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Why is WordPress the best website dispensary website builder?
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Why is Wordpress the
best website builder for a cannabis site?
Wordpress has been around a lot longer than the legal recreational marijuana industry. The first legal US dispensaries opened in Colorado in 2014 and Wordpress has been a staple for cannabis website design since the very beginning.
Releasing in May 27, 2003, Wordpress was a platform that originally targeted bloggers but quickly expanded with plugins in 2004 and themes in 2005, closely mirroring what we know today by Version 3.0 in 2010.
The primary reason you should use Wordpress? It’s the easiest way to create a mobile-optimized website, and as we’ve covered previously, you cannot afford to have a website that isn’t mobile-friendly.
What WP features will you use most in a dispensary site?
WP Plugins: Plugins set Wordpress apart from every other 420 site building platform because they make it easy to adjust your site to your changing business. A site that’s been hardcoded in a language like HTML or Drupal will need custom code created for any feature you want.
Wordpress allows you to get the same end result by simply installing a plugin.
For example: You want to install an age-gate on your dispensary site. If you have an HTML site it will need to be coded in, then made sure to work properly across mobile phones and tablets.
If you decide it’s not working right, or encounter issues, you’ll need additional coding time.
Installing an age-gate on a WordPress site is as easy as choosing a MMJ site age verification plugin. Installing it, and going straight to the testing round.
Because WP is already mobile-optimized, all of the most popular plugins are too. We rarely encounter cross-device issues using WP, which saves clients on development and maintenance costs.
Cannabis E-Commerce
made easy with WP
Woocommerce is one of the biggest E-commerce platforms in the world, and Wordpress allows for the installation of plugins that modify plugins.
What does that mean?
Because there are so many limitations on inter-state sales across CBD products, many of which are sold by farms and dispensaries that also produce THC products they cannot ship out of state, Woocommerce allows us to strictly limit who can purchase what products by location.
That means we can easily set up a client’s cannabis site so that shipping options are limited by product type, category, user, location, and a wide range of other variables. These UX adjustments can help keep your business on the right side of the law.
Woocommerce also allows us to search engine optimize products.
Optimization options are incredibly limited on DIY cannabis site builders like Wix and Square. Even Woocommerce competitors like Bigcommerce have extremely limited SEO options.
With Woocommerce, we can optimize individual products listings and increase a websites overall ability to rank for individual products, something you can’t get full control of using other building options.
Wordpress gives you the flexibility to change web design companies
Do we have a client retention rate of one-hundred percent? Yes. Did many of those clients come over with a website after working with a different cannabis site design firm? Also yes.
There are 100 ways to do anything on a hand-coded website.
Every programmer has different preferences, methods for making something work, and unique approaches for structuring data. A custom-coded website contains all of those personal preferences, and if you want to change design firms they’ll need to figure out how it all works together.
Understanding another developers coding can be like reading a book where half the words are replaced with crudely drawn symbols.
Your new developer must:
- Identify all the unique ways a previous developer coded your site.
- Update your website to their standards so they can work on it.
- Repair structural issues left behind by the previous developer.
This can take days, and adds on to the cost of changing web development firms. These hidden costs of hard-coded site design can financially strain a company into staying with a bad developer.
Make the switch
with Wordpress
Wordpress is the world’s most used website builder; that means that more marijuana website developers know how to work with it than any other platform.
This provides you with a freedom your hard-coded site can’t. Instead of tying the entire online side of your business to a single company, you’re giving yourself the freedom to change companies if one doesn’t work out.
You can also become more selective with your spending, keeping your site if you like it while gaining the ability to have an outside cannabis SEO company optimize your existing site.
WP puts you in control of your own website and allows the flexibility and freedom you need in the cannabis industry to adapt to changing cannabis regulations and the growth of your own business.
Don’t hardcode the fate of your company—make it adaptable with a cannabis website designed using Wordpress.
