Why You Should Avoid Using WordPress for Your Website

Wordpress is one of the most popular CMSs available, but it also has its detractors. It can be slow, vulnerable to malware and hackers, and difficult to update and maintain. Plugins can be poorly coded or conflict with other plugins, and updates can break custom themes. It can be difficult to diagnose errors, and the lack of official support means that customers often have to pay for extra work.

WordPress also offers limited SEO optimization features, and custom websites offer more precise control over SEO. In addition, custom websites are simpler and more compatible with all versions of browsers and mobile phones. If you want a powerful, secure, and functional web platform, custom web development is the way to go. WordPress uses a lot of plugins for websites, which can slow down loading speed if too many are used.

These plugins

can also be poorly coded or may conflict with other plugins that slow down your site.

As millions of websites use WordPress, they are an obvious target for hackers. If a hacker finds a vulnerability in one system, it is likely that it exists in many of the others. Robots (computers that crawl the Internet) can determine whether a site is created by WordPress, and once a vulnerability has been found, it can be automatically exploited on every similar website found. Once a website has been hacked, it can be exceptionally difficult to fix. While WordPress releases updates regularly to fix security holes, with an average of more than one patch per month it can take a long time to keep your website safe.

Updates will have to be done by someone technical, which means that customers inevitably end up paying for this extra work in the long run. The other major disadvantage of updates is that there is always a risk that they will break your site, especially if you used a custom theme. Add to that ever-evolving nature of the administration area to increase confusion. For example, it is possible that two add-ons work brilliantly independently, but when both are installed they can conflict and cause problems. Along with updates, add-ons can also break.

A plugin can work perfectly, and then, after a client updates its main system, the plugin can often break and will remain broken until the plugin developer can update it. As plugins can often be the basis of the essential features of a customer's website, and since we have already established that the core system needs to be updated regularly, you will face a dilemma: choosing between a job site or a secure one. This leads very well to support; as WordPress is open source, it is free and is developed by the “community”. This is a good idea and allows software such as WordPress and many UNIX-based systems to remain free. However, it does cause a problem with support. Since there is no official development team, and since the customer has never paid anyone for the software, there is no phone number to call or a guaranteed way to get an answer.

Therefore, if a customer's website breaks, perhaps after an update, any error can be difficult to diagnose. The usual process is to use Google to search multiple support forums and, if no one else has had the same problem, post a ticket on a forum and hope someone can help you fix your problem. Even then, it is likely that a client or web developer will only receive one indicator in the right direction and will have to do a little work for himself. This can be difficult for a professional web developer and can be nearly impossible for many web designers who only know how to install and use WordPress. The thousands of add-ons available can perform a variety of different tasks, but the time will come when add-ins won't do what a customer wants or the way they want it to be done.

When this happens, you've reached the end of WordPress's capabilities. There are many SEO plugins for WordPress, and by choosing the right ones you can achieve a certain level of optimization. However, you never have the precise control you get with a custom website, and therefore full search engine optimization is not possible. Any vulnerability of the website can have a negative impact on its credibility and could spread viruses to its users. WordPress positions itself as an SEO-friendly platform but in fact almost all open source CMSs are SEO-friendly. WordPress only offers limited SEO optimization features in its packages which is not enough to help you rank in Google. Pay for quality hosting and a professional developer and your website built on WordPress will be more than competitive with a site built on any other platform.

For example if you used WordPress to create a 5-page website it will give hackers the ability to attempt attacks against potential vulnerabilities within 2159+ wordpress files and if a hacker goes through one of those vulnerabilities it will open the gateway for them to attempt attacks against potential vulnerabilities in PHP Apache MySQL and the operating system running your server. However if you want to add features to your website your agency would have to look for plugins on WordPress. The advantage of custom websites over WordPress is that since they are simple and built step by step if necessary they can be made compatible with all versions or all browsers work on all mobile phones and validated according to current standards. So if you imagine your business growing WordPress is definitely not the best technology choice for website development. As you can see WordPress is not without its flaws as its three major disadvantages above suggest. Although a little work is always required the complexity of WordPress sites means that this can be more difficult than for custom websites. You will then need to change the domain's nameservers to redirect to your WordPress site hosted on a server (if the domain is not purchased on the same service as hosting).

In particular you'll need to hire a WordPress expert who can set up the environment and do the rest of the work so it can cost you almost as much as custom web development. But if you want to develop a powerful secure and functional web platform look at custom web development instead of using WordPress.