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Banks using WordPress for their websites

bank website on wordpress

For law firms and other professional services firms concerned about security issues with WordPress, check out the post WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) shared last week about banks using WordPress for their websites.

…[T]here’s probably not a ton of benefit to having the online banking / billpay / etc portion of a bank’s website on WordPress, however there is no reason you couldn’t run the front-end and marketing side of the site on WordPress, and in fact you’d be leveraging WordPress’ strength as a content management platform that is flexible, customizable, and easy to update and maintain.

For an example of a beautiful, responsive banking website built on WordPress, Mullenweg says to check out Gateway Bank of Mesa.

Commentators to Mullenweg’s post shared that Southern Bancorp, Vantage West Credit Union, Tucson Federal Credit Union, Cornerstone Financial Credit Union, Lake City Bank , Middelfart Sparekasse in Denmark, and Oaken Financial in Canada are all running WordPress.

It’s not only banks running WordPress. Facebook, SAP, Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, eBay, McAfee, Sophos, GNOME, Mozilla, MIT, Reuters, CNN, Google Ventures and NASA are all running WordPress.

Security concerns? From Mullenweg:

  1. Make sure you’re on the latest version of WordPress and the plugins you run. Update each as soon as new versions become available.
  2. Use strong passwords for all user accounts or restrict logged-in users to a certain IP range (as if behind a VPN).
  3. Make sure you or your web host stay up-to-date for everything in your stack as well from the OS on up. Most modern WordPress hosts handle this (and updates) for you.

Mullenweg adds you could always run your site on WordPress.com VIP which runs some of the top websites in the world, a service of Automatic of which Mullenweg is the CEO and founder. In the law, you can run your blog and media sites with WordPress based, LexBlog, offering solid development, support and hosting for law firms, large and small, world-wide.

No doubt that organizations (including law firms – large and small) get into problems running WordPress when they set it up and maintain it in a suboptimal fashion. From Mullenweg:

…[But the same could be said of Linux, Apache, MySQL, Node, Rails, Java, or any widely-used software. It is possible and actually not that hard to run WordPress in a way that is secure enough for a bank, government site, media site, or anything.

I share word of WordPress running secure sites for larger organizations with you for a number reasons.

  • WordPress is a powerful effective CMS systems for law firm websites and blogs that can be very extensible.
  • The cost of using WordPress is likely to be far less then sophisticated CMS solutions, both in original development and support over the long haul.
  • WordPress is open source. With hundreds of thousands of developers, innovation will far surpass that with proprietary CMS. Integration with other solutions and systems you will want to integrate into your site will be much easier.
  • With more companies offering WordPress development, hosting and support than proprietary CMS solutions it will be much less costly to move to a new site at a later date.

Here’s a few more comments on the power of WordPress for sophisticated sites from commentators on Mullenweg’s post.

  • From Spain, we have developed WordPress sites for a national bank, a very important clothing brand and also a big Business School. Large organizations have historically signed expensive IT contracts to get a website using a custom and complex CMS so they are mow slow to use WordPress.
  • The issue isn’t whether WordPress is a appropriate platform for building a banking site — it is — but whether or not the person asking the question can muster the expertise and resources to do it successfully.
  • From Sweden, we have built a bank site on WordPress and would build a new web solution for a bank today on WordPress without blinking. It is hugely affordable solution. Customers’ money should not be wasted on CMS solutions that cost huge sums. On WordPress you can build a more modern and future proof solution for a tenth of the total of other CMS systems.
  • Many banks are using custom content management systems that are full of security bugs. An obvious advantage that WordPress has over a custom CMS is that it is probed, prodded and tested by thousands of developers and security professionals. There are bugs in WordPress core and plugins but they are found and fixed quickly.

The LexBlog Network doubled down on WordPress over the last year with a significant investment in our WordPress install and hosting solution serving law firms and other professional services firms. We know that using WordPress — correctly – offers our members an optimal experience at a reasonable price.

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