If you own or run a restaurant—or any business—you need to take a look at what’s started happening at WordPress.com.

I could almost stop there and move on with my day, but let’s spin things, OK? Just hopping over to WordPress.com might be fun, but more than likely it isn’t the right answer for your business.

WordPress parent Automattic is becoming a very important company. Assuming there’s any accuracy to these numbers, Automattic’s baby now powers north of 17% of all web sites, and there’s no real second place in this race; a couple of other CMS platforms show up in the statistics, but they’re way behind WordPress.

More telling is this: over seventy percent of all web sites are still running using older, non-content-management-driven technologies. And I promise you; there’s no chance in the world you can make your Influency* go where you need it to go without using a CMS.

Even more telling is this: Automattic wants to rule the world, and while they have a long way to go before they unseat Google, they’re making some very smart moves. A year ago, for example, I told you that Automattic had broken ties with Google to start running their own advertising engine, and the traffic at WordPress.com and other Automattic properties is indeed so high that this makes sense.

Since we use, recommend, and often implement WordPress influency for our clients, you’d think I’d have told you a lot about it. But this morning I checked, and found, as you can see above, that I’ve mentioned WordPress here just sixteen times (out of nearly 900 stories posted at Answer Guy Central).

Expect that WordPress-to-everything-else ratio to change.

Influency is about a lot of things, and while we love talking about how great our Search Engine Optimization approach works,  it—and most other methods of chasing Influency—will fail if your website structure isn’t in order. Yes, that means your content needs to reside in a CMS.

WordPress is one. Statistically, of course, it’s the one. But there are lots of ingredients to be decided on in cooking WordPress soup.

What Automattic has just announced and rolled out is a pretty convincing play for a vertical market that’s long needed one. Restaurant web sites are notorious for being built the wrong way, and now you can build a restaurant website right at WordPress.com. Hooray!

But that means that you lose control of other elements of how your business web site functions.Which is what Automattic wants.

I have no problem with Automattic wanting to control you by hosting you at WordPress.com and maybe charging you for the privilege rather than you installing WordPress on your own server. Seriously. Unlike, say, Hubspot, I believe you can trust Automattic to do the right thing if you ever decide the time has come to leave WordPress.com.

Nevertheless, relying on a proprietary CMS platform—even one as minimally proprietary as WordPress.com is when compared to the fully open-source and self-hosted solution that you get by downloading a copy of WordPress from WordPress.org—isn’t a choice you should take lightly.

And in managing Influency*, you need to keep all of these variables under control.

Sounds tough? No worries; managing your influency is what we do. Wanna talk? Contact me here.