Government Websites and WordPress

The latest release of data from the Government highlights the costs of Government websites from April 2009 to March 2010. It gives a somewhat-detailed breakdown of the costs of 47 websites, along with the number of visits for the same period of time.

There are some sites there which have cost the taxpayer shocking amounts of money – including Business Link, which cost over £6m just for planning, over £4m for building and £4m for testing! On top of that there was £15m content provision costs and a staggering £4m per year to host – all for just 16m visits. Compare that with the WordPress-based Number10.gov.uk website, which receives almost as many visits – just short of 12m last year – but costs only £86k a year to host. Another WordPress-based site, Bis.gov.uk, received just over 1m visits last year, yet cost a measly £5k to host. Just to put that into perspective, you could host the BIS website at those costs for 1,250 years – over a millenium – and it would not even cost as much as it did to just plan Business Link!

Compared to the large Serco-made mess of the Business Link site, WordPress is clean and efficient, and doesn’t require a large infrastructure to run well. I suspect a large part of the Business Link £4m hosting fund is down to MS server license fees. The fact that WordPress comes with a user system and content management cuts out the costs of developing these too (which aren’t usually done too well, anyway). Using WordPress across the government keeps things consistent, and would keep training costs down in the long-term, as website staff won’t necessarily have to undergo much training if they’re moving from updating a WordPress website to another WordPress website.

There are many smaller WordPress sites within the Government, however no others are big enough to have been covered by the dataset released. Hopefully in the future they will be.

In the new age of budget cuts it will soon become clear that, inside Government, sites which have a smaller footprint when it comes to infrastructure, along with smaller initial development costs will survive the axe – which is soon going to fall on sites which have ridiculously large budgets and hosting costs.

UPDATE: Turns out the BIS site is not using WordPress anymore. It was doing last year, probably was just an interim site.