WordPress is popular partly because you don’t have to build everything yourself. Need ecommerce? Add WooCommerce. Need better SEO tools? Install a plugin. Need forms, events, delivery options, product filters, email integration or improved search? There is probably a plugin for that too.
That flexibility is one of WordPress’s biggest strengths, but it can also create a less obvious problem for small businesses. We can end up paying separately to solve the same problems again and again.
The plugin itself is only part of the cost
WooCommerce itself is free and open source. Where the costs start to build is when a business needs additional functionality.
Paid WordPress and WooCommerce extensions can range from relatively inexpensive tools to specialist plugins costing hundreds of pounds each year. One plugin isn’t necessarily expensive, but ecommerce websites rarely need just one.
A shop might need additional functionality for:
- product options
- search
- delivery
- forms
- SEO
- performance
- backups
- security
- events
- subscriptions
- reviews
Even a fairly modest collection of annual licences can therefore become a noticeable ongoing cost.
And the licence isn’t the whole story. Someone still has to decide which plugin to use, install it, configure it, make it work with the website, style it appropriately, test it and keep it updated.
Then there is the ongoing maintenance. When another plugin changes, something breaks or the original plugin stops doing what is needed, somebody has to investigate the problem and find a solution.
For a small cheese business, the real cost isn’t just software. It is money, time and repeated problem-solving.
Now multiply that across lots of cheese businesses
We don’t yet have reliable enough data to say exactly how many UK cheesemakers and cheesemongers are running WooCommerce stores, or what they collectively spend on plugins and website extensions. That’s something we’d like to understand better.
But we can illustrate the issue without pretending we know the exact number.
Imagine 250 independent cheese businesses each spending an average of £500 a year on WordPress plugins and extensions. That’s £125,000 every year.
At 500 businesses, it becomes £250,000 a year. If 700 businesses were spending £700 each, it would be approaching £500,000 every year.
Those are examples, not estimates of actual sector spend, but they demonstrate the point.
The bigger question isn’t whether the exact figure is £100,000, £250,000 or £500,000. It is this: How much are we collectively spending to solve the same problems independently?
Buying a plugin isn’t necessarily a bad thing
There is an important caveat here. Shared development doesn’t mean we should start rebuilding everything ourselves.
If an established business has spent years developing a good security plugin, payment system, SEO tool or performance solution, it will normally make much more sense to use it than recreate it.
The opportunity is different. It is in the places where cheesemakers and cheesemongers repeatedly need functionality that isn’t quite provided by standard tools.
For example:
- A cheesemaker might need a good stockist finder.
- A cheesemonger might want consistent maker profiles connected to their products.
- Both might want better ways to explain cheese care, delivery, provenance, pairings or serving suggestions.
- An online retailer may need a better approach to variable weights, Christmas ordering, cheeseboards or chilled delivery.
- A shop might want events and tastings properly connected to its website and customer email list.
These aren’t necessarily huge software problems, but they are repeated problems. And repeated problems create an opportunity to share the solution.
Ten businesses don’t need ten completely different solutions
Imagine ten cheese businesses all want better stockist or location functionality.
The normal approach might be for each business to:
- Research available plugins.
- Buy something.
- Configure it.
- Adapt it.
- Discover its limitations.
- Pay someone to fix or extend it.
- Maintain its own solution indefinitely.
Ten businesses effectively repeat much of the same work.
There is another approach. Those businesses could define what a genuinely useful cheese-sector stockist tool needs to do, then prototype and test it on real websites.
We could improve it based on what happens in practice and, once the approach is proven, build one reusable solution that others can use too.
The same thinking could apply to dozens of common website requirements.
And sometimes the answer won’t be a plugin
This is important too. We shouldn’t build software simply because we can.
Sometimes the best solution might be a plugin, an Elementor widget, a WooCommerce extension or an integration. But sometimes the answer might simply be a better page structure, reusable template or piece of guidance.
If we discover that customers need clearer chilled delivery information, for example, the answer might not require any new technology at all. We could create a better content pattern, test it across several websites and share what we learn.
The aim should always be to solve the problem in the simplest useful way.
What if we shared more of the boring bits?
Nobody starts a cheese business because they are excited about comparing WordPress extensions. Makers want to make great cheese. Mongers want to sell it, talk about it and help customers discover something brilliant.
There will always be things individual businesses should invest in themselves, and there will always be excellent third-party products worth paying for.
But there will also be website problems that lots of us are solving repeatedly. Those are the opportunities that interest us.
What if several cheese businesses could identify those problems together, test possible answers on real websites and share the cost of developing the things that genuinely need building?
One business gets a better solution, the next business doesn’t have to start from scratch, and each time we repeat the process the shared knowledge and toolkit get a little better.
That’s part of the thinking behind the Maker & Monger Website Collective
We’re bringing together a small group of cheesemakers and cheesemongers to explore exactly this approach.
They’ll help identify the problems worth solving, test ideas on their existing WordPress websites and help us work out what is genuinely useful before we make it available more widely.
If we can solve more of these common website problems together, we can spend less time reinventing the same things and more time making cheese websites better.
Find out how the Maker & Monger Website Collective works.
