The official website of the White House has now joined nearly a third of all of the world’s websites in being powered by the content management system (CMS) known as WordPress.
(Pixabay / oohhsnapp)
WhiteHouse.gov is the official web page of the White House and is owned by the federal government. The website was launched in 1994 to share information about the President and Vice President as well as press releases, executive orders, and speeches by White House officials. The site was previously powered by Drupal before White House website developers migrated it to WordPress.
Both WordPress and Drupal are open-source, free content management systems that were rolled out less than 20 years ago. But WordPress has amassed a much larger following-up to 10 times larger by some accounts.
In my opinion, WordPress holds a number of benefits that the White House can take advantage of.
- WordPress is agile and allows for input from multiple users.
- With how many staff are at the White House, user management is important for allowing the constant stream of information that the government needs to put out.
- WordPress facilitates better search engine optimization.
- WordPress sites can be indexed easier due to a more search engine friendly structure, more diverse page-speed improvement options, and better SEO plugins, like Yoast.
- Strong backend
- Granted, every software will have its day of vulnerabilities. However, because WordPress has so many users worldwide, this helps others stay secure with the “wolfpack” benefit of other users reporting potential security gaps in the platform’s infrastructure. With millions of users testing the waters, problems can be identified and fixed before they have a chance to develop into anything significant.