Is A WordPress Website A Good Option For Your Recruitment Agency?

I saw a blog post the other day from a “competitor” who were telling recruitment agencies to not use WordPress for their recruitment website. To “NEVER” use WordPress for your recruitment agency as it’s never the right option. Now this competitor specialises in low code / no code websites and doesn't employ any software or web developers so I took their opinion with a pinch of salt. 

Now one important rule you learn relatively early on in your software development career is that every tool has a job. Just because you’ve learned to use a particular frontend framework, such as Angular, Vue or React then it doesn’t mean you apply it to everything you do and although Python might be a great option for data, you can still use other languages for data analysis. 

Now straight off the bat, I don’t specialise in WordPress websites, I develop recruitment websites using Angular, TypeScript, Firebase, .Net & C#, which are more commonly associated with software as a service applications.However WordPress websites can be a great option for your recruitment agency - depending on what stage your business is at, how you plan to use your website and your current budget. About half the websites on the internet are WordPress websites! 

Now the competitor I mentioned specialises in no code / low code recruitment websites where you pay an initial build fee then an ongoing monthly fee for some reason. I think no code / low code website builders, much like GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, Duda, etc. are great options if you’re just launching your recruitment agency. In my opinion I’d opt for a website from GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, Duda as the build quality will be higher and it will be way better value (normally £20/£30 month). After 6-18 months when your recruitment business is reasonably well established I’d recommend upgrading to a WordPress website or like we offer a Google Angular + Google Firebase website. 

One disadvantage they seemed to focus on was the fact that WordPress was old. And old is apparently bad in the world of technology. I’ve studied a little bit of the C programming language. It’s a little tougher to pick up when compared to other backend languages such as Java or C#, however C is extremely secure and highly performant. And guess what! It's been around for decades - since 1972! It’s used in a lot of banking and insurance software and government platforms. 

Another point they seemed to continually bring up was that in WordPress you had to “code”, which is apparently bad and in their no code / low code platform, the code has been written automatically in the background. Well this is false. The platform is not writing code itself. Someone has coded the platform and created a user interface, which allows you to drag and drop elements to create a website - there's still code behind every element and component of this, albeit a wrangle of unnecessary and bloated code blocks. 

WordPress websites are a great option for personal blog and small business websites. WordPress developers are plentiful, it’s an easy platform to learn and when I say easy you as a recruiter could learn and develop your own WordPress website within a month quite easily. There are tonnes of videos on YouTube, which talk you through the process. 

If you’re not up for learning WordPress and PHP (the backend code used for WordPress) then you can hire yourself a WordPress developer - most WordPress websites will probably cost around £1,500 - £2,500 which is great value considering your site will normally last 5+ years. You’ll then expect to pay an annual hosting fee on top of that too of maybe £200.

One big disadvantage of WordPress recruitment websites is that they require a lot of “plugins”. These “plugins” are essentially little pieces of code other developers have written for the WordPress platform and you use them to perform various pieces of functionality. Now this is great if you’re not a great developer as you can just plug in other people’s code into your recruitment website. However this is also a major security risk. These plugins must be continually updated by the developers who created them to protect against security hacks and also your website needs to be updated on a regular basis to protect against hackers.  

Because of all of these plugins you can see big hits to performance and it can lead to a slow loading recruitment website. If you’re sensible and limit the number of plugins then it shouldn’t be too noticeable but bear in mind that 53% of mobile website visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s a lot of valuable candidates and clients navigating away from your site to your competitors. 

To sum this all up I have a little experience with WordPress, a little experience with no code / low code platforms and a fair amount in Angular, TypeScript. Firebase, .Net and C# and there is no one size that fits all. There is no one ultimate platform that is better than all the rest in all situations. If you’re a start up recruitment agency founder then go for a Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy or Duda website. If you’ve got a bit of money saved up after a year or two opt for a WordPress website maybe. If you’re an established and growing recruitment agency with growing website needs (or you recruit for the tech sector) then maybe opt for something a bit more complex such as what we offer at Abstraction Labs.