Advantages and Disadvantages of WordPress Websites

If you’re starting the process of planning your website with your e9 team, you might be wondering about the different platforms available to build your website. You might even have some suggestions of your own. Though there are many options available, e9 believes WordPress is the best option out there. But that doesn’t mean WordPress doesn’t have any drawbacks.

Let’s take a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress before you decide whether it’s a platform you would like to use.

Advantages of WordPress

Popularity

For starters, WordPress is the most widely deployed content management system with over 100M installations. So e9 can choose the best from tens of thousands of developers to bring your website to life.

Open-source and non-proprietary

WordPress is an open-sourced system. This gives you several advantages:

•   You can never be held hostage to a proprietary system. It does not matter if WordPress’ author or owner goes out of business. Your website will not be affected.
•   WordPress is under active development. So, there are frequent bug fixes and security patches. This will further extend the life of your CMS. Your investment is safe for years to come.

Easy to use

WordPress’s CMS is the easiest to use, which means that you can update the content and run the day-to-day operation of your website at a lower cost—both in dollars and stress. You can extend the functionality of your website with little or no coding knowledge.

Functionality

WordPress comes with thousands of plugins that offer almost unlimited flexibility in terms of features. So, any functionality you want in your website can be included by simply including the appropriate plugin. You can usually customize the look and feel of these plugins. Your website will be unique and differentiated.

SEO friendly

WordPress makes your site SEO-friendly by identifying words and phrases that can be used as keywords. It simplifies the creation of Meta descriptions and tags. All this drives more traffic to your site.

Disadvantages of WordPress

An over-abundance of features

WordPress comes with many plugins, themes, and a plethora of features, and there are many ways of implementing these elements. This may confuse developers.

Limitations of templates

Your WordPress site is constrained by the template you select. It is difficult to create a professional, stand-out website using generic templates. Customization is possible, but it is time-consuming.

Software updates

Both WordPress and its plugins roll out frequent updates. Sometimes, the quality of the updates is poor, and this impacts existing functionality. As a precaution, you must backup your website (code and data) before every update. This is a tedious activity.

Vulnerabilities

WordPress plugins are susceptible to bugs and viruses. You need to take care when selecting a plugin.

Website speed

WordPress sites can be slow. Developers tend to use a lot of plugins and themes, which slow down the site. Images and the database may not be correctly optimized, or the website hosting service may not be configured appropriately. All this results in slow load times.

PHP

Most WordPress sites do not need any custom programming to work. However, for intricate customizations, programming may be required. In this case, PHP is the only language that WordPress supports. PHP has its fair share of detractors.

Conclusion

We have tried to be fair in listing both the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress. But we can confidently say that the disadvantages mentioned above will be faced only by inexperienced WordPress developers. At e9, we are experts in WordPress website development. We have the technical chops to work around all the WordPress disadvantages mentioned here.

e9 will manage the infrastructure, WordPress updates, daily backups, and security patches. You only need to focus on running your business. Working with e9digital means you have a team to help you through the process of building a functioning, optimized, and beautiful website.

So, while competing platforms have some positive features, e9’s opinion is that WordPress is usually the best choice for building business websites.