobile-first website, built on an accessible platform, that can even be reskinned in the future and given a new look, without having to completely start over from scratch.

Between the flexibility of ownership without contracts, a robust, mobile- and accessibility-friendly design and structure, and plenty of carefully curated WordPress plugins at your disposal, your site is guarded against becoming dated before its time – it will be solid, reliable, and extendable for the long haul.

Bulletproof Web Hosting

Flexibility and ease of use are important when it comes to website administration and upkeep, but there’s more to the equation; website security, reliability, and speed are critical. To that end, we use a managed hosting infrastructure on the Google Cloud that’s optimized specifically for WordPress, resulting in faster load times and better overall performance.

With managed hosting, you’ll retain full control of your website but you won’t share resources with other sites as you would on a shared hosting account. That way, we can all sleep well at night knowing your site is in the hands of a dedicated, 24/7 support staff of experts – with all the necessary resources, backups, and failsafe – keeping an eye on servers that are fine-tuned for optimal WordPress performance.