April 3, 2025

Is WordPress the Right Platform for Your Credit Union’s Public Website?

By Lance Cummings

Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) platform involves finding the one that fits your credit union’s business goals and member needs best. Here’s a rundown of what makes WordPress a leading option for some Canadian credit unions.

We’ve taken a deep dive into the ins and outs of WordPress so you don’t have to. Using our experience working with credit union digital teams, we’ve identified the benefits we feel best meet your CMS and business aims and challenges. Feel free to get in touch with any questions.

First, here’s a quick overview of some of the reasons why WordPress powers 43% of websites across the entire Internet (Source: w3techs):

User experience: WordPress’s block-based architecture and drag-and-drop interface makes building pages, customization, updating your site, and adding plugins easy. No coding required.

Integration with marketing tools: WordPress plays nice with the systems, analytics, and tools you need to manage your digital operations and marketing. 

Social Media integration: WordPress’s ecosystem of plugins includes a range of social media tools to help you meet your members where they are.

Lead generation and conversion: Easy-to-use tools, such as custom contact forms and landing pages, enable you to customize, track, and optimize your digital sales and marketing campaigns.

Search engine optimization: WordPress offers industry-leading tools and plugins like Yoast SEO to help you constantly assess and improve your findability online.

3 Common Frustrations with a Proprietary CMS

Having worked with credit unions for a number of years, we feel the frustration you may have experienced with your current proprietary CMS. Do these pain points sound familiar? 

  1. Limited customization options: It can be difficult for you to deliver tailored, member-specific experiences. Adjustments that seem simple on the surface can be time-consuming and expensive to implement, leaving your team feeling restricted in how they can best serve their members. 
  2. Slower pace of innovation: Proprietary CMS systems often struggle to keep up with rapid changes in technology and consumer expectations, resulting in a competitive disadvantage for some financial institutions. Slow customer support from the vendor can lead to costly delays in essential updates, putting both operations and member satisfaction at risk. These delays can also impact your go-to-market initiatives, further hindering growth.
  3. Higher costs: The high costs of proprietary CMS systems can add up over time. Beyond the initial investment, you must continuously budget for updates, support and customizations, which can quickly escalate. This long-term drain on your budget limits the ability to invest in other areas, such as new product development or improved member service. 

Factors to Consider When Choosing a CMS

With the above pain points in mind, here are the main factors to think about when reviewing your CMS options:

Ease of Use

A platform with an intuitive interface and straightforward content management features enables staff to easily create, edit, and publish content without needing extensive technical skills. This not only improves workflow efficiency but also empowers your team to maintain and update your public website independently, reducing reliance on IT support.

Customization

The ability to tailor both the design and functionality of your site is vital to being able to meet your unique credit union needs. A flexible platform gives you the ability to create a unique user experience, integrate necessary tools, and scale as your organization grows. This adaptability ensures that your CMS can evolve alongside your business, supporting your long-term success.

Scalability

Scalability ensures the platform can grow alongside your business. A scalable CMS can handle increased content volume, traffic, and feature expansions without compromising performance. This allows your website to continue functioning smoothly as your credit union and its digital presence evolve.

Security

Security is a crucial factor when selecting a CMS, especially for financial institutions. Robust security features help protect your website from vulnerabilities and potential breaches. A secure platform should offer encryption, regular updates, and built-in protections against common threats, ensuring that your data and users’ information remain safe from cyberattacks. This proactive approach to security minimizes risks and instills confidence in your digital operations.

Integration

Compatibility with third-party tools and services like CRM, marketing platforms, and analytics software can streamline operations and enhance functionality. A CMS that easily integrates with these systems allows you to centralize data, automate workflows, and gain valuable insights.

Support and Community

Having access to reliable customer support and an active user community can be invaluable for troubleshooting and advice. A platform with strong support options and a vibrant community ensures you can quickly find solutions to issues, access helpful resources, and stay updated on best practices.

SEO Features 

Having tools to optimize your content for search engines is crucial for improving visibility and driving organic traffic to your site. A CMS that supports SEO features makes it easy to manage key elements like meta tags, URLs, and sitemaps, helping your website rank higher and reach your target audience more effectively.

Performance

Speed and reliability directly impact user experience and search engine rankings. A CMS that ensures fast load times and stable uptime keeps your site running smoothly, minimizing the risk of frustrating users or losing traffic due to slow performance or frequent downtime.

Cost

The total cost of a CMS extends way beyond initial setup. It’s important to consider ongoing expenses like licensing fees, hosting, and maintenance, which can add up over time. Evaluating these costs in advance ensures that the CMS fits within your budget, while still meeting your long-term needs for growth and support.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is a widely-used open-source CMS for building websites, blogs and web applications. In fact, it’s the most popular CMS in the world. Forty-three percent of all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. 

It has become a go-to platform for organizations of all sizes due to its user-friendly interface and extensive customization and integration options. As open-source software, it’s also free to use and backed by a huge community of users who constantly improve and update the tools, resources, and support available to fellow users.

How Does WordPress Stack Up as a Solution for Credit Unions?

WordPress’s open-source flexibility, combined with its strong community support and extensive plugin ecosystem, gives it an advantage for some credit unions when reviewing it against the critical CMS factors above.

WordPress User Experience

Ease of Use

WordPress’s block-based architecture and drag-and-drop web page building functionality offers unparalleled versatility and ease-of-use. It enables users to easily design and customize pages, without the need for coding. 

Customization

An extensive plugin library allows for feature-rich extensions and unmatched customization possibilities—again, without the need for custom coding. The accessibility of its open-source code empowers developers to modify and build bespoke solutions you can then add to your site. This provides a level of flexibility that proprietary systems often can’t match.

WordPress and Marketing

Integration with Marketing Tools

WordPress is highly compatible with a wide range of CRM systems, email marketing services, and analytics tools. This makes it easy for your team to integrate these essential business functions directly into your website. With numerous plugins and APIs available, WordPress allows seamless data flow between your site and tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zoho, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, and Hotjar. With WordPress, your marketing, member management, and reporting processes can be streamlined and efficient.

Integration with Social Media 

WordPress can leverage plugins like Jetpack and Smash Balloon to easily integrate social sharing buttons and display social media feeds directly on your website. These plugins simplify the process of connecting your site with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter), enhancing user engagement and expanding your social media presence.

Lead Generation and Conversion Optimization

WordPress lets your team create custom contact forms and landing pages that capture valuable user data with the help of plugins like Gravity Forms. Tools like Nelio A/B Testing enable you to experiment with different layouts and content variations to optimize performance, track results, and enhance conversion rates.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress offers native SEO capabilities, allowing you to easily manage key elements like URLs and headings. Additionally, plugins like Yoast SEO provide in-depth optimization suggestions, content analysis, and tools to improve readability, helping to boost your site’s search engine rankings, visibility, and reach.

WordPress Security and Performance 

As an open-source platform, WordPress promotes transparency by allowing its codebase to be continuously reviewed by the community. Vulnerabilities are identified through regular audits. This open structure also ensures quick patch deployments whenever security issues are discovered. 

The responsibility of keeping a WordPress website updated with these security patches ultimately falls on the site owner. Something to bear in mind is the importance of implementing systems to reduce this maintenance burden, while maximizing your site’s security and performance.

The Importance of Hosting

Choosing the right hosting provider is crucial for simplifying WordPress maintenance. A top-tier Managed WordPress hosting provider, such as WP Engine, Kinsta or WordPress VIP, can significantly minimize your overhead by offering robust, WordPress-optimized security and performance solutions. Here’s what you can expect from a high-quality provider:

  • Tailored infrastructure optimized for WordPress to enhance performance
  • Expertise in managing WordPress sites, ensuring best practices and security
  • Enterprise-grade protection with firewalls, DDoS protection, and malware scanning
  • Daily backups and one-click restore options to safeguard against data loss
  • Global CDN integration for faster load times and improved site speed
  • Scalable solutions to handle traffic spikes effortlessly
  • High uptime guarantee and reliable infrastructure to keep your site operational at all times
  • 24/7 expert support from WordPress specialists
  • Hosting options for Canadian and US clients, ensuring compliance and data residency where needed

Developer Support

An experienced and reliable web development team on contract can provide essential support for core software, plugin, and theme updates. They can also implement robust user authentication protocols, such as enforcing strong passwords and enabling two-factor authentication (2FA). 

The Choice is Yours

Ultimately, the choice of which CMS to go with depends on your credit union’s specific needs and long-term goals.

In our view, WordPress can be an excellent choice for many credit unions. The platform is ideal if flexibility, customization, and control are top priorities. Its open-source nature allows you to adapt your site to specific needs while keeping costs manageable. Add in its flexibility, user-friendly interface, and ability to meet diverse marketing, security, and performance requirements, and you have a powerful tool for maintaining a dynamic, reliable, and up-to-date website. One that meets both your business needs and your members’ expectations of what a modern website should provide.

At Sprout & Harvest, we bring over 20 years of experience in supporting credit unions of all sizes with their web development and maintenance needs, including working with WordPress. If you’re interested in exploring your CMS options (whether it’s WordPress or another option), schedule a meeting with us. We’d love to chat!

About Lance:

Lance Cummings

Design & Build, Sprout & Harvest Growth Partners

Lance has over 20 years of experience turning complex ideas into beautifully crafted digital experiences that drive results, including:

  • Comprehensive client-side & server-side solutions, and 3rd party integrations
  • Financial services digital experiences – Prospera, East Coast Credit Union, HSBC
  • Development on your favourite platform, including Forge/OpenText, WordPress, Headless CMS, etc.