Why Our New Website Isn’t Built On Power Pages

A Quick History

The very first version of EngineeredCode.com wasn’t on WordPress – it was actually hosted using SharePoint. That version was just a simple single web page. Eventually, Microsoft removed the ability for us to easily host a simple web page using SharePoint, so we looked at other options. We ended up choosing WordPress, since it was a tool we were using for clients, and hosting and licensing is cheap! At the time, it didn’t make sense for us to use a tool like Adxstudio Portals for our website.

However, a lot has changed since then, and so when last year we decided to embark on designing a new site, we did consider whether or not to keep using WordPress. However, due to a number of reasons, the choice wasn’t really a hard one.

Alternatives

When considering what platform to use, we really only considered two options: staying with WordPress, or moving to Power Pages. There are a few reasons for limiting our choices to those two.

We weren’t really looking to learn a new technology as part of this project. While our blog focuses on Power Pages, our team actually also does quite a bit of work using WordPress as a platform to build web applications. This includes projects that are connected to Microsoft’s Power Platform (often using AlexaCRM), and those that aren’t. We find ourselves using WordPress in situations where the client has more robust content management needs, or simply doesn’t have the budget for a more complex Power Platform implementation.

We also were happy with the functionality and performance of our previous website, so there really wasn’t a reason to explore a change to a new technology based purely on technical reasons.

Finally, with a large portion of our business focused on Power Pages, it made sense to at least consider whether it made sense to try to use it for our new website.

Features

When considering what platform to use for your website, it’s always best to consider the main purpose of your site. In our case, when we look at the analytics of what was most popular on our website, there was a clear winner: our blog.

Power Pages does technically have blogging functionality. WordPress, however, has robust blogging functionality. In fact, blogging was the original purpose of the product. Along with the features of the base product, the huge ecosystem of plugins means that it is easy to customize your blog without huge investments.

The blog capabilities of Power Pages just don’t compare.

General content authoring with WordPress is also much better. Power Pages isn’t really meant for simple brochure-style corporate sites. The Power Pages Design Studio requires system administrator privileges, which isn’t great when you just want to allow some people to update content on a website.

Where Power Pages shines is interacting with Dataverse. While we do have forms that push data into Dataverse, our needs are basic, so the AlexaCRM plugin allows us to do that easily with WordPress.

Pricing

As it should be, pricing is always a factor. WordPress is open source, and hosting options are quite inexpensive. The cost to host our website for a year is less than the minimum monthly cost of Power Pages. And that is not even considering the cost of Dataverse, Power Apps, etc.

Minimal Content Migration

Almost 90% of the content on our website is blog posts. Had we decided to change platforms, we would have needed to migrate all of those posts.

Our new site is actually the same WordPress site, just a new theme and some updated page content. By sticking with the same WordPress site, all we had to do were minimal tweaks to the blog post content to align with the new designs. So we avoid a painful content migration process.

The Right Tool for the Job

Even though we love using Power Pages, what we love more is using the right tool for the job. If a client came to us with a need for a corporate brochure-style website that also hosted a blog, WordPress would most likely be our recommendation. It offers a superior authoring experience (for both normal page content and blog posts), and is more cost effective.

Could we have used Power Pages? Probably. But if we had, it would have only been in order to show that it could be done. It would have probably been hard to justify that it should have been done.