5 Key Reasons Your MVP Should Be Built With WordPress

Starting a new business may be challenging. You may have a brilliant idea for your new online company. However, it may be difficult to figure out how to gauge your target user’s interests, behaviour or wants. To make this a little easier, you need a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Eric Ries in his book “The Lean Startup”, defined MVP as the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

It is a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with enough features to satisfy its first set of users. The product viability in the market are examined, variations are tested based on user feedback, and improvements are made.
An MMP (Minimum Marketable Product) is then designed after the feedback from the product’s initial users has been examined.

What you can achieve by using an MVP

Altogether, by creating an MVP you can:

• Begin development based on a hypothesis on what your target audience wants and needs
• Build your “product” to fulfill those needs with minimal resources.
• Launch the product faster than you would have with a full build.
• Pay attention to detail, talk to the real users, and learn how they use and find value in it.
• Apply what you’ve learnt from the first adopters when developing the future version of the product.

By using WordPress for your MVP, you can build the first version of your business at a relatively low cost with a high-quality output. WordPress is a powerful web tool for many reasons. One of its strengths is the ability to add new features through its immense library of premium and free plugins.
There’s a good chance that every feature you need for the first version of your product can be implemented with a WordPress plugin. Why then should you invest in several developers when you can offer a feature to your initial users by simply installing and configuring a WordPress plugin?

In this article, we will examine 5 reasons why WordPress is ideal as the core of your MVP. The 5 key reasons your MVP should be built with WordPress are:

• 1. Excellent Authentication System
• 2. Rich Plugin Structure & Attractive Themes
• 3. Content Management
• 4. API functionality
• 5. eCommerce

1. Excellent Authentication System

The WordPress’ authentication system is very well tested and constantly being developed. WordPress has an active development team that constantly provides security updates. As long as you or your users don’t use weak passwords that might be easy for hackers to figure out, you can worry very little about the security of your website.

With its highly functional user registration and login module, you don’t have to spend time developing login/logout/password features. Reduction in development time means you save cost and you can get to market faster.

2. Rich Plugin Structure & Attractive Themes

WordPress’ biggest strengths lie in its very passionate community of developers who construct a wide range of free and premium plugins. These can be utilized from building anything right from a CRM to a SaaS solution. The WordPress plugin directory contains over 50,000 plugins. Therefore, you will most likely find a plugin suitable to provide your users with the features they need in an MVP.

For example, if what you seek in your MVP is a fully functional form system, Gravity forms is a great WordPress plugin for that. You can do much more than just collecting users’ contact details with Gravity Forms. It allows you easily integrate with third-party services such as Stripe, a payment gateway and Slack, a messaging service. Formidable Pro also gives WordPress sites rich front-end forms.

Beauty and Elegance isn’t an area that WordPress lacks. There are thousands of WordPress themes designed for different purposes. They are highly customizable and easy to set up. Within a few minutes, you could have a WordPress theme fully installed with the demo content install feature. You can find this feature mostly in Premium WordPress themes.

There are marketplaces such as Themeforest that host thousands of highly customizable WordPress themes. Although each of them might have different prices, they all aim to improve the appearance of your website, keeping your site looking well-branded.

3. Content management

WordPress has strong functionality for content management that is trusted by many reputable brands. Some of these include the New Yorker, TechCrunch, CNN, USA Today and Time to mention a few. All your “pages” can be considered as content. From the ‘about us’ page to the ‘how this works’ page. You can create or modify content for your website through the WordPress stock revision tracking editor or custom page builders.

4. API functionality

According to comScore’s Global Mobile Report, more time is spent on mobile apps than mobile web and desktop. Consumers spend 80% of the mobile time within apps. Therefore, having an app store presence in the iOS and Google Play stores would mean a huge advantage when getting new users to test your MVP.
WordPress allows you to make your website’s data accessible and extendable to other parties or platforms. So as your business grows, you can build mobile apps or external widgets that can be easily integrated into your WordPress website. If you would like to even take a step further, you could convert your WordPress website into a mobile application.

5. eCommerce

The connection between WordPress and WooCommerce brings eCommerce closer to the core of WordPress. With WooCommerce, you can turn on monetization without having to build shopping carts, payment modules, or product catalogues.

Building your product from scratch can take you months to get a first version ready. With WordPress, that time frame could considerably reduce to just days when you’re using the right tools. If needed, there is a host of experienced WordPress developers available to help you create your site. You can find them on freelance services websites such as Upwork or Fiverr.
To recap, in this article, we considered 5 key reasons your MVP should be built with WordPress. These 5 reasons are:

• 1. Excellent Authentication System
• 2. Rich Plugin Structure & Attractive Themes
• 3. Content Management
• 4. API functionality
• 5. eCommerce

For many startups, the goal is to create an MVP to reduce risk while keeping costs low. If this is also your goal, WordPress is the ideal tool to build your MVP with.