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Advantages and disadvantages of WordPress for webdesign
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Back in 2003, WordPress was just a blogging platform - now it's the biggest CMS for websites on the market. To date, 35% of all websites are developed in WordPress, and 50,000 new WordPress sites are created every day. This makes the WordPress open source platform an industry leader and a clear favorite among website owners.
It is always an individual consideration as to which platform you should choose for your website or webshop. WordPress has many advantages, but certainly several disadvantages. You can find here the advantages and disadvantages that I have identified through my work with WordPress over the last 8 years. When creating a new webdesign, WordPress is a really easy system to work with.
Advantages of choosing WordPress:
1. Very User-friendly CMS:
WordPress is a powerful content management system, mainly because of it was developed in the early days for blogging. It is very easy for an administrator to navigate the backend of one's own website, edit the pages and upload new content. WordPress makes it easy to organize content without much knowledge of websites. By the way, many themes also have a nice demo content that can be imported and makes it a lot easier for you to get started. You can easily create some beautiful webdesign solutions in this CMS. Just take a look at this webdesign.
2. Plugins and add-ons:
There are currently over 55,000 free and paid plugins available to WordPress users. These plugins allow you to customize and enhance any WordPress site. If you need to make specific changes to the functionality of your site, chances are there is a plugin to do just that. However, it's very important to have an understanding of the quality of plugins, as they can both slow down your site and, in the worst case, outright damage the site. But often it’s quite easy to install and use a WordPress plugin. If yuo want a WordPress webshop, then just install and setup the WooCommerce plugin. WooCommerce turns your existing website into a real webshop with tons of shopping features. Take a look at some of the WooCommerce features.
3. SEO:
The importance of SEO "best practice" is high at all times. WordPress does a good job of promoting these best practices. There are many SEO plugins available to help optimize content, meta tags, keyword focus and more. Things that will help rank your website on the search engines without to much work.
There is no better platform than WordPress when it comes to user-friendly SEO optimization. However, keep in mind that working with SEO in WordPress is very superficial, but there are some great tools to help. Luckily WordPress is without doubt one of the most SEO friendly CMS systems you can get.
4. Open source system:
WordPress is an open source software where anyone can use and edit the source code. Some WordPress themes are still free, but eventually the best ones are the ones you pay for. By the way, I would almost never recommend buying a theme under 50$. The main reason for this, is that I simply have too many bad experiences with too cheap themes. When the code is open source, it gives many good opportunities for a relatively cheap development. But it also has its costs. You have to be incredibly careful about what gets installed and coded for your website. The good thing is that you can always find a developer who can code for WordPress. However there are some exceptions. Many premium themes offers a ton of cool features, but you will most likely only use a few of those. But this doesn’t prevent the website from loaded the code for all these features you don’t use, something that can slow down the website quite a bit. And here in 2024 speed is an important factor of a website or webshop.
5. Responsive for mobile devices:
WordPress has thousands of available themes. Generally, these themes are very reliable when it comes to being responsive. But make sure you review the themes very carefully in the different viewports. It also matters a lot if you like the responsive part that developers have made. It can be a mess if you have to change the responsive design of a WordPress site afterwards. Sometimes you will need some CSS experience in order to style a specific part of your website to work on a mobile phone. It all depends on how well the Word Press theme was coded. There are way to many poorly coded thmes so chooce wisely.
Why WordPress is not always the best CMS
1. Updates:
it is important to install updates for the security of your website, but it can also go horribly wrong. These updates are important for the security of your website. Updates can cause major problems with your website where you should have the option to do a "roll back".
There will be updates to WordPress core, your theme and your plugins. If any of conflict with each other it can break your website. Therefore, always make sure you have backups of your website. I believe it takes a minimum of about 2 hours of work per month to maintain your website. To that you have to add the technical challenges, if the site goes down for example.
2. Vulnerability:
As an open source platform, WordPress is attractive to potential hackers. To mitigate this risk, it's again good to have a knowledge of which plugins and themes you can use, and know which things to look for in terms of weeding out bad plugins. Always install a plugin with caution. So if you don’t keep your site updated all the time, you risk getting hacked or infected with malware.
3. Speed:
Some themes contain a lot of unnecessary generic code. This can reduce site speed and cause slow load times. If you don't know anything about coding, it's almost an impossible task for you to know what you can do without and what you can't.
4. Custom features:
WordPress is a very flexible tool unlike many other "drag and drop" web builder tools out there. If you're not a WordPress expert and you don't have someone developing your website, this can be a problem. But it’s still easier than many other systems on the market today.
With all of the above factors taken into consideration, I would always recommend you talk to an experienced WordPress developer. You can give it a try yourself, just like you can fix a broken wall in your house, but in most cases it’s not worth the time when you can hire an expert to do it for you, and in the end – you will likely end up with a much better result. For many website projects a WordPress solution would be an ideal solution. And for a lot of smaller webshop projects, a WooCommerce webshop would be the way to go.
