An Expansive Platform That Could No Longer Scale

I started this guide by talking about the power of building your community experience with purpose. Here’s an example of what can happen when you don’t do that.

This creative community leader had a custom-built platform on WordPress that had been chosen for its flashy features and been painstakingly tailored to her needs.

Now don’t get me wrong. Customizing can be great. But this leader had chosen an unnecessarily complicated platform without considering the pros and cons that come with a custom solution.

The app she built had carried her through major growth, but as she reached almost 10,000 members, things started to go wrong really fast.

First, the enormous amount of apps and plugins that accumulated over the years, started to make the platform incredibly unstable and prone to service outages.

The volume of content members produced every month was weighing down site speed and skyrocketed her hosting bills.

And finally, customizing the platform any further required, specialized technical help that didn’t come cheap.

Not only were these problems affecting her community’s experience, but the tech costs were climbing at breakneck speed and the website desperately needed an update if it was going to support further growth.

This leader was at a crossroads. She could either pay more than a hundred thousand dollars to fix and modernize the current platform or risk the financial gamble of migrating her large community to a whole new system.

Both options presented huge risks and left her with what she felt was an impossible choice.

So, was choosing a custom-built solution, a bad choice? Maybe, maybe not.

The real mistake was jumping into the solution without fully understanding the implications it could have down the road.

You might have a vision for what you want right now, but you really need to weigh your options with the future in mind. Whether it’s overloading your platform with plug-ins or overbuilding your team, remember that every choice you make today has long-term consequences. And while we don’t have a crystal ball, we’re still making our best guess.

Taking a few moments to think about what tomorrow might look like can pay off in spades.

This is where hiring an expert can come in. They’ll guide you through your options, weigh them against your business goals and help you make a selection that won’t land you with your own impossible choice.

I hope that the platform guide and these stories have been helpful in guiding you through the process of choosing your next community platform.

If you’re wondering whether something is possible for your business or not and which platforms can make it happen, I can help.

Check out the last page of the guide for an opportunity to send me your thoughts and receive a free video reply from me.