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Tip #3 For Managing a Pharmaceutical or Biotech Website Redesign

TL:DR: WordPress Gutenberg is faster, Elementor is easy, Wordfence is cool.

The situation: Your pharmaceutical or biotechnology company is small but growing. And something noteworthy happened: it got funding, is about to announce results, launch a product or go public. It’s time for the next level of website.

We recommended WordPress as the content management system (CMS) for most smaller pharma and biotech company websites. Now, let’s get into one of WordPress’ best (and sometimes overwhelming) features: plugins.

(Webflow is also really good!).

Some plugins are really big and radically change a WordPress site’s functionality and others are little guys that do something very specific.

Let’s talk about the first big plugin choice you’ll want to make: Gutenberg or Elementor. 

Now, let’s talk about what they do! Both are used to manage content and make edits and refinements to pages and sections within pages (called “blocks”). NOTE: These descriptions are an oversimplification, but are probably good enough for most website users.

Gutenberg and Elementor are both solid but they have differences, which are quite simple. Gutenberg is the default WordPress content & block editor (so the default is technically not a plugin). They’re both user-friendly. Elementor is easier for designing custom pages with its drag-and-drop editor. Gutenberg is simpler and faster, but better for basic content editing. If you need complex designs, go with Elementor; for basic content, go with Gutenberg.

You can decide which you want to use based on your answer to this question:

Do you want to (1) get in and fiddle around with design or do you want to (2)  simply edit content and let the dev team and designers make visual edits? If your answer is (1), choose Elementor. If your answer is (2), choose Gutenberg.

There are three more types of plugins we recommend. First, a SEO and general analytics management plugin. Yoast is the industry standard. Second, some sort of security plugin and service. We recommend Wordfence, but there are others that work well, too. Third, you should have some sort of cookie and user consent plugin – the biggies are Cookiebot, CookieYes, WPConsent, and OneTrust, but there are many others that fit into whatever your company size or requirements. 

Finally, plugins abound. We recommend that you only use plugins that are backed by real companies and have been around for a while. The reason is that plugins are a major source of WordPress’s biggest security and reliability issues. Choose wisely!

If you love a plugin that you use for pharmaceutical or biotech websites, we’d very much like to hear about them! Or you can just yell at me for not covering Webflow … 🙂

> Back to the Pharmaceutical and Biotech Website Redesign: 10 Tips For New Sites article.